The next few days are slow. With the Day of Reverence for Ancestors so close, Ascetic Yang does not even make me work on some vocab list, calligraphy, math and more. Instead, Ascetic Yang merely reads me some short stories, without fussing whether or not I know the harder words, but making sure to stop to answer any such questions I could have.

But it’s not all good news. Her consideration borderlines apprehension – while careful and gentle in ensuring my few days are easy, she refuses to budge on a few topics: mainly cultivation and anything too strenuous, be it intellectually or physically. Any questions about cultivation I have, she meanders around slowly but so skillfully I quickly lose track of my train of thought or begins speaking so esoterically that she may as well be speaking a different language. Pretty sure she was actually speaking a different language the first time I asked her. Either way, I stopped trying after a few times. She might be a bit sore about the fact the first time she guided me in cultivation, I entered a month long coma.

Mother spends more time with me these few days, bringing me around town to window shop; listen to musical concerts that mainly surrounded a single instrument, perhaps a singer too; bringing me on walks around the estate, which is surprisingly boring. Not because there’s nothing happening in the estate, but everywhere that has something happening, mother avoids like the plague.

Father even brings me on runs in the afternoon to get my body moving. More specifically, I’m running every evening. Despite only being a head or so taller than me, father dances on blades of grass as each of his spins outstrips me by multiple yards. He was probably using some fancy movement skill, since by all means father was proudly portly. It doesn’t take long in the run before father simply double-backs towards my position, then starts retelling a story the tortoise and the hare. Only in this version, the tortoise is so slow, the hare can be lazy and still win the day.

However, even with all of these distractions, most of my day remains empty. White Lies, A Hundred Faces can help me clear meridians, but does so through brute force. There’s a more complicated second step, but that cannot happen until the meridians themselves are open and clear. Since the technique relies so heavily on qi and little else, it soon appears that, even with spirit stones, this will be an extended project rather than a simple task. However, it’s because it’s so simple that I can do alongside other things.

And so on the Day of Reverence for ancestors, I wear my normal hospital gown outfit. Not sure if my ancestors would like that, but mother approves of my outfit and brings me to see father, so what do I know.

“There’s our little hero,” father roars, scooping me off my feet with such ease that I’m reminded that father is a seventh rank cultivator. Hard to remember that fact when I have never seen his domain – I bathe in mother’s, Aunt Meng’s and even Ascetic Yang’s domain every day. I’m pretty sure a good part of the reason I have been able to cultivate so quickly is that I have been absorbing their qi. Although he has some frustration and disappointment, I have yet to see the man angry or lash out, not even once. Mother at least raises her voice and gives her glares, whose usual recipient is father.

So I try leisure meditation as father carries me. While I have never quite been on Mount Everest, replace the amount of air with qi, and it feels like I have suddenly been teleported there. I breathe deeply, trying to increase the amount of air, and subsequently qi, I breathe in, but to no avail. I’m so unsuccessful and blatant about it, mother eventually takes me from father’s arms. As I feel her domain envelop me like a gentle flame, my qi absorption rate returns to normal levels.

…don’t tell me that slow rate is my baseline rate without any treasures. Utterly abysmal. Even slower than when I had yet to reach the first rank in the womb. As I nestle that thought in the back of mind, in things that I should consider more but rather not, mother and father have already brought me into the carriage.

“Will your parents be there this time?” Mother asked, exasperated.

“They have to. Clan elder or not, they cannot shove this particular responsibility onto others. Even if not for us, but for the other branches.” Father said, shrugging. “Besides, if they didn’t show, would it even be a bad thing?”

Mother shrugged and looked away.

Father laughed, then turned to me. “Unlike last time, you are now old enough to pay respect. That means you cannot fall asleep halfway through the walk. You don’t have to bow to all of the ancestors, just the founding ancestor and the more notable recent ones. Just copy whoever is leading the walk or our lead and you should be good. Alright?”

“Won’t it be boring?” I ask.

“Not as boring as it will be for your grandparents.” Father says, smiling. “You only have to do it once. They have to do it all day, with each batch of children.”

