Google can't help me so I thought I should ask for help here. In Jinyong's wuxia novels and currently in KR wuxia novels, I often see how much inner ki a person have is defined by decades. Why and how? How does it count for a person to make ki by meditating? Or if they are using some special arts to make ki while walking, sleeping and eating? What happened when they use up their ki? The special types of ki due to special training/ meditating methods?
Maybe they measure it at the rate of like, say, one pint of qi absorbed per year. Of course, this necessarily entails a standard, which could be the qi intake per annum of a super average guy with extremely average aptitude cultivating a shockingly average cultivation art 9-5 with unmatched regularity, who is extraordinarily average in terms of his cultivation environment, resources and effort, and possesses super average luck and willpower
There's also seniority to consider, as eastern people respect elders very much. Since cultivation causes you to stop ageing, this might be the only way to check who is elder
I guess it is the amount of ki lasting for a definite years. And it is consumed in that period of time. Like we can say a battery can be used for 1 month to run a clock and after 1 month we have to find another battery or recharge it again.
Which is rather inaccurate, taking me as an example. If all of the martial artists just sit on their arses all day to accumulate qi, there will not be wulin because everyone is a bloody recluse. Also, pretty sure that the authors are saying in quantity, not in rate of accumulation, because lord knows how to define that when all meditation techniques have different rates and different effects on different individuals. No one bothered with a universal standard of qi, only caring about if they are second rate, first rate or peak master. That can be true, until Jinyong introduce qi sucking techniques that oddly only works against those weaker than the user. The user can then earn decades worth of qi from others with ease. I have to think about that.
It still comes back to a universal standard. One year's worth of qi cannot be the same for everyone, nor can it it be the same every year, be it in quantity, consumption or accumulation.
This is why I hate vague calculations like Supreme Magus' core colors that make no sense in combat whatsoever and while xianxia is doing a mediocre job in trying to toe the line of different levels, ie golden pill has ten times more ki than foundation as well as some other BS, it becomes moot when their MC comes into stage and screw the planning. I hate Jinyong's Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils for making me ask why use years for ki. I know that using combat to gauge prowess of qi is stupid because lots of factors are at play like terrain, attitude and techniques used, but when qi is mostly used for fighting, how to properly gauge it then? Ps. Changed error from "to toeing" to "to toe"
@The Hamster Overlord @otaku31 @Agentt @Neverthelessilu Somehow after spamming multiple different chinese text, Baidu gave an answer. It can go suck balls. Butchered MTL plus my embellishment: If you keep practicing everyday for about a year, you will have a year of ki. Internal ki is accumulated over time.
Can I gloat over how I had told you so? :blob smug: Damn, sometimes the depth of my own insight terrifies me. Such genius should be illegal.
I'd like to picture it as " digging a bigger pool" More ki will increase the pool size. It's not 50 years worth of ki is inside of it...that'd be an insane amount of ki... Probably already created a singularity and eaten the guy from inside out. So over time the accumulation is increased, so the ones who have trained longer have a larger pool of ki. The qualitative change, i haven't thought of it right now.
I know this is from like a year ago, but I happen to have some knowledge about this courtesy of my dad who has been reading novels of this ganre for the past 60 years or so. To sum it up, he told me that: Qi used to be something that can't be measured precisely, so they made a baseline for it, if you're a regular person who hasn't taken any special medicine or elixir, and just studied using books/scrolls for a year, you'd have 1 year worth of qi, and so on and so forth, these can be augmented if you have the innate affinity for it. But this is a somewhat imprecise measurement because everyone is different. Although I don't know if this is definitive, I don't think I have enough knowledge to be doubting him. Think of it like a lightyear, a lightyear isn't a measurement of time, but a measurement of distance: how far light could travel in a year in a vacuum. Qi would be: How much qi someone would have accumulated within a year. Hope this helped!