God Of Crafting

Chapter 56: Learning the basics of cultivation

I sat down in nothing but my underwear and with my legs comfortably crossed. My hands rested down on my knees, allowing me to fully relax my shoulders.

In fact, if not for the heavily ingrained habit of keeping my back perfectly straight at all times, I would likely slump down and, before long, fall into the sweet embrace of the nap.

The place where I sat down was merely a few meters away from where I had just sat with Claire and drank their insanely tasty herbal tea... And yet, with about ten meters of space between me and that very chair, it was still the closest piece of furniture to me in the entirety of the room.

In essence, this whole place looked like a big but relatively ordinary mansion that was transformed into a cultivator's abode only after its construction was finished.

With the eye of my imagination, I could easily picture a dividing wall going across the massive room to separate the living area with the sofa, chairs, table, cabinets, and all the other pieces of furniture one could expect from the day room from the perfectly clean, open side of it with nothing but thick padding laid across the floor.

"Okay, let's start with the basics," Claire announced right as I was not only done with learning everything there was to learn about the room and readily approaching the point where, even while keeping my back straight, I was starting to succumb to my desire to take a nap.

She walked back into the room... in an outfit looking like something in between a proper nightgown and a sexy lingerie aimed to tease all that was underneath.

'Is it her way of preparing for the reward I mentioned hoping for?' I thought, sparing her but a single glance before closing my eyes shut and regulating my breathing to calm down the small spark of excitement invoked by her looks in the single instant before I shut my vision off.

"Mortal cultivation can be divided, in rough terms, into three stages," Claire started with the very basics... that already went beyond what I knew beforehand.

"The first phase of cultivation is all about manipulation of the spiritual force. During the first step, you learn how to properly gather it. Or, in more pragmatic terms, you learn how to absorb it from whatever medium you are using, be it the air around you, a medicinal bath, or even holy flames.

This step can be further divided into the ability to sense your inner Qi, the ability to sense the free Qi, the ability to infuse your body with the free Qi, and so on."

It was but a single episode of my childhood... yet one that, through the slipper of my mother, ended up deeply ingrained into my mentality, now appearing as an indeliberate choice of words and comparisons during a cultivation lesson.

'In a sense, one could turn it into a joke. What does a moonshine have to do with cultivation?' I thought, trying not to smirk at the silliness of this thought.

"That's... pretty interesting way to put it," Claire's voice grew slightly warmer for reasons I could likely guess... if I had the balls to open my eyes and take a look at her face.

Yet, given her choice of clothing for the lesson, by opening my eyes, I risked putting my concentration on an axe!

After all, how could I focus on the details of Claire's lesson when all I could think about were her curves joyfully bouncing up and down with every step she took?

"You can remember the second step as turning the spiritual energy denser while the third step as making it more... pure? Or just remember it as the step of cleaning your own Qi. While the theory behind those two steps can seem hard to distinguish, it's really easier to feel the difference on a practical level," Claire explained before clearing her thoughts.

"Now then, moving on to the fourth stage..." she hesitated for a second, "there are two schools of thought. Some believe it to be the last step of the spiritual cultivation of the mortal phase, while others argue it's a transitional stage with all the rights for a separate categorization."

"And that fourth stage is...?" I asked as soon as I sensed Claire close her sentence.

"Flesh-Qi balance, otherwise called bodily purification," Claire answered as swiftly as I did ask the question, hinting if not outright proving that she somewhat expected me to ask about it.

"Even though it's the fourth stage already, you should know it from all the media renditions of it, especially popular in cultivation dramas," Claire explained only to then stop her pace, once again standing still right in front of me.

"This is the stage where cultivators use their condensed and purified Qi to cleanse their flesh from all the physical imperfections, turning their bodies into vessels capable of the second phase of cultivation, the four core-based stages."