“That is the poison you want me to use?,” I asked, incredulously rolling the herb around in my hand. Apparently Eolia had a sense of humor. I wasn’t opposed to taking the “poison” he had handed me. In fact, I’d done it before, like most of the people I went to high school and college with.

“Yes, this herb has dampening properties that could be very beneficial to your cultivation process until you reach the fourth stage. It is generally used for certain medical conditions related to cultivation overload. It has no short-term or long-term drawbacks, won’t damage your cultivation permanently, and is short-lived,” he answered.

“Yeah, and it’ll make your food taste fantastic and music wonderful,” I said, chuckling.

“You’ve had this poison before, then,” he said, with an expression of suspicion on his face.

“It was in fairly widespread use on my home world. I’d say that half of the people in my home country have tried it at least once,” I explained, “It’s safe to say that I’m quite familiar with it.”

And I was. My roommate in college spent his entire time smoking the stuff and playing video games. I didn’t take it to that extreme, but after I graduated it was made legal for medical purposes in my state. I’ll admit to spending several long evenings with friends watching old concerts on the internet while eating pizza. Or to several mountain campouts that culminated with us sitting around the fire passing a pipe. Oh yes, I was familiar with it.

“Where’s the pipe?,” I asked.

Teacher looked puzzled, “What pipe? You’re supposed to eat it.”

“Pipes work better. Trust me on this one,” I said, smiling. Even if it didn’t work, this was going to be awesome.

It’s good to be right, I reflected, as I exhaled the smoke. This is indeed awesome. After our discussion an ornate pipe was found in the cottage and was filled with the herb. I built a small fire next to the stream in a comfortable spot, so that I’d have an easy way to relight the pipe if required and proceeded to enthusiastically poison myself. The drug had originally been used as a medical treatment for qi overload and worked by blocking both the inflow and outflow of qi from the cultivator. This was fortuitous, as my problem was an overflow of both, which served to make initial cultivation exceedingly difficult. A bit of herbal remedy, however, had turned the tide. It had been three weeks since I had begun our treatment, and it was paying off in spades. What had originally been a fight against a raging torrent of qi had turned into a dance. I was able to cultivate with a speed that Temüjin, begrudgingly, admitted was “faster than anticipated.” He predicted that I would break into the body tempering stage any day now, and I was looking forward to it.

Body tempering was the goal of the dispersal exercise I had been doing for the past weeks and had required me to stuff the cells of my body full of qi. It would flow into the bones, organs, muscles, and skin and once my body was saturated it would “break through” to the next stage. While all the stages required the same basic steps, they were used as ranking system to determine the power of the cultivator. Given the specialization between elements it served as a loose ranking system to determine how fast, strong, or durable a given cultivator was. After body tempering came the foundation stage. After foundation was soldier, then adept, elite, centurion, sage, martial lord, and profound spirit ancestor.

Around half the cultivators born would never pass the body tempering stage. Half of the remainder would never get past foundation, and the numbers continued to decrease further until the centurion level, where all but a bare handful of cultivators stopped cold due to the increasingly large amounts of qi required to advance. According to the conversations I’d had with Temüjin over our meals there were less than five martial lords in the entire empire and only one person in the empire had ever been confirmed as reaching the profound spirit ancestor. It was a level that he had told me I could reach with a few easy centuries of practice.

Centuries of practice that I would enjoy, I thought, as I picked up the pipe and a smoldering twig from the fire. It was amazing, I thought as I took another drag off the pipe and tried not to cough, how sitting and meditating could make me feel so energetic and strong. I exhaled and grabbed a bit of the qi in my core before dispersing it across my body. Residual stress from the morning martial arts practice that teacher had instituted fell away, bruises healing rapidly, minor scrapes and cuts sealing up as if by magic, all washed away by the healing powers of earth and water qi. My schedule was simple, I woke at dawn (which considering how much I hated mornings was an achievement), ate a simple breakfast of rice porridge and tea, then Teacher would show me some “simple” moves for a few hours until lunch, after which I would retire to the brook until dusk for cultivation while he tended the garden, fished, or tried to sculpt rocks by the riverbank. He had given me leave to cultivate inside the house if I wanted, but the sound of the river running over the rocks soothed me and seemed to make the entire process easier.

My minor boon was the only reason he allowed it. While all intelligent monsters (like goblins) and most beasts in the mountain valley steered clear of the cottage, because those that didn’t ended up getting killed and/or eaten by the Hermit, there was always the chance that a random beast would stumble across me while I was meditating. With the native wildlife ranging between soldier and sage levels of power I would be easy pickings without the boon. During my first week, while the process still consumed the entirety of my attention, a Whitewater Tiger took a fish from the stream and proceeded to eat it next to me before settling in to bask in the sunshine. It’s amazing how stealthy a cat the size of a VW bug can be when you’re baked and have your attention focused on other things. By the time Teacher realized it was there it had curled up behind me and started to nap while I was happily meditating away. He let loose with a crack of thunder, it ran away, and I almost wet myself realizing how close I’d been to a centurion level creature. It was a gorgeous cat, though, and made me start thinking at night about possible familiars. My dreams were filled with visions of me riding on the back of a white and blue tiger, or a unicorn with a flaming horn, or flying on the back of a giant eagle while lightning bolts crashed down on our foes below.

Observing the fading light, I made sure the fire was out before starting to gather my things. It wasn’t until I was halfway back to the house before I got an urge. It felt like a tickle in my brain, telling me to spend just a little longer cultivating. With every step closer to the cottage the feeling got stronger, until I finally gave in and turned around to head back to the river. It took a few seconds to settle myself back into a meditative pose, and I skipped relighting the fire since my last dose of “poison” was still going strong.

