The Dao of Magic: Book II

by Andries Louws

“What’s your name?”

  “Huuhuu-What? I’m calle-” Her reply is cut off as they are swarmed by a horde of braincores, clamouring and shouting questions about his cultivation method.

  ⁂

  A fine web of white trails disappears as Selis lands. The soldiers on top of the thick walls fall silent. The mages stop their casting as the hordes of monsters all fall to the ground. Each animal has a small hole in their head, the edges freezing over quickly as the ice projectile bleeds the heat from the perforated flesh and bone.

  Dusting off her hands, Selis freezes. “Shit, I didn’t want to reveal my power, right?” Flustered, she quickly forms a white mask from condensed ice and throws it onto her face. She strides across the battlefield as the still horde freezes over slowly.

  The rows of soldiers are still frozen on the spot, staring at the small figure that’s wandering through the corpse-laden fields. She suddenly jumps, soaring over the wall. Every single pair of eyes looking at her somehow lose her mid-flight, the freezing mana mutants below the wall the only proof she was ever there.

  Wandering through the city, Selis has a lot of mixed emotions running through her mind. Instead of the sections that divide Tower City, the Capital is partitioned into rings. The closer to the massive, circular palace in the centre, the richer the buildings. She knows the inner circles reasonably well, having been dragged to various official happenings and parties by her parents. The poorer sections are both familiar and hauntingly unknown to her.

  Many stories of the lowly working man, the savage manservant or unwashed knave echo through her mind as she strolls through grimy streets and alleys. Her face switches between unbridled disgust and sadness as she steps over or around dirt-covered bums and heaps of stinking rags. Suppressing her shivers, she speeds up.

  Not long after, she stands in front of a gated mansion halfway into the noble’s circle. Closing her eyes, she sends a wave of qi forwards, covering the entire complex. Opening her eyes, she jumps and lands near a hunched over gardener tending to some bushes.

  “Where are they?”

  The man nearly has a heart attack. Spinning around, he drops his shears. “Miss! You are alright! Master and mistress were so worried about your disappearance.”

  “Shut it, the only thing they were worried about was missing out on some opportunity to marry me off…”

  “Ah, the time apart has done you good, miss.” The old man relaxes a bit, unseen tension flowing out of his shoulders. “They had to sell the house after some setbacks with their businesses. Someone leaked a lot of sensitive data. No-one knows who…” Keeping his eyes on Selis like a hawk, the old guy smiles.

  “Peak? The family still has a house there, right?”

  “No, they had to sell that one too, I’ve heard. Now they are… guests.”

  “Where?”

  “The Isles were very interested in an unknown blue-haired magic user. As the only family whose blue-haired daughter could not be presented to the Mage Council, they were invited to stay in the Royal Palace.”

  Selis is smiling now. “Thanks. You doing okay here?”

  “Don’t you worry about me, miss.”

  “If things ever get bad… no, if they get worse, take this and go inside the hollow tree.” Selis hands the old guy a small fragment of green stone and walks off. The old man looks at the rock in his hand for but a second, but Selis is gone when he looks up again.

  Sprinting through the garden, she runs towards a small group of trees behind the large house. Hidden in shadows and far from prying eyes, she reaches the largest tree. Brushing long grass to the side, she slips inside the hollow trunk. Infusing qi into the portal stone she pulls from her ring; she drops it and starts pulling. The small and innocently carves rock splits slowly, a white line of cut space appearing between both halves.

  On the moon inside Tree, a second stone arch has already been constructed. Slowly, a second white line crawls it’s way upwards as Selis works had to carve the connection into existence.

  Covered in sweat, Selis pokes her head through the portal after a long time of physical exertion. Satisfied that her head is looking out across white, curving stone, she retreats after receiving a tidy sum of points from Database.

  Leaving the newly installed portal behind, she swiftly leaves the mansion. Now running across rooftops, she looks forward to the large castle dominating the centre of the city. One side of the massive building has towers peppering it, like candles on a birthday cake.

  Soaring through the air, she covers herself with a thin layer of qi, encouraging people to not pay attention to her. Swiftly she approaches the part of the castle the mages are rumoured to occupy. The gap between the large mansions and the actual castle is bridged with a large leap, wings of ice coasting her across the wide gap.

  Clinging to one of the towers jutting from the structure, she pushes qi through the gaps between glass and stone. She hangs there for a few minutes, unmoving as she searches the massive, nearly empty complex. Suddenly, she lets go of the ridge she was clinging to, plummeting towards the ground below. A few dozen metres above the cobblestones, she arrests her momentum by flapping her wings of frost.

  Landing on a protruding balcony as snow swirls around her, she examines the locked door. A small transparent fish glides from between her hair and spits a thin beam of water at the lock. It slices through the metal with ease, letting the door creak open. Selis’ previous severe expression melts into a warm smile as she traces a finger across the small fish’s scales.

  Shooing the little creature back into her secret water storage place - her hair - she sneaks inside. Spreading qi in front and behind her, she swiftly makes her way through the many abandoned hallways. Traces of previous occupants are still present, an unmade bed here and there or dirty dishes in the corner of a room. A thin layer of dust covering everything causes Selis to suspect that this section of the palace has been empty for less than a week.

