The fear of the unknown, the healthy apprehension at mentally ascending while still being physically stuck her is washed away as my understanding grows out of my control.
My eyes open even wider.
The end of this world comes into sight, only a scant few million years until the ecosystem becomes unable to sustain life. The few billion years until the local sun expands, swallowing up this solar system is now as clear as the next number in a simple mathematical sequence. It feels like the sun exploding into a supernova, leaving only a white dwarf, is just around the corner.
I clearly see the universe’s heat death approaching now. Then blackness. Just an infinite empty void in which the last black holes radiate themselves to death.
I do still feel some sort of tether holding me back though. There is a small link to a small mind that holds a small bit of understanding. It does feel warm though. Warmer than this hopeless, bleak outlook that has the end staring me in the face all the time.
The last remnant of my old, foolish, ignorant self reaches for the link. It wants to hug it, to keep it close in blissful ignorance. The majority of my mind is now calculating the likeliness of a big bang happening again. Gravity affects everything in the universe, so all that blackness should contract once again, right? Calculating when the ever-expanding cloud of loose and disintegrating elemental particles will contract once again is straining at my mind.
The creation and collapse of the entire multiverse could very well be the heartbeat of a creature far beyond any understanding. A more likely scenario is that this universe is just a single sub-molecular particle in some sort of ultra-high dimension. History and nature do tend to repeat.
Just as the answer to this question seems around the corner, I get pulled back.
“You were gone. What happened?” Unfamiliar grey eyes stare into mine with a hint of concern.
I blink a bit while looking around. I am on top of the mana dungeon, right? Things are slowly making sense again. Massive sack of crystals, check. Disciples, check. Unconscious mages, check. I should form the student contract thing with Ares later, I remind myself. Smoking hot dragon babe, check.
What was I doing again? Rhea just poured information into my mind, and then… Then what? Heartbeats that span quadrillions of years? It slips from my mind as my brain-space reforms from a template. Chunks of data processing and other automated procedures slide back into place from memory. I gather the floating bits of information that were just shoved through my skull and place them in in the information inbox.
D cup. There is that measuring process again. I look down and grin. “You got a handle on the form shifting process?”
I see the gears inside her mind spin as she follows my gaze to her bust. Her chest glows a bit and shrinks.
C cup… That’s fine too, I guess. “We can explore that stuff later. Let’s first get out of here.” I just want to be away from this place now; there’s a creepy deadness in the air that I don’t like at all. It wasn’t there just moments ago, weird.
I sink qi into my necklace and slide the ship towards Tree using some quickly formed qi threads. I pull it through and out the moment the bow touches the golden glowing wood while making sure that the modified keel is slid upwards into the hull. It slams against the black stone, and I form some qi constructs to keep it from tipping. Jumping up on the deck, I go and stand behind the wheel.
Let’s go through the pre-sail checklist quickly. The ship is fully repaired and looking sleek. The single mast is back in place. The sails are not necessary anymore and are stowed below decks. Lastly, I check the extensive modification I made to the internal qi wiring and control systems. That all checks out too.
Then I set the entire thing rolling down the slope, going to the south-west. The towering smokestack is a rather easy-to-spot goal. I feel the deck reverberate as my disciples and Rhea get onboard.
“Don’t start pulling chairs from your ring just yet. It’ll get rough for a bit! And don’t mess with the ship in transit, Angy!” I raise my voice to be heard over the din of wood screeching across stone. Angeta lets the wooden chair she formed from the deck sink back, and Ket pulls the luxurious couch back into his ring.
The vessel picks up speed, and I begin constructing a ramp. Almost forgot to activate the stealth field. The protective shield would negate some of the coming shocks, but centuries of sneaking around made me avoid unneeded attention. Much good that did me so far…
Halfway down the slope, I realise that I need to modify the way I process momentum. Also, I might have underestimated the slipperiness of a perfectly smooth stone surface wet from the rain. The fact that a large wooden vessel weighing several hundred tonnes generates a lot of momentum when sliding down a slope seems so obvious in hindsight.
