Chapter 11
I was careless.
No, how could a Princeton-trained theoretical physicist like me let myself be taken in by some shoddy manual from this uncivilized lower realm?
‘Empty your mind and feel the spiritual qi?’
Become one with Heaven.
A mind like a still lake, a mind free of distracting thoughts, mind and body as one.
At first, I thought it sounded rather plausible.
After all, this was a world where actual immortals flew through the sky, so I figured those words probably had some practical meaning I didn’t understand.
But after spending several days sitting on the floor, waiting for spiritual qi, I came to a single conclusion.
This is insane.
If you empty your mind because you want to see electrons inside an atom, will they suddenly appear?
If you do abdominal breathing in front of a telescope because you want to observe a black hole, will the event horizon give you a pretty little wave?
No professor tells an undergrad, “Go into the lab and sense the Higgs boson with your mind’s eye.”
If there were such a professor, they wouldn’t be an educator. They’d be a fraud or a cult leader.
No human can see electrons with the naked eye.
We know electrons exist through the tracks they leave behind and the effects they have on their surroundings—
In other words, through measurement and observation.
Light is no different.
We see it through the response left when light hits the retina.
Just as we taste things according to the stimuli that reach our taste buds, sensation is nothing more than the output of a detector.
Then spiritual qi must be the same.
What I needed to do wasn’t stand there going “Spiritual qi~~ come here~ come here~” and dance the parapara.
Up until now, I’d been earnestly following some cultish manual.
I uncrossed my legs and rubbed them, stiff as boards.
The area below my knees was tingling.
“Right. The methodology was wrong after all. Hup!”
Cultivators in this world lump spiritual qi together as nothing more than ‘the breath of nature’ or ‘mysterious energy.’
But if spiritual qi exerted physical force, then it could never be dismissed as something simply ‘mysterious.’
If spiritual qi exerted physical force and interacted with things, then it had to be energy, particles, and waves through and through.
Then what I needed to do wasn’t vaguely sharpen my senses and wait for it to come to me.
“I’m starting over with the experimental setup.”
I pulled a sheet of paper toward me.
The paper Father had given me wasn’t very good quality, but it was enough.
It wasn’t as nice as a smooth whiteboard, but the laws of the universe didn’t have to be written only on a smooth surface.
First, I started with 『Organizing Observations and Defining the Problem』.
First. Spiritual qi exists.
Second. I sensed spiritual qi once.
Third. But I failed to reproduce it afterward.
Fourth. The likely cause of my failure to reproduce it is not spiritual qi itself, but the method of detection.
Once I’d written that much, my head cleared a little.
It really was different when I put the problem into words.
The human brain is stupider than you’d think. If you leave everything in your head, worries, delusions, self-loathing, and the urge to use the internet all boil together in one pot. But the moment you write it down, at least some of it becomes something you can analyze.
‘What happened when I first sensed spiritual qi?’
The first thing I sensed was Water Qi.
It felt like cold saline being injected into my veins.
But the problem came right after that.
The moment I sensed Water Qi, the other four spiritual qis—Metal, Wood, Fire, and Earth—came rushing in all at once.
Then they made a mess inside my body like five monsters let loose in the middle of Seoul.
The positive thing was that I’d succeeded in sensing spiritual qi itself.
What I’d failed at was selective detection and regulating the intensity.
By regulating the intensity, I don’t mean the suggestive kind. I mean I couldn’t control the amount of spiritual qi.
If my assumption that a spiritual root was an antenna was right, then mine was a broadband antenna.
It picked up the news, the neighbor’s radio, the cosmic background radiation, and even all the North Korean military communications.
No wonder my head was about to explode.
It wasn’t poor performance; I just had no control system.
If so, the solution was simple.
I just had to make a filter.
Then I put forward one of the most basic propositions of quantum mechanics.
The Copenhagen interpretation.
To put it in a tedious, pompous version first,
‘Until observed, a quantum exists as a probabilistic wave in a superposition of multiple states, and the moment it is observed, its wave function collapses and it becomes a particle with a definite position.’
Don’t worry, even Einstein couldn’t understand it and spent his whole life refusing to accept it.
Put simply, Schrödinger’s cat.
The famous ghost story where life and death coexist until you open the box, and become determined once you lift the lid.
Honestly, bringing up the Copenhagen interpretation here might be quite a stretch in the strictest sense.
If my advisor from my previous life were here, they’d adjust their glasses and say, “Mr. Kim Muyeol, you should be a little careful with that analogy.”
I’d like to say this.
Shut up, Professor.
This is a romance-fantasy… no, a xianxia world!!!
Anyway, perhaps spiritual qi in the air spread out like a probabilistic fog until it was observed.
Whether the Fire, Water, Wood, Metal, and Earth Qi were mixed together chaotically or in a superposition.
Once I met some sort of condition, all five kinds of spiritual qi flowed into my meridians through my Five-Element Root’s broadband antenna.
