Chapter 104: The Strange Canyon and Its Secrets

Staring at his own veins with a heavy, exhausted gaze, An suddenly snapped back to reality and yelped. "Damn it!" He activated Qi Silence, and immediately started shaking, realizing the technique wasn't working quite right, sending him unpleasant little jolts of feedback. Ignoring that for now, he leapt up, leaving a crater behind him, rose all the way to the clouds, and, his bare body catching the light the whole way, dropped like a stone back down into the milky river. Falling, he turned his head, scanning for the exact spot where he'd been lying on the riverbed. "Found it!"

Like a arrow, he plunged toward the bottom, where a white ring lay buried in the mud.

He pulled it out and slipped it onto his finger. 'One down! Now I just need to find Baldi's pouch!'

Turning his head around, An finally picked up the Qi trail of the second ring and the pouch, both sitting just a few dozen meters apart from each other.

He swam over, put on the second ring, grabbed the beast pouch, and started rising back up.

Breaking through the surface, he flew back and landed on the same clearing where he'd left the crater earlier.

Whoosh!

He opened the pouch, and water came pouring out along with a soaked, terrified rooster.

"CLACK! BWAWK!"

Baldi landed on his rear and started screaming at the top of his lungs.

"ROAAAR!"

Somewhere in the distance, in answer to his screeching, a low, heavy roar rang out, one that made the ground itself vibrate.

Hearing it, Baldi went dead silent at once, glaring at the shameless human who'd nearly drowned him with pure anger and hurt in his eyes.

"Sorry, I just didn't really have time to think about you back there... Not even sure I could explain it if I tried."

Pulling clothes out of his own ring, An got dressed, and while putting on his shirt, brushed against his brand, which, after everything his body had just been through, was still there, unchanged from before. He frowned slightly, pushed the thought out of his head quickly, and wrapped both rings in small scraps of cloth to visually conceal them.

He pulled out a bottle of orange-tinted wine and dropped down onto the ground, leaning his back against a tree that had somehow survived.

He set out a small bowl and a few second-rank fruits beside himself.

The moment Baldi spotted the bowl and the fruit, every trace of his earlier resentment vanished instantly. His beak clacked with anticipation as he settled in front of the bowl, eyeing the bottle in An's hands greedily.

An took the bottle, flicked it once to knock off a layer of frost, popped the cork, and poured it right to the brim of the bowl. "Careful, this one's stronger than usual. It's brewed from Vuemaona fruit. And if you'd actually been listening before, you'd know that fruit's famous for its intoxicating properties."

Hearing the warning, Baldi snorted, offended that this nasty human thought so little of him.

He grabbed the bowl in both wings, lifted it slightly in front of An, and drained the whole thing in one gulp.

Setting it back down with a proud look on his face, Baldi tapped it again. "Clack!" But something wasn't quite right. "Bok?"

Plop.

Baldi toppled over backward, already so drunk he couldn't move at all, only managing a few soft, contented little noises.

Watching the thoroughly satisfied and drunk rooster, An shook his head and wrapped him in a layer of his own Qi, keeping the demonic energy in the air from seeping into the bird's body.

Shifting his attention elsewhere, An looked out toward the horizon, across the whole stretch of the milky river. 'Heh, looks like I solved my whole cultivation problem without even meaning to...' He took a few long swigs from the bottle. 'Even before I took off earlier, when I was scanning my own body, I felt it... My Qi cultivation isn't tied to any technique anymore. My body, through that symbol of the two merged Daos, managed to break clean out of that damned pattern.'

Tipping the bottle back for a few more gulps, he kept scanning the surface of the river. 'If I've got this right, I'm no longer capped by whatever limit came from the pattern, since there simply isn't one anymore. Now the only limit is me, or rather, the strength of my mind, which depends on the strength of my soul.'

He set the bottle down beside himself and leaned his head back against the tree, looking up through its already-thinned leaves. 'Once Baldi's rested up and I put him back... I can move on to experimenting, to figure out exactly how my Qi works now.'

Picking up the beast pouch, he started tidying it out using his Qi. Every time he used this new energy, he felt a mix of novelty and slight uncertainty.

Clearing out all the excess water, leaving just enough to fill a small pond, and returning whatever fish were still alive back inside, he slowly restored the space inside the pouch, bringing it almost exactly back to how it had been before.

Still not fully trusting his new energy, An carefully picked up the rooster with his own hands and set him back inside the pouch, placing the fruit and the refilled dish beside him.

