Chapter 6
I planted myself at my desk like a college student cramming for finals, trying to understand the principles behind the cultivation manuals.
I didn’t know when that immortal would come back.
I couldn’t let Mother go through that ordeal again.
Never again. Absolutely not.
They say knowledge is power,
and that knowing yourself and your enemy means you can win a hundred battles.
To stand against cultivators, I had to learn about cultivation.
I spread all the cultivation manuals across my desk.
Qi Guiding Art, Metal Qi Initiation, Wood Qi Foundation, Earth Breathing Method, Water Qi Art, Fire Breathing Art.
They sounded pretty impressive from their titles alone.
But every one of them was crap.
“Aaargh! I don’t get it. I don’t get it!”
I grabbed at my hair.
It was a total mess.
There was no structure to the writing and no logical framework at all.
If I summarized these thick books, they came down to just three lines.
「Clear your mind.」
「Feel the qi of heaven and earth.」
「Concentrate, and even a rock can be pierced—that is the power of the mind.」
There wasn’t a single line of concrete methodology explaining exactly what spiritual qi was, how to distinguish it, or how to gather it in the dantian.
It was no different from writing a physics lab report, skipping the procedure, and putting, ‘Observe the experiment carefully and feel it in your heart.’
What a shitty feeling.
I felt like I’d been here before.
Right, this awful sense of dissonance came from a situation exactly like this.
「Describe, in 3,000 characters, the devastated feelings of an advisor confronted with a shoddy thesis draft written by a new graduate student with their toes.」
Devastating. Utterly devastating.
Worse, every cultivation manual was like this.
“Aaargh! No wonder everyone keeps suffering qi deviation when they cultivate with these slapdash manuals!”
At first, I wondered if they were fake manuals written by frauds.
But if all the samples were similar, there were three possible conclusions.
One.
Even these cultivators didn’t properly understand the ‘essence’ of spiritual qi or spiritual roots.
Two.
They were deliberately breaking the ladder that would let commoners enter the cultivation world, so no one could rise from the bottom.
Three.
My intelligence—Ryu So-ha’s—was abysmal, and I couldn’t understand because of my trash Five-Element Root.
For now, my paltry pride wouldn’t allow number three, and number two seemed unlikely.
Why? Apparently, even the cultivation world had an organized school system in the form of sects.
Sects would use cultivation manuals too, so they wouldn’t deliberately sabotage foundational texts that served as textbooks.
So wasn’t the answer closer to number one?
〈Even cultivators don’t know exactly what spiritual qi is.〉
Or they knew the phenomenon but couldn’t explain the principles behind it.
There were plenty like that in academia, too.
At first, I’d been intimidated by world-renowned scholars who’d won Nobel Prizes, but I was shocked to see they knew nothing outside their own fields.
And when I actually attended their lectures, they had a knack for hypnotizing students into sleep.
After all, ‘knowing’ and ‘explaining’ are entirely different domains.
‘Right, these uncivilized fools only know how it works; they have no idea about its physical structure.’
After all, knowing and explaining are entirely different domains.
Otherwise, everyone would’ve written a textbook.
Royalties were pretty sweet.
Wait…!
‘Textbook…? Right, a textbook.’
I took a deep breath and picked up my brush. In any field, the fastest and surest way to deepen your understanding is to create ‘your own textbook’ that you can use to explain it to others.
I would cut out all the vague literary metaphors.
A cultivation manual wasn’t a science textbook.
It was closer to an experiment notebook left behind by a senior researcher after a night of drinking.
It was useful.
It just had to be translated into human language.
I had several cultivation manuals now.
I would consolidate them and make my own textbook.
I began translating them from a rigorously materialist perspective.
First, I wrote a question in large letters on a sheet of paper.
[1. What is spiritual qi (靈氣)?]
I started by organizing the observed facts.
Spiritual qi existed in reality.
There was no need to doubt that.
Jin Mu-ak had crushed people beneath his pressure, flown through the sky, and pierced Mother with red light.
Using spiritual qi could move objects and produce light and heat.
In other words, spiritual qi could do work.
In physics, the term for ‘the ability to do work’ is already established.
Energy.
Spiritual qi was energy.
Or it was a medium that transmitted energy.
Good. Next question.
[2. What are the Five Elements (五行)?]
Why were they divided into fire, water, wood, metal, and earth (火水木金土)?
