The merchant's wagon carried autumn's surplus toward the city market: dried
mushrooms packed in reed baskets, mountain herbs bundled and tied, cured hides
rolled in their own smell, and several unmarked wooden boxes that Cheol the
merchant did not invite inquiry about and which Jaehyun therefore did not inquire
about.
Four days to Yeongsa, Cheol said. Assuming weather.
Cheol talked. Jaehyun had encountered people who talked continuously before,
but most of them were performing for an audience. Cheol talked the way a stream
moves not because anyone was listening, but because that was the nature of a stream.
He talked about regional prices, road conditions, the personalities of officials at
various checkpoints, the reliability or otherwise of certain road town inns. He talked
about cultivator politics with the informed peripheral view of a man who'd spent thirty
years moving goods through a world that cultivators shaped but didn't fully occupy.
What Jaehyun was most interested in was the city, and Cheol was happy to
provide.
"Sects take outer disciples twice a year," the merchant said, as if answering a
question Jaehyun had been careful not to ask aloud. "Spring and autumn both.
Autumn intake's coming. You're the right age for it though I'll be straight with you, you
don't look like much of a cultivator."
"I'm not," Jaehyun said. "I'm trying to become one."
Cheol glanced sideways at him. Something shifted in the granite friendly
calculation behind his eyes. "Stubborn or stupid, one of the two," he said, not
unkindly. "The minor sects aren't so picky. If you can show the first channel's opened
even partway, most of them'll take you for the registration fee. The big ones the Three
Great and the Five Main require full Body Opening minimum, usually family
background, usually connections."
Body Opening: the prerequisite to formal cultivation, the opening of all eight
primary channels to allow qi to flow freely. He had partially opened two, with a third
now developing on its own from the redistribution pressure. The remaining five were
dormant. Proper Body Opening through conventional means would require a teacher,
cultivation resources, or a great deal of time. He had none of the first two.
The strange hunger had started the previous day.
Not food hunger he was eating adequately now, Cheol fed his workers with the
same pragmatism he applied to everything else. This was different: a pulling sensation
seated between the sternum and the abdomen, intensifying when they passed anything
with concentrated qi. The road had taken them past a minor sect's outer training
ground, fenced and posted with the standard orthodox symbols, and the sensation had
sharpened as they passed until he had to consciously regulate his breathing.
His body was drawing in ambient qi.
Not through any active technique. The redistribution pathways he'd smoothed
in the mountain hollow were functioning as suction, pulling environmental energy in
to fill the deficit created by the damaged central channel. It was happening without his
direction.
He observed this carefully. He did not interfere. He stayed well clear of the two
mounted cultivators who passed them on the road that afternoon, just in case drawing
from sources that could perceive the draw would cause problems he wasn't ready to
address.
By nightfall, his dan jeon had measurably grown. Still small. But larger than it
had been.
Something was happening. He did not yet know what to call it.