The ambient field ran strongest before dawn.
I had known this for awhile due to the zone two sessions. In winter the cold pressed the field lower and closer to the water's surface, making it denser in the places where the current moved fastest.
I had been coming here every morning since the academy opened its first day, before the training ground woke and before Luan Mei started the breakfast fire, and the quality of the practice was different from anything I could do later in the day.
I worked the slow circulation first. Twenty minutes of tracing the field's movement and reading the world around me.
The current ran north-south along the bank and the ambient qi moved with it, carrying a signature that was distinct from the ridge caves' compressed deposits or the training ground's worked ground. River qi was alive in a different way. It turned and pooled and redirected around obstacles, and learning to read it was teaching me to adapt my awareness in real time.
Then I tried the pooling.
The technique was simple in conception: instead of circulating ambient qi outward through the pathways, you invited it toward the body's center.
The field responded immediately. The ambient qi around me shifted toward my core with the ease of water finding a low point.
The sensation was destabilizing. The feeling of trying to push more current through a channel built for less volume felt immensely uncomfortable. I released it and the backlash through my limbs caused me to step back into the wall, nearly doubling onto on my knees as I took a moment to catch my breath.
I sat with the aftermath and took stock. The technique worked on a technical level, because at least it was possible. However, the problem was the destination: my core's capacity wasn't built for the volume I had pulled. What I needed was to build the core's tolerance gradually before attempting the draw again, or learn to filter the draw so that only what the core could hold was invited in. Either way, I had a long way to go.
I noted it and went to watch the first morning session.
I saw that Wei Bolin had opened with the Five Principles.
He recited them the same way I recited them, which was the way Mother had recited the twelve meridian pathways.
The cohort sat in the zone one classroom and listened with awe inspired eyes. Dian Lu was in the front row and his attention was complete, which told me the zone three demonstration had done exactly what it needed to do.
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I stood at the back and watched Bolin move through the zone one awareness exercise. I had done this exercise myself so many times that I could follow it without thinking, which left my attention free to observe.
That was when I saw it.
Dian Lu was circulating his primary meridian loop with two fingers, the way Bolin had instructed, tracing the pathway from the lung point at the wrist through the chest and down the inner arm. I was fifteen feet away, watching his hands. And I could see the pathway.
The large intestine restriction I had assessed through contact on the first day was visible, a narrowing in the channel just below the ribcage on the right side, the qi backing up behind it the way water backed up behind a partial dam. I could see the shoulder channel running hotter than the surrounding tissue in real time.
I kept my face neutral and I hovered near the back of the room. I did not tell anyone what I had just seen because I needed to understand it first.
I had been honing my Qi sensing abilities these past three years, and now it seems that I was developing something different: the ability to look at a person's Mai in real time.
I continued to make my morning rounds and noticed that Pei Yan was the first one at Lu Duan's dawn session for the militia.
I could see the militia ground from the bank and she was always there before Duan arrived, running the footwork drills he had shown her the day before. Duan ran on a strict schedule and he arrived at the sixth notch every morning, and Pei Yan was there at the fifth notch without fail. They ran through a few basic drills to try and catch her up to speed with the remainder of the trained militia like Ma and Tao and the Wei Brothers.
That evening Suyin taught her the first three polearm stances and she ran them until the light was gone.
The fierceness of Pei Yan's practice sessions inspired me to work twice as hard as well so I took some time at the river to do some more dagger work alone on the south edge of the training ground.
The change in my qi circulation over the past months had been incremental enough that I hadn't noticed it day to day.
However, standing here now and running drills at full pace, the difference was measurable. I was a clean half-step faster on the draw and my Qi was moving through the pathways with less resistance than ever before, which meant the body had less to compensate for on each movement.
I opted to experiment by distributing my Qi to the blade of my dagger.
The qi reached the blade and bled out unevenly, dissipating at the point instead of concentrating along the edge. Running qi through a held object required a different level of control than running it through a body part, and I hadn't drilled it.
I sheathed the dagger and stood at the edge of the training ground.
When I expanded my senses once more, I concentrated on Wei Bolin and tried to gauge his potential.
I had been watching him and the picture was consistent - he had built his cultivation through deliberate work and the result was a practitioner who operated reliably within a defined ceiling. He constantly refined his Mai and his Qi much like I had done, be was clearly ahead of the students.
Qi Refining, Stage Two.
The category arrived in my head with an unsettling thought. I recognized what I was doing, because I didn't have any other framework to work off of, but naming the realm after what Orthodox Sects have done would only create a ladder for others to climb, and that was not what I wanted.
I went back to the curriculum room and picked up the session notes.