Simulated Journey To The Top Chapter 1: Chapter 1: First Wisp

Read chapter 1 of Simulated Journey To The Top by Acron on NovelPedia.

Year 2,885. Qiao Empire. Dawn province. Tianyu city. Du family compound. Personal study room. Du Yuan sat with one elbow on the desk, a scroll open in his hands, dark eyes moving across the text without hurry. His black hair was tied back, loosely enough that a few strands had come free without him noticing, the outer layer of his blue robes was half off one shoulder in the same way. His strong physique looked slightly out of place behind the desk and the surrounding clutter of books, scrolls and pages. Knock. Knock. "Young master." Old Fen's voice carried its usual apologetic weight. "The young miss has stabilized her first step in cultivation. She is requesting your presence in the eastern training room, for a spar." Du Yuan set down his scroll, a dry account of ferry taxation disputes along the Heijin border, and stared at the ceiling. 'She actually did it.' He'd known it was coming. Little Ning had been sitting on the edge of her breakthrough for two weeks. "I understand, you are dismissed." Du Yuan replied while getting up and fixing his clothes. 'Little Ning is what? 10–no, just 11 years old, she completed the four steps in mere three years, hell, it took me three for the first one.' A smile bloomed on Du Yuan's face, slowly turning from pride to lament with the continuation of his thought process and steps out of the room. Walking on the stone path under the noon sun to the training room his thoughts couldn't help but wander. 'What was cultivation?' Cultivation was the process by which a person made themselves into something more than a person. Heaven's essence saturated everything — the air, the stone underfoot, the slow pull of rivers toward the sea. Sensing it was the first step, and it came to most children, fortunate enough to cultivate, within their first or second year of starting at eight. Then came the emptying: the body's natural essence had to be fully cleared from one's vessel making room for Heaven's essence to take volume. Finally one's personal will was attached to heaven's essence, then it was cycled internally, ultimately making it private. The first stable unit was known as a wisp. Du Yuan had taken eight years to individually complete each step. 'Well, not the last one.' Three to sense. Three to empty his vessels. Two to bring his will under his control, and all of that had been done four months ago. Since then he had been standing at the threshold of the actual completion of the final step. He walked the long corridor beside the inner courtyard, hands behind his back, and kept what he felt about that to himself. The mortal training room, the eastern training room's rightful name, was the smallest of the four the compound kept, made of wood unlike its cousins made up of stone and more exotic stuff. Du Ning was already there. She was stretching against the far wall when he arrived, one leg extended high against the wall. Tall for eleven, her dark hair pulled back tight. Her face was all sharp angles, which matched with her white robes. 'It was so clear she was cosplaying the Ancestor, just missing a sword to complete the get up.' She dropped her leg when she heard him and turned. Her eyes moved from his face to his hands to his feet in a single quick pass, a habit he'd put there himself, when he'd explained to her that, mostly speaking, how someone entered a room told you more than most of what they said after. 'That... Uncanny feeling, she truly has succeeded.' Du Yuan knew nobody would lie about such a thing, still, seeing the characteristic uncanny aura of cultivators hammered in the recognition. "Took you long enough," she said. "I was reading something." "You're always finishing something." She tilted her head. "What were you reading?" "Ferry tariffs." She blinked. "Why." "Someone wrote them down." She looked at him with the expression of someone deciding whether they were being made fun of. "Brother," she said finally, "I say this with genuine love, you are very strange." "Of course Your Highness