12 Chapter 12 – Cultivating the Dantian

"Hey Ken, look what I brought you!"

Haoran brought out a book. Ken read the title and saw it said it was a manual for the stage he needed. However, the manual was much thicker than Sol's. From a glance, he estimated it as around 200 pages.

"Is this the best book?"

His large baby eyes stared into Haoran's.

"It is. It's the book I planned on giving you when you turned 12."

Haoran answered truthfully.

"Thank you, Daddy."

Haoran played with him for a few minutes when he remembered their agreement.

"Do you still want to learn how to read?"

"Yes! But I want to play with my new book first."

"Okay, I will watch you and we can learn after."

Ken started reading while Haoran watched him flip the pages every 15-20 seconds or so. He was losing patience when he saw Ken didn't skip a single page and looked at each one of them. 45 minutes later, he raised his head to his father.

'All right, I finished reading the manual. I guess he deserves a reward for giving me the book,' Ken thought to himself as he looked at his father tapping on the ground with his foot impatiently. 

"I finished, teach me how to read."

They passed the next hour learning a few letters that Ken pretended to have hardships understanding, and they called it a day.

"We can continue tomorrow, cutie."

"Oki."

Ken spent the next hour thinking about all the knowledge he had gained and integrated it into one complete story. When he finished, it was time for him to go to bed and he fell asleep.

He still needed around 10 hours of sleep at night and 2 hours of naps during the day as a 2-year-old, and he made sure not to sleep less to avoid complications in his growing process.

In the morning, he took a paper and a bamboo pen again and started writing again until breakfast was ready. After eating the breakfast Haoran prepared, his parents soon left the house and Sol arrived. She had a tired face and black circles under her eyes which she tried to hide with makeup.

"Young Master, I was so excited about the manual I didn't notice the hour and barely got any sleep."

She complained to the writing baby in front of her while she was lying on her stomach and resting her chin on the back of her palms.

"Just sleep, you got two hours and a half until you need to prepare lunch."

He wasn't the type of boss that demanded his employees pretend to work even when there was nothing to do.

"Hehe, you're the best, Young Master."

She fell asleep on the floor a few meters away from Ken and her light snoring sounded in the room.

'You could sleep in another room.'

Ken thought in irritation but soon concentrated on writing his manual again.

*SLAP*

"OUCH!"

Three hours later, Ken woke up Sol from her sleep.

"Three hours passed, so I woke you up."

"I'm sorry Young Master for not waking up on time. But slapping a woman's butt is inappropriate!"

He knew that, but when he looked at her earlier it seemed like the most fitting place for a smack. 'It must be the effect of the 21st-century culture,' he thought.

"I'm a baby, I didn't know."

He shrugged it off and Sol had no choice but to drop it and get up. She rubbed her aching butt and left for the kitchen. She gave up on talking back to this peculiar toddler.

After lunch, he handed her the book he finished writing while she was asleep.

"Take it. Although you've already awakened your dantian, I believe you can still improve it by following these steps. Stop your meridian training for now and focus on improving your dantian first. It will also improve your future as well as the prospects of your meridians' awakening process."

"Okay, thank you, Young Master."

She didn't forget his status was above hers despite the favors he was pouring on her. She was glad she made the decision to leave her job as an errand runner and become a babysitter.

Although Ken had an almost complete understanding of the second stage by now, he still wanted to see the effects of his manual on Sol's dantian before moving on with his own advancing. He just had to do some tweaks and simplify some techniques for her.

The next 3 days had the same routine: during the day Sol would memorize the manual he wrote for her for dantian awakening and he read the books she was bringing about the dantian and about the meridians, and during the evenings his father would "teach" him how to read.

"Young Master, I finished memorizing the manual and am ready to try it."

Sol announced on the fourth day and started removing her clothes. Since she already knew what was going to happen, she didn't wait for Ken to tell her to remove her clothes.

Ken sat in his usual spot in her lap and hugged her. They both closed their eyes and concentrated. Sol was practicing as depicted in the manual while Ken sensed the changes in her body and how the process worked.

*Growl*

He was so focused he didn't even notice his hunger. 5 hours passed since they began the cultivation session, and lunchtime had passed an hour or two ago.

"Ok, let's eat quickly and continue."

Since Ken wanted to continue later, the sweaty duo didn't take a shower yet and didn't wear their clean clothes. Thus, the comical scene of a sweaty naked baby and a sweaty naked babysitter eating lunch together could be seen if anyone peeped.

45 minutes later Ken was sitting in Sol's lap again. They started their cultivation session again when Ken noticed it was dangerously late.

"Quick! Wash us and get dressed!"

There were around 15 minutes until one of his parents came back home, and they quickly took a shower together and got dressed.

Sol was starting to feel weird about the fact she was getting too comfortable being naked around Ken. She wondered if he would remember it when he grew up since he seemed to remember everything. But Ken was thinking about other matters.

'It should be enough. I will start cultivating my dantian tomorrow.'

He read more books since he wrote the manual for Sol, so he knew he could improve her manual, too. But since her memory and understanding were limited, the improvement would be minor, and he only improved her cultivation for testing his ideas. He didn't really care about her improvement other than that anyway.

He waited expectantly for his parents to leave the next day after breakfast to start his cultivation.

"Sol, I'm going to cultivate. You can cultivate too or do anything else you want, just don't bother me."

"Are you sure, Young Master? It's considered very dangerous for kids your age to cultivate. Do you even have a pill to support your dantian's awakening with Qi?"

"I'm the one who wrote your manual, why are you worried?"

"Um, I guess you're right. Good luck, Young Master. Don't forget I will be killed too if you die, so be careful!"

Her last warning came out wrong, but she didn't notice it and just sat at the side and cultivated. She was much more motivated now and didn't want to lose to a toddler.

Ken closed his eyes and sensed his body again. He had around 96.5% of the godly energy left. He started channeling some of it to his dantian in a weak stream. In fact, it was less of a stream and more of a trickle. The godly energy was multiple times stronger than Qi, and he had to adjust the quantity mentioned in the manual.

He started feeling strong pressure in his stomach, and this time his baby body didn't help in negating much of the pain like in the former stage.

The unawakened dantian was small and leaked any energy that entered. With a Qi manipulation technique, he made the energy enter via the hole that leaked. This way the leaking was blocked while receiving the Qi it needed.

He started making the godly energy fill his dantian and smeared it all over the boundaries of the dantian. Then, he pushed it at all at once.

"Argh!"

He groaned in pain when the dantian's boundaries grew, making it bigger. He made more godly energy enter and did the process again. Despite the pain, he continued with this method for an hour. When his constant fear of being rejected, betrayed, and abused by society resurfaced, he forgot his pain.

"If I can't be strong enough, I will only become other's servants like Sol. I must stand at the top and be the one looking down on the rest!"

After a whole hour of painful stretching, came the moment of relaxation. He prepared in advance a long sequence of different techniques for each step in the awakening process to get the best results possible. If he wrote it down as a manual, it'd probably be over a thousand pages long with all the details.

Now the energy soothed his dantian, making it relaxed before making it go through another stage of stretching. A cool, pleasant sensation filled him.

'That's one way to please myself.'

He thought to himself and continued his cultivation. That day, he only stopped twice; once for lunch, and once before his parents arrived to wash his sweat.