Seated in an empty court yard of section in the Khan's territory that had been cleared for him, Luan took notice of the changes his body had gone through in the past twelve days.
Since he came back home, apart from a few interactions with his mother and sister, Luan had locked himself in this court yard.
He had been practicing with a sword. Though he didn't open the Sword Body Scripture since he came back, he stuck with trying to make sense of his answer to the question that previously weighed on his heart.
Have you held a sword before?
Even though he had answered this question, Luan still wanted something like an elaboration of why this question was on the scripture in the first.
This was what his instincts demanded.
Using the sword hidden in his walking cane, Luan had been practicing with the sword 16 hours a day. There was nothing special about his sword movements.
Just simple, basic strokes.
Slash.
Thrust.
Beat.
Press.
Parry.
Block
Guard.
This was all Luan had been practicing over the days.
No flair, no qi.
Just focused movement. With every move, Luan observed as much as he could of his body, not even noticing how quickly his mental strength was being drained each day.
And by the time he begins to feel the fatigue, he rests, completely forgetting about everything he had been practicing until the next session.
This was his way.
When you cultivate, you cultivate. When you rest, you rest.
Around the seventh day, Luan noticed few peculiarities with his movement and the sword.
With every slash that he made in the air, there was some heaviness in the sword.
Now obviously, this was logic. The weight of the sword under the influence of a force would be pulled down by gravity, and he knew this.
This heaviness he noticed was something different from that. It was as though it opened a whole new world for him.
Luan then began focusing on his slashes. He understood that if he could understand a bit of this heaviness, then perhaps he could apply it to the other basics.
By the tenth day, he had finally touched upon this heaviness, however, he only scratched the surface.
Holding his sword in place, his legs sunk into the ground as though he was holding something very heavy.
Luan stayed this way for over a minute, adjusting his breath. And then suddenly, he leaned forward slightly and slashed.
A strong wind followed his movement, and at the peak of his slash, the wind rushed ahead.
It hit the surface of a boulder seated a few meters away from Luan.
Boom!
A rough scar, about two feet deep, appeared on the boulder.
Luan's chest heaved up and down as he fought for breath. Staring at this sword scar, he couldn't help but marvel at what he just accomplished.
He would never have thought that such a concept existed back in Sorja.
What he achieved now could be done by body cultivators and those with a strong enough brute strength. However, that was the point, he didn't possess that brute strength.
For now at least, and yet, he was able to achieve this.
Pushing his excitement away, Luan continued to train this heaviness, giving it more focus than the other moves.
Presently…
I think I understand a bit of why this scripture is called the Sword Body. He thought as he continued to observe his body.
Previously, when he entered the Qi Condensation stage, after suppressing the energy from the crystal pearl, Luan had no particular way of circulating his qi.
Yes, he had used his family's main cultivation technique for reference, but that was all. He only used it to confirm a few of his suspicions about qi cultivation.
But when it came to how to circulate qi, he was nothing short of a barbarian. All this while, he had been crudely circulating his qi, treating it like inner strength.
It was only after observing his body that he noticed how refined his circulation had become under the guidance of training with the sword.
It wasn't that Luan had learned a new circulation technique, rather, he seemed to have understood what it meant to just… let it be.
His qi now carried the nature of the sword in it, and within it flowed it paths.
In other words, the more freely he let his qi flow, the better control he would have over it.
Now, compared to before, if he's placed in a situation similar to what he faced when he met Steward Jo and those guards, his qi wouldn't run out so easily.
This was efficiency.
Because of the baptism of the nature of the sword in his qi, his bones and muscles were constantly being strengthened. This becomes even more pronounced when cultivating with the sword.
"This concept of heaviness… it shouldn't be only one." He reasoned.
Since he was able to touch upon the concept of heaviness in his slashes, Luan could tell that there were other concepts related to the other basics.
But the others still felt far to him.
Also, Luan realized that his main qi had stopped bringing changes to his body. Normally this would have been good news to him, but it wasn't in this case.
While the sword qi in him made his body stronger, his fused qi brought transformations to his body. They affected two different aspects of his strength.
Mind you, what Luan pursued wasn't just the extremity, but evolution through cultivating. Back in Sorja, this was his way forward.
And even though qi was a catalyst for evolution, it didn't mean that people chased after this evolution.
They were satisfied with just reaching the peak of each stage.
Luan wanted more than that.
Despite all his attempts to stimulate the qi in his core to condense further, it just didn't.
This is going to be a serious issue. Luan was a stubborn man. He wasn't going to breakthrough to the next stage until he achieved this evolution he envisioned.
If he didn't want to be on the passive side of this conflict his family was facing from different fronts, he would have to overcome this obstacle as soon as possible.
After some research, Luan realized that, unless he could get the crystal pearl to give him some of the energy it gave when he it first moved, he would have to look elsewhere.
Only this morning, he met Belan for some cultivation pills for Qi Condensation and Foundation building cultivators. Not long after he ingested these pills, Luan realized that, while they did stimulate his core to condense his qi some more.
They left impurities. And this frustrated him.
The concept of impurities in cultivation didn't exist in Sorja. Your inner strength was your inner strength, it couldn't be impure.
When he complained to his Second Grandpa, the man told him that unless Luan could get Pill Masters with great skills to refine pills with zero to none impurities, he would always have to face this issue.
He also said that if one had an abundance in spiritual fruits and plants of with certain properties, he wouldn't need pills, nor would he have to worry about impurities from consuming them as those things were from Nature.
Belan told him that he could find and excess of this in Aethelgard. After hearing this, Luan added a new goal to his objectives for the Secret Grotto.
First look for the ingredient needed to make his mother's antidote, and then hoard every spiritual fruit and herb he could find.
Nonetheless, he was satisfied with this progress.
By the corner of his court yard was a small table with a few cultivation manuals on it.
Luan had gone to ask his grand uncle for them. Even though he was restricting himself to the Qi Condensation realm for now, it didn't stop him from researching the next stage.
This is called understanding before breakthrough. A concept that few followed.
Most cultivators would prefer to make the breakthrough and spend their time to understand the intricacies of that new stage.
But with understanding before breakthrough, one wouldn't have to focus on that. Its main problem lies in the comprehension abilities of the individual.
Sometimes, it lied in the nature of the realm they're trying to understand.
For Luan, it wasn't a problem.
It wasn't that he had blind confidence in his comprehension capabilities, rather, he felt that he had the time.
Luan had just started getting absorbed in studying these manuals when a maid rushed into his court telling him that he's being summoned by the elders urgently.
Without wasting time, Luan got up and change into one of the clothes his mother had sewn for him. A crimson colored robe with black inner clothes.
While changing, took a glance at the bronze mirror at the corner of his room.
An attractive face stared back at him.
His beards had been trimmed, courtesy of his mother nagging him to cut it. Romain didn't like that her son was being called the mad son of Khan.
And she attributed this nickname to the way he looked.
Even his hair had been packed into a bun and held up with a jade pin.
Have I always looked this good?