Tarrah left me alone with the jade slip I'd received from Elder Cix, Healer's Hall had a Qi and nutrient-rich broth delivered for dinner, so I wouldn't have to leave my house the rest of the day. Since the meal was charged to Braun's account, I admit to eating it with a certain enjoyment that had nothing to do with taste.

The cultivation technique contained within the jade slip was interesting. Instead of an arbitrary cycle of Qi that followed some esoteric channels, which is what the Qi I was absorbing now was doing, I found structure and order. The technique used the meridians of the body to actively reach for and embrace the atmospheric Qi. This, in addition to the refinement of Qi that accumulated as I digested food and drink allowed for a qualitative increase. As I became more proficient, and I had breakthroughs between tiers and realms, my meridians would widen, capable of gathering the surrounding Qi much faster.

Transcend the Heavenly Footpath was a dual-stage process. The Qi that had accumulated and was free-floating within my body or pooling at my meridian points was gathered and rotated along my meridian channels until it was condensed and purified. This allowed the energy to fill the Dantian making Qi available for martial techniques. Once that first half of the revolution was finished, then I needed to manipulate the Qi stored in the Dantian, moving it counter-clockwise so that the purified Qi that I had processed was available to be moved to my soul ocean allowing me access to Dharmic techniques.

The process required meditation. I wasn't forced to assume the lotus position, but I found it easiest. Any attempts at meditation I made while laying down inevitably lead to me falling asleep. When I had meditated to align with my affinities, my mental world had been a simulacrum of the world at large, the only difference the eddies of energy that I had never noticed before. This time's meditation was different. I saw the world and my body through the prism of the ruby matrix. Red film over-laying everything my inner eye was processing.

My selection of the Ruby to create my matrix was fortuitous. My meridian pathway was made much clearer, the additional red over-lay blending with the blue meridian channels resulted in a vibrant network of purple that was easily identified. Once I had identified the meridian channels, the next step was to guide the Qi that I was condensing along the path that Transcend the Heavenly Footpath required. The process would allow me to gather enough Qi to fill my Dantian and Soul space over time. Both spaces capable of expanding, although the reason the term breakthrough was used was that my Dantian had to be shattered at each tier increase, shattered and reformed with a larger capacity when I reformed it.

Although the meridian channels were highlighted helped me see where energy was pooling, that didn't help me guide or move that pooled Qi. The trick to moving and circulating Qi along the path was difficult, each meridian junction required me to make changes in direction as the Qi flow would pass down one side of an arm, then back up the other to continue along the path of the body. Both arms, the legs, the torso each area a part of a proscribed pentagram, a star that gathered Qi to be cultivated.

Gathering Qi was simple enough, my body seemed to almost thirst for the energy. In fact, it was too simple. Each of my major meridians began absorbing Qi at a prodigious rate. I needed to limit and control absorption which added to the complexity of what I was attempting while cultivating. Selecting my heart meridian as the starting point for Transcend the Heavenly, I had to spend time and will to learn how to block the meridians in the rest of my body. I would only open each meridian as the Qi passed that location during a revolution.

I would need to learn to open and close meridians at will because each type I processed newly accumulated Qi, I would need to start back at the heart, all other meridians required to be closed once again. Once I had mastered this part of the technique, I had to begin moving the Qi that I gathered in my heart meridian, forcing open blocked and narrowed channels and paths. If I was unable to maintain a constant influx of Qi, the energy would fade, similar to a fire that is starved because of a lack of oxygen. Once that happened, I had to begin the process again, coaxing the Qi down meridian channels in an uninterrupted stream of energy, feeding the gathered Qi to maintain the connection with each meridian.

The process of opening and clearing my channels was exhausting and painful. The energy felt like someone had taken a sandblaster to the chambers of my channels and were scouring them clean. The accumulated impurities had to then pass through the channel membrane and be expunged from my body. This left a line of black waste material that required a path as an opening to the surface of my body. A path that made use of my blood, veins, and capillary system to transport and purge. My venous system became a mirror image of the cultivation technique I was taming, millimeter by millimeter.

