034. BOTTOM'S UP, I HOPE

Ming Shi made it back to his room at Madam Zhang’s without exploding.

Great sign. Very auspicious, he assured himself.

He sat on the floor at the foot of his bed. There was a square patch of sun there from the light slanting in through his window. It reminded him of a meditation mat, so he sat there for good feng shui.

Yes, he was clutching at signs and portents.

He’d hoped to get a certified, authentic, direct-from-the-cosmos tip in the form of another Sample. But in order to receive one he’d have to host his Primordial Fire again. He didn’t know if he had enough soul capacity to feed such a hungry guest. Doing so would only add more risk to the equation.

So that left him with Eighty-Eight Hells.

Fine.

Theory and practice always differed.

In his dantian, his qi-dumplings rumbled like storm clouds. A moment later, they let out a thunderclap that had his whole torso vibrating.

He had to act now. They wouldn’t hold much longer.

Ming Shi poured himself a drink. The teacup he’d borrowed from Xiaoye was small, just the size of a shot glass. He filled it to the brim and set it on the floor in front of him.

Then he crossed his legs and assumed the lotus position. He breathed slowly, sinking into the heat of his dantian.

He was well familiar with the opening breath work of All is Tea and Tea is All now. It was just about letting himself relax into his own qi, imagining tea leaves in water without urging anything anywhere.

Not that conditions were particularly relaxing at the moment. After three days of being fed but not exercised, his qi had turned the tables and was now urging him on to action.

Out, his qi-dumplings clamored. Let us out. Move.

Not yet, he told them. Soon.

Another deep breath, in and out. He let himself sink in a little further—just a bit; he didn’t want full submersion. He wanted to be sitting upright in a hot spring, aware of both the water and the air.

He could lie back at any moment and go under completely.

But not yet.

He opened his eyes slowly and reached for the drink he’d poured.

A breath in. A breath out. He lifted the cup to his lips.

And then he knocked back his shot of Eighty-Eight Hells—straight, no mixer.

At first, nothing happened. For a moment, he wondered if he’d miscalculated.

Why’s it not working? he wondered. Madam Wan only inducted me. She didn’t immunize me. Did she?

Being inducted to use a spirit-sauce allowed a lower-level chef to safely handle a higher-Ranked condiment while cooking. It didn’t mean they could personally consume and eat the condiment with impunity. So why wasn’t he feeling any—

Never mind.

He felt it.

The physical pain was actually not that bad: a burning that spread from his tongue down his throat to stomach, intense but not unbearable. It moved gradually, letting him acclimatize. The induction was doing its job there, letting him handle the oil physically.

The spiritual pressure was another story.

It descended on his meridians in a brutal surge, a giant palm slamming down on an ant from the sky. Ming Shi spat out a mouthful of blood as the fragments of his spiritual channels strained and cracked under the assault.

Pressure.

For a moment he resisted. It was reflexive. After all, what kind of madman leaned in to a knife pressed to their throat?

A chef named Ming Shi, that’s who.

He leaned in and let the knife have him.

Or rather, he lay back. He submerged his senses fully into the qi in his dantian and let the ruthless pressure of Eighty-Eight Hells smash down.

The scattered fragments that were the ruins of Liu Baozi’s meridians disintegrated.

They were already no more than loose shrapnel, jagged detritus, but now they shattered even further, into splinters.

There was no turning back from this point.

Good. Ouch. Good.

This was the first stage of the bigger gamble he’d been planning the past three days.

Why?

Because theory and practice differed.

Burrowed deep in his own core, Ming Shi watched as the destruction spread through his spiritual channels. Every rubble-ridden road to nowhere that had been repelling his qi’s movement was being demolished.

Clear the way for me. Do it.

You see, in theory, any mortal could break through to Qi Condensation. One conscious, guided qi cycle and you had it in the bag.

But in practice, it was silly to even try if your constitution was lacking. Good luck meditating your feeble qi through your road-blocked, tangled meridians. Even if you managed one miracle, that’s where you’d peak—or bottom out. You’d never progress past “technically Qi Condensation, barely meeting the definition.”