I’d disliked this classification from the start.
This wasn’t Aristotle. Was the world really made of fire, water, and dirt?
Of course, there was no guarantee this world operated by the same laws as Earth.
If it was true that heaven and earth were made of spiritual qi, then spiritual qi could be matter and energy at the same time.
And if we brought in de Broglie’s matter waves, matter had wave properties too.
So the conclusion that spiritual qi behaved like a wave wasn’t unreasonable at all.
It actually made sense.
But if spiritual qi was energy, it wouldn’t have color or attributes in and of itself.
The Five Elements Plate glowing in five colors didn’t mean spiritual qi itself had color.
A thermometer turning red didn’t mean heat was red.
Then what were the Five Elements?
I thought of the most familiar form of energy.
「Let there be light.」
Light.
Light carried energy.
And light was both a particle and a wave.
There was a decisive reason I thought of light.
Even the same light could sometimes look red and sometimes blue.
What was different about it then?
Its frequency.
Every wave had its own rhythm.
Waves that vibrated quickly.
Waves that vibrated slowly.
In physics, that rhythm was called frequency.
The essence of the light was the same, but our brains divided it into colors based on its frequency.
They differed only in wavelength within the visible spectrum, yet for a long time we’d perceived them as entirely different properties.
Just as red and blue had become colors symbolizing fire and water.
Suddenly, my mind cleared.
‘Maybe this is nothing but an illusion. It’s possible that spiritual qi, at its core, is one and the same.’
I spread out the five cultivation manuals and examined them.
The Water Qi Art said to breathe long and calmly.
The Fire Breathing Art said to draw the spark in with short, forceful breaths.
The Wood Qi Art said to imagine your breath stretching upward.
The Metal Qi Art said to inhale thinly and sharply, like a thread.
The Earth Breathing Method said to breathe deeply and apply force below the navel.
The descriptions were all different, but…
To a physicist’s eyes, they all looked like the same thing.
In other words, they meant to change the ‘rhythm of your breathing.’
Could it mean that each type of spiritual qi had its own suitable rhythm?
No!
My fingertips trembled with the realization.
What if spiritual qi was matter and energy—in other words, a ‘wave’?
What if the five attributes of fire, water, wood, metal, and earth weren’t different elements,
but merely a single fundamental energy vibrating at five different characteristic frequencies?
Perhaps uncivilized people had misconstrued the phenomenon and called it the Five Elements.
It was just like arbitrarily dividing the colors of light passing through a prism.
If that was the case,
[3. What is a spiritual root (靈根)?]
I decided to extend my hypothesis through physics.
That immortal guy had said a spiritual root was the foundation for absorbing the spiritual qi of heaven and earth. If I translated that into the language of waves and particles, the answer was simple.
A spiritual root was a kind of receptor that synchronized the energy making up the world with the frequency of my body.
In simple terms, an antenna.
‘An antenna. And Bluetooth.’
An antenna didn’t receive every radio wave equally well.
Think of a smartphone.
In my previous life, I used cell phones as a matter of course.
Naturally, countless radio waves drifted through the air.
Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, radio, broadcast signals, and so on.
All sorts of signals filled the air.
But why hadn’t my earbuds played the radio broadcast of the guy next door?
The answer was simple.
They only picked up the right signals.
The antenna did that job.
An antenna wasn’t a rod that received every radio wave equally.
It was a receiver designed to respond better to certain wavelengths.
More precisely, it was closer to a radio.
Tune a radio to a frequency, and you could hear only the sound of a specific station clearly.
What if the frequency was off?
Nothing but static.
I picked up my brush and wrote on the paper.
「Spiritual root = an antenna or receiver that takes in spiritual qi」
An antenna in a xianxia world.
It looked a little funny after I wrote it down.
But it was a very apt analogy.
Once I thought about it this way, a lot of things became clear.
Why was the ‘Single Spiritual Root (一靈根)’ considered the best?
A spiritual root with only one attribute.
In other words, it was a high-performance antenna tuned to a single ‘channel.’
For example, a Fire Spiritual Root picked up only the frequency band corresponding to fire qi, so there was no noise.
Naturally, that was an advantage.
It might look like a drawback, but it was an enormous advantage in cultivation.
Less noise and less loss meant, in other words, that it was easier to interpret.
