I do not know when exactly I made the breakthrough. What once came like a drop from a leaky facet became a trickle of qi that came regardless whether or not I said the sutra. I greedily absorbed the qi – and why not? I worked hard to get this point. At some this trickle grew, bursting the dam that once impeded my progress. I relish that the qi for the briefest of moments before I realize that it came at a speed threatening to wash me away.

A talisman on the shelf shatters and all the dam repairs itself and the qi within my soul, which has flooded the lower levels have stilled. I snap out of my fugue and begin reciting the sutra once more, slowly.

Too much qi was dangerous, could kill me. I always thought I would know what “too much” was, but my current capacity is trifling. I have drunk a river and my stomach is aching, even with the little amount within my soul. As I continue speaking the sutra, I open a valve within my soul to allow some of the qi to flow away, until my body no longer threatens rebellion.

A pool of qi, a smaller one, still lays at the bottom of the spiritual orb that I am, for I have now absorbed enough qi that it no longer disappears into my soul like a water droplet on desert land.

I have reached the first threshold of qi, firmly put my foot into the first soul cultivation rank. Now, I can move onto the next step: strengthening the threshold of my soul so it has uniform strength, or at least under my own detection – it does not have to be perfect – since I aim to build my best foundation, not a fast one. While my spiritual body is a spiritual orb, it is not very consistent. Some parts are more translucent than others and the membranes of some are two to three times as thick as the thinnest areas.

I have to strengthen the weakest areas by stitching my soul with qi to strengthen it. Unlike sewing where one mistake may require hours of undoing to fix the problem or may require a restart – which I cannot do with my one mortal soul – the soul has enough self-defense mechanism to rectify my screw ups by dispersing the qi that I do collect outside of my spiritual body. Any bigger mistake can be rectified by the talismans that line the second shelf – nine more altogether. Hopefully, I do not screw up that many times, but as I just learned, the difference between success and failure is a thread.

It’s just a thread of qi, how hard can it be to make?

҉҉҉

Distastefully hard. Each thread takes half of my current capacity to make, something that I learned when I tried to hold three at the same time, where I got spiritually drunk and shattered another talisman. So I’m basically limited to two threads per meditation session before I move to the sewing part. Thankfully, my soul can take abuse better than it can form threads, otherwise I would have long given up. This does not mean I succeed very often – only one out of every ten threads can be considered a minor success, and only one out of every twenty be considered a great success – but I have only shattered two talismans in the weaving process so far.

I’m beginning to understand why I need to strengthen the weakest parts of my soul, besides the fact that such weaknesses may be exploited by others. The more weaknesses I resolve, the more qi I can hold with myself without getting spiritually drunk – effectively increasing the size of my dantian. That makes the requirement to reaching the second rank quite clear: strengthen my soul enough that I can fill the entire spiritual orb without getting spiritually drunk.

Seems simple enough, except for one caveat: although the percentage of space being used as a qi reservoir has grown, the size of my soul has also increased. Now this should be a great thing, I know, bigger reservoir, even without cultivation, is a boon few can refuse. But this suggests something: that as my physical body grows, my soul does too. If the part of my soul that grows is as resilient as the strengthened parts of my soul, I would be relieved. However, the percentage seems to more mirror the original state of my soul, so about eighty percent needs strengthening.

Now, under most circumstances, growing would be a good thing. I would even welcome it. But, even though I’m no mathematician, the difference in size and volume between a fertilized egg and a newborn baby is about a gazillion times. That basically means, I am trying to use a bucket to remove water from the sinking Titanic. Perhaps not the most apt metaphor since I can always breakthrough to the second rank after being born, as normal breakthroughs take half a year even under ideal circumstances, but the thought irks me. My soul strength currently sits at ‘60’, though I need to work a bit faster if I want to reach ‘100’ or the second rank before I am born.

҉҉҉

I return back to threading – I have gotten good enough at deep meditation, the type where I sit down to focus on collecting qi, that I can absorb qi nowadays while ruminating sometimes. It slows down my already pitiful qi absorption rate but sometimes I need a break. Still, to ensure that this does not become a habit, I do take some genuine breaks where I do not meditate at all. sometimes to read Spirit Like Water. Now that I have practical experience to better understand the literal parts, I can better tackle the more allegorical parts.

