Chapter 96: Nothing to Prove

He was braced for a crash, for him to fall back into his bed and pass out for the rest of the day.

That didn't happen.

Instead, he felt normal. Totally, absolutely normal. No lingering effects on his mind. His body felt a little tired, but it had been a while since he had slept.

Paike stood up and went through a quick routine, testing the limits of his body. There was nothing wrong in the slightest.

Slowly, a smile crept its way onto his face. As far as he could think, this was his first absolute, unadulterated success. There were no caveats, no major problems he had to deal with later or things he had missed out on. Nor had it been a frantic scramble to fix previous mistakes or something he was late to.

He had done something long before he was supposed to. He did it early and far better than anyone could have thought possible. This wasn't the control he had been required to achieve; no, it was the beginning of mastery. This was a tool he could use at will, and he saw that it could even take an Emerald cultivator off guard.

It only reinforced the idea that no one could really challenge his position in the outer sect. Only Li Feng, he thought, could give him a real fight, but even then he was pretty sure he could come out on top. But he didn't think there was any reason to have that fight in the first place. Li Feng wasn't going to stand in his or Liming's way.

Not only did they agree to work together, but neither he nor Liming wanted that top spot. Not really. Top five was all that mattered to Paike. What it came down to in the end was the end-of-year tournament and who would qualify to enter the inner sect. Being top-ranked wasn't a guaranteed ticket to entry.

There was still a long way to go. Almost a year, but he couldn't sit still, not because he didn't think that he wouldn't make it. Already, he was nearing the level at which disciples entered the inner sect. No, if he stopped moving, he would lose momentum and stagnate. Father had told them all over and over that nothing was more dangerous to a cultivator than a lack of a threat.

Complacency killed cultivators. One would think that they were good enough. That they could slow down a little and still make the next stage, or whatever milestone that was next. They probably would. But always the next step was so much more than the one before that if one didn't hit it running, one would look at it and think. I've lived five hundred years; I have a couple thousand years left. Haven't I lived a good life? Don't I deserve to rest?

That answer was yes. One did deserve a rest. Because the effort was not worth it. If one didn't rest, they would be destined to spend four times longer than they had already lived, striving and pushing for the next hurdle, with an almost guaranteed chance they would either fall short or die along the way. They would never know peace or rest for more than a few moments at a time.

That was where the odds came into play. Only one of a hundred would advance, and it might be worse in the later realms.

If there was something pushing a cultivator. Whether it was some threat or motivation, family pressure or societal obligation, or, better yet, a threat to one's life, they tended to push for that power. It was a very rare person who could make themselves keep cultivating for no reason other than for the sake of their own power. Even then, there wasn't much more than one got from moving from the fifth realm to the sixth. There were few who could force their will on you, and they could be easily avoided. You would live longer than anyone truly wanted, and there was no extra comfort. So most would fall off.

Paike refused to be one of them. He had been when he couldn't even get started. He had seen what his life would be as a mortal. He then accepted what he could do as a Ruby cultivator and was happy. It was satisfying.

Now, he knew that it was so small. Having been given a second chance, which cultivators were rarely afforded, he couldn't waste it. There was no way he could be satisfied with what he had, not because what he had wasn't good. It was. Better than anything he had ever imagined. But because he saw how much it could change and gett better.

He hadn't hit a goal and stopped. Maybe cultivators did that. They thought of Emerald or a bit beyond. They beat the odds and made it, then they rested. Took time to have children, and then, when it came time to move again, the fire had long since died out. Those were the success stories.

Paike wasn't going to be that. He hit his first goal, and then moved past it, and everything was better. He then passed his next goal. This time he hadn't even set a goal. There was no destination for him anymore, just the path and progress. Why should he ever stop? Did he believe he could get to the top? Not really, but why did that matter? Did the top even exist? It seemed like a silly question to him.

Stories always told of heroes who had an unshakeable belief that they would ascend and nothing would stop them from defying the heavens. Paike wasn't that. He never had that belief in himself; he would only be faking it. So instead, he would need his own motivation. He wasn't like Mother, trying to keep up with Father. No one knew what drove Father, but Paike had an idea of his own.

If he didn't have a goal, there was no need for him to believe he would make it. There was no faith to be shaken. Nothing that could stop him. Instead of shooting for the top, he would be moving because of the movement itself. It didn't matter how far he had to go, but the fact that he was always climbing would define him.

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This all hit Paike as a revelation all at once. He didn't have a full chance to process it all, but he knew it to be true.

He stood at the end of his bed with a full and open smile on his face. His shoulders relaxed, and he had never felt more free or motivated.

It wasn't like his obligation to his family had vanished, but it wasn't a burden he would have to bear anymore. There was no pressure he felt from not disappointing Mother, nor a sense of failure for not being able to keep up with his sister. He would be able to do all this. Even his advancing, as he was going to, would help them, and he didn't need to find an alternative way to serve the family's interests once he was done, because he would never be done.

