The Dao of Magic: Book II

by Andries Louws

  ‘Can I beat Lola yet?’

  ‘Five points.’

  ‘Yeah, kay.’

  ‘Points deducted. Measured qi levels are equal.’

  That’s the best news Bord has heard all day. Finally, his levels of qi are the same as that annoying rabbit. A normal rabbit should be covered in scales or chitin, not fur. Shivering at the thought of that freaky combination, Bord rolls from his throne.

  The ground shakes as ripples undulate across his girth, his impact with the floor whipping up a minor dust cloud. The surrounding people freak out and start fussing over him. Bord rolls to his feet and stands. Holding up his gut, he starts waddling towards the volcano towering over the trees.

  ⁂

  “Listen here, Angeta. I’m very grateful for the rescue. Protecting me during our escape is also something I really appreciate. I would like some explanation though. What the fur is going on?”

  “Listen here, Ragni…” Angeta’s voice is a mocking caricature of Ragni’s sensual but slightly panicked voice. “You better be grateful for the rescue. You would have been auctioned once the hall repairs finished. You know full well where slaves with your assets go.” Casting a glance at her old rival’s chest, Angeta puts down the bundle she is carrying.

  The two beastkin are standing on a slightly rounded white surface. The portal they came through is no longer a white line standing in the middle of nowhere. An ornamental arch made from stone houses the spatial rift. The other end is still in Ket’s old shack, so Ragni was quite flabbergasted once she was led through.

  “Help me, you lazy cow.”

  Ragni keeps staring at the spectacle around her for a moment longer. The golden tree, the small suns, the endless void, it’s quite a bit to take in. Turning, she sees Angeta pull another vine wrapped bundle through the white portal.

  “What are those?”

  “Ah, you know. The usual people Teach would kidnap. Slaves, political prisoners, unwilling participants in arranged child marriages. All good people though, I left the backstabbing bitches to rot in the bed they made.”

  Ragni feels a sudden urge to run away. Ignoring that gut feeling, she walks back through the white line, amazed at the way it opens around her. Amazed at the fact that now she is standing in Tower City again as if the floating mountainous tree island was but a dream. She shakes herself free from the daze and looks at the bundles stacked high inside the little hut.

  “Those are people?” Ragni grabs one from the top of the stack and tosses it through the white opening.

  “Hmm, yeah. Put this on your forehead once back on the moon.”

  Grabbing the green stone handed to her, she stuffs it in the folds of the dirty rags she is wearing and continues hauling bodies.

  ⁂

  “Why? Why by all the tails do you want me to do this? I appreciate that you freed me and introduced this entire qi and cultivation thing to me, don’t get me wrong. It nearly makes up for the years of making my life miserable, but why?”

  “You know how we work. Beating up a guy is the least effective way to get rid of them. Getting beaten by a guy is also not effective, that just means they conquered you and will also never leave you alone. The only way to get rid of these pervs is to distract them. Who better to take this mighty burden off my shoulders than a cow like you?”

  Ragni’s tail starts bristling. “Is that why you took the clothes Database offered me?”

  “What clothes? Database, did Ragni pass the test?”

  A flat, synthetic voice can be heard. “Minimum base knowledge test completed. Access to Tree granted.”

  “Great, off you go!” Angeta smiles widely and approaches. Ragni’s tail puffs up further in some sort of danger-sensing response.

  “Angy, what are you doing? Stay awaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaayyy-”

  ⁂

  “LOLAAAAH!! IMMA GOWNA BEET YA.” Bord’s blubbering voice thunders across the hot foothills of the volcano. A large group of beastkin and humans wearing white fluffy clothes look at him.

  “Squueee!”

  “Nah-uh. Downt cawe wha Teetch sayd. Fite me!”

  Lola’s ears poke up from behind a rock up the slope. Bord starts walking towards them.

  “Come here, fite meee!”

  Lola lets out an irritated snorting sound and hops on top of the rock. Looking down on the fat boy imperiously, she wiggles her nose at him. The spectators, both of Lola’s and Bord’s faction, all clear the area. Lola stamps her foot once but lowers her posture as Bord keeps approaching her. Now huffing and puffing slightly, Bord keeps his vision trained on the small rabbit.

