It had taken him a while to recollect himself and recall what happened. Now that he did, Artorian was kicking himself for ever thinking his tactic had been an idea worth considering. Flooding his body with Essence? It had trashed his system. You’d have more luck getting a ballista to work better by drenching it in oil and somehow hoping the javelin it launched shot further through the air! No, you old fool, he told himself; all you end up with is a dirty ballista that takes forever to clean, if it doesn’t just catch on fire and destroy everything!
On the plus side, having had to inspect every. Single. Ring provided him a count. Four hundred and twenty rings in total—corruption containers included—all cleaned up and formatted to his latest containment design. His skill at modeling, molding, shaping, and establishing Essence designs had greatly improved over the years, and the results were speaking for themselves. Next was that spider web layer occupying the indistinct space between his Center and what lay outside.
The natural Essence channels were originally indistinct as well, but with the binding and opening of Meridians… that changed. Similar to the cardiovascular system a normal body had, this secondary system was equally as intricate and complex. The Essence system—for the most part—overlapped the existing design a body already sported. If you had veins going into your hand, you also had Meridian channels that copied and overlapped that pattern.
The ‘Center’ on the other hand was ‘something’ that was present, yet not physically. The peculiar space had a unique, individualized connection that didn’t adhere to any sort of pre-existing bodily structure. His studies in anatomy had proven him correct on that topic, and he held the fact with certainty. With the addition of Essence, the Center became a more defined part of the overall whole, and connecting it to the body was a challenge in its own right.
To his grumbling satisfaction, he was finally willing to admit that the ‘spider web’ surrounding his Center had been helpful. Rather than some ungraspable barrier between two different varieties of empty space, there was now a very distinct ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ to his Center. This allowed a very significant increase in his ability to measure and estimate future ring additions. There was only so much space, and he hadn’t forgotten some of the mentions his Choir friends had let slip.
At a certain rank—C, he believed—one’s cultivation technique would ‘solidify’. He didn’t have the details on that, but it was an eventuality that had to be planned for in case it was true. Especially for his particular mechanism. A fractal technique wouldn’t have the problem he was envisioning; those interconnected spirals cleanly worked together while focusing entirely on draw and separation.
Their function seemed to be to ‘pull in’ refined Essence by virtue of spin-direction. The heavier elements—the corruption—couldn’t handle that movement and were rebuked in the process of what was considered ‘refining’. Actively refining had more to do with spinning your technique faster without it shattering or fracturing on you. Faster spin, more Essence of a cleaner and higher purity. More spirals? Better results. Simple, direct, effective cultivation technique.
Most cultivation techniques still relied on the use of a single, flat plane. Nothing moved up, down, or in a direction other than circular. The raw material comes in from the top, goes through the filter, and comes out at the bottom. It was a sieve. Refined Essence is stored in the body of healthy cultivators, since their cells can handle holding a certain amount.
“Healthy cultivators, my foot.” Artorian grumbled at the thought, though he didn’t notice. Health while cultivating was a precious luxury that he’d never had, and therefore he couldn’t access that body-storage feature. It was akin to having a house, except he couldn’t put anything in the building. All his furniture just ended up on the lawn. Sure, it worked, but who is comfortable leaving all their possessions out on their lawn? He certainly wasn’t. “Ah well, gotta do what I gotta do.”
Essence gets refined, open the window, and punt. Out you go, Essence! Stay on the lawn! Or in this case, his version of an Aura.
*Sigh*. Back to the work at hand… Artorian floated up to the barrier’s edge and prodded at the ‘web’. An unpleasant mental shudder ran down his imagined shoulders. *Argh*. Why did it need to be sticky? Of course it was sticky. It couldn’t just be silky soft, now could it? No, that would have been convenient.
He pulled on it, and the entire web bent and stretched like the goop that ran from a child’s nose. It was sickening in the sense that he wanted to berate the small child responsible for this. Oh. Right. That would be himself.
