"Five years old!"
That year, Andy began receiving instruction alongside the other children from an elder of the Jian clan, each of them setting out on their own path of cultivation. The one responsible for teaching this group of children the foundational arts was a white-bearded, bald old man of the Jian clan named Jian Shi. Despite his advanced age, his cultivation realm was not particularly high, and his standing within the clan was rather ordinary.
Andy still remembered the first time he saw Elder Jian Shi demonstrate a spell—the sight had left him so excited that he found himself dreaming about it again and again for the next half month.
The old man had merely murmured a few words of incantation, raised his right palm flat, and gently tapped the air with his joined left index and middle fingers. Suddenly, a few centimeters above his right palm, a fireball six or seven centimeters across—about the size of a fist—appeared, drawing loud gasps from the children. The incantation continued without pause, his left hand shifting through one gesture after another, each finger-point sending the fireball growing larger still, until at last it reached roughly half a chi in diameter—about the size of a human head. Andy, standing closer than most, could already feel waves of searing heat radiating off it. Then the old man uttered a single word—"Go"—and the fireball shot off at an angle, slamming into a rocky patch of ground some three zhang away. With a thunderous boom, the solid rock was blasted into a crater over a chi deep and more than three chi wide.
This old man's single fireball carries that much destructive power! Andy's mind reeled. Nothing from his past life could explain what he had just witnessed, and it only deepened his fascination with cultivation.
Once the demonstration was finished, the old man looked over the children's astonished faces and nodded with satisfaction, then began teaching the basics of cultivation. Sure enough, the children, thoroughly won over by his display, listened with rapt attention. Andy forced himself to memorize every single word the old man said without missing so much as a syllable.
As it turned out, the path of cultivation was divided into nine great realms from lowest to highest: Qi Refinement, Foundation Establishment, Core Formation, Nascent Soul, Spirit Severing, Void Refinement, Body Integration, Great Vehicle, and Tribulation Transcendence. Qi Refinement itself could be further divided into thirteen layers, while every realm beyond Foundation Establishment had only three stages—early, middle, and late. As for Tribulation Transcendence, rumor held that it had only a single stage: surviving the Immortal Tribulation. Once one survived it, one would attain immortality itself, living on for as long as heaven and earth endured.
The entire purpose of a cultivator's endless practice was to advance through these realms. The higher the realm, the greater the leap not only in magical power and supernatural ability, but also in one's natural lifespan. Generally speaking, a Qi Refinement cultivator's lifespan differed little from that of an ordinary mortal—living out a natural span, one could typically expect to reach somewhere around a hundred years. A Foundation Establishment cultivator could live past two hundred, and Core Formation and Nascent Soul cultivators saw their lifespans multiply many times over still. Rumor had it that Nascent Soul cultivators commonly lived well over a thousand years, and a small handful of such cultivators were said to exist even within Jinyan Kingdom. As for Elder Jian Shi himself, he was only at the early stage of Foundation Establishment—and had already lived more than a hundred and eighty years.
Live over a thousand years—maybe even forever! Hearing this, Andy could barely contain himself. He could hardly wait to begin his own path of cultivation.
Elder Jian Shi did not keep them waiting long. After briefly covering a few points to watch out for and the basic methods of cultivation, he produced five different technique manuals for the children to choose from. The five books looked impossibly ancient, their covers made of neither silk nor paper—clearly no ordinary objects. Written across their covers were the titles Art of the Keen Edge, Art of Eternal Spring, Art of the Chasing Wave, Art of the Blazing Flame, and Art of Earth and Stone—corresponding respectively to the five spirit root attributes of metal, wood, water, fire, and earth, each a foundational technique for cultivating one of the Five Elements. Anyone who possessed the matching spirit root could practice the corresponding art. A cultivator with wood, fire, and earth attribute roots, for instance, could choose to practice any one of Eternal Spring, Blazing Flame, or Earth and Stone.
