Wen comes back from her wash completely nude and seemingly unconcerned about it. Her clothes are laid out in the grass to dry and she launches into a lecture.

"So, meridians! There are natural lines in your body, that are pretty much all the same for most people- Direbeasts included. I think that's because of the structure of the soul? Direbeasts are generally reincarnated humans, supposedly. But anyway, it's true. They're hard to perceive from a standing start, and the first part of my qi condensation mostly involved slowly clearing them of impurities and learning to control qi in complex patterns, then cycling spiritual qi through your meridians in ways that consume it but enhance innate qi. The end goal is to saturate your body and spirit with innate qi, while preparing your 'spiritaul terrain' by evening it out completely except for a large gap, where your life root* will go, while also practicing qi control and discipline. Thus preparing you for an ideal breakthrough into foundation building."

*Dantian

Nod.

"So if the meridians are pathways, what are the voids and filled spaces?"

"I'd call them... Spiritual terrain? Natural hollows and fills? It's just how your spirit naturally is over however it developed thus far. The goal is complete flat, with a large 'sea' in one of a few locations. When you break through to foundation establishment, the quality of the sea will be the biggest contributor to your strength. And when you go for core formation after that, how level the terrain is and how much you reinforce it during foundation establishment will affect the construction of the pillars and cores. I've thought about it for a while and both my instincts and what I've read is that three is the best number of cores for me. The more cores you form, the less their effects are. And... I'm going with a plan that I think will make me comfortable in my own body. What use is strength if you're suffering from being alive? Root, sacral, and crown or third eye, most likely."

"But in qi gathering stage, there are no decisions to make—I just need to completely flatten it out, fill the hollows and even out the fills?"

"Unless you plan on doing something weird, there's no big decisions for the cultivation of your spiritual terrain. The aspects you cultivate are important, but if you hate mine you can disperse."

"Aspects?"

"Qi has types and aspects, right? And the way you cultivate, the words, motions, patterns you use, can attract certain aspects, or draw unaspected qi into the correct aspects. Your innate qi becomes 'flavored', for lack of a better word, and it's easier to do certain arts and harder to do others."

"What's the usual relationship between your cultivated aspects and their affinity; does one usually follow the other? And how hard is it to change, in the early stages? Do you always need to completely disperse, or is it possible to pivot only losing some?"

"This is getting beyond my level of expertise. But goin' by overheard gossip and stuff, you almost always choose an aspect similar or identical to your affinity. It's just so, so much easier. And I have a fire affinity, so I'm going with fire and wind as aspects. I don't know about partially dispersing, that sounds like a bad idea. But adding a complementary or supplementary aspect isn't usually impossible. The big boys, like... Have techniques designed and optimized very specifically by upper-realm people who've spent ages studying this stuff, and at the lower level everyone is kind of going off accumulated common sense?"

"That makes sense. For now, should I just keep doing the same thing... any additional exercises to do to flatten out my spiritual terrain, or am I not at that level yet?"

"Well, if you have the basic breathing down we need to start finding meridians! The basic idea is to continue drawing in qi, but also push it around your body and try to feel out your meridians, and try pushing qi through them. They'll mostly feel kind of wrong, clogged, blocked. That's expected at first. They clear up over time. You'll learn to control meridians individually later."

Great. To it now?

Wen follows her over and - peers closely while Rebecca starts pulling it in again, calling out advice.

After a little bit she takes a spirit stone and goes to her own circle and starts drawing it in. Rebecca can feel just how intensely Wen is pulling on the qi- Her circle is a cyclone, compared to Rebecca's moderate breeze.

Well, she'll just have to get better faster, then. She does try to see if Wen is doing anything different which is more about technique than just power and speed.

Can she actually detect her meridians clearing up in real time, or is this more of the kind of thing that will take days to see an effect?

Wen seems to be actively reaching out into the surrounding qi and moving it- Evening out turbulence and creating a pressure gradient. Rebecca completely lacks fine control outside of her body, as of yet.

She can detect little pieces of gunk coming to the edge of her skin and falling away. It's slow, but definitely something that's already ongoing. It does look like it'll take days upon days to fully clear them out, though.

She has patience. With Wen working on her own cultivation, Rebecca isn't going to try experimenting, so she'll mostly focus on mapping out her internal landscape, feeling for meridians and getting used to parsing the sensory feedback.

Several hours can pass peacefully like this.

After a while, Wen pads around Rebecca's circle, sniffing and peering...

And gently nudging the qi inside Rebecca's circle, enough to get her attention.

She raises her head and blinks at Wen. She doesn't stop, but her spirit breathing gets less focused.

"I've pretty much refilled my pool now, and as long as I can hide away a few spirit stones I'm more than happy to actually teach instead of just meditating near you. Most places kind of just leave the juniors be, they'll sink or swim, but you're not even working from a manual, so... I notice you haven't actually started working on your meridians? Any reason why? Maybe I wasn't clear enough what to do."

"I had some guesses of how to do it but didn't want to experiment without active supervision in case I did it wrong and injured myself, and I wanted to first get the basic motions and... spirit-awareness down. But if people normally do this without supervision, then I should be taking more initiative?"

"People normally have a manual, at least, and someone to ask occasional questions of. I'm your manual in this case. Working on the basic skill is not a bad idea either. Cultivation is a steady process, not a fast one. Someone wise once told me, slow is smooth. Smooth is fast."

Nod.

"My perception of what's happening is that the qi that I channel isn't very directed. It's flowing around the underlying topography of my spirit, and by controlling how I breathe I can bias the flow to increase it in some places and decrease it in others, but I think I need to figure out how to... identify and move the individual muscles, metaphorically?"

How much perceptual detail does she have on her spiritual landscape, now? Enough to actually identify a graph of meridians?

She'll also make another crown of spirit stones this time with a thin wireframe easy to pry the stones out of and roll it to Wen, if that was a request to top her up.

(Yoink. It wasn't, specifically, but like hell is she going to NOT accept wealth coming her way! She'll just have to make sure to honor the karmic debt building up here and give it her best good-faith effort.)

She has identified a few dozen of what probably are meridians, fuzzily, and can feel out roughly where they go through her body, though it's quite difficult to trace one's exact position and map it to body parts. There's a moderately greater density of them going up to her head and arms than down to her legs, and a large chunk spread out around the torso too.

"That is what you need to do next. There's something... So, you you remember what that demonic cultivator did to you? He was injecting his own essence in an attempt to parasitize or overwhelm, I think, but I'm fairly sure I can - activate a meridian for you, highlight it, by feeding it filtered spiritual qi directly. It would stand out very strongly to you, and that will help learning to perceive and control it. I want to be a little cautious about this because meridian damage is not a good thing. I'm quite sure it's possible and I have an image of how to accomplish it. But I wouldn't say it's completely without risk."

Hm.

"Are meridians coupled to our physical bodies in an ongoing way? I'm remembering that the demonic cultivator didn't manage to hurt me very much, and I don't know if that's because I only got grazed, or because I was a little intrinsically resilient, somehow, partially carrying over from my physical invulnerability. Does my spirit look different to you, compared to an ordinary mortal?"

Or it's Battle Angel, but she thinks that still has to have a physical mechanism? Maybe she's wrong and a baseline human with Battle Angel can take a tank round directly to the chest and be completely fine, but she'd been imagining it like how in movies the hero will be running through a storm of gunfire and miraculously only get a cosmetic bullet graze; in that case it falls under her first proposition.