Wei Bolin came to me after a session in the third month of the second year and said, "Zhao Jun, Ma and Tao are all making the same error on the kidney-to-liver pathway exercises. They're bracing at the hip instead of releasing through it. The qi stalls when they are not relaxed because they don't understand that Qi responds to intent, not desire. It's part of the principles."
He had proposed the correction: a modified breathing rhythm that encouraged visualization training in the same way that I had done to Bolin when I trained him.
I made him zone one's lead instructor that afternoon.
"You're sure?" he asked me.
I gave him a pat on the back. "You soak up knowledge like a cloth. So yes, I'm sure."
He took the position without ceremony. Within a week, Gao Run was assisting him. I found her running the breathing exercise with Ma and Tao even though, to my knowledge, I hadn't asked her to supervise. When I raised an eyebrow at her, she immediately told me that Bolin said she could do it if she wanted to.
"He also said that you'd be fine with it," she added.
I nodded.
The beginnings of the Sect was producing its own teachers. Students were becoming instructors without me orchestrating the promotion, which meant that the system was working the way it was supposed to. The knowledge flowed downhill because the channels were open, and the people found their level naturally.
And speaking of which....
Zhao Jun found the river.
I came to the training ground before dawn on a morning in the fifth month and he was already sitting at the water's edge with his hands submerged.
I sat beside him and didn't speak, and he in turn didn't look towards me.
After some time passed he finally pulled his hands out of the water. "The river makes it easier."
"How so?" I asked him, testing his knowledge.
"The energy in the water gives me something to push against. Without it, I'm reaching for a feeling I can barely detect."
So, he'd independently derived the environmental qi principle. The same discovery I'd made at this same riverbank when I'd first plunged my hands into the current and felt the membrane thin.
"How long have you been coming here before dawn?" I asked.
"Four months. I figured if the environment affects cultivation then I should find the environment that helps me most," he said.
I didn't tell him this was exactly what the program was supposed to produce, nor that was the makings of the sixth principle. Some things landed better when students found the answers for themselves.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
I told him that I was proud of him before then turning my attention to the growing clinic near my home.
When I entered inside, I had found a bound bamboo volume sitting on the clinic counter between the herb inventory and the patient log.
The title was brushed in clean characters: Mother of Healing.
I opened it.
The first section covered basic healing: wound cleaning, bandaging, and the signs of internal bleeding. The second covered herb identification with illustrations that I recognized as Suyin's hand. The third mapped the twelve meridian pressure points with clinical annotations on each one's healing application. The fourth addressed anatomy and physiology at a level that went beyond anything Mother had taught. The fifth covered wound management for combat injuries, with special regards to Duan, which meant that Suyin must have consulted with him due to his military background.
I read it cover to cover standing at the clinic counter. It took an hour.
Liu Jun came in while I was on the final section and stopped when he saw what I was holding.
"Oh, you found it. She made twelve copies of that," he began. "We've already sent some to healers in the neighboring villages. The Dongshan clinic requested three more."
I continued to read while I listened. "When did she write this?"
"Over the past year after many late nights after sessions. She compiled Mother Pei's teachings, our clinical notes, and her own research into a single text."
He paused. "I'm surprised that she didn't tell you about it."
I wasn't, but there was no point in telling him that. I instead sat the book down and went about my day to continue my own cultivation training.
The mornings at the river had become more than a ritual for me. I could feel the ambient qi field as texture now. The river's signature differed from still air, from warm earth, from the forge's exhaust, and from the qi that radiated off the training ground when all of the students practiced there at once. My internal channels had started to resonate with the external environment in harmony.
I tried to push my awareness even further by attempting to sense heartbeats.
Commander Xu had felt our heartbeats when she encountered us and I assumed at first that it was a natural gift or something that she was born with. But the more I developed my own ambient sensitivity, the more I believed it was technique, a specific application of environmental qi awareness that extended outward. I figured that it was more akin to reading the disturbances in the ambient field that living bodies created in the same way a spider read vibrations in a web.
Unfortunately, I couldn't do it yet. My range extended about fifteen meters on a calm morning, and even though I could sense Hao from across the training ground if he was channeling, that wasn't a useful metric since Hao's qi signature was about as subtle as a bonfire. Sensing a normal person's heartbeat at distance required a sensitivity I hadn't reached yet.
With regards to Hao, over the next few months his household had become something quietly remarkable by the middle of the second year.
Chen Mei managed the family accounts faithfully and with dedication. His second wife, Tong Lian, gave birth to a daughter in spring and was carrying again by midsummer.
Wei Ru, Bolin's aunt, had taken longer to settle in as she and Hao had circled each other for months before something real took hold, and by the second year they'd built a partnership that was quieter than his dynamic with the other two but no less genuine.
Shan Pei had become an honorary uncle who showed up for meals without being invited and taught the Chen Widow boys how to sharpen tools. In his culture in the hill tribes it was expected for the village to be responsible for the children.
I was, privately, in complete awe of Hao. Three wives, each with her own rhythm and needs and history. A household that should have been a disaster of competing claims and bruised feelings, humming along with a warmth that defied analysis. I would never say this to him because he would grin and tell me it was simple and that would only make me want to throw something at him out of jealousy.
I helped ran the cultivation training program, I managed the village systems and labor rotations and assisted in the iron ore trades and studied reports for Wen, coordinated the forge output and planned the militia rotations, but I could never, in a million years, do what Hao was doing.