The world had just starting to welcome the coming of the sun.The earth basked in the warm light, wait a minute, why was the sky orangeish? Li Kong raised from his bed and looked out of the window.
"Wake up yet?" A light voice resounded right inside of his ears.
"Woah!" Li Kong's body jumped out of surprise. "Oh, that's you White. How long did I sleep?"
"Not too long. Just around twelve hours." White said nonchalantly.
"Twelve hours?!"Hearing that, Li Kong's mouth was agape.
"That's what you get for not listening to me." White snorted. "I told you to rest and you kept on meditating as if there was no tomorrow. At this point, I'm rather amazed that your brain hadn't shut down yet from the sheer mental burden you put on it."
"I'm sorry, White. I promise I'll never do it again." Sensing the great displeasure, Li Kong uttered in the most sincere manners he could think of.
"Bah. As if a brat like you know how to keep a promise." White whiffed out of his nose.
Li Kong peeked a little at the bead and when he sensed no projectiles was coming after his head, he heaved out a relief.
After a little talk they had after Li Kong awoke, the clarity of Li Kong's mind had come back as the memories of the last night struck Li Kong like a lighting and he jumped around the room.
"I did it! I did it! I can't believe I did it!" Li Kong throwed several quick jabs to the air.
"I succeed, White! I actually did it! Isn't that awesome?" Li Kong jumped back to the bed and grabbed the bead and tossed in the air a few times.
"I know, I know. Stop throwing me in the air!" White voiced a complaint which fell on deaf ears.
An imaginary bulge formed on top of the bead's surfaces as an invisible projectile suddenly hit Li Kong's head in full force which made him bit his own tongue.
"Argh!" Li Kong screamed in pain as he desperately tried to ease the pain by sticking out his tongue to the air and frantically blowing out air from his mouth.
"Whaa wha dat?" Li Kong said in resentful tone while keeping his mouth open like a dead fish.
"Something you deserve." White refused to elaborate any further.
Li Kong couldn't care less about anything else and trying his best to ease the pain of his swelling tongue.
"Do you feel anything different?" White asked.
"What do you mean by that?"
"Anything different from the usual?"
"Hmm..?" Li Kong pulled of his clothes forward and took a peek at his body. Same old thing.
After that, Li Kong looked at the white bead with a confused expression and said, "I don't think there's anything different."
"Of course, you won't feel anything with your body. I mean your senses. Your vision. Can you see anything different?"
'Anything different?' Li Kong thought to himself.
Following White's instructions, he tried to observe his surroundings but he didn't notice anything different from usual.
Questions started piling up in his head but he refrained from asking White.
'Maybe if I focus my senses on my eyes?'
Li Kong closed his eyes tightly and carefully managed his breathings and soon, he entered a meditation-like state.
The overnight training he had done before had given him a quite peculiar skill and that was the ability to manipulate his senses to his liking. He was able to chose his area of focus by "pushing" or "pulling" his senses in the boundary but the skill put too much mental burden on himself so he needed to
After a while, Li Kong finally opened his eyes and to his shock suddenly the world around him changed leaving him beyond shocked.
"You can see it, don't you?" White's light voice went through his ears but it didn't managed to get to Li Kong's mind.
"Wow." Li Kong unconsciously let out a word of admiration.
Countless golden particles that was invisible to his eyes before had revealed itself right before his eyes and swirling through the air continuously as if following the path of the wind.
Li Kong tried to grasp the particles but his hand phased through it like the particles was never there at the first place and quickly dispersed out of sight leaving behind Li Kong who was still yet to processed what had just happened.
"What?"
"Of course, it'll phase through your hands. You hadn't reach the proper stage yet." White explained shortly.
"Oh..." Li Kong was a bit disappointed but quickly dispersed the negative thoughts.
"I will train even harder from now on!" Flames blazing through his eyes, determined to advance even further..
"Good, that's the spirit and..." Li Kong looked at the bead on top of his palm. "...Congratulation, Li Kong! You are a cultivator now."
Li Kong blinked for a few times, "What?"
...
"I'm already a cultivator? How?" Li Kong started shaking the bead around in his clasped hand.
He raised his palms in front of his face and stared at them intently in disbelief.
"But how? I never done the absorption step and circulate Qi in my body. Isn't that the requirement to enter the first stage?"
"It all happened when you collapsed from fatigue, a surge of Qi suddenly sucked into your body and by the time I realized something was wrong, a huge amount of Qi was already sucked into your body.
