After Tang Ze was done with his chores, he still had some free time before he'd have to go to bed in order to wake up on time.
He could go back to see Xian Yue - but he felt quite embarrassed right now about his emotional outburst. He had thought it might be cathartic to get the feelings off his chest, and while he was slightly relieved after sharing them; he was more concerned with how Xian Yue now thought of him.
Crossing that off the list of potential activities, the next most logical one would be to work on a costume.
However, reliving that tale had reminded him of why he had abandoned making them back home for the last two years in the first place.
It might have only been indirectly, but his hobby had been what had gotten his younger brother killed. If he hadn't gotten into making costumes, he never would've wanted to go to that convention - and they never would've ran into that knife-wielding maniac. It was several massive leaps of logic too much to actually be reasonable, but Tang Ze had found himself dwelling on this train of thought whenever he looked at his costumes back home regardless.
And ultimately, he no longer got any joy from his hobby.
Because of that, he had lost all interest in it after that incident.
Now that he could get a tangible benefit from it in this world, he had started doing it again. His passion had been somewhat reignited when he had discovered that it was a method to make himself stronger.
That moment when he was able to do good - by saving Jin Zhen through wearing a costume, had been the turning point for this change in his attitude.
But, with those bitter memories resurfacing from when he had opened up to Xian Yue, he didn't want to look at them again.
That left the next most logical choice: cultivating.
He hadn't been paying that much attention to it up till now, unfortunately, despite having escaped the confines of the Zeroth Realm a while back. The reason was that unfortunately, he wasn't that good at it, and that led to him focusing more of his energy on making costumes. But, even if he was bad at it - he knew deep down he would just have to keep trying. And if he didn't make any effort to improve, he would always be bad at it.
And so, he went to his room, and then began meditating.
Actual cultivating at this level involved trying to take in Qi from the environment, condensing it, and then driving it towards one's meridians. After that, the remnant Qi would leak out of one's body and then into the air - with a portion of it being used to develop the meridians.
This sounded simple in theory, the issue was putting it into practice.
Manipulating Qi took concentration, as did driving it towards one's meridians.
Per his teachers, it was far easier to first condense some Qi within your dantian, and then drive it towards the meridians rather than doing so continuously.
Qi was present in the air, and Qi Condensation cultivators would first drive this into their dantian. After doing so, they would focus on the Qi and condense it into small beads of liquid. As with water, the vapor form occupied far more volume than the liquid, so in one go one would find only a few drops had formed and dropped to the bottom of one's dantian.
The Qi in liquid form had been modified after interacting with Tang Ze's dantain when it was being condensed.
Everyone's Qi network was different - even among twins it differed ever so slightly, just like fingerprints. As such, this condensed Qi was slightly different for everyone. For Tang Ze, it was a light blue color; though every shade of the rainbow was possible depending on the person.
Even if it was the same color, it would not be the exact same shade - even if at first glance it appeared so. Between relatives the condensed Qi was usually similar though not always exact.
Because the condensed Qi was different from person to person, you could not transfer your Qi after condensation to another's dantian.
If you tried, you would get the same result as if you had transfused someone with a unit of blood of a blood type with which they were incompatible - it would end up damaging their Qi network! The extent of the damage depended on how different the Qi was.
That was why you couldn't give someone your own refined Qi at this stage to help 'power level' them to the next realm.
As one moved up the minor realms of Qi Condensation, the middle and upper dantians would also become available. In that way, one could condense Qi faster. However, it was entirely possible to get through all of the Qi Condensation realm using only the lower dantain. Where they became essential was for Qi Refinement stage cultivation, in which the main focus was passing the liquid Qi through each of the dantians in a stepwise fashion to practice 'purifying' or refining it.
Some people like Guo Jia and Zhang Long were able to use one or even two of the other two dantians before others could, which allowed them to advance in their cultivation faster as they had two dantians with which to draw in Qi.
Once a few drops were formed, Tang Ze then drew in more Qi from the air, and then condensed it to add to the pool that was developed at the floor of his dantian. He repeated this over and over. Once he had accumulated a satisfactory amount, he began to drive it towards his meridians at a steady rate.
Too fast and it might end up damaging them (such damage would only be temporary, though he wouldn't be able to cultivate for a few hours thereafter otherwise he'd risk causing permanent damage), too slow and it would accomplish very as his gathered Qi slowly returned back to its vapor phase and leaked out of his dantian. At his level, he couldn't hold the liquid Qi in his dantian for much longer than a few hours before it would escape into the environment.