Artorian rubbed his metaphorical hands together and pulled Essence from his Aura. It was surprisingly easy to do once he’d gotten used to it, so long as it was just push or pull. Aura had this handy benefit of speed. He didn’t need to unfurl a ring to access the stored Essence, and didn’t have to struggle with his own body just to get Essence out of the cells where it was stored. Positives, negatives, it was all just one more thing to work on.
“Right…” He regarded the mess of his ‘fence’ for lack of a better term. This haphazard, slimy mess was just… ew. Why? Why did he have to think of spiders during the moment he was opening the first of his Meridians? Why not bees? He liked bees. Artorian worked with those in the apiary, and oh the pie! Nice, clean, hexagonal shapes. Stable and sturdy.
Well… why not bees? He knew how hives were constructed. He’d seen it happen for years, and he’d certainly eaten enough honeycomb to feel guilty about it. Maybe he could make this a tribute to the bees? Tribute to the bees! Yes! Those little critters never did get the praise they deserved, and he could swear that bees were better mathematicians than some of those old fogies back at the Academy.
Artorian waxed nostalgic. He really did want to go back there; it was the second closest thing to a true home before the Fringe, though the Fringe itself… well, he was a visitor now. A basic land rule in some places was that once you abandon an area—or give away a titled dominion—you’re not welcome there anymore. Not that the people wouldn’t try to go back, but the place feels… different. He’d experienced it before in the Socorro desert, and he’d never had the stomach to even consider returning. The very place rebuked him on principle, and he never did understand why.
Distractions! “Come now, old boy! Back on task. Remember that it’s the beeswax’s consistency that’s important.”
It hurt, as usual. Making alterations in your Center—or near it—always hurt. Essence work was a growing pain he’d become accustomed to. Unlike ordinary discomfort, this was not a ‘rip the tree sap off’ kind of injury. You had to make this one last. It was important to go slow when making alterations inside oneself. Gather Essence. Loop, twist, loop. Shape, bend, shape, bend.
Artorian made a prototype hexagon before committing to the concept. Nitpicking some details such as size, density, thickness of the shape, and a bit more that only a grumpy old man would care about. He whined about it in a you-can’t-quite-hear-me yet still ‘I’m-displeased-and-fixing-it’ tone. Which could mean anything from ‘it was actually improved’ to ‘oh heavens, no, it was improved! Promise!’… complete with the horror-stricken faces of onlookers.
The latter didn’t happen in this case. Plain and simple honeycomb patterns were pushed into the space that the sticky spider web currently occupied. He ran into a snag immediately. The space separating inside from outside was too indistinct for precision lengths of honeycomb. He could make them sturdy, but they would rip as the space wavered and stretched. The spiderweb did not, simply moving and stretching along with the minute movements of the space it occupied.
Some chin-scratching later, and the idea was adopted. Why make hard honeycomb when it could be more gel-like? Beeswax was important for structure, but not all parts of the structure needed solidity. No reason the pattern couldn’t breathe. Actually… was it important that the web was sticky?
It could be just a momentary annoyance, but it was worth a test. Artorian took some refined Essence and haphazar
dly tossed it at the webbing. Some of it did what he expected, and it stuck to the webbing, then was… absorbed? What? Was he losing Essence to this contraption? Oh, please no.
In a tizzy, and moving with a speed that would have made him lose his hat. The old man zipped after the tiny mote of light that was bouncing through the webway network. It eluded him like a feisty chicken that wasn’t having any of his cluck today. “Where are you going, you snooty little… oh.”
Artorian found himself at the connection of where his Center connected to his heart Meridian. He rubbed some shadow chest pains away at the memory, and observed as the mote of light… returned to his gyroscope-style cultivation technique.
“Huh.” He scratched the top of his head, an odd sensation when he had neither fingers nor head in this space. “Just like that?”
Artorian waited there and watched several more of the previously tossed motes copy the behavior. They bounced through the network, ended up at a connection point, and were drawn right back down into the refining process. That wasn’t what he expected at all. He thought he was going to lose the… wait a minute. Did that mean that all Essence that passed that midway space point didn’t come back?