"After that, I checked your body and to my surprise, there was nothing wrong with your body. All of your meridian has opened and the streams of Qi had circulated in your body without any problem. Shocking really. I thought that you would explode from the amount of Qi you absorbed."
"Explode?" Li Kong gulped down.
'What happened when I was asleep?'
"It was as though the Qi was trying to fill in the empty space." White added.
"Filling in an empty space? Empty..." Li Kong's eyes suddenly widened. "Empty!"
The bead glowed amicably as if smiling.
"Could it be my spirit root doing?"
"It seems that we've come up with the same conclusion." White nodded.
"Now, try to sense the Qi inside of your body."
Li Kong didn't waste even a single breath as he nodded at the instructions and immediately went into meditation state.
'I can feel it. A warm feeling slowly coursing through my entire body and somehow becoming aware of it makes me feel kind of stronger?' Li Kong didn't really get it either and decided to abandoned the thoughts.
"Can you sense it, Li Kong?" He heard the familiar light voice ringing in his ears.
"Yeah, it slowly flowing through my entire body! I feel like I'm bathing in a warm water." As Li Kong's words progressed, his tone gradually becoming more soft.
Li Kong heard a chuckle and the light voice continued to talk.
"Just be careful not to be too immersed or else you will piss yourself." .
Li Kong immediately turned pale and he pulled himself out from the meditation state.
"What was that for?" Li Kong sent an annoyed look to the white bead.
"Just reminding you before you actually doing it and wetting the bed in the process. After all, if the bed ever wet, then we may have a problem because I'm not going to touch it ever again."
Li Kong was left completely speechless.
"Now let's end the jest and get serious."
Li Kong immediately fixed his posture and put both of his hands on top of his lap and looked at the bead with a serious look.
"After last night, we finally learned something new about your spirit root or perhaps, constitution."
"Constitution?" Li Kong raised his eyebrows at the new terms.
"You heard that right. Last night when I've checked your body, I found that something was wrong and I sensed that my Qi was disappearing slowly that was the moment I came to the realization.
"A spirit root only affected your talent in cultivation such as how fast can you progress and the element you most attracted to and it never done anything other than that."
"So because of that you think that the cause of my spirit root is my constitution? My body?"
"Correct."
"I think I roughly understand what this "constitution" means now." Li Kong nodded.
"And the important talk must be what kind of constitution I have. Am I right, White?" Li Kong looked at the bead as he finished his words.
"I couldn't ask for a better student." The bead let out a warm voice.
Li Kong immediately scratched the back of his head and let out an embarrassed smile.
"What you embarrassed for, huh?"
"Nothing. Hehe." The curved on lips hadn't straightened yet.
White let out a huff before continuing. "To be honest Li Kong, in my thousands years of living, I've seen only one case that loosely resembled yours."
"Is it that rare?" Although Li Kong couldn't fully comprehend how long was thousands of years truly was but he knew that wisdom came with long age.
'Um, grandfather Zheng was 80 years old and he was already very smart and White was around more than a thousand years. So White must be hundreds times more smarter than grandfather right? Wow, White was so old.'
For some reason, White felt very pissed all of a sudden but he didn't let the feeling ruled over him and went back to explaining.
"Now back to the main point. Although I've never see anything exactly like yours but there was that similar, the Great Absorption constitution."
"What does it does?" Li Kong asked.
"Well the name as pretty self-explanatory, the bearer of this constitution have amazing absorption capability. They can absorbs their enemies attack, completely nullifying it and then use it to strengthened their attacks."
"Isn't that unfair? How do you even defeat someone like that?"
Li Kong imagined a scenario where he met the bearer of the Great Absorption constitutions and the moment he threw his daggers, his daggers would just be disappeared in thin air leaving the terrified Li Kong behind and the bearer triumphantly stepped on Li Kong's body.
By the time he done imagining, shivers ran down his spine. 'I hope I never see someone like that.'
"It was strong but it wasn't like there weren't ways to hurt the. The bearer still susceptible to physical attack."
The scenario inside of Li Kong's head immediately changed and now he was the one standing triumphantly as his opponent turned to hedgehog by his daggers.
"But even that still poses some problem because your lifeforce would be absorbed too if you were standing near the bearer."
The scenario turned back to grim as suddenly Li Kong's flesh slowly being washed down his bones and leaving the lone figure of skeleton.
"No!!!" Li Kong screamed.
Li Kong regained his clarity and when he found himself with still perfectly fleshed body, he breathed a relief and wiped off the sweats from his forehead while White in front of him was startled by his sudden screaming and observed Li Kong's figure in puzzlement.
"What are you doing?" The scrutinizing gaze, full of annoyance and dissatisfaction dawned over him.
