Glossary / Cultivation Actions
Cultivation Actions in Chinese: 109 Terms and Their English Renderings
Everyday verbs of the practice: sitting down to meditate, moving qi, forcing a bottleneck open, hiding how strong you are.
109 terms
| Chinese | English | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 打坐 | Sitting Meditation | Sitting cross-legged to gather qi or stabilize a realm. The default state of any cultivator between scenes. |
| 吐纳 | Breath Work | Controlled breathing used to draw qi in and push impurities out. |
| 运功 | Circulate Qi | Actively driving qi through the meridians. What you do to heal, to resist, or to strike. |
| 引气入体 | Draw Qi In | The first skill a beginner learns: pulling ambient qi into the body. |
| 周天 | Full Circulation | One complete run of qi through the body's channels. Counted when describing long sessions. |
| 冲关 | Break a Checkpoint | Forcing a blocked point open. Loud, painful, and often done behind closed doors. |
| 压制修为 | Suppress Cultivation | Hiding how strong you are. The standard move before walking into someone else's territory. |
| 隐藏修为 | Hide One's Cultivation | Staying deliberately unreadable so others cannot judge you at a glance. |
| 散功 | Disperse Cultivation | Giving up your power, usually to survive, to escape, or to start over. |
| 燃烧精血 | Burn Essence Blood | Trading lifespan for a short burst of strength. Always a losing trade, sometimes the only one. |
| 自爆 | Self-Detonation | Blowing yourself up. The last move of someone with nothing left to lose. |
| 疗伤 | Heal | Treating wounds with pills, qi, or both. Takes time the plot rarely allows. |
| 调息 | Regulate Breathing | Settling your breathing to recover. Short rest, not full healing. |
| 入定 | Enter Deep Meditation | Going so deep you stop noticing the room. Interrupting it is dangerous for both parties. |
| 出关 | Leave Seclusion | Coming out after a longseclusion. Usually means a power jump and a changed world. |
| 辟谷 | Grain Avoidance | Living on qi instead of food. Quiet proof that someone is past a certain level. |
| 淬体 | Body Tempering | Beating the body with force, medicine, or lightning until it stops being ordinary. |
| 温养 | Nurture | Feeding power into something slowly over time. How treasures and injuries are handled. |
| 感悟 | Comprehend | The moment something clicks. Not taught, only caught. |
| 固本 | Consolidate the Root | After a breakthrough, spend time packing the new realm solid before pushing on. The habit that separates a survivor from a shooting star. |
| 聚气 | Gather Qi | Drawing ambient qi to a single point. The first thing a beginner is taught. |
| 凝气 | Condense Qi | Packing loose qi into something dense enough to use. |
| 化气 | Dissolve Qi | Turning qi into something else: force, light, a blade. |
| 御气 | Command Qi | Moving qi outside the body without a treasure. The line between journeyman and master. |
| 出定 | Exit Stillness | Withdrawing from meditation. Usually followed by checking how much time passed. |
| 收功 | Close the Exercise | Ending a session properly. Skipping it is how minor injuries start. |
| 行功 | Work the Qi | Running the technique in steady rotation. Slower than circulating qi, deeper. |
| 运气 | Move the Qi | Directing energy to a specific place. What a healer does before touching a wound. |
| 屏息 | Hold Breath | Stopping the breath entirely. Used to hide, or to survive poison gas. |
| 闭气 | Retain Breath | Holding breath underwater or in a sealed place. Tested by how long. |
| 换气 | Change Breath | The single breath taken between long exhalations underwater or in a fight. |
| 吸灵 | Draw Spirit | Pulling ambient qi into the body. The intake that makes cultivation possible. |
| 转气 | Cycle Qi | Sending energy around the meridians in a loop. Repetition is the whole method. |
| 泄气 | Leak Qi | Energy escaping where it should not. A wound, a flaw, or a betrayal. |
| 补气 | Replenish Qi | Refilling after depletion. Slower than it sounds and never fast enough in a fight. |
| 蓄力 | Build Power | Holding force back to release it all at once. Obvious, and still works. |
| 发力 | Exert Force | The instant the stored power is let out. One word, one moment. |
| 化力 | Neutralize Force | Turning an attack into nothing without meeting it. The highest form of defense. |
| 运劲 | Channel Strength | Moving force through the muscles in a specific path. A martial technique, not a spell. |
| 螺旋劲 | Spiral Force | Force that twists as it travels. Bores through armor instead of pushing it. |
