Stuff About Elemental Attunement

I got some questions about this a while back. How does it work? Can anyone use any element? Are there prerequisites for certain elements?

And so on.

First of all, any cultivator can learn any element. It’s just a matter of training and proper guidance. At least, that’s the theory of it. It gets a bit more complex in practice.

Learning an Element

Let’s use fire as an example.

If you want to learn fire attunement, you can sit in a closed room in front of a candle and meditate. It’s really that simple. Just sit in that room and meditate. Study that flame until you can begin making your Qi just like it.

A person can do this even without any guidance, but those who have a teacher will usually learn faster. A good teacher can help break down the process into easily digestible steps and make it so the student doesn’t even need a natural flame to learn from.

Affinities

Not all people learn at the same rate. Talent and natural predispositions are absolutely a thing. Affinities, if you will. Someone with a great affinity for fire might just need to meditate on a flame for a couple of minutes to get the hang of it, while someone without any natural affinity might need months to learn. There can even be people whose affinity is so great it just kind of happens. They didn’t need to “learn” the element. They just knew.

Just as there are affinities, the opposite can also happen. People who simply don’t have any compatibility for an element.

Let’s use the Divine Frozen Palace as the example here. The Divine Frozen Palace focuses on Yin-aligned techniques to an extreme degree. Those techniques are not really compatible with men because men are usually more in tune with their Yang Qi. Even if they train their hardest, they won’t ever reach the same level of mastery.

The Eternal Flame Clan dodges this because while their flame techniques tend to be more fitting for men, they have a much larger library of disciplines to offer their disciples. The extreme focus of the Divine Frozen Palace is the reason why they’re the smallest of the Four Great Sects in disciple size by a wide margin.

Availability 

Another factor to consider when learning an element is the availability of the element. The more in contact you can be with an element, the easier it is to learn it. Things like earth, water, and wind are examples of “easy” elements.

Lightning is an example of a hard-to-learn element.

As you might imagine, lightning is not exactly the easiest thing to find or interact with. The reason it is relatively common in the Storm Dragon Empire is that they have lots of storms. This led to several lightning masters who created several schools, which allowed those teachings to spread throughout the country.

Also, this is why using Poison Qi can be a bit eyebrow-raising. Being able to use it means you know your poisons. It means you have studied them and taken them as part of yourself.

It’s not exactly something that inspires a great deal of trust.

As an aside, Liu Jin being able to use Poison Qi is not just an aspect of Nine-Headed Snake God's Inheritance. It is also because before getting that Inheritance, his body was constantly being poisoned. First by his master, then by Nine-Headed Snake God's trial. It essentially worked as Poison Qi training, though Liu Jin never realized it.