What is a body to a good cultivator?

It’s a vessel. The thing that can carry a cultivator’s spirit and allow the spirit to perform to its full potential. A vessel is disposable. Despite the fact that a spirit exists only when the body and the soul interact, there’s a delay in after the body is destroyed where the spirit can still live even without it. You could call it an extension of inertia to the hypermaterial but it would be wrong as it doesn’t quite work on the same principles. Well, nobody really cares about how it works and why, so I’ll be referring it to as “inertia”.

Inertia can truly start to be used only when a spirit is manifested in a practitioner. It only happens during the Nascent Soul stage. Well, one could argue that the Golden Core stage before it is also a stage where the spirit is manifested but the Golden Core can only barely count as a manifestation.

Anyway, starting from the Nascent Soul stage and higher, a body for a cultivator becomes less and less important.

Now, here’s the second question:

What is a body to the best of cultivators?

It’s the foundation of the foundation.

During the Qi Refinement stage, the practitioner has to open up as many of the meridians that have formed inside their body during the Aura-sensing and Aura-synchronization stages as they can and refine Qi inside the body.

This leads to two questions: “What are meridians?” and “How do they form inside the body?”

If we compare the spirit of a cultivator to a plant then the spiritual roots would be, well, its roots.

That’s why they’re called this really. Not that many people know it as it’s old and obscure knowledge.

Anyway, the spiritual roots are the roots and the meridians are the extensions that grow out of the roots in order to suck up the nutrients from the ground. The ground being the Aura between Heavens and Earth, not the body, by the way.

Now, to the second question. How are meridians formed in a body?

Well, you see, the first and the most basic abilities that the roots give to those who have them are of psychic kind. The very first ability they give is the sixth sense.

Everybody calls it differently. The Divine Sense. The Immortal Eye. The evil eye of Darkness and Malevolence. The last one was what I called it went I went to the Demon Path in my previous timeline, by the way. Fuck the Demon Path.

The sixth sense is developed at the very beginning of cultivation at the Aura-sensing stage. And it allows one to, well, sense the aura.

During this stage, the spirit’s nature slowly synchronizes with the body’s parameters. It starts with one becoming more aware of their surroundings, just like a highly-trained human warrior and goes all the way up to being able to sense the immaterial aura between Heavens and Earth.

During Aura-synchronization the practitioner delves more deeply into the aura and this step already requires one to rely on the methods developed by our ancestors.

Using those methods, those usually being meditation or telepathic guiding by senior cultivators, one fully integrates the already synchronized spirit into the body, changing the body on an anatomical level by creating meridians to interact with the aura. The spiritual roots also develop by unleashing their potential and making the meridians a part of their nature, so even if the body is destroyed, another body would develop meridians too, by using the already existing experience as a foundation.

The way I went from the beginning of Aura-sensing to the peak of Aura-synchronization the moment I woke up in this timeline, I reckon, is because I already had the experience of creating the meridians in the previous timeline and, while my body and spirit were destroyed, my soul still had some sort of connection to the material plane and because of inertia it established a connection to the spirit that existed in my younger body.

Or maybe not, what happened to me is beyond my own understanding of how the world functions. Going through time with memories and experiences only? I never knew this kind of thing was even possible. This experience also made me doubt the existing theory of cultivation a little. Well, I won’t question it too much as I am in no state to theorize on how it works as I have very little to go off of.

Anyway, as you can see, the very map of the meridians and the way they are grown depends on the body. When a body is changed it takes time to adjust the meridians to the body in order to not accidentally fry the body because of incompatibility.

A Nascent Soul is also developed by taking references about the Heavenly Dao of the material world through the body, which is why it’s normal to have the Nascent Soul and all of its versions of different cultivation stages look like a scaled-down version of the body.

When a body is changed, it may not seem like there appear any serious problems with cultivation but each body that doesn’t have good compatibility impacts the foundation in ways much greater and more dangerous than most are aware of.

