After our first time, we couldn't stay to cuddle since I had to bring her back, so we cleaned up before I brought her home. She had already prepared everything.

The following period had me setting aside my future plans as I enjoyed my time with her. We had a lot of sex whenever and wherever we could. We may have been a bit too enthusiastic, but I believe it was understandable.

Not much changed aside from the sex at first.

I was still pondering what to do in the future, just that I was also thinking of Cong'er while making my plans.

I had been slowly realizing that in the village there was not much opportunity for me right now – not if I wanted to do something meaningful with my life – but that also meant that if I moved she would have to come with me. She didn't seem keen on changing location, though. I had considered bringing her family with me, but that was unfeasible with my means.

Even by bringing only her with me, though, the problem was that I couldn't guarantee a stable living right away – and I doubted that she would move like that.

But a solution came to me in the end – we could go to the Sect.

Cong'er would not be able to enter the Qi Gathering realm in time, but if I could do it, the sect allowed the children and wife – or husband – of the disciple to move in with him in the sect buildings. Going to the sect would also give me access to many benefits and resources.

If I was lucky, I would find a way to make money without giving up my freedom.

There was, of course, also the small problem of my inability to cultivate, so I did not give voice to my thoughts right away. I wanted to see if there was another way before trying to overcome my handicap.

I was also a bit guilty toward my family. After all, I worked at the farm only half of the time, and while we didn’t lack money, we also weren't swimming in it. One mouth to feed was not a small expense after all – especially one as big as mine.

I already talked to them about my intention of finding another line of work, and the possibility of me changing city. They said they would support me however they could. When I married Cong'er, they would also help take care of her if I was away. I had, in fact, also considered doing it like her father and leave alone, only bringing her when my situation stabilized.

That aside, I didn't change much of my routine, and for a time, I was happy.

Still, when you make a choice, you have to bear the consequences. Cong'er was quite convinced that I would choose to work with her father in the shop. She had literally just asked, “so, when will you start working with father?”

I didn’t know that the sex came with that attached.

I was surprised, and she didn't like that my answer was, “I don’t know, I still have to consider.”

That put an end to that short blissful period.

Nothing changed right away, but she was visibly upset. Things started to get worse gradually. I tried to explain what I felt and wanted to do, but it didn't go well. For her, my idea to go away from the village was childish, as they already had everything they needed to make a living here – I just had to give up my dreams.

She criticized my plans as too risky, and she thought we didn't need anymore to live a comfortable life.

In her view, I had to settle down with her in the shop. That was the only reasonable and responsible thing to do. She viewed everything else as the delusions of an immature man.

She had her ideas, and she wouldn't make compromises. She didn't even try.

We had many arguments about this. Until, one day, I just had enough. I told her that if she was not satisfied with who I was, she could just search for someone else.

She started shouting, calling me names until I just left, telling her to go fuck herself.

Was I wrong? Maybe, but I was sure she wasn’t right either.

We didn’t come back together after that. I was a free man, finally.

It had been a happy relationship for a time but, lately, it had just been a burdensome thing, and I was not looking to see anyone else for the time being. I had a pressing matter that I needed to see to, and couldn't wait anymore.

I was still convinced that going to the sect would be my best chance to have a new and better life. Even if I could only cultivate the beginning stage of the next Realm, and never progress for the rest of my life, it was still fine. The sect accepted so many outer sect disciples because of necessity, not because they wanted to find talent.

If they just wanted talent, they could just choose the kids who reached Qi Gathering before thirteen – but they wouldn't have enough people to do all the small jobs needed around the sect. From what I knew they didn't let outside people inside the sect grounds unsupervised.

The problem was that I was getting closer to my twentieth birthday. I needed to find a way to enter the next realm, and I didn’t have any idea how to take that step.

I first asked my uncle for the cultivation books that the sect distributed in its territory, since he didn't keep them in his office, and tried again with those – who knows maybe things changed. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case, so I desisted.

Seeing me dejected when I returned the books, my uncle suggested, "why don’t you try with the ones my son sent me?”

I had forgotten.

There were still some books I hadn't read in the office. Among those, a few were on cultivation – I hadn't needed them before, so I just put them in a corner and left them there. Maybe there was something I could use.

After I went through them, I found that nearly all of them still were unusable by me – with one exception.

There was a cultivation technique that I could probably use.

I could bet it was a cultivation technique that he had just bought to send to his father because the book looked ancient. He knew his father didn't actually read them, so the most likely case was that he picked books that didn't cost too much and were good-looking for exposition purposes.

The cultivation technique was a transcription of an ancient scroll written by an Elder of the Wudang Sect.

There was also a chapter that explained the reason why he tried to make this method.

Briefly explained, he was a cultivator at the end of his life, with no hope of advancement. He wanted to leave something behind for future generations to remember him, so he devised a new cultivation technique. His idea was to create something that didn’t rely on talent or resources but only on dedication and time.

It was half successful.

Indeed, for someone to successfully cultivate with this method, he didn’t have to rely on his ability to sense qi or, more importantly to me, the ability of his meridians to circulate it.

To be used, the technique just needed one to control the qi in his dantian.

