Godsforsaken

Chapter 7: Turning the Qi

After breakfast we had checked the map and figured out what route to take to get to the village we'd been trying to reach by crossing the rope bridge over Ymir's Scar. Yume had seemed doubtful that we'd find the rest of our group there but I had explained to her that our emergency protocol – one we'd yet to use – involved traveling to the next village on the way and then waiting there until the lost part of the group could catch up, so all we needed to do was reach that next village to catch up with them.

So our route needed to take us out of the canyon, which first meant getting away from the riverbank. Once we had left the river behind us we found a small forest. We'd traveled for a few hours until we found a nice little clearing next to a babbling brook, which Yume decided would be the perfect place to train me in the use of Qi.

“By the way”, I asked, “if Qi is life force what happens when I, you know, run out?”

“Exhaustion claims you and you fall unconscious”, she said. “Don't worry, you won't kill yourself by overusing it.”

“Good to know.”

And then Yume lost all traces of playfulness as she got into her teaching role.

“Before we begin, I need to give a little disclaimer”, she said and I waited for her to continue. “When you speak of 'the realm beyond the volcanoes', you make it sound as though there's only one realm there. But there are three. In this kingdom, as I understood it, the people pray to three different pantheons and everyone is free to worship whoever they want, right?”

“Right”, I said.

“Back there it's different. There are three different realms beyond the volcanoes. Each of them worships their own pantheon. There are some who worship the gods of another realm, but they are exceedingly rare. There is the realm ruled by the Golden Raja, whose subjects worship the Deva. There is the realm of those who see their ruler as the voice of the Jade Emperor who rules the heavens, and finally there is the realm I am from, that of the Tenno, the Emperor whose subjects worship the Kami. I am telling you this because this technique for Qi manipulation was not created by my mother's people. It comes from the land of the Jade Emperor's worshipers. The Raja's subjects have something similar, though they call the force Prana instead of Qi.

“Thus, do not refer to this as 'my' or 'our' technique. My mother's people did not invent it and all the terms are just as foreign to me as they will be to you. Understood?”

I nodded.

“Good. Then the first thing you need is to understand where this power is coming from.”

She stepped close to me.

“The power centers around three places in your body called the dantian. The first is here”, she said, placing a finger on my forehead, between and slightly above my eyes. “This spot is used for Chi manipulation. If you had any talent for that I could teach you techniques that use Qi to amplify your control over Chi, but you don't. If she wants, I might teach your priestess all about those. For you, you only need to know that this spot exists but it is basically useless to you.”

I nodded again.

“The second dantian is here”, she said and placed her finger on my chest, right between my pecs, against my ribcage. “This one is the most relevant to our purposes. It is the place you will focus on to direct your Qi outward. And finally, there is this place”, she said and her hand reached between my legs, pressing against my taint. My eyes widened but her touch was clinical and she continued: “This is the lower dantian. Qi flows from both the middle and the lower dantian, but this one here is harder to train. It directs your Qi subconsciously, without your willing it.”

“I don't think that place directs Qi”, I said, a bit uncomfortable.

“But it does. What else would your seed be, if not life force in liquid form?” I felt my cheeks warm. “If you were to learn to control this dantian you could give yourself superhuman stamina in the bedroom, but from what I've seen so far, you aren't exactly lacking in that regard.”

Before the discussion could get any more embarrassing I asked: “So where is your lower dantian?”

She smiled. “Deep in my womb, of course. That, too, is a place that can create life. Some particularly crusty instructors will tell you that women don't have a lower dantian but I know my body better than anyone else does and I do in fact have that second spring of Qi inside me. Now, sit down on the ground, just the way I do.”

She sat down with her legs crossed in front of her and her hands resting on her knees. I mirrored her, our knees almost touching.

“The first thing you need to do is to feel the flow of Qi in your body. If you've never felt it before it's almost impossible to notice, which is why you need someone to teach you. Here”, she said and pulled my right hand to her chest. Not to her breasts but to the point she had indicated as the middle dantian. “I am going to cycle my Qi around my body, just so you can feel the flow. I want you to identify it in me so you can better feel it inside you. Close your eyes.”

I did and concentrated on my hand. At first I only felt her heartbeat, the warmth of her skin and her chest rising and falling in time with her breathing. I could hear the brook babbling, the rustling of the leaves and her deliberate breathing. I tuned all of it out, focusing only on what was happening close to my hand.

I had no idea how long we sat there but finally I felt it. There was a flow inside her. It pulsed, but not like a heartbeat. It felt like waves lapping at the shore and it traveled outward from the spot my hand was on. The more I concentrated on it the more I could sense. The power was hot, yet cold. Bright, yet dim. Fierce, yet gentle. I felt an incredible yearning for this power, wanted to be able to do what she did, as if I had been blind my whole life and someone had just given me a taste of what sight was like.

