The qi thread halted.
The entire loop began to distort before the formation crumbled.
Han Yu stared in amazement.
"It works... It actually works."
It was subtle, but it was a genuine disruption of simulated qi flow. In a real body, this might have caused a temporary seizure in the meridian. Or worse, if aimed well.
Excited, he performed a few more trials, alternating between gentle pricks with the supportive technique and sharp jabs with the offensive one. By the end of an hour, he was confident enough to say he understood the basics.
Finger like a needle. Soul as the thread.
The Needle Finger Alchemist might’ve been half-mad and metaphor-happy, but Han Yu could now see the brilliance buried under all that nonsense.
He grinned and clapped the book shut.
"Worth every damn stone." For the price of mere fifty spirit stones he had acquired something that one might not get even after selling an entire city.
His Soul Qi had grown sharper. His toolkit broader. And now, he had a strange, hidden edge no one would expect.
"Needle Finger Technique... huh."
He lifted his finger again, admiring the invisible glint of energy.
"Let’s see who’s brave enough to shake my hand next."
Han Yu stood under the warm morning sun in the small courtyard behind the inn, peering down at a confused and mildly indignant chicken. It clucked once and tilted its head at him with a look that said, "You’d better have grain, human."
"Sorry, feathered friend," Han Yu said, rubbing the back of his neck. "You’re here to serve the greater cause of cultivation... and because I can’t afford to test this on people without causing a city-wide manhunt."
He sighed, reached into his spatial pouch, and retrieved a few kernels of common grain as payment. The chicken immediately pecked at them with gusto.
"See? Compensation." He knelt beside it and extended his spirit sense.
Even a common chicken, as it turned out, had qi channels—tiny, undeveloped, and clumsy though they were. Like most living creatures touched by the natural world, it had spiritual essence flowing through its meridians in small amounts. Han Yu gently traced the circulation, focusing particularly on the creature’s wings where the qi converged into a delicate spiral.
"Alright," he murmured, raising a finger. "Let’s see what the Soul Pricking Finger can really do."
He channeled a thread of Soul Qi, sharp and refined, into the tip of his index finger and lightly pressed it to the base of the chicken’s right wing. Nothing happened at first. The chicken didn’t react. For a moment, Han Yu wondered if he missed the mark.
Then the chicken squawked abruptly and flapped its wings in a startled frenzy—except, only the left wing moved.
The right wing hung awkwardly, paralyzed.
The chicken did a frantic little circle-dance in the dirt, one wing flapping like mad, the other flopping uselessly like a half-cooked noodle. It didn’t seem in pain, just very, very annoyed.
Then, after a few seconds, the wing twitched. The flow of qi restored itself. The chicken shook its feathers indignantly and strutted away with as much dignity as it could muster.
He did a few more tests—targeting the legs, the tail feathers, even an experimental jab to the chest meridian. Each time, he was able to disrupt the qi and partially paralyze the limb or slow its function for a few seconds before it resolved.
"It’s not permanent," he noted, scratching his chin. "But with more Soul Qi, maybe it could last longer."
Still, he didn’t want to exhaust his reserves just testing poultry. His Soul Qi wasn’t limitless, and recharging it took much longer than spirit qi. Besides, the chicken was starting to give him the side-eye, like it was beginning to suspect this wasn’t a regular appointment.
"Fine. You’ve been brave," he said, offering the rest of the grain to the chicken like a proud patron. "You may return to your coop a hero."
The chicken gobbled the reward, fluffed its feathers, and strutted off, completely unaware that it had just participated in the cutting edge of experimental Soul Cultivation.
Han Yu turned his focus to the second technique.
The Soul Stinging Needle.
If the Pricking Finger was meant for healing—or at least neutral interference—this one was designed for damage. Covert, precise, deadly. According to the book, it could be used to inject poison or mental intent into a target’s qi channels. But there was a major problem.
"How am I supposed to use poison with this?" he muttered, frowning.
The book said the technique was supposed to be invisible. Silent. Unnoticeable. If he simply coated his finger in poison, any halfway competent cultivator would smell it or sense it. Some poisons glowed under spirit sense. Others had distinct auras. Not exactly stealthy.
Han Yu squatted down and tapped the ground with his index finger, thinking.
"Unless... it’s not external. It’s internal?"
A horrifying thought struck him.
"Wait. Wait. You mean I’m supposed to poison myself?!"
He remembered vividly the countless pills that crazy Alchemist Li Mei had made him test. Pills that turned his skin green, his voice squeaky, his hair pink, or caused his ears to vibrate like cymbals. Most of them harmless... eventually.
But this was different.
Soul Qi moved inwardly. It was connected directly to his soul. If he ingested a poison just to coat it with Soul Qi and inject it into someone else, what would that do to his own soul?
"I’m not Li Mei," he whispered, shuddering. "I have boundaries."
Still, he couldn’t shake the idea. There had to be another method. Perhaps the poison didn’t need to be literal. Maybe what the book called "toxin" was symbolic—or metaphysical.
A spiritual disruption?
He frowned and flipped through the book again. One passage stood out:
"The poison lies not in the finger, but in the will. To wound another is to carry intention sharp enough to cut the river of qi."