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I spent the next month cooped up resting and combing through the manuals, which saw me eventually combine the two Pure Yang One Qi manuals into six. Yes, six... Don’t ask me how come I ended up with more. It wasn’t my wish.
On account of the gravity of a mistake, and to justify all the meridian damage, blood I coughed, and times I suffered qi deviation as part of my daily childhood, I decided to seek opinions of reliable individuals. Thus, I interviewed Boss, Tang Ye, General Manager Bai, and Su Xiao, whom I didn’t want to admit knew more Chinese characters than I did. Unexpectedly, the four of them reacted similarly – frowning, labelling it complicated, folding their arms to think, walking off with the manuals, then coming back a few days later with a new copy of their interpretation.
Boss opined that, although there were a number of profound views and innovative methods, there were too many horsefeathers. There were virtually three sentences of nonsense for every half a sentence of genuine knowledge; the more she read, the more riled up she was. By the time she got to the latter half, it was basically nonsense and actual knowledge all mixed together. To quell her rage, she took it out on innocent me with her inkstone. She decisively deleted over half of a manual, removing the parts she believed were designed to mess with the reader. As such, there was only the first to third chapters of the mental cultivation left, so it was impossible to practice even half of the discipline.
Tang Ye came back with notes five times thicker than the two manuals combined after referencing all of his knowledge base. Had he not told me that wrapping yourself up in blankets to train in summer was to ward off bad spirits and mastery would ward off flies as one of Kongdong Sect’s mental cultivations claimed, I’d have believed him. After giving me the stack, he told me to wait for his sixth notebook, so he had been locked up in his room since.
I thought General Manager Bai would have had something valuable to offer since she learnt from my uncle, but she just complained that Zizi would just go wrong learning it. Instead of pointing out what to learn, she pointed out an endless list of things he couldn’t learn.
Su Xiao told me the yang qi gathering method wasn’t correct based on his experience, and then he gave me a bunch of weird descriptions that I never encountered when learning Yijin Jing.
That was how I ended up with four more copies.
All I could do was reflect on Shifu’s personality and experiences, combine them with my own experience and analyse it. It was a more painful process than taking Shifu’s tests back home – if they weren’t questions on chess or medicine.
“Mm.” I ran my eyes over the text, nodded and asked, “What do you think it means?”
“I think it means...”
Blah, blah, blah.
“Exactly, especially this part. You must control it well.”
“But how do I collect so much pure yang qi?”
That section was all about pure yang qi? All the qi, supplement, loss and red in there made me think it was a recipe for congee with dried red dates.
Thankfully, there was a standard answer for such questions.
“That’s why you need to train.”
“I will... but I need to constantly accumulate yang qi for a year, and each successive time, it must be more potent yang qi than the last. How do I do that...?”
Hmm... I think I know the answer to that!