⁂
“What just happened?” Selis tilts her head as she steadies herself on the vibrating deck. Seven young adults and a mature lady are gathered in a group, huddling midships. “Ket, what just happened? Lady?”
“Call me Re-Haan. And I just blew his mind. Don’t know why he is acting so weird though.” Re-Haan shifts on her feet while avoiding any eye contact.
“Blew his mind? Can you clarify?” Ket asks.
“Uhm, I sent him a rather large collection of data directly. Like putting it inside a piece of jade.”
“You send him information directly! Let’s see. Yep, that would shatter the numbered compartments and cause his mind to expand beyond the local universal limit. We are lucky that he is back, somehow. He felt wrong for a moment like he was everywhere but nowhere.” Selis has the presence of mind to command some rain to gather on Ket’s head the moment his hair starts wafting steam.
“What do you mean, compartments? Is it like telling a part of my brain water to do something by itself?” asks Selis.
“Brain water? Compartments? Don’t you mean brain-slaves that do my bidding?” asks Re-Haan.
Ket stumbles a bit as the ship picks up speed. “It seems that we all have our own way of setting up automated processes. Interesting. Teach must have just reformed his basic template, that’s why he suddenly pulled out a ship and set it barrelling down the slope.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, but aren’t we going a little fast?” The small group of braincore cultivators only then notice the rapid gaining of momentum. They turn to the speaker, Tess, who is looking ahead nervously.
“I’m sure that he has it under control, right?” Angeta joins the group as she casts a worried and irritated glance towards the bearded man behind the steering wheel. “He seems a bit manic at the moment, what did you do when you kissed him, lady?”
“Call me Re-Haan. I just gave him some information.”
“Sure, Re, and please don’t do that again. At least not outsid-”
The rest of the conversation is cut off as the ship starts bucking wildly. A grey, glowing ramp starts to form in front of the ship, only for the sliding vessel to shatter it without much effort. The ship has reached the forty-five-degree slope halfway down the large stone sphere and is barrelling towards the highest buildings with speed.
“Whoops, sorry about that! Can’t anchor qi constructs to dungeon stone, somehow slipped my mind! Now how do I keep this thing under twenty g?” Teach’s voice does little to reassure the group, who are now clutching the railing.
Tess starts sinking into a shadow while waving at the rest with a shit-eating grin. Selis has closed her eyes and tendrils of water start to gather around the ship. Bord is murmuring something about triangles while eyeing the shattered remains of the ramp. Re-Haan looks around with a frown on her face. She sighs a bit before yelling: “CLOSE YOUR EYES.”
A bright, purple-tinged light bathed the mana dungeon that day. Some mages reported seeing a flying ship with massive dragon wings sprouting from the deck sailing overhead. Other swear they heard incoherent screaming. Other still swear that nothing special happened. A small contingent of low ranked mages went missing for half a day, only to be found st
umbling around without any recollection of what occurred in the past week.
That last report was largely ignored by the mages in high positions, only a secret council of mages skilled in control instead of power took notice. The disappearance of one of their own, a promising potential recruit, was just a small footnote in the reports that they sent out.
Besides all that though, none of the mages seem to be aware of a small circle, spinning slowly at the highest point of the mana dungeon.
Chapter thirty -five
Rapport
L og of Ket. Day 2 of sailing.
0600: Wake up in own room in the Ascent, go outside at 0612, swim in sea for 10.5 minutes at 15.6 metre per second average, eat 0.94 kilograms of food. Fish, grains and vegetables. Set alarm in 8 hours to eat again.
0630: Juggling 82 swords. Sailing is getting boring now.
0714: Tess walks on deck and attacks. Spar for 46 minutes.
0800: Go fishing. Try to teach Tess to fish with Selis’s help, again. I catch 2.3 fish per minute, Selis catches as much as she wants, upper limit is her range. Tess catches 0.001 per minute, total time she has spent fishing so far is 16.25 hours. Factually it’s 0 per minute but she jumped overboard and caught one with her own hands yesterday. Discuss morality of Selis playing with the glass mana mutant fish while consuming its brethren.