I now have a major success one out of ten times, a minor success one out of five times. Great progress, if I say so myself. Just don’t pay any attention to the thread I just failed and move on. While I should analyze each thread to ensure improvement, I only do so every other one. One so I can see how I do without trying to analyze my every movement, since I seem to do a little better like this. And two, it is exhausting analyzing my mistakes. There are many flaws. And focusing on them all the time mentally and emotionally exhausts me.

҉҉҉

I have seemed to have finished my explosive growth spurt – who knows how long has passed. Mothers should consider putting clocks in their wombs. For the last while, my spiritual self has not increased at a noticeable pace. While I am only around thirty-three percent complete with my weaving, the surface area of what I have sewn together is greater than the entirety of my spiritual self that I started with. I was basically the size of an orange before and now I’m the size of a bowling ball. I am not sure when, if ever, I will grow out of my spherical shape.

Meditation sessions have grown longer now that I can hold more qi, so I can make five total threads each session. New ideas and improvement considerations can be tried more liberally now that I do not have a meditation session in between each attempt to forget them. Yay, progress. I might be getting a bit tired of my external environment and am ready to be born.

What is interesting nowadays though, is how much the nebula of qi has been changing recently. Massive clouds of red and blue lay upon each other to form a giant sphere around me. No longer a diverse spread of different qi, but mainly of heaven and earth qi. Not exactly sure of what this means or why this is even happening. However, as long as one source is yang dominant and the other yin dominant and I pull fairly evenly between both, it is enough for my cultivation.

Now that I am more comfortable with manipulating qi, I have moved onto some tricks recorded within Spirit Like Water – the third scroll, the useful edition. Pictures, step-by-step instructions and more were recorded within this scroll to make cultivating easier. Why they did not start with this scroll from the get-go, I would never understand.

If just for making threads to mend my soul, I can spend a little bit of qi beforehand to create little qi tubes to gather my qi into. Saves me from having to create the threads themselves and they are reusable as well, thought they do dip into the amount of qi I can control at any one time. The size and thickness of the qi threads are also changeable – ones I used before were like silk threads because I was so small and I could not control much more qi. I have made them bigger now, almost twice as thick, but later on I will need to decrease the size to fix smaller imperfections. At ‘70’ now.

҉҉҉

My progress advances leaps and bounds. Where I previously walked up the mountain, I now bolt down it. Some of my success can be attributed to the third cultivation scroll of Spirit Like Water, but I would be remiss not to strangle the author who organized the scroll this way. Every bit of info it has is useful, but the author is more than willing to allow me to trip, stumble and fall with every trick before providing answers. So much so, I decide one day to stop cultivating and finish the scroll first to unearth all its secrets lest I stumble further in troubles I could easily save myself from.

Like one particular tidbit about how qi replenishment speed is based off of how much qi one already has stored up. The first and last eighths of one’s qi reservoir are the hardest to obtain. I had to put the book down for a little a while after I read that particular news. Especially since it would have been nice to know this information months ago and not as a could-be-helpful-tidbit footnote. Other tricks, such as weaving qi into the soul directly even before attuning it has been suggested too, but required much more finesse than I could muster.

After a quarter of the way through, the scroll was locked, requiring input of qi of a higher cultivation rank before it would open. Instead, the last few sections available redirected me to consider the stanza and the interpretations within the scroll. Perhaps later. I had enough to chew on for another few threads at least, so I started threading once more. So many questions, so few answers.

But hey, I finally reached 90, just a single step away from the coveted ‘100’.

҉҉҉

Now that I finished weaving my soul, I can begin to fill my soul with qi. And while my qi reservoir is being replenished, I can use the qi to feel the shell of my soul to see if there are any weak spots so to speak of. This should work better than my sensory abilities, but I only find a couple of weaknesses that require fine threads to fix.

I’m under no assumption that my soul sense is perfect, but this is about as good as it is going to be. Apparently if I begin to practice the mental portion of Spirit Like Water, Awareness, I can possibly further improve, but I put that off for now. Although it would be nice to strengthen my foundation, all the letters stress that reaching the second rank was paramount – perfection could be achieved later.