  “FIITE MEE YOU STUUPID RABBI-”

  His shrill voice is cut off as furry paws slam into his chest. The thick blubber undulates and bounces around as Bord backflips. Landing in a wobbly version of the superhero pose, Bord swipes at Lola. The rabbit dodges the blast of air with ease, turning into a white streak aimed for his midsection. Bord manages to dodge the incoming headbutt by falling to the ground faster than physically possible. Lola avoids the punch thrown by the grounded Bord in return.

  Long story short, tales of the mighty match between Lord Bord and the Lady Lola were talked about in two versions. One tale tells of the might of the small rabbit, able to land hit after hit, wearing the evil giant down over time. The other tale is of the heroic hero, taking hit after hit without fail, but unable to beat his slippery and treacherous adversary. In the end, though, neither party did much damage.

  None of Lola’s kicks managed to penetrate the fluid armour surrounding Bord. None of Bord’s powerful attacks were fast enough to hit the nimble rabbit.

  So, half an hour later, the rocks around them are ground to sand and the few plants obliterated, both combatants stare at each other as they catch their breath. Lola’s previously pristine fur is now matted with dust and dirt, Bord’s previously tight clothes now hanging slack across his diminished frame.

  Bord’s fists start to pulse with a mystical energy, each new flare of power causing his feet to sink further into the soil and rock. Lola’s forehead sparkles as a horn of pure white starts to form.

  “BRING IT YOU FWUCKING RABBIT!”

  “SQUUEEEEEEE!”

  The two cultivators kick the ground with enough force to splinter more rock into dust as they propel themselves at the other party.

  “-aaaaaAAAAAAAAH” KER-PLOINK

  Only to be smashed into the ground by a flailing beastkin goddess in skimpy rags.

  GULP

  All the male observers swallow at the sight. Even the females shift about restlessly as they observe the voluptuous female rub her butt.

  “Stupid Angeta, that hurt. Ah, she told me to grab the rabbit here and the fatty here. Done. Now what?” Standing up, the few scraps of dirty fabric stretch taut around her assets. She holds the still dazed Lola in one hand, her fingers pinching the little critters neck. Bord’s neck is pinched tightly with her other hand, his form also barely conscious. Ragni looks at the scenery surrounding her. Her tail once again doubles in size the moment she sees rivulets of lava dripping from the massive mountain behind her. Her tail reduces in size as she notices that she is the centre of attention of a few hundred people.

  “Uuhm, hello? I’m new here, my name is Ragni, Angeta saved me and now here I am, I guess? What should I do with these two?” She pumps the bit of qi she has access to through her arm and legs as she hauls Bord upwards. Absolute silence greets her as she looks at the dumbfounded faces surrounding her.

  Ragni shrugs her shoulders, throws both boy and rabbit to the side and strides towards the massive Tree towering over the forest. Moments later, she is walking through the forest while inspecting her own core space. Suddenly, a massive thundering of voices and footsteps comes from behind her.

  “ALL HAIL RAGNI.”

  “SHE DEFEATED BORD AND LOLA.”

  “PRAISE THE GODDESS RAGNIIIII!”

  “NOOO, SHE BEAT THE FLUFFY ONE.”

  “BRING MORE FOOD FOR LORD BORD.”

>   “Angeta, I will get my revenge!” Shaking her fist at the moon, glowing white overhead, she starts running as the jungle behind her gets trampled by many feet.

  Chapter sixty

  Assuage

  “I should stop worrying about this planet as a whole,” I mutter this under my breath while looking at the spectacle. The annoying voice beside me confirms my suspicion that beastkin have sensitive ears.

  “Why, mister beard?”

  “Call me Teach, brat. Did forests do something to me in a previous life?”

  “Whatcha talking about?”

  “They keep getting destroyed. Just look at those tree-crushing savages. This is barely my fault, indirectly at most.”

  “Stopping those muties is worth it! All trees should go away if that stops the hordes.”