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Once an entire revolution clockwise was completed, the second stage began. The condensed Qi which was stored and solidified as a liquid in my Dantian needed to then be distributed to the soul space located at my head meridian, the path this energy took used my spine as a stabilizing route, moving in counter-clockwise synchrony, a double helix very similar to DNA was required to cycle the condensed and purified Qi energy.

Clearing my meridian channels had been painful, but this was so much more. Transcend the Heavenly Footpath required honing the bones of my spine in order to permanently etch the correct path, each cycle would refine the very real physical changes to the bone that this etching produced. Nerve clusters that branched out from the spine were sublimated and re-routed as needed. Clusters that fired electron bursts of messages to my brain at the speed of light were triggered, and pulsing, debilitating pain only intensified as the liquefied Qi filled the groves that I was forced to carve in bone.

If Tarrah had not gifted me with some restorative pills and a potion that restored the nutrients of my body that were lost while expunging the impurities that were scrubbed clean and ejected, I would have been unable to practice this method. Although the medicines that she had gifted didn't do anything for the pain, they did allow me to remain focused and endure the pain.

Every tenth cycle, the Qi would ignore the second part of the revolution and flood the outer layer of my skin. Repairing the small amount of cellular damage that had accumulated and occurred over my short life. This process of repairing damaged cells and exuding impurities was the first stage of Body Cultivation. I began honing my skin laying a foundation for each subsequent increase in Realm.

The black gunk wasn't as pungent or voluminous as what was released when I gained my elemental affinities, but it was still problematic. I had to stop cultivating after that tenth revolution, rushing to the restroom to empty my stomach and scrape the gunk off in a shower with water blasting as hot as I could stand.

I gave some serious consideration to just sitting on the shower floor and cultivating with the water running until I had purged the impurities from my body but was uncertain if the hot water would last. It would have been convenient if the Sect offered meditation pools of water, hot tubs with jets that could remove and filter the gunk as it accumulated. It seemed something that a Sect that was aligned heavily with the water affinity would have. Maybe they did, and they were reserved for inner Sect members and Elders. And if not, maybe I could invent one. It would be a way to bring my old world to this one.

Transcend the Heavenly Footpath required my full attention. The mental process was exhaustive as the physical pain I was required to endure seemed to only increase as the night progressed. I had always been stubborn, and this was no different. I had endured forty-eight hours of childbirth with my eldest son, maintaining the absorption of Qi as my Dantian and Soul space filled was possible, because I was that tenacious, determined, or stupid.

What made the process even more demanding was the time I needed to spend mastering the technique. The first complete cycle, ten revolutions, required almost three hours to complete. The process became easier every ten count, until morning finally arrived, and I was able to complete the entire primary, secondary, and rest phase in ten minutes. I wasn't sure if a minute a revolution was the fastest, I would ever be able to do, but it certainly was a marked improvement from the eighteen-minute cycles I had started at.

Just as important, at least to my nose, the impurities finally were purged from my skin and meridian channels. My skin had regenerated in the process, any small scar, imperfection, or blemish removed as the green tint that all Elves contained within their melanin glowed with health. The jade-like quality of my new complexion was a visual cue to others that I had broken into the first level of body honing.

I had taken the first step on the path as a level one, tier-one Body Refinement Realm cultivator. The energy that I was storing within my Dantian and Soul space cleared the toxins that lack of sleep should have produced and left me clear-minded and wide awake. This was only the first step, but I had succeeded in taming the Transcend the Heavenly Footpath body honing technique and knew that I would continue along this path.

The night's events had proven to me just how long and difficult the journey ahead of me was going to be. But brimming and revitalized that next morning, the memory of my travails, the pain as my body was forcibly sculpted to fit the technique Elder Cix had suggested, were forgotten. Those memories becoming nothing but fleeting bits of gossamer, tenuous and vanishing with each second as my newly re-vitalized body luxuriated in this feeling of satiety.

The only problem? I was starving.