Last week I introduced you to the elements and trigrams that form the foundation of magic within The Four Gods, this week, I’m going to talk about the importance of qi in Chinese medicine and metaphysics, as well as its use in the universe of The Four Gods. Let’s get started!

The definition of qi can be vague depending on your Chinese source that you consult, but in general, qi can be translated to “energy.” In The Four Gods: The Prince of the North, Gen notes that his best understanding of qi is “life force,” and that everything on Earth, even things we consider inanimate, have qi. Humans, animals, the wind, water, fire, the weather, and even stones have qi. Without it, nature itself wouldn’t function. Like the elements we reviewed last week, qi also has different reactions. The feeling of wind against your face is a qi reaction, the heat that fire releases is a qi reaction, rushing water is a qi reaction, even our emotions are reactions of qi. Qi also plays a part in illness, as with yin and yang, too much or too little qi in our bodies makes us sick, and there are certain activities we can do and foods we can eat to get our qi back where it needs to be. 

As you see with this chart, our bodies are constructed like the five elements, with certain elements ruling over certain parts of our bodies, creating different reactions. When this gets out of sync or we are too stressed, that’s when it’s bad news for us. But what about gods? Let’s turn to our good friend Chonglin and his teachings to Gen about how the gods utilize this qi to create reactions we human folk would see as magic.

As with the trigrams and their representations with divination, the elements are important to forming magical reactions and releasing this qi to get a certain outcome. Chonglin cautions Gen not to use his qi for magic for simple daily tasks, because if you use it to boil your water for tea or to bring an item to you without getting up, you’ll not only lose valuable stored qi, but you’ll create an imbalanced system that can drain your life force for nothing. Gen catches Fengge using his qi to create fire for his cooking, and Chonglin scolds him for being reckless and correlates Fengge’s oversight to his constant bad moods (notice how fire is related to the heart and the nervous system.) Gen later learns that qi flows through every inch of his body and using his confidence in his divinity, his qi manifests into elemental magic outside his body, mainly ice and water. But using this does come at the cost of energy depletion, which by learning more about the elements and qigong, or qi control, he can master his qi like his divine colleagues. 

That’s all for this week! Next week I’ll go in depth with our gods’ specific magical abilities and what their qi mastery can actually do.