Sen intellectually understood what was happening. Both his master and Uncle Kho had spoken to him in general terms about five cultivation stages. They’d also been clear that there were smaller stages within the stages. When a cultivator transitioned between the major or minor stages, they were breaking through. Sen even understood that this was not his first breakthrough. Looking back, he could recognize several times that he had broken through while on the mountain. He had a small breakthrough while looking off the mountain and deciding that he would see the world. He’d had a breakthrough when he took that second cleansing pill and opened those extra channels. Although, looking back, he wondered if he’d somehow done that out of some kind of prescribed order. Those extra channels hadn’t really done anything until after Auntie Caihong had given him that potion and he’d been facing down the goat. Was that also a breakthrough, he asked himself. He thought that perhaps it had been. Then, there was the breakthrough he’d had just now.

What he was less clear about were what kinds of breakthroughs he had experienced. Both Master Feng and Uncle Kho had broken cultivation into two strict paths. There was spirit or soul cultivation, on one side, and body cultivation on the other. While they seemed very certain that the two paths were distinct, Sen didn’t feel as confident about it. He wasn’t sure if that was because he just didn’t have enough information or if his personal experiences were just so strange. They had told him that he’d started down both paths, which was a little unusual, but not unheard of. When he’d asked what the cultivation stages were called, though, both of the old cultivators had suddenly lost the ability to remember things. Master Feng waved it off, saying something about everybody always giving everything in cultivation a stupid name. Uncle Kho had seemed more hesitant about withholding the information. In the end, he’d left Sen with a somewhat cryptic statement.

“When you name things, intentionally or not, you can limit the ways that people think about a subject. Ming and I have decided not to burden you with too many names for the time being. Suffice it to say, you’re in the first major stage of cultivation development. Your job during this stage is gathering qi in your dantian and learning to manipulate it.”

“Manipulate the qi or manipulate my dantian?”

Uncle Kho smiled. “Both. Ideally, you’ll expand the capacity of your dantian over time.”

Sen had been so baffled by that idea that it was two full days later when he thought to ask Master Feng about body cultivation.

“Well, there’s nothing really mysterious about body cultivation. Ultimately, it’s just refining your body into something ever more perfect over time. At first, it just makes you stronger, faster, healthier, and even better looking. Your body tissues and bones become more durable. Take it far enough, though, and it gets a little stranger,” said Feng, then he laughed. “I promise that you don’t need to worry about that right now. Come and talk with me about it in fifty years or when you’ve progressed two full stages, whichever comes first. Then, we’ll get into the specifics because that’s when things start to get strange.”

“How can I tell a spirit cultivation breakthrough from a body cultivation breakthrough?” Sen asked.

“At your level, there aren’t a lot of good ways to tell the difference. Sometimes, it will be really obvious. Most of the time, though, you just have to trust your body and your spirit to guide you in the right direction. The good news is that breakthroughs of any kind at that level aren’t particularly dangerous. Painful, sometimes, but not dangerous.”

Despite Master Feng’s assurances, though, Sen didn’t enjoy going into a breakthrough without knowing what kind of breakthrough it was. Still, he didn’t know, so all he could do is try to capture as much progress as possible while it was happening.

“Sen!” Ma Caihong shouted.

Sen snapped out of his mental daze. Auntie Caihong was holding the bottle out to him. He reached out and snagged it from her.

“What is it?” He asked.

“Just something to help the process along.”

Sen sighed. “They got to you, didn’t they?”

Ma Caihong snickered. “Yes, they might have. Just drink it and then cycle your qi.”

“Yes, Auntie.”

Sen went to open the bottle, but Caihong caught his hand. “You should go to the cultivation room before you take that. Quick. You don’t want to waste any of what’s happening.”

Sen didn’t need her to tell him a second time. He darted through the house and entered the room with the drain in the floor. He shut the door firmly behind him and swiftly stripped out of most of his clothes. Since he couldn’t know for sure what was going to happen, he didn’t see any reason to risk perfectly good clothing. Taking a deep breath, he popped open the bottle. Almost reflexively, he sniffed the air. The potion or elixir smelled strange to him. It wasn’t a bad smell, just unlike anything he’d smelled before. Much more important to him at that moment was the knowledge that the liquid was bursting with all five of the major kinds of qi.

He could sense something else, some other kind of qi, just below the surface, but he didn’t have the time to puzzle over it. With a swift motion, he tilted the bottle back and let the potion slide down his throat. It tasted sharp, bitter, and just slightly metallic on his tongue, but he pushed that thought aside. With nothing left to distract him, Sen began to cycle his qi. When the breakthrough first struck, Sen had thought he held as much qi as he could possibly handle. His dantian felt like it might rupture at any second. His channels, all of them, were packed solid with qi. To say that cycling was difficult monumentally downplayed the mental effort it took to get that energy moving. Yet, he did get it moving. As it moved, he could feel some of the qi seeping away from his channels and out into his body. It took a bit of the pressure off of his channels and his dantian. Sen gasped in relief.

Then the potion kicked in and Sen’s inner world turned into a battleground. An entirely new wave of qi poured into his dantian, into his channels, into his everything. It felt like fire was burning him away from the inside out, consuming cells, muscle, bone, and organs. Yet, right behind it came air to blow away the cinders, earth to set the stage, wood to heal, metal to reinforce, and water to soothe away his agony. His dantian stretched and stretched until Sen knew, knew with absolute certainty that it could stretch no farther. He stretched out his will and seized not his dantian, but the qi inside of it, somehow reaching past the ephemeral, but all too real boundary his dantian presented. Barely coherent, Sen managed to decide that if the qi couldn’t push any farther out, he’d have to compress it to relieve the pressure.

He imagined the feeling of packing snow in his hands, the way the soft powder gave and gave until it suddenly stopped giving and started resisting. He squeezed against the qi, a task made even harder by the fact that he was still cycling qi, still trying to think past the agony of a body on fire, still trying to decide if this was a spirit or body cultivation breakthrough. The qi tried to flow out of his will’s grasp, but Sen redoubled his efforts. He squeezed and squeezed, certain that his dantian would explode if he eased up for even a second. He bore down on that qi even as more qi swirled past moving in and out of his seemingly newly made channels. He kept squeezing harder and harder, eventually forgetting even why he was doing it. It felt like he’d been squeezing that qi forever. He couldn’t give up. Couldn’t surrender. He had to keep going because, because, he didn’t even know anymore. He just knew that he couldn’t stop. With a final burst of willpower and desperation, Sen compressed the qi one last time.

There was a pop that Sen heard inside his body and felt inside his soul. The struggling, writhing mass that his will had held was abruptly gone. Sen looked inwards with his mind’s eye. Where that mass of qi had been, there was now an iridescent drop of liquid. It floated for a brief moment in the center of his dantian, then the flow of his cycling snatched that droplet of condensed qi and drove it into one of his channels. The qi that Sen was used to using flowed through his channels. This tiny droplet shot through his channels like a crossbow bolt. As it did, he felt his body arch up off the floor. Impurities burst from every single one of his pores. Distantly, he was even aware of the rank stink of it. The pain of it, though, was indescribable. For a few seconds, that pain was everywhere inside of him. It was inside his bones, inside his cells, inside the very fragments of consciousness he clung to for sanity. Then, mercifully, it was done.