“Something like that, my sun isn’t in the sky, so I have to go and walk a bit.”
“…”
“I’ll be back in while okay? Just go to sleep, I’ll wake you when I’m back.”
What followed was confusion again. Trees don’t know shit about the world. Their entire universe is the soil they stand in, the wind, the rain, and the sun. I knew some trees on the previous planet that were smart, smart for a tree that is; they still frame their entire perspective on wanting to grow to the sun while standing still.
Trees and travel plans are like fire and water. No, that’s not right; fire makes water vapour. What are two things that have nothing in common? All things are connected through existence; all things are directly connected based on your perspective.
Anyway, trees don’t have travel plans. Their idea of a vacation is a year with ten per cent more rain than average. The confusion I felt from the tree was based on this; the moment you are speaking with a tree and say something like “I’m going over there,” you’ve lost them. They have no frame of reference for travel, so it’s no use explaining.
“Simply close your mind and rest for a while. Also, go back to normal please.”
A slight sense of grudging acceptance is thrown in my face. The tree shakes a bit and the hole in its bark slowly closes. I busy myself with erasing any trace of my presence while the little bunny just hops around, nibbling on some grass. Truly looking like an adorable little critter now, she has glossy white fur with some fading black streaks across her back.
I mentally look up my priorities list. A crude imaginary text editor opens with the following list:
1 - GET STRONGER BE BADDER AND BIGGER while being chill about it.
2 - WTF ARE THESE DARN LOCALS SAYING.
3 - WTF IS UP WITH THIS DARK MANA SHIZZLE.
4 - GO FORTH AND EXPLORE while being low key and shit.
If you feel young, you are young, thinks a certain thousand-year-old geezer…
Artfully I craft number five.
5 - I WANT SOME FUCKING GODDAMN COFFEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
Perfect. Closing that masterpiece of a list I pick up the bunny. Putting a hand to the tree, it greets me with silence; it’s asleep again. Jostling a non-sentient being into some semblance of consciousness is taxing after all. Without me present as a qi source the tree would just die.
If forcibly awakened and unable to go back to sleep, it would have used up all the qi in order to stay awake. When the qi is gone, there is just life force to feed on, so the dumb being would literally think itself to death.
Discarding these morbid thoughts, I make my way to the village. My plan for today is stalking some more locals and making my way over to the big city after that. The village is still the same. Wooden huts, a single stone house, and a lot of peasants. Forcing some qi into a singular point I focus on recording everything once again.
Hours of listening later the sun is going down. More audio files fill a messy file structure; I’m hitting the limits of what I can remember. If I were to spend my qi now, with no solid core, I’d forget it all again. Information takes a while to get transferred to the long-term storage. I suspect that these me memories are offloaded to the soul, but that’s a theory for another time. Most people would strive for more strength instead of just boosting one’s mind, but information is king after all and much mightier than the fist.
I assign a compartment to gathering mana and generating qi. I have a small percent of my mind to spare, so I build a rudimentary audio analysis process. It’ll simply go through the files and count discrete words. I hope that this planet has a normal language, and not some context based convoluted mess.
Praying it’s not some crazy ritualistic language with thousands of years of development, I walk around the village. The sun rose from the mountains behind me, so I went around the village’s west side. Shadows hide me as I make my way through the underbrush.
“HAAAR FUNDIK NI aardti loopti….”
Damn shadows! Hide me for fuck’s sake! The rest of the yell gets quickly left behind as I sprint away and back into the forest on enhanced legs. Sending some qi to my eyes the forest lights up around me. Focusing the qi only on my retina does away with the blurry whitewash of qi filled eyes. Dodging some branches, I decide that I’m far enough away and slow down. I take the bunny out of my pocket and put her on the ground.
“Don’t look at me like that. You need exercise to grow.”
Talking to a bunny is much better than talking to yourself. Like this, we leisurely walk through the forest. I focus my senses around me, scanning for interesting stuff. I find some odd plants, but nothing that uses any type of energy.
My spatial ring is filled with seeds for all types of rare qi herbs, but planting them in this toxic mana environment would guarantee negative mutations. Why did I sell all the good stuff again? Oh yeah. Lamenting about how expensive spiritual metals are, I keep walking.