| 震劲 | Shock Force | Force that shivers into the target. Damages what is inside, not what is outside. |
| 寸劲 | Short Force | Full power delivered from a distance of one inch. Looks like nothing happened. |
| 隔山打牛 | Through the Mountain | Hitting the front target to injure the one behind it. Old trick, still impressive. |
| 出手 | Strike Out | The moment of committing to an attack. Once done, no more talk. |
| 收手 | Call It Off | Pulling the strike back before it lands. Either mercy or a trap. |
| 下狠手 | Strike to Kill | No longer holding back. The line where conversation ends. |
| 痛下杀手 | Deliver a Killing Blow | Deciding to end the opponent's life, and meaning it. |
| 硬拼 | Trade Blows | Meeting force with force. Stupid, unless you know you are stronger. |
| 对轰 | Exchange Blasts | Firing techniques at each other until one side collapses. Pure arithmetic. |
| 抢身 | Close the Distance | Getting inside the opponent's reach. Where long weapons become useless. |
| 撤步 | Step Back | Yielding ground deliberately. Not the same as retreating. |
| 错身 | Pass By | Two fighters crossing past each other, strike already landed. The scene ends here. |
| 闪身 | Dodge Aside | Slipping out of the line of an attack. The most used verb in any fight. |
| 侧身 | Turn Sideways | Presenting a narrow profile. Less target, less power. |
| 沉肩 | Drop the Shoulder | Lowering the shoulder to add weight to a strike. An old martial detail. |
| 沉腰 | Sink the Waist | Rooting the lower body so the upper body can deliver. What stops a push from moving you. |
| 扎马 | Horse Stance | The low, wide stance every martial student hates. The foundation of everything else. |
| 下盘 | Lower Body | Legs and footing. What a master attacks first, and what a novice forgets. |
| 上盘 | Upper Body | Torso, arms and head. Where the visible fight happens. |
| 盘膝 | Cross-Legged Sit | The default posture: knees out, hands on the thighs. A chapter that opens with someone settling into it is signaling a time skip. |
| 静坐 | Quiet Sitting | Sitting still without the ambition of samadhi. Used when a character is thinking rather than advancing. |
| 闭目 | Close the Eyes | The half-second gesture before a decisive move. Almost always followed by a strike. |
| 逆运真元 | Reverse the Cycle | Running the energy in reverse on purpose. Buys a burst of power and takes years off a life. |
| 抽丝剥茧 | Draw the Thread | Separating one strand of a tangled inner energy from the rest. Painful, precise work, rarely filmed well. |
| 引雷入体 | Draw Lightning In | Taking a tribulation strike inside the body on purpose to temper it. Either a genius move or a death, and the prose usually commits late. |
| 以身试药 | Test Medicine on Yourself | Swallowing something unverified to see what it does. Alchemists do this once per arc and regret it twice. |
| 归息 | Return the Breath | Coming out of a deep practice session. Used as the chapter's exit cue. |
| 散功重修 | Scatter and Rebuild | Deliberately destroying your own foundation to lay a better one. Rare, expensive, and the plot usually rewards it. |
| 封印修为 | Seal the Cultivation | Locking your own power shut, sometimes with a talisman. Being unsealed later is a one-chapter event. |
| 伪装修为 | Disguise the Cultivation | Presenting a false level. Easy against strangers, hard against anyone who has fought you before. |
| 渡真气 | Pass the True Qi | Pushing energy into another body, usually to heal. Intimate, slow, and often the first physical contact between two characters. |
| 灼烧精血 | Burn the Essence | Converting lifespan into immediate power. You can see the years come off; the prose describes skin and hair going grey. |
| 断臂求生 | Cut the Arm to Survive | Losing a limb to escape. In this genre the limb is often regrowable, but the shame is not. |
| 服食丹药 | Take the Pill | Swallowing the prepared pill, then sitting to let it work. The sitting is where the danger is. |
| 沐浴更衣 | Bathe and Change | The ritual before a formal event. Signals that the next scene matters. |
| 沐浴焚香 | Bathe and Burn Incense | The fuller ritual before teaching, worship or a duel. Takes a paragraph and sets the tone. |
| 斋戒 | Ritual Fasting | Abstaining before an important rite. Mechanical, but it slows a character down at a bad moment. |
| 摘下面具 | Remove the Mask | Literal in theatre arcs, figurative in the rest. The genre likes both at once. |
| 自断经脉 | Sever the Meridians | Permanent self-destruction as a refusal. The character survives, usually, and is never the same. |
