Chapter 13
Lying facedown with my large breasts pressed against the floor, I reviewed the theory.
“Thank goodness. No matter how many times I go over it, it doesn’t seem to be a heart demon.”
The observation had been a great success. But this was only the beginning.
Now I had to draw all five kinds of spiritual qi into my dantian.
I took a deep breath and tuned the frequencies in the order of Water, Wood, Fire, Earth, and Metal, lining up all five kinds of spiritual qi at the entrance to my meridians.
It felt so natural that I didn’t even realize what I was doing.
Wasn’t I handling spiritual qi with a sensation so vivid it was as if I could see it?
Even though I was doing something close to a miracle, I was so focused that I failed to notice anything unusual had happened.
The spiritual qi simply licked at my meridians and tickled them, as docile as golden retrievers.
“All right, good. That’s it. Now for the main event…”
Carefully, as if opening the floodgates of a reservoir, I opened the door leading to my dantian.
Whoooosh—! Gush, gush, gush!
The docile spiritual qi instantly turned into ferocious hunting dogs.
The spiritual qi pouring into me was nothing but uncontrolled, high-energy plasma.
“Ow! That hurts!”
First, an icy awl seemed to stab me; then, searing red-hot lava tried to burn through my veins.
Wood Qi constricted my heart, while Metal Qi scraped mercilessly at my meridians like shards of razor blades.
The pain piled on like a boulder, leaving me unable even to scream.
Was cultivation always this painful?
The pain was enough to make me regret it.
My meridians were more fragile than I’d expected. If the spiritual qi rampaged unchecked, interference would either make it vanish on its own or tear my meridians to shreds.
But it wasn’t as if I had no plan.
I was standing on the shoulders of giants in physics!
Strangely enough, I thought of how a particle accelerator worked.
How to accelerate charged particles to near the speed of light.
That was none other than,
the Lorentz force.
I decided to apply the concept of the force particles experience as they move through an electromagnetic field.
Let’s run electricity through a helical coil.
That would create a straight magnetic field through its center, which we could use to move particles in the direction we wanted.
So what if I imagined my meridians leading to my dantian not as ordinary passages like blood vessels, but as helical coils?
I focused my consciousness and mental energy on the meridians leading to my dantian.
I made a spiral loop, as if winding a thin thread around the outside of a blood vessel.
In accordance with Fleming’s right-hand rule, I set the direction of rotation perpendicular to the direction the spiritual qi was moving.
It was a calculation bordering on science fiction, but I thought the force generated by this spiral—what I dubbed spiral force—might stop the spiritual qi from beating against one another in a chaotic rhythm.
Vrrrrrr—!
It was the moment theory became reality.
As the imaginary magnetic field I’d created formed inside my meridians, the spiritual qi that had been running wild lined up in one direction as if by magic.
Like an electron beam fired through an empty vacuum tube, the spiritual qi slid smoothly and furiously down my meridians.
“That’s it! A superconducting maglev train running through my meridians!”
How was this possible?
It really wasn’t scientific at all.
Would you believe me if I said I could see something without opening my eyes?
I’d only concentrated my senses to feel the spiritual qi.
But whether it was because I’d wished for it so desperately or because my imagination had made it up….
Even with my eyes closed, I could ‘see’ not just inside my body, but the paths of the energy too, as clearly as if they were in 4K.
Perhaps after taking in the spiritual qi, I’d developed the illusion that my consciousness had expanded.
The meridians branching out like capillaries, and the five-colored light created by the spiritual qi, were as vivid as light passing through a prism.
Was this how Blind Shim Bong-sa felt when he saw Sim Cheong’s face?
Or how someone who’d been deaf from birth felt when they heard their wife’s voice for the first time?
I felt something welling up inside me.
How on earth could I explain this?
I could only accept it as something people commonly called a sixth sense.
‘Now that I’ve even discovered the fifth force, is a sixth sense really such a big deal?’
Without even having time to wipe the sweat from my forehead, I poured all five types of spiritual qi straight into my dantian.
The moment spiritual qi first entered the empty space of my dantian, my insides twisted as if I’d come down with food poisoning.
‘Now!’
It was time to put my own wild theory, ‘
the Five-Element Return-Flow Method (五行還流法)’ to the test.
My dantian was now what they called an ‘open system,’ with outside energy pouring in indiscriminately.
