Ninety-One: Hard-to-Cultivate Skills and Easy-to-Heal Wounds

To be honest, this was the first time Chen Jue had ever felt a cultivation method be so difficult to practice.

Perhaps because this Circulation of the Lesser and Greater Heavenly Circuits was not a traditional martial art, but a Taoist inner-alchemy technique. It involved guiding qi and blood through the body’s meridians and acupoints, then following fixed minor and major routes to complete each cycle. The sensation was as though ants were crawling through his veins.

When he practiced Taiji stance work before, he had once felt a faint version of this. But this time, with the Lesser and Greater Heavenly Circuits, that prickling, itchy feeling was several times stronger than when he trained his fists.

Fortunately, after a period of fist training, his will had become extremely firm, and his mind, strengthened by the added intelligence attribute point, had grown clear and agile. For the moment, he could suppress the disturbance caused by that irritating sensation.

Yet after completing one full circuit according to the method, Chen Jue still did not see the technique appear in his skill list.

“Could I be doing it wrong?”

“But moving the qi and blood through one cycle feels even better than going through a whole set of fist work!” Chen Jue wondered, and tried again, following both the lesser and greater circuits to circulate his energy.

At first, because he was still feeling his way through the method, one complete cycle took about fifteen minutes. It was rather slow, for he feared the blood might run to the wrong acupoints and trigger a deviation.

After four rounds, even the landlady of the guesthouse was calling them to lunch in the courtyard, yet the cultivation method still failed to form a panel skill.

Slightly frustrated, Chen Jue went downstairs for lunch. When he returned, he immediately resumed his practice.

Five rounds, six rounds, seven rounds—he followed the route map all the way to ten rounds, spending nearly two full hours on the Lesser and Greater Heavenly Circuits, and still no new skill popped up.

Instead, after ten rounds, his free attribute points rose by 0.01.

“Two hours for this little bit of attribute? Is this cultivation method fake or what?” Chen Jue grew even more puzzled.

If not for the fact that the circulation left his whole body warm and that his qi and blood moved through him just like the feeling from stance work, he might never have persisted.

But on second thought, since this method could indeed generate free attribute points, it proved it was not useless. Perhaps, like when he had first practiced body-hardening striking and the Classic for Transforming the Tendons, it simply took time and was hard to get started with.

More than fifty people in the group had failed to verify it. It made sense that it would be a little difficult.

He practiced for another two hours. When he saw his free attribute points rise by another 0.01, Chen Jue finally stopped and stood up to stretch his arms and legs.

By then it was already dark outside. He went to Uncle Yu’s house for dinner, then ran to the beach and kicked at the sand for a while to clear his head.

A whole day of practice, and still no entry into the method. This was the first time since awakening his attribute panel that Chen Jue had encountered such a thing.

After his walk, he returned to the small villa and did not rush to continue training.

He felt he must have taken the wrong direction or used the wrong approach, and had not fully grasped the Lesser and Greater Heavenly Circuits. So he went back into the group and carefully reread, word by word, the section in the group files on Daoist and Buddhist culture, specifically the elixir path and the explanations of its terminology.

When he finished reading, Chen Jue wore a deeply strange expression.

Because the material also discussed ancient Daoist alchemists refining elixirs with lead and mercury, and practicing by swallowing those pills.

This was the modern age; everyone knew how dangerous lead and mercury were if taken into the body. Many emperors of antiquity had literally died because of them, and Chen Jue certainly would not dare try it.

However, the part about taking medicines to assist cultivation—namely, increasing the intake of “essence” in order to accelerate the process of “refining essence into qi”—made him think of the tonic stew he had made that day.

Just then, his health had already recovered to 82 percent, no longer as weak as before and unable to absorb nourishment. He could now take such restorative medicine.

So Chen Jue ladled out a large bowl and drank it down, then sat cross-legged again and began circulating his qi and blood through the lesser and greater circuits.

With the broth entering his stomach, he found that his circulation speed had in fact increased slightly.

What had previously taken ten rounds to raise his free attribute points by 0.01 now yielded the same increase after only about seven rounds.

“It really works!”

