In the quiet corners of the estate where no cultivators trained and no noble brats wandered, Keshav sat alone beneath the willow tree.
He had no manuals, no instructors, no ancient scrolls passed down by sect elders. He didn't even know what cultivation really was—only that it made people stronger, faster, longer-lived. That it let them soar into the sky or split stone with a finger.
But no one would teach that to a servant's child. Especially not one with a "flawed vessel."
So Keshav watched. And listened. And felt.
When he breathed, the energy around him shifted.
At first, it was so faint that even he wasn't sure it was real. Like heat from a flame or wind just before a storm—it wasn't seen, but felt in the skin and bones.
Over time, he noticed that the grass beneath him died faster than it should. The color drained from the leaves he touched. His hair, left uncut, sometimes twitched slightly when a cultivator passed nearby—as if tasting the energy in the air.
He began to understand: his body wasn't merely absorbing energy.
It was devouring it.
Unlike traditional cultivation, which refined energy through channels or drew it into a core, Keshav's body had no such structure. The qi didn't enter through meridians or get stored in a dantian. Instead, the moment it touched his skin, it was pulled inward—broken down and consumed at the cellular level.
Every cell in his body—muscle, blood, bone, skin, even his hair—acted like a miniature beast, hungrily feeding on any ambient energy it could touch.
He wanted to test it.
One evening, after watching cultivators harvest herbs from a high-spirit-density patch near the edge of the garden, he returned alone under the cover of night. A single stem of Silverreed still stood, glowing faintly in the moonlight.
Keshav plucked it carefully.
As he held it, the spiritual energy in the herb began to flicker.
It dimmed.
The stem shriveled.
The glow faded.
When he let go, the herb was just a husk—lifeless and gray.
It didn't transfer qi into me, he thought. It vanished.
He checked himself. No obvious change. No burst of power. But something inside him had changed. A slight clarity. A warmth in the blood. A feeling of expansion in his bones, like the faint ache after growth.
He was Feeding the Body, Not the Core like others did.
Days turned to weeks.
He continued meditating beneath the willow and wandering into high-energy zones whenever he could. Each time, his body absorbed more, changed more. Muscles grew leaner. Bones denser. His senses sharpened—not just vision or hearing, but a sixth sense that told him where the energy in the world flowed thickest.
He realized something that chilled him.
Even his hair devoured energy.
Stray strands that fell to the ground sometimes withered nearby grass. Once, a hair drifted into a pond, and the water near it dimmed, leaving floating algae gray and dead.
His body wasn't just a vessel. It was a colony. A network of cells all sharing the same instinct:
Consume. Adapt. Grow.
The Cell Cultivation Method
He gave no name to it, because he did not yet know it was unique.
But a method was taking form—unconsciously built by necessity and instinct:
No meridians. No core. No breathing patterns.
Energy was broken down into micro-particles and distributed directly to the body's cellular structure.
Growth was constant, but internal—no explosive breakthroughs, no flashy surges.
Physical resilience, regeneration, and subtle mutation were prioritized over flashy techniques.
And though he didn't realize it yet, this method had no bottleneck—because there was no single path. Every part of him was a path. Every cell a cultivator.
But the hunger grew.
Ambient energy was no longer enough. His body wanted denser sources.
He began to crave proximity to cultivators—not emotionally, but physically. Their presence was like standing near a fire on a winter night. He had to force himself not to reach out and touch them.
He feared what might happen if he did.
Once, while hugging his father after a long day, he accidentally pulled a wisp of energy from the man's core. His father staggered and coughed, unaware of what had happened. Keshav lied, said he had slipped.
That night, Keshav sat alone under the willow again, staring at his hands.
What am I becoming?
He couldn't tell anyone.
They wouldn't understand. They'd think he was cursed—or worse, dangerous.
So he resolved to remain silent.
To grow in secret.
To observe this body that devoured the world and build something new from it—not a path of light or darkness, but something far deeper:
A pathless path.
A way of evolution itself.