But as the five types of spiritual qi—Water, Wood, Fire, Metal, and Earth—mixed together, their opposing natures came to the fore, and they were all desperate to devour one another.
I immediately realized this was the point where most Five-Element Root cultivators fell into qi deviation.
‘Aaaaaah! Entropy’s going through the roof!’
Like steam escaping from a pot of water boiling without a lid, the spiritual qi tried to scatter and burst out wherever it pleased.
In other words, its disorder was increasing.
From here on, it was the realm of thermodynamics.
It was time to bring out my secret weapon, one no one in this uncivilized xianxia world could ever imagine.
A great mage of the elf race who lived a thousand years in my previous life once said,
「Magic is a matter of imagination」
That was what he said.
He also said, 「If you can’t visualize it, you can’t make it real.」
In a similar vein, Wittgenstein developed the picture theory in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and left us with these words:
「The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.」
It meant that people could only perceive the world within the bounds of what they could define and describe in clear terms.
If you lacked the vocabulary to explain a phenomenon logically, you couldn’t even imagine a way to solve it.
In other words, if the limits of language were the limits of imagination, then the world I could understand would expand infinitely through the language of physics!
Ultimately, the power to manipulate invisible phenomena depended on how clearly you could describe them in concepts.
The reason cultivators called Five-Element Roots useless was that they had never once been able to picture a logical tool in their minds for neatly sorting out energies that clashed with one another.
This world’s meager vocabulary couldn’t explain it, but a Princeton PhD in physics knew the ultimate thought experiment for creating order out of chaos.
I had a secret weapon of my own that no one in this uncivilized xianxia world could ever imagine.
A godlike being who could see the speed of each incoming molecule and control it by opening and closing a door.
A taboo in physics that directly violated the second law of thermodynamics.
‘
Maxwell’s Demon
’
“No chance. This is my turf. Come on in! Come on!”
The important thing wasn’t the strength of the force, but its direction.
I became the demon guarding the entrance to my dantian and knocked the five kinds of spiritual qi into a mathematically perfect pentagonal formation.
I forcibly bent the vectors of the forces trying to collide and connected them, one after another, tail to head.
‘Water overcomes Fire becomes Water generates Wood.’
Water might try to put out fire, but it could instead soak the wood and help it grow.
‘Wood overcomes Earth becomes Wood generates Fire.’
Wood might put down roots and tear up the earth, but it could instead be cut down and used as fuel for fire.
Fire overcomes Metal → Fire generates Earth.
Fire might melt metal, but it could turn aside and enrich the earth instead...
At last, I completed the cycle: Water generates Wood → Wood generates Fire → Fire generates Earth → Earth generates Metal → Metal generates Water.
It was a sort of cyclical hamster wheel.
It was the moment the chain of opposing forces that had destroyed one another finally transformed into a cycle of mutual generation.
“Therefore, the vector sum is zero!”
Once the forces were balanced, even the net force became zero.
I repeated the process over and over, gathering enough spiritual qi to fill my empty dantian to the brim.
Having achieved my modest goal, the well-fed ‘Demon of Ryu So-ha’ firmly shut the door leading to my dantian.
Standing guard like Zhang Fei at Changban Bridge, I made even a million strands of spiritual qi afraid to enter.
My dantian had now become a ‘closed system’ that exchanged no energy with the outside.
Then, like particles circulating in an accelerator inside a closed circuit, the five types of spiritual qi rode the cycle of mutual generation, amplifying one another endlessly as they spun like mad.
This was probably similar to the process that generated energy in the sun: nuclear fusion….
‘Ah, it’s like a heat engine embodying the principles of the Five Elements, working inside the tiny universe that is my dantian.’
A tiny nuclear fusion reactor inside my very own tokamak.
A cute little artificial sun.
An arc reactor.
‘Carnot engine? What the hell is that? It can go to the dogs.’
Fortunately, not even one unit leaked from the hundred units of spiritual qi I’d drawn in from outside.
But then an unexpected obstacle arose.
The faster the cycle spun, the more the energy density and pressure inside my dantian soared exponentially, completely beyond my control.
Ugh…!”
Nausea surged through me. My bones screamed, and it felt as if my dantian were about to burst.
A tempest of spiritual qi raged across the once-calm sea of my dantian.