Once everything was packed away, he tied the pouch to his belt, settled into a lotus position, and closed his eyes.

Slowly, very carefully, An started searching his own memory for the process of drawing in Qi from his surroundings, the one his body had used while he was unconscious.

Latching onto the right memory, or rather the right sensation, he began slowly opening his inner world, picturing, in his mind, a set of enormous imaginary gates swinging open, granting access to his world, forming a tunnel that led straight to his symbol of the two Daos. 'Focus.'

Slowly, everything around him began to shift.

He started feeling how, from the neutral Qi in his surroundings, he was drawing in particles of WoodQi mixed together with grains of DeathQi.

Sensing his surroundings, tracing exactly where these particles, especially the DeathQi, were coming from, he was surprised to find that this energy didn't just come from dying organisms and the ambient neutral Qi, but from the shadows around him too, where it sat quietly, settled among Yin Qi.

'There's a lot more Death Qi around than I expected, since it's the element that marks the end of a cycle. It gathers in shadows because of Yin energy, Yin loves stillness, cold… loves pooling in shadow, and that's exactly where Death energy is easiest to pull out.'

'The neutral Qi surrounding me carries death energy too, because a cycle always needs both a beginning and an end... Life and Death... Qi itself is both the start and the ultimate end.'

Carefully regulating the flow of both kinds of Qi into his spinning symbol of two Daos, An moved cautiously. 'I still haven't gotten used to this cultivation process, or to this new energy of mine... I need time.'

Then he smiled slightly. 'Hm, and what should I even call this new energy of mine... I'm sure I'm not the first person to discover something like this, but given how little I actually know, I suppose I'll just slap my own name on it... Sigh, if only I had a knack for coming up with something more elegant. So, how about... the Cycle Symbol? Beginning is life; ending is death. From every ending comes a new beginning, and so on, forever... As for the energy itself, I'll just leave it as energy, or Qi. No point overcomplicating things.'

Relaxing, forgetting entirely where he even was, An continued through his very first true cultivation cycle under his new Qi system.

Carefully regulating the intake of both energies, he settled into the process, learning it fresh all over again as he went.

.

.

Almost ten hours later, he finally opened his eyes. 'So the real cap on how much I can cultivate in a single cycle now genuinely depends on the strength of my mind, my soul, really. The stronger my soul, the faster and the more I can draw in Qi particles... I've got a technique for that, though it's about as low-grade as they come. Unfortunately, it's all I have for now. But I shouldn't forget, even though the mind depends on the soul, speed and control still come down to consistent Qi training, the kind that lets me actually direct and manage my mental reserves better. So I can't afford to slack off on Qi training either.'

Looking around, he noticed the dead grass and the fallen trees, all casualties of his first big release of Qi into the surroundings, had come back to life. The grass had grown so tall and thick it nearly swallowed An whole.

The trees had grown fresh, healthy bark and sprouted lush new foliage.

'Since I'm pulling Death Qi from my surroundings, and at the same time, when I cultivate, my Qi mixed with rich vitality gets released back out into the world around me... Everything nearby just flourishes. Incredible.' Smirking slightly, he got up off the ground, tearing away the thick vines that had made a new home out of his legs while he'd been sitting there.

'The one thing that still worries me is my Qi Silence technique. With this new energy, I've had to spend time again just getting it to work reliably at all... Guess I got lucky no one decided to wander over here while I was radiating my presence to the whole area.'

Pushing off the ground, he rose into the air, then suddenly stopped. 'My whole goal in heading to the central ring was to find help modifying my Evergreen Qi technique, and to find some way out of that cultivation pattern... But now that there's no pattern holding me back, and no technique to modify either... Is there even a point in going further?'

Still hovering in midair, he thought it over for a moment and settled on an answer. 'Only if I find more spirit plants and fruit, and maybe some alchemy archives, or something else along those lines that catches my interest.' Having made up his mind, he shot upward, vanishing into the crimson clouds.

Climbing as high as he could, he flew in the same direction as before, toward the central ring.

The moment he crossed the milky river, he found himself dropping like a stone roughly every few minutes, the instant he sensed spirit-plant energy nearby.

Landing on the ground once again, he found a green fruit that looked strikingly like a kiwi. 'Eastern Breeze Fruit, third rank. Very beneficial for spirit beasts...'