0802: Sidenote, hourly time notation is based on percentage, not minutes. 16.25 hours is 16 hours and 15 minutes. Why can’t an hour have 100 minutes? Really annoying.
0903: Teach Bord to fish for exactly 2 minutes. Stop when he falls asleep while I’m teaching him. Ignore Bord for rest of day.
1126: Adjust ship’s course to avoid stormfront. Verify weather report provided by Re-Haan. Re-Haan displayed elevated heartbeat and enlarged facial capillaries. Start causality searching process. End causality searching process 0.028 seconds later when most likely cause is found. This also explains why Teach and Re-Haan didn’t show up on deck until 1042. This also explains why certain smells accompany the two of them at certain times. This also explains why certain hormones are wafting from the two at certain times. Teach… Try to determine if he is a good or bad example.
1148: Confirm accuracy of weather report. 2.3 Percent deviation per hour found, compounding. Acceptable for casual use. Start own weather prediction program.
1152: Stop own weather prediction program. Calculating capacity insufficient for up-to-date weather prediction. Simple model makes results useless, accurate model is too resource intensive to maintain.
1159: Request weather prediction algorithm from Re-Haan. Very little useful information provided. Gut feelings and experience are difficult to quantify.
1206: Information processing compartment is done with new subject. Spend 19 minutes reviewing information about the way trees get water to their leaves. Question usefulness of information.
1327: Spar with Angeta. Usefulness of tree information is high, restricting cells responsible for water transport shuts all her plant-based techniques down. Get beaten by large construct made from seaweed 1.07 minutes later. Start countermeasure process.
1400: Food alarm goes off. Eat snack from ring. Teach nowhere to be found again. Check Tree necklace hanging on mast, observe restructuring taking place. Observe localized water level drop due to massive amounts of seawater being transported inside Tree. Do more fishing while transforming mana into qi.
1457: Teach gives tour of Tree dimension. Breathing in dense qi causes core to fill with gaseous qi. Advance to qi condensation at 1503. Teach explains that messing with differing cultivation bases caused my control and cultivation speed to rise. Find out that everything, not just certain metals, has electromagnetic fields.
1536: Tess advances to qi condensation stage. Observe her moving through stances to test new capabilities. Notice self observing her hip area more than usual. Set process in motion to figure out why my sight is attracted to hip and chest area.
1546: Ask Teach about hormones. Ignore smirk. Ignore loaded looks between Teach and Re-Haan. Ignore bunny on Teach’s shoulder. Get sent out of Tree dimension with Lola exactly one minute later. Teach puts up privacy barrier as soon as we are all on deck again. Start and stop analytical process due to predictable underlying reasons. Avoid Tess.
1813: Discuss advancement with other students. Sense uncomfortable atmosphere between Tess and me. Reasons unknown. Most likely reasons are scary, somehow. Ignore knowing smirks from other disciples.
1947: Eat dinner inside Tree. Tess cooked. Food is very, very tasty. Weird smell in the air, emanating from Teach’s castle. Ponder whether to question Teach about it. Decide not to.
2001: Practice with magnetic control. Attempt water control. Horribly inefficient. Salt water control is slightly less inefficient. Still needs couple of thousand times more concentration and qi in comparison to metal control. Defeat Angeta’s seaweed by pulling on trace metals.
2110: Receive piece of jade from Teach. It’s filled with all kinds of techniques and information about human copulation process. Be fascinated about possibilities. Be absolutely horrified about possibilities. Qi-infused sexually transmissible diseases? Mind control through orgasm? Flesh-eating parasites that mind control their host through genitalia consumption and mimicry? Thoroughly memorise and comprehend Eternal Stamina Mantra and its braincore adaptation. Make difficult decision; avoid Tess until we both have solid cores.
