Chapter 20: Life 50, Age 17, Martial Disciple Level 2
The next few months, my finances took a hit. My primary motivation was to improve my control of fire qi. From what I had seen, advanced alchemy was beyond me until that happened. Oh, could I try to make a more advanced pill? Sure, but producing anything that wasn’t High-Purity was just giving money away. If I was going to burn money anyway, I might as well burn what was supposed to burn, those damn index cards.
Honestly, some days I wished I could just burn that whole store down.
Even following Bao’s advice, progress was slow. Getting fire qi right up to the edge without going past it was crazy. Bao had said to think of the qi like a needle or dagger. The problem was, qi wasn’t solid. At first, trying to form it into a dagger led to me making something that might resemble a dagger that had been sitting in salt water for a few hundred years. A rough, patchy, worthless mess.
I thought I might be going down the wrong path, but Bao assured me, that’s just how it was at first. It was all a matter of practice. So that’s what I did. I practiced. I burned through cards at a truly manic pace. When my funds started to get low, I made pills. Everything was to push my skills in qi control.
Eventually, I decided to start cultivating to gather extra energy. I needed it. Waiting around for it to restore naturally was too big of a time sink. I even opened up the acupoint on my upper left arm, advancing to Martial Disciple 3.
Cultivating like this would hurt my purity, but it would ONLY hurt the purity of the qi in my upper arms. After hitting Martial Master, qi becomes mobile, so impurities in one place are the same as impurities everywhere, but as a Martial Disciple, the problems would remain stuck in my upper arms, so I felt it was worth it.
After reaching and constantly cultivating to recharge, my progress was significantly swifter.
It took me around five months, but I was finally able to complete the first set of cards successfully.
After completing the first row accuracy cards, I had to decide what to do next. As I saw it, I had three options.