Chapter 19

  Vast-Body Dantian (II)

  Long Tao had just left the house to practice movement arts at the back of the mountain peak when he saw his master coming up from the distance. His steps were slow, his breathing haggard, and he was sweating buckets.

  You'd think he'd just fought in a legendary battle, but no, he was simply climbing up the mountain with two extra people in tow--a boy and a girl.

  Long Tao ignored the comatose boy and focused on the girl--as someone with intimate experience with poisons, he immediately recognized hers. And, beyond it, recognized the potential in her.

  Though he couldn't tell exactly which physique she had, he could tell that it was a body-related one and that even in a Major or perhaps even in Divine Realms, it wouldn't be bottom of the barrel.

  How? That was the question hanging in his mind. How did his master find someone like that in this backwater?

  "Hey, ungrateful disciple! Will you just stare at me with that look or help?!" Long Tao chuckled momentarily before heading over and taking the boy as his master put the girl down.

  "You sure do pick up the strangest things, Master," he said, rueful of just how out of shape his master was. The boy barely weighed sixty pounds, if that, and the girl likely weighed half of that, and he, as someone at Spirit Manifestation Realm, struggled to carry them up a mountain. Perhaps, he mused, he'd have to implement a workout routine for this out-of-shape Master of his...

  "Oh, don't you even start, phew, phew," He sat down directly on the dirt, completely disregarding his position as an Elder. "What the hell kind of a custom is it to live at the top of a mountain? These people are insane..."

  "What do I do with these two?" Long Tao asked; he'd already surmised that the girl likely asked his master to also bring the boy, as the latter seemed to have a wasted dantian. If he wasn't immediately taken care of, he wouldn't live the night. "I'll take the boy inside and help him," He knew that his master likely didn't know how to help the boy. Rather, there was a good chance that there wasn't anybody in the sect who could.

  Perhaps if it were five or six days earlier, these low-level alchemists may have been able to concoct a pill, but the boy was on the brink of dying, with Death Qi already slowly condensing in his breath.

  "Y-yeah, you do that," his Master said. "I'll just dig a hole here in preparation for my death..."

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  "C-can... can I come?" the girl asked suddenly, prompting Long Tao to glance over at her. There was radiance in her eyes unfitting her scrawny build, and though they were full of fear and trepidation... there was also determination within them.

  "No," Long Tao said firmly. "To save him, I have to strip him naked."

  "A-ah!" Her cheeks flushed red as she quickly looked away; though he felt his Master's burning glare at the back of his head, he ignored it and went inside.

  The last few days, he tried to push his Master as much as he could to see the limits; however, the old man seemed incapable of getting angry at him. Rather, he played along. It was more like he was being seen as a peer rather than a disciple.

  Then again, as far as he knew, he was the Master's first disciple, so perhaps the man simply didn't know how to behave.

  Either way, he put it all out of his mind for a moment; even for him, saving someone at this stage would be difficult. Naturally, if it had been his peak self, he could do it with a singular thought, but he was only at the fourth stage of Qi Condensation at the moment.

  He brought the boy up to the Master's room and gently laid him onto the bed before disrobing him. Ribs jutted out wholly, almost approximating an anatomical model. He likely ate nothing but raw grass for at least a few months, if not longer, his body sapped of all necessary nutrients.

  Long Tao sighed momentarily before doing the one thing he could to save the boy--inject his body with Qi.

  Qi, at the end of the day, was the energy of life; while not so in the most literal sense, in theory, so long as the body could hold Qi, it could live. The reason why nobody else could do this was the level of control necessary--every living being had meridians, even the innately crippled ones. However, nobody's meridians were exactly the same as another's.

  It was a unique, intricate web that was invisible to even Divine Sense. Thus, guiding Qi meant responding to any alteration in direction so quickly that most people couldn't process it. Even one single mistake led to, at least, complete invalidity and, more often than not, outright death.

  Even Long Tao had to concentrate and take it seriously, guiding the strand of Qi through the shattered and dried-up meridians. So long as they woke up and started 'breathing', the rest of the body would follow; Qi was everywhere in nature, it was just that the bodies naturally resisted its influence, as very few could actually sustain raw Qi integrating with their body.

  But instead of food or water, it was entirely possible, even for mortals, to temporarily sustain on Qi, and in situations like this where the body was so emaciated, it was actually better.

  It took him almost an hour to do a singular rotation, and by the end he was gasping for breath; it wasn't easy, far from it. The level of concentration required was immense, but even more than that, his cultivation realm simply wasn't enough. Sustaining the tether to the singular strand of Qi for so long was something that even those at Revolving Core would struggle with and likely fail if their control over Qi wasn't immaculate.

  Luckily, he far surpassed that in his past life.

  Opening his eyes, he glanced yet again at the boy; the changes were subtle but visible still. Though he was still sallow, with blood practically drained from his face, and as skinny as a twig, his breathing had stabilized, and his body was slowly feeding on the nutrients.

  Long Tao didn't fix the broken meridians or dantian; he merely used them to 'jolt' the rest of the body. It would still take at least a few months until the boy would recover completely, but at least for now, his life was saved.