Filling my soul has been a rather peculiar sensation, mainly because I never bothered to sit still long enough to fill it past fifty percent. I feel like a bloated pufferfish filled with lead, especially once I reach the last one-eighth. The absorption speed is less than half compared to the first eighth and I get the feeling that skipping Awareness and fixing other parts of my soul may have been a bigger problem than Li Angry suggested. But while a bit tiring, I still can think and act unlike the first couple of drunken stupors I put myself in because of malpractice.

Breaking through the second rank sounds trivial. Once the soul is full with qi, gather more qi. The difference this time compared to before was the soul was now ready for more. Sounds easy enough, but my soul vehemently opposes my attempts, releasing as much qi as I am able to absorb with finer control than I have consciously.

I want to cry but my soul has no tears to shed. Without any other option, I consult the first Spirit Like Water scroll, this time looking at cultivation overall, not just the soul. Why does a spiritual manuscript cover parts it does not train? I will never know, but it does and I’m out of options.

҉҉҉

Turns out, although the heavens leave a path for people to cultivate, they like to put a couple of mountains and oceans on that path. Unlike beasts who can naturally cultivate with time with no need for cultivation techniques, human are only by the barest technicalities following the will of heaven when they cultivate. So while we can conceptually understand what needs to be done with each breakthrough, our instincts believe that we are self-harming ourselves if we do that. While the body may not have the expressed will to resist, when it comes to our souls, the retaliation is swift and automatic. When we cultivate, we fight not only the heavens above but ourselves as well.

Breaking through is not very hard in theory, but it is a marathon of grinding against one’s own soul and patience. Eventually the soul will capitulate but not without a battle. But fear not, I have been building up its endurance through our little weaving practices, so there should be no problems. At least it’s just a race to reach the second realm. Reaching the fourth rank apparently requires dealing with a lightning tribulation.

I’m pretty sure whoever designed this technique gave it to their enemies. Everything from its wording and organization to achievements and prerequisites exist to frustrate the learner. A big prerequisite, that I had not considered before now, is that only a child actually has the lifespan to cultivate this technique. Even tenth realm cultivators only live two hundred years. Those who can easily pass through the first few ranks to get this technique off the ground would find this technique worthless and those young enough to profit from this would be too weak or immature to cultivate this properly. That leaves reincarnators to use this technique – but not just any reincarnator, for why would they give up their techniques that they spent a lifetime already cultivating? No, this technique is specifically geared for people like me, who have reincarnated without a technique. And since I am, to the best of my knowledge, one-of-a-kind in this regard, the maker of this technique gave this away as some sort of elaborate revenge plot.

After that realization, I take some time to calm myself down. It’s fine. Maybe not the intended recipient of this technique, but it is almost handcrafted for me. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you. I open Spirit Like Water and begin reading while absorbing as much qi as I can. Like I said, pure absorption is easy.

Not sure what percentage of the scroll I expected to finish reading before I succeeded, but it definitely was not more than a single readthrough. I’m halfway through the second iteration. Given that I was bored enough to pay attention to most words, I do have some better grasp of things. Besides the typical yin and yang duality, all yin has a bit of yang and all yang has a bit of yin. Hence the two small but opposing circles within a Taiji symbol – hence it is the strive to approach complete yang or yin, but not actually reach it.

Another aspect of balance is how the body, soul and mind interact. The soul is the fulcrum between the mind and body. The mind is the spark of life but too delicate and instinctive to put into the body by itself. So the soul shields and raises it, giving it all the energy its needed. Granted, the soul is not particularly important until the later ranks. What’s most important is that cultivation of one aspect disrupts this balance tremendously. Too much on the body and the mind cannot control it – too much the soul and the body will begin to grow to match it, even if one burns the rest of their lifespan and fail in doing so. Hence, why cultivating to the fourth rank in one without addressing the other is banned.

Eventually, I do succeed in breaking through. My soul stops for the briefest moment to rest, but I still am going strong. My capacity surpassed, something within me opens. Freedom, safety and relaxation overwhelm me. Then it’s lights out.