If I may add ā thereās also a lot cultural understanding that the canon(s) require you to have, such as how a lot of xianxia/wuxia takes values based off Chinese-specific spirituality/religion.
Qi (spiritual energy, chi, life force, however you want to call it) is an energy you develop inside of yourself, by practising meditation, exercise (usually the martial arts), discipline, educating yourself and practising compassion. The more you cultivate it, the bigger pool of it you have at your disposal when you need it.
This is not just some fantasy idea ā itās difficult to transliterate because Western religions donāt have the exact same idea, but itās essentially a manifestation of a metaphor for self-control and self-development. You develop self-control by doing those exact same things. The more you practise being patient and learning more about the world, the less likely you are to have anger problems. The more exercise you do, the better you will be at martial arts. Etc.
To add to this, everything in the natural world has its own qi. Humans and animals have qi, plants and rocks, etc do as well. Everything has qi. This is reflected in the idea of when you reincarnate, you could reincarnate into anything, because everything is made of the same energy, a religious/spiritual precursor to the idea of atoms before we had the vocabulary to define atoms. This is an amalgamation of traditional Chinese Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism that exists within a lot of wuxia/xianxia.Ā
The difference with cultivators is that not only do they have qi and can control their usage of it, they can build it up and store it, aka developing a golden core. In the novel, after WWX removes his golden core, itās not said that he has no qi. He will always have some spiritual energy, but he isnāt able to gather enough in one go to do all the things that a cultivator can.
(This is where I make an aside to point out that the golden core is metaphysical. Itās not like an extra organ in your body. Qi is spiritual energy. I see a lot of reference in fic to Wen Qing slicing WWX open or scars or whatnot ā but in canon, you give people a spiritual energy transfer by placing two fingers on their wrist. You also see them seal their spiritual energy by jabbing fingers/needles/nails into their meridians (aka acupuncture pressure points). The golden core transfer is more likely to look either like the above, or like Wen Qing shoving a Kamehameha-esque ball of energy into Jiang Chengās chest.)
Traditional cultivation is all the stuff Iāve mentioned above, aka using and developing your own qi. It is considered rude AF to use spiritual energy that is not your own, because it means that qi belongs to something else, whether itās a tree or a rock or whatever. (If reference to another media helps you, imagine in ATLA Hama waterbending by pulling all the water from the flowers around her, killing all the flowers and also later bloodbending.)
Traditional cultivation methods are liberate, suppress, eliminate, in that order. Liberate is fulfilling a dying wish aka using positive energy to negate the resentful energy, suppress amounts to essentially boxing it up and putting it somewhere else, and eliminate is to kill whatever monster it is and make it take its resentful energy with it into the afterlife. None of these three things actually involve touching the resentful energy itself.
Now, all of the above is knowledge that a Chinese audience or anyone whoās read/watched any amounts of wuxia/xianxia kind of automatically knows.
I know, this is long, but this is where demonic cultivation comes in. Now, demonic cultivation is interesting because it skirts a weird-ass grey area! Demonic cultivation is using spiritual energy that is not yours, so it should be all means be frowned upon. However, itās different than for example, pulling the life force from the nearby wildlife so that you can stab your sworn enemy, because resentful energy is just lurking there. The corpses/ghosts/etc donāt need it to stay alive, and the resentful energy is in fact whatās making it linger.
WWX is correct in that if you managed to manipulate it somehow, the corpse/ghost/etc would disappear ā if you imagine, for example, a large concentrated amount of smoke and WWX is there flapping a fan at it, it will get thinner and thinner until itās unnoticeable. Itās still there, but heās dealt with it very effectively.
When Lan Wangji expresses his concern that the resentful energy will corrupt him, it isnāt a judgement that using resentful energy makes you morally evil, but a concern that in a similar way to if you surround yourself with mean, angry, violent, volatile, abusive people all the time, it takes a toll on you mentally and you are more likely to become like that.
The main complication of the story is, of course, that it goes beyond the theoretical of being able to manipulate the resentful energy - once heās figured out how to manipulate it, he doesnāt just use it to put things to rest, he uses it to control corpses.
So when everyone reacts badly to the idea of him using resentful energy, I think itās twofold. Thereās the initial ick factor of using energy not your own ā no, invasive! ā and then there is also much potential for that type of bending cultivation to be misused because it can be scaled in a way that using only the limits of your own golden core cannot.
If youāve only got your own core, sure you can stab people with your spiritual sword, or if you have a spiritual weapon like Wangji you can decimate multiple people at a time. But if youāre not relying on the pool youāve built for yourself, you can harness the resentful energy from anything and most of the time itās just lying around!
Narratively, we as a reader see that itās fine for WWX to do it because he really has no interest in raising a corpse army and ruling the world, but we do also see how other characters are interested in using demonic cultivation techniques to actually do evil. So the demonic path itself isnāt evil cultivation, but it does admittedly allow for people who want to cultivate evilly (ā¦lmao) to do so with more ease than the traditional path.