Holding the fruit, An glanced toward the beast pouch hanging at his belt. 'Hm, I've already fed him a third-rank fruit, and his cultivation's still barely creeping toward a breakthrough into second rank... What kind of terrible bloodline does this chicken even have... I used to at least hold out some hope he might be some kind of heir, fine, a distant heir, to a Phoenix or a Dragon.'

He tossed the Eastern Breeze Fruit into the pouch, next to the sleeping Baldi. 'Distant heir, sure... just a regular fat backyard chicken.' He scanned the Qi around himself once more, confirmed there was nothing else of interest, and shot back up into the clouds to continue on his way.

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After several more hours of flying like this, constantly stopping whenever he sensed something valuable, he was almost at the border between the inner ring and the central ring.

"Hm?" Sensing massive instability in the Qi around him, An looked toward a grand canyon ahead. Great sandy mountains rose along its edges, splitting apart a huge stretch of dense forest, a passage running through the middle, and in front of that passage, a vast abyss, its secrets hidden beneath thick black fog that spilled out and poisoned everything around it, killing off all the plant life and staining the earth black.

Looking across that abyss, right at the passage, at the unstable Qi radiating from it, 'Judging by the energy, this is clearly a major clash between two groups of disciples... But none of them are demonic disciples, only one of them's giving off something like demonic energy... Hm, maybe they couldn't split something evenly, or someone decided to stab a friend in the back. Who knows.' Losing interest quickly, he turned toward the opposite side.

"Oh, what's this?" On the other side of the gulf, beneath the layers of black fog, An sensed a strange energy, one that closely resembled the Qi given off during pill refining. 'Strange, it really does feel like pill energy, just so weak it's probably long since gone to waste, leaving behind nothing but stagnant Qi particles that, for some reason, can't seem to break free.'

Without thinking twice, An flew straight to the abyss, dropped into free fall, and plunged into the darkness, passing straight through the black fog without any trouble at all. 'This fog is made of accumulated impurities... Wait, could this be why the concentration of demonic energy keeps rising?'

Focusing on the black clumps surrounding him, he realized this was a dense concentration of energy acting as a catalyst in the process of converting neutral Qi into demonic Qi.

'It's not harmful to cultivators, sure, but if an inexperienced disciple wandered in here without at least some basic body-protection technique, something like the ones used against gaseous poisons, they'd run into serious trouble. And the only real way to fix that would be to find somewhere with clean Qi, in other words, leave this whole space, and let the body clear out those impurities on its own, once outside.' Still falling, he kept scanning everything around him, missing nothing.

'There you are!' He finally pinpointed the rough direction of that weak, pill-like Qi flows.

Cutting his fall short while still deep inside the black fog, he started flying toward the source. 'Shame there's no Death Qi down here... would've been nice to absorb some. Though then again, with how little experience I've got with my new Qi, I'd have to balance out that much energy with Wood element instead... Still, thinking about it, I could just absorb it and leave it unfiltered for now, until I get the chance to balance it out properly...' Winding his way through the fog, An sank into his own thoughts, completely ignoring the battle raging not too far off, close enough that voices occasionally reached him. Though given his cultivation and the shape of this whole place, basically one long tunnel, the fight could easily be happening hundreds of kilometers away, and he'd still catch the sound of it. That is, without accounting for the Qi flows he saw on the other side of the pass, which proving the clash was actually only a few kilometers away.

Flying up to the wall of the gulf, he spotted crumbling steps carved into it. 'Someone actually bothered carving steps into the wall of this place... but why?' Cultivators who'd broken through to the fourth layer of Qi Condensation could already fly on basic swords or artifacts without any trouble, the whole point of a staircase like this wasn't entirely clear.

Dropping a little lower, he kept following alongside the staircase. 'Maybe it's because of this fog, to avoid pulling in too many impurities, they tried not to use their Qi at all while they were down here?'

"Oh?" Reaching a small platform carved into the wall, barely big enough for two people standing, he landed on it and looked at the wall in front of him.

Studying the Qi flows coming off the wall, he tilted his head slightly. 'Hm, only once I got this close was I able to actually see these Qi flows at all... This is definitely a formation, and judging by the flows... it's not just hiding the entrance, it's creating illusions that mask the Qi itself too. Damn illusions.'

Reading a few grains of information off the formation, learning about one of its main effects, the illusions, An rolled his eyes. 'Maybe there's another way around this thing. Worth checking.' He turned, hopped off the ledge, and kept falling.