Calculating Cultivation

I sat in the force chamber. I could almost taste the energy in the air as it pressed down on me. I had just woken up after a nap, from cultivating my ninth channel and meridian pair. I had the process down for the most part.

It had been slow and frustrating the first time, but the next eight times had given me enough confidence and experience to go quickly and efficiently. The trick was to not hesitate while carving out my channels. If you went too slow then then one’s astral soul hardened too quickly.

Before I started on the next pair, I took the time to eat, drink, and relieve myself. The waste bucket was about halfway full, and it was almost time to empty it into the waste barrel, which used to be a food barrel. But the real cost to this kind of chamber was entering and exiting, allowing the energy to dissipate. That was why I had taken the absolute maximum number of resources when I entered and planned to stay in here until they were all out.

Thankfully, I could get away with eating and drinking less, and carefully paced myself. I really didn’t want to use the waste bucket, but there was no choice. I carefully removed the lid and a horrible smell assaulted me. I quickly did my business and closed it back up. I was more than happy to pay the costs of having the waste bucket and barrels sealed with arrays. Sure they cost a single rank 1 spirit stone, but it was worth it in my mind.

With how bad the smell could get, there was no way I would be able to cultivate for years on end in this tiny chamber with such a horrible smell. Speed was absolutely key in terms of completing my third stage of cultivation in any reasonable time.

I had been stuck in this horrible chamber for almost a year. For any other cultivator this speed would have been insane. Completing one or two channels per year was considered the standard. I would be completing ten per year. It was mind boggling, but the Displacement Channel Carver, had been worth it by a large margin.

It was a huge investment and worth every single bit of effort I had taken to get it. After doing my business, I quickly sealed up the bucket and took the time to stretch. Only the soft blue glow of the arrays and formations lit up the tiny chamber. It was about the size of a studio apartment in a major city, so a shoebox in my mind.

Thankfully I wasn’t claustrophobic, otherwise there was no way I would have been able to last. There was nothing to do but cultivate and rest down here. With the amount of force energy, the barrels were made out of spirit wood and metal in order to withstand the crushing force inside the chamber.

The sect and the Sect Leader had clearly gone all out in terms of quality and investing in me. I did bring back a lot of wealth and the chamber could be reused after I was done. Still, it was nice to see that all the contributions I had made to the sect giving tangible benefits back in return.

I finished my stretching and had a short meal of salted beast meat and a couple cups of water. Once I started carving out my channel, I needed to go as long as possible until the moment I couldn’t continue. Then I would pass out and wake up as quickly as possible after that. Repeating that process until the channel was carved out.

The only way I was able to keep track of the time, was how long the spirit stones lasted on the barrels in order to seal them. Otherwise I would have no idea how long things had taken. Even then it wasn’t precise, since there were gaps in spirit stone being used up and a new one being applied. Once every 100 days.

I laid out small spirit wood sticks for each spirit stone that had been consumed by the waste bucket. There were three sticks laid out, and based on how long it took to carve a channel, I had probably been in here around 320 to 340 days.

This test of being stuck in a chamber, cultivating was probably the hardest thing I had to do so far. It was mentally exhausting. I had never considered this issue before, since the previous stages had been rushed through once, I had the needed supplies and I cultivated while traveling. For the third stage, I needed to stay inside this chamber to attune my meridians to force energy. It was a massive luxury other cultivators would have killed for.

While I wasn’t one to needlessly charge out and risk my life, being stuck in a tiny chamber for almost a year was mentally taxing. Cultivation might strengthen my body and soul, but my mental state was a reflection of myself. It was something I would have to ask about once I left this chamber for the first time.

There was no more putting off carving my next channel once I finished my meal. I lay down on the angled stone table in the center of the tiny chamber. I had used my martial robes as a pillow to rest my head and the sleeves to go over my eyes to block out what little light there was from distracting me. While I could kind of look at my body, it was distracting and not very helpful.