That doesn’t sound too bad.

We soon arrive just outside the mausoleum, a few steps slower than the other four branches, each with a single child. They seem to be the families from the tea party, but I don’t remember much from that event, besides the qi storms and that particularly grating noblewoman, who now that I think about it, was nothing more than a cat’s paw. An elderly couple – my grandparents – stood at the front of all of them and, boy, they looked fuming. Just not enough to start a cussing match right here and now. They barely acknowledged our arrival before walking into the mausoleum.

Something that I didn’t realize, given how distracted I was at the tea party, was how many nobles were fat. Sure there are the occasional fat cultivators in xianxia, both heroes and villains, but they seemed in the minority. Not on Orange Peak, where a good half of them were fat. Father, my grandparents, a couple of children and their families were all fat. Mother is not, but she’s a commoner; and I’m not because I can hardly put on enough weight to stay awake. Xin Feng wasn’t either, so the reasoning behind it is not at all clear, but I doubt it’s a disadvantage. Some type of clan technique, perhaps?

҉҉҉

Quick note for the rest of my life: never trust a seventh rank cultivator when they say a physical task is easy. Founding ancestor is pretty straight forward: Ying Tian, one of the earliest alchemists in the world and pioneer of cultivation breakthrough pills. We – my family, plus the other four other families sitting on the dais during that tea party – had to kneel three times, then kowtow nine times. This meant standing up, getting down onto our knees three times. Each time we knelt, we tapped our heads to the ground three times.

Not bad at all, barely took five minutes. The problem is that since we paid respects to Founder Ying Tian first, we got the wrong impression of the task ahead of us. The founding room was dedicated to him and him alone.

There were nine more rooms, for the nine most recent generations of clan members. For the Ying Clan was one of the highest of clans, hence the souls of their fallen members lasted the longest, unlike some commoners. I would have like to chime in it’s not too late to start, but I did not know how true I wanted those words to be by the end of it.

I expected that the nine rooms would have more than one person within them, given that a generation in a clan with ten branches would have a befitting number of people, but I sorely underestimated our endeavor. Given an Emperor level cultivator, at least in the Overthrowing the Heavens books that I know, only lives about two hundred years, I was already dreading our upcoming two-thousand year history lesson.

But I was so, so, so very wrong. Each generation is denoted by the oldest person in that generation. And the average Emperor level cultivator may only live about two hundred years, but my man Ying Lan, the Lazy Alchemist, lived a comfortable eight hundred and thirty-seven years. Not sure how or why, but that meant that Ying Lan lived longer than some legitimate Divinities. And since we paid respects to the person, not to the generation or the room….it was not a mere two-thousand year history lesson but more than four thousand years.

Each of the nine rooms were so crammed full with stone tablets with names on them, half of them could be replaced with gibberish and I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. One thing I did note, though, was that since the family was so big, not all the branches had ‘Ying’ as their family name and not all the branches survived through the generations.

My mind checked out after the thirtieth history lesson, my patience only lasting so long so I could see if there were any Divinity names that I know or something. My endurance lasted quite a bit longer, since I began revolving my qi through my meridians outlined in ‘White Lies, A Hundred Faces’. Not much for opening my meridians, but it did go a long ways in alleviating the pains within my muscles. But even then, my body cried bloody murder around the fourth room and collapsed onto the floor.

The moment I did, grandfather – a taller, fatter father with the voice of an angel – stopped giving out the history lesson, then walked us through the next five rooms – with each couple carrying their children. Why make us kowtow to oblivion only to drop the lesson halfway, I want to scream but I’m too tired to even open my mouth.

Rather than being one long hallway, the mausoleum had five rooms side-by-side, connected through a single path. Towards the end, when I am able to ask mother about our not-so-recent ancestors, father says their stone tablets are essentially crushed into fine dust, just like their souls after that much time.

Just as he does so, we step downstairs and everything turns pitch-black.