“I can feel it”, I whispered. My voice sounded reverent even to my own ears.

“Good”, she said, then placed my hands on my knees and placed her hand on my middle dantian. “Now find the same source inside yourself. Fair warning, it won't be as strong as what you just felt.”

I nodded and started concentrating.

This time I completely lost track of time. As I kept trying to sense out my own well of power I felt rivulets of sweat running down my body, then I felt cold as if I'd sat inside Selene's ice storm miracle. I felt like I was floating away, then I felt too heavy to move. Only when all of these feelings had abated did I finally sense it. I'd been prepared to find a trickle compared to the raging river I'd felt inside Yume but it was a steady stream flowing inside me. I felt elated and it took me a while before I noticed Yume speaking to me.

“Very good. Now try to manipulate it. Make it travel up your right arm.”

It was slow going. It felt like this river of power did not want me to interfere with it at first, but I tried to visualize my whole body in my mind and then made this river of power flow up my arm. Once it reached my fingertips I let it abate.

“Good”, Yume said. “Again.”

The more I worked at it the easier it got. After about twenty attempts I found I could make it flow all the way in only a few seconds.

Then I felt Yume's hand on my cheek and I opened my eyes to find her staring at me in awe.

“Everything alright?”, I asked.

“More than alright”, she said. “I takes the average disciple weeks to accomplish everything you just did. Usually it takes weeks for them to even feel someone else's Qi, never mind finding their own flow. Though I wonder if it might be because you're more experienced and know a lot about your own body. Most disciples start learning these techniques when they're still children.” I smiled, then frowned as I looked up at the sky. It was already well past noon. We'd sat here for hours while I had done this.

She noticed my gaze and said: “Your meditation was pretty deep. But it paid off. You've barely even learned to manipulate Qi in general and you're ready to learn your first technique.”

I smiled. “What techniques are there?”

“More than you could learn in a lifetime. We divide techniques into layers. The first layer consists of basic techniques. For the higher layers, you combine multiple lower layer techniques together.”

“So I should learn the first layer first”, I guessed.

“Not quite. Basic does not mean easy. What I did to that dire wolf was a Qi Blast, which is a first layer technique, but your Qi is not strong enough to do that yet. I mean, I could teach you but you would struggle to blow out a candle with it as you are now. And there are some higher layer techniques that are fairly simple.”

“Like?”, I asked.

“Hand me a sword and I'll show you.” She paused. “Ideally with the sheath.”

I dug through my bag of holding and offered her my usual long sword, then dug a bit more until I'd found its sheath. Yume nodded her thanks, then swung the sword a few times to get a feel for it.

Finally she said: “I really don't like the swords you Northerners use. I wish I had my old one with me, but my captors weren't kind enough to let me take my spatial ring.”

“What are your swords like?”, I asked.

“They're longer, thinner, lighter, sharper and single-edged. They're also brittle and you can't defend with them, but the upsides outweigh the downsides”, she explained, then looked up.

About ten feet from us a leaf from one of the trees around us was drifting lazily towards the ground.

“Observe”, Yume said as she stared at the leaf. She sheathed the sword and held the sheath to the left side of her waist, then took a deep breath and in one fluid motion she drew the sword with her right and slashed through the air, almost horizontally. That wasn't the shocking part. The shocking part came when a white line cut through the air, mirroring the arc of her slash, except ten feet in front of her, cutting through the leaf as it drifted down.

If I hadn't seen her use that same power to burn a hole through a dire wolf's skull I would have doubted my eyes but there it was. The leaf was neatly cut in two, both halves drifting down in separate arcs.

“This is called Qi Projection. You amplify the act of attacking itself in order to project it outward or forward. It works with slashes, thrusts, even slams from heavy clubs though those are harder. Now, let me show you what a higher layer version of this would look like.”

Once again she assumed her stance with the sheathed sword held to her left side. She paused a moment longer than before and with my newfound ability to sense Qi I could feel her gathering power before she performed the same slash again, except this time she didn't project a single slash forward. She projected at least a dozen slashes in a half sphere all around her. Had she been surrounded by enemies, she would now have been surrounded by corpses.

“That was that same technique, except a dozen times at once. I call this technique Sen.”

“What does it mean?”, I asked.

“It's a word from my mother's language. It can mean a lot of things. Flash, cold steel, thousand... it felt appropriate.”

“Will you teach that to me?”, I asked.

“So eager”, she said, smiling. “Yes, but not at first. For now, we'll start with something more simple, the Qi Burst, not to be confused with the Qi Blast. Qi Burst amplifies a motion to make it more powerful, for example...”

