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652. BarbenHuimer
🕑 Added 2023-08-12 14:59:01 +0000 UTCSlowly, his tiny body took shape. Tiny hands and tiny feet, tiny legs and tiny arms, a tiny torso and tiny legs, and a tiny head to top it all off.
Hui jolted to life for a moment, gasped half a breath, and immediately keeled over as his tiny heart stopped. Immense pain blasted through his entire being, every hair of his very few hairs aching in electric agony. Instantly calling on phoenix fire, he burned the body away without waiting for the blades this time. Failure! That’s a failure. No question!
Gathering himself once more, he formed a tiny body again. I did something wrong the first time. But this time, I’ll take care! I’ll pay attention to every tiny detail. If my body is perfect, then surely it’ll succeed.
Once more, a tiny body took shape. This time, Hui closely watched the forming body. Bones… muscles… nerves… organs, qi organs, qi passages, veins, skin, hair, here we go! Hui surged inside once again.
Again, intense pain assaulted Hui. The body failed around him, tiny heart struggling, his tiny organs screaming, qi pouring out of him. This time, he gritted his teeth and bore it for a few moments, circulating enough life qi to force his body to stay alive despite its imminent failure. Hold! Hold my ground! I need to figure this out. Just a moment, just a few moments! If I can figure out why the tiny bodies are failing, I might be able to fix it!
He stretched out his hand, feeling his body’s limits. His limbs moved naturally. His bones held strong. He blinked, seeing the world from his new smaller perspective, then clapped. The blades hurtled toward him, even more threatening than before. He took a deep breath, and air whooshed in and out of his lungs. I can move without breaking myself. I can see and hear. My lungs and other organs mostly work. They aren’t perfect, but they’re functional… and yet, they’re failing. I’m physically fine, or at least good enough to survive for the few minutes I need to survive. So why is my body still falling apart?
Turning his senses toward his qi organs, Hui immediately received his answer. He sucked in a breath. Oh. That’s not good.
His tiny qi organs struggled to contain even the scraps of qi he currently had. His meridians opened as wide as they could, his qi passages gaped, but his body was so small to support the usual flow of qi. Overloaded, his tiny dantian shuddered, on the verge of bursting.
Burning his body again, Hui paused, putting a hand on his soul’s chin. Hmm. I can scale my body down, and that all works out, but the problem is that my qi organs, fundamentally, still have to handle the normal amount of qi. I could cut back on my qi, but if I do that, I’m essentially locking myself to using low-level techniques in my tiny form.
Hui considered for a moment, then shrugged to himself. I suppose I can go with that for now. After all, I’m supposed to be a low-level cultivator, and it’s not as if I’m planning to fight in this form. I’m just using it for survival.
Once more, he lit the phoenix fire and reformed a body from the ashes. He structured it to be tiny, widening his qi passages, meridians, and dantian as much as possible. Make my body barely functional, and save all the space for my qi organs! That way, I can use as much qi as the small size allows.
Hui drew his qi into his soul, only letting a little bit out, and squeezed into the new tiny body. The body ached, but he managed to fit into the body. Adjusting his qi output a little, Hui eased the pain down to a manageable level.
Okay. I can survive with this much pain. But do the blades hit me? I’m pretty small, but I’m not that small.
The blades closed in on him. Hui tensed, watching them come. They pushed the ash pile below him, piercing through it toward his tiny body. He caught his breath. They’re definitely going to hit me! Definitely!
He activated his crystal form, but due to the small body’s lower qi capacity, he could only activate it at the fourth stage level. The blades sliced off his arms, immediately closing in on him. He gritted his teeth. I need more qi. If I’m going to use this form to rest in between using the phoenix fire to rebuild my body, I need it to last more than one round! If I can’t use a higher level of the crystal body cultivation art, then I’m just wasting my time.
Circulating his life qi, he quickly regrew his arms as the blades retracted. The one upside of the small body is that it doesn’t take a lot of life qi to regenerate it. After all, my body is so small that the most grievous wound can’t be any more than losing a finger. Even if all my limbs get cut off, I only need as much qi to regenerate it as I would to regenerate four fingers.
It’s a decent solution to the blades, except for two problems! One, I don’t have infinite life qi. It would last much longer, especially since I can transform death qi to life qi with the phoenix flame, but it would eventually run out… probably before the end of ten thousand rounds. Two, and more importantly, I don’t like pain! I don’t want my limbs to get cut off every ten seconds! That’s a lot of pain. A lot!
While the room reset, Hui considered, thinking rapidly. Hmm… if I circulate qi right now, my qi passages are too small to handle it. I can’t make my qi passages bigger without making my body larger, which voids the idea of creating a small target that takes less damage from the blades. If I can’t make my body larger, then I have to make the qi smaller.
Make the qi smaller…
Hui reached out. He clenched his hand into a fist, calling qi to his palm. A small strand of qi replied to his call, hovering over his hand as he opened it. Rather than absorbing it, Hui spun the qi over his hand. As he spun it, he pushed down on it with his pressure. The qi compressed, as flexible as a gas.
Hui’s eyes widened, and he grinned. Haha! I knew it. I can compress the qi! If I compress the qi and make it smaller, then I can use lots of qi even with my tiny qi passages! Excellent, excellent.
As the blades hurtled in, he pressed all the qi out of his body, then drew it in. Qi hurtled toward him. He held both hands out, calling the qi to his palms rather than directly to his dantian. Catching the qi outside of him, he spun around, circulating it in a loop around him. Using the same technique to pressure it, he spun it around and around until it grew thinner, into almost a thread. Only then did he direct it into his dantian, where he carefully spooled the compressed qi in the small space.
Blades sliced toward Hui. Taking a deep breath, he drew on his newly compressed qi and activated his crystal technique. Here goes nothing!
Comments
Green0Photon
Bruh the title. Also, Hui finally doing Qi Condensation, huh. No wonder they just need to comprehend things already. Already made a Nascent Soul, though. Clearly Hui's doing things backwards. And no wonder Ying Lin ascended so fast.
