Chapter 7
I dipped my brush in ink and drew a regular pentagon.
At each vertex, I wrote one of the Five Elements.
Fire, Water, Wood, Metal, Earth
I'd thought they were just an outdated classification the ancients had invented to explain the world.
But when I thought of them as light, the pieces fell into place.
Having a spiritual root meant being the kind of person who could see and sense these elements, as though they were visible light.
Just as ordinary people had cones and rods in their retinas that let them see rainbows in all their colors.
In this world, only people born with a special kind of receptor called a spiritual root could sense the Five Elements.
In other words, ordinary people were those who couldn't see energy in this range of wavelengths.
Put simply, having a spiritual root was like being able to see X-rays.
If someone could see X-rays, they'd basically have X-ray vision.
Of course, they'd see skeletons, not skin, so there'd be no lewd situations.
But how much of an advantage would it be in a fight to see someone's joints and bones?
According to the cultivation manuals, ordinary cultivators absorbed spiritual qi from outside, converted it into true qi, stored it in their dantian, and used it.
When they expended true qi performing spells, they apparently replenished it by taking pills or sitting in meditation.
It was just like endlessly pouring water into a leaky jar.
That's when I thought of the thermodynamics I'd studied in my previous life.
Leave a cup of tea outside, and it cools.
That's because it constantly exchanges energy with its surroundings.
This is called an open system.
By contrast, a system that doesn't exchange energy with its surroundings is called a closed system...
A cultivator's body itself is closer to an open system.
Let's say there's 1 million units of spiritual qi in the atmosphere.
If 20 of those units are Water Qi, a cultivator with a Heavenly Spiritual Root can store those 20 very quickly and reliably.
That's why it's called a talent bestowed by heaven.
But in the end, they can only take in 20.
What about the other 80 units of energy—the Fire, Wood, Metal, and Earth Qi?
To someone with a Heavenly Spiritual Root, that's just noise.
Then what about a Five-Element Root?
In theory, if there's 100 units of spiritual qi between heaven and earth, it can react to all of them.
Up to that point, it sounds like an insane talent.
But the cultivation world calls Five-Element Roots useless trash.
Because with the methods available until now, there'd been no way to take in all 100 without them colliding.
In short, as the five frequencies traveled along the meridians, their rhythms would clash and cancel each other out. Or, if constructive interference became too strong, it would damage or tear the meridians and dantian.
Some energy scattered before reaching the dantian, while some damaged the body.
Of the 100 units of spiritual qi absorbed, 80 were lost in collisions, 10 harmed the body, and only 10 remained in the dantian.
Naturally, it was slow and dangerous.
That's why they were treated like trash.
But I decided to look at it from a different angle.
"Look, look, look... let's see."
First, I carefully connected the Five Elements with lines according to their relationships.
Water puts out Fire, Fire melts Metal, Metal cuts Wood, Wood digs into Earth, and Earth dams Water.
A star shape appeared inside the pentagon.
Sure enough, like this, the five forces would simply point their blades at one another and snarl forever.
That's why it was called mutual overcoming, and cultivators feared the Five Elements' mutual overcoming.
But…!
When dealing with forces in physics, you don't look only at their magnitude.
Force is a vector, so you have to take its direction into account.
'What matters is direction, not magnitude!'
Even if two forces have the same strength, the result can be worlds apart depending on which way they point.
Suppose Mom and Dad each grabbed me from the left and right, saying they wanted me to sleep beside them tonight, and pulled me toward them.
If they pulled with exactly the same force, I wouldn't move in either direction.
From the outside, it would look as if nothing were happening.
But that didn't mean there was no force.
The forces were balanced.
In technical terms, a state where the net force is zero is called equilibrium.
Looking for the principle of equilibrium, I stared closely at the Five Elements' mutual-overcoming diagram.
Imagine an object being pulled by ropes from five directions at once.
If the forces had different magnitudes and directions, the object would be dragged toward the strongest one or eventually torn apart.
Just as the dantians of Five-Element Root cultivators had been until now...
But what if the directions and magnitudes of the five forces were adjusted to match?
What if they could be tuned mathematically so their vector sum equaled zero?
This time, I drew a circular arrow around the outside of the pentagon.
And then the vicious star-shaped diagram of mutual overcoming turned into a smooth circular cycle of mutual generation.
‘Balance and circulation. That's it! I have to find a balance among the Five Elements!’
Wood generates Fire, Fire generates Earth, Earth generates Metal, Metal generates Water, and Water generates Wood.
Wood generates Fire, Fire generates Earth, Earth generates Metal, Metal generates Water, Water generates Wood.
The cycle of mutual generation, with the Five Elements chasing one another's tails and nurturing each other.
'This is it.'
Depending on their direction, forces could become blades that devour one another—or waterwheels that push each other along.
My heart began to pound.
If I could make the five kinds of spiritual qi circulate endlessly in this order of mutual generation inside my dantian...
A ring with no beginning or end, endlessly circulating as each force pushed the next along.