In fact, if a cultivator’s body is destroyed even once in their lifetime before the Path Integration stage, it becomes impossible to break through to Path Integration or the stages higher unless they get some kind of godly stroke of luck. This fact isn’t very well known as the cultivation world is like a pyramid and the higher the stage, the fewer the people of the stage.

People who can break through to the Path Integration stage are generally the kind who wouldn’t have their body destroyed in the first place.

And people who know as much as me when it comes to the theory behind cultivation are even fewer. I’m not boasting, but I might as well be in the top 10 of the most knowledgeable people in the Galaxy with its trillions of cultivators when it comes to the general cultivation theory.

There can be any natural number of meridians inside a practitioner’s body theoretically. It depends on the quality of the roots. Nothing else matters really.

I have double supreme roots. How should I put it…

If we take ten thousand random people who have roots, seven thousand or so would have average quality roots, two thousand would have good quality roots, nine hundred would have rare quality and a hundred would have the best quality roots.

What? Where are people with supreme quality roots? Well, if we take a hundred billion people with roots, the ration would be the same but there would be something like a dozen people with a supreme quality root.

I say this because in this Galaxy there, if my memory serves me right, should be around one thousand two hundred and fifty individuals with the supreme quality roots.

This backwater doesn’t even have the technology that could detect the supreme quality roots and they think I only have the best quality.

When it comes to the number of roots though, the situation reverses and the fewer the roots, the rarer it becomes. People with single, or how people call it “heavenly”, roots are somewhat rare so they are sought after.

Well, they aren’t that rare. We just have to take the measurements in tens of thousands of people to show how rare they are.

The amount of roots certainly is directly proportional to the number of meridians in the body but the single roots have other advantages.

Like, faster progress or a clearer understanding of the element that the root is attuned to.

Anyway, the amount of meridians I get is, well, in thousands. Three thousand eleven to be exact.

It’s both a good thing and a bad thing. The good thing is, I’ll be able to quickly form Qi inside my body.

The bad thing is… Do you remember that I said that during Qi Refinement one has to open up the meridians inside the body? It makes it sound like meridians are some kinds of canals but in reality they are more like… Hm… On a very backward planet I once saw that the mortal civilization developed well. They had those things… satellites. They used them to communicate through great distances through the use of electro-magnetic waves. Well, a meridian is like a receiving station for the signals from satellites. To open one up one needs to, usually through the use of meditation techniques, to adjust and tune the stations so that they could receive the signals.

Individually they don’t take much time. An average practitioner has around fifty, so it takes a year at most to open all of the meridians up.

I have three thousand eleven. Well, in reality, one doesn’t have to open all of them up.

A human cultivator, just like with the limbs and a head, has the so-called “twelve standard and eight extraordinary meridians”. They are generally the biggest and most important meridians. All the others are generally located near those and opening each of the 12+8 meridians automatically opens, depending on luck up to six other meridians.

I can open up to 120 meridians without too many problems. It’s already so many to the point where I would have more than 99.999% of all the other practitioners in the Galaxy.

Of course, I could stop there and build a foundation. Do I want to though?

Nah…

You see, opening meridians before the Foundation is built is okay but after the Foundation is built the meridians that haven’t been opened will become harder and harder to open and on the higher stages they will disappear completely. And those meridians that were opened late will never be as good as the ones opened on time. During the Celestial Tribulation stage, the one I was at before I died for the first time, the meridians opened after foundation building will outright disappear.

It was a piece of information that only I know as only I have as many meridians and had reached the Celestial Tribulation stage.

So you can understand why I would be so reluctant to be satisfied with anything but three thousand eleven meridians.

But to open all of them up I would need four hundred years. And that’s because opening a meridian should be easy for me personally. Four hundred years! I once read a story of a fella who refined Qi for 3000 years and who was able to contend with Immortals but I would prefer to not follow his steps.

So, this was why I need to devise a technique for Qi Refinement that would be able to open the meridians fast.