In total, the initial meditation exercise had lasted just over two hours. If anyone outside the school had been told that 300 six-year-old children had sat quietly for over two hours, they wouldn’t have believed them, not at all. Yet the wonders these children were discovering kept them wholly captivated, their bodies secondary to the wondrous experience of drawing in the natural energy around them.

Xinasa was joyous as she called an end to their meditations. Seven! Seven children had connected with their core on their first attempt! The results were bordering on outrageous, showing just how much potential these children had. In her experience only those with truly monstrous talent connected with only the barest hint of effort. On other planes, it would be a momentous event to find just one, but here they had found seven. The results were almost unbelievable.

Even better, there wasn’t a single child that didn’t show at least some progress. Oftentimes even children who possessed a natural talent for cultivation in their bodies lacked some other faculty that made it difficult to take those first steps. Yet here not one child had been truly unable to touch the natural energy about them. Almost a third had managed to draw in some, though few had managed more than a tiny thread. Still, for them to achieve that much at this early stage was a sign of great potential.

Then there had been that girl. Xinasa hadn’t gotten her name, but she’d noticed her reaction. The girl had touched the natural energy almost as soon as she’d closed her eyes. She’d drawn it in as if it was merely air. She’d even managed to reach the first minor completion of the Connection Phase – the spirit pulse. A core that was not yet fully opened, that was immature in other words, couldn't contain energy.

Instead, it was like an open dam at first, simply slowing the flow of natural energy and allowing it to pool slightly. The first step to developing a true core, the first minor completion, was to overflow that dam, drawing in enough energy that it flowed out around the dam rather than through it and generating a flood of energy throughout the body – a spirit pulse. This pulse resonated with the body, giving it the very first taste of natural energy. While it couldn’t qualify as refined it still generated a euphoric reaction as the body rejoiced in its access to this new power. In many cultivators’ minds, the euphoria of that first touch overshadowed even the greatest pleasures of the bedroom.

For that little girl to have drawn in even that much energy so soon her affinity for cultivation must be unfathomable. To be clear, a cultivator’s talent was measured by many different things all lumped together – their affinity for natural energy of various types, which is required for them to be able to connect with the energy and draw it in, their meridian size, strength, and layout, which determines how much of the energy that they could connect with could actually be channeled through the body at any one time, their core size and strength, which determined how much energy a cultivator could actually retain, and finally their comprehension, which governed how efficiently they could put the energy they had to use. There were also other things, such as the strength of the Dao Heart, but those weren’t directly connected to cultivation at this stage, though at later stages the Dao Heart became intricately linked to one’s progress.

What the little girl had achieved meant one of two things; either she had an above-average affinity for natural energy and above-average meridians paired with an incredibly small natural core or she had a monstrous affinity and meridians paired with an above-average core. The larger her core, the stronger the other two factors would have to be to compensate. The fact that she was here at all meant that her core was at least average, meaning that this little girl must have taken in an impressive amount of natural energy to achieve the spirit pulse.

This put Xinasa in quite a quandary. Did she single the girl out for special attention? Or did she treat her the same as all the other students for now and let her figure it out on her own? In a normal sect, there would have been no question – the girl would have been singled out and treated like a descended goddess come to reign over them all. Xinasa knew that such treatment all too often led to such ‘geniuses’ experiencing a bad end, either through their arrogance or from the jealousy of others. Earth had another answer, one that would have her keep the girl in ignorance of her status as long as possible. The problem with that approach was that it could stunt her early growth, something that many would view as unforgivable.

Cultivation was an endless race against time, with each realm adding to the lifespan of the cultivator and challenging them to reach the next realm before it ran out. The early realms were particularly hard on cultivators since the lifespan gains were meager, meaning that one couldn’t tarry. Working against this was the knowledge that these early realms built the foundation for later realms, meaning moving too quickly here would limit future power and growth, something every cultivator dreaded.

Thus these early realms acted as a balancing act, with the geniuses delaying growth to strengthen their foundations while the less gifted rushed to make their breakthroughs. Generally speaking, the most cultivator clans encouraged their children to advance from the mortal realm around age 12. Any sooner and not only did the cultivator sacrifice the chance to build a deeper foundation but the effects of advancement, that is the slowing of biological aging, could leave the cultivator in a child’s body for twenty or thirty extra years – not a fun prospect for most.

The problem wasn’t the advancement between realms, however, at least not currently. The problem was that even the steps within the realms offered significant increases in power. As the girl advanced through the mortal realm, and gradually left the bonds of mortality behind, she would gain in both physical and mental prowess. If she got more than a step or two ahead of the other children she would likely find herself ostracized due to being too strong and too smart. Left without explanation, such situations could greatly affect the direction of a cultivator’s early development, even so far as to scar their Dao Heart. It wasn’t uncommon for children in such positions to grow into devil cultivators, a plague which Xinasa adamantly refused to allow within her sect.

They did have a plan for this particular occurrence. The problem was that they didn’t expect to have to implement it so soon. Generally speaking, those with exceptional talents didn’t truly begin to distinguish themselves in the Connection Phase, since they were typically bottlenecked in one of the three major areas this phase concerned – affinity, meridians, and core. If either of the first two were lacking, the rate they drew in natural energy was stunted. On the flip side, if the core was too large in comparison to the other two it could take monumental effort to draw in enough energy to reach even the spirit pulse. While other steps could be approached gradually, building up energy and storing it in the core to gather the necessary energy to move forward, the first steps of the Connection Phase had to be done as all or nothing since the core couldn’t store energy for any length of time yet.

