Chapter 2: Taking Inventory
Two weeks after we buried Father, I sat behind the house before dawn and tried to feel the world.
That sounds more profound than it was. What I actually did was sit cross-legged in the dirt with my eyes closed, palms flat on my knees, breathing the way I'd read about in roughly three hundred cultivation novels and hoping something would happen that wasn't mosquito bites.
The novels were useless, by the way. Every cultivation system I'd ever read described the process of sensing qi like it was obvious. "He turned his awareness inward and felt the flow of energy through his meridians." Great. Wonderful. Extremely helpful when you're a fifteen-year-old transmigrator sitting in the dark behind a farmhouse with no teacher, no manual, and no frame of reference beyond fiction written by people who had never cultivated.
Breathe in. Hold. Breathe out. Feel for... something.
Two weeks of this. Every morning before Hao woke up, every night after Mother fell asleep. Two weeks of sitting in the dirt like an idiot, reaching for a sensation I'd only felt once, standing next to my brother while he leaked spiritual energy like a cracked jar.
Except it wasn't nothing. That was the frustrating part.
There was something at the edges. But the moment I focused on it, it vanished. The moment I stopped trying, it brushed against my awareness like a current in still water and then disappeared before I could grab hold.
I opened my eyes. The sky was turning grey along the eastern ridge. Twenty minutes, maybe, before Hao stirred and I needed to be in the fields looking like I'd slept a full night.
Alright. Different approach.