The cultivation technique Arthur chose to practice was called the Constellation Soul Art, and it was a weird one. Pretty much all cultivation techniques were built on accruing Qi into one’s Dantian or “Soul Sea” and then circulating that Qi throughout your body in order to strengthen it and utilize Qi techniques. There were variations, obviously, most of which revolved around only cultivating a specific type or types of elemental Qi or focused almost specifically on enhancing the body and its’ physical attributes. Things like tougher skin, greater strength, and so forth. That’s not how the Constellation Soul Art worked though.
The Constellation Soul Art worked by not only collecting Qi into the Dantian and using it as the reservoir, but also used one’s meridians to do the same thing on a smaller scale and having one’s Qi flow between all of them, like the lines connecting stars into a constellation. This had the practical upside of being able to amass a frankly ludicrous amount of Qi even in the early ranks, which was really useful in so far as it allowed those of lower cultivation to use more costly techniques meant for people of a higher level.That was the idea at least, nobody actually practiced it because of the severe downsides.
The first of which being that it was an excruciatingly slow art to practice due to the sheer amount of Qi needed to practice it coupled with having to treat each Meridian like its’ own little Dantian. The second down side was an extension of the first but didn’t really apply to Arthur at all. The Constellation Soul Art restricted the cultivator to exclusively cultivate pure Qi instead of any elemental variety. This wasn’t a problem to him because he didn’t have a Qi affinity in the first place, so his constitution would just filter it anyway, actually easing the slowness of the technique quite a bit by automating the most annoying part. The final downside was that it was purely a cultivation technique, with no special powers granted by Qi affinity or any martial techniques to speak of.
All of this culminated in the Constellation Soul Art essentially being relegated into a meme, shared among masters and scholars in a sort of “Get a load of this useless nonsense” kind of way. In fact, the way Arthur had encountered it was when he was drinking with a scholar friend of his and he dug it out to share the joke. At the time he’d been interested in it as an alternative to the Burning Soul Fist, but quickly found out that it had to be practiced from the beginning, and just thought that was another way the universe chose to screw with him. Boy was he glad he memorized it now.
The first basic step of the Constellation Soul Art was to accumulate Qi into his Dantian just like every other cultivation technique ever devised. The quirk of the technique meant Arthur had to have a looser grip on it so it could flow through his Qi channels and into his meridians like water flowing down a dry riverbed, and like a dry riverbed, his body would absorb the Qi into itself as it flowed. For the prospects of long term cultivation, this was a stupid and wasteful thing to let happen by the standards of pretty much any other cultivation art not specifically trying to enhance the body, but for him it was perfect. Arthur’s body would be strengthened by the Qi it absorbed, meaning that even in his current emaciated form, he would have the strength to move like a normal person instead of hobbling everywhere, very useful since he was planning to walk out into some kind of apocalypse.
Arthur’s first cultivation session was a long one, lasting over a day and a half with periodic breaks to eat and nap. He would have preferred to extend it another day or two to really give himself some gas in case of an emergency, but he was running out of vending machine food. Arthur would have to descend at least one hospital floor to find another one and if he was going to do that, he might as well go all the way to the ground floor, or at least the second, to get a better look at the conditions outside and maybe find a clue as to what the hell had happened while he was in the other world.
Feeling significantly better than he had the day previously, Arthur descended the stairs with a lantern he’d made out of a cut open energy drink can and another alcohol candle in one hand, and a broken table leg in the other as an improvised club. He knew that if he encountered anything, he wouldn’t be able to put up much of a fight, but he’d be damned if he didn’t at least go down swinging. The stairs down were completely bare and showed no signs of anything having walked them in quite some time, and it only took a few minutes to reach the ground floor. Arthur pushed the door to the ground floor open as quietly as he could manage, which, considering the door apparently hadn’t been oiled or opened in who the hell knew how long, was not quiet in the slightest.
With a sound like dragging a handful of nails across a chalkboard, the door squealed open like it was really gunning for lead sound effect in a horror movie, and Arthur prepped to die fighting whatever horrible snarly monster would jump him with everything he had. When nothing made so much as a peep, he lowered his club and stepped through. The ground floor was even more of a mess than upstairs, with clear signs of people getting the hell out of dodge as fast as their legs could carry them. Upon closer inspection, there were no signs of a fight or any kind of threat, which was good, because that meant whatever threat had caused the evacuation was something people had the ability to run from. Arthur mentally crossed off zombie plague or any kind of WMD warfare from his mental list of horrible things that might’ve happened, natural disaster had also been crossed off earlier, since the parts of the city he could see from his hospital room were in a state of long term disrepair and in desperate need of a mow, but ultimately intact.