When uncontrolled spiritual qi flowed through my meridians, it was horribly painful. If they’d collided in my dantian like that, I might have fallen into qi deviation right then and there.
But what if I could select the spiritual qi?
For example, what if I wanted to receive only Water Qi?
Wouldn’t I just have to match the frequency of my antenna to Water Qi’s natural frequency?
Then what could I use to tune it?
I recalled the vague poetic lines in 『Water Qi Art』.
‘Empty yourself, cold and still, like deep water settling.’
I’d thought of it as nothing but sentimental xianxia-style prose.
But after experiencing it for myself, I began to see it differently.
This is
about
breathing.
The cultivation method was basically saying this.
The breathing of Fire and the breathing of Water are different.
‘Breathing?’
If I assumed the breathing methods differed according to the spiritual qi, it was easy to translate into the language of physics.
The conditions for inhalation and exhalation in a technique corresponding to Water Qi were….
Low amplitude, long wavelength, and a steady period.
If that was the case, cultivation methods were discussing the proper way to breathe.
Having reached a conclusion, I crossed my legs and consciously controlled the speed of my breathing.
I did my best to maintain a steady flow of inhalation and exhalation, just as the Water Qi Art described.
With a single purpose in mind instead of completely emptying my thoughts, my concentration increased several times over.
And I no longer indulged in idle chatter or wild imaginings.
I simply felt my lungs expand and contract, and the rise and fall of my ample chest.
I gradually synchronized the rhythm of my breathing with my heartbeat.
Generally, if you fix both ends of a string and shake it to the same beat, a standing wave forms.
A wave that moves, yet does not move.
Such a standing wave formed within my spiritual root, the resonator that was me.
It was the realization of a remarkable conviction: ‘Only those with this wavelength may enter my meridians.’
To put it crudely, I was fishing with bait that a particular fish liked, dangling it at a steady rhythm.
How much time passed?
‘…It’s here!’
Something formed in the pitch-black abyss.
In the probabilistic fog that contained countless possibilities, I could sense one among the many kinds of spiritual qi taking on a distinct physical form.
It was so clear, like a single drop of water imbued with a blue glow plinking down from a dense fog.
An incredibly cold energy.
Maybe it was so amazing, or maybe it was because it proved my hypothesis was correct?
A giggle threatened to escape me.
‘Don’t get excited. It’s too soon to celebrate.’
If my breathing wavered, the conditions would break.
I’d gone to all that effort to capture ‘the breathing of Water.’
I maintained my breathing and recorded the wave’s form on paper.
According to Fourier’s theorem, every wave is ultimately the sum of sine and cosine functions.
That meant I alone in this world could assign an exact value and measurement to the wavelength corresponding to Water Qi.
“Hwahahaha! It worked! It worked!”
Only after finishing my notes could I break into a broad smile.
After enjoying my success to the fullest, I crossed my legs and focused again to see if I could reproduce it.
And then,
“I, Ryu So-ha, have mastered Water Qi!”
I’d cleared one of the five spiritual qis.
After that, everything went smoothly.
It was as easy as Columbus’s egg.
The problem had already been solved, after all. Finding solutions for Fire, Wood, Metal, and Earth was a truly simple matter.
It took one shichen to detect Fire Qi.
Wood Qi took about an hour. Once I got the hang of it, Metal and Earth Qi took less than thirty minutes combined.
“Haha… hahaha!”
Success.
I’d moved beyond the primitive method of ‘feeling’ spiritual qi and completed a detection mechanism that selectively ‘observed’ spiritual qi through frequency synchronization!
A hollow laugh escaped me.
“Cultivation……”
The moment I thought, Maybe cultivation really is easier than I expected? I smacked myself in the head.
Why?
‘This is going way too smoothly. Could this… be a heart demon?’
「
Third Commandment: Doubt your enlightenment
」
They said the greater the enlightenment, the greater the trap.
To be safe, and to take a breather, I took a nap.
As a bonus, it would help store the results directly in my long-term memory.
A little while later, I woke up on my own.
I quenched my thirst first, then picked the sleep from my blinking, drowsy eyes.
“Haaaaaam”
After yawning as if the world were ending.
I began verifying again whether what I’d realized was truly correct.
“Haaaaaaam! It worked. It worked, I tell you. I’m officially a Five-Element Root cultivator now. And it’s not a heart demon. Ah, what a relief.”
Fortunately, it wasn’t a heart demon.
Thus, the observation was a great success, but this was only the beginning.
I hadn’t even solved half the tasks before me.
I had to draw all five spiritual qis into my dantian.
And turn them into true qi.
With that in mind, I prepared a modest but convincing offering table.
I even put meat on it, and observed the basic rules: fish to the east, meat to the west, red foods to the east, white foods to the west.
This was to bow to someone in hopes of ensuring the experiment succeeded.
Who, you ask?
None other than Maxwell, the father of electromagnetism.
Please let the experiment succeed.
And let me become a Qi Refining cultivator.
I offered up a prayer with reverence.
It’s no secret that the crew later happily ate the beef jerky left over after filming.
