NOVPUB70: Chapter 70: The Union of Yin and Yang Creates the Five Elements (Please Favorite, Follow, and Vote)
70: Chapter 70: The Union of Yin and Yang Creates the Five Elements (Please Favorite, Follow, and Vote)
“Heaven” “Qi” “Lungs”
He Ao had found the corresponding characters for the first sentence in the small book.
What does this mean?
Heavenly Qi exploded the lungs?
…
It didn’t feel like that was the meaning.
The texts from the First District were ideographic, and with incomplete parts, making them highly challenging to learn, with the author explaining only one or two characters in detail on almost every page.
However, the script of Central Earth was also a type of pictographic ideographic writing, sharing some similarities with the script from the First District of the Copy World, so He Ao could use the thought processes of the Central Earth language to adapt to the thinking of the First District script, and he had begun to grasp the basics.
But searching page by page like this was too much trouble.
He Ao thought for a moment.
Super Memory, activate.
Super Memory had thirty seconds of consequence-free time each day, which could be used to aid observation.
Although, after absorbing the ‘Talent Sequence 34: Waiter’ Secret Medicine, which enhanced his physical abilities, He Ao had almost come to use it exclusively as a combat skill.
Still, the consequence-free mode differed from the Life Consuming mode; while the consequence-free mode could only record the details of his surroundings and was unable to predict an enemy’s further actions, the Life Consuming mode could do just that.
The Life Consuming mode was a bit like overclocking the already expanded computing power, adding an extra portion of computational capacity.
During those thirty seconds, He Ao quickly flipped through the First District section of the “Restoration of Partial Texts from the Original Federation’s Regions” that he held in his hands.
Then he got up from the front desk, took advantage of the effect of the Super Memory before it faded, dashed out of the library doors, and took in all the people and scenery outside the library at a glance.
As he finished taking everything in and his gaze narrowed, the effect of the Super Memory also vanished.
Then he calmly walked back into the library.
In a corner of the street in front of the library, two young men dressed in casual clothes were sitting in a car, looking confused as He Ao walked back into the library.
“Bro, what’s up with this Old Geezer?
Why did he suddenly run out and back in?”
The young man in the passenger seat was puzzled.
“Don’t know,” the young man in the driver’s seat lit a cigarette, “maybe he’s senile.
It’s common for elderly folks at that age to have the disease.
We’re just here to watch, not to meddle in things that don’t concern us.”
“Our gang isn’t having it easy, either, now taking on jobs from retirement homes, even having to keep an eye on those with dementia.”
The young man in the passenger seat sighed.
——
Back at the front desk, He Ao continued to translate the contents of the small book.
Although this ‘Text Restoration’ had dozens of pages introducing the script of the First District, it actually involved just over a hundred characters.
Most of these characters were commonly used or seen in everyday life, such as parts of the body ‘hand’ ‘foot’ ‘mouth’, or internal organs, ‘heart’ ‘liver’ ‘lungs’, or daily necessities like ‘cup’ ‘quilt’ ‘bed’, along with some conjunctions, such as ‘and’ ‘with’ ‘and’.
Just with these characters, He Ao was still unable to translate most of the sentences in the small book, but he had managed to deduce two sentences.
The first was the very first sentence of the small book, the one starting with ‘Heaven.’ That sentence was not ‘Heavenly Qi exploded the lungs.’ The full sentence was,
‘Heavenly Qi connects to the lungs, Earth Qi connects to the throat.’
“嗌” is a relatively rare character, but coincidentally it appears in this book, where it means ‘throat’.
He Ao’s understanding of this sentence was roughly that ‘Heaven Qi’ connects to the lungs, while ‘Earth Qi’ connects to the throat.
He came to this understanding because the sentence reminded him of energy absorption; the energy he breathed in entered his chest cavity, which in some sense was the ‘lungs’, and the energy from food he consumed gathered in his throat.
So, the very first sentence of the whole book was likely discussing energy absorption.
