Black Swan – Rank 1 (You have discovered an advanced Silver Swan assassination technique! Strike with the fury of a tsunami behind your blow! This technique can shatter lesser wards. Water-Metal Qi elements involved. Cost to use: 5 Qi and risk of significant meridian strain, unless used after Silver breakthrough made, or in a storm.)
Piercing Strike – Rank 1 (Excellent for piercing elemental wards, once Soul Sight and Find Weakness have been successfully used.)
Qi Deflection – Rank 0
Qi Absorption – Rank 3 (Breakthrough made! An additional 5 points of damage is absorbed from all Fire Qi or Poison-aspected attacks.)
Qi Flood – Rank 2 (Flood a grappled target (or artifact) with Dark Qi!)
Qi Perception-linked Disciplines
(Note: all of these abilities are Qi Perception-based. Their rank may not exceed Qi Perception rank. All specialization points invested in Qi Perception will boost all underlying skills!)
Qi Perception – Rank 4 (5) (Sense all physical and Qi manifestations around you within 50 feet with concentration. Sense spirit beasts and their flow of Qi. +5 to Perception checks.)
Artificer – Rank 3 (4) (Understand, manipulate, or destroy treasures and artifacts!)
Find Weakness – Rank 3 (4) (Works on artifacts, constructs, demons, spirit beasts, and cultivators! Basic check with Qi Perception lets you sense the weakest points in any opponent’s physical body and technique. Advanced skill rank and successful use of Soul Sight is needed to actually pierce a cultivator’s Qi defenses!)
Soul Sight – Rank 3 (4) (Sense the flow of Qi through any spirit beast (effortless) or cultivator (difficult)! If this skill is not successfully used, Find Weakness can only sense surface flaws in armaments or technique.)
Spiritual Teacher – Rank 5 (6) (You may now directly impart the knowledge of any and all Cultivation disciplines upon suitable students with a successful skill check! This skill allows suitable students to enjoy multiple breakthroughs up to Spiritual Teacher rank. Diligent focus is required over a period of days, weeks, or months, depending upon student-teacher compatibility and mystic connections being harnessed.)
Qi Purification Techniques Learned:
Dual Path Purification Technique (96% Efficiency.)
Cleansing Breath Purification Technique (100% Efficiency.)
Qi Restoration Techniques Learned:
Golden Realms Meridian Restoration Technique (100% Efficiency.)
Qi Cycling Techniques Learned:
Dual Path Dark Qi Cycling Technique (1% Efficiency.)
White Crane Cycling Technique (100% Efficiency.)
Body Cultivation Techniques Learned:
The Eternal Fox Unified Cultivation Technique – Rank 9
- This divine technique now incorporates Golden Realms Meridian Restoration Technique (can regenerate damage meridians), Cleansing Breath Purification Technique (can cleanse all meridian gates), and White Crane Cycling Technique (additional 5-fold increase in rate of healing) at 100% efficacy! Works with all elemental affinities at all levels of cultivation.
- Breakthroughs currently in effect include Saintly Aura, Longevity, Regeneration, Power Healing, Dark Qi Recycling, Pristine Light Cultivation, Pristine Dark Cultivation, and Pristine Form.
Damage from all poisons and caustic agents is neutralized at a rate of 10 damage per Rank in Eternal Fox per second from all threat tiers: mortal, infernal, or ethereal. Cellular mastery achieved! All cells naturally revert to their ideal age. Eternal youth has been achieved!
Note: Tier 1 Bronze Ogre status achieved. Additional 10-Fold modifier in effect. Total personal modifier at Rank 9 Eternal Fox = 1*5*10*9 = 450 pounds per 1000 hours = 0.45 pounds of lost flesh will fully regenerate per hour of cultivation. Cuts can now be healed in seconds!
A Path Cloaked in Mist
Thanks to your constant training and the crucible of abuse you endured pushing yourself to Bronze, you have permanently gained 8 points of Impact Resistance, 4 points of Cutting Resistance, and 2 points of Piercing Resistance! You have taken your first step in forging a new body cultivation technique. Details: unknown.
