Some reading is the understatement of the century. The golden scrolls are not very big, maybe a couple of inches tall and about five or six inches long when unrolled. Just big enough for me to sense and for the mini-me resides within my soul to grab. It’s odd seeing a small ball of ectoplasm and realize it’s a representation of me. Then again, it’s odd to house a bookshelf in my soul, so what do I really know?

I was expecting about ten thousand words to get a good picture on cultivation – sure I read some books and stuff about it, but I wanted a clear, described picture of cultivation in this world before I dipped my toes into it, especially since my body is too small to physically cultivate so the only option that remains is my spirit. I would be okay with about a hundred thousand words, a bit wordy, but manageable. Better thorough than insufficient.

But no. I got an encyclopedia set, the first scroll being one of five scrolls part of the set. It had a seventy word sutra, titled Spirit Like Water, a hundred thousand word interpretation of those seventy words like an English class (had some bad experiences with it, then again, all classes seem rather annoying amidst a mental breakdown) and another twenty thousand words for a meditation guide, so I can review the sutra. Even if I finish reading all of it, this only gets me into the front door – to see qi. The first stage of cultivation starts in the second scroll which is similarly just as long, if not longer, with enough esoteric words that I need to consult a dictionary as well.

Overall, it’s a nightmare. I have read stories that were well over a hundred thousands words before, but reading a hundred thousand words of a textbook is a whole other beast. And reading a textbook that is basically in another language adds on an additional layer of decryption. I might have been conned into this game. Thankfully, the scrolls have bullet-pointed notes for my convenience, though the meditation guide was not shortened. While I still need to revisit the text after I get a basic handle on things, this is a good place to start.

But before that, I begin to test my current spiritual strength with the spiritual cloak treasure that I been given. It does little in the ways of protection – a few other treasures are in place to ensure I don’t kill myself by accident through meditation in these first nine months – it does prevent some random schmuck from walking past me, sensing my spiritual cultivation because of my potential. Helps me hide among the other babies so to speak. Also sends Li Angry the progress report, as he is invested in my studies.

‘Sense spiritual strength’ the mini-me says. The number ‘40’ appears in front of it. Not bad, the average adult in the world achieves 100, but they already have at least five years of cultivation under their belt and reached the second cultivation rank. I should be able to reach 100 by the time I am born, according to the scroll, mainly because I can siphon quite a bit of qi from my mother without much fuss, since my qi is currently based on her own.

All I need to do now is just meditate and sense it.

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Meditation is difficult. And although I know I have to struggle during the first stage until I can finally grasp onto qi but I wish it would be easier. Stilling thoughts and focusing on the breathing is one thing, but given my body is completely irrelevant at this point in time, what I am actually focusing on is the darkness that surrounds the white ectoplasm spirit orb that I am. Countless thoughts drift into my head as I meditate, some denouncing my talent and ability to cultivate before I spend even a few moments. Others denounce the reality of my current situation, an extended dream where beings I cannot comprehend offer wishful promises riddled with thorns. But the worst denounce the very worth of this reality, if it was indeed real.

Friends. Family. Familiarity. I lose many, many things when I was summoned. Sure not all of them were great – this past year, junior year at college, had left a lot to be desired. I became too reliant on my advisors, both of whom had screwed me over, and I started on the wrong foot in fall semester. Did not expect to be hospitalized from losing consciousness randomly the first week and putting me behind. I should have been more resilient and sought to compensate for the lost time, but I grew irritated. A desire to prove myself grew only to flounder that I did very little to actually to learn and gain the skills, instead of proclaiming that I had them.

It was a slow process of accepting that reality, but things were not all bad. I had made precious friends at college and at home. My family, while hardass about grades for the most part, would not abandon me during my struggles, like so many other families had threatened my friends. Now…well, it was an unknown and I have so little control over. Is it worth it? What if I fail and become unable to gain friends and family? Money was easy enough to come by. But xianxia web novels made the sense of family and friends surprisingly difficult to accept. Plots within plots and, more likely than not, noble families came with more enemies than with family.