I picked the next channel I was carving out. There was an order to these things. Rotate around the body to reduce the stress placed on one’s soul. Longer and more complex channels first, since they would impact more of the body. As one progressed through the third stage it would become slightly harder. It was a minor amount, but where every advantage was grasped, it was highly recommended to do the longer and more complex channels first.

Personally, I hadn’t noticed a huge difference in terms of difficulty between the first and the ninth channel, but I wasn’t going to reject millennia of wisdom. This time, I was doing a channel that started below my left eye. This was going to hurt.

The first step was to carve out my meridian, this was the most painful part. I pulled out a jade needle. The one I had was top quality, and they weren’t that expensive. One couldn’t get a fancier needle or a better one. It was a staple of the third stage, and while people had looked there was no better material than jade, which was quite common. Even the Imperial Sect used jade needles on the third stage.

I slowly pushed the needle into my skin. At the same time it also pushed into my soul, breaking through the outer part. I adjusted my arms to rest on my chest while doing this, being comfortable in a single position for a long period of time was important. The jade needle was in place, time for step two.

With my right hand I brought up the end of the displacement channel carver to where the needle was stuck into my face. I personally liked to think of it like treating a tooth. The jade needle was the scraper, and the Displacement Channel Carver was the suction device.

Once everything was in place, I twisted the jade needle a full rotation. Energy from the surrounding began to be pulled in one end and blasted out the other into my soul. I had control of this energy. I focused on shaping the energy into a circular drill. The debris that were very tiny bits of my soul, were quickly sucked up allowing me to quickly make progress.

A regular cultivator would have to focus on expelling these tiny soul bits. Sure, it was easy at the start, but the longer and further the channel, it became much more difficult. Like trying to drill sand, the sand would just mostly settle back down.

That was why the process took so incredibly long. But with the Displacement Channel Carver, the end would be as nearly easy as the start. I just needed to focus as I drilled down. Thankfully the walls of my meridian and channels acted as a guide.

Like having clay inside a steel barrier. I might scrape along the edges occasionally, but as long as I wasn’t digging into them that was fine. It hurt quite a lot at first, but then the pain mostly became a numb feeling.

The wave cone meridian design didn’t take long, as I quickly drilled down. One aspect of the third stage of cultivation was gaining a much more in depth feeling of one’s body. If the first stage was moving motes around and the second stage was to make the scaffolding, the third stage would fill in all the floors and completing the interior work.

Once I hit the bottom of the wave cone meridian, I spent a moment clearing and touching up a few places I had missed. This involved just blasting the minor spots with force energy the needle was pulling in.

It was important to do the minor touchups now and per each section in my channel. Once that was complete, I mentally focused on the triangular drilling method I had come up with years ago. A method to make triangular channels. Spinning a pointed oval around, and then spinning the entire pointed oval around in an almost circular pattern.

Pulling the force energy down to the tiny energy construct I had made. I began to drill out my channel. It took a moment at the start, due to me taking time to clean up and the edge hardening, but after that it went smoothly just like how I felt during the previous nine times.

The trick was slow and steady, making sure I didn’t go to fast and miss a corner I would have to clean up later, or too slow, making my progress harder. I felt a dull ache in my body as I slowly drilled through my soul. The Displacement Channel Carver really began to show its value since all the tiny ripped up pieces of my soul were quickly pulled out of channel, preventing them from settling and making the entire process far more difficult than it needed to be.

I couldn’t even imagine the sheer frustration that other cultivators had in the third stage, but I could imagine. Slowly chipping away and digging out their soul. If they had made a mistake in the second stage and put a barrier between motes that shouldn’t be there, then it would be far harder.

Eventually I made it to the first six-fold valve. This time I used the mental image of a saw to cut through the three intersecting lines, to create six partitions. It was slow and tedious to cut through the barrier that had been made in my soul. But the motes and the barriers had been very carefully laid out, so the barriers didn’t collapse once I cut through.

That would have been a disaster. A barrier that had been made of motes, breaking into near impossible to destroy chunks. That could add in a lot of extra time for a regular cultivator if they had screwed up in the second stage. Thankfully I hadn’t screwed up anything.

