Chapter 51: Pot of Tea
The old bronze mirror was as round as a cookie. However, no matter how much Anji thought about eating it to absorb the yin energy hidden within it, she could not convince the yin energy coating the mirror to leave, much less enter her body as nutrients. The creative girl tried various methods of coaxing it, including attempting to snort it up. However, nothing worked.
Yan Ping spent the last twenty minutes observing her student. Anji was very innovative. She would give her that much credit. The child tried biting the mirror, slurping the energy around it, and even talking with the object in an attempt to negotiate. However, energy wasn’t a living creature in the most logical sense.
"Do you know what it takes for cultivators to finish their Initial Core?" Yan Ping finally broke her silence, offering Anji a clue.
Thinking for a while, the child replied what she could recall. The Initial Core was the foundational stage when practitioners learned to awaken their qi internally and sense it in the external environment. Much like this mirror, cultivators at the Initial Core stage would exude a grey aura. The colour was denser than the flimsy energy coating the bronze mirror, but that might be due to the quality of the energy involved.
It was a good answer. Yan Ping found nothing wrong with that answer. It was perfect from the textbook. However, it didn’t apply to Anji, who had her golden core sealed.
"Normally, life energy or qi is naturally attracted to people with cultivation affinity. The golden core is a cosy place for life energy to rest and become refined into something suitable for the cultivator. However, in your case, with a sealed core, there’s no attraction force for the yin energy to leave. Moreover, people like your third brother have a condition of only attracting certain types of energy due to his Yang body physique. How else would you be able to harness the trapped yin energy without the attraction of a core?"
Her teacher was giving her a huge hint. Unlike her older sister, Brother Yihao was constantly scolded for being lazy and unable to make much cultivation progress. However, after Uncle Bai took over her third brother’s training, he made astounding progress that surprised her parents. Those with special constitutions require different training methods. The icy waterfall that would have made Anji fall ill after soaking in it for an hour helped Yihao further strengthen his cultivation base. Why was that so?
Placing the bronze mirror on the table, Anji frowned. Suppose her older sister was like a strong magnet that attracted all types of qi easily, her third brother was like a sieve that could only accept specific energy types. Compared to them, Anji was like a brick wall, not receptive towards energy because her core had been tightly sealed. Despite her latent talent, she was no different from a non-cultivator. It was still too dangerous to use the energy in her core even after her father, shifu, and Sect Leader Bai helped to adjust the spell on her core’s seal.
Wait! If cultivators needed a core to cultivate, then what about spiritual herbs that did not have cores? How did they harness energy for evolution? That made little sense.