Embarrassment caught up to Li Kong as his face quickly turned into stone and in the end, he only could let his head down and with a low voice, he muttered.
"Please continue."
White gave a side look to the youth for the last time before continuing.
"But you don't need to panic because your constitution isn't the Great Absorption though it was undeniable they have some similiraty."
"Then what is it?" Li Kong asked.
"Both was keenly related to absorption in some way but your constitution was on the weaker side of absorption. Everything standing near the bearer of the Great Absorption constitution would quickly faced an inevitable death and if left alone, sooner or later a disaster would struck if the bearer stay alive.
"Fortunately, the last bearer of the constitution had been taken down and hundreds of years after that, it seemed there won't be any coming soon and besides that, the person who had the Great Absorption constitution was recorded to have elemental attribute.
"While the Great Absorption, absorbed everything and leave nothing behind but your constitution seemed to only boost your absorption rate so fast it might be the reason why you loses your elemental affinity."
Li Kong gradually regained his composure as White continued to explain and back to his usual self, but the moment he heard the last words, his face dropped a little and White couldn't help but notice the strangeness in Li Kong.
"What's wrong?" White asked concerningly.
"Isn't it just too unfair for the bearer? Everything near him would die. How would he even make friend? And it isn't like they chose to have that constitution."
White didn't answer him immediately and remained silent for time being before spoke solemnly to Li Kong.
"There are many injustice in this world, Li Kong. A child starving. A wife left behind by his husband to go to war. Person who was born with weak body and lived a short life. A healthy man suddenly caught a deadly illness and die. Weak people exploited by the strong. There are too many to count Li Kong. There are just too many to take care of. Even if you collected every person in this world to take care of every unfairness, no matter how many you have it wouldn't be enough.
"That was–" White paused for a moment. "–Just how the world works."
Li Kong bit his lip and stayed silent during White's speech.
"Which one are the better choice? One man death that resulted in the lives of many or one man life that caused a whole destruction of a world?
"The choices were clear."
After that, White stopped talking and observed the boy in front of him.
The boy was still too young. He hadn't even experienced the outside world yet. He was still too naive. But White remained tall on his position, no matter what happened, he must guided this child correctly after all he couldn't be with the boy forever.
In the end, a remnant would only be a remnant, destined to be washed by the relentless marching of time and while he was still lingering in this world, he would done everything he could do to guided the boy in front of him to the best path he possibly could.
But the boy was still just a boy after all.
Seeing the boy's dispirited figure, White could only sighed inside of his heart.
'Well, what am I expecting?' He shook his head inwardly in his heart.
After a long moment of silence, White finally continued to talk.
"But everything didn't matter in the end."
Li Kong silently looked at the bead in front of him.
"Do you still remember, Li Kong? What I've said before to you?"
Li Kong tried to recall the conversations he had with White and when he arrived at that point, his eyes slowly turned bright again.
"Be strong?"
White unknowingly let out a smile.
"Yes. Be strong. Be so strong that even the world can't do a single thing against your will. Be strong so that not even injustices means nothing to you. And when you already that strong, do what you want to do. That's why you should work hard in your cultivation from now, understand?"
"Yeah!" Li Kong answered passionately.
"Good. Now you know about your constitution, I suppose that our session has ended for now."
Li Kong got up from the bed and stretched his body.
"Oh, and I almost forget."
"What is it?" Li Kong's head appeared right in front of the bead but he suddenly felt something was pushing him away and he fell straight to the floor.
"Aw! My butt!"
"Don't stick your face too close to me." White let out a breath from his nose.
"Aye, aye, captain." Li Kong said while rubbing his butt.
"When you was sleeping, there was this little girl coming to see you." White saying while the piece of clothing on top of the shelf beside the bed suddenly shifted around and seemingly making a space in the center while the bead started levitating to the center of the piece of clothing.
"Little girl? Is the little girl this small?" A figure of a little girl shielding her little brother appeared on Li Kong's mind and he pointed around the area of his waist.
"No, she's just around your shoulder."
"Wait, is the girl using a purple butterfly hairpin?" A figure of a girl in her youth appeared on Li Kong's mind while sticking out her tongue.
"Yes."
"How can that be a little girl? It's my shoulder size!"
"Doesn't make any difference at all. All of you look like the same brat to me. Now, isn't there something else you should do? If there isn't anything else, please leave. I will sleep now." And then the bead stopped glowing, leaving the speechless Li Kong behind with no chance of replying.
Li Kong stayed silent for a while before letting out a light sigh and made his way to the outside.