Once I cut far enough through, I slowly began to expand my triangular drilling pattern outwards before continuing down my channel. Once I clear the area next to the valve I checked the first section of my channel, and there were no areas that needed a touch up. I was getting better at this.

One slip of concentration, and the energy I was controlling could shift in size. That would lead to my channels being clogged. Like fat deposits in one’s blood system, it wasn’t good for you, and this wouldn’t be good for my cultivation, if I left anything behind.

I then began carefully weakening the far edges of the valve panels in a specific pattern. It was tedious drawing energy down through the cuts I had made, and then back up. But now was the best time to make sure the valve functioned properly so I had no problem drawing in energy further down my channel.

Once that was complete, I went back to drilling. The pressure of energy moved my valve slightly open, but not that much. There was a reason people didn’t use jade needles in the fourth stage, they put tremendous pressure on a person’s soul.

Some cultivators did it regardless, but it often led to that one specific channel collapsing and their core being unbalanced. Then there were cultivators who tried to draw in energy using a jade needle for every channel. It was technically possible, but it often led to long term damage and stress on one’s soul. Meridians and channels were meant to draw in energy naturally. Relying too much on jade needles in the later stage would damage the meridians.

Even if they were placed perfectly every time, there would be residual damage, as the time it took a channel to settle, would allow a person to have control of the barrier between the meridian and the outside world. If one used jade needles too much, this environment or the natural resilience of one’s soul would be compromised.

In the absolute worst case, the meridians would start leaking and a person’s cultivation would completely collapse. For the best possible cultivation in the third stage, I couldn’t remove the jade needle once inserted. I had to commit to completing the channel. Sure once or twice more wouldn’t be crippling, but it would damage me.

There was supposedly one sect, that permanently inserted tiny jade pins into each meridian and never took them out. But the problem came in trying to cross the bottleneck, their soul couldn’t reform due to the jade pins embedded into it. They had tried removing them at the last moment, but their soul wasn’t trained to resist the pressure from the core, and they began leaking.

They tried it with valves with some cultivators succeeding, but they were compromised in the later stages and struggled, due to their soul being incredibly weak. Like a boxer always wearing headgear and never taking a blow to the face until the big fight, then they struggled to keep going once they began taking punches.

If one wanted to be a cultivator, they didn’t skip out on soul day. The sect that did this apparently was trying new things, like turning off their jade needles one month a year, and various other tactics. But it was considered a sub-par cultivation method, with possibly only a minor boost past the first bottleneck, and then very sub-par results after that. That was on top of compromising all combat capability, with jade tiny pins stuck all over their body.

A needle drew in more energy, but it also made the process much quicker for me. There were minor size adjustments to jade needles, the smallest being called a pin. I went with the largest size of course.

I was completely exhausted and had reached my limit in the second section of my channel. I pulled the Displacement Channel Carver away slightly and reached up to twist the jade needle back. It stopped pulling in energy and I went to sleep.

Once I woke up, I carefully reached to the side and picked up a canteen. I unscrewed the lid and used a straw to drink some water. I then sealed it back up and set it to the side. I then started up again. The first part was like grinding through copper or iron, but not steel. It was two to three times, and not the ten times that the actual edges of my channel were like.

Well, that was ten times the first time I reached them. They would go up to twenty or thirty times more difficult to drill through once they were exposed inside my channel. Actual solid barriers to keep my energy inside of me, and not go all over my body.

The drawn in energy would settle down inside my meridian and channel. This would be my attunement. I hadn’t really felt anything, but what I had read, made it something that would just come more naturally over time. For me it would force the energy would seep into my channels and meridian permanently imprinting them. I would draw in more force energy in the fourth stage, and more easily convert other energy to force energy.

This would prevent conflicts with my cores. There had been discussion about using different attunements for my three types of cores, but there were no good options besides water and earth. I had considered them, but I felt having the same type of attunement across all channels would be for the best.

For my mind cores, I could focus on different applications of force. Also, the final amount of energy I would have to contain in the fourth stage would be more easily accomplished by having a greater understanding of force energy.

