Calvin had often heard the breakthrough from Gathering to the Foundation realm described as the first true test of a cultivator’s aptitude and dedication. Just about anyone—young or old, sharp or dull—could ignite as a cultivator, and progress through the Gathering realm was mostly a matter of time and qi. Talent could help, making less qi go further, and the right physique or superior spiritual root could greatly accelerate the rate at which qi could be gathered and processed, but ultimately anyone with a shred of patience could reach the peak of the Gathering realm.
That wasn’t to say that everyone who ever ignited did reach the peak of Gathering, of course. In some parts of the province, the qi was thin enough that, without pills or spiritual herbs, someone with an Earthly root like his own—or the rare unfortunate soul born with a Mortal root who somehow managed to ignite regardless—could live a lifetime without accumulating enough qi to progress. Even those living in more powerful regions often never made it. Qi was useful after all, and few could afford to spend years or decades stockpiling a resource rather than spending it right away. Many of those in Sapphire Tooth City fell into that category, exchanging qi for coin rather than the tenuous dream of advancement.
However, within a powerful sect like the Eight Peaks, reaching the peak of the Gathering realm was practically the expectation, even within the Outer sect. The sect did not allow Gathering realm disciples to travel nor duel—true combat could drain years of a Gatherer’s progress dry in moments—nor did it teach them qi-intensive techniques such as those of the Sun Shines and Grass Grows on the Eight Peaks method. It limited direct abuses by seniors and provided limited access to knowledge and training typically unavailable to ignited mortals. They still had to work, but they were primarily given tasks that required the strength or spirit of a cultivator with only minimal expenditures of qi.
They tended to fields and orchards where spiritual herbs and fruits grew, toiled in mines extracting spiritual metals and spirit stones, scripted simple talismans powered by ambient qi, and maintained some of the sect's endless formations and infrastructure. Tasks that required a certain strength of body and spirit, but only a tiny expenditure of one’s hard-earned strength. Sure the sect was happy to bleed them for every coin it could, but it also understood that a single Foundation realm cultivator could do the work of dozens of Gathering realm juniors.
The sect didn’t even bother dividing the realm into stages like Calvin had heard done outside the sect. After all, the difference between someone in the so-called ‘First Stage’ of the Gathering realm and the ‘Ninth Stage’ was minimal, and didn’t account for variables such as the strength of the cultivator’s spirit. And by that logic, a cultivator could trivially expend entire stages of their cultivation without any lasting harm, whereas regressing in later realms was typically the result of crippling spiritual injuries. Calling someone a half-step or quasi-Foundation realm cultivator like some used for higher realms was simply stupid too. You were either still Gathering, at the Peak and preparing for your breakthrough, or you were already in the Foundation realm.
Even still, the advancement wasn’t really all that difficult, all things considered. A person’s spirit instinctively understood the process of forming a new qi node if provided with enough energy. That was how a mortal with no ability to manipulate qi could ignite into a cultivator, after all, and why the process was colloquially referred to as ‘opening’ a dantian rather than creating one from scratch. Sure you had to guide the process to some extent, to ensure the new node formed in precisely the right place if nothing else, and forging one’s first qi channel––meridian––was not entirely trivial, but neither was it truly all that challenging. Progressing through the Foundation realm was much more trying than entering it.
Not for the first time in the past several hours, Calvin took a deep, steadying breath, his spirit drawn in tightly to ensure his presence did not disturb the currents of qi flowing through the room.
Gwen knew what she was doing. He had prepared her to the best of his ability, and she had been a diligent, attentive student. He had absolute confidence in her abilities and this breakthrough should pose no challenge to his junior's spirit. Despite all that, he couldn’t quite shake the faint unease in his belly as he watched over her.
Gwen sat near motionless in the center of the room, legs crossed over one another and hands resting on the ground palm-down on either side of her. Her honey-blonde hair was pulled up into a lazy, unsecured bun and her head was tilted back, the golden rays of the setting sun dancing across her bare skin. Despite the importance of this moment, there was a small, happy smile on her lips, and she looked to be utterly at peace.
