At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. This planet does not have any loose qi hanging around and my core seems insistent on advancing despite this fact. The mana tornado around me did a good job of supplying me with power, but it’s not enough by a long shot. I feel through the migraine and sense that my core is still filled with liquid and it’s absorbing qi like a madman. Qi that isn’t directly available here, so it sucked every last drop from my body.
I crack open an eye and peer at Lola, who seems fine. Qi under control of a living being is rather hard to influence on a subconscious level. Even consciously I would need to be many factors stronger than her to influence her internal qi. A spike of pain shooting through my head brings my thoughts back to the present. I breathe in some mana while gritting my teeth but it just swirls around in my bloodstream, not going anywhere near my core. Can’t my core absorb more mana?
Thinking this over anymore won’t do me any good, I need to do something. I focus on my swirling core. A white liquid is spinning rapidly, desperately searching for more qi. I impose my will and command it to stop so it can condense into a solid core. It slows a bit so I start mentally shouting at it. A couple of minutes later it slows enough to start crystallizing. My headache lifts as the tiny amount of liquid gets solidified rapidly.
I shudder from the sudden lack of pain in my head. Sighing deeply, I study my core. It is minuscule. I don’t think that this has ever happened before. Qi was everywhere on the Cultivation World. Any that was used was quickly replenished and qi free areas were impossible unless you expended massive amounts of effort to absorb it fast. Just to give a picture of how difficult this would be, around a hundred sect elders would need to work together to keep one single square metre free of all qi. This was used in one place that I know of, a prison for demonic cultivators at ascension level. About five hundred top-tier experts used to man that place in order to keep any qi from going near the individuals.
The solid core inside my head is about a thousand times smaller than anything I’ve ever seen. Not even the scrubbiest of scrubs without an ounce of talent would have a core this tiny. More unknowns, and I’m bumbling about in the dark. The bigger the unknown the bigger the payoff when I make that problem my bitch, I ruefully think.
I’m not really worried though; solid cores grow slowly but steadily. I do wonder what caused it to go into overdrive mode. Advancing through the realms usually takes a lot of time. My core felt like it couldn’t wait to get to the next stage, the exact opposite of what happened the first time I reached this level.
One can see a cultivation’s core as a control centre while the liquid or gaseous qi around it is the stuff being controlled. I sense a single shred of gaseous qi present in my core. I drag it outside and perform a slow radar sweep. I don’t seem to have attracted any attention yet, despite the flattened ground fifteen metres around me. I close my eyes and reactivate the same three processes I had running before. They take up just ten percent of my mental faculties now, a sure sign I’ve stepped into the solid core stage. Still, the minuscule fragment of crystal in my head is an embarrassment, three simple processes like these should only take a single percent at best at the core forming stage. I set the knob to eleven and a fierce tornado springs up around me.
I breathe like that for a couple of hours until I feel full. Active qi absorption like this is suicide in any qi rich environment – it’s like pumping unfiltered crude oil in your car – but I’m making this qi on the fly so it’s my bitch immediately upon creation. It’s not about purity or impurities, but control. Just absorbing some random energy doesn’t instil confidence that one can control it, and this causes problems. I made this qi from its components, so a stronger sense of ownership can’t really be achieved. A look inside shows me liquid qi swirling around the minuscule crystal. It will have to do.
I assign a few automated mental processes, a qi radar for starters, one short range sweep a second and a longer range sweep every ten seconds on its lowest density setting. The audio files get a few percent of my brain, continuing the similar word tally. Passive cultivation is the last one I form, with a standby mode for when I’m filled.
That done, I look around. The whirlwind is just dissipating now, and the first qi radar result comes in.
DANGER, DANGER, multiple animals around me. Mister blue bear brought friends. I send qi surging through my body and sprint away, taking a massive leap into the crown of the nearest tree. The animals startle as they wake from some form of trance. They scatter immediately and I see an entire zoo of animals with various shades and colours sprinting into the foliage. Something feels off about these beasts though, they feel like badly remembered renditions of animals I’m familiar with. A deer-like being with feline paws and a yellow stripe along its back is just one example. The big blue bear seems to have no ears, too many eyes, and teeth sticking out of its mouth. A big black raven with fluffy feathers flaps its wings as it gains altitude, allowing me a view of its red belly along with its… flippers?
That was potentially very dangerous. I scold myself to keep better watch as I continue tree hopping. Lola is shaking again, and I absentmindedly rub her head with my finger and some qi. She calms down and nuzzles my hand.
A few hours later the sun comes up, and I slow down from my half sprint. I let Lola down, and she hops around but doesn’t stray more than a metre away from me. It seems like I’m not the only one that got a scare back there. I absentmindedly throw my spear. It goes clean-through a peeping squirrel, and I proceed to skin and cook it with my qi. Cooking is a joy with my new forming solid core; no more fires are needed. I simply shape sharp edges and flames with my mind. There is no living consciousness to get in my way, so my qi has free reign inside the critter’s corpse. Organs plop out of its rear end and blood gushes from its mouth as I use its heart to pump it dry while the skin unfolds itself. A pleasant smell spreads around as the meat browns, and I dig in the succulent and perfectly cooked meat. I leave a trail of bones as I enjoy this unnecessary meal.