Only when I begin to realize how much my thoughts have drifted away from meditation, do I accept the feelings for a moment and push them aside. Meditation was not so much the removal of feeling and thoughts but to regain control when such feelings and thoughts do arise. I push them away for the moment and return to the darkness. Somewhere out in the void was qi, much closer than I would expect and, although I was unsure about its existence, Spirit Like Water promised. Have faith for once, instead of believing that things would fail anyway, I tell myself.

Reaching out into the darkness for something I cannot feel see or feel does seem like space travel, only with the navigation system utterly destroyed after being a few million miles off course. My attention shifts after what must be tens of minutes, though probably only some odd seconds if I truly bothered to count, and I progress nowhere. Soul cultivation generally came after physical cultivation. At least then, physical exhaustion could innately absorb qi even when I cannot sense it. And after I create my dantian, I would be able to sense qi, overcoming the first step of soul cultivation. Trying to gather qi with soul cultivation is difficult as well, for the spirit while much more attuned to qi, loses most of that ability to attach itself to a body, or so Spirit Like Water says.

Which brings up the point of soul cultivation, not spiritual cultivation. The soul and the spirit are different things – the soul can cultivate because it is like a dantian, a transportable, organic qi battery. The spirit, on the other hand, is the soul and mind together. What was transported in his reincarnation – a lot of his mind and some of his soul. The mind had no cultivation techniques – memory, intelligence, process speed were offloaded to the body and soul – but had martial techniques, that better organized the tools of the body and soul – sensory manipulation, increased working and long-term memory, strategic use of intelligence. Not that I can use any mental martial techniques until I can use qi.

Shit, I’m falling to more tangents. I pause to take a deep breath – at least picture my mini-me doing so, which helps ground me. Then I repeat the sutra, the words already memorized by this point in time. The only thing keeping me going at this point in time is my soul now reads ‘45’. Small progress, but progress nonetheless.

As I begin to repeat the sutra for the fourth time, something nudges against my spirit, drawing my attention away. Qi. I have absorbed some amount of qi, but I am still too untrained to sense it. Ultimately I should reach a bot where the nudges no longer distracts me, but each time it happens now means I am one step closer to sensing qi.

The next nudge happens after the twentieth or so repeat. Then the fifteenth. The twelfth. Tenth. Ninth. Eighth, seventh, fifth, fourth…until my soul reaches ‘50’ and I have reached some sort of critical mass of qi that the darkness I reside within lights up like an aurora borealis. Vast nebulas line the horizon. So colorful and beautiful, they put rainbows to shame, with enough diverse colors afterwards to create another rainbow. But that made very little sense – as far as I knew, there were only two types of qi: yin and yang.

So I consult the fourth scroll, which is the cultivation primer. While yin and yang are the basic frameworks of the world, too vast and pure to be the qi mixture that I look at. Techniques that use their energy in the purest form are generally considered supreme and require a lot of resources to make them more palpable. Otherwise the cultivator would die instantly upon absorption.

No, the qi at the horizon seems to be more tangible derivatives, one of the eight paths and sixty-four expressions of yin and yang. That’s where I begin to get lost. Kind of why I might have “skimmed” through it the first time around. Could the author have made the philosophy more clear and detailed? Possibly. Then again, I doubt that the primer was anything but a refresher for any typical cultivator, not meant to teach an otherworlder reincarnator the basics of Dao from the very beginning.

There are cultural connotations that I have missed, but that can only be addressed once I talk to someone who I can ask follow-up questions too. As good as the scrolls are, they are unable to rephrase their words clearer.

But I now get the gist. The eventual goal of cultivation was to increase the purity of one’s qi into yin and yang and draw exponentially closer with each rank, retaining just enough impurities to retain a self of sense. At least, that was for the normal person. Since I came from a different world, I first need to get to the starting line that everyone else starts at when they begin cultivating – a balance of qi. Where others begin with a pond that they eventually want to make into a sea, I start with a desert. In order to fix that, I require random sampling of qi for proper balance and once I no longer need to count to absorb qi, I have met that requirement.

So back to repeating the sutra I go.