Around her, Calvin’s indoor garden swayed and rustled in a phantom breeze. He’d noticed the reaction before a handful of times while she meditated in the room, but today it was amplified to a level he’d never seen before. The spiritual herbs were visibly growing, colors becoming more vivid, leaves opening wider, and stems thickening. It was most apparent with some of the trellises, some of the vines gaining as much as an inch of length in just the past hours, but every herb and flower in the garden was responding to her cultivation. Even his gemstone orchid and other superior herbs were being affected, though at a lesser rate compared to some of the herbs Gwen had planted. The orchid was chiming softly, like it supposedly did in its natural habitat though Calvin had never heard it do so before, the musical tones lending the chamber an ethereal air.
It was…incredible. There were undoubtedly formations and techniques that could have accomplished something similar, but those were no doubt ruinously expensive in terms of qi and reagents. There was a reason the sect employed thousands of Outer disciples to tend to its herbs—growth formations that did not ruin the properties of spiritual herbs were far too costly to operate for all but the most unique and precious reagents. Meanwhile, Gwen wasn’t even expending any of her qi. Near as he could tell, the ambient qi and the energy within the herbs was simply responding to her spirit, growing in response to her own growth.
Not for the first time, Calvin wondered just what the Scroll might tell him if it didn’t absolutely refuse to work on contact with his fellow cultivators. He and Gwen had run a number of minor experiments over the past few weeks, ever since he’d done his best to explain to her just how incredible her gift with spiritual herbs truly was, but he still wasn’t sure if her abilities were the result of some bloodline, a rare physique, a mutated spiritual root, or any number of other possibilities. Gwen wasn’t sure either, and they wouldn’t truly be able to begin eliminating options until Gwen entered the Core realm and could examine her body and spirit with her own spiritual senses. Well, that or they had her examined by an Elder with access to the appropriate formations.
Somewhat reluctantly, he had suggested that Gwen might want to approach an Elder or Hall Master who might be able to help her develop her talent. As much as it pained him to lose out on such a precious resource—and a wonderful junior sister—he knew he was not the best option Gwen had to help her grow. Not yet at least.
To his relief, she’d refused, wanting to at least be in the later stages of the Foundation realm before revealing her gift. He’d told her his goal to enter the Inner sect by advancing to the Core realm, and she’d seemed interested in the idea as well. A Core realm powerhouse could not be exploited in the same way those at their current levels of strength could be. In furtherance of that goal, she’d temporarily stopped selling most of her herbs and pills for contribution points. It was more than possible that she’d already been noticed, but no reason to draw any additional attention beyond that which was already directed her way.
Calvin took another deep breath. He’d expected watching over Gwen to be rather boring, but had easily caved to her request regardless. What was a little boredom compared to his junior sister’s comfort during such a pivotal moment in her cultivation? What he hadn’t expected was for it to be quite so stressful.
With his qi suppressed, his aura withdrawn, and still a stage short of unlocking his spiritual sense, he was completely blind to her progress. She could be experiencing qi deviation at this very moment and he’d never know before it was too late. All he had to go off of was the faint specks of foul black impurities that slowly formed on her skin and the flickers of emotion ghosting across her face.
The seconds seemed to crawl past rather than flow, the sun all but stationary where it shone down from its perch high in the sky. He’d tried to spend his time productively, scouring the Scroll’s endless fonts of information —examining his nodes and channels for flaws, attempting to comprehend the details of his apparent physique, delving into the profound mysteries of the Nine Rotating Gates method—but he found himself unable to properly focus.
Instead, his thoughts were filled with his junior sister, even as he did his best to keep his eyes from wandering. She trusted him to watch over her, and it would be shameful to take advantage of her in this manner. Not while she was so distracted, at the very least. Even if she was very beautiful and had done nothing to avoid his gaze as she prepared for her breakthrough, disrobing and stretching her muscles in preparation for an extended session of intense meditation.