  “The destruction of all trees will have a rather detrimental effect on this planet’s ecosystem. I don’t think humanoids will survive that. Massive soil erosion, depleting oxygen levels, extinction of nearly all tree dependant organi-”

  “Still worth it!”

  Well, Ferah has been on this planet a whole lot longer than I have, so let’s give her this point for now. I need to gather more data before I can crush her idealistic little views with pure facts and science. I set up a priority bounty mission for all information about mana mutants.

  Immediately, updates flow through my link to Database. The students Ket taught are rapidly supplying lots of unverified data on the beast horde phenomenon. So those creepy cultists can be useful after all. I order Database to extrapolate and fill in the blanks through brute force number crunching.

  The majority of my students are beastkin. A third are standard non-animals-parts human. There are very few standard humans, most of the slaves I rescued are either bred slaves from the mage isles or captured tribesmen from afar.

  Somehow, my own qi clone felt the need to expound on this data a lot. It feels apologetic, almost. All of this to explain why there is very little information about the subject I requested, data on beast hordes in the Shi-eit Kingdom… There is information about the migration patterns of mutant aquatic beast schools and swarms in the ocean, an excellent summary about how certain beastkin tribes hunt the hordes for prestige and worshipping rituals practised by far-off savages.

  And then there is but a bare summary of the human kingdom’s beast hordes itself. I dig a bit deeper and see that this information has been submitted by Danarius. The rest of the old mages are still refusing to cooperate and seem to be inciting a small rebellion on the moon. More shit I will have to deal with. I sigh deeply.

  Shaking myself back to the present moment, I look forward. Another tree bites the dust as Rhea kicks a blue otter through its trunk. The massive chunk of wood is then pierced by a small storm of iron shrapnel. Grey fog shines brightly between Ket and his new floating club. More trees die as the iron-studded trunk is sent flying at high speed by the boy. It smears a couple of blue-flecked chickens into a paste before smashing another three trees into splinters.

  “You want to go join them?” I slice Ferah’s binding open with a sharp thread of qi.

  I don’t even need to shout at my qi now; ever since I stepped into the foundation realm, I need but think of an image to change my qi’s intent. The image of a monomolecular edge is enough to transform the thread of power into a perfect cutting weapon.

  “Nope.”

  “What cultivation system are you using, anyway? I don’t sense a core in you.”

  Ferah’s eye starts to sparkle as she answers the question animatedly. “I wanted a heartcore, but Bord is stupid, and I don’t wanna be stupid. Ket is also very stupid, and I don’t want to wear a black robe like all those creepy guys. Tess has one in her stomach, but everyone who did that had to sit on the toilet for hours.”

  “Are you going anywhere with this?”

  She nods her head up and down like a chicken. “I asked Dee-Bee if there were more ways to do that cultivator thing. I tried a few, and they were just fancy and difficult gut or heartcores. But there was this thing called meridens. So, I made my maridinans my core!”

  “It’s meridians. And they don’t exist.”

  “Nu-uh! They totally do! I asked Dee-Bee to measure me, and he told me that my caltiveter method was like… one in ten more efficient than the core I tried.”

  I stare at the little girl. Make your meridians a core? What the fuck… “Can I check?”

  “Wha?”

  “Do you mind if I check what you’ve been doing?”

  “Nuh?”

  I put my hand on her head, in between her twitching ears. What animal is she anyway? Shrugging off that question, for now, I send my augur through her body. I weave it in a grid through her flesh and bone, giving me a three-dimensional CAT-scan of her entire being.

  A web of qi-enriched glowing lines flows through her entire body, following her nervous system. Her spine lights up brighter than the rest. I sense qi flowing from her spine through nerve bundles. Where the nerves end, the bands of qi flow back in reverse. It’s a really complicated web of loops, branching into finer streams of qi before merging on the way back to her spine. The lines follow whatever physical organ is in its path and I see that the lymph nodes contain a large number of branching points. The kidneys are a focal point of the returning streams, and I sense non-essential compounds and impurities being deposited there.

