Ryu understood now that the root of his blood's impact on Little Gem hadn't been his blood himself, but rather the result of his training causing his Chaos Qi to begin to influence his Vital Qi.

Over the last six months, Ryu had been completely focused on controlling his Meridians. The process was just as nonsensical as it sounded. It was almost like a mortal trying to control the pumping of their veins. It was hard and even for a genius like Ryu, it took half a year of effort at the expense of improvement to his cultivation.

The results, though, were even better than Ryu had thought they might be. He had accomplished a few things.

First, he could manually take control of his qi's conversion into Chaos Qi now. To him, it was almost like breathing now.

If one didn't think about breathing, it could be done without thought. However, the moment one focused on breathing, it was a different story entirely. Once that happened, one could control the pace of their breathing, how deeply they breathed or even if they breathed at all.

Ryu had reached such a state with his Meridians. If he focused on them, he could speed up the conversion, slow it down, or even stop it from happening entirely. This would allow his Six Realm Opening technique to finally display its true prowess.

However, this was just the first step of what Ryu had wanted to accomplish. As far as he was concerned, this was just the bare minimum.

What Ryu had truly wanted was the formation of Primordial Qi. As described previously, though this Primordial Qi fell short of Chaos Qi and Essence in overall strength, in terms of niche uses, they could far outstrip the latter combination of energies.

With this greater control, Ryu was able to considerably slow the process of change, allowing him to observe his Meridians and Qi with greater clarity. After months of work, he wasn't disappointed. Well… Not entirely, anyway.

According to his readings, Primordial Essence worked very simply.

In order to form Essence, it would intake Qi, combine them, then expel them. The Essence would then breakdown the further from Primordial Essence it came, becoming influenced by the environment to become the myriad of different Qis in all of existence.

This process was the quintessential example of Order tending toward Chaos. Essence was Order perfected, while the Qi it would eventually become was a representation of Chaos. This was why Essence would always be the perfect representation of energy and would always be the strongest.

However… Primordial Chaos, as Ryu coined it, worked completely differently. Or, more accurately, it could be said that it was the exact opposite.

Rather than adding to Qi to form it like in the case of Primordial Essence, Primordial Chaos instead stripped Qi down to their barebones. It contradictorily ripped Qi apart until there was nothing left but its very foundation.

Logically, this foundation should have been far weaker than the original qi itself. However, the reality proved to be much different.

Not only was this foundation powerful, it was powerful enough to match even Essence.

Why was this distinction important? The reason was simple.

Let's say Ryu had a theoretical set of Essence Silk Meridians instead of Chaotic Silk Meridians. If he wanted to extract Primordial Qi, he would only have to wait until the golden fog within his Meridians injected what his original qi was missing, then take it for himself.

But, in his Chaotic Silk Meridians, his dark golden fog would be taking away, not giving.

What did this mean? It meant that what Primordial Qi equivalent there was appeared not during the first steps, but during the very last. And, since Primordial Chaos was stripping Qi down rather than adding to it, this meant that the Primordial Chaos Qi that formed in the final moments, just before Chaos Qi was formed, would depend on the original form of the Qi Ryu fed into it to begin with.

This meant that if Ryu wanted a specific kind of Primordial Chaos Qi, he could only feed his Meridians a specific kind of Qi.

Still, when Ryu made this discovery, he wasn't too disappointed. Though it was an extra step, it was also easier to control.

If he had this imaginary Essence Silk Meridians, then he would need to parse out many Primordial Qis and filter them one by one until he got what he wanted. But, with this method, he didn't need to do such a thing. He could guarantee the kind of Primordial Chaos Qi he would get depending on the Qi that he absorbed in the first place.

When Ryu figured this out, he had immediately used the one qi type he still had to test his theories: Grave Qi.

As expected, when he stopped the process of conversion just before Chaos Qi was formed, Ryu ended up with a product of such dense death that even he felt as though he might die had it not been contained within his near indestructible Meridians…

The Qi alone was so fearsome that Ryu was almost afraid to use it at all. The only saving grace was there was very little of this qi within him currently, so it hadn't reached a level where he couldn't control it.

The realization left Ryu wondering if this qi was more or less powerful than the Primordial Death Qi he had read about. He wasn't sure… But if Primordial Death Qi wasn't at least half as powerful as this Primordial Death Chaos Qi, it wouldn't be worthy of its title as a Primordial Qi.

It was at that point in his six month seclusion that Ryu realized just how dangerous his experiments had been.

Though Essence and Chaos Qi were both extremely powerful, they were also unintuitively gentle, something that was especially shocking for the latter.

However, Primordial Qi was famous for being extraordinarily difficult to handle, and it seemed like this was even more so for Primordial Chaos Qi…

Realizing his mistake, Ryu decided to instead take small steps, trying to see if he could take control of a less dangerous qi. So, he turned his attention toward his Vital Qi.

Though Vital Qi could only exist with blood as a medium, it was still a Qi. If not for this, how could Essence help Ryu break through in his Body Realms?

And… It was the result of this experiment that had ironically led to the changes he and Ailsa were now seeing in Little Gem… It was a result that left Ryu's heart thumping for the future.