  Sneaking through the stairwells, she reaches her destination. Below street level are row upon row of cells. A single person brimming with regret and grief is present in the only comfortable room at this level. The man is continuously polishing and messing with iron cylinders, so Selis stays away from the area. She quickly scans the objects strewn around the iron mage’s room, confirming her suspicions.

  Telling herself to not bother the guy that has dozens of mana cannons in his apartment, she moves on. She quickly reaches the door she has been aiming for. Peeking through a gap between the frame and door, she sees her parents for the first time in weeks.

  Clad in worn ornamental clothing, sitting on hard rock covered with little straw, they still manage to exude a noble’s aura. Her mother’s cheeks are still pudgy, her father’s sharp features still as regal as ever. Taking a deep breath, Selis straightens her simple dress. She then pulls the gun from her ring and sets up a sound barrier.

  BANG

  The lock shatters, allowing the door to swing open slowly. The woman has half-climbed onto her husband, their faces masks of terror as they both stare at the door. They immediately change as they spot their own daughter standing there, a smoking piece of iron in her hands.

  “Selis, my dear. What are you doing here?” Looking past her daughter, the woman tries to see if someone is beside her. “Be a dear and go back to the mansion. Mister mage! Do you like her? She would make a great concubine or second wife, very obedient!”

  Wringing her hands, the woman looks to be more worried about what imagined damage her slow daughter might cause than the fact that she is currently inside a cell.

  “Listen to your mother. These nice mages only want to ask us some questions. Go back to the mansion now and leave these matters to us grownups, yes?” Her father is too busy fixing his own hair to pay attention to Selis.

  The two nobles continue to berate her, trying to flatter the non-existent mage at the same time. Selis stands there, letting the words wash over her for a minute. Then the door closes due to a draft, muting the voices of he
r parents. Selis freezes the door in place with the wave of a hand, stuffs the gun back in its holster, and walks away.

  She swears to herself that the single tear running down her cheek will be the last one she will ever shed for her parents.

  Instead of wallowing in her past, Selis goes on an understated culinary rampage. Many cooks inside the castle and the noble district wake up in cold sweat the following day. They all vaguely remember something blue and cute asking them question after question as they answered every single question, divulging their every cookery secret as if their lives depended on it.

  Chapter sixty-six

  Theorising

  I look at the mass of gathered and processed data. I make a firm decision. I will return to the real world in a moment. I have spent a few subjective decades running away from literally everything while drowning myself in data, simulations and schematics. But first I should recap what I have been doing, right? Yes, that will be very useful. A good way to spend time, not a sign of me procrastinating once again. No, no.

  Anyway, I started this depressed, lonely, and introverted binge because I didn’t properly think things through over the last few weeks.

  Gods, how long have I been on this world already? A month or two? It feels quite a bit longer, to be honest. A far cry from the decades that flew by like seconds in the cultivation world.

  Anyway, I spent the last subjective few decades as I ignored reality going over all my decisions in painstaking detail. I fucked up so many times; it was pretty horrible. If a choice I made wasn’t suboptimal, it was inefficient or could be easily construed in a manner bad for my image.

  Then I simulated the coming thousand years and found that none of those mistakes really mattered. For example, the few mana types I forgot to include in my initial batch of qi will amount to a millionth percent difference in a millennium, provided I fix it inside the year. I went through all of the decisions I made like that, mapping out consequences and following their effects to theoretical ends.

  Conclusion: I made a lot of small, fixable mistakes. Some errors didn’t turn out that fixable, like the fact that I nuked the entire shadow mage island, but no use crying over spilt milk. At this point, I was years into my self-imposed seclusion and maybe a minute had gone by in the real world. I wanted to jump into designing solutions immediately but decided to go over my social interactions with a fine-toothed comb first.

  Decisions made in a social situation can’t really be labelled as correct or incorrect. Could I have made a slightly different facial expression? What effect would shortening this speech or ignoring that comment have made on my relationships? There are very few proven and quantifiable ways to measure such potentials, so I only spent a few subjective years going over that stuff.

  Conclusion: my relationship with my students is one hundred percent fucked. My seduction of Re-Haan was pretty great though. For the rest? I don’t really care enough about this planet’s locals or the new students to bother with such an analysis. I don’t really like Ares enough to include her in my contemplation, but I did anyway for completion’s sake.

  Lola is awesome, even if she is going through her rebellious stage right now. I’m not sure how to label the fact that she integrated heat into her cultivation method and gave herself a red mohawk other than teenager rebelliousness.

  Nearly ten years of on-and-off thinking later, I had a neat list of problems with varying severities. I didn’t spend all this time with torturous self-analysis, of course. I did a lot of fun stuff too, like categorising other memories or piecing together random facts from snippets of memory. I went over the sound recordings I did in order to learn the language and learned a lot of juicy details about this world - that kind of stuff.

  With all the serious stuff behind me, I could stop hyper-analysing every single thing I ever did like some retard and start designing solutions.