In physics terms, something that could keep running on its own without fuel supplied from outside—
A laugh escaped me before I knew it.
"…Then my dantian wouldn't be a reservoir. It'd be its own power source?"
It was the same principle as Iron Man having an arc reactor in his chest that generated power without an external supply.
‘Could this be the legendary perpetual motion...? No, I'm crazy. Ryu So-ha!’
I was about to utter one of the most forbidden phrases to a physicist.
Perpetual motion!
A perpetual motion machine!
It was so obviously against the laws of thermodynamics.
Had all the impossible things I'd experienced made me lose my mind?
As a physicist, I shouldn't throw around the phrase perpetual motion so carelessly.
Energy had to come from somewhere, and losses were inevitable.
No matter how wondrous spiritual qi was, energy couldn't suddenly appear from nothing.
‘Wait, maybe the law of entropy doesn't apply here.’
This was a place where the world was made of the Five Elements, not atoms.
One of the subjects I'd researched in my previous life was dark matter and dark energy, whose true nature had never been identified on Earth.
What if the Five Elements corresponded to dark energy?
'The list of experiments I need to run just keeps getting longer.'
At this rate, I'll end up with a hundred things on my bucket list.
Anyway, what if I could absorb spiritual qi from outside once, then keep it circulating inside without letting it flow out of my dantian, producing energy?
If I turned my dantian into a closed system where the Five Elements circulated, my dantian would become an arc reactor.
In theory, even if it wasn't a perpetual motion machine, it had to be something comparable.
Now that I thought about it, it sounded way too chuunibyou, but what could I do?
Physicists just have that sort of sense of humor.
Why else would we turn the name of the subject mathematical physics into a toast pun: ‘Soju is physics!’?
Anyway, I couldn't help marveling at my own idea and ingenuity.
Absorb spiritual qi from outside, make it resonate once, then trap that resonance inside the dantian and keep growing it until I needed to use it.
‘This is it. This is a cultivation method only a Five-Element Root can use—something mediocre Three- or Four-Element Roots could never imitate.’
A cultivator with a Three-Element Root, who handled only three elements, could never complete this cycle.
It was truly an original cultivation method I'd devised myself.
Shouldn't I give it a proper name?
Have you ever heard of it?
The brilliant and resplendent...
「Five-Element Return-Flow Method (五行還流法).」
Is that too grandiose?
“In theory, this is ridiculously OP. Right? Hehehe.”
I set down the brush I'd been gleefully scribbling with.
For now, it was just a delusion.
99.9% delusion.
Anyone could come up with something that sounded plausible.
The world was full of con artists who deceived people.
They existed in academia, and there were probably plenty in this mysterious world too.
But there was only one way to tell a con artist from the real deal.
Can your claim be verified?
A delusion that can be tested is called a hypothesis.
But if you can't test whether it's right, it's not a theory. It's just nonsense.
It's like how a Nobel Prize isn't awarded to a theoretical physicist until experimental results have proven their theory true.
My theory of the Five Elements' circulation was no exception.
I'd forced a theory onto the phenomenon, so it only looked plausible.
A theory was only a theory.
Good, now all that remained was... an experiment!
To conduct an experiment, certain prerequisites were necessary.
Right now, I wasn't even a Qi Refining cultivator. I was the most ordinary of mortals, a total beginner.
A chirping little chick who'd chosen a research topic but couldn't even turn on the experimental equipment.
One thing I'd realized while doing my PhD was this:
The more beautiful the theory, the more damn difficult it was to conduct the experiment.
The most urgent thing was to first sense spiritual qi so I could experiment.
But did spiritual qi even really exist?
And I knew one of the truths of academia.
If you came up with an insanely brilliant idea, someone had already made it, or
it would be published in a paper tomorrow.
Someone on Earth was bound to have thought of that idea.
If there wasn't one, that probably meant it had already been proven wrong.
But this wasn't Earth.
'So I'd better start cultivating before someone steals my discovery!'
Then there was only one way!
###
"This young lady will enter seclusion to cultivate."
My earth-shattering announcement threw the household into an uproar.
Mother nearly dropped her medicine bowl, and Father froze with his teacup halfway to his mouth.
“Seclusion? What on earth are you talking about?”
“It means I’ll shut myself away and devote myself to cultivation.”
“I didn’t ask because I don’t know what it means.”
“I wanted to cut back on my activities outside for a while anyway.”
Father set down his teacup.
Normally, he'd just laugh it off if I acted a little cute, but this time seemed different.
The wrinkles around his eyes had grown fierce, and his voice was thick with anger.
I could see why the villagers called him a tiger.
“I’m asking you for a reason. I absolutely cannot allow it without a proper reason.”
“Well...”
“So-ha, do you think seclusion is child's play?”
Father scolded me for what felt like half a shichen.
I could only listen in silence.
'Hmm... Is it that serious?'
Just how dangerous was cultivation in seclusion...?
They'd scared me with talk of heart demons and qi deviation.
Anyway, I never expected him to oppose it this vehemently.
"No. Absolutely not. You can do anything else, but I won't allow seclusion."