Usually, a cultivator had to circulate the qi in a predetermined path through the meridians, which differed based on the cultivation technique. That allowed him to absorb the ambient qi and slowly incorporate it with his own qi before storing the excess in the dantian. The properties of the qi also differed vastly from one technique to another.

Most of the time, when one wanted to create a new cultivation method, he used his knowledge of the existent ones as a reference to modify the pathways and speed at which the qi circulated.

But this senior thought differently.

Usually, the meridians of a mortal naturally absorbed qi through the air and food to maintain an internal balance. If this balance got upset for some reason, various complications could arise, from sickness to death. This was the objective of the Body Tempering realm: to prepare the body of the future cultivator. Before, it was absolutely forbidden to interact with the meridians in any way unless one was a doctor.

This method relied on the natural ability of the meridians to absorb qi.

To use it, one had to move the qi inside the dantian through imaginary pathways, like when a normal method required one to circulate the qi in determinate meridians. Of course, it was only faintly similar, but that was where the thought process started.

That allowed the cultivator to absorb the qi from his meridians while they slowly replenished themselves from the ambient qi.

That was what I could take out from the overly technical explanation at least.

There were three major problems, though.

The first was that the cultivator had to be at least moderately proficient at controlling small amounts of qi in the dantian – which was not exactly an easy feat.

The second was that, because of the difficulty and concentration required, the cultivator couldn't enter long periods of seclusion.

Usually, cultivation was not hard. One would only be able to guide a certain amount of qi to the dantian based on his talent, and the act itself was relaxing. If one tried to force things, it could be easy to go into cultivation deviation or damage the meridians.

That allowed people to cultivate for a long time without needing to take breaks or feel the passage of time – for the Higher Realms, it wasn't rare for cultivators to enter secluded cultivation for months or even years. In the lower ones, one could at least cultivate for multiple hours at a time, only stopping for meals or sleep.

With this cultivation technique, an hour, in the beginning, would be a stretch.

The third problem was the rate of absorption of the meridians. It was just too slow.

If one was to use this method, cultivating a few hours a day, by taking breaks, one was expected to reach the peak of Qi Gathering in around 100 or more years.

There were also smaller problems – the qi would not be attuned to an element, for example. That would lead to complications when one tried to enter the Foundation Establishment Realm.

Considering the effort and time needed, not many would be willing to try for so little gain. And even less would keep cultivating for years to see almost no improvement. Most, after realizing they had no talent, weren't even willing to waste time in normal techniques – that's why so few people ever reached the peak of Qi Gathering, outside the sects.

Hell, some could hardly reach the peak of Body Tempering by fifty here, and the qi in the Wudang Mountains was much denser compared to other places, based on what the travelers said.

This senior who devised this method spent several decades trying to improve it. He even paid some mortals to use this technique to see the effects, but, after many years, he only noticed a peculiar movement in the qi of their dantian. Before he could continue his research any further, though, his time came to an end. It seems that no one was willing to invest in his method after his death, letting it be forgotten.

His last desperate move was to make as many copies of his scrolls and distribute them around. Most of them were probably just thrown away. This book was a historian's transcription made when the passage from scrolls to books was made a few hundred years ago.

It seems that he really hated the thought of being forgotten, I thought as I sat in my room with the book in my lap.

Regardless, chance – or fate for those who believed – brought this book in front of me. It was time to see if it was my ticket to a new life or just another disappointment.

Truthfully I was half hopeful half resigned. There was only a certain amount of failures a person could take before giving up, and I was very near that point.

In the end, though, I succeeded.

It took me months to move the qi in my dantian adequately, but the book had warned it could take even longer, so I had not worried. It had been trying, though.

It was a bittersweet feeling taking this step after so many years. So many things changed compared to when I had tried the first time.

Given my previous experience, I decided to wait for the cultivator from the sect to give the go-ahead before I informed others of my success. In the meantime, I tried to cultivate as much as I could. As the book said, I didn't make much progress, and it was hard. I could just maintain the concentration for forty minutes the first few times – though I had improved some more after hitting a plateau. By the end of the first week, I could cultivate for almost an hour straight, and didn't seem to make any more progress after that.

I found out an interesting fact, though.

In the beginning, I would meditate for an hour after I woke up, one after lunch and one before bed. Since it was spring, though, the farm was quite busy, and that, added with my other routines, made it hard to keep cultivating constantly, so I sometimes had to do it for less time than I could. On those occasions, I tried to take some time as I rested to cultivate some more.

I discovered that it was far easier to cultivate since. After all, there was no need to enter a meditative state to sense the qi in the environment – I also didn't need to guide it in the correct pathways. Even if I had some distraction, I would have no fear of any backlash or risking qi deviation – at most, the technique would just stop working.

That discovery allowed me to just take small breaks throughout the day to cultivate. It was also far less mentally draining. It still didn't make much difference for the speed of my cultivation. Maybe I could just cultivate slightly more, but it was at least far easier to keep it up during my everyday life – and this was a great advantage.

I think this was something normal cultivators would never even think of, being so set on using isolation chambers or secluded spots to cultivate.

Like that, a few months passed, and the Sect’s examiner came to the village.