DANGER, DANGER.
Danger. Start standard cranial qi circulation. Time slows. Head-sized object to the left. Head slowly turns, pour more qi out to observe. Bunny is to the right, ignore for now. Closing in fast. In visual range. Red and yellow, wings and carapace. Wasp type? Stinger probable, no antidote, avoid getting stung. Gather qi in front of face. Basic triangular lattice. Smallest construction unit? Millimetres instead of nanometres, how the mighty have fallen. Concentrate now. Construct triangle.
A small triangle takes form in front of my face, made up out of white glowing lines.
Construct tetrahedron. Expand into weapon shape. Sword? Hammer? Spear. Reinforce edge. Qi getting low, absorb some from sense. Pour into spear.
A metre-long white glowing spear constructs itself in half a second. The wasp thing has enough time to halve the distance.
Use transformation matrix to move spear? Better integrity, but my mind can’t keep that up for now. Grab spear. Move ten centimetres to the left. Adjust point. Wasp reacts. Readjust point. Force wasp to commit sudoku. Lol.
That’s how I ended up with a wasp carcass the size of a football – a pretty big football too – and don’t forget the perfect hole through its abdomen, the size of a coin, with chunky goo slowly dribbling out and various cuts on my hand with a distinct triangular pattern.
Creating an aesthetically pleasing and ergonomic weapon was not high on my priority list. Triangles are the sturdiest shape and this hand will heal in a day or so. I stop the bleeding by circulating some qi through my palm.
I sigh at the massive qi wastage. I’m not getting that quarter of my power back without effort. I might look down on weapons as a crutch but ignoring firepower like that is not something I can do now. I’m simply too weak at the moment. That and the dripping stinger of the wasp might make a fine spearhead.
Walking on with a dripping wasp in my hand, I keep an eye out for good wooden staves. The trees around here have gnarly and curly wood. An hour of walking later, I spot a bush thing with straight branches. Getting closer reveals almost black bark with five-sided leaves. Three sides on the left, two on the right. Shaking my head at this world’s flora, I look for the best shaft.
Ignoring my own innuendo, I send qi into the straightest branch I can find. Then I perform a lesser version of the tree talking trick. It’s basically imposing your will on a living being to such an extent that it becomes that being’s new reality. It’s also a lesser form of mind rape, so no using it on anything with a chance of becoming sentient.
That’s a fancy way of saying I shouted really loud, inside my head. After a good session of yelling things like: ‘BE STRAIGHT. NO SPROUTS. BE ROUND,’ I convince the branch to separate. Spear shaft acquired!
The wasp corpse in my hands is turned over, and I examine the stinger. In its resting mode, it barely pokes from the wasp’s abdomen, pulling on it reveals a hand span worth of a glossy black murder weapon. Pulling further… isn’t working. Is the venom sack attached to the stinger base?
I retrieve qi from my core, and I send it through
my arms. With a sickening plop, it comes free. The point is sharp, and the entire thing is hollow. It flares out at the base, so now I’m holding a fifteen-centimetre-long air horn with a sharp tip. Some more mental yelling at the wood and the barb is snugly encased by one side of the stick.
A black wooden shaft a metre long and a vicious looking stinger completes my first weapon on this ball of dirt. I hope it’s a ball of dirt anyway; science and flat planes of ground that go on forever don’t like each other. Being in an unscientific situation makes it harder for me to be convinced that Newton and Einstein were right.
Missus bunny is still hopping around happily, nibbling grass and sniffing about. Totally oblivious to my fight and the following crafting process. She’ll have to start being more aware if she wants to survive this place. Her parents didn’t do a good job of drilling survival skills into her. Wait, that’s technically me now. I never trained a bunny before.
Suddenly I remember my bloody magic circle inside the tree. Nothing bad will happen, right? It’ll lose power in a few days, right? This won’t come back to bite me in the ass later, right?
Done with the setting of flags and jinxing myself, I smile and walk on.