Now that the force pushing him forward had vanished, he discovered it had been slowing him down. He had been modulating his pace to match the pressure, making sure that he always had enough to keep moving in the future. Now he could charge forward; if he fell, he fell. But that was that.

Paike had been putting off his cultivation for a while now because of that. It had been weeks since he had made progress to the next stage. Sure, his dantian was growing, but he was hitting massive diminishing returns. He was adding the same amount of volume each time, but as a percentage of the total volume, there was now not much difference. Not that he was going to stop, but he had long since pushed past the size he had needed. He had been stalling because he didn't know what he needed to do next. But that was a lie.

He had always wanted something more to work for next, so he was doing things that weren't as important, just to keep making easy progress, but it wasn't everything he could be doing.

Paike left his room and entered the adjoining cultivation chamber to the side. He primed the controls and sat in the center. He didn't know if he could actually make progress or what would happen if he did, but he wasn't about to risk ruining his bed if he didn't have to. Also, the risk of distraction there would be too high if Guan Li came back. In the chamber, he would not be disturbed.

Diving into his spirit, he examined the mass of qi spinning in the center of his dantian. How should he progress? He had an idea of how one progressed to Emerald from stories and common knowledge, but like so many things, he was pretty sure that it wouldn't work best for him. He had passively avoided learning more. There was no reason he couldn't have sought out more information.

No reason, besides arrogance, which he freely admitted was growing. But he was pretty sure that he deserved it. Between his own creations, discoveries with Guan Li, and conversation with Elder Song, he knew that he had a much better understanding of qi theory than any cultivator at his stage.

He also didn't follow standard practices, even if they had been made by high-realm cultivators and time-tested for millennia. They were made for the average cultivator, which he was not. Paike had resisted admitting it, but he was special, and not just because his qi was slow.

While he wasn't technically a natural cultivator, he didn't find them as incomprehensible as everyone knew they were. It was supposed to be a lifetime's work to understand a single thing they came up with in an afternoon. But that wasn't the case for Paike. He wasn't a genius in all things, but he apparently did have a gift.

He wasn't going to waste that.

So, taking a tiny part of the qi, Paike examined it. It was just Topaz qi that was affected by the qi factor, giving it a higher qi initial in the spiritual world. But what was that really?

He thought back to how he had advanced. An overwhelming concentration of Ruby qi in one space had caused a cascading effect that transformed all his qi and the qi constructs that made up his spirit into a more potent, powerful version. Could he replicate that for Topaz? Maybe that was what most did. Upgrading their organs and getting more power and potent qi until they hit a threshold, then moving them up again.

They would condense the qi, but he wasn't sure his would work that way. First, he had some intuition about the viscosity that would make it hard. Second, he struggled to overstuff his dantian because it needed to heal after he had brought in more qi.

No, there were more things he would try first. But before that, there was something he wanted to understand. When he had advanced to Topaz, it wasn't the first time he had qi of a higher realm than Ruby in his dantian.

How he had really advanced in Ruby was because he had taken the ancient spirit's qi and split it apart, forcing his dantian wider. He obviously didn't have access to Emerald qi, and even if he did, it wouldn't have helped him in the same way.

What he did wonder was if he could still do the same thing. Could he split some of his qi back into Ruby, and what would he learn from it?

Now he was so different than who he had been before. He had so many more sensory capabilities and power. There had to be so much that he missed. But beyond that, he learned so much more about qi and qi theory. Even if he could see everything he could now, he wouldn't have even tried to understand it.

He wasn't even sure he could do it. The way the qi felt to him was different. He wasn't sure whether that was a quality of his qi or of his also being of the higher realm. Maybe there was some aspect of qi not available for him to interact with when he had a lower spiritual weight in the lower realms. Or some part of the cultivation he didn't yet know of or understand.

So he isolated a small bit of qi. It was spinning as fast as he could make the whole mass go. He tried to make it spin even faster, hoping that because it was smaller, maybe he could isolate it better. When it did nothing, he figured that was obviously in line with what he knew. If you were pushing a frictionless cart while running at max speed, you couldn't push a feather faster if you were already running at your max speed. That wasn't his best metaphor, but he was pretty sure he understood it.

So he started to slow the qi down. As it slowed, he was able to take a look at the individual particles of qi. Slowly, he separated the qi into smaller and smaller bits. It got harder and harder to separate them. He could move them far more easily than he remembered moving the individual particles while in Ruby, but it was as if he had lost some of his dexterity. Like a child growing up, one's fingers got larger and stronger, but also bigger.

When he had a few individual particles, he couldn't quite feel the cracks he had used to pry them apart before. They were just one solid mass that, if he didn't know better, he would assume couldn't be broken apart.

So naturally, he did what a child would do with a pair of rocks: he took two and smashed them together.