SCC Chapter 09 (Patreon)

Dual cultivation was thought to be mostly a gimmick. It was a way for cultivators to justify having sex and making marriage agreements outside of their clans for people with suitable spiritual roots. Someone with pure neutral spiritual roots can dual cultivate with anyone and it’s normally more effective if the person knows what they’re doing.

There is similar cultivation and opposite cultivation where the stronger element gets more of a boost than the weaker element. That means if two fire cultivators were to dual cultivate they could just do a similar method they already had and share the elements between the two. Li Chunhua was a fire cultivator and preferred ice cultivators to fire or wood. At least in her previous life, she did.

She developed a bond with a clan that produced a high amount of ice cultivators and every few decades when she got sick of her husband she’d replace him with a newer model. The clan had only survived because of her proclivities to take them as her concubines, no one wanted to crush that family because it would have put a target on their head and they got away with far more than should have been possible.

There were also darker aspects to dual cultivation. If one side was stronger than the other they could burn the cultivation of their partner to grow stronger faster than if they dual cultivated normally. This had the name of them becoming a living cauldron because it had the same effect as rapidly growing their strength as if they ate a top-grade cultivation pill.

The final difference between dual cultivation compared to normal cultivation is that the person with the lower cultivation gets more benefits from it than the person with the higher cultivation. If the person with the higher cultivation is too far beyond the person with the lower the higher cultivator would have to pay close attention to their partner otherwise they’d risk overloading their meridians and causing them to rupture and cripple their cultivation permanently. There were fixes but… Who would fix a cripple when you could just get another cultivator.

That was the life of a cultivator. One moment, you got a lucky break, the next, you’re rendered impotent, and your lifespan has been shortened by dozens if not hundreds of years. Cultivating between people in the same realm was normally fine, even if their elements didn’t match up just rubbing your qi’s against each other still produced some effect. A wood cultivator could cultivate with a metal cultivator and get some effect but they’d gain more cultivation if it was a water or earth cultivator.

If they were mixed cultivation like a water, fire cultivator then they’d get even more cultivation out of the process, especially if the cultivator was experienced in dual cultivation and could actively control the elements inside their body. Only elements outside of the five common ones started to have problems with their cultivation partners. A lightning cultivator had a much higher risk of crippling their water partners while they gained very little benefit from fire while the fire cultivator would gain a smaller boost and metal would get a much bigger boost.

Ice cultivators had a higher risk of crippling metal partners, gained little benefit from water, and gave fire cultivators a bigger boost than other elements. Even as old as I was I only met a handful of cultivators that had elements outside of the common five and most were part of the uncommon ring like lightning, ice, clay, poison, and obsidian. 

The stuff like light and darkness was more rare but I think the emperor and his children were light cultivators while the shadow organization leaders often had shadow cultivators. Even beyond that, there was time, space, and gravity but in my previous life, I never met a cultivator with enough to consider those types of cultivation compared to their other elements.

That was the thing, most people could have light affinity or time or lightning or poison… But those elements aren’t even checked for by the normal spiritual root testing methods and when they had their affinities checked for ones outside of the five common ones, if the person didn’t have an affinity above twenty percent then it wouldn’t show up. Even if it did show up there would be little they could do with that low amount.

Most people would have a very high common element if they had an uncommon one. If they had forty of fifty percent affinity with ice they’d most likely have a seventy or eighty percent affinity with water. The common affinities also had more resources to strengthen their affinities while someone who chose to incorporate their uncommon element they’d have to travel a road far fewer have traveled on. The known methods could be used as reference material but the vast majority of their techniques would have to be created by themselves or passed down by their families.

The ice clan Li Chunhua loved so much was one of the only few clans that outright practiced an uncommon element only because of her backing and that allowed them to grow stronger and develop new cultivation methods, techniques, and pills to help improve their family's ice cultivators. Otherwise, if someone had the ice element, they’d have to marry into the family to get access to their resources or they’d have to go it alone.

The final thing you could add to the situation is the dual cultivation method. Just like normal cultivation, you could increase the effectiveness by using different methods with the speed of cultivation varying wildly depending on which method was used. The default would be two people rubbing their elements against each other. This was the basic cultivation most people who don’t plan on doing dual cultivation for long periods of time use.

The next would be pushing and pulling each other's elements into your own body. This method is just more effective for a variety of reasons but the main reason is it allows your body to absorb qi outside itself more easily so the qi left behind in your system is more easily absorbed and your qi left behind in their system is more easily recovered. This method is about thirty percent more effective than the default method but it comes with a much higher risk of having your cultivation stolen by your partner.

There was also dual imagination cultivation where the two people devise mental images that compliment each other. Both could imagine their cultivation as balls, gears, or other things similar to the solo cultivation methods to grow their strength. I would use a new method I devised that was an altered version of the second and third methods.

I was going to pull in portions of their cultivation while absorbing it. This would lower their own cultivation but their bodies would be better at recovering back to where it was while I would have gotten a bigger boost than the other cultivation methods. I wouldn’t cripple my partners but if I moved up tiers above them then they’d get more benefits from dual cultivating with me. The biggest problem with this method is the downtime my partners would have to go through to reach their previous cultivation. That problem could be made up through multiple partners.

I was effectively stealing their cultivation and making them recover it while I grew stronger faster and when I eventually outranked them all they’d get more benefit from cultivating with me. I was calling it the dual slingshot cultivation method with multiple partners… Maybe I should workshop the cultivation name before I tell anyone about it. That was in the future though, I was just going to dual cultivate normally until I had enough cultivation partners that I could rapidly cultivate without anyone noticing our insane cultivation speed until it was too late.