Where did it go? Well… now he just had to know. Nearly giddy from the thought of figuring out something new once more, he zipped back to his honeycomb. Now… what to test? He took some refined Essence and tossed it through a region without the spiderweb present. It went, and went, and went. *Pop*.
It was gone.
“Where did the motes go?” It couldn’t have just vanished, could it? Slapping on his investigation hat, he zipped about a short while only to come up with nothing. Well… that was uneventful. Perhaps he should toss some Essence while far outside the Center and see what it did? Why not?
He fetched some, bundled it in a woven orb, and off he went. He passed through several Meridians because it was faster to mentally move through a pathway that had Essence-channels built. He unfurled the woven containment back into refined Essence by bathing it in some starlight Essence, wiping the orb’s identity from it… then he watched.
The Essence did nothing at first. It just moved around and stuck to cell walls, being harmlessly absorbed into them. He lost the refined Essence, but on closer inspection had a hunch that this particular set of cells was ‘fed’. They had greater vibrancy than surrounding cells. It was, after all, always important to eat. Speaking of: when was the last time he ate? The thought provoked complaints from his physical stomach, and he wondered why a few hours would have reduced him to such a state of physical complaint.
This half-sleep had gone on long enough, and the honeycomb project wasn’t a huge rush now that he knew where the Essences went. The spiderweb gave existing Essences more chances to refine further, while escaped Essence fed the body. This must be why cultivators didn’t need to eat as much, and could do more with less. Essence was substituting their previous primary intake source. Good to know, but it still didn’t beat a real meal.
Unfocusing from his inner work, he returned to the normal mental space where he lessened his awareness of the internal. With his refinement Center up and running, he let it do its own three-dimensional passive refinement thing. Artorian took a deep breath, and woke.
Chapter Four
*Cro~o~oak*. Artorian’s stomach rumbled loudly as he came around. He patted the painfully empty space, feeling both weak and in need of water. A headache built as he pushed himself up against the base of a tree. Artorian remembered something about a tree. Deep breaths disturbed the passive pattern of his nearly unmoving form. His stomach started complaining louder as it realized he was awake.
Night already? Must have been more than a few hours. The sound of a vast flame flickered nearby. The clicking pitches of large, dry logs being flame-licked came to mind. Wiping the shmutz from his face and eyes, he also felt the dire need for a bath with hardy scrubbing. *Cro~o~oak*.
“Mm… mmm. Excuse me… is anyone around?” His voice was hoarse and paper thin, hand sliding up to his neck for a quick rub. This wasn’t quite what he’d expected. He tapped around with the other, and his fingers dipped into some water. A curious glance at why his digits were wet allowed for the discovery of a water cup. Several, even. “Don’t mind if I do.”
He drained them. All of them. As soon as he started drinking one cup of the crystal-clear spring water, he had a second in hand. Then a third, and fourth, as he glugged them down, not having realized how awfully parched he was.
“Starlight Spirit, you wake! Birch had deep concern when you remained still for many moons.” The Wood Elves—which Artorian could have sworn had been trees a moment before—moved with their uncanny unified grace. They approached him, took a knee, and gently touched him to look the human over now that he was awake.
The old man didn’t fight or resist the head tilts, nudges to his legs, or puppeteering of his arms. He was quite used to being manhandled during medical checkups. The Elder had had years of it in the village when the clerics were screaming at one another during his days of Meridian opening. He smiled fondly at the recollection. What pleasant rabble-rousing that had been. The Wood Elves silently concluded that their charge was fine.
“Told you,” an unexpected and exhausted voice thrummed in reply to the calmed Wood Elves. It carried the same undertone of age Artorian himself possessed, and his ears followed the sound to the flickering of the nearby bonfire.