I continued to focus on my drilling. The big thing was not to stop near any of the five valves inside each channel. I had done that once and vowed to never do it again. It was a nightmare cutting through it once I had woken up after that. Once you got sucked into a slow down spiral it was a nightmare to get back out.

That was why I had mentally put my stop places in strategic positions that aligned with how long I could stay awake per each stretch of drilling. The entire process was a complete and utter nightmare. I pushed to the very edge, but if there were specific areas I didn’t dare to stop, or be screwed over with my next session.

Once I cleared the five six-fold valves I was onto Liu Chen’s valve design. Their twists and dead ends would have been completely impossible without the Displacement Channel Carver. I had to adjust how I drilled through these designs.

Sure, it had appeared simple in dimensions in his model, but in reality, it was much more complex and time consuming. Without his valve design, I could have probably reached 25 to 30 channels per year. But his valve design cut my speed by more than half and possibly up to a third. Even with the Displacement Channel Carver and the amount of energy inside the chamber, it was still a struggle to cut out the valve design properly and with speed.

The worst part was leaving anything behind to do clean up, which was a major hassle. That was what had slowed me down at the start and was hair pulling. Now I had gotten a handle on what I needed to do.

I slowly kept drilling my way through my channel and eventually made it to the end. If I wasn’t a cultivator, I would have wasted away to become skin and bones, just lying in a chamber, drilling out my soul, with little movement or food.

I crossed the final portion of my channel into the core area. After that, I then began working on a chunk of the core. I was slowly picking away at it with each channel. If I dug it all out at once, there was a risk of too much stress on my soul and it would collapse.

That was why it was recommended to carve out a bit of the core, preferably an equal portion, with each channel, to try and spread the stress of drilling into that much of a person’s soul over as long a period as possible to avoid complications. Again, it was something I wasn’t going to reinvent since I didn’t have to.

This did make it harder to carve portions out of the core later on, but it was the only option. The weird part about carving out portions of one’s soul was that if they were not dislodged, they would remain in place to the rest of the body. So, it didn’t make a huge difference to carve out around the edges of my core first.

The main thing was to try and not let any areas I dug into with a channel connect to other channels across the core until the very end. Otherwise, the small bits of my soul could settle in places I would have to dislodge and remove. It also might cause my core to start drawing in energy too soon, which would complicate things, pushing me into the fourth stage before I was ready.

I cleared out the portion of my core, that I had set aside for this channel. I would leave a super thin barrier, as I carved out the other channels, keeping things separate in my core for as long as possible. Some channels converged before reaching my cores, but they would just connect, no further portions would be connected to my core.

Once I finished my tenth channel, I first twisted the jade needle and carefully removed it. I felt pain on my face and across the entire length of the channel until it reached my core. After that I immediately went to sleep. I always pushed myself a bit more than I should at the very end.

This was my life day in and day out. I was trying to go as fast as possible, but I couldn’t afford to miss any soul bits that remained behind. I couldn’t dig any faster, since it was a limit of the amount of energy I could bring to bear inside each channel.

The energy limit was something that wasn’t easily overcome. It was another thing I had asked about, but there wasn’t anything anyone could do without risking one’s cultivation. Using a larger jade needle was about the most one could do, and I was already using the largest size.

While it was a decent amount of draw at the middle, it was painful at the start, and almost not enough at the very end. Anything larger and I would have serious problems near my meridian. Changing out jade needles wasn’t an option in my mind, since it could compromise my meridian.

There had been work with one jade needle surrounding another and pushing more down, but that was only slightly better than just switching out a jade needle. That thin barrier that formed after a soul was dug out was incredibly important on one’s meridian. Damage to that would only risk future problems.

After having discussed things over and reviewing my options, I elected to go the more traditional route than trying anything creative. With the Displacement Channel Carver, these small boosts weren’t needed, with the negatives they brought along.

Now I had just 1,294 more channels to carve out. Unless something changed in a major way, which was unlikely to happen, that meant about 130 more years of cultivation, which would put me around 180 years old when I entered the fourth stage.