2235: Spar with entire student group on top of sea to train in low light situation. Tess is everywhere, Selis is unapproachable, Vox is useless without light, Ares is useless because all her buffing and healing causes a lot of light, and Angeta efficiently harasses everyone with underwater plants. Re-Haan joins in and wins 3.4 seconds later.
2357: Decide to meditate for rest of day until morning. Increased cultivation realm in combination with braincore has lowered my sleep requirement to a single full night per week. Remove process that keeps analysing visual memories containing Tess, again.
⁂
Light Island, or Wave Island is gorgeous. There are tall white buildings everywhere. It looks like a futuristic tropical vacation resort complete with white beaches and palm-like trees. No big mountains on this one, just flowing hills rising out of the sea, dotted with tall, bleached structures. I’d say it was worth the almost week of sailing to get here.
While I’m waiting for Ares to get her shit together, I might as well take inventory of what happened in the last few days. First off, Tess and Ket have broken through to the qi condensation realm. They managed to compress the gaseous qi in their cores by sheer force of will.
I always suspected that wilfully removing your cultivation base and reforming it gives willpower a significant boost. It literally feels like you are dying while doing so. Those two rebuilt their bases the most and tried all types of cores. It feels pretty nice to strike that theory off of my to-research list after the centuries it has been on there.
The rest are nearing the next realm too, except for Selis and Ares. Selis because she only experimented with changing the flavour of her qi intent and Ares because the rest got a head start. I forcefully rebuilt Ares’s core a few times, which proves that the removal and rebuilding needs to be done by the individual themselves.
Another theory of mine is also confirmed beyond reasonable doubt at this point. Advancement from a mortal to the qi condensation realm should not be this quick. The reason why it has been possible on this planet is due to the complete lack of qi.
The cultivation world had been blasted by ungodly amounts of qi for many, many years. Even a single rock held a rather large amount of qi in structural form. This permeation of qi made sensing the energy difficult, separating wild qi from qi under one’s control usually took years. It was like figuring out what water is your own, while being underwater. The qi gathering stage was all about gathering small strands of personal qi and filling your core with the stuff.
Then there is Tree. I have slightly underestimated the growth rate that my very own pocket dimension
went through. The installation of the fancy mana-to-qi converter now adorning the massive tree has sped up the rise of qi levels significantly. Tree feels very content. Its previous goal was to be the tallest tree around. It certainly has achieved that goal now, and it’s using the smidgen of intelligence it possesses to turn the disc of land into a lush forest filled with all kinds of herbs and plants.
I poured a lot of seawater in there along the way, setting it to a slow spin. It now cools the slowly growing volcano, transporting that heat clockwise towards the cold mountain. There it clashes with the self-sustaining ice mountain, generating more qi. The circulating wind has brought its first heavy rains, causing even more life and motion in the form of small rivers running back to the sea surrounding the lands.
I am starting to feel slightly reassured about the increasing levels of qi in the air. It totals an early stage foundation realm cultivator. Not enough for me to significantly advance, but that is something I am planning to change soon. I could advance to the foundation realm but would need to suck dry nearly all the accumulated qi. That would reset the entire process and would be rather stupid.
All the life that came along with the earth and dirt I kidnapped also helped. Life breeds conflict and conflict is just clashing energies. Qi clashing with qi generates more qi, so all the insects, bacteria and fungi living everywhere are generating non-trivial amounts of qi.
This entire area of research is rather ground-breaking work. Back in the cultivation world, this area of study was non-existent. Why bother with qi generators if the sun is generating more than you can use? I have read about dimensional artefacts and every slightly influential or powerful cultivator had at least one spatial ring back in the cultivation world, but using pocket dimensions to generate power is a new field of research.
There was this one clan who specialised in making pagoda-like structures in order to cultivate personal gardens. Making qi cycles was, to my knowledge, never done. Why bother producing fresh drinking water when you are living on top of an ocean of the stuff? It’s kind of like that.
The Dao of Magic: Book II Page 29