The Laws of Cultivation: Qi = MC^2

I walked silently behind Yin, as she guided me back to her home. A thousand questions ran in my mind, all that I’d been wanting to ask the girl, but she’d insisted on taking me to her place, and seeing her resolute expression, I’d given in to her demands.

The village swept by beyond my awareness, as my eyes remained set firmly on the back of the girl walking in front of me. I nodded absently to the village head as I walked into his home. The man squawked, looking at me nervously in confusion, and then at Yin. For a while he tried to stop me for tea, but I briskly refused the offer, thanking him once, as I continued to follow behind Yin.

Stepping in the girl’s chamber, I waited for her to enter. Yin shut the door behind her leaning against the frame as she looked at me with beady eyes that seemed to still be staring in disbelief.

“This is my chamber. Before me, it used to be my grandfather’s. He gave it to me in his will,” Yin said, in the Azure-Jade language, straightening her back from against the door frame.

“Were you close to him?” I asked in English, keeping my eyes on the girl.

Yin nodded, walking past me. She went to a drawer set at the corner of the room. Crouching on the floor, the girl pulled out the bottom most cabinet, letting out plumes of dust. From within, she picked out a single dusty book, coughing twice. Gently, she cleaned the book, before turning to face me, as she took a seat on the floor, and opened its contents.

“This is my grandfather’s book,” Yin said. “He only ever showed me this. The one place where he wrote of his home, and his past.”

I took a seat in front of Yin, watching her go through the book. Her gaze was distant and nostalgic, likely going through the memories of her time with her grandfather.

After a moment, Yin closed the book, and turned it towards me. “I think my grandfather would have wanted you to read it.”

I looked up to meet Yin’s eyes, as I gave her a nod. Carefully picking up the book, I inspected it. The cover was of leather, sewed in with threads on the side. Sloppy work, clearly not someone who was used to the task. There was no name or title written on the book. I flipped the page open and frowned as I saw the contents within.

“This isn’t… the Azure-jade script is it?” I asked, looking up at Yin.

The girl shook her head. “It’s the language of his homeland. One similar to ours, but not the same,” she replied.

I read the letters, finding quite a few of them familiar. It was definitely a language similar to this world. Mandarin, I suspected. Briefly I remembered Ki’s ability to understand the languages from earth, and I wondered if I could replicate any of it, having inherited the tree.

I pressed a palm against the page, letting Chi flow through it as I closed my eyes. I could sense a shift happen, as the Chi soaked into the pages. Opening my eyes, I read the words again and… of course that didn’t work. It wouldn’t be so easy.

“There is a section ahead, written in another language that you should know. My grandfather had written this book in the hopes to reach out to someone else who might be lost in this world like he had been,” Yin said, and I flipped the pages, finding the language switch to English about halfway.

“My name is Guo Wei. If you can read this, then either you are my kin, and have learned this language. Or you come from a world very far from this one.

If you are my kin, I thank you for keeping my legacy alive.

If you are from my world, then understand that though I may not be alive, I offer you the heartiest comfort I have to give, and welcome you as a fellow kin in this strange land. Just the understanding that there are others from our home in this strange world is a comfort that I so dearly wish to share with you.”

I read the words, feeling a strange warmth fill me. Here this man had lived and died, having never met me, yet his words remained, offering me comfort of sharing a past home. I flipped the page over, reading ahead.

“The day I reached this world was 23rd February, 1988. I was twenty-two back then, living in America after my family had escaped our home around a decade ago. My memory is not very clear on how I had arrived on this world, merely that I had been working on a ship when the seas had taken me, and when I opened my eyes, I was here. It had taken me some time to find settlements. My first encounters with the wildlife of this world had been difficult, given how they possessed seemingly magical abilities that I lacked the ability to deal with.

It took me a week before I found civilization. They spoke a language similar to Mandarin, but distinctly different. I struggled at first, but explaining it as a dialect from a remote village seemed to work with them. After I’d changed my clothes, little to no one seemed to regard me strangely anymore, though my mannerisms raised more than a couple of eyes.”

I chuckled, finding the train of thought oddly relatable. A brief glance showed Yin watching me instantly. The girl averted her eyes when I looked up, but I didn’t pay it any attention, returning to the book.

“In just a few days, I had realised something strange about the place I was in. It wasn’t just the lack of industry, roads and civilisation, which had been obvious, but also the fact that Qi existed in this world. An energy that allowed feats of magic to be performed by people revered as gods by the common public.