Your peripheral meridian channels have expanded, and can handle significantly greater amounts of Qi than ever before. Your meridians have been forged in fire! Your peripheral meridian channels are now Extremely Resilient, and enjoy a total +5 modifier to all durability checks, +6 against all meridian-searing attacks based on Fire Qi.
Biochemical Mastery – Rank 5
You may now synthesize or cure any poison or alchemical formulae mastered, save those reliant upon silverbell or shadow blossoms. You have full immunity to the caustic and toxic effects of all poisons mastered and all alchemical reagents used.
________________________________________________________
6
Alex coughed and cleared his throat, suddenly feeling the weight of the combined bemused stares of over a half dozen strikingly beautiful young women, Hao Chan flashing him a teasing smile when he ducked his gaze.
“Transcendence agrees with you, hero. Just you wait, I’ll catch up with you before you know it,” assured Hao Chan. “And then, Alex, the race is on.”
Alex flushed, not quite sure what to make of that.
Yinzi’s grin didn’t make it any better. “It is absolutely delicious seeing you puff up and flex your almost interesting muscles, though you do know that either of my mothers could thrash you in a heartbeat, right?”
Alex frowned, despite the good-natured chuckles he heard. He gazed at his shins and all the strike points he had used with his hands. “That’s strange, they should be sore by now. At least the outside ridges of my hands, but they’re not.”
“What are you talking about?”
Alex’s smile was almost apologetic. “I’m sorry, Yinzi. I wasn’t just smashing the pel to show you proper form with full-force blows. Mostly I wanted to show you how to repair basic muscle soreness and abrasions, perhaps the easiest and mildest of all injuries for our bodies to heal using my Eternal Fox Unified Cultivation Technique. But, well, I have no injuries to heal. None whatsoever.”
Yinzi blinked, the entire group going quiet. “You, a Rank 1 Bronze, actually had the gall to name your manual with the symbols of eternity and a divine god? You’re treating it as a sacred path of knowledge? And Unified? Unified? As if you were some sage master who had successfully fused multiple disciplines and Qi paradigms into one?”
Alex shrugged. “Well… yes?”
Hao Chan winced. Qie Qie looked horrified. The other girls were exchanging hot whispers Alex did his best to tune out. What he hadn’t expected was Yinzi roaring with laughter.
“Oh, that’s too much. It’s absolutely perfect! You devised all this when you were a Basic cultivator, right?”
Alex didn’t deny it. “Most of it. I had some extra insights as I transcended.”
Yinzi positively beamed. “And my father didn’t strike you dead. You didn’t collapse with your spleen torn out by a miscast spear, trip over and impale yourself upon a half-buried sword, or have a wound go septic from the tiniest of cuts. Your work is a backhand smack against every pretentiously titled manual ever written by any puffed-up Silver or Gold, and my father’s laughing at the joke, right along with you!”
Lady Ning Jing, fierce as she sometimes was, was actually smiling. “He is a pretentious bastard, isn’t he? And look. He’s still alive. Maybe he really does have your father’s favor. Perhaps he can teach us something useful after all.”
All the girls grew solemn at those words. Qie Qie looked ready to faint.
Finesse check made!
Then she did faint, though Alex was there to catch her and gently lay her down. Even Ning Jing looked surprised by how fast he had moved. But then again, Alex had been all but prepared for it. He knew Qie Qie’s present condition, after all.
“Come now,” snorted Ning Jing. “None of you are fools, you’ve all deduced who and what Yinzi really is by now, and none of you are stupid enough to blab it to any o
utsider.”
Yinzi rolled her eyes. “You make me sound like a priceless jade heirloom left abandoned on Beggars’ Row.”
“You are certainly my priceless heirloom, and at least your would-be mentor has decent reflexes,” said Ning Jing, absently patting her daughter’s head while proceeding to Qie Qie’s side, a concerned Lady Feng Huang quickly brushing Alex aside, now examining Qie Qie with a healer’s careful gaze. For all that she snorted at the claim that she was anything more than a Water Qi body cultivation instructor, she certainly had the movements and professionalism of any of the Academy healers Alex had seen.
