The Lesser Heavenly Cycle Breathing Art

The beginner’s breathing art that circulates openly in Qingqi Market. It runs the Governing Vessel, three layers in all, and nine in ten rogue cultivators in the market town train this one. Copies are everywhere, and two or three copper coins buys one.

The verses are short and the road is straight: qi rises in the dantian, sinks down, travels upward along the lower stretch of the Governing Vessel, and is held at the middle stretch. Almost nobody comes to grief in the first two layers. Half a shichen sitting morning and evening, and the diligent hold the second layer steady within three to five months. Cheap, easy to start on — that is why it spread.

It is also the easiest thing in the market town to get hold of. The copies carry no imprint and no provenance, and the stallholders themselves cannot say which copy theirs was written out from. A few talisman stalls on West Street copy them out on the side and sell them, and the labour on a copy comes to less than half a day. The sects take outer-gate disciples from the third layer of Qi Condensation upward, and this art is written down to exactly the third layer, which makes it the one knocker on that door a rogue cultivator in the market town can reach.

The copies come in several grades. The two or three copper coin ones on the West Street stalls are on coarse paper with crooked characters, and a word or two dropped in the copying is ordinary. The fair copies at the South Market bookshops go for 50 copper coins, the characters even and the paper stiff. The kind a pill-shop keeper keeps at the bottom of his chest, said to have been checked against 3 different copies, is priced at one spirit stone, and not many buy it. Whatever the grade, though, around the third layer a few in every ten stick for no reason anyone can name, or take a qi deviation at one fixed place.

And the places where they stick match one another. If it were really a matter of differing aptitude, some would stop at the second layer and some at the third, scattered all over. What actually happens is that a whole batch of them sticks on the same stretch of road, at the same turn. The qi deviations are neater still: when it comes on, the same place goes tight first and the same place bursts first.

The market town’s version is that your aptitude has reached its limit. The line is extremely serviceable — the man saying it need explain nothing, and the man hearing it has nothing to argue back with. Of the rogue cultivators squatting at the foot of the West Street walls, eight in ten have been talked round by it.

The outer gates of the sects have beginner’s breathing arts of their own. The road through the first three layers is much the same, and men stick there too. Only, up the mountain, the thing is called uneven root-bone.

Trained honestly, it will indeed carry a man a stretch of the way. It is only that the end of that stretch looks as though someone had measured it out in advance.