At first, I’d believed my inability to use this power resulted from my nature as an outsider in this world, but I’d quickly found out that only one in ten men in this world possessed the strength to use this magic. They were called cultivators and formed a social hierarchy above regular people. Furthermore, they had ranks for cultivators as well, where each further rank raised you that much higher in society. But said rank was not the only thing that judged one’s position, but also the age someone reached it. These were called as realms of cultivation.

Suffice to say, all of this took me some time to adjust to. But with time, I managed. Despite my many hopes, I was mortal and could never touch upon this mystical Qi during my lifetime.

After spending some years near the coasts, I made my way further into the vast empire of Azure-Jade. It took me just a few months to figure out that this world was much vaster than I had expected before. On my travels westwards, I found information regarding different lands outside this continent. After some understanding of distances and talking to sailers about routes, I roughly estimated this world to be nearly twice the size of ours, if not larger. Further in my travels, as I crossed the empire over nearly a decade, and reached upon the west coast, I got the chance to meet a stranger who took an interest in me.

The man appeared to arrive from a culture similar to ancient Rome. One that gave a different name to the Qi the Azure-Jade empire used, but followed the roughly same mystical nature of magic. After some talking with this merchant, he mentioned he had once met a man who claimed to be from a distant land in a different world. A place called America. After talking more, I found out the man had arrived here from the year 1899, from western America.

From this merchant, I remained a trinket of this other stranger from earth. An old pistol carved with a name on it that read John Smith.”

I paused at the word, struggling to take in everything written. I’d always suspected lands outside the empire existed, because while it was entirely possible that this world just had a single supercontinent, it was entirely likely that that wasn’t the case as well.

But to hear of another person from earth, from all the way back from 1899… I wasn’t sure what to think of it. After a moment or two of thought, I flipped the page, and read further.

“Along my travels, I met some others. None were from my home, but some had mentioned encounters with people who may have been. I documented these encounters in a diary, and along my travels, I also made notes of the industry and development in the empire. Little ideas and comforts that I wished to introduce in my life here. I’d once met a merchant who’d been willing to gamble on my ideas, but that is a long story that had ended in tragedy by the hands of the mighty gods that ruled this land.

“After nearly a decade of travelling through most of the Azure-Jade empire, I grew weary of my life as a wanderer. As chance had it, I met a wonderful woman in a quaint little town near the seventh peak of the empire. Having been a lone wanderer for nearly a decade, I longed for the company of others, and settled down with her near a Qi-vein that was recently discovered. Somehow, I was elected as the head of this new village, and decided to name it Taizhou, after my homeland that my family fled from, back home.

It pleased me immensely, to finally have a place to call home. But as the decades passed, I felt a strange loss about my home, and how I had never found anyone who'd come here from Earth. I had met strangers, and obtained trinkets, but they were far and few in between. And so, when my granddaughter Yin had shown interest, I told her of the secret, something not even my wife knew of. I’d told her stories of my home, and of the adventures I’d had in this land. Eventually, this led me to write the book that you hold in your hands, hoping if one day, someone else is brought to this world like I was, they would know that there was someone before them, and that there might be others out there, waiting to be found.”

I sat there in silence, as I read the last portion of the entry. Further pages showed the man’s ideas on general technology, documents of his travels and other things. A strange feeling filled me, that I couldn’t quite describe.

“I never thought I would get to meet someone from my grandfather’s home. For a long time I’d thought that he had just invented these things to tell me stories. Even the languages, I’d thought of them as quirks of my grandfather. He’d always been a strange man. But… the day before he passed, he showed me something. Asked me to promise that I would not share this with anyone till someone like you came around,” Yin said, tears pooling in her eyes, and trickling down her cheek.

Wiping the tears off her face, the girl turned, and pulled open the drawer. Putting her hand in, she reached into the back, and ran her hand around. A few moments later, I heard a click as the drawer fell out of the cabinet, and Yin pulled out a thin rectangular box that'd been hidden inside the cupboard.

Yin presented the box to me, setting it on the floor. “This is my grandfather’s legacy. I’d like you to have it.”

I stared at the wooden box, looking at it hesitantly for a moment. Nodding, I grabbed the small lid at the top, and pulled it open. My heart began to race as I saw the contents of the box inside.

There was a letter, ruled with lines clearly printed from an electrical printing machine, with words inside. Pages from a book I didn’t recognise. Next to it were two electrical devices with small screens. Pagers, I think they were called. I touched the plastic coverings on them and felt something go through my chest at the sensation of the material.

The box was full of items like these. A metallic compass, a pen. Yet, at the bottom of everything here, I saw one particular item covered in a white handkerchief. The name John Smith was carved on it, now blurred and scraped from rust.

Gently I picked up the pistol, and felt a world from my past be far closer to me than I’d ever imagined.

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