Rebecca did a stint learning how to meditate long ago. She got down the textbook basics but never went anywhere with it. She's good at focus, which she's not sure is the same thing.

She gives it her best shot. She settles into a lotus pose and tries to feel her spirit. She's been thinking of the way she's feeling qi as a singular sense; can she break that down more, into a—surface? As she inhales, holds, and exhales, does that change? She tries thinking of a candleflame first, but something about spirit surrounding your soul like skin and muscle surrounds bone shifts the picture, and she finds herself imagining something more like a tiny star inside her, a pinpoint core enveloped by a radiant corona, the latter expanding and contracting with each breath.

(She's not sure if Anything You Can Do is working. They're getting on alright, but they've also only spoken for a few hours.)

It's a very vague process. There's something like a surface there, something vaguely proprioception-like except not really, something vaguely dream-like (if she ever dreams). Something that whispers about unknowns and being unbound. Metaphorically.

If she has a star inside her, it's a dead and cold one, for now, with the thick gas surrounding it and moving in and out slightly in response, but not feeding fusion within. There does seem to be... A space inside her, or perhaps several. And a lot of other stuff. If she's not imagining it.

"Stay focused," she comments eventually, "But I'd like you now imagine taking it in and not letting it go. You are a flame, and air is drawn to your updraft. It becomes part of you, and you don't need to let it go again. It becomes fire, lifting you up, growing stronger. More air leads to more fire, leads to more heat, leads to more wind, leads to more air. A cycle of growth, taking energy in."

That... doesn't quite work with a star metaphor, but actually fire doesn't work like that either—she's being too literal.

Can she... do whatever Wen said. Draw in qi and trap it? Or react with it. She tries to feel the spinning "breeze" around her and how it whispers over the something-like-a-surface and thinks of binding it into her, swallowing the "oxygen" into her flame. Or drawing stardust into her very sad gravity well, she supposes. Does either work better, or should she just pick one and stick with it.

"How do I know my affinity, and would that affect what metaphor I should use?" she wonders.

Stardust in her gravity well works much better, given how it matches the rest of her visualization. Some of the energy is sticking within her, getting over everything, like sand on wet skin at a beach. Some is bouncing off her. Even the energy that goes inside her mostly bursts out again when she exhales.

"Once you have a little bit of progress I might be able to feel it. Higher realms definitely could. And it would affect- Not just the metaphor you use, but what cultivation methods entire are suited. You are making annoyingly fast progress... But then, sensing qi is the hard part and you already had that. Don't try to do any more yet, just get used to what you're doing now."

She keeps at it.

"The power which lets me learn faster from friends might be working. I don't know how much it takes to activate or if it comes in gradually the more we're familiar."

"Would knowing that for sure change anything right now? I'm going to go cook and get water- Keep going like this."

"No, just reflecting on your comment about annoyingly fast progress—thank you for your help."

And she will sit there, meditating on the process.

Things slowly become more clear as she meditates. Qi flowing in and sticking, then bursting away when she breathes out, and seeping slowly in and out of the stickiness she feels. The swirling energy around her remains ephemeral. She's not grabbing and pulling on it so much as... Allowing it in. A passive process, not an active one. And yet every cycle of breath where she actually manages to flex her spirit feels fatiguing, straining something in a way that's slightly worse when she's breathing in and out, and slightly better when holding. It's not painful yet, but feels like it could become painful later.

She can almost feel the remnants of the blood-claw attack in her arm, a faint pattern in the fuzzy stickiness, three thin stripes where something is just a little bit off. And she can slightly more clearly feel the spaces inside of her. There's at least three different ones, and probably more, plus some other areas that seem particularly 'full'.

Eventually, she can realize that each sharp breath out, when it sheds qi in a little burst, actually seems to loosen up a little bit of the gunk it's sticking to, even carrying some of it away.

Huh. Wen said she was... cycling her qi to flush out the foreign contaminant? Is that what Rebecca is doing now, or did Wen mean circulating it within her? Either way, Rebecca is going to listen to instructions and keep doing the same thing instead of messing around.

Spaces, huh. After a while, once she's sure of what she's detecting, she reports her findings to Wen: the voids and full areas in her, the vague sense of strain, and the degunking.

"Murr! Yeah, that's about right! I guess I'll tell you the next part after we eat."

She extricates herself from the circle. Can she still sense her spirit and the things in it after she's out of the spinny qi field?

She can still feel them, though some of the sharpness is going away- The qi inside her is now mostly fading and not being refilled, dulling the sensations.

Wen has prepared several cuts of roasted meat, plus a small reddish pearl-like object, laid out on a dark cloth, and is gnawing at a large bone. Two more cuts are on the fire now.

She inspects the cuts. Do they look different from normal pork? If Wen doesn't object, she'll pick on up and tentatively take a bite.

No objections here, she's just working on her own portions.

They look like ordinary pork, well butchered. If anything, they seem - a bit more idealized, a bit juicier and more solid, than ordinary pork. Almost like an advertisement.

It's delicious. For all that it's fire-roasted and without so much as salt. Concentrated savory flavor that only grows stronger as you chew, juicy fat suffusing the meat.

Oh she might need to spend more time eating in this world.

If this is just barely a spirit beast, she's looking forward to what the real ones look like.

"...we need to invest in those bentos you were talking about," she says once she comes up for breath. "Hold on, let me..." She changes into a sterile suit and slips a cut of pork in her pocket, then removes it, and duplicates two more. She tears a strip off one. "Works fine," she says wonderingly. "As you said, would be odd if it didn't."

She tosses a scrap up, catches it in her mouth, and yips out some high pitched laughter, which somehow indicates that certain Gluttony Cultivators would be very happy with her, and that Wen is amused.

She shakes her head, laughing.

"Food at home doesn't taste this good." She frowns. "Though... that's definitely true, but it's possible the Spirit's blessings also improved my ability to taste." Her taste buds had been on their way out for a while already when she got her powers. It's possible that her vial hadn't fixed them properly, without her having a proper memory of the correct baseline.

Or maybe the meat is just that good. She shrugs dismissively and takes another bite. She'll put the extra cut down next to the others, and then in another blink her getup is replaced with her travelling clothes again.

"Gluttony cultivators?"

Chomp chomp chomp on air. Then a big hop.

(They eat things to get stronger.)

"This world is full of such strange things."

She yips in agreement and returns to her bone-gnawing.

She wonders if the bone marrow is good. She'll give it a try if there are any bones handy. She wasn't a terrible fan of it back on Earth Bet, but this is magic bone marrow.

It's... Better than normal bone marrow? It's not amazingly perfect or anything. Mostly just intensely flavored like itself.

Wen finishes her bone and tugs another one out of what's left of the butchery.

Some time passes like this.

When it looks like mealtime is winding down, she'll ask, "What needs to be disposed? I can disappear things with the same power I use to create things."

"Everything left, there. I'm gonna go wash up and then we'll come back and talk about meridians."

While Wen's turned away, she'll change into a large rucksack, load remains of the carcass in, vanish it, and repeat. When Wen comes back, she'll be just about done.