Chapter seven
Core
‘BE A BALL, A BIT MORE ROUND, good, HOLE IN THE MIDDLE, INVERSE SPIKE, GLOSSY FINISH.’
I fit the branch that is now a ball of wood in my hands on my spear. It doesn’t fit.
‘HOLE DEEPER, MORE NARROW, TAPER, WIDER OPENING.’
The ball subtly changes in my hands, and I fit it on the spear again. Perfect fit. I now have a walking stick. “Speak softly and carry a big stick with a nasty stinger hidden in it.” I always liked that saying. My roiling qi settles down as I stop the mental shouting. It is still night, and I have the bunny in my pocket, asleep.
I decided not to do any destructive experiments on the bunny, so it needs a name. Fluffy seems oddly fitting, but it just doesn’t click. Bugs? No, Lola would be better. Lola seems nice. I rub the little gal’s head and she wakes.
“Bugs.”
No reaction.
“Fluffy.”
She just looks around.
“Lola.”
I’m completely ignored.
“Missus Fluffingsworth.”
She thinks the grass is more interesting than me, her head poking out of my pocket just looking around.
“Carl Marx.”
Thankfully she ignores that one too.
“Hopper.”
Alright, this isn’t going anywhere. I’ll just name her Lola, I guess. Filling my finger with a bit of my qi I rub her head.
“Lola.”
She looks up now, staring me straight in the eyes while keeping one ear trained on me and swivelling the other around. Her little twitching nose is just too cute.
“Lola.”
She looks at me for a little while longer and moves around a bit. The name will have to do. I rub her head a little more and she closes her eyes in delight. The Cultivation World didn’t have any cute critters. Any feature that does not aid in survival got culled quickly there. Any cultivating beast acts and looks as imposing and intimidating as possible. There are no immortal herbivores, and only predators tend to live long enough to get anywhere with cultivation.
The forest stopped getting darker and denser a couple of hours ago. I should be walking towards the spire I saw in the distance when I left the mountains; that should be some sort of tower. It’s probably a mage’s tower or a cultivator’s abode, maybe with a city surrounding it. It didn’t seem sturdy enough to keep itself upright ,so I guess some sort of mystical art was used in its construction or maintenance. A quick mental calculation tells me that I’m only a tenth of the way there. With the pace that I’m currently walking it will take a week at least.
That suits my plans just fine; I want to have a solid core when I reach proper civilisation. The woods should give way to grassy plains by morning though. Maybe there will be something interesting to look at.
I didn’t see any more wasps that had beef with me. Maybe the stinger in my spear keeps them away? Wasp type creatures tend to be solitary bugs; the stinger is a clear indication that it is more of a predator. Bees in both worlds I saw them in had hooks in their stingers, making them poisoning kamikaze bugs, giving up their lives for the greater cause when they stung someone. Hostile insects don’t require such a sacrifice, but beasts like bears get their noses stung at the price of a bee’s life. Only thick mammal skin has the sturdiness required to get a stinger stuck. A shiver runs up my spine as I remember the ten-metre big bee that sacrificed itself to kill the third realm cultivator that was trying to steal their Heavenly Honey. The pulsating and pumping poison sack that was stuck to the murder weapon gave me enough nightmare fuel for all three worlds I’ve been in so far.
I keep walking, occasionally scanning with my narrow-beam qi radar to keep track of anything around me. Just trees and small forest animals. I really hope that the lack of any bigger predators is caused by a wasp nest nearby. Anything else would probably be worse.
Yep, I jinxed myself again. A bear is trouncing through the woods. I don’t need my qi to sense it; I could hear it walking through the forest from a kilometre away. I look around for a proper climbing tree. A low hanging branch on a tree to my right gives me enough leverage to climb into its crown. Qi pumps through my legs as I jump from tree to tree. A dense fog of power around my feet dampens any energy in it, muffling the sounds I should be making. I can’t do anything about my smell at the moment, so I will have to be fast.