  Absolutely speechless, I stand there for five minutes, scanning the system she made in ever higher detail. Her increased squirming snaps me from my baffled daze. I pull my hand back from her head as I dump the entire scan of her system into Database’s storage. Only when all the data is offloaded and my augur is retracted do I notice the extremely uncomfortable expression on her face.

  “Ah, was that uncomfortable? Sorry about that, what you have done is very interesting.”

  She squirms a bit while looking around. “Nah, it only tickled a bit. I agree with the tree thing now. They shouldn’t destroy them all.”

  Looking up, I see that Ket, Tess and Rhea have devastated a lot of forests. Previously, we were standing a couple of dozen metres from the edge of the forest. Now I oversee nearly a kilometre of finely splintered wood before the forest resumes.

  “I will teach them to respect nature a bit. More work…”

  “I don’t care about that; I need to pee and there are no trees left nearby.”

  Only now, I notice that she is shifting about uncomfortably while squeezing her legs together. I sigh deeply.

  ⁂

  Selis stares at the dark, swirling fog in front of her. She pokes a finger through the opaque mist, retracting it immediately. Staring at her finger, she realizes how the Tower dungeon got access to a large sample of Teach’s qi. Only the structural qi she manually deposited inside her flesh and bones remains in the digit; the rest is absorbed by the spatial manipulation.

  Pouting to herself, she turns around and starts sprinting back up the stairs. She runs back up through every dungeon floor she conquered so far.

  The seventy floors take her half an hour to run through, a fraction of the time she spends in coming that far down. The small crystal core inside her head is gradually surrounded by liquid qi as the many mana crystals surrounding her head in a watery crown continue to shrink.

  Back on the first floor, she stops. Putting the leftover crystals into her ring, she wraps the water around her body, hidden under her clothes. She crouches down and starts hugging the walls, becoming just another sneak avoiding attention.

  People seem to avoid her instinctually as she glides through the crowd surrounding the Tower. She slinks off towards the slums while covered in a faint blue glow. Water flows under her feet as she glides through the streets.

  Much like Tess, she also has trouble finding Ket’s old hut. Two times, she glides past it, only seeing it after infusing qi into her eyes to pierce through the stealth field. She shivers a bit as she walks into the damp, dank, and smelly hovel, making sure to keep away from the
walls and turning to the side when walking through the gaping doorways. She nearly stumbles over the two doors laying on the floor.

  Her expression brightens as she sees the white crack in space. Poking a finger through, she musters her courage. She jumps through, catching her balance as she is suddenly standing on the moon. She blinks as she orients herself, gasping slightly as she turns around. “Ooh, that arch is beautiful! Who made that?”

  “Design submitted by mister Archibald.”

  Selis freezes the moment she hears the flat voice. “Don’t scare me like that, Dee-Bee! Who is Archi-Actually, I don’t care. How much points for these?” Selis rubs her ring and drops a large pile of mana crystals on the ground.

  “Mana crystals price inflated due to dropping qi levels. Scanning… A total of four thousand and fifteen points. Accept?”

  “Accept! Give me one of those metal weapons Teach has been messing around with and give me a portal stone. I’m heading to the Capital next.”

  “Prototype mass-produced gun, a thousand points. Portal stone, free. Transaction complete.”

  A circle of moonstone twists as it separates from the rest of the moon’s surface and disappears underground, taking the small pile of colourful crystals with it. It emerges only seconds later, carrying a brutal-looking gun, several rectangular metal objects and an intricately carved rock.

  Selis lifts the large weapon with two fingers and enthusiastically starts looking inside the barrel. She wiggles the slide and trigger a bit while keeping the thing pointed at her face. “Uhm, how does this thing work? I want to intimidate some people without giving away that I’m capable of magic.”

  The mass of condensed qi inside the moon’s core makes a connection with the girl, relaying the information requested. Selis is a bit shocked at the speed and urgency with which Database relays the information, thankful for the added thinking capacity the crystal centre of her braincore provides.

  Going over the information, she pales as she realizes where she is pointing the large calibre pistol. She checks the safety and drops the magazine, paling further at the fact that her brains were nearly splattered all over the pristine white surface of the moon. She jacks the slide backwards and catches the flying bullet. She pales a third time.