Squinting to see, Artorian could faintly make out the form of an armored figure that was slumped into itself. It sat with arms crossed on its knees, leaning forwards so the head was pressed to the wrists as a makeshift resting perch. The figure exuded tiredness. Long fingers on the gauntlets hung feeble and loose, and lengthy tresses of dull grey hair hung without a care in the world from the bottom back of the helmet. Now… the armor itself was exquisite.
At least, it would have been… had it held any of its original luster. The design screamed Masterwork, but the suit was coated in the kind of soot one saw when you left something in a kiln too long. This person had either stood, or had their armor interred in a place where constant furious blazes happened with great frequency. A myriad of battle scars emblazoned the plate. It wasn’t in disrepair, yet the history of war was so obvious on the exhausted figure that there was simply no question where they had spent most of their life.
The old man looked the other way, back to his caretakers. “Hello, Birch. Did I introduce myself? I’m a little foggy on if I did so.”
The calm Wood Elves smiled at him in unison. “You require no further introduction, Starlight Spirit. Birch is aware. We have kept you safe from the hungry Caligene, though we requested the Fire Soul be present.”
They motioned at the slumped individual to introduce the Fire Soul, but there was no response. They dropped the subject and awkwardly returned their gazes to the old man. “Please do not feel slighted at her… peculiarities.”
“Quite alright, lad. Lads? How…?” There was a mix of genders in the group and it was tripping him up. Some gears turned and fell into place, and Artorian thought he might understand the method Wood Elves used to refer to themselves and others. “Birch?”
The Wood Elves nodded in unison when the old human grasped their meaning. “Worry not, Starlight Spirit. Our speech may be difficult, but we are trying our best to speak… human?” They looked at one another and broke unison for a moment. Some of them raised their hands in an ‘I don’t know. Why do you expect me to know? I know what you know’ motion. Their unity reformed after they had their private conversation.
“‘Human’ is the best we can describe your language. We are doing what we can to converse in it. Ordinarily we speak Elven, or a long-winded dialect of tree. There are many of those, before the spirit asks. The questions you form can be seen from how your face does the… scrunching… thing.”
They clearly didn’t have the most polished social skills, but that didn’t matter one whit to Artorian, who had pulled out his ‘this is fine’ bucket and wa
s cramming their insecurities into it as if he were thieving bread off a table. He’d treat them kindly no matter what, so long as they were making the effort.
*Cro~o~oak*.
Speaking of bread… “Don’t worry so much Birch. You’re doing wonderfully, and I appreciate the effort you’re putting in. That’s very kind of you, and I think it’s delightful. On the topic of signs my body is giving off… would there happen to be anything to eat? That noise will continue until I do, and if I deduce correctly, your ‘many moons’ mention means days. I will require quite the amount, if possible.”
Birch was having a tough time. There was a lot that needed explaining in a quick timespan, and they weren't the best at this. The unison of their bodies remained, but a notable pause occurred before the group of Wood Elves spoke again. A whirl of wind cut through the area; it didn’t have a discernible source, air was just sucked from the region. Branches fluttered as the surrounding air tore into the vacant space. The bonfire flame flared to life as the excess oxygen allowed it to powerfully spike. That same spike gave away that the Fire Soul was no longer slumped next to the flame; the figure missing entirely.
The momentary distraction held all their attention, but it did well enough to snap Birch out of its quandary. Who knows what the Fire Soul was up to? If it was anything relating to food, the human would need to know in a hurry. “In this forest, the entirety of it, there are rules one must follow to not draw the ire of regional spirits. These may be beast spirits, tree spirits, and the like.”
“While there are many species within the forest, there is a bark-clad rule that we do not kill to feed ourselves. If a creature falls from age or accident, it is free to be taken. That which grows endlessly may be taken in moderation, so long as enough remains for the plant or being to create more of itself without concern. As a human, you may be tempted to destroy what exists in order to create something else. This is taboo here. Those who violate the rules are free game to be hunted by others. Also, the first to take a prize owns it.”
Artorian's Archives Omnibus Page 40