All of this was mainly a game of concentration, which is where Tang Ze had most of his problems.
He found it difficult to clear his mind of distractions, and could only focus on the Qi for a few seconds. By the time he had gathered it up, he was already losing control of it, with it running amok instead of condensing properly. Even when it was condensed, he would end up wasting some of it as he didn't drive it to his meridians properly, with the wasted Qi turning into vapor and leaking into the air.
It was the cultivation equivalent of trying to drink soup with a fork. Yes, it was possible, but it was extremely inefficient.
Basically, his efficiency at doing so was very low, to the point where he was only able to effectively use about ten percent of the Qi he took in. Yin Tiang and Chen Yu could use about twenty-five percent, while Zhang Long was able to focus enough to use thirty percent. Experts could go even higher than that.
This was not for a lack of trying on Tang Ze's part, but he had never been good with paying attention to a specific task for very long, and in the days of the Internet which is where he came from, it was easy for one's mind to grow wild and easily distractible. Watching one too many TikTok reels had greatly compromised his ability to focus on anything for longer than a minute.
There were ways to expedite this process. One was to cultivate somewhere where the Qi was thicker, so that even if he could only utilize ten percent of it, he could take in more in the same amount of volume.
The other thing was to simply cultivate for longer periods of time, the only issue was that Tang Ze had problems with that as well.
He had managed to leap into the first minor realm of Qi Condensation, but all that meant was that his journey had just begun, not that it was over.
Sure, he could use some shortcuts like pills to try to bolster his lack of practice, but that was just a temporary solution.
At Qi Condensation, high quality pills were ubiquitous enough that some very wealthy families could afford to have their descendants just chug pills every single night so that they got to Qi Refinement extremely fast. These pills were essentially filled with liquid Qi which could be digested after which it would interact with one's own Qi network to make liquid Qi without the cultivator having to put in any effort. They were designed to dissolve and release it steadily so that the entire process that Tang Ze was trying to do happened on its own.
Perhaps the Imperial Family and a handful of other cultivators could also afford enough pills at the Qi Refinement level to let one skate through that as well.
Tang Ze did not have such resources - and while for the first time he was actually able to use some of the pills that the sect distributed to them, he quickly realized why the first three that he had gotten from the sect janitor were considered to be 'high quality' when he tried them out.
He popped one before sleeping, thinking that it would be a good idea to use it when he was asleep and couldn't cultivate. If you tried to use a pill you couldn't cultivate at the same time, because the Qi from the pill was running through your system all on its own. If Tang Ze tried to direct the Qi in any way on his own, it would just lead to the pill's efficiency declining. So why not use one when he couldn't cultivate to save on time when he wasn't doing anything anyway?
That had been his line of thinking, but what he hadn't counted on was the side effects. The burning sensation that he had felt earlier when he had taken a pill was extremely mild compared to this - and it was so bad that he ended up fidgeting all night and not getting a wink of sleep. The pill only had about a fourth of the Qi as the one the sect janitor had given him - and it was really only at this point that he truly appreciated the difference between a high-quality and an ordinary pill. It felt like his meridians were burning well into noon the next day.
Sooner or later though, he would reach a point where it would no longer be feasible at all to use pills. He would have nothing but his innate skill at drawing in Qi during that time. He might as well work on that right now, because it would only become more useful in the future.
His cultivation teachers had a couple of pointers for him in that regard. "Focus on a rhythm and help it empty out and clear your mind."
This could be something like a metronome, or water trickling down at a steady rate. Even if those things were not available, every cultivator still had the rhythm of their breathing or their heartbeat to rely on.
Tang Ze would try this over and over - sitting down and focusing on his own breathing, controlling it, before moving on to gathering Qi.
His thoughts just always had a habit of moving elsewhere. Like towards stories he had heard on Earth, or what was going to be served for lunch in the cafeteria. And on the worst days, his mind might end up dwelling on something more morbid and darker - like his brother's face as he bled out, or the face of the assailant who had caused all of that.
That wasn't to say that he wasn't making any progress whatsoever. He estimated that within a couple of months to maybe a year, he should be able to climb to the next minor realm.
Tang Ze wasn't the only one who was working hard.
Zhang Long spent long hours dwelling on the technique he had learned. While he could use it at the Qi Condensation level, it was only really going to be useful towards the Qi Refinement level when others would actually have techniques that he could borrow.
Still, it wasn't like he couldn't start working on it right now. It might be a decade or so before he could actually start using it, depending on when he would break through the next major realm, but whenever he did, he would already have a leg up on other people as most other people did not know even a single technique by that point.