Falling back into my meditative state, I started with my breathing exercises. As always, I visualized the qi as a wispy cotton candy colored form of energy as it collected inside me. Stripping a small piece from my center I began dispersing it throughout my body, as I had been doing for weeks. The first dispersal went fine. The second dispersal started well, but my body was strangely reluctant to absorb the energy and it wasn’t until I’d started my third cycle that the energy from the second had been completely absorbed. When I attempted to disperse my third breath I immediately ran into problems. My body was saturated with qi already and every cell was vibrating with barely controlled energy. I briefly considered backing off and letting it flow back out into the world, but I felt that same strange urge again almost as if my subconscious didn’t want to let go of the energy.

I tried again, moving the energy back into an even layer over my body, and then forcing it with my will to assimilate…And got nowhere. It felt like trying to drive a plastic straw through a cinder block. Struggling to maintain my meditations I focused my will as much as I could. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the qi began to seep into my already overloaded body. Maintaining a nice, even, pressure as it began to assimilate I sat and meditated. Loose qi in the environment began to swirl around me, clearly visible in my meditative state. I was sitting in the eye of a small qi hurricane and my body began drinking it like nectar. Eventually, the qi began to absorb more and more quickly, until the vortex collapsed with an audible whoosh. I had time for a single relieved breath before every cell in my body seized up and began to be remade.

Growing up in a rural area means that sometimes you get hurt. Don’t get me wrong, I’m quite aware that you can get hurt in a city as well. It’s just always seemed that in a rural area the severity of the wound is inversely proportionate to the distance to adequate health care. When I was twelve I managed to flip a four-wheeler while driving it through a pasture. No fault of my own, for the record. I hit a washout that was concealed by the low grass while I was going at a good clip and went ass over elbows across the field. I managed to flip the ATV back over, crawled on, and got it started before motoring one-armed back to the farmhouse. I got a quick once-over and when it was proven that my arm could move but just hurt, and that my leg could indeed bear weight and wasn’t likely to be broken, I got a dose of ibuprofen and a warning that I’d need to fix the front end of the ATV tomorrow.

It wasn’t until the end of the summer that my Mother, worried after hearing the story, took me to the hospital for an x-ray and found out that I’d cracked both my collarbone and my tibia. I was able to walk fine after a few days and my arm regained full range of motion in a week or two. They had healed up well on their own and I didn’t require any follow up. Going to the hospital while on the farm just never occurred to me. A few years after that I got tossed off a horse while going on a ride with some friends. Horse saw a snake, got spooked, and I got a quick and painful lesson on how not to fly. Two cracked ribs, no hospital visit. Caught a four-inch gash on my calf from a piece of tin sheeting when I was sixteen. That got fixed with superglue and I got a tetanus shot from my aunt, who was working as a nurse. It wasn’t until I was twenty that I managed to score my first hospital visit. I’d had a bad abdominal pain for a few days and I finally broke down and let a friend take me to the ER after I almost collapsed while walking to class. Turns out my appendix had ruptured. Few days of crappy food and a quick surgery and I was out.

So yeah, I’m no stranger to pain. Not a fan, but I’ve experienced my fair share. So, when I say that having every cell in my body lit up like a Christmas tree is painful, take my word for it. I have no idea how long I laid there, in too much pain to even scream. The pain pulsed through me as the qi ripped me apart and rebuilt my body at the cellular level. I could feel my bones buckle and pop. My heart started to miss beats, stuttering, before starting to beat strongly again. Blood frothed from my mouth and stained the river rocks as my muscles tensed and tore before rebuilding themselves. My skin wept a vile black sludge as it was shredded by the maelstrom of power before reknitting itself.

Slowly the waves of agony torturing me tapered off and I was left laying on my back, gasping for breath, on the bank of the stream. My body felt like a piece of taffy that had been overpulled. I smelled like a septic tank. Night had fully fallen while I cultivated but the moon was bright enough to tell that the immediate area around me was scorched by the breakthrough, as if it had been blasted by flame. I closed my eyes and laid my head back down. My tank was empty, I was finished for the day. A quick little nap here, then I’d head back inside and sleep for a few years. A good plan, I thought. And it would have been, up until Teacher started pouring buckets of cold water from the stream over me.

“You stink,” he said.

“Yep,” I answered, though it came out more like “ugh”. I wasn’t moving. Cold water wasn’t enough to make me abandon the most comfortable piece of rock-strewn ground I’d ever laid on.

“You’re not coming inside to eat supper until you smell better,” he said.

That, on the other hand, was just enough impetus for me to turn onto my side and try to lever myself into a sitting position. Whatever happened to me had left me ravenous, and I hadn’t been aware of it until the old man mentioned supper. Rice and a few pieces of boiled meat sounded divine right about now. Groaning, I managed to make my way onto all fours, and fell face-first into the stream. I tried to scrub off as much of the stuff as I could, but it was in my hair, my nose, my ears, and basically everywhere else. Ever tried to take off your clothes one-handed while on all fours in a glacial runoff stream? Not as easy as it sounds while you’re sporting the mother of all qi hangovers. It didn’t take long for me to overbalance and flounder in the currents. Taking pity on me, Teacher helped. Normally, having another man undress me before scrubbing me down with a stiff bristle brush would be outside of my comfort zone. I wasn’t in any condition to complain that night, though. He was right, I smelled awful. Whenever I’d start to drift off he would mutter something about broth getting cold, and I’d perk up for a few seconds and try to help. Then I’d fall insensate again.

Once I passed the test of cleanliness he picked me up and tossed me over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and carried me inside before bundling me in a blanket. He lit the fireplace with a careless wave of his hand before feeding me tiny sips of broth. I fell asleep before I finished the bowl.