| 逆行经脉 | Reverse the Meridians | Forcing energy backwards through the body. A suicide technique that sometimes promotes the user. |
| 爆体 | Body Burst | What happens when too much energy goes in. The visual is always the same; the sound effects vary. |
| 授功 | Bestow a Technique | Teaching the method itself rather than the energy. Formal, witnessed, and politically loaded. |
| 入关 | Enter Seclusion | The scene where the door closes. Nine times out of ten the next chapter is five years later. |
| 静养 | Rest and Recover | Slower healing without technique. Used to buy time for other characters to act. |
| 观想 | Visualisation | Holding a fixed image in the mind to stabilise practice. Details matter less than the character's patience. |
| 渐悟 | Gradual Enlightenment | Progress by accumulation. Rarely shown on the page, because it has no scene. |
| 卡关 | Stuck at the Barrier | Being unable to advance. The genre's standard explanation for a protagonist who is losing. |
| 伐毛洗髓 | Scour the Hair and Marrow | The full-body version, usually triggered by a rare pill. The scene is always the same: black sludge, then a bath. |
| 易经锻骨 | Change the Tendons and Forge the Bones | Rebuilding the body for cultivation. Slow, and it explains why a late starter can still win. |
| 换血 | Blood Replacement | Swapping out mortal blood for something better. Unpleasant to watch, effective within three chapters. |
| 炼气 | Refine the Qi | The baseline daily task. Ninety percent of cultivation prose is this, described fifty different ways. |
| 散气 | Disperse the Qi | Releasing gathered energy. Sometimes a defence, sometimes a concession. |
| 掩息 | Mask the Breath | Suppressing the body's energy signature. Standard for anyone about to do something improper. |
| 传音入密 | Secret Sound Transmission | The tighter version: no visible lip movement. Used for conspiracy inside a crowded hall. |
| 化音成线 | Thread the Voice | Compressing speech into a line of sound aimed at one person. Same function, more expensive. |
| 神识扫过 | Sweep with the Spiritual Sense | A single pass over an area. The standard way to discover that someone is hiding. |
| 敛息藏形 | Hide Breath and Form | Full concealment: no sound, no energy, no outline. High-level stealth in the genre. |
| 隐身 | Vanish from Sight | Ordinary invisibility. Useless against spiritual sense, which is why it fails hilariously. |
| 踏空 | Walk the Air | Stepping on nothing. The basic tell of anyone above a certain level. |
| 御风 | Ride the Wind | Flying low and fast without a tool. Cheaper than a sword, and it looks better. |
| 御剑飞行 | Fly on the Sword | Standing on a blade and going. The genre's most photographed shot, and the one every adaptation gets wrong. |
| 踏云 | Tread the Clouds | Cloud walking, the older method. Slower, quieter, and used by people who want to be seen arriving. |
| 遁地 | Earth Escape | Sinking through soil and travelling below. Blocked by stone foundations, which matters in sieges. |
| 五行遁术 | Five-Element Escape Arts | Travelling through wood, fire, earth, metal or water. Each has a counter, so fights become element puzzles. |
| 移形换位 | Swap Positions | Trading places with a decoy or a shadow. Used once per fight, then expected. |
| 分身 | Clone | A copy that fights for a while, then dissolves. The longer it lasts, the more it costs. |
| 撒豆成兵 | Scatter Beans into Soldiers | Throwing beans that become troops. Absurd, and in the right novel absolutely terrifying. |
| 召雷 | Summon Lightning | Calling down a strike. Slow to start, impossible to dodge once it is committed. |
| 走火 | Internal Fire Deviation | The milder stage, usually caught early. Manifests as a fever that will not break. |
If a translator only memorises the realm ladder, dialogue still comes out stiff. These verbs do the quiet work. Compiled from the free cultivation novels at cultivationnovel.com and the Chinese source texts behind them.
Where these words turn up
Stories on this site that use them the way the notes describe.
The Sect Ancestor Leaves Seclusion, Mistaken for a ServantA century behind a closed door, and the sect no longer recognises its own ancestor.出关 A Century in Seclusion, the Last Cultivator AliveA hundred years of practice end with everyone else gone.出关 Three Centuries of Cultivation, Yet the Sect Thought I Had PerishedThree hundred years of practice, and the sect filed the protagonist under dead.出关Source: cultivationnovel.com · Cultivation Glossary