The sun is halfway in the sky when the underbrush thickens, a sure sign of a clearing or of the end of the forest. It turns out to be the latter as a wide-open plain comes into view while I claw my way through the bushes. The spire I saw before is a lot closer now, it’s size and scale still indescribable without anything nearby to compare it to. A single greyish tower pierces the sky just over the horizon.
New walking goal found.
Chapter eight
Walk
Ihave a confession to make. I might not have actively thought about it a lot, and I didn’t even mention it in these logs I’m saving in my mind, but I have been struggling with my body. When I arrived here, stripped of all my qi, it took me a while to recognize the feeling of hunger. Similarly, other bodily functions that had been taken care of by qi previously need some attention again.
Shitting and pissing for one; any cultivator of the foundation realm can dissolve anything they eat while breathing out any impure remains afterwards. I have been digging holes and squatting and wiping with leaves. Me being at the core forming stage allows me to perform some tricks like cleaning myself inside and out.
I do this almost subconsciously. Having a clean body for hundreds of years means that any impurities feel uncomfortable, as if there is something in or on my body that doesn’t fit, a part of me that shouldn’t be there. There are some solids that are qi intensive to break down, so for those materials, it’s wiser to let nature run its course.
Sexual urges have come back to haunt me in a similar manner. Every time I think of past events, the emotional baggage comes along with said recollection. Emotions have less of an effect on a person able to control every molecule of their being. Glands and hormones have less of an effect when the person in question perfectly understands how they work.
Now, however, I am falling victim to whatever fluids my body decides to produce. When I was sitting in the cave, I was reminded of a certain black skinned lithe woman with whom I spent a coup
le of months in a cycling tomb. Getting anywhere in that massive ancient burial place was a matter of careful rune observation and a lot of patience.
The inner working of the shifting and teleporting doors was laid out in runes around those doors, and after I decoded what was written there it was a simple matter of waiting until certain doors connected. The woman and I got stuck in the same rooms for weeks on end, and after we got to know each other we did some… couple cultivating.
We were at a similar power level so we both profited from these actions, and she was really, incredibly limber; or that water cultivator with blue hair – blue hair everywhere; or the ferret-like, beast-taming girl that had taken on certain aspects of her pets, improving her sense of hearing, smell, and danger but making some rather… interesting changes to her physical form in the process. Her furry ears, feet, and tail were so soft, aah. She made these mewling sounds when things…
There I go again. I am walking on an open plain without any cover in sight, so I’ll just have to ignore myself standing at full attention for now. Long story short, I rubbed a few out since I got here. Especially in and around the tree I took residence in, the bark and scent reminding me of a certain voluptuous plant cultivator. She could do things with her green tinted skin that could make your… Stop it, letting emotions rule the mind is a good way to get yourself in a lot of trouble.
I cough and focus on putting one foot in front of the other. I just barely became a proper cultivator again, so I will have to deal with these inconveniences for a little while longer. The spire in the distance is slowly getting bigger, gradually showing that I have underestimated its true size again. From here it looks like it sticks a couple of kilometres into the air, but as I get closer, I’m sure it’ll start looking even bigger and bigger. Curiosity about how the thing is being kept standing bubbles up inside me, so I increase my pace a bit.
Lola is still hopping around me. The qi in her body seems to be slowly thickening and will ultimately follow the same process I just went through. Body cultivators can store a lot of qi in their fleshy forms so I will have to pump her body full of the stuff when her solid core starts forming to prevent qi starvation. The sun is now hovering low over the horizon, but Lola is still energetically jumping about like she was this morning. A closer look shows me that she is sending mana to her heart, where it is transformed into qi. Did she learn this trick from me, or did she figure that out herself?
A few hours later the tower is bigger yet again. A moon hangs high in the sky, giving me plenty of light to see in the darkness. Lola became a bit more timid and kept walking underfoot until I guided some qi to her retinas. After a few minutes of doing this, she got the hang of it and is now frolicking about again. I’m pretty lucky that my first companion here has such a non-specific diet. Any type of plant will feed her; she hasn’t shown any meat-eating tendencies yet. Thinking about what happened to her siblings, I plan on keeping it that way. Her soul shows me a lot more detail with my increased perception, and I can see the rudimentary processes going on in there now.
I keep calling it a soul, but it might just be a spirit or a visual representation of the cloud of consciousness. I haven’t found any evidence that the abstract ball of light I can perceive is anything truly soul-like, but it has enough similarities with what I see as a soul that I start calling it that. I have another theory that it’s nothing but a link to the place where the true soul lies, but I will need to become a bit more powerful before I can verify that. It vanishes upon death, possibly dissipating or teleporting or shifting to another plane, the moment the body can’t sustain a consciousness.
The qi in Lola’s body seems to protect her from the overflowing darker mana, preventing the corruption. Her soul became light grey and seems to have stabilized at that colour. The higher amounts of qi in her body cause her soul to shine more distinctly.
