Legends are always a mix of truth and lies.
According to Shaolin legend, Saint Damien crossed the sea from India and founded Shaolin Temple. From there, Zen Buddhism spread across the land, making Shaolin the ancestral home of Zen.
They say all seventy-two Shaolin ultimate techniques were created by Saint Damien, but that's not really true. These techniques are pretty diverse—some are obviously Central Plains style. Researchers found that most of these moves were actually brought in by wandering martial artists who joined Shaolin later. Of course, Shaolin likes to claim they all came from Saint Damien, just to sound mysterious and, well, more impressive.
But setting aside those wild rumors, when Saint Damien first founded Shaolin, he at least left behind three martial arts manuals: Saint Damien's Muscle Manual, Purification Manual, and Diamond Invincibility Technique. These became Shaolin's deepest foundation and strongest roots. Thanks to these three, Shaolin built its heavy, resilient, and tough martial arts style.
So what are these three legendary manuals actually good for?
Here's the thing: Saint Damien was from India, not the Central Plains. Just like the Vajra Sect's Dragon Elephant Power, Saint Damien's experiences after arriving in China are another story, but his martial arts foundation definitely wasn't about internal energy.
Saint Damien's Muscle Manual is kind of like Dragon Elephant Power—it's all about training your muscles, bones, and skin from the outside. Unlike Dragon Elephant Power, which is easy to start but hard to master, the Muscle Manual requires serious insight just to get started. Not everyone can train with it. That's the first big feature of Zen martial arts: it's all about fate. In terms of building up your body, the Muscle Manual is a bit weaker than Dragon Elephant Power. That one maxes out higher, hits harder, and gives you combat power fast. The Muscle Manual isn't as strong in pure fighting.
Honestly, if you compare Zen to Vajra Sect, the Vajra folks are way more into brute force and physical training. The Muscle Manual is like a platform—you need to install other martial arts on top before it really shines.
The Purification Manual and the Muscle Manual are two sides of the same coin—they complement each other.
Most martial artists think the Purification Manual is some deep internal energy technique, able to produce thick, powerful inner strength. Actually, that's not true. Later generations of monks added notes and their own spin, so some versions do give that effect. But when it was first created, the Purification Manual wasn't meant for that at all.
It’s believed that Bodhidharma created the Purification Manual only after witnessing the wonders of internal martial arts in the Central Plains. As the founder of the sect, Bodhidharma had a master’s insight—embracing all streams of knowledge. Like the Saint Damien’s Muscle Manual, the Purification Manual is a foundational “platform” technique. It doesn’t directly generate internal energy, but fundamentally improves the practitioner’s physical roots for internal cultivation—optimizing the dantian, meridians, and apertures.
In the martial world, even if two people put in the same effort, their achievements will vary. Part of this is due to talent and comprehension, but an even bigger factor is physical constitution and compatibility.
When training external techniques, if your muscles and bones aren’t naturally coordinated or strong, you’ll struggle to succeed no matter how hard you try. That’s when practicing the Saint Damien’s Muscle Manual, or reaching the eighth level of the original Dragon Elephant Power, can solve these problems once and for all.
Similarly, for those whose internal cultivation is slow due to fragile meridians and other issues, the Purification Manual is your salvation. It fundamentally clears the meridians, improves the training environment, nourishes the dantian and apertures, and boosts the efficiency of converting life essence into internal energy.
While the original Dragon Elephant Power, once cultivated to a high level, can also expand and strengthen meridians, each art has its specialty. The Purification Manual has a unique, irreplaceable power that outshines Dragon Elephant Power by a mile—it increases a practitioner’s compatibility with different types of internal energy.
Just look at Linghu Chong in The Smiling, Proud Wanderer—he suffered terribly from conflicting energies after learning the Absorbing Star technique, like a bad case of food poisoning that left him bloated and miserable. But after practicing the Purification Manual (originally the Yijin Jing in the source, but here we substitute consistently), he instantly recovered, as if his digestive system rebooted and everything flowed smoothly again.
That’s the unique magic of the Purification Manual—solving incompatibility issues and boosting your ability to harmonize with all kinds of internal energy.
If your physical foundation is like a patch of farmland, then cultivation is like growing flowers and grass. Salty, alkaline, or acidic soil only grows certain plants; pick the wrong ones and they’ll just wilt and struggle. The Purification Manual’s job is to enrich the soil at its roots so you can grow all sorts of flowers, trees, and herbs with ease.
In gaming terms, it’s like lowering the experience needed to level up while boosting your growth rate. With this kind of ‘cheat code’ ability, it more than earns the title of ‘Divine Skill Manual.’
But despite its legendary power, very few have ever mastered the Purification Manual. That’s because the second major feature of Zen martial arts is all about state of mind.
