I could harness the power of the sun to speed up my construction effort by making qi-powered solar panels. A zero-gravity assembly line would be pretty useful, maybe start mining the moon and shoot raw materials into orbit? Harvesting the power of the sun would only give me efficient returns if the sun got a power-up. That would mean infecting the sun with more qi, forcing me to speed up my own efforts.
Recognising the vicious thought cycle for what it is, I forcefully terminate that line of thought. All of this is useless speculation anyway. I will need to get past the orbital defences first. The chance that those automated railguns are the only orbiting weapons is non-existent in my opinion. I am sure that they’re just the first line of defence.
A small line of qi travelling towards my head shakes me from my stupor. I calm the roiling power inside my head and return to the present. The world around me speeds up, and I feel the miniscule probe attempt to pierce my mental defences. Tracing it back to where it came from, I see Ares and Ket looking everywhere but at me.
I stare at the duo for a bit while I analyse the probe. A thick shell of qi surrounding a single sentence of obtuse symbols. I partition a section of my mind and let the probe break through its defences. A soon as it enters the small think space, the thick shell dissolves and the piece of code fragments. Each fragment takes a bit of shell energy to form small, swimming probes.
Ket made a brain virus! I thought the shell was just a clumsy attempt at hiding the content, but he used it as an energy source.
Only then do I notice Ares’s attempt at intrusion. The effort she made seemed too pathetic to take seriously. She managed to slip it through my outer mental defences, flying under my radar. Her probe smashes against my authentication process and halts.
I purge both attempts by flushing the infected areas with caustic qi and smile at the duo. “Very well done. Making a self-replicating process and hiding a process by fully enforcing its own patheticness is genius!”
“I was furious at you two for messing with my mind, but you can’t really do a lot to someone else’s mind.” Ket rubs the back of his head while looking down from the castle balcony we are on. He looks at Tess, who is listening to a lecture by Selis. Tess, Bord, Vox and Angeta are all sitting on the grass, looking at the shapes of water Selis is using as a blackboard.
Rhea is sleeping in my castle, cultivating on autopilot, while Ket, Ares and I are having a little discussion.
Ares chuckles once. “I tried to make Bord do things, but his thought processes are so incredibly huge and massive, it takes all my focus to change a single thing.”
Ket nods. “Yes, Bord and Vox are thinking thoughts that are multiple factors bigger than even the gutcore cultivators. I can’t convince Tess to do something she does not want.”
“Instinct versus awareness. Automation versus control.” I nod sagely while blocking more probes. Ares comes at me with a deluge of small attacks, each more sad and harmless than the last. Ket attacks with a mathematically random prodding pattern.
“Subtlety or raw power. You could brute force someone’s brain, but that would be similar to forcing them to move their limbs. People notice and start fighting back. Influencing someone subtly prevents you from making them do something against their nature or will.”
Filtering my eyes with a bit of qi, I sense a line of communication between the two. I attach my own qi thread and intercept their manner of coordination. Performing a man in the middle attack, I feed both wrong data and make their attacks collide and cancel each other out.
We have been at this for quite a while now. I am training my own fine control while they keep coming up with new ways to attack.
Selis got bored of it a while back and decided to teach the other students. I can see veins bulging on the blue-haired girl’s forehead as Bord makes another dumb comment.
“…aaaaAAAAAAAAH” PLUNK
A shrill scream ends with a dull thud. I glance at the furball sprawled along the grass and request an update from my qi clone. Database sends me a packet of information, and I raise a single eyebrow. That’s faster than expected!
⁂
“So, the double point thing is the same as the crooked line?”
“Yes, Angy. The double points with a line between them are also dividing.” Selis forces a smile while adjusting the floating water symbols.
“Because that’s how you write them down? A half is a one above a two.”
“Thank fuck! Yes, thank you for understanding!” Selis’ smile is now filed with relief as she addresses the beastwoman.
“What comes after nine again?” Vox raises his hand with a deadpan expression.
Bord replies to the question. “I know this one! It’s zero one! You add a zero when there are no numbers left.”
Selis splendidly ignores the two heartcore cultivators and focuses on Angeta and Tess. “It’s all in that Database thing. Teach set up this entire system where more knowledge unlocks when you’ve proven that you understand. Just spend some time studying and doing the exercises, and Database will recognise it when you have mastered the subject.”
Tess fiddles around with a green gem. “But there is so much! A literal sea of things to learn!”
“Do one of the starter tests, that way you can easily figure out what you enjoy and what you are good at.” Selis weaves an intricate web of water, pointing here and there. “I really enjoy learning about physics and the way water moves.”
“I like learning about plants and the way stuff reacts with stuff,” Vox interjects.
Selis shoots him a condescending smile. “That’s great, Vox. Angeta, look at section twenty-four thirty. That is the start of all the plant knowledge I have found.”
The beastwoman puts her own piece of jade to her forehead and scrunches her eyebrows. Selis turns to Tess. “Tess, look at section ninety-two hundred-twelve. Shadows and darkness are the absence of an electromagnetic radiation range.”
Selis then turns to Vox and Bord. She is silent for a bit. “You guys should just go and have fun or something.”