He guessed that the energy absorbed from nature through breathing was called ‘Heaven Qi’ in the booklet, while the energy present in matter and taken in through food was referred to as ‘Earth Qi’.
Besides the opening sentence, he had also translated another sentence, not following the first sentence but on the fourth page.
The illustration on the fourth page depicted a person’s cross-sectional view, with various organs squeezed together within the body.
The text beneath was long, but not complicated, making it easy to translate.
The approximate meaning of the sentence was,
‘Heaven is Yang, Earth is Yin; the harmony of Yin and Yang gives birth to the Five Elements: Metal birth lungs, Wood birth liver, Water birth kidneys, Fire birth heart, Earth birth spleen’
He Ao couldn’t yet grasp the meaning of this sentence; he estimated that he would only understand it when he reached that stage of cultivation, combining practical experience with theory.
For instance, on pages one to three, aside from the phrase, ‘Heaven Qi connects to the lungs, Earth Qi to the throat,’ he couldn’t translate most of it fully, but he could guess from the fragmented phrases that these three pages were about the pathways of energy circulation within the body.
The first page described ‘Heaven Qi,’ detailing how to draw the energy introduced into the chest cavity up into the upper arms and how to let it flow between the hands, shoulders, and chest.
The second page discussed ‘Earth Qi’, specifically how to guide the power that entered the throat into the upper arms.
He Ao felt that the first two pages were more instructional in nature, with simpler and shorter pathways, aimed at helping cultivators to get started and become familiar with how to absorb and guide ‘Heaven Qi’ and ‘Earth Qi’ and how to cultivate.
But by the third page, the difficulty started to increase.
On the third page, there was no longer a distinction between ‘Heaven Qi’ and ‘Earth Qi’; instead, a dashed line was drawn from the throat to the chest cavity, indicating that the energy in the throat could be guided into the chest cavity and circulated along the ‘Heaven Qi’ pathway.
Next, He Ao tried to circulate energy according to the third page’s pathway; he began by breathing in, drawing energy into his chest cavity, then guiding it out. 𝓃𝓸𝓿𝓹𝓾𝓫.𝓬ℴ𝓶
This time the energy didn’t pass through the atrium but flowed from the area around the heart, across the ribs.
The energy flow pathway on the third page roughly went from the chest cavity, passing over the heart region, along the left ribs, around the navel, through the lower groin, then along the right leg, returning at the right big toe, passing up the right leg again, entering the left leg, returning from the left big toe, back up the left leg, through the lower groin, around the navel, along the right ribs, and back to the chest cavity.
The entire pathway wound through most of the torso and both legs, almost covering a full tour of the body.
However, because Regit’s body was constantly and crazily drawing energy, He Ao could only infuse it slowly.
The reason he started to attempt the third page’s pathway was that while he had been reading, he had also been trying to cultivate, but after his physical quality reached 40, having the energy pass through his arms no longer significantly improved his physical qualities, and absorption efficiency also became extremely slow.
He Ao guessed he had hit a bottleneck in the cultivation of his arms, so he began the training from the next page.
Without knowing how to break through the bottleneck, the best approach was to improve other parts as much as possible.
After waiting for around ten minutes, just as He Ao felt his physical quality was about to increase, his takeaway arrived.
So he went to get his boxed meal first.
And as he was about to eat, he suddenly realized that food in this world also contained energy, and food energy that converged in the throat was what the little book called ‘Earth Qi’.
The fourth page of the booklet said, ‘Heaven and Earth are Yin and Yang; Heaven Qi is ‘Yang’, Earth Qi is ‘Yin’.’
‘Yin and Yang combine to create the Five Elements’
Could it be that merging the two powers from the throat and the chest cavity could give birth to some new type of energy?
Thinking this, he quickly unwrapped his boxed meal, shoved a mouthful of food in, and indeed found that his throat began to surge with energy as he swallowed.
He took a breath at the same time, gathering a wisp of energy in his chest cavity, and then began to use the taught pathway from the third page to guide the energy in his throat toward the chest cavity.