She walked up to a tree and held the sword in both hands, at head height and parallel to the ground, pointing at the tree. She took a breath and the white light of Qi traveled up her arm all the way to the tip of the blade. As it reached the very tip, Yume thrust forward and the sword that should have sunk maybe an inch into the tree and then jarred her bones instead kept going and going until she'd sunk the entire blade into the tree in one single burst of strength the petite woman couldn't possibly have been capable of.

“... like this”, she finished. Then she tried pulling the sword out, but it was hopelessly stuck so she had to use the same technique again to gain the burst of strength necessary to pull it back out.

“And that's what I want you to train”, she said, then handed me the sword.

“Does it have to be with a sword?”, I asked.

“Not at all. You could do this with any weapon or even your bare hand. It works best if you're using something you feel confident using. Oh, and it doesn't have to be a thrusting attack either.”

I nodded. My sword wasn't a great weapon but I was comfortable with it and with this technique, thrusting attacks seemed to make the most sense to me, so I assumed the same stance she'd used, though I held the sword a little lower. As I understood it, it wasn't about the motion but about the Qi.

“Channel your Qi up your arms as you did before, then extend it further to the tip of your sword. Thrust as it reaches the furthest point”, she instructed and I concentrated on the well of energy inside me again.

It came far more easily now that I knew what to look for and how to make it work for me. It traveled up my arm, into my fingers, then after another push into my sword, further and further until it reached the tip. As I thrust I realized that I'd waited too long and the power slipped and I fumbled as I thrust forward.

“Shit”, I said.

“It's alright”, Yume said. “You almost had it. You just need to...”

I interrupted her. “I got it. Now that I know how long is too long I think I know how.”

I got into position again, then pulled on my well of Qi again and this time I thrust out just as the power was at its furthest point instead of gawking like a fool. This time, the power did not slip away. It stayed where it was and amplified the strike and when I thrust forward, my sword, too, sank into the tree as if it had been made out of butter. And just like when Yume had done it, the sword was hopelessly stuck again. But hey, I'd done it.

“Ha!”, I yelled, pumping my fist.

“Very good”, Yume said. “That was almost perfect. You could have kept going for a tenth of a heartbeat longer, but for your second try that was amazing.” I smiled under her praise and then gathered my power again, trying to pull the sword out. Now that I knew how a proper execution was supposed to feel recreating it wasn't too difficult, though applying the same technique to a yank rather than a thrust made it a bit harder. The fact that I managed that ended up impressing Yume even more.

“So I wondered”, I told her, “if you can apply this to any motion, could you apply this to your leg, push off the ground with a Qi Burst to make yourself faster?”

Her mouth opened in a tiny 'o' of surprise before she said: “You are going to go far, Felix. Yes, that is indeed something you can do with it, though most disciples take a while to even consider trying that.” Then she demonstrated, gathering Qi to her leg and kicking off the ground as she dashed off with a loud woosh of air. She had gone about thirty feet in a second and from over there she told me:

“You can combine this with the Qi Burst thrusting attack as well. That's actually the easiest second layer technique there is.” Then she demonstrated. She kicked off the ground with a burst of Qi, then her fist began glowing and she punched a tree with another burst of Qi, the momentum behind her adding to the force of the blow. By all rights hitting a tree with her fist like that should have shattered every bone in her arm, but instead the tree rocked alarmingly and there was a big, fist-shaped dent in the tree's bark and Yume just shook out her hand.

“Don't try that”, she advised me. “I actually used a third technique there to make sure this didn't hurt me.”

“What technique was that?”, I asked her.

“It's called Qi Hardening”, she explained. “It hardens bones, muscle and skin, but it's really only useful when you're punching things.”

“I don't know”, I said. “Hardening your body to withstand damage sounds good to me.” She shrugged.

“It would, but keeping it up for more than a second takes unreasonable amounts of Qi. Wearing some light armor or holding a shield would be much more efficient. Qi only really works for sudden bursts, not for continuous enhancement. No one's life force is strong enough to make them that strong all the time. Well, no mortal's is, anyway.”

“Shame. So, do I keep practicing the Qi Burst now?”

She thought about it for a while. “How about this? We head out and keep going until dusk. Whatever resistance we encounter along the way I'll use Stupor on and you can train your Qi Burst on it.”

“Sounds good”, I told her.

“But here's the catch. Each time I'll shorten the Stupor duration by half a second, giving you less and less time.”

“So eventually I'll have to pick my windows more carefully?”, I asked.

“Either that or work faster”, she said. “Your technique is good, but with training you'll be able to speed up the process quite a bit. Eventually you'll be able to use Qi Burst on every swing you make without breaking stride.”

“Are you at that level yet?”

She grinned. “Behold.”

She backed off from me until she'd cleared a little space. She turned slightly away from me and then slammed her fists together and took a stomping step forward.

“Haa...” she began and then started a series of punches into the air. They started normal enough but as she kept punching her fists started glowing and the brighter they glowed the faster the punches came until her arms were a blur of white light I could not hope to follow.