Vox stares Selis in the eye. “Don’t look down on me. I made my heartcore with a focus on being smart.”
Despair flashes across Selis’ face. “That means that you are one of the smar… What’s that?”
“…aaaaAAAAAAAAH” PLUNK
A small figure falls from the sky, landing spread-eagled on the grass with a dull thud. Vox disappears and is crouching beside the crumpled form a split second later. He touches the furry mess. “She’s fine. Just a bit dazed.” He gives a single glance towards the group and wanders off.
Selis runs towards the small heap, fingers twitching. She looks towards Vox and shrugs. She then hauls the small figure upwards and starts hugging it. “You look so much better all clean and clothed and without the collar and chains. Aaah, so cute! Come, sweetie, tell auntie Selis your name! You are the first one to prove to Database that you have mastered the basic knowledge, where is your key?”
One arm holds the furry girl tight while the other roams the small body. A small hand reaches the small green stone stuck to the beastgirl’s forehead. Selis then touches her own forehead to the still dazed beastkin and smiles.
“Ah, your name is Ferah. Nice to meet you, cutie! You put a lot of effort into learning. You should totally become a braincore cultivator like me!”
The small girl looks down into the smaller girl’s eyes, shining with expectation. Seemingly struck mute, Ferah shakes her head. She weakly struggles but is completely unable to free herself from the blue-haired girl’s grip.
“Grandma, gotta find grandma! Heartcore is the strongest.” Ferah mutters to herself, still half dazed.
Selis holds her like a ragdoll with mounting horror. “No, no. You should form a braincore. They are the best! Please don’t become another dumb brute like those fellows.”
Ferah looks up as Selis turns her around. She sees a fat boy picking his nose, a redheaded boy waving while smiling, a dark-haired girl rubbing her temples and
a beastkin whose ears are twitching. Ferah’s ears start twitching in tandem, both pairs of furry appendages flicking through a wide variety of poses before the smaller girl blinks once slowly. Angeta seems to lose interest at this and starts talking to Tess.
Selis drops the girl with a dejected expression. Then Ferah’s tail straightens and she turns to Selis. “Dee-Bee told me that I needed to learn stuff before I could leave. How can I learn the fastest?”
Hope rekindled, Selis starts a lecture on the many advantages of braincore cultivation. She only stops when Ferah falls flat on her face, twitching uncontrollably. Selis fusses about frantically, until a large hand lands on her shoulder.
Teach glances at a fidgeting Selis while laying a hand on the spasming girl. “Time to earn your keep, my students! Guide the fellow members of your school in forming their first cultivation base. Database, or Dee-Bee as she called it, only grants new school members access to Tree when they pass a test. It then stresses them to pick and start a cultivation. She would have started that the moment she landed where she not distracted by someone.”
Ferah opens her eyes slowly, clarity sparkling behind her eyes. She sits herself in a seated position and closes her eyes. Seconds later, her breathing becomes shallow. “Thanks…”
⁂
“No problem, kid. Congratulations on being the first to show a modicum of intelligence.” I grin at the small seated figure of the first addition to my forces. Looking upwards, I spot the majority of ex-slaves and other unfortunates milling about uselessly. They are slowly exploring the barren moon.
The biggest disappointment so far has been the old mages I picked up from the nexus skull rooms. The skulls themselves disintegrated during my breakthrough into the foundation realm. The fact that the only things I have left of that undertaking are still unable to cope with their changed lot in life leaves a sour aftertaste. They have been bitching about being unable to use their mana powers. Only one is seriously studying so far.
“As for the rest of you fellows, I’ve put up the first missions in Database. You can earn points to buy stuff and dangerous knowledge, just ask it.”
A serious lack of enthusiasm greets me. I look at my castle where Rhea is sleeping. I feel rather lonely. “You can buy food with points.”
Nanoseconds later, the only one not communicating with my qi clone is Ferah.
I need a drink.
Chapter fifty-one
Patterns
I look at the statistics ticking by with a fraction of my concentration. Some more beastkin have proven to the database that they have a solid grasp of basic knowledge. My students are now messing around with them. The only two humans who have been allowed to make the trip from the moon to Tree’s lands are Valerius and Ares’ old master, Danarius.
All in all, only a couple of dozen people have been ferried over out of the few hundred I kidnapped in total. The beastkin’s got really pumped after that little beastgirl was the first to succeed, but I also see that some humans are working hard.
As for the old fogies, it turns out, the mages are too stuck in their old ways and thinking patterns to admit to not knowing basic knowledge. The only mages in my school are Ares, Valerius and the old guys about to become crystal skulls. I’m guessing that the crystallised part of their brains set their characters traits, literally, in stone. I did a little bit of research on that subject and have found nothing so far to disprove that hypothesis.
The forming mana core is at the exact location where I can sense the soul. The middle of the brain, above the brainstem, seems to be the place where the soul has the most solid connection to the material plane.
I learned quite a few new bits of information about the soul these past few days, much to my surprise. I sink further into meditation, closing off the weird sounds penetrating my castle walls, as I prepare my next experiment.