This also explained why there weren’t more cultivators and why testing for talent was so important. If one was born with either affinity or meridians lacking, it would be nearly impossible to complete the Opening Phase without special assistance. Such assistance was possible but generally considered a waste. The only exception was if one was born with an over-sized core potential. In such circumstances simply performing meditations within an energy gathering array solved the problem.

Once talent was identified, however, the only real block to becoming a cultivator was a minor comprehension test – one simply had to familiarize themselves with the meditations necessary to draw in energy. In this phase those with fairly modest talents tended to proceed rather quickly because their core potential was small, meaning they had to draw in less energy to proceed. Because of this, true geniuses weren’t generally identified in the Connection Phase. However, this girl wouldn’t be here if she didn’t have at least an above-average core potential, meaning that even in the energy-rich environment of the school she had to have a fairly large advantage in both affinity and meridians to have achieved a spirit pulse on the first try. It was likely that her average classmate would be a week or more familiarizing themselves with the meditation sufficiently to draw in enough energy to achieve a spirit pulse.

If she pushed the girl forward now she would reach Excavation Phase much sooner than her classmates. Of course, her classmates would eventually catch up – she only had so much potential to excavate, after all – but it might take a year or more for her peers to catch up. To her, that didn’t sound like a lot of time, but a year of social exile to a child of six was forever. When the gap closed again, which it inevitably would, at least for a while, her peers might be sorely tempted to punish her for her excellence while they had a chance, especially if her excellence bred arrogance, which was often the case.

It sounded like a mess to Xinasa, but she was at a loss as to what to do about it. She could deliberately suppress the girl, but that ran counter to everything she had ever been taught. Worse, doing so might damage the girl. If she allowed her to continue, however, they would have no choice but to show her the next steps on the path, lest she do damage to her body.

That thought stopped Xinasa for a moment. While, generally speaking, it was stupid to deliberately damage oneself, there were times when doing so was advantageous. There was a whole branch of cultivation dedicated to harming oneself to grow stronger – Body Cultivation. Generally speaking, most cultivators did the bare minimum of body cultivation since it required enduring pain to make any substantive progress. This girl, however, might be at just the right moment to avoid some of that. She would be sore as if she’d played an entire day at top speed without a break, but it shouldn’t do any real harm since the amount of Qi involved, despite seeming massive to the cultivators going through the process, were very small.

Taken with the idea, she went to visit her master. It took only a few minutes before she was allowed inside. They discussed the idea briefly before Master Zhao agreed to it. He spent nearly two hours searching his prodigious memory for a suitable method before he had to admit that he’d never encountered anything like she was proposing. Given how rare it was for him to encounter something truly unique, she now had his full attention. He sent several messages to associates and friends asking after such a cultivation technique. He didn’t expect to find any positive results, but it didn’t hurt to try.

Given that they lacked a specific method to perform the cultivation she was proposing, Xinasa and Master Zhao put together a meeting of disciples, mostly those teaching at the school, to begin pondering just how such a method should work. It lasted all night and into the morning, after which many of the teachers left to attend other duties, but by then they had a solid foundation for how to proceed. The technique they were building wouldn’t be all that special, and it probably wouldn’t make much of a difference in the long run, but it would add another layer to the students’ foundations and give something for the ‘genius’ students to do while the others caught up. It would create a slight imbalance in physical prowess in the short term, but it would likely be small enough to go unnoticed and disappear fairly quickly. With that said, one could never put too much effort into their foundation. Every little bit would pay out dividends in the future. Those who had the chance to spend a significant amount of time with this technique would likely find body cultivation much, much easier in the future.

The mechanics revolved around the peculiarities of the spirit pulse itself. The pulse caused euphoria for two reasons. First, the body was receiving natural energy for the first time. Like a wanderer dying of thirst, the first drops of water cause a cascade of pleasure. The second reason was that the natural energy, despite being unrefined, had resided in the person’s core for some time, building up a resonance. This resonance was what allowed the natural energy of the spirit pulse to open the core in the first place, once it was suitably directed. Dispersed, however, it caused the spirit to resonate, causing pleasure.

Of course, there was good and bad to this. Since the energy in the pulse was unrefined it contained impurities that could cause all sorts of problems if they were allowed to build up. The method they devised, however, allowed the natural energy to act as a sort of… scrub, pulling the natural energy into the body, impurities included, and then wash them away as the energy moved on. The idea was that the energy would force the body to endure waves of both stress and rejuvenation all at once. Normally this would be a stupid idea since the amount of energy that a cultivator could bring to bear to produce such an effect would cause massive levels of pain and discomfort for very little gain. However, the spirit pulse was so relatively small and dispersed so rapidly that at most it should induce mild fatigue and minor aches and pains. The real trick would be to continue to generate the pulse without actually opening the core. This turned out to be rather simple to avoid, however.

It was unknown, however, what effect causing the spirit to resonate would have if done more than a few times. Theoretically, it should have none at all, but since such things were only either done with a person’s own Qi or as an attack, they weren’t quite sure what the effect would be in the long run. They postulated that it might strengthen the spirit, but that was just a guess.

Whether the process was worth doing was anyone’s guess, but by the time Xinasa left they were all resolved to try. The plan made, she left to handle her duties and prepare for the cultivation session that evening.