This did not make Arthur very happy, however, because in his mind that basically just left invasion level armed conflict as a possible reason for the apparent desertion of the city. Considering Arthur was pretty damn sure he was still in America, any armed conflict requiring evacuation of an entire city was a terrifying prospect, given the whole “a gun behind every blade of grass” thing and the general propensity of Americans to really hate people trespassing on their lawns.
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Arthur was vaguely wondering if he’d have to go all Red Dawn on some country’s army as he searched around for like a locker room or something so he could find some actual clothes instead of braving the outside world with his ass hanging out a hospital gown. He was successful in this endeavor, but only technically. The only set of clothes that kind of fit his tall and currently twig like frame was what had to be gym clothes consisting of a pair of sweatpants, a hoodie with the words “I have abs-olutely no idea what i’m doing that was about seven sizes too large, a blank black baseball cap, and a pair of sneakers that were a half a size too small.
Deciding that he might as well ransack the place while he was there, Arthur quickly busted into the remaining lockers and struck, if not gold, because that would be finding something like a fully loaded shotgun and a bag of ammo, at least bronze. Said bronze being a wooden baseball bat in the locker of someone who was probably part of a community baseball club, given the baseball uniform and mitt in the locker. Saying a quick prayer of thanks to the guy who left it behind, Arthur ditched his table club in favor of the bat and grabbed the gym bag he’d pulled the clothes out of, with his next task to be finding another vending machine.
Completing this task quickly, Arthur was just about to smash the vending machine open when he had a random question pop into his head and fly right out his mouth. “Why the hell hasn’t anybody raided this place”. As soon as that thought cycled through his ears and circled back to his brain from the wrong direction, it triggered three centuries of instincts and Arthur cast his senses around looking for something, anything to indicate that anyone had been here since whatever incident caused this. He found nothing.
Okay, evacuating after a problem is one thing. Nobody coming to see if there was anything worthwhile left “scavenging” was a completely different thing. Whatever happened was horrible enough that people ran and didn’t come back. He had to get out of here ASAP. With a crash, the protective glass on the vending machine was smashed into teeny tiny pieces, and the contents quickly stuffed into the gym bag. Within ninety seconds he was out the door and heading north, having seen from the windows of the hospital that would be the closest direction to get out of the city in.
Arthur walked through the deserted streets of the city he still didn’t know the name of, casting his eyes about looking for some kind of clues, and finding little. It was obvious that something that happened though, because there were signs of destruction everywhere. Damaged buildings, flipped and or crushed cars, even the occasional crater. All of this coupled with how much nature had regrown to fill the space humanity had vacated, led Arthur to think he’d been gone a lot longer than six months. Maybe December 2024 was just when the incident occurred and people had to get out of dodge, triaging him as a patient too difficult to take with them and unlikely to awaken anytime soon, and thus left behind in the evacuation. He was really glad he hadn’t checked any of the other hospital rooms. The idea of seeing the corpse of someone left behind to die alone of their illness right after he woke up didn’t exactly give him the warm fuzzies.
Arthur made sure to travel in the center of the street as much as possible to cut down on the chance of being ambushed from one of the alleyways, keeping his eyes open and senses as sharp as he could make them as he scanned the surrounding area for any sign of threat, which was really helpful when he saw some foliage down the road move in a way inconsistent with the breeze blowing through the area just before an arrow shout out of it, flying straight for his face. It was only through reflexes honed through over three centuries of grueling combat, and tripping on a piece of rubble as his “OH SHIT” response kicked in and he startled backwards, that saved him from having another nostril installed in his skull.
As it was, the arrow only missed by a fraction of an inch with a bone chilling whistle. “FUCK,” Arthur shouted as he scrambled to take cover behind an SUV, narrowly dodging another arrow that actually buried itself halfway into the concrete instead of ricocheting off like something that obeyed the laws of physics. “You have got to be kidding me, that’s just not fair,” he complained as he slowly sidled to front of the SUV in the hopes the engine block would be able to stop the super arrows.
After an agonizingly long minute of hiding behind the SUV’s engine block without another shot being fired, in which Arthur used the time to stuff his heart back down his throat so he could breathe properly, a question popped into his head and flew out his mouth like a little foul mouthed fairy. “Who the hell is shooting at me, and why the hell do they have super powered arrows?” He knew of at least a few cultivation techniques that focused on using the bow as their primary weapon, but they were only practiced by a few people who where looked down upon for using a “dishonorable” weapon. That knowledge didn’t really help him in this situation though. Partly because that was in the other world, and partly because it didn’t matter if whoever was shooting at him was a cultivator or just using a baby ballista, the important part was that he was being shot at.
Arthur needed to move and at least find better cover, if not ditch the sniper entirely, but he was pinned. As an experiment, he put his ball cap on the end of the bat and stuck it into the air, where it promptly caught an arrow and was wrenched from his hand, sent flying away with the upper third smashed into matchsticks and leaving Arthur’s hand stinging like a bitch.
“Well shit”.