Delighted, Chen Jue immersed himself in the practice.

The process that had once taken more than two hours to produce a single attribute point was now compressed to about seventy minutes, a substantial improvement in efficiency.

Though it still could not compare with the speed and vigor of his underwater training before, it had the advantage of stability, and could be attempted normally even with his current slight internal injuries.

After practicing through the night, he managed to gain 0.03 attribute points. He finished every drop of the tonic stew, and even ate another pot of fish gelatin as a late-night snack, yet still failed to push the Lesser and Greater Heavenly Circuits into becoming a skill.

Still, Chen Jue noticed that after each full circulation of qi and blood, the next round would become one or two seconds faster. It was probably because some of the hidden meridians and acupoints that had not been regularly stimulated were being washed through repeatedly by the blood and gradually becoming unblocked, along with the improvement in proficiency.

Most importantly, he also discovered that practicing this method was of considerable help in healing internal injuries.

Over the course of the day, his health index had risen to 87 percent, a much faster recovery than the previous day’s reliance on internal and external treatment alone.

All this only made Chen Jue more hopeful about this difficult cultivation method.

After finishing his practice and taking a hot bath, he went to bed to rest. In the meantime, he picked up that thick atlas of human anatomy, meridians, and acupoints and read through it again, planning to review what he had learned and prevent mistakes from creeping in after memorization.

The next morning, after sleeping soundly, Chen Jue found that after a full day of circulating qi and blood, even his sleep seemed deeper and more refreshing.

He woke before six. The vitality he had known before his injury was returning in large part, so he got up and continued to simmer more broth and fish gelatin.

He had not even entered the method yet, and it was already proving extremely demanding in terms of medicines and nourishment. Chen Jue could hardly imagine what sort of state it would be in once the Lesser and Greater Heavenly Circuits truly reached the threshold of entry.

Before breakfast, he practiced for another two hours, still without success. His health index, however, had already reached 90 percent. After taking his internal injury medicine and rubbing the unnamed ointment once more, Chen Jue went off to eat.

After finishing the sticky rice cakes the auntie had made, he discovered that the Minor Internal Injury status on his panel had actually vanished.

“Has the injury healed?”

Chen Jue felt a burst of happiness. Looking at his panel attributes, he saw that his current strength and agility had both returned to the same level as their peak values.

Aside from his physique attribute still lagging somewhat behind, he was now once again able to display that previously unthinkable level of martial skill.

After eating, he went to the beach. When there was no one around, Chen Jue faced the sea and let out a roar with the sound-striking technique from the Tiger Roar Golden Bell Shell. The cry burst from his throat like muffled thunder, carrying more than a hundred meters before being swallowed by the roar of the waves.

His voice and breath rang out like thunder, and that faint stabbing pain in his internal organs had completely disappeared. This meant his internal injuries were fully healed, and he could resume training in fist methods!

“At last, I’ve fully recovered. Tonight I can go back to underwater training and attribute farming.”

“But I’ll have to add the Lesser and Greater Heavenly Circuits to my training schedule as well.”

Chen Jue was in a good mood. Internal injuries like this were ordinarily extremely difficult to heal completely.

As the saying goes: injuries to muscles and bones take a hundred days; injuries to the internal organs take half a year.

If internal injuries were not treated properly, they could even leave lifelong hidden ailments.

Chen Jue’s late grandfather had once broken a rib in his youth and injured one side of his lung. In those days, rural medical care was limited, and he had never fully recovered. In his old age, he often became short of breath and unable to draw enough air.

That was what people meant when they said an illness had left its root in one’s youth, and by the time one looked back, it was already too late to cure.

But Chen Jue, relying on the panel’s monitoring, the effect of the unnamed ointment, and the final push from the qi-and-blood circulation method, had actually cured such a stubborn internal injury from a fall in just a few short days. This was enough to prove how effective cultivation could be.

For ordinary people, even a small scrape that bled and scabbed over, left to heal on its own, might not recover as quickly as he had.

Of course, most of this was due to Chen Jue’s exceptionally powerful physique attribute.

Translated from the source provided, with names, terms, and proper titles rendered naturally into English.