Yet its center was calm, like the eye of a typhoon….
I saw hope there.
‘Hold on! I just have to get past the critical point!’
When temperature and pressure reach their extremes, matter doesn’t collapse at its limit; it finds a completely new form.
Like ice turning into water, and water turning into steam.
Now there was only one thing I hoped for.
A
phase transition
!
Spiritual qi becoming true qi must mean it’s undergoing a phase transition.
Like collecting seawater or water vapor you can’t use in a desert and condensing it into drinkable water.
Turn unusable spiritual qi into usable true qi!
The moment the spinning spiritual qi, on the verge of exploding, reached its limit—
Ping—!
A clear, crystalline chime rang out inside my head.
The horrible pain vanished as if it had never been there.
The thunderstorm in my dantian instantly grew as calm as a clear mirror and still water.
In its place, instead of the dazzling five-colored spiritual qi, a heavy, colorless, transparent liquid shimmered and rippled.
‘This is true qi (眞氣)! Right?’
It was the decisive moment when my theory—that spiritual qi, a gas, could be captured and converted into true qi, a liquid—was proven.
“Haaaa……”
My pent-up breath escaped in a long exhale.
But just then, hundreds of pores all over my body opened at once, and something burst out.
Poof!
A dull sound rang out as murky, noxious gas spewed forth.
At the same time, a stench that stung my nose filled the detached building.
“Uweegh!”
Unable to hold it in, I vomited everything I’d eaten into an empty bucket.
When I finally caught my breath, layers of black, tar-like mud covered my once-white, jade-smooth skin.
Had that detox juice I’d seen on Starsta actually worked?
It felt as if all the impurities I’d accumulated over a lifetime of eating and drinking had been forcibly expelled from my body.
‘Did the stagnant qi and impurities burst out in every direction?’
The stench was worse than a sewer, but my body felt as light as a feather, as though gravity had vanished.
‘What is this? I feel strength surging through me!’
An incredible power bubbled up from within me, as if I’d become superhuman.
Was it the energy released by true qi?
“Heh… Hahahaha! So this is it! This is what it was!”
I instinctively knew that I’d finally taken my first step onto the path of cultivation.
For a long while, I laughed so loudly the detached building rang, still covered in black filth.
From now on, I, Ryu So-ha, was no longer a helpless mortal (凡人) who had to beg for her life.
I was the first physicist in this world to understand the laws of the universe and prove them with my own body, and….
someone who had crossed the first boundary separating mortals from cultivators,
“a Qi Refining cultivator (鍊氣期), that’s who!”
Wahahaha!
Without a master, spirit medicines, or a sect’s secret teachings.
A miracle achieved with a body mocked as the worst kind of mixed spiritual root!
“Just you wait, Jin Mu-ak.”
I’ll teach you a lesson in the names of Newton and Einstein.
I’ll show you what a nuclear punch feels like.
But before that….
“Uweegh! Ugh! Ugh! What a horrible stench!”
‘Is someone… coming from far away…?’
“What’s going on? Daughter! So-ha!”
“Oh my, what’s that smell? The stench is overwhelming.”
My parents’ sudden appearance startled me.
I wanted to brag right away that I’d become a Qi Refining cultivator.
But right now, I looked like the Stink Spirit from some Japanese anime.
I wasn’t just covered in mud; it looked like it was oozing out of me.
“Mother, Father, have you arrived? This girl is safe and sound!”
“What on earth happened? It stinks worse than a pigsty or a latrine! Something terrible must have happened! I’ll rescue you at once!”
“Please don’t open the door! I’m in no state to be seen! Please!”
“You’re in no state to be seen?”
“Please! Just leave me alone!”
“How rude. That’s definitely not our So-ha!”
“That’s right, dear. Hurry and open the door!”
“Nooooo!”
With a scream that was nearly a wail, I plunged straight into a large bucket of drinking water.
Crash!
The door burst open, and Father charged in with a gleaming, sharpened sword in his hand.
“Ugh! What is this awful smell and sticky stuff?”
“So-ha’s gone! Dear, this is terrible!”
Since I’d happened to dive underwater at just the right moment, had they mistaken me for having disappeared?
“Stand back! This must be the work of a demon or a yaoshou (妖獸)!”
“Sob… What are we going to do about our So-ha? She’s disappeared.”