He took yet another deep breath. His relationship with his junior sister was something he had increasingly complex feelings about. At first, he’d seen nothing wrong with intentionally feeding her devotion, seeing it as an easy way to acquire a valuable ally and resource. But he was coming to genuinely enjoy spending time with Gwen, her humor and enthusiasm infectious. Though it had taken up precious time he could have spent cultivating, teaching her had been anything but a waste of time, his own comprehension deepening as he was forced to comprehensively explain topics that had come to him intuitively since he’d used some of the Scroll’s knowledge tokens.
So far, he’d mostly managed to keep her at arms length, the gulf of cultivation between them an easy excuse. But Gwen was just about to enter his same realm of cultivation, and sometime in the past few hours he’d realized that the expected surprise that had lit a fire in Gwen’s eyes was not the Foundation manual he planned to gift her but something a lot more…intimate. And well…he couldn’t say that he disliked that idea.
And then, as though triggered by his thoughts, the air in the room shivered, the ambient qi seeming to freeze for an instant as a ripple passed across Calvin’s skin. Gwen’s expression sharpened, her jaw clenching and her muscles stiffening. A moment later, the ambient qi surged towards the center of the room, pouring through the filtering formation around Gwen and flooding into her body. Simultaneously, vile black slime began to leech from beneath Gwen’s skin, rapidly coating her in a disgusting layer of foul-smelling impurities. Some flowed like thick oil, slowly dripping down her body to form a puddle beneath her. The rest acted more like hot tar, clinging to everything it touched and sizzling faintly in the dimming sunlight.
Gwen’s eyes snapped open, the whites standing out against the surrounding impurities like distant lanterns in the black of night. She tried to take a breath and gagged, doubling over and beginning to cough up more impurities, these ones slimy strands like half-digested herbs.
Calvin stood frozen for a single moment, then rushed forward, stopping right outside the circle of statuettes surrounding her. He held his breath, doing his best to ignore the utterly repulsive smell rising up from the impurities and beginning to spread to fill the room, and rapidly turned several of the jade figures even as Gwen continued to hack and sputter, purging more impurities from within her body and spewing them onto the ground.
It took two tries to adjust the formation properly, qi flickering in the air around Gwen. Then it finally activated and Gwen sucked in a huge, relieved breath as the impurities caking her skin and slowly spreading across the ground were scraped away, flowing like some disgusting slime creature into a clay jar Calvin had prepared ahead of time. She coughed several more times, a few more strands of filth rushing to join the mass already in the jar, and then sagged forward, breathing slowly and deeply as though recovering after a great exertion.
The formation hadn’t managed to get all of the impurities, some specs of black sludge still clung to her fair skin and hair, but those could be scrubbed off later. It was certainly better than not having such a formation during a breakthrough—Calvin shuddered remembering how he’d had to manually scrape away the clinging layers with a knife after his own breakthrough—though having to manually adjust the jade statuettes was somewhat frustrating. A proper impurity-syphoning formation should have been active throughout the whole breakthrough, not activated manually only at the end. Perhaps that was the downside of such a versatile formation artifact, though it would become even more useful once he advanced and could command the figures to move on their own with his spiritual sense.
Seeing no more impurities flowing into it, Calvin finally slammed a tight-fitting lid onto the jar, sealing off the foul smell and unpleasant aura rising from it. Taking an experimental breath, he found the air mildly tainted but breathable. The surrounding herbs and formations on the villa would deal with the lingering miasma quickly enough once once Gwen was fully cleaned off, and as an alchemist his junior sister might actually have a use for the jar of fresh filth.
Standing up, he moved the jar out of the way and took a step back, observing Gwen as she regained her bearing. She sat with her shoulders hunched and her hands on her knees, tired but triumphant, her eyes closed and chest rising and falling as she caught her breath. With the breakthrough complete, Calvin relaxed his grip on his spirit and qi, allowing him to easily feel the gentle pressure of Gwen’s aura as she slowly regained control of herself after her breakthrough. It was weak, but firm, with none of the fragile translucency Calvin associated with crippling damage and rushed advancement, and the qi around her sang with joy and the satisfaction of a job well done.
