Chapter 11: Cavern secrets

  Sam no longer got that tingly feeling when he ate from his thermos, so suffice it to say that his attempts at mimicking its effects using the ambient qi was successful enough to push him over the threshold of how much his thermos could improve his physique this tier. One thing he wasn’t sure of though was whether that threshold was actually the maximum possible for him at the tier or whether that was simply what the magic of the thermos could handle. He decided to experiment with that later on but it didn’t need to be here and now. Right now his more pressing concern was figuring out what the true purpose of this place was. Given the fact that the system barely gave explanations regarding cultivation, Sam was under the assumption that beginning cultivation in general wasn’t expected of the participants in his tutorial instance. After all, the lack of information on it made him believe that there would only be very few people who would figure out the process to start cultivation. It would require a mix of luck, obsession, and prior knowledge from reading certain kinds of fiction and mythology from back home. He wasn’t arrogant enough to believe that he would be the only to figure out the catalyst to the whole process but also he was confident enough that he was one of the more successful and earlier participants in cultivation. This seemed likely to him because of the Sagacious Being title he got from the system. It mentioned reaching beyond your station so it made sense to him that his efforts in cultivation was also breaking the normal order of things at least somewhat.

  So far his only clues as to the purpose of this place was the nature of the qi in the surroundings. As such he went over what he knew to be the characteristics of the qi here in comparison to the qi from the cherry blossoms outside. He knew they were two sides of the same coin in some way, he knew that the side of the coin that was within this space was more related to mortality and death. The part that he was struggling with was that he couldn’t really be more specific about what he meant by those assumptions other than that was the vibe he was getting from the qi.

  With how much focus he had been putting into feeling just the qi recently he tried to switch to seeing what the mana in this place was like. A lot of things so far used both energies, they were similar in a way but also incredibly different. When he utilized qi it came from his core which was metaphysically superimposed into the area of his body behind his navel. It was both material and immaterial at the same time. In some ways it was like he now had a new and incredibly small organ in that part of his body but that the organ was only complete when you included the immaterial aspect of it.

  As for his mana, he hadn’t really thought about it as much. It was a bit daunting to begin looking into mana for Sam because his understanding of it was precluded by the many different stories he’d read that had magic. And the issue was that there were so many different ways it had been used among those tales unlike qi which tended to remain relatively stable in conception regardless of the work of fiction that it came in. While he knew when he activated his skill that the qi was supplied from his core, pinpointing the origin of his mana when he used his skills eluded him. He could generally feel it coming from around his upper torso but he wasn’t sure exactly where. Magic in the different stories always had a few ways of progressing. One of the more common ones was the idea of forming magic circles, with the number of circles determining the kinds of spells and the overall strength of the mage in question. The issue was that he didn’t have a mage class and he sure as hell didn’t have circles as far as he knew. Which begs the question of where the mana was coming from within him. It was a similar problem to when he didn’t have a core yet. Technically Sam had utilized qi even before he formed his core but because he wasn’t as attuned to the energy at the time, all he had to go on was the knowledge that he used qi but not how or where it came from before his core was around. It seemed like right now, that was the issue he was facing with mana. Of course this was under the assumption that forming circles was even necessary in the first place. Not every story used that version of a mana based magic system. Some stories even used a framework similar to cultivation where the characters developed a mana core. He was getting a bit side tracked here. He realized he didn’t really need to know yet exactly where the mana he used was coming from internally, he just needed to be able to pay attention to the characteristics of the mana in here and whether he could get a vibe from it as he had from the qi.

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  Closing his eyes, even though in the darkness it made no real difference, he began to go through a similar process to when he cultivated except this time he reached out to the mana around him instead of the qi. The hope was that if he could circulate that energy and keep all of his attention on it that he would be able to get a sense for its innate aspects. When he breathed in he reached out to the mana around him and urged it to follow his breath. As he visualized the path of the mana, he kept it in the general area that he did know it originated; so his imagery remained within the upper torso. He imagined his lungs filling up with the energy and moving into his blood then from his blood into his heart and brain. Obviously it wasn’t a literal thing but just a useful tool to help him meditate on things better. Whenever he fell into these bouts of extreme focus and meditation, time really did lose all meaning especially in an environment of total darkness like where he was. He did this dance with the mana in the air, pushing it out and pulling it into himself in rhythm with his breathing. At first he wasn’t sure but he began to sense a similar kind of attunement to the mana that he got from the qi. It reminded him of mortality, of impermanence, of death. It wasn’t malevolent in nature though, it felt more akin to the certainty that one could feel knowing that the sun would set at the end of the day. It was like yes death is an end, but it is an end that leads to many new beginnings. A circle of life one might say where the death of one being fuels the growth of another; it was reminiscent of a well balanced ecosystem that required predators just as it did prey and primary producers, they all fed into each other like a well oiled machine.

  Unlike the situation with his experiments with qi, now there was no sudden system notification and neither was there a bout of unconsciousness. Still he was grateful for the opportunity to take his time and examine these things in a safe environment. If he were outside he didn’t really know if he would be able to be calm enough to think this hard about the nature of his new reality. Now he was looking for the commonality between the mana and the qi. He knew they were not the same but he also knew that they were adjacent to each other and could be used for similar purposes. He did have both a skill and a magical item that could use both and that both could variably change the consumption of in order to control the intensity of certain effects when used in tandem or in isolation. Not knowing where to start looking for the commonalities, Sam did something he had not tried so far. He continued his meditation but he would switch energies after every cycle of breath. And so he went on for a bit, breathing in and circulating the qi then moving onto breathing in and circulating the mana, so on and so forth. After some time, it yielded results. He realized that one major thing both energies had in common wasn’t just with the nature of the energies themselves but in the very method by which he interacted with them. It was hard to tell at first because it's kind of like realizing you're breathing and then suddenly having to breathe manually. No that wasn’t quite right, it was more like realizing that the common thing between all the colors that you see is that you see those colors through your eyes. That’s what it was. He was interacting with qi and mana using the same “appendage.” Keeping that in mind, Sam continued to switch between touching upon the qi and touching upon the mana. The hope was that by continuing the practice that he might be able to more consciously pay attention to what he was using to interact with them instead of just letting the instinct of control take over. That was why Sam initially thought of manual breathing. Right now Sam was trying to get to the point of familiarity with the method enough to not have to let instinct take over. He thought back to the descriptions of the titles he had received so far. All of them said something about improvements to his soul. Those titles were ones that he received predominantly because he had been reaching out to mana and to qi in ways that were not yet expected of him at the time.

  “That’s it! It’s my soul; that’s what I’m using to grasp the mana and the qi!” Sam exclaimed as realization flooded his mind.