Father gripped his sword and radiated killing intent.
“You wretch! Evil demon! Show yourself! What have you done with our So-ha?”
“Sob… What are we going to do about our So-ha?”
“Madam, keep a firm hold of yourself. I’ve found something suspicious. This bucket is the only one with such murky water in it. I think it’s the source of the stench, too.”
‘Agh, this is driving me insane…!’
At this rate, I was about to lose my head to my own father’s sword.
“Pwaaaah! Father! It’s your daughter!”
Splash!
The moment I raised my head above the water, the cool tip of a sword stopped just short of touching my neck.
“Eeeek! Dad! It’s me, it’s me! Your beloved daughter, So-ha!”
“I won’t be fooled. You’re obviously an illusion!”
“…It’s really me! Please put the sword away!”
“What happened to leave you in such a dreadful state? Explain yourself.”
“This girl, well… has become a Qi Refining cultivator!”
I told them as truthfully as I could.
“Then filth started pouring out of my body, in a huge, disgusting mess… Eek!”
“You wretch! There’s a limit to how much you can lie! A Qi Refining cultivator? You’re spouting nonsense that would be impossible even if Heaven and Earth turned upside down!”
“There’s a mole on my butt….”
“You overheard what happened that night. Do you think we’ll fall for the same thing twice? What have you done to our beloved daughter?”
“Dear, it’s So-ha. It’s So-ha!”
“Madam, don’t be deceived. I’ve heard that yaoshou who know transformation techniques can take on human form.”
I gave up.
A vein throbbed on Father’s forehead.
His hand trembled as he gripped the sword hilt so tightly.
What on earth could I say to make him believe me?
How could I prove not only that I was Ryu So-ha, but that I’d become a Qi Refining cultivator?
I remembered a secret I’d told only Mother.
It was my dream.
I shouted with all my might.
“I’m going to become a physicist!”
But had I put too much force into it out of sheer frustration?
The true qi condensed in my dantian burst out all at once along with my shout.
KWA-GA-GA-GA-GANG—!!
A tremendous shock wave, as if a bomb had exploded, swept through the detached building.
“Kyaaaaa!”
My parents were swept away by the force and flew back about nine feet before hitting the wall.
And that wasn’t all.
Crack!
With a thunderous crash, a thick pillar supporting the roof broke and began to fall toward my parents.
Father hugged Mother tightly, bracing for the impact.
‘No!’
My own safety didn’t matter to me at all.
I instinctively reached out toward the falling debris.
Then something astonishing happened.
The enormous pillar about to crush my parents shattered in midair, scattering into a fine powder like roasted-grain flour.
“Mom… Dad….”
Relief at having made it through the crisis came with a wave of exhaustion, as if I’d poured out all the energy in my body at once.
The last thing I saw was my parents’ horrified faces as they rushed toward me, and then I passed out.
The debris covered me from head to toe.
‘Thank goodness. Thank goodness.’
……
…
How much time had passed?
I slowly opened my eyes as warm droplets fell onto my cheek, one after another.
“So-ha! Open your eyes! What are we going to do, dear? It really was our So-ha!”
“I’ve said I’m sorry several times. I must have been blinded by suspicion… But a Qi Refining cultivator? And you turned that thick pillar to ash. And what on earth is a physicist?”
“Mom… Dad….”
As my vision came into focus, I saw their faces as they hugged me, both streaked with tears.
“Are you awake, So-ha?”
“Do you know who we are?”
I managed a faint smile and nodded with difficulty.
“Hehe. Of course. Mom, Dad… I really did become a Qi Refining cultivator.”
At that, Mother hugged me as if she’d crush me and burst into tears, while Father’s own tears fell in heavy drops.
“So you did! Our daughter, you did wonderfully!”
I love it when Mother strokes my head.
“I’m sorry, daughter. I failed to recognize you and pointed my sword at you….”
“It’s all right. You had plenty of reason to misunderstand.”
‘Honestly, if I’d seen someone looking like a monster, I would’ve cut them down, too.’
Father kept apologizing to me for a long time, while Mother rubbed her cheek against mine again and again.
But I only gave vague replies. None of it registered in my ears.
My head was filled with nothing but the dopamine rush of realizing I’d become an immortal.
Ah, the lively otherworldly cultivation life of a genius physicist!
Now the real story begins!