Then, with both of her forearms wreathed in white energy she suddenly thrust forward with her left arm as if grabbing someone and then delivered one final punch with her right that released the white energy with a whoomp.

I had no doubts that, had she hit a person with that last hit, this would have been a killing blow.

I felt like applauding but she didn't give me the time as she explained:

“I actually learned that from a traveling master decades after I first learned about Qi. This is next level Qi manipulation. The individual Qi Bursts build upon each other, never quite dissipating and getting stronger and stronger until they reach a breaking point. It takes a lot of Qi to make it that strong but once you can do it the result is stronger than what your Qi pool should be able to provide.”

I just shook my head. This tiny little woman was stronger than the strongest fighters I'd ever met in my life. But one thing kept nagging at me. “Decades?”, I asked. “You look like you've barely reached the age of majority. If you looked any younger I'd be feeling bad about what happened last night.”

“I'll take this as a compliment. But it is rude to ask a woman her age. Then again... how about this, then? Do you know how kitsune tails work?”

“What do you mean?”, I asked.

“Have you ever seen a fox with three tails?”, she asked.

“No, not really.”

Her tails wagged and fanned out around her. When she looked into my eyes she no longer looked like a cute woman with fox ears. She looked like a powerful magical creature who was being nice to me as a mere flight of fancy. “We grow tails as we get older and stronger. We are born with one. We grow the second when we reach the age of majority. We grow the third at fifty, then the fourth at ninety and so on. At four hundred and fifty we grow our ninth and final tail. At that point we are called tenko, heavenly foxes, and we cease being mortal.”

That was a lot to process. First of all, this meant that Yume was older than my mother by at last five years and possibly almost twice her age. It also meant that...

“You're a demigod?”, I asked.

She chuckled and suddenly she was just a cute girl with fox ears again. “I think you may be the first man in history to call a kitsune a demigod. I've never thought of myself that way. I was certainly not born of a goddess, though my mother is already at her seventh tail now. Then again, our Qi is much stronger than that of you mortals, which would make sense for a divine being. Hmm...”, she said and thought for a bit, then shook her head. “No, that line of thinking leads to arrogance. So, no shock that I'm at least twice your age?”, she asked.

I thought about it for a bit and as I did we started walking again. Finally I told her: “Surprise, yes. But shock, no. It's weird for us humans to interact with species that don't age like we do. Elves age differently from humans, too. For all I know Alisha is older than the two of us together.”

“She's not”, Yume said.

“I'm pretty sure she isn't”, I agreed, “but how can you tell?”

“You're right that with longer-lived species it is harder to gauge age properly, but if you are part of such a species you learn to look for other signs of age. And I can assure you that she is younger than you. I would assume her to be somewhere between eighteen and twenty-one. What is the species called? Elves?”

I nodded. “Wood Elves, specifically. According to Alisha they are quite a bit different from the other types of elves as they are kin of the Fae.”

“Fae?”, she asked. I thought how to explain.

“Woodland spirits. Some benevolent, some malevolent, all mischievous. One type in particular, fairies, are these tiny little humanoids with butterfly wings on their backs. And Alisha...”

“... has a faint outline of butterfly wings on her back when she uses her magic, yes”, she said. “I'd been wondering about that. I've never seen an aura like that before. I guess these Fae are similar to the youkai that exist in my mother's land. So, by your definition I would be one of the Fae.”

“I hope not”, I told her. “Most of the Fae can't abide the touch of iron in any form.”

“No, thankfully that's not a problem I have to deal with”, she said, then paused and her ears pricked up. “Felix, over there”, she said and pointed at a boar that had just gotten our scent and was preparing to charge at us. By the size I could tell it was a male whose territory we had just invaded.

Yume weaved her fingers through the air and a light blue haze drifted from her to the boar, stunning it.

“This is your chance. Show me your Qi Burst in action”, she said and I nodded as I drew my sword. I ran up to the boar, assumed the stance and charged up my Qi Burst. After all the practice it felt almost natural to do so and the power came easily, ran up my arm into my sword and I thrust forward, the Qi Burst allowing me to stab straight through the boar's tough skull and sinking the blade up to the hilt into its body, killing it instantly.

“Four seconds”, Yume called out. “For a beginner that's very good, but it's too slow for proper combat.”

And so we went. For hours we walked through the woods, seeking out whatever animal or monster crossed our path, Yume dazing it and me using it as target practice for my Qi Bursts. On the second attempt I went too fast and fumbled the technique and only barely managed to get it right before the Stupor spell would have worn off. But after that, I made no more mistakes and was eventually able to whittle the time it took me down to a bit more than two seconds. Yume promised to teach me another technique once I got down to a second and a half, which I found excellent motivation.