Fantasy Martial Arts Starting Abilities

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by zoncxs

What I am trying to create is a list of starter abilities that a teacher or school would teach students in their first or second year.

You've established Sense Chi as the first. After that, I'd say Recovery/Healing, alongside building up a larger reserve of chi (if that's something one can do via training), as those will allow more practice for later steps (as you don't need to rest as long between sessions if you boost recovery, and can practice for longer at a time with a larger reserve). After that, I'd go with my prior suggestion - strength/speed/physical resistance, then improving Sense Chi and gaining increased mental resilience alongside the ability to suppress/conceal one's chi, then gaining the ability to actively use chi to intimidate and similar (although I could see that being learned around the same time as suppress/conceal, as they seem like they may be similar actions but aimed in different directions), and then start learning some of the more overt stuff, depending on the student's talents (and probably the school's philosophy/quirks - in Dragon Ball the ability to use chi for flight was largely a Crane School thing, while the Turtle School favored strength building).

Of course, there may be other factors involved. If chi practitioners are frequently targeted for attacks (by a fearful government, rival schools, etc), chi concealment might need to be learned rather early to avoid getting crushed as a newbie. If building up a reserve and/or learning how to recover faster is sufficiently boring that an unacceptable number of students are likely to quit if just learning that, obvious improvements like strength boosts and even force-fields and imbuements might be learned much earlier. If medicine is sufficiently advanced that sickness is rarely a serious concern, increasing physical resistance may be delayed - although if boosted resistances lets you more safely make use of certain power-boosting elixirs (historically, a lot of "elixirs" contained dangerous components, and I know in some "cultivator" stuff I've seen/read many of the high-end elixirs are dangerous to weak practitioners), then you might want to learn that trick ASAP.