There was no known way to speed this up. Even after paying the information brokers in Imperial City, the best item was the Displacement Channel Carver. Anything else was just a lesser version or had to do with the attunement one got from the energy sources they used while carving out their channels.

Experience would help a bit, but after 10 channels, I was already as efficient as I would get in digging them out. It was a daunting thing to think about how much further I had to go, and how mind numbing this all was.

When I woke up, I had thoughts about quitting or just giving up. And it wasn’t the first time either. It was something that wasn’t often discussed, but there were cultivators who just gave up. They were viewed as quitters and wastes of resources. The level of shame for a quitter was immense.

It was one thing to be stuck at the bottleneck and working to get past it, but it was another thing to completely give up. If someone gave up when starting, why even start in the first place? Why waste resources?

After five decades, I had finally stumbled on the answer on why all the cultivators were basically aesthetic monks. Even the more martial cultivators were subdued. This kind of long stretch of time where a person couldn’t do anything else would wear on one’s psyche. If I didn’t need perfect attunement for my meridians and channels, then it would have been possible to take breaks outside this chamber to cultivate, between each channel.

It was also a waste of energy and resources to do anything else, but sleep, cultivate, and attend to some bodily functions. I couldn’t bring anything else in the force chamber. The place was already quite cramped with supplies.

Once I woke up, I relieved myself, and then began to eat and drink. I looked at my remaining supplies. I had another nine years and change in this chamber. Another risk of starting and stopping, was that part of the design sealed me off from the outside world.

If the formations lost power, I would have to stop my cultivation fairly quickly, with the hope that I was at the end of a channel. I would probably reach 100 channels over the course of a decade, maybe 1 or 2 more. While addition was fine, the brutality of multiplication that was my cultivation was biting me on the rear.

Starting and stopping was just too expensive as well and would make my heart bleed if I did anything less than the maximum I could per session. I was definitely taking three to six months off once I was out of this chamber, that was for sure. Remind myself what the sun and people were like.

I chewed on my salted meat and then drank some water. It was time to start my eleventh channel and repeat the entire process all over again. This time I was going from my left hand. I lay down on my stone table after making sure everything was set up. I wouldn’t be getting up for a bit over a month.

All of this made me wonder how people came up with cultivation, but I figured over 200,000 years just for the third age, that there were bound to be developments. That was around 40 generations for rank 8 cultivators, which was about 800 years back on Earth.

It wasn’t impossibly long when people had long lifespans. But sitting in this chamber day after day, it was easy to see why cultivators believed themselves above mortals. To push themselves to such an extent, in the path of immortality and power required a very strong belief in oneself.

Lifting up the jade needle in my right hand I hesitated for around five minutes. I then let out a long sigh. There was no quitting. I had risked death to get this far. I couldn’t just give up on the incredibly boring, tedious, and mentally draining part after completing all the near impossible parts. It really would be such a waste, that even I would cough out blood.

Even with all that, it felt agonizing to slowly put the jade needle into my left hand. And it was more than just pain from the needle itself puncturing my soul. It was pushing through the mental block I was developing around cultivation. Even my long carriage ride after entering the astral plane, was more interesting than being stuck in a tiny chamber.

I felt like I was doing something, returning to the sect, even while cultivating. Even if I had something to read, I couldn’t afford the distraction. My speed was dependent on my focus. The more I was distracted the slower I would go which would lead to a self-destructive spiral.

This was why cultivators looked down on other cultivators who were pill pushers to get through the first stage. If one lacked the mental strength to spend time gathering motes they would never have time for the third stage and possibly later stages.

I twisted the needle, and quickly picked up the Displacement Channel Carver immediately after with my right hand. Some channels would be a much bigger pain than others, but I would manage. As long as I had at least one hand to work with, I would be able to manage. The tricky part was to find a position that I would move as little as possible at the start. Risking the needle moving and damaging my tiny meridian in any way was unacceptable.

If I was going to suffer, then I wasn’t going to self-sabotage myself. I started digging out my next meridian and channel pair.