Depthless Hunger

Chapter 62: Qi to Mana

Zae Zin Nim did not like mana cultivation. She did not like it at all. She especially disliked the fact that she kept thinking about it as "mana cultivation" even though she should have known better.

In fact, mana was proving to be far from the inferior version of qi that she had always been taught. Approaching it calmly accomplished little and all her mental discipline needed to shift gears as if she was on a radically different path of cultivation. She gritted her teeth and tried to channel all of her frustration into enough raw emotion to stir her internal mana.

It was easy to slip into the wrong habits, because she actually could cultivate mana. It would never help her advance, and she knew it wouldn't awaken a Class either, but it felt surprisingly good. Her meridians, so strained and cracked, accepted the new energy despite herself. She needed to force away that soothing current and instead stoke a flame.

Everyone on Cloudspire had also been wrong about mana-users having no internal techniques. They were certainly more brutal, but calling them simplistic was like saying a perfectly executed palm strike was just slapping someone. Kai had actually been a bit frustrated at first as she tried to grasp the concepts.

Of course, she'd been able to master them in time, ahead of the schedule he set for normal hunters. No matter how strange this land was, she was still the woman who had been hailed as a genius so many times that her rivals had conspired to ruin her life forever.

Once she pushed her mind into the proper mental grooves, Zae Zin Nim didn't falter from them. The mental discipline required wasn't the same as the mind-consuming focus of meditation, so that meant her thoughts began to wander. Unfortunately, they wandered straight back to Kai.

She had tried to give him suitable encouragement without inflating his ego, but the truth was that his progress was intimidating. If she hadn't realized that mana users did develop strong mental discipline, she would have been terrified. Despite all his disadvantages, he threw himself into cultivation with a fervor she'd rarely seen before.

How strong would he have been if he'd grown up on Cloudspire? Strangely, she thought that he might have lost what made him remarkable. Cultivating here required clawing for the barest wisps of qi, which suited him perfectly. The life he'd lived involved running headlong into every obstacle and battering it down with his very essence.

What a contrast to the lazy cultivators she remembered surpassing! She remembered how they had whined and struggled when they were sent to practice in regions with diffuse qi, and that had been ten times as dense in as this environment.

The major problem might be his body, which was clearly shifting on a spiritual level. She had omitted some facts about that because she had no solutions and didn't see how the knowledge could help him. His body soaked up qi like rain on parched soil. Normally that wasn't supposed to happen until the Body Refinement stage, and she feared he would deviate painfully, but the qi didn't seem to be going to waste. There was a hunger deep within his soul, never satisfied...

Best not to think about that. Zae Zin Nim stood up and dusted off her robes, or the closest she could get to proper robes here.

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"I would like to spar now," she said. Kai finished his current cycle and then leapt to his feet.

"Sure! I was thinking you might need some work."

They walked further from their camp and bowed to one another, though his bow was a strange imitation. Zae Zin Nim disliked it, but she had come to accept that mana could not be cultivated by meditation alone. She had been skeptical when Kai had said it required tension and danger, then slowly come around to his way of thinking.

Sparring with him wasn't exactly dangerous. Oh, he was reasonably skilled, definitely more than cultivators who relied on advancement to blow opponents away. He also had a vicious edge that occasionally came out when she landed blows, an animal ferocity controlled by human intellect.

But despite all the ways she had come to respect Kai, he was weak. Despite his willpower and skill, he had been born on a continent with barely any power. For the first time in her life, she thought about how truly unfair that was. The will of the heavens was ultimately senseless and cruel.

Midway through the sparring match, Zae Zin Nim felt something rupture inside her. Her condition had been improving, but the ragged scars within her could only hold together for so long. There was bile spilling out inside her, and unless she stopped immediately, she would suffer for it.

"Are you alr-"

She cut him off with a palm strike to his shoulder, sending him stumbling back. Though he looked concerned, he respected her enough to keep fighting. Zae Zin Nim pushed herself harder, seeking that edge of danger, feeling the mana surge around her as she forced out the last of her qi.

It ended with her stumbling to the ground and vomiting, of course. She was bleeding everywhere and her robes were soaked in a foul sweat. Part of her was furious that her condition had interrupted her sparring match, but she thought she had made the right choice despite the misery: her mana had responded to her last desperate attacks more than to hours of meditation.

"Are you alright?" Kai bent down beside her and she turned away from him. Thankfully he understood and backed away. "Well, I don't want you to hurt yourself, but you're adjusting to the mana exercises. Your cultivation techniques must work better for this than I thought, because you're making incredible progress. I'm sure by the time we find a sufficiently dense pool you'll be able to awaken a Class."

"And how-" She stopped to hack up what felt like internal organs. "-how will I know what will awaken?"

"That's the part that's up to fate, supposedly. Some think that it has something to do with your inner nature, and if that's true you don't have to worry. Everything about your soul is so orderly, I feel like your Class will have to fit in or it would be ashamed of itself."

Always such broad encouragement with a laugh. Zae Zin Nim was never sure if his words could be entirely in earnest. Not that he didn't express hard realities, but he seemed to want to make her feel better. It was simultaneously confounding and strangely warm.

"Please excuse me, I need to clean up." She staggered away from him toward the river. Water was becoming more frequent as they traveled further south, so she was easily able to find a bend in the river that was blocked by rocks so that he couldn't see her.

Ordinarily, she would never have bathed alone while traveling with a man, since she knew exactly how that would end. After so long together, she was beginning to accept that Kai truly wouldn't do such a thing, or even try to peek at her. Not because he thought of himself as honorable, but because it didn't occur to him to do so.

As she reached the edge of the water, Zae Zin Nim caught a glimpse of her face in the water and choked back a sob. Always so arrogant and thoughtless. Even if he had been a worse man, why would he follow her? She was a bleeding wreck, her former beauty a ruin of scars and oozing bile. Even the smugglers had been too repulsed to try to touch her.

Cleanliness long forgotten, Zae Zin Nim fell to the side of the river and wept.