Qi Like Tar

Panic gripped him as he felt his heart start to fail. He was pretty sure it wasn't supposed to do that. His muscles felt starved for oxygen, and he felt the need to breathe like he was underwater, even though he could inhale just fine.

After a couple of breaths, he was able to convince himself that he could breathe and needed to look at the cause of the problem. Something had gone wrong in his physical cultivation.

As a cultivator in the second realm, he was able to take a lot more physical punishment than a mortal, but even this was pushing it. He could feel his heart straining as it struggled to move his blood.

He traced it back, feeling one part of his body at a time. The erratic beats seemed to be caused by the flexing of his aorta, contorted in a way that didn't align with his heartbeat.

That seemed to be directly from the pumping action trying to move his qi through the channels. For some reason, it was also affecting his body. It made some sense; it was physical cultivation after all.

Paike could see two ways he could come out of this alive. First was to undo the changes he had made. That may or may not be possible in time. It would certainly set him back. It might even knock him down a stage of physical cultivation.

His other option was to try and fix this.

He didn't have time to weigh his options.

Reaching to the root of where his cultivation decided to pulse, he made a slight change. Instead of pumping his qi, it would pump his blood. The rhythm changed, but his heart was still fluttering, and it was getting worse.

He could try to retool all of the physical cultivation changes that he had made to be controlled manually, instead of following his heart's lead. The changes, though, weren't some well-thought-out plan, or instructions from some art or cultivation manual that people had tested and used before him. No, it was a cobbled-together mess of unproven theorems and intuition that he had made in a mad rush.

The string of recent successes was too much, and had gotten to his head. He had been overconfident and was paying the price. It was already too late to back out, though. He was glad he hadn't tried, as not enough blood was making it to his brain and his vision was starting to narrow.

Since there was no way for him to unweave it all before he lost consciousness, he did the only thing he could think of. Since the physical cultivation was based on the rhythm of his heart, he beat it manually.

With tendrils of qi, he reached into his chest, ignoring the searing pain as they lanced through him. Gently, he wrapped them around his organ and squeezed. Blood rushed, but mostly pressure just built. He stopped before it burst.

Examining it more closely, he realized it was a two-step process. That had also been one of the reasons the rate wasn't stabilizing.

He ignored the qi in his physical cultivation, making him spasm on the floor, and squeezed again, only part of it this time, letting the blood move through the organ and into his artery. After a few pulses, his vision started to unblur.

It only took three before the physical cultivation started reinforcing the proper rhythm. Still, he didn't relax; he kept manually pumping as he looked at the root of the issue.

Again, he was faced with the choice of trying to untangle the mess he had made or trying to push through. Now, though, he had enough time. But should he? Yes, absolutely.

But a new idea gripped him, and it wouldn't let him go.

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Cultivation was all about taking obstacles and turning them into boons. Perhaps this was luck, but he started to see a way through. Now that he had time.

His heart pumped his blood. It forced the red liquid through a series of tubes around his body. Its function was simple yet infinitely complex. The basic function of moving liquid around masked all the other things it needed to interface with.

He had been trying to imitate that system for qi without fully understanding it. In some ways, qi was simpler. There were far fewer channels and total length was only a fraction of a fraction. The complications came from how the physical cultivation interacted with his body.

It wouldn't be possible, nor would he want to remove that. That was the essence of physical cultivation. It was only because of the reinforcements that it gave his body that he survived long enough to reach this stable place.

While this state was stable as he lay here not moving, he was pretty sure that if his heart rate changed from the steady beat he was currently forcing, things would spiral out of control.

So he started to make changes. He made tweaks and then slightly changed the rate at which he was beating his heart. It took hours, but he finally had ranges set for what would be acceptable. Then he made it so that if the heart was outside of those ranges, his cultivation would keep the blood flowing and bring the heart back to the normal ranges.

Ever so slowly and carefully, he removed the control he had over the rhythm. His heart kept beating. It sped up as the fear of the last several hours was finally able to accelerate it. Paike held his breath, but his cultivation worked as intended and adjusted without issue.

He swallowed a couple of healing pills, and the damage around his chest from his intervention started to repair itself.

Sitting up, he started to run experiments, carefully testing each and every piece of his cultivation. It all seemed to be operating as he had planned. Nothing was out of place. His qi channels were once again tightly held and reinforced. His heart felt as if it was working less hard, and he hoped that didn't cause any problems down the line.

After some more time of observation, he took a trickle of his qi and ran it through his qi channels. Even that small amount sent him shooting to his feet, his body bursting with energy, ready to move.

The qi was already moving fast, its initial speed sending it rocketing through the qi channels. Even though the pulsing of his physical cultivation around his channels wasn't fully optimal, it still increased the speed significantly.

What he had not been prepared for was that the qi had more 'momentum' when it returned to his dantian. Elder Song would need to hear about this. Their theory implied that Paike had given his qi as much momentum as he could. But clearly that was wrong.

He had no idea why it was possible with this method. He simply didn't know enough to even form a theory. Or maybe he was just too exhausted, and something would come to him later.

Either way, he had no way to contact Elder Song until she called for him next. He was pretty sure that a letter wouldn't reach her. Especially before she wanted to talk to him again. So he would have to wait.

It took a little getting used to, but the rest of his qi accelerated slightly. It was only a tiny fraction of his qi that had been accelerated, so the effect was minimal. He wanted to try a larger amount next. How fast could he get it up to? What if he kept circulating it?

When he had more qi, he would thoughtfully test out all of his techniques. However, he also had enough of a near-death experience recently and had the presence of mind to wait until he was fully recovered.

Reluctantly, he started to let go. One piece at a time, he looked over and made a few slight corrections. No more than a tap here. Soothing out a wrinkle there. He started from his toes and worked his way up.

This process was finally done hours later. He let go of the last piece of qi, reinforcing his body.

There was one thing he hadn't considered. He was already on the brink of pushing to the next stage of physical cultivation. He had just made major changes and improvements. He hadn't added that much qi. But that wasn't the only thing that mattered in physical cultivation, and he didn't even need much more.

The second his iron grip over his cultivation vanished, the natural process took over.

His brother's training kicked in, and he slipped into his battle trance, which helped him stay conscious as further changes were made to his body. His heart rate fell to almost zero before spiking up out of its normal bounds.

The cultivation he had established started to bring it back in range even as he could feel it strengthen.

Whatever process that was taking place decided it needed more, and Paike felt his dantian sucked dry. It wasn't just empty; it flattened as all the remaining qi was ripped out of it through his channels and worked its way into every part of his body.

His cultivation warped slightly and grew, his heart beating steadily.

The changes were more than he could have expected. But at the same time nothing really changed. There was no total restructuring, but instead each piece was built up. Not larger, but denser. Each piece still formed the same function, but just better.

This wasn't as simple as him increasing a stage.

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