"Mine move with me when I transform, but I do retain the same body plan, from toe to crown. The spirit is the thing that ties body to soul, so it would follow easily enough. Your spirit looks unremarkable except for how quickly you rejected the foreign essence, but I'm not a sensory specialist."

"So there might be something different, but it's not obvious and not on the normal axes. Let's do it anyway. I have a power which lets me recover from any injury, eventually, though there's no definite time frame. Conceptual, not physical, so it should work on damaged meridians. And you're saying the baseline risk is low."

"Okay. I have to step into the circle and tap the meridians, for best effect. It, uh..."

"I'll be gently touching you on the meridian points. This type of thing as a general class gets called 'Dual Cultivation', but if someone mentions that and doesn't specify, they mean sex or cultivation during sex."

Of course that's a thing.

She nods. "Should I stop what I'm doing or keep going while you do it?"

"Probably should stop and focus on what you feel."

She stops and focuses on her senses.

"Ready now."

...It's less weird if she is a fox. She doesn't stop to examine this feeling, but hops over the circle, feels the flow, and gently taps the outside of Rebecca's wrist with a paw, before sending a thin string of qi, packed into a dense and near crystalline structure, into the outer point of the meridian.

To Rebecca this feels... Wrong. Like something is trying to get into her mouth or nose, sort of. Or cutting off her metaphorical air. Also kind of painful. 

It stops after a short moment. She hears a fox-like whuff.

(Rejected. She feels... Metal? And something subtler. Inconvenient. Okay, it's a lot more effort to compress the free-floating qi. Slowly building up a funnel for it. But perfectly doable, even if it feels like it should be easier.)

This time it feels like a bright itch, slowly working its way inward from her wrist, up her arm, through the shoulder, down into a muddled Somewhere in her chest. Still kind of hard to pinpoint exactly where it's located, but the discomfort certainly attracts attention.

Her neck tenses at first when it hurts, but it stops before she says anything about it.

"It itches," she reports on the second go around. "I can feel it."

Yip!

(Try to flex it!)

She'll try and flex the parts of her spirit which were activated just now. Can she draw qi up that meridian?

She can, with some effort, 'open' and 'close' the meridian! Actively pushing qi into it... Kind of makes the qi go everywhere but slightly more into the meridian.

(Wen just keeps the flow steady. It seems to be taking lots of focus from her.)

Hm.

Is what she's supposed to do close all meridians except that one to funnel qi exclusively through it? Except the qi is going everywhere there aren't meridians as well. Can she tense the rest of her spirit to exclude qi from it, like when she's "breathing out", and only allow entry into the meridian?

Tensing the rest of her spirit to stop qi from flowing seems to work. Kind of. It's like holding on to water in your hands, easy to slip.

Does it get easier as she practices or does it seem like she's probably doing it wrong? Does Wen comment if she spends twenty seconds trying to do this?

It's hard to tell? Twenty seconds is not a lot of practice? Wen is silent.

"Is this how I'm supposed to do this?" she asks as she keeps at it.

...This is hard to convey in fox form.

She becomes human again, paw turning to a palm.

"It feels like your spirit is still permeable. That'll mostly go away as you progress through qi gathering. It's like thick molasses for now, or like a filter cloth. Tensing it to stop the leakage isn't wrong, but also isn't what we want right now. What you want is to fully open the meridian- Once you manage that, it'll definitely be noticeable, as a steady flow. Oh, but you have to have a decent level of qi saturation first. I also noticed that you have at least a mild alignment with the element of metal, which makes it harder for me to do this for you- My fire alignment means I can't give you refined spiritual qi from my core, so I'm holding up a compressing funnel in the stream instead. Which is kind of hard, though not a bad control exercise. Speaking of which-"

The itchiness had receded while she spoke, but slowly builds again once she stops.

Nod. So she'll stop trying to tense and just fully open the meridian, and attempt to pump qi through it, allowing the leakage to slosh everywhere.

"Like this?"

"Like that. Or- There are two kinds of open. One is like a door, and one is like a drawstring, or a muscle. It's subtle. You need to separate them. Your drawstring and door are both open now. If you tense the drawstring just a little bit, it'll be less- Everywhere. Completely opening it like that is for flooding your body with qi to improve your senses, strength, and speed. Easy, but often wasteful."

She tries to identify the difference and implement it. Can she figure it out herself or will she need more pointers?

At this point, she can figure it out! At least for this particular meridian, which is still itching really obviously. The others are still indistinct and will require a lot of feeling out.

After a few minutes experimenting with her settings and just letting qi flow through the meridian, she says, "Do you want to stop to see if I can do it without assistance now?"

"That's probably for the best."

Can she?