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In theory, a cultivator with multiple spirit roots could practice multiple techniques simultaneously—but in practice, no cultivator ever actually did so, for mastery prized depth over breadth. One's cultivation realm was measured by the highest layer reached in a single technique. Cultivating Eternal Spring to its thirteenth layer meant reaching the thirteenth layer of Qi Refinement—one step further, and one would be a Foundation Establishment cultivator. But even if a cultivator with three spirit roots poured enormous time and effort into advancing all three corresponding techniques each to the twelfth layer, his realm would still amount to nothing more than the twelfth layer of Qi Refinement—neither his spiritual power nor the strength of his spells would match that of a cultivator who had reached the thirteenth layer through a single technique.
Of course, techniques of different attributes each carried their own characteristics. Generally speaking, fire-attribute techniques boasted the strongest offensive power, water-attribute techniques were somewhat easier to cultivate, and wood-attribute techniques placed greater emphasis on bodily conditioning, with practitioners often enjoying longer lifespans than other cultivators of the same realm. Metal- and earth-attribute techniques each had their own distinct traits as well.
Since every child already knew their own spirit root attribute, Jian Shi let each of them choose freely. Andy possessed a Five-Element Spirit Root—all five attributes at once—so all five manuals were open to him. Once Jian Shi had finished explaining the traits of each attribute's technique, Andy chose, without the slightest hesitation, the Art of the Chasing Wave—the fastest of the five to cultivate. After all, his spirit root was already poor to begin with, so picking the easier path seemed unlikely to slow him down further; as for water's reputedly weakest offensive power, he didn't much care about that. The other children made different choices. Nearly every child with a fire spirit root picked the Art of the Blazing Flame—whether drawn to it by Jian Shi's fireball demonstration, it was hard to say.
Once everyone had made their selection, several mortal servants of the Jian clan brought forward paper and brushes that had already been prepared. Once everyone had their writing materials in hand, Elder Jian Shi struck a series of strange poses with both hands, then tapped the air toward each of the five manuals in turn. At once, the five books burst into glowing light of five different colors, each forming a sphere of radiance roughly two chi across that enveloped the corresponding book. From within each glowing sphere, characters of light began streaming out rapidly, hovering in the air above. This dazzling display of five-colored light drew the children's attention even more powerfully than the fireball technique had.
"These are the incantations for the first five layers of each technique. Copy them down quickly—the light spheres will vanish in half a shichen." Jian Shi's voice was not loud, but it jolted every child into action at once as they snatched up their brushes and began copying frantically.
Andy copied at breakneck speed, not even pausing to consider the meaning of what he wrote—there would be plenty of time for that later. Once he finished transcribing the first five layers of the Art of the Chasing Wave, finding he still had time to spare, he went ahead and copied down the first five layers of the Art of Eternal Spring as well, since it had the fewest characters. In under half a shichen, every child had finished. Elder Jian Shi gathered up the five books, tossed out a final line—"Practice diligently. Once you've completed the first layer, come find me at the Children's Pavilion"—and departed.
Hearing this, Andy assumed the first layer would be easy to cultivate. As it turned out, nothing could have been further from the truth.
He read through the incantation for the first layer carefully, committing it to memory until it was second nature, then began following its method—slowly guiding the spiritual energy of heaven and earth into his body with each breath, controlling its flow along the proper meridians within him in a continuous cycle, until at last it gathered in his dantian and condensed into his own spiritual power. This was known as completing one Minor Cycle. He found this part easy enough to manage—but each time, the amount of energy he gathered was pitifully small, far less even than children who had only just begun. Though he spent every waking hour absorbing spiritual energy, sleeping only four or five hours a night, and grew steadily more proficient as the days passed—each cycle taking less time than the last—it still took him nearly a full year before he finally accumulated enough spiritual power in his dantian to successfully drive it through several key meridian points in his body, completing the first layer and advancing to the second layer of Qi Refinement.
Some of the other five- and six-year-olds had finished the first layer in just two or three months; most of the rest managed it within about half a year. After all his painstaking effort, he still couldn't even match these five- and six-year-old children. Andy found himself at a loss for words over his own poor-quality spirit root.