Fortunately, Ming Shi’s qi was good. It was great.

But his meridians weren’t just lacking. They were trashed.

He was the literal embodiment of a cultivation trash cripple. He hauled around the remains of meridians that weren’t even connected—just littered scraps of spiritual garbage that stank so bad they repelled his own qi.

So, let’s take out the trash.

Eighty-Eight Hells obliged. Its spiritual pressure bore down further on the crushed splinters of his meridians; he sensed them as tiny slivers of flashing light leaving a thousand cuts as they shivered.

It hurt. Of course it hurt.

And it was going to hurt some more.

Pressure, pressure, more pressure.

The meridian splinters exploded into dust. For one breath the force of this explosion pushed back against Eighty-Eight Hells and he felt a strange re-inflation.

Then Eighty-Eight Hells struck back even harder. In cultivators, this oil was designed to inflict adaptive damage just below the levels for spiritual assault charges.

In mortals without active qi-defenses, armed with nothing to trigger the adaptive element, it just crushed their spiritual anatomy and kept crushing.

Now that his meridian fragments were dust, the pressure pushed in to invade the last spiritual structure standing: Ming Shi’s core.

The force was methodical, inexorable, compressing everything inward—

Including the dust of his meridians.

Ming Shi sensed his razed meridian dust being gusted to the final stronghold of his dantian, the merciless pressure leaving no particle behind. As Eighty-Eight Hells assailed his dantian, it slammed the shimmering meridian dust against its outer walls and held it there, building layer upon shining layer like geological strata being pounded down by the passing of time. Soon his dantian was completely encased.

Having forced every last speck of meridian dust to his center, the pressure closed around his whole besieged core, compacting everything together.

Now he had two barriers around his qi: his dantian walls and this compressed, luminous shell that was formed of what used to be his meridians.

His dantian groaned in anguish. His qi-dumplings strained, skins thinning.

Eighty-Eight Hells kept up the pressure. Its vice grip tightened. There were no gaps in this grip; it was absolute. Clenched within it was the total mass of his spiritual constitution, collapsing in on itself—or about to.

It was time ...

To serve his next course.

Ming Shi unleashed his dumplings.

They detonated in a rush of hyper-boosted vitality: three days of Chang’s congee, all that accumulated, stir-crazy vigor bursting free at once. The force slammed into the inner walls of his dantian with such massive impact that Ming Shi’s whole body convulsed.

His dantian should have ruptured.

It didn’t.

Because just as tremendous as the pressure of his qi forcing outward was the tremendous pressure of Eighty-Eight Hells, forcing in.

And yes, it hurt. His damn dantian was being burger-pressed between two opposing forces warring for dominance.

The chili oil pushed in. His qi pushed out.

Then, miraculously, the pressures balanced.

Equilibrium. Yin and yang. Compression and expansion.

Still, one wrong breath this way or that and it would all end. That’s how precarious this balance was.

The two-way pressure that kept his dantian intact was becoming torturous. His qi raged against its confinement while the chili oil tried to crush it. Assailed on all sides, he would fail if he did nothing, the balance would tilt, collapse, and he would—

Before fate decided for him, he had to decide for himself.

Here was the third course of his great gamble.

If it went down wrong, he’d paint the walls of Madam Zhang’s with his internal organs.

Which was why one of the coin piles beneath his bed had a note attached that said “Madam Zhang, cleaning fee, in case my deposit falls short.”

He had to let his qi go. He had to let it out with no meridians to flow to, to hope that instead of a mindless blast something else happened instead.

He had to trust himself—to trust the thing in him that had awakened after his first training session.

He did not know what to call it, but he knew it nonetheless. It was an Intent he recognized although he could give it no name.

It was … a feeling. That was all.

That was everything.

He breathed in.

He breathed out.

He took a deep breath and held it.

There.

In that held breath, in that space between coming and going—

There in that breath he found the thing that was multitudes and worlds.

Now, he said, his Intent said.

Dian xin.

Dim sum.

Touch.

The heart.

Ignition.

And with that spark, his qi erupted.