In short, you only needed to learn the Fire Qi Art.
It was like tuning in to the station broadcasting fire qi and just turning up the volume.
No wonder cultivation was so fast.
Breathe in time with a single rhythm.
Open your meridians by following a single sensation.
Convert a single type of spiritual qi and send it to the dantian.
I could understand why they gave it such an impressive name as Heavenly Spiritual Root and all that.
But as I understood it, they weren’t so much geniuses as high-performance receivers tuned to a specific frequency.
What did other people’s business matter to me?
The problem was my Five-Element Root, the bottom-of-the-barrel trash everyone mocked.
According to my hypothesis, the cursed Five-Element Root was a broadband antenna capable of receiving all five frequencies.
It sounded great in theory.
Oh! You can use all five attributes?
Isn’t that a complete superpower package?
But in practice, it wasn’t like that.
Receiving five frequencies at the same time was like a broken radio with all five frequency channels switched on at once.
Five signals poured in randomly without any control.
The nine o’clock news, a music program, World Cup match commentary, a shoe commercial, and a Buddhist chant of “Namu Amitabul” all blasted into my ears at once.
I was already dizzy just imagining it.
It was like being told to listen to all of them at once and write down the main points of the sutra.
“Are they insane?”
Now I finally understood what Jin Mu-ak had said.
The spiritual qi of the Five Elements interfered with one another.
He’d said that while others could accumulate spiritual qi in a year, it would be difficult for me even if I spent ten.
That wasn’t because the Five-Element Root couldn’t receive spiritual qi.
It was because it received too much.
More precisely, it couldn’t filter it out.
Bluetooth worked the same way.
For Bluetooth earbuds to connect to a phone, they first had to be paired.
In short, pairing.
It was an agreement to distinguish my device from yours and exchange signals according to an agreed-upon method.
What if that process didn’t happen?
Every Bluetooth signal nearby would intrude all at once.
The earbuds wouldn’t know whose signal to listen to.
The music would cut out, noise would mix in, and the connection would become unstable.
Modern civilization had devised complex protocols to solve that problem.
Separate the signals.
Set their order.
Discard unnecessary noise.
Interpret only the right signals.
But there was nothing like that in this world’s basic cultivation manuals.
They simply said:
Empty your mind and take in the spiritual qi of heaven and earth.
“Fuck.”
Was the Five-Element Root really trash?
‘No… wait a second… what if it’s energy, and thus a wave?’
A Single Spiritual Root generally seemed to have no problems.
It could only receive one kind of signal.
No matter how carelessly you opened the door, you’d mostly receive the same kind of spiritual qi.
Even if fire qi tried to enter a body that could only receive water qi, the antenna simply wouldn’t respond in the first place.
So you could cultivate by brute force with a simple manual.
Breathe.
Feel.
Gather it in the dantian.
Even with an explanation that shoddy, it could still work somehow.
The meridians opened, and the dantian stabilized.
But the Five-Element Root was different.
I responded to all five signals.
Open the door, and water qi, fire qi, wood qi, metal qi, and earth qi would all pour in at once.
Inevitably, their paths through the meridians to the dantian would overlap.
The five types of spiritual qi would pass through the same channels and throw one another’s rhythms out of sync.
When waves overlap, two things can happen.
They can reinforce each other.
Or cancel each other out.
When their phases match, it’s called constructive interference.
When their phases are out of sync, it’s called destructive interference.
No matter how hard I tried to draw in spiritual qi, if their rhythms didn’t match, they’d cancel each other out inside my body.
That was why cultivation was slow.
It was fortunate if all that happened was cancellation.
If different waves collided chaotically in narrow meridians, energy could build up at specific points.
If I failed to tune them, the spiritual qi would clash wildly in my dantian, creating endless destructive interference and destroying one another.
The energy I’d painstakingly gathered would scatter chaotically, and the flow inside my body would become tangled.
Just as an opera singer could shatter a glass with nothing but their voice.
Just as a sturdy bridge could shake violently and collapse because of its natural frequency.
My meridians would twist, and my dantian would shatter.
That was…
“Qi deviation.”
A wave of gooseflesh swept from head to toe.
And at that very moment,
I found a clue to the proper way to cultivate with a Five-Element Root.
It was this.
‘Life is about direction, not speed.’
What mattered wasn’t the magnitude of the force, but its direction.