Her frown deepened. “Her Qi flow seems to be slightly off… wait, I sense something inside her!”
Quickness check made!
And before she could blink, before her probing fingers could touch Qie Qie yet again, Alex acted, knowing he dare to take no chances. Not with something this precious.
“Don’t.”
Lady Feng Huang’s eyes blazed. “You will remove your hand from me this instant!”
Alex nodded. “And you will use no Qi surges on Qie Qie without her consent.”
The instructor’s eyes bulged in outrage. “Listen, young fool, I’m trained for this! After all we’ve been through, after being betrayed and nearly poisoned by that damned alchemist at the Academy, forced to face off against corrupted cultivators using infernal poisons while foolishly waiting for you, we need to act now, before any taint consumes her entirely!”
And Alex could tell from the haunted look in her eyes that it was terror of her own infernal taint that had her acting in an eyeblink, as well as the conditioning that only constantly facing off against death could bring, not callousness.
He respectfully bowed his head. “This one apologizes for offending you. It is my hope that with a single sentence, I can dispel your fears and assure that Qie Qie gets the treatment she truly needs.”
He turned to a curious Yinzi, whispering in a quivering ear of shadow. “Congratulations, Yinzi. You’re going to be an aunt.”
Yinzi’s ruby eyes widened. She blinked then whistled, a slow smile gracing her flawless features before she gave a throaty chuckle. “It looks like the rumors were true. Everyone knew Qie Qie was hungry for a certain Silver, and it will be so delicious having this over my so-perfect brother! And Mother always comparing us was annoying long before I ever knew we were kin.”
Her gaze turned gentle and she sighed. “Forbidden love, and the girl runs off in tears while the young prince and his father consolidate their power after claiming the throne, only for him to discover his lost heir, years later!”
Alex winced. “That’s not exactly how it happened,” he said, knowing that now absolutely everyone understood what had happened. But this was Yinzi, after all.
Lady Feng Huang was gazing at her own hand in horror. “May the gods forgive me,” she whispered.
“For what?” Alex said. “You performed a basic scan, made sure she was in good health, noted the Qi flow irregularity, and got the additional data you needed to make an appropriate diagnosis. All for the good, I’d say. I mean, nothing else is wrong with her besides the obvious, right?” Alex frowned. “But it seems pretty quick considering...”
Feng Huang flashed Alex a grateful smile. “Pregnancy is actually far harder on us, in some ways, than it is with mortals. It disrupts our Qi flow almost immediately, within mere days after conception. Of course, for the most powerful, like Yinzi’s birth mother, they can push through that easily enough. And with how grueling her own Hardened Iron technique is, she might not have noticed the added discomfort at all. Or, more likely, she saw it as a sign she had to train all the harder. But for your average cultivator at Basic or even Bronze rank, it hits extremely hard.”
Yinzi nodded. “Mother explained it all in grueling detail. She said it would be torture for me, unless I forged myself like she had. But at least female cultivators survive childbirth almost always, unlike mortal women.”
She then stood up, after flashing a sympathetic smile to a groaning Qie Qie who looked far more seasick than Alex had ever felt on any boat or carriage-top training ring. “All my kitsune sisters, metaphorically speaking, will now be doting on her the entire trip. Good. Maybe she won’t kill us when she realizes you and I blabbed to everyone before she knew herself! Especially if we’re not looking her way. Okay, back to the pel. Show me those strikes again?”
It took time, more than Alex thought it should, before his fists, shins, and feet showed the results of his efforts. If nothing else, the training had been good for him, he thought, showing an impressed Yinzi the mild abrasions on his limbs.
He now truly felt at one with his enhanced body, sensing better than ever how to convey maximum power with each blow while maintaining almost perfect balance, able to duck and pivot away in an instant.
“Alright, thanks for being so patient with me,” Alex said. “Next time I’m just going to practice pummeling stone or naked bronze, though this pel is fine for anyone else to train with...”
Yinzi snorted, gazing at her own reddened hands. “Hardly. You had me practice all the techniques I knew just minutes ago, and just look at my hands and shins. That pel hardly has any padding at all. It’s just boiled rawhide armor over a core of steel!”