It took her several more minutes to stabilize her cultivation, during which time the sorely depleted ambient qi slowly began to move back towards its prior concentration. Her somewhat chaotic aura slowly settled down into a placid, solid edifice like a young tree, and the spiritual herbs ceased their rustling and shifting. At last, the garden’s usual stillness returned, broken only by the sounds of their soft breathing.
But not for long.
Gwen leapt to her feet and let out a wordless whoop of joy, thrusting her arms into the air and throwing her head back in celebration. Even though she’d clearly intended to control her strength, she still got a good bit more height than she’d been counting on, nearly crashing into the room’s skylight window with a loud yelp as she hastily shielded her face with her hands. She stopped with only a scant few inches to spare, her bun nearly brushing the glass, then squeaked as she began to fall back to earth.
Despite the awkward start, Gwen was a cultivator. A Foundation realm cultivator even, with the dexterity and proprioception to match. She landed lightly on her feet, the only mark of her accident the scarlet blush of embarrassment that was rapidly spreading from her cheeks down her neck.
“Congratulations, junior sister,” Calvin said mildly, doing his best to hide his amusement. This was a big moment for her, and he didn’t want to ruin it.
Gwen’s face warred between pride and embarrassment, her aura flaring up again for an instant before she wrestled it back under control. She ducked her head for a moment, then took a shaky breath and squared her shoulders. “Thank you, senior brother!” she exclaimed, her voice filling the room and her smile dazzling. “Thank you thank you thank you!” A moment later, Calvin caught her out of the air by the waist as she launched herself at him with enough force to reduce a mortal to paste. He instinctively swung her around in a circle, bleeding off some of the force, and she bent her knees to avoid knocking over any of the myriad pots and troughs of herbs.
She laughed, relief mixing with giddy excitement in her voice, and when Calvin tried to set her down she clung to him instead like a limpet. “Thank you, senior brother!” She repeated again. “No,” she took a deep breath, “thank you, Calvin!” Her smile was as bright as the noonday sun and her face redder than a mortal’s who’d spent all day beneath it.
Calvin smiled back, intending to brush the words off. He’d helped, sure, but Gwen would have managed the advancement with or without his help. It might not have gone quite so smoothly, and she would have had a much more difficult road through the Foundation realm, but she was a bright young woman. She’d have figured things out on her own. Perhaps even with Yunfei attempting to sabotage her every step of the way.
“Not––“ he began, but he never had a chance to finish. Gwen rose up on her tip toes, her arms still wrapped around him in a hug that was impressively tight despite the difference in their cultivation, and smashed her lips against his own. It was not a chaste kiss, nor a skilled one, but it was certainly passionate. He blinked once, uncomprehendingly.
Gwen pulled away––though her arms didn’t loosen so much as a hair––but her motion was halting and her eyes...hopeful, but scared. Calvin considered the situation for a moment, his eyes absorbing the look on her face even as he felt the question in her qi.
Then he wrapped his arms around Gwen’s shoulders, pulling her even tighter against him and kissed her back. She melted against, satisfaction rolling off her in waves so thick he felt he could drown in it.
This time, he broke their kiss, though only after Gwen was practically putty in his arms. He might not have much, if any, hands-on experience, but he’d spent a good deal of his childhood in one brothel or another…not to mention in Lulu’s company. She was anything but shy when it came to such matters.
Gwen stared up at him with wide eyes and Calvin gently poked her on the nose. “You still stink of impurities,” he told her plainly, “and you need more time than this to settle your cultivation. Like I promised, I have something to show you, but then it's time for you to bathe, get some rest, and we can speak more on this––“ he gave her one final kiss, deep and passionate as he surrounded her in his qi, “over lunch tomorrow. How does that sound?”
Gwen blinked several times, her breathing labored and her eyes wide as saucers. Then she nodded rapidly. “Yes, senior brother,” She agreed squeakily, “Yes! That…that sounds perfect!”
“Good girl.” Calvin set her back down on her feet, then caught her when she started to fall. “…let’s find you somewhere to sit before you fall. Imagine the embarrassment, injuring yourself right after a flawless breakthrough.”
Gwen moaned in embarrassment and hid her face in his chest. Calvin could only laugh.