Dawn broke over the forest in a cascade of golden light that made Axel's eyes water. He'd barely slept, too afraid of the sounds in the darkness, too focused on trying to replicate that tiny success from the evening before.
His body ached in ways that had nothing to do with sleeping against a tree trunk. Hunger gnawed at his stomach with increasing urgency. His throat was dry, desperate for water. But beneath all that physical discomfort, something new had taken root.
Energy. Just the barest whisper of it, but unmistakably present in a way it hadn't been yesterday.
Axel stood slowly, his legs protesting the movement, and tried to take stock of his situation. The fragmented memories from this body's original owner were less helpful than he'd hoped—just scattered images of a small village, faces of people now probably dead, and the most basic awareness of cultivation without any actual technique or training.
He was essentially starting from zero in a world where zero meant death.
"Water first," he muttered to himself, the sound of his own voice oddly comforting in the vast silence of the forest. "Then food. Then figure out this cultivation thing."
Following the slight downward slope of the terrain, Axel eventually found a small stream, its water so clear he could see every stone on the bottom. He drank deeply, the cold liquid sending shocks through his system, and felt marginally more human.
Food was harder. He recognized almost nothing growing around him. The fruits hanging from nearby trees could be delicious or deadly poisonous, and he had no way to tell which. Eventually, he found some roots that looked vaguely familiar from the body's memories and risked eating them raw. They were bitter and tough, but they stayed down.
Survival needs addressed—barely—Axel returned to the more pressing question: how did cultivation actually work?
The memories gave him concepts but not methods. Qi was the energy of the world. Meridians were channels in the body through which that energy flowed. The dantian was a reservoir in the lower abdomen where power accumulated. But knowing those things was like knowing that cars had engines without understanding how to drive.
He needed to experiment.
Axel found a relatively comfortable spot beneath a large tree and settled into a cross-legged position that felt more natural than it should have. The body's muscle memory, perhaps, from the original owner's failed cultivation attempts.
He closed his eyes and focused on his breathing, trying to recreate whatever he'd done the night before. In, out. Slow and steady. Trying to feel the energy in the air around him.
Minutes passed. Nothing.
More minutes. Still nothing.
Frustration built in his chest, hot and urgent. He'd felt it last night, hadn't he? That tiny spark of energy entering his body? Or had he imagined it in his desperation and exhaustion?
No. It had been real. He was certain of it.
Axel forced himself to relax, to release the tension that had crept into his shoulders and jaw. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe he was trying too hard, forcing something that needed to be coaxed.
He let his breathing slow even further, until each inhale and exhale took several seconds. He stopped trying to grasp the energy and instead just... observed. Felt. Experienced the world around him without judgment or expectation.
And there it was.
Not in the air, exactly, but somehow present in everything. The trees, the earth, the water, the sunlight filtering through the canopy. Energy hummed through all of it, a frequency just below normal perception.
Axel breathed in, and this time he felt a tiny amount of that energy come with the breath. It was like drinking water but for some other kind of thirst he hadn't known existed.
The energy settled in his chest, warm and alive, and for a moment he panicked, not knowing what to do with it. The fragmented memories whispered something about meridians, about circulation, but the details were frustratingly vague.
Before he could overthink it, his body seemed to know what to do on its own. The energy moved, flowing downward from his chest toward his lower abdomen, following paths that he couldn't see but could somehow feel.
It was the strangest sensation—like blood flowing through veins, but lighter, faster, electric. The energy traced a circuit through his body that felt both alien and natural, ending in a space near his navel that must be the dantian.
The amount was tiny, almost negligible. But it was there. Real. Proof that this wasn't some elaborate hallucination or dying dream.
Axel kept breathing, kept drawing in those microscopic amounts of Qi. Each breath added a little more to the reservoir forming in his dantian. It was painfully slow progress, like filling an ocean with an eyedropper, but it was progress.
Hours passed. The sun climbed higher. Axel lost track of time, lost track of everything except the rhythm of breathing and the slow accumulation of energy within.
When he finally opened his eyes, the sun was past its zenith, beginning its afternoon descent. His stomach growled with renewed urgency, reminding him that cultivation didn't eliminate the need for actual food.
But something fundamental had changed. He could feel it—a warmth in his lower abdomen that hadn't been there before. A reservoir of energy, small but growing, that made him feel less weak, less fragile.
Axel stood and stretched, and realized with surprise that his legs didn't shake as badly as they had that morning. The exhaustion was still there, the hunger still gnawed, but underneath it all was a new foundation of strength.
This was Stage 1 Early cultivation, according to the fragmentary knowledge in his inherited memories. Body Tempering, the first step on a path that could lead to immortality or death depending on talent, resources, and luck.
For someone like the original owner of this body—weak spiritual roots, no training, no resources—even reaching this point had been difficult. Most people with his level of talent would never advance beyond the most basic stages.
But Axel had one advantage the original owner hadn't: experience from a world with different rules. On Earth, he'd learned that success was less about raw talent and more about consistent effort, careful planning, and refusing to give up even when progress seemed impossible.
If cultivation was a system—and everything he'd seen suggested it was—then it could be optimized, improved, exploited within the bounds of its rules.
He just needed to figure out what those rules were.
As the afternoon wore on, Axel continued his experiments. He tried cultivating while walking—it worked, but less efficiently. He tried cultivating after eating—slightly better energy absorption. He tried cultivating near the stream versus deeper in the forest—the stream seemed to have slightly more ambient energy, possibly because of the moving water.
Each observation was filed away, building a mental database of how this world's power system functioned. It was crude, probably missing important details, but it was a start.
By evening, Axel could feel a definite difference in his body. The Qi in his dantian had grown from a spark to a small ember. His movements were steadier, his breathing easier. The weakness that had plagued him since awakening in this world had diminished noticeably.
This was working. Slowly, painfully slowly, but working.
As darkness fell once again, Axel prepared a simple camp—gathering fallen branches for a potential fire, though he had no way to start one, and clearing an area of sharp rocks and roots. He settled in for another night of cultivation, determined to make every hour count.
The forest around him was alive with sounds—rustling leaves, distant animal calls, the whisper of wind through ancient trees. Any of those sounds could represent danger, but Axel pushed the fear aside. Worry wouldn't change anything. Action would.
He closed his eyes and sank into meditation, feeling the world's energy flow into him with each breath. The reservoir in his dantian grew microscopically larger. His connection to the Qi around him strengthened by imperceptible degrees.
In a world where power meant survival, every tiny improvement mattered.
Axel breathed in. Breathed out. And took another step forward on a path he was only beginning to understand.
The night deepened, but he no longer feared it quite as much. Because now he had something the original owner of this body never had—direction, purpose, and a systematic approach to growth.
He would master this cultivation thing, one breath at a time if necessary.
He had no other choice.