Alex winced in sympathy with what must have been painful abrasions for Yinzi.
Surprisingly, her mother chuckled. “You’ll live, Yinzi. Now let’s see if our wonderfully pretentious young hero can actually teach you something useful.” Her almost playful banter hardened into a tone that brooked no argument. “Learn what you can from him, daughter. I expect you to focus!”
“Yes, Mother,” Yinzi said in a soft, respectful tone so unlike her normal gregarious voice that Alex actually blinked in surprise, before smiling into Yinzi’s nervous gaze.
“It’s alright, Yinzi. Sit just the way I am, and do your best to open your inner eye. Don’t just see me. Try to sense the flow of Qi through me. If you can sense it, you’ll be able to detect the flow of spiritual energy getting more and more diffuse as it approaches my surface abrasions. And if you really pay attention, you’ll begin to sense how my cells almost sparkle with Dark and Light Qi as their natural rate of healing accelerates several thousand-fold.” He frowned. “Okay, that sounds impressive. But humans normally heal pretty slowly, so it’s nothing like Logan or Wade Wilson’s ability to regenerate. But if you look really closely, you might see my abrasions begin to fade.”
“Alex?”
“Yes, Yinzi?”
“What’s a Wade Wilson?”
Alex smirked. “A thousand years before your time.”
Eternal Fox embraced. Healing will complete in 15 seconds.
Alex couldn’t help frowning, hoping Yinzi would pick up something from what he was doing, before losing himself in the sheer joy of having mastered his body so well, sensing his cells channeling Light Qi directly from his capillary-like peripheral meridians, allowing for a phenomenal rate of recovery even as Dark Qi was used to channel excess heat generated by supernaturally rapid cellular repair into revitalizing his cells as a whole, the ultimate expression of ordered chaos, effectively reversing entropic decay.
It went far beyond healing gross physical injuries, of course. He had found the secret to eternal youth in the tiniest of places, and he could only hope his friends would be able to understand and emulate what he had worked so hard to perfect.
Alex looked up when he was finished, hoping Yinzi had at least gotten something from the demonstration, not expecting to see her staring back at him so solemnly, several girls and Lady Feng Huang herself gazing at Alex with open-mouthed awe.
“I felt no rush of Water or Wood Qi. I sensed no grand surge, and I feel no wave of heat emanating from your arm,” Feng Huang said.
Alex nodded his head. “Dark Qi allows me to bend the second law of thermodynamics.” He smirked at their furrowed brows. “I can take the cumulative disorder symbolized by a dangerous buildup of heat in the cells and
redirect it to further rejuvenate those very same cells, much like you might harness the power of a river with a water wheel, using its energy for your own ends.”
Hao Chan’s instructor blinked. “But that’s...” She sighed. “I will tell you a secret few are comfortable admitting, most refusing to see Fire Qi as anything but the province of destruction or, in the case of alchemists, purification and transformation. Yet when combined with Water Qi, for all that the two elements are so often in conflict for the poorly trained, when properly harnessed, the most powerful healers are those with affinity for Water and Fire Qi both.”
Alex smiled. “I’m guessing because they can draw the excess heat that develops when using too strong a healing technique on a patient?”
The Silver dipped her head in approval. “Correct.”
“How about Wood and Fire? Don’t they have synergism?”
Feng Huang winced. “There is indeed synergism, but fragile as a mortal body is, it’s never advised for Wood healers to dare synergize their techniques with Fire Qi, lest they accidentally boil or freeze their patient as a result.”
“Ah, so it’s an overabundance of power kind of thing. Fine when burning enemies to ash, not so good when performing a delicate procedure, and you need control above everything else.”
Feng Huang’s gaze had turned painfully intense. “Alex, would you teach me your art?”
“I would be glad to,” he said, pretending not to notice the desperation behind her austere gaze. “You’re welcome to read my manual as well. But I’m warning you, you need an intact set of peripheral meridians, so unless you’re willing to undergo the agony of thousands of nerves coming back to painful life...”
Silver Fox & The Western Hero: Warrior's Oath: A LitRPG/Wuxia Novel - Book 4 Page 9
