When I finally touched it, I understood why it had been so hard to sense.
Unlike most types of qi, Yin qi didn’t like to be apparent, it was the shadow that only existed because there was light, but once it could be sensed, it lit up everything around it in a way that was difficult to describe.
And it turned out that I had been right, this entire time the suns and the star had been generating Yang qi all along, the only problem was that I hadn’t been able to sense it, but the presence of the moon changed that.
Yin qi gave the Yang something to define itself against, which made both of them perceptible, this was something neither could be alone.
And what I found was that Yang qi developed by each sun had a different quality to it.
The red sun’s Yang energy was an aggressive brightness, which suited its personality. It was dense and physical, and made matter want to move and change. The blue sun’s Yang energy took a lot more skill to sense, but it had the deep creative resonance that I’d come to expect from it. It was also more consciousness-adjacent, the active principle applied to spirit and mind.
As for Golden Sun's Yang, that was something I couldn’t put into words, but that could be because my understanding of that solar energy was far behind the others. And the child star put out a Yang that was still forming, young and restless, that would occasionally produce small flares that made the other celestial bodies briefly adjust their orbits in mild irritation.
Intellectually, I had always known Yin and Yang existed.
In fact, it was a concept even those not familiar with xianxia were aware of.
And now that I could feel them grow in my inner world….
"Master, if you're considering what I think you're considering," Azure said, "you should wait."
I looked at him with a questioning look.
"The thrones," he clarified. "If you want to create one for yin qi, wait until there's enough of it to balance the yang that’s already here. Adding a throne now would be like trying to balance a scale when one side is still empty."
He knew me too well.
That had been exactly what I’d been thinking about, but he was right.
If I rushed this step, it would only create instability instead of harmony.
After all, Yin and yang were the fundamental opposing principles that held everything else in tension, so they needed each other to be stable. Too much yang without enough yin produced a cultivation foundation that was powerful, volatile, and prone to burning itself out. Too much yin without yang produced stagnation. The ratio between them was something cultivators spent entire lifetimes calibrating, I had just introduced a new variable into my inner world's balance, and losing control of my cultivation was the fast track to turning into a Realm Stabilising Tree.
That was something I had no intention of being, so yeah, I’d rather wait.
The other thing I could sense, faint but unmistakably present, was Soul Essence.
It was different from Spiritual Essence. Spiritual Essence was the general energy that cultivators refined and used for techniques. Soul Essence was the energy that nourished consciousness directly, the substance that souls were made of and fed on. It was present in tiny quantities right now, the moon only just integrated, but I could feel it being generated steadily.
I thought about the new residents in my inner world.
Four Stellar Realm souls with no bodies, an ancient Civilization Realm consciousness recovering in mortal form, an inner world spirit who was still adjusting to a new home, an entire population of Leech-kin who ran on blood qi but who also had souls, and a Leviathan that was so old and massive its consciousness was more like a small country than an individual.
All of them, as well as the older residents, would benefit from a steady supply of soul essence.
As for the other potential effects, the Water Dao, the Dream dao, the Illusion Dao, I couldn't sense them yet, but that didn't disappoint me because the moon was new. These things took time to develop. I had enough experience with my inner world by now to know that it grew in layers, each one building on the one before, and rushing any layer produced results that were weaker and less stable than simply being patient.
What I could do right now was experiment, so I flew down toward the meditation plateau in the southwest quadrant and landed on the wide flat stone surface which I created for practice.
I extended one hand and channeled wood qi into my palm.
A small tree grew out of the air, maybe two feet tall, formed with silver-green wood.
It was standard wood cultivation, nothing special, I had done this thousands of times.
I let it dissolve, then I did it again, but this time I did something a little different.
When the wood qi gathered in my palm, I reached for the Blood Moon.
The connection was there now, a thread running from the Genesis Seed up through the sky to the dark red disc hanging above.
What formed was what most would call demonic, and few would call beautiful.
And I suppose there was some beauty to it.
The two feet tree standing before me was less of a tree and more like one of Elder Molric’s abomination experiments. It was the color of the dark of iron ore that was still in the mountain, and its bark had the same deep red sheen as the lake below.
When I pressed a finger against it, it gave way the way metal gives.
There was a knock and a faint ring.
The resistance was structural instead of soft.
“Master, this…this isn’t wood qi,” Azure whispered.
He was right, it had become something greater.
The elemental cycle in xianxia novels ran in a specific direction.
Wood fed fire, fire created ash that became earth, earth compressed into metal, metal enriched water, and water nourished wood. Around and around they went, each element producing the conditions for the next one.
But there was also the controlling cycle running the opposite direction, wood defeating earth, earth defeating water, water defeating fire, fire defeating metal, and metal defeating wood. The cycle cut across itself, each element capable of being overwhelmed by the one that dominated it.
As for blood essence, it was built on corruption, on taking an element's nature and forcing it into something harsher and more concentrated.
Wood, filtered through blood, but it didn't become more wood, it became something else. The blood essence stressed the element's nature like how heat and pressure stressed stone, and what came out of that stress was something closer to the element that earth normally produced, metal, without actually being pure metal.
It was pseudo-metal.
In the cultivation world, metal cultivators were rare.
People talked about lightning as if it were rare, and it was, but metal was actually less common.
Most sects specialized in fire, water, earth, wind, and lightning because those were the elements that cultivators most often developed naturally.
Metal was slower to appear, harder to awaken, and the techniques built on it, the precision cutting, the structural reinforcement, the sound manipulation through resonance, required traits not every cultivator's dao supported naturally.
And yet here I was, a wood cultivator with access to pseudo-metal effects.
This wasn’t something anyone would see coming.
And it was all thanks to the Blood Moon, it gave me options that traditional cultivation never would.
The blood aspect allowed it to change the nature of qi, while the moon reflected it just like it reflects sunlight. This is how the wood became pseudo-metal, but if it could change one element, then what about the others? What did fire become? And what happened when you ran qi aligned with water through blood?
I didn't know yet and finding out was going to be interesting, but those experiments were for later because right now I wanted to know what the Blood Moon did to the sun energies.
The red sun, the blue sun, and especially the golden sun, which I had only just begun to understand.
As I let my new creation dissolve, I looked up at the sky above my inner world, at the three suns in their orbits and the dark moon between them, and I thought about what it meant to be a cultivator who had all of them, and I felt the familiar mixture of inadequacy and possibility that had characterized basically my entire time in this world.
The inadequacy was real, and the reason was simple.
I was a newly advanced Stellar Realm cultivator with a cultivation system that was growing faster than my understanding of it, and mental pressure on this level could paralyse cultivators. I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel the expectations of the beings in my inner world who relied wholly on me for survival.
But even though I disliked the pressure, I accepted it. After all, the best leaders were the ones who feared the rights that their followers had over them. And I had a feeling deep down that if I never forgot that, then I could handle the responsibility that had been thrust onto my shoulders.
As for the possibilities, they were unquantifiable.
The Blood Moon had opened up paths that hadn’t been accessible to me before. I just had to find a way to use it safely without being seduced by it. At the end of the day, I was just as susceptible as anyone else by the allure of power that came from blood cultivation. And usually, the power came in spades.
Taking a deep breath, even though I didn’t need to in spirit form, I raised my hand toward the red sun and drew on its energy through the Blood Moon.