  The first issue I tackled was my and Tree’s lack of all types of mana attraction. Even now, Tree is only absorbing the five mana sets I originally sensed, leaving out air, light and darkness. The circle I drew with my blood is still present inside Tree, now minuscule compared to its massive trunk.

  Tree’s perception of time is rather slow at the best of times, so I made a process that will slowly fix it over the course of a few days. Instantly and forcefully ripping the inside of Tree’s trunk apart seems a bit rude. The process will change the circle to include air, light and darkness symbols.

  Then I had a brilliant idea. Combining several types of mana into qi will produce the same neutral qi, even if I only merge two mana types. What if I combine a lot more dark mana than light mana? This massive beast horde happened because I stubbornly pulled in similar quantities dark and light mana, thus worsening the dark mana excess. What if that’s not needed?

  So, I started a few small tests. Pulling, for example, dark metal and nature mana together into qi will provide a pitiful amount of qi. After thoroughly studying this small quantity of produced power, I came to the conclusion that qi made from dark mana is perfectly normal qi. Adding even a smidgen of light mana to this process immediately doubles the amount produced.

  So, I fiddled some more with the circle design in Tree and ran some more tests. In a weeks’ time, Tree’s circle will be fully changed. By then it will absorb nine parts dark and one part light of all eight mana sets. The total qi produced by this process is slightly higher than the amount produced right now, the additional mana types offsetting the less efficient dark and light ratios.

  That should fix the depleting qi levels slightly, nudge this world’s mana imbalance back on the correct path and allow a greater growth potential for the entire pocket dimension.

  For the second issue, I started designing solutions for my very own stomach pieces floating through this solar system. Firstly, I redesigned my scouting probe. Combining solar panels, more efficient engines and a wider array of available elements, I pimped the fuck out of the flying drones.

  The triangular delta wing design is mostly the same. The bottom is still blue. The top is now a pitch black. The black material is super absorbent, sucking in any form of radiation. This energy is then used to compress the mana sucked through the engines into qi, which is then sucked into its core through two absorption formations.

  The engines are still two tubes through which air is compressed; I made them slightly larger to increase efficiency. I then spent seven years designing a super-efficient computer system. It started as a simple finite state machine, a web made up of all possible states that its control components could be in. Making something complex turned out to be very inefficient while using that model.

  I was designing these things to scan this planet for qi contamination. The last thing I want is one of these things crashing and breaking open, exposing its compressed qi core and causing it to contaminate the surroundings.

  Then I tried making a basic processing unit. The shitty things about computers is that a simple central processing unit is very complicated. Making electronics do a single thing is easy and can be done with a fairly low amount of logic gates. The most basic of processors that are general-purpose are very complex beasts indeed.

  Long story short, those seven years later I had designed something that I could work with. Then I added a nanoscopic portal so the drone could stay connected with Database.

  Then I realised that Database could communicate with the drone through this portal, making the entire CPU design useless. Then I spent another year depressed.

  In the end, I simplified the CPU some more, letting it store large amounts of data and instructions. I added a set of broad-range spectrum sensors to the drone’s nose, finishing my engineering spree with a round of optimisations and making it ready for mass production.

  I then tried to adapt it so it could function in space. In the end, I scrapped that idea because of its terrible efficiency. The best way for me to get eyes in the sky above the atmosphere would be to launch a single vehicle carrying a whole boatload of miniatur
e satellites. I will do that eventually, but not before thoroughly testing the capabilities of this planet’s orbital defence network.

  Then I went over all the things I have already designed and implemented, from the mass processing plant beneath Tree’s roots to the moon. I concluded that they all performed well within acceptable limits.

  That left me with one large problem: the lack of power and qi. I threw some ideas around, from setting up a massive solar park to creating a singularity drive or fusion core. Unfortunately, none of them turned out to be cost-effective.

  Back on Earth, a single wind turbine needed to run for ten years before generating the energy used in its production. I kept running into the exact same problem. I could make a fusion reactor, sure, but that would require such an astronomical amount of energy that it would take hundreds of years before that investment would pay itself off.

  I kept feeling like I was in one of those incremental games I used to play. You needed to click a piece of candy ten times to buy a candy maker that would produce a single candy in ten seconds. A candy producer that made a candy in a second would cost a hundred candies. In the end, you’d end up producing gazillions of candies per second.

  That segue had given me an idea though. What if I had a lot of qi generators walking about that would only need minimal up-front investment? What followed was a period of feverous theory crafting and scheduling of small tests. The needed objects, wiring, and mystical formulas made from symbols took me mere moments to design once I had the base concepts figured out. I got reminded of a certain foul-mouthed king and decided to put him on top of the volunteer list.

  In the end, I came up with a simple ring design, black with a miniature silver tree symbol inlaid. The small tree contained a personal qi containment field and a small link to Database for spying purposes.

  Making money costs money, making qi costs qi. I managed to give myself a splitting headache at this point. So, I decided to stop beating myself up and look at suboptimal decisions that the people in my surroundings have made so far.