Qi brings out the best version of a person. If you are a good person, you become a better person with higher cultivation levels. If your nature is that of a spiteful little bitch, the qi will make you more spiteful, and more little-bitchy. Qi is the high-powered version of the “be the best you” self-help philosophy. Lola seems to be a slightly positive being. I will have to keep my qi in check, cleaning up after myself, not letting any drift around after using it. If a dark-souled being gets hold of some of the compound energy, that’s bad news, I think. I haven’t seen any other energy users around here, but the tower is a clear sign that some mages or practitioners must exist.
The rest of the night is just us walking. I pull some food from my spatial ring, more to have anything to do than from hunger. I quench my thirst by spreading some qi and shouting at the water vapour to gather. While sipping on the floating water ball Lola looks at me and I let her drink some too.
The tower seems even more imposing by the morning. Is it a space elevator? No, it does reach the clouds, but I can vaguely see the top of it. It still looks a uniform grey. No windows in sight so far; it looks completely smooth. The horizon is starting to light up, obscuring the stars in the sky. It’s an unknown starscape, by the way, no recognizable constellations anywhere. The top of the tower starts shining like a beacon, the sun shining on it already. It looks amazing, a slowly growing bright spear of light high in the sky, the lit-up part obscures the still dark tower under it. It looks like a massive lightsabre that is being turned on.
Yep, that’s a pretty amazing sight. It looks like I had written this place off as unimpressive too soon; this is postcard material. Besides the fact that the sun is now up, nothing changes. No road is in sight, and grass is everywhere. There should be some type of grazing animal around, keeping all this grass short, but they have eluded me so far.
I just keep walking, taking it slow to allow my cultivation foundation to settle down. By the time the sun has set and risen again, I have halved the distance between the tower and me, and there is peace in my head at last. The roiling qi waters around my shard core have settled down. My current mental capacities are still iffy, so it’s useful for me to spell things out. I am an old computer working with a futuristic hyper-advanced database. Too much information is just as bad as too little, and a lot of the information I currently need is submerged in massive amounts of unnecessary details. But now that my cultivation base has calmed down, I can start growing my core.
I imagine a pressure gradient and use it to increase qi pressure close to my core. Just beside the piece of crystal the pressure is enough to collapse the liquid into solids. I used to put literal computer components and books of information in my core. A lot of computer gates, library archives, and data storage. It’s useful for massive data handling and some calculations but not really useful for anything else. I get to do it all over again and I have a better idea this time around. Instead of making certain structures, I try to keep it mutable. Instead of rock-solid rigid connections, I keep them flexible and changeable. Programmable hardware instead of a certain architecture chip. It feels like the strongest rubber in the world. You can twist the crystal structure a bit, but not break it. I focus on redirecting the flow of qi instead of letting it flow through hardwired paths or switches.
The structure is triangular, small qi lattices similar to crystalline atomic bonds, except the structures are a bit bigger. The condensed fluid qi is slowly compressing itself into the growing core, the free space in my core is quickly filled with more qi gained from mana. The downside of stuffing your core full of liquid qi is that it takes time to shift qi from liquid form to gas, and the usable form in term of spells and such is the gassy version. So I have a shitload of qi but access to it is restricted by how empty my storage space is.
Life is a contradiction after all. Do you want to grow? Limit yourself, in more ways than one. Want to become stronger? First you must become weaker by damaging your muscles.
While we keep walking I occasionally pick up Lola to inspect her, pet her, and give her some more qi. She seems to be eating massive amounts of grass. I’m happy I don’t need to
watch her eat her own morning shit, as rabbits in nature do. They need to pass their food through their digestive system twice in order to extract the nutrients from it, but qi solves that problem.
That’s enough shit related thinking. Why are there no farms here? That’s the biggest clue I’ve got that the tower isn’t a standard city. Normal cities need massive sprawls of farmland in order to feed the inhabitants. Cultivators are usually way too prideful to play farmer with their qi; a single middle-level cultivator could feed a city of hundreds of thousands if they were to learn farming related techniques. I guess they were too lazy or proud, so instead of a single person doing something useful, they had mortals farming the surroundings. No farms around here means either no city or an alternative food source.
The fourth day of walking is beginning when I spot walls. I stuff qi into my eyes and see a dark wall poking over the horizon just in front of the tower. It’s a city then. That is great news because I am starting to feel peckish. I could use a bite to eat and information. The conversations I got from the small village have proved to be a sample size that was too small. I didn’t get any useful data from analysing the few conversations. With that in mind, I have been preparing various programs and techniques in order to decipher the language when I reach a bigger sample size… I mean population. Let’s hope somebody is home.
Chapter nine
City
Ithink Lola might be bored. So far something exciting happened every day since she was born, and the last few days was nothing but walking. To combat this, I played with her. Actually, it’s a thinly disguised training session for both of us. No, actually it’s just kid’s games. We played tag. I couldn’t think of anything else, so we just chased after each other.
The DAO of Magic Page 7