Breathing out, I dump an immense amount of qi into the atmosphere. Reaching the foundation realm with the concept of nothingness and pure potential did away with any solid form of my cores. To be more precise, I can make my braincore whatever I need it to be at the moment. I can shape it into a book, similar to my previous cultivation, without much effort. A few seconds later I can turn it into a sword, vastly increasing the cutting power of my qi. Then I could switch it to an ever-burning fire, etcetera. It’s slightly less efficient at those tasks than a dedicated cultivation method, but the pure versatility wins out in the end.
My heartcore is somehow still there, largely unchanged except for a massive increase in power density. The few body cultivation methods I found all focussed on training the physical body, so that makes sense to me.
I shift my focus away from my heart and shape a sensor array in my braincore, making detailed models of spying apparatus. I focus all the dishes, antennas and telescopes on Tree, aiming at the one-dimensional portal inside its large trunk. The ship becomes clear in my mind, now a lot closer to the other continent. Still no land in sight though.
HHHuummbbRRtTTrrrRRGbrrWUGAWU
The wave passes across the ship again. Now only passively observing instead of letting it wash over me, my soul and mind remain unrattled. I notice a slight variation, the surreal feeling the entire thing gives me feeling slightly different from any wave I have sensed before.
I collapse the cloud of qi into a single rope and snake it towards Tree. That single rope contains more qi than this entire dimension, let’s be careful now. I mentally chuckle at that. I poke it through the portal while keeping the feeding line underground, splitting it in two the moment it emerges from the necklace. I thread one rope to the bow, the other to the stern of the ship.
Then I weave the complex interlaced structure of the rope tighter, completing the core. A highly dense ‘T’ shape of qi now extends from me. I shield the entire thing, only letting the two ends of the ‘T’ open to outside influence.
Qi can transmit information, but like sound, the speed of said transmission depends on the density of the material. Sound travels through metal nearly fifteen times faster than through air. Information like mental images moves through qi based on some sort of vibration. These vibrations can propagate much more easily when there is a lot of the medium to propagate through.
The scanning process I made when walking through the forest I found Lola in worked at half the speed of sound. For this test, I will need to measure speeds at significant fractions of lightspeed. The speed of light is nearly nine hundred thousand times the speed of sound through the air.
A quick bit of math tells me that in order to be able to measure one hundredth the speed of light, I’d needed to have increased my qi density by five thousand-fold. Luckily for me, I have more than accomplished this task. The qi I used for scanning was a faint cloud. I will be using compressed wires this time.
GGuummbbRRtVVrrrRRGbrrNUNUWU
Still too fast. The wave hit both of my probes at what felt like the same time. I expel more qi and weave the rope even tighter. The density of qi in the middle of the ropes increase once again by a couple of folds. I increase the length of both ends further, making them both float over the sea as I extend the horizontal bar of the ‘T’. This is starting to strain my con-
GGuuNNppRRtVVTTTttbrrNUNUWU
Got it! That wave is going at zero point thirteen c. I just barely managed to measure a slight time difference between both measuring points. Satisfied, I retract my experiment while my enhanced senses fade as I release the sensor array. The gaseous qi I breathe back in turns into a sloshing ball of liquid centred in my brain.
So, what does this mean? I will need to do a lot of tests in order to measure the effect of air, water and mana density on this radiation. What would speed it up or slow it down? Radiation that I suspect to be mana leakage. Pumping a lot of energy into, let’s say, iron makes it glow. It starts dumping energy in the form of visible radiation.
Qi does something similar. Powerful cultivators release this energy automatically unless suppressed. Not being able to sense someone’s h
igher power level simply means that your senses are overwhelmed and thus blinded by the radiation intensity.
I’m assuming that mana has similar properties. The wave of soul-stirring radiation is slower than both electromagnetic and qi radiation. I sit there for quite some time, inside the stillness of these stone walls, just listening to the variations in the waves with a small qi probe. The single person couch… I’m sitting… Shit…
My entire thought process grinds to a halt as I find yet another inconsistency in the English language. A two-seater couch is a love-seat. A three-person version is a sofa. A single person couch is a… Not a recliner, you need footrests for those.
With a bit of irritation, I add this conundrum to the ‘do not think about’ list and try to move on.
The comfortable chair I’m sitting on supports me as I analyse the patterns. Each wave is slightly different, but they never stray far from each other. They seem to be based on a procedural pattern, each wave a slight variation of the baseline instead of a compounding changes system.
That makes this entire problem a lot easier. And it reminds me to choose true, incremental mutations instead of variations of a baseline. I’m guessing this system was implemented this way to prevent creatures from developing a resistance, so it’s fine for whatever this stuff needs to do, but it’s still a security risk in my opinion.
Whoever made this shitty planet was no braincore cultivator, too many things are not thought out to their logical conclusion.
Now that I have all the data, the solution is pretty easy. I reverse engineer the formula that would generate all the possible generations I have found so far. I create a process that records the waves and checks it against the algorithm. Then I offload it to my qi clone. It’s not working anywhere near capacity, even with Ket, Selis and Ares accessing it nearly constantly, so it has processing power to spare in spades.
The Dao of Magic: Book II Page 41