You can’t be too deliberate, but you can’t be too casual either. Wanting it too much doesn’t work, but wanting nothing also doesn’t work. Not too hot, not too cold, not too much, not too little. Only in this subtle, almost paradoxical state of mind can you truly grasp the mysteries hidden in the Purification Manual’s eighteen diagrams.
Yang Qi gulped down countless medicinal pills—so many that a normal person would’ve overdosed and probably bled out from the nose. But she’s got a strong constitution, and with her twin’s spiritual portrait nearby, she’s basically eating for two. So the medicine’s power is just right for her. She lay in the Lotus Crucible, half-awake, half-dreaming, hovering between clarity and sleep. She looked like she was about to reach a state of total detachment, but in reality, she was in a rare and delicate mental zone.
In this state, she felt like she was dreaming—soaking in a hot spring, warm and comfortable all over. In her mind’s eye, the thousand-petal crown chakra radiated light, illuminating her whole mental world. Her spirit was fully engaged, creating a dreamlike realm between sleep and reality. The Purification Manual’s eighteen diagrams flowed around her like a ring-shaped river, or like eighteen satellites, drifting through her heart and washing out profound truths.
Yang Qi felt like she didn’t think about anything, didn’t understand anything, but somehow understood everything. In her dream, she rolled over—her sleep posture is famously wild—and naturally struck a new pose, which just happened to match the second diagram. Instantly, another meridian in her body was activated.
Ding—as if a string had been plucked, Yang Qi’s meridians began to tremble and hum in that space between the material and the spiritual. With this subtle vibration, her already tough and wide meridians gained a touch of flexibility.
The next diagram drifted through her mind, and Yang Qi naturally shifted into the third posture.
Dong—the vibration in her meridians spread like ripples on water, radiating throughout her body. Her Supreme Skill began to stir, like a curious cat poked by a teaser toy, peeking out from the dantian and chasing the rhythm through her limbs and bones.
“Huff... huff... so comfy...” Yang Qi muttered in her sleep, her beautiful sleeping face bubbling with bliss. She rolled over again, naturally shifting into the fourth diagram’s posture. Zheng—a sharp resonance burst from her dantian, sending shockwaves through every meridian and detail of her body, like water running along the branches of a tree. The vibrations started subtle but soon grew intense, with increasingly obvious effects.
Her Supreme Skill spun faster and faster. With a crackling sound, the ninth meridian of the twelve main channels suddenly opened up. Yang Qi’s cultivation officially broke through to the ninth layer of Supreme Skill—forty-five years’ worth of power.
As her power rose, her incompatibility issues became more obvious, making each breakthrough harder. Eating supplements was like pouring them into a bottomless pit—she’d get less than a tenth the effect others did from the same medicine. Most people would see explosive gains from a single bite, but she could eat a whole pound and barely feel it. Not even the Killing Stone could rocket her cultivation anymore; otherwise, she’d have parked herself on it for half a year before doing anything else.
But now, those stubborn obstacles that were once like bricks and stones had softened and melted away, broken through naturally and effortlessly. The power of the Purification Manual was finally beginning to show.
And this was just the beginning—an even bigger transformation was only getting started.
The fifth posture, the sixth posture—Yang Qi moved through them with ease, one after another.
Inside her, the meridians vibrated like plucked swords, ringing out with metallic sounds. Normally, just mastering one diagram would take months or years, since most people’s meridians can’t handle such intense shaking—they might tear or snap. But for Yang Qi, this strain was nothing. After finishing the first six postures, she started over from the beginning, repeating them in a cycle. With her dantian as the center, shockwaves radiated outward, her meridians chiming like musical instruments, and even her Supreme Skill energy felt like it was being shaken loose.
With all that shaking, the loose bits became dense, the rough spots smoothed out, and the overly rigid places gained flexibility. In her sleep, Yang Qi cycled through the six postures nine times, and her meridians improved at a pace you could practically see. The first six diagrams form a major stage—most compatibility and meridian issues can be solved with them. Linghu Chong, for example, had his problems perfectly fixed this way.
But for cases like Yang Qi and Wu Zhenfeng—women with pure Yin bodies training the most Yang, hardest Supreme Skill—it’s a whole different ballgame. The first six diagrams are just a warm-up. To really improve, you’ve got to dive even deeper into the Purification Manual.
The further you go, the harder and more obscure the insights become. But seven layers of Prajna Skill weren’t for nothing—her mind was sharp, inspiration flashing like lightning. Yang Qi shifted into the seventh diagram’s posture. A ripple of energy spread from her middle dantian, different from the first six—finer, subtler, reaching every corner of her being.
Every meridian danced to two different frequencies at once. The medicine she’d swallowed finally kicked in—the scattered energy throughout her body was drawn out by the vibrations, rising from each cell and sticking to the meridians like iron filings to a magnet.