Chapter 93: Impurity

The formation started cleanly.

He was sitting in the middle of the room with the methodology Rui and Yua had described over breakfast, directing ambient Qi toward the dantian point.

The movement was different from mana work. Less assertive, more patient, the way water found its level rather than the way a current was directed. The Qi responded correctly, gathering in small increments, the accumulation building.

He refined the gathering.

This was where it stopped being clean.

The mana heart in his chest and the Qi gathering below it were not in conflict. They were simply doing different things in the same body, operating at different frequencies, and the combined output of both systems reaching toward activity simultaneously was more than the meridians had agreed to handle at once.

The Qi leaked.

All of it. Outward from the dantian through every available channel simultaneously, including several he had not been aware of, running along his meridians and beyond them and then through his skin and into the surrounding air.

The room temperature changed.

Every surface glowed faintly in the dark. Not visibly, a glow felt rather than seen, the Qi concentration in the ambient air suddenly several times higher than the natural level outside. The walls were conducting it outward.

He tried to pull the flow back. The Qi, now in motion and distributed across multiple channels, did not respond to pulling. It responded to conditions. The conditions were: moving, and the mana heart was doing something unhelpful in the same frequency range.

He tried to stop the mana heart’s output.

The mana heart interpreted this as an instruction to do its job more.

Three degrees.

The room dropped three degrees in the time it took him to realize what was happening.

The door opened.

Both of them. At the same moment. Rui came in with her hand already extended, reading the room’s Qi distribution with the cultivator’s sense she had developed over years. Yua came in a step behind and stopped at the threshold.

She looked at him.

She looked at the walls.

"What did you do," she said.

"Working on it," he said.

"The walls are—"

"I know."

"They are glowing," she said.

"I am aware," he said.

Rui was already moving through the room, along the walls rather than toward him, placing her hands at intervals on the wood, redistributing the excess Qi that the room had absorbed, cycling it back into a pattern that did not make the walls glow.

It helped.

The ambient concentration reduced. The temperature stabilized. The channels his Qi had escaped through gradually slowed as the pressure differential that had been driving the leak decreased.

The mana heart made a final opinion about the situation.

Then it settled.

"Hold it," Rui said.

He held it.

"Rui," Yua said, from the doorway.

"A moment."

"I need you to explain what is happening to him right now," Yua said. "Clearly."

Rui paused.

"The core is forming," she said. "Badly. But it is forming. The mana heart is contributing to the formation, which is not what a mana heart is for. They are doing it wrong together."

"Can it be stopped," Yua said.

"Stopping it would cause damage. It can be stabilized."

"Then stabilize it," Yua said.

Rui put both hands on his shoulders.

The technique she ran was slower than anything he used, long and deliberate, working with the meridian system rather than through it. The Qi in his dantian gradually stopped competing with the mana in his heart and started settling into its own layer, a distinct structure, lower and different in frequency, operating independently.

The formation continued.

Slowly. Correctly.

Forty minutes later something in his lower abdomen settled into a configuration that was different from the rest of his body. Dense. Stable. The quality of something that had found the position it was always going to occupy.

[Qi Core: Formed.]

[Grade: Irregular. Dual-system integration detected. No existing classification applies.]

[Foundation of a Second World: Complete.]

[Reward: 500 Ink. Origin World cultivation ability unlocked.]

"Done," he said.

Rui took her hands off his shoulders.

"Done," she agreed.

Then the smell arrived.

All at once. Which was the only mercy in the situation, because gradual would have given them time to hope it was something else.

Yua made a sound.

"That is," she said.

"The impurities," Rui said. Her voice was admirably controlled. "The body expels them after a breakthrough. The accumulation from a lifetime. Or, in this case, from whatever the equivalent is for someone from another world with two energy systems."

"It is worse than usual," Yua said. She had stepped back to the hallway.

"Significantly," Rui agreed.

He looked at his hands.

Every surface of his skin was wet.

He understood viscerally and immediately why the sweat scene in the cultivation accounts he had reviewed during game development was always described as requiring a bath afterward.

"The waterfall," Rui said. "Behind the eastern trail. Ten minutes."

He stood up.

He moved quickly.

The door, the step, the path behind the house, the eastern trail, the sound of water somewhere ahead. He kept moving and did not look at the expression Yua was wearing as he passed her in the hallway, which was one he suspected would live in his memory regardless of whether he looked.

The waterfall was cold.

Extremely cold.

He did not care.

He stood under it for a very long time.

In the morning he woke up before the light arrived.

He lay still and took inventory.

Mana heart: present, stable.

Qi core: present, stable, a new weight in his lower abdomen that had not been there forty-eight hours ago.

Body: different.

Not the way he had been different after the Hell’s Fire integration, or after the Sin signature settled. Different in a simpler way. The way he felt after a very long sleep that resolved something that had been running in the background.

He sat up.

Through Ether Authority he could feel the ambient mana of this world. Through the cultivator’s sense the sisters had described, he could feel the Qi threading through it. Two distinct things, present simultaneously, neither competing with the other.

He could feel the meridians. All of them, not as something he had to search for but as a present fact, the network lit with the Qi core operating at its base level.

He got up and went to the window.

The sun was beginning at the eastern horizon, the light arriving before the heat, the world outside doing what it did every morning.

He felt like he had been rebuilt.

Badly, in one night, with materials from two incompatible systems and the help of someone who had never worked on anything like this before.

But rebuilt.

He went to help with breakfast.