SCC Chapter 08 (Patreon)

First I needed to improve the qi collecting environment before I started. I had used feng shui to increase the comfort of my bedroom but now I needed to focus on chi cultivation. The perfect way to gather chi for a neutral spiritual root like mine was by perfectly balancing the elements in the root. Wood, fire, earth, metal, and water.

Even the position of the entrance would make a difference which required me to reconstruct the layout of the house to have my door facing and what color the door is. White for metal, I’d rather not have to hang a sword above my bed to gain the metal element to the same level as the other elements. Wood bedframe, desk, and basins for water and incense. Approximately 7.4 catty’s of water and three ever-burning incense to reach the right elemental balance inside my bedroom.

Most people would have a room specialized for cultivating qi but that wasn’t necessary for me. I slapped down a basic qi gathering formation on the inside of the door and felt the shift in the energy of the room. It didn’t feel as homely as my previous layout but it would allow me to gather qi at a much faster rate while inside the room. 

I sat on my bed and took a meditative posture as I tested a long-thought theory of mine from a previous life. I had played around with the idea as I tried to figure out the best method for cultivation but any that required little to no input weren’t nearly as good as I devised previously. The way cultivation works is if you have one element, you circulate it throughout your entire body.

Most people do this poorly at the start and because of their lack of imagination, they lose out on possible cultivation speed until they learn a better method. The first most single-element cultivators learn is the qi breathing method. They mentally picture their breathing and imagine the qi in the environment to spread throughout their body and turn into their element.

That was a somewhat decent method and many will stop at this point and try to climb as high as they possibly can with just the basic cultivation method. The next would be imagining the qi flowing through your body through your bloodstream. This method was about fifty percent more effective than the previous one and fifty percent was an astronomical difference in cultivation speed. If you spent five hundred years cultivating you’d have gained two hundred and fifty extra years of cultivation for free.

The final method I knew was the synapse method. This method was much, much faster than the previous two but there was the risk of crippling yourself while meditating if you lost focus. There were thousands of other methods and ones personalized beyond that but that was only the process of those without five elements in their body. People with neutral roots ground the elements in their bodies against each other to generate new qi.

The basic method and the first they’re taught would be the ball method. They’d imagine the five elements as separate balls and push the five together before trying to move them toward the center. Very reliable method but it was more tedious as you had to constantly switch which ball you push otherwise you’d end up with an imbalance in the elemental qi in your body.

This wasn’t dangerous but your body would try its best to bring you back to a neutral level and that often ended with the higher element being expelled from your body losing you the cultivation progress. The next method was the five disks method. You turn your elements into five disks and layer them on top of each other before moving the second and fourth alternatively.

This method is once again about fifty percent faster but it’s also easier to manage and you’re less likely to have a high amount of qi expelled from your body. The third disk, the one in the center is the most likely to have the overflow but once again it really isn’t bad for your body you just lose some of your cultivation progress.

The method I devised was a five-dual-gear system. Starting at the bottom you would have a bigger gear rotate into a smaller gear. That smaller gear was attached to a bigger gear which would spin at a faster speed which was tied into a small gear which would make the bigger gear on top spin faster. This method wasn’t perfect as there were points where you would have dramatically more of one element in your system but flipping the gear you’re spinning from the top one to the bottom would rapidly make up the difference so you would only expel a small amount of the element from your system before it rebalanced itself.

That method was twice as fast as the disk method which is how I grew so fast as a cultivator with a neutral spiritual root. I was the only known person with that method in my previous life and that well-kept secret was what allowed me to stay near the top and create my own sect and surpass the other sect masters as the first true nascent soul cultivator.

The method I was going to use was an alternate version of the first method. While exploring the mundane world I came across a contraption that bounced balls back and forth for a fairly long time. Having some of my neutral root disciples test the theory allowed me to learn that they could cultivate at a similar speed to the first method while not meditating for up to an hour at a time. Afterwards, they’d only need to restart the process which took a thought to do at that point.

That was the method I was going to use to cultivate. That method might seem like it was worse but if I could dual cultivate while using that cultivation method I was looking at similar if not better results, especially if my other ideas came into play. Not only that but I could also cultivate while I made pills or walked around the sect. I could cultivate for longer than anyone else reasonably could at this level, only losing out on a few hours of sleep and that’s if I didn’t figure out how to extend the time passed an hour.

I made the ‘Newton cradle’ in my mind and began to rock it. The real-world version only lasted about ten minutes but it was mostly because of gravity and friction. That didn’t really exist in the cultivation space so without doing anything different than lifting a ball and dropping it to start the cradle would clack for about an hour. Over the course of a week, I ground out the qi needed to reach the first level.

It took less than any other with each successive rank taking more but it was at a speed higher than I had reached in my first life. It had taken me an entire month to reach the first rank, three months for the next… Five months for the third and that was cultivating almost every second of wakefulness. That is the difference my improved spiritual root and cultivation process gave me.

I wasn’t even taking it seriously as I let my cultivation turn off for hours at a time not accustomed to constantly starting it. If I was monitoring it closely I’d have gathered qi much faster but I didn’t see the point in stressing out over that. I was already far stronger than I was even when I reached the sixth rank in my previous life and I’d only keep growing that difference in the future. It was finally time for me to bring in my first cultivation partner to the process to really test the speed I could reach.