Why the fuck is this bear blue? Is it a water bear? I didn’t see any seas or lakes nearby. Does its colouration have anything to do with mana affinity? I scare myself shitless by imagining myself powerless while locked in a room with said bear. Also, I’m a girl in this setting, for some reason, and the bear has a randy look on its face. Dark blue tinged mana swirls visible around me but the bear doesn’t react. This emotional mana sensing stuff has a limit of a few metres, so I can’t sense if the bear emits anything. I get excited at all the stuff I still have to learn here. So many opportunities to try out new cool shit. A lighter-blue now swirls in front of my eyes.
I jump from tree to tree on my original path, pushing the matter of the blue bear to the back of my mind. I wonder if the beast has a house nearby? No, that house was blue, not the bear. Then I realise that the light blue mana is present in the same quantities as the dark blue mana. So far, the dark side of mana was way more prevalent. Did the bear absorb it, causing both sides to equalise there? Why did it leave the lighter water mana alone? So many questions and all the time in the world to figure them out. With a grin on my face, I return to walking on the ground.
A shaking in my pocket alerts me to Lola, who is acting all scared.
“Not a fan of heights, huh?”
She looks at me with an angry glint in her eyes. That intelligence should not be present in an animal not even a week old. Did qi do this? Maybe the lack of qi on the world amplifies its effects? That gives me an idea and I want to try it out immediately.
I jog for an hour through the forest when I reach a clearing. The circular hole in the forest is filled with long grasses and various shrubs and plants. I sit down in the middle and slowly do a long-range scan.
Pouring the majority of my qi through my mouth I shape it into a vertical sheet a few metres high. I slowly drag it around me, looking for any dangerous wildlife. I begin my plan after finding nothing unusual. I move the qi around me in a sphere, slowly spinning it. I breathe in deeply, using my qi to drag in all the mana it can hold. Breathing out the mana-deprived air I reuse the qi to drag in more colours with the next breath. I hold my idea firmly in place and use big portions of my mind to automate the process. I make a process that takes up a quarter of my mind and assign it to spinning the qi around me. A knob set in its lowest setting appears in my mind’s eye, going from one to eleven. Another quarter goes to breathing in mana and qi, while only breathing qi out. Anot
her quarter goes to guiding the energy to my head. The moment I snap the partitions in place I feel the world dull.
Spinny thing too slow. Faster. Broken qi come to me! I want all. Swirly whirly around me, come to me! Breathe the colours, send it to head. Knob to three now, colours getting more and more now. Puff out white stuff; more swirls are fun. Knob to five, and the blue sticks with green hair disappear. See only white and colours now. Woah, so fast. Dizzy. Don’t look at swirly whirly. Colours go to top, into glowy ball. Glowy ball now even more glowy! Glowy good. More white stuff through mouth, and more colours in. Knobby knobby at sevensies now. Whirly twirly pretty. Coloursies more, wooohoo.
⁂
The rest I don’t remember. I gain back my full mind an unknown amount of time later, a tornado of colour going around me. A blur of fun and joyous colours getting sucked up by the glowing ball is all I remember after the knob was on seven. A splitting headache is piercing my head, my sight blurry with tears. After my plan was accomplished the sectioned portions of my mind automatically delete themselves. The condition for release was the knob at eleven, which should be plenty to gather enough mana to form a solid qi core. This headache is quite something though. My mind feels like its’s splitting open. The only time I remember having such a headache was when I advanced my cultivation base without sufficient free qi available… Just like now…
In hindsight, locking away three-quarters of my mind at my low level was a bad idea. A really bad idea. Normal cultivators go through major realms and smaller steps, and I just skipped a whole lot of them. Every single practitioner starts at qi gathering. Here they learn to control qi, separate their own qi from the neutral power that suffuses everything while gathering the gas in their core. Then, when enough power has been gathered to fill their core, they can enter the qi condensing stage.
This works like how its sounds. Squeeze it until it becomes a single drop hanging in an empty core. Evaporating water into steam increases its volume nearly two thousand times, and qi works in a similar way. More qi is gathered until the core is filled with liquid, which is then squeezed into a solid crystal when entering the core forming stage. This once again condenses qi by several factors, increasing the cultivator’s strength by large amounts. It’s a direct parallel to how the world works on a physical level.
The DAO of Magic Page 6