Addendum | Why the Market's Rogue Cultivators Always Stall — A Few Explanations No One Says Aloud

(This entry is a compilation of market hearsay, mostly what rogue cultivators say to one another. It represents no sect's position.)

Stay long enough in Qingqi Market and you notice this: men who have stalled are everywhere, and word of someone breaking through comes maybe once a year. Of those squatting at the foot of the West Street wall, seven in ten sit below the third layer of Qi Condensation.

The same low-grade art: a sect disciple carries it upward, while a rogue cultivator gets halfway, tears his meridians, deviates, and jams for good. Why? The market has a few explanations. Here they are; weigh them yourself.

Before you weigh them, look at the ledger. A full hand at the West Street mine earns 80 coppers a month. Qi Condensation Powder is 3 coppers a pill, 8 coppers for a dose of 10, and a man between the first and third layers swallows 1 to 2 a day. The debt from a single qi deviation is reckoned separately: a Spirit-Reviving Pill at double for urgency, 24 coppers; pressing the points to channel qi, 50; the care fee, 100. Altogether 174 coppers, better than two months' work at the mine. Those who cannot pay sign a cultivation indenture, and those with nothing left to sign are carried away.

The first: blame aptitude.This is the explanation that costs the least trouble, and the one the sects would most like you to believe: you cannot climb because your root-bone is poor and your temperament is unsettled. Blaming yourself is safest. Blame anywhere else and you have to ask who.

There is a place where this does not add up. If it were truly a matter of differing aptitude, the stalling points would scatter; instead a whole batch of men stop at the same turn, and the ones who deviate all seize in the same spot and burst in the same spot.

The second: blame pill poison.Three firings in ten of the market's low-grade pills carry poison, and the meridians have long been laying down hidden damage. Of the Qi Condensation Powder a middling pill shop sells in 3 months, at least a tenth comes back on its batch mark; the death-black pills in the waste-pill vat, the kind that tear your meridians the moment you swallow, come out at a steady 2 to 3 every month. The return rule runs smoothly as well, one back and one replaced, so smoothly that nobody asks why that tenth is a tenth year after year.

But it explains nothing about one thing — why rogue cultivators who never touch a market pill stall just the same.

The third: blame the art.For this one a man checks that there is nobody to his left or right before he drops his voice. They say the arts circulating in rogue hands and the versions in the sects' inner vaults are not the same text at all; the opening and the closing are both still there, and the middle stretch, the one that matters, has been dug out. Practise the broken thing and of course it goes nowhere. Copies come in grades, from a couple of coppers a sheet up to a whole spirit stone, and at whatever grade, around the third layer someone always stops in the same place.

Ask enough people and you find the accounts do not meet. An outer-gate disciple says men stall up on the mountain too, only up there it is not called stalling, it is called uneven root-bone, 4 words, and nothing follows them. A pill-shop keeper says it is the firing, says nobody watched the charcoal that night, and goes back to working his abacus. A rogue cultivator hauling herbs on West Street puts it flatly: what they practise up the mountain and what we practise down here were never the same document.

At the East Mouth wine stall an old rogue cultivator set down his bowl and spoke of something else: when he was young he saw a copy with nothing missing from it, pressed under a dead man's pillow.

Four accounts, and they mostly land in the same place: the fault is the rogue cultivator's own. Only the last one landed somewhere else.

One more saying is worth clearing up. The market says "stalling means poor aptitude," but the market cannot measure aptitude at all; what it can measure is layers. The sects take men in with a slab of green stone half a man's height, and you lay your hand on it and run your qi, and the rings on its face light up to whatever layer you reach. The stone measures only whether the qi holds steady. A steward writes that into the register, and read back afterwards it has become aptitude.

There is one thing the market's old rogue cultivators all nod at, though: the road that truly goes upward was never inside an art sold in the market. You can buy the opening, you can buy the closing, and the one stretch you cannot buy is the middle — every low-grade art under heaven, with nothing arranged between them, is missing in the same place.

Coincidence? Nobody can answer that. Lame Yu at the West Street talisman stall did say one honest thing: of the breathing arts he copies out for customers, whichever exemplar he works from, his brush catches at the same few lines in the middle. He says those lines simply never ran smoothly, and after enough years the hand knows it on its own.