҉҉҉

After a few minutes of walking, we soon arrive near a giant green cauldron, wrapped by a golden dragon that may be worth more than a few houses. Might have been worth a city if gold was actually valued by cultivators at all. A bright grayish glow surrounds the cauldron, enough to illuminate the few smaller, human-sized cauldrons, around it. The parents and grandparents walk towards it, carrying me and the other children, like they are hypnotized, which is fine and dandy. Until they decide to put me into one like some ritual sacrifice and I try to yeet myself out but shackles soon bind my limbs and a cover slides over my head. ‘Relax’ I hear my mother say, and now I’m panicking twice as hard.

Black and gold lines burst with life and qi, filling the darkness, as they congregate on the cover, forming some type of golden dragon. Its mouth soon opens – not enough to negate the point of the cover, but just enough that a turquoise cloud of qi pours down onto me. Dragon vomit. That’s what today needed.

It doesn’t take long before the turquoise qi pierces into my body like little fishhooks. Spicy, I grimace, attuning to Awareness, which actually does numb my sense of touch and pain quite a bit. The qi plunges straight for my meridians. Like a torrent, they overwhelm the crusted webs of my mother’s qi within my meridians. Bits and pieces begin to flake off and dissolve into the turquoise qi, going round and round my body. As for where that qi ends up, I have no idea.

The process is oddly reminiscent of what White Lies, A Hundred Faces required from me, but that was so abysmally inefficient and taxing that I gave up on it. Now that I’m not the source, this technique seems perfect. It’s almost like a god gave me it to practice.

As the turquoise qi runs amuck within my meridians, I attempt to siphon a bit of that qi, that fervor, to clear my smaller meridians. They are more delicate and it seems that the turquoise qi cannot sense them or are prevented from targeting them. But I can and they need to be cleared.

The turquoise qi refuses – flowing far quicker than my meager control can tame. So I try a different tactic. There’s a slower, more reasonable way to clear meridians. Using a considerably less amount, I can basically pulse my qi through mother’s qi and slowly grind them away that way. As mother’s qi cannot replenish itself, I will win eventually.

My hopes are dashed when I do flake off a bit of mother’s qi but it is insufficient to gather the turquoise qi’s attention. Fine, I sigh to myself. I will double down on the first strategy and ignore my smaller meridians.

The turquoise qi, for all its power, lacks technique. So I help it out by pulsing all my qi through the same area, in the same path. But instead of smashing the web of qi and bouncing out, I pulse my qi through it, shaking its foundation just enough for the turquoise qi to stream roll it a few moments later. Then I work my way down my meridians.

This is much faster than simply leaving the dragon vomit to do its thing, but it drains my qi reserves quickly and fails to clean the roots of the web attached to the meridian itself. Oh well. Then things fall into a rhythm: pulse qi until one-eighth remaining, refill qi, then pulse qi once more. I don’t know how long the formation will last, so this makes the most efficient use that I know of.

When the formation finally ends, I am covered in a jelly with a putrid fishy smell. Somehow, despite all the xianxia novels I read about expelling the impurities, I forgot about the smell that accompanies it. Well played memory, I blame you. A smell so lovable that when my parents come for me, one of them uses telekinesis to pick me up and holds me at a distance. Mother then shoves a pill down my throat then throws me into a pond. Not of water, oh no. That would be too plebian.

Only the purest fire and ice in this household. Somehow my body does not go into shock as literal fire and ice enter my meridians through pores that once expelled impurities. I try absorbing this qi but my spirit refuses, so I twiddle my imaginary thumbs while I watch the fire and ice work their magic. The two main meridian circuits required for White Lies, A Hundred Faces are cleaned, roots included.

I now know that cultivation talent is completely and utterly crap. The scroll said it would take two years per circuit and in less than a day, two have been cleared. There’s still two more, but opening those two risks death and I kind of like living.

The fire and ice qi move onto the second step: mending my meridians, which are like old blankets with some holes within them – much better than the fish nets the scroll said they would be. Perhaps because the impurities did not remain very long within my meridians. However, this process is much slower. Restoration does not seem to be its thing. Eventually, I am dragged out of the pond, get a new set of clothing.