The two cultivators are supported by the ecosystems of their equipment, their immediate friends and families, but also their clan, their country, their planet and their universe. You can see it like this: the physical form is like a planet, the energy is like the air and water around said planet. They both exist together and influence and affect each other but are completely discrete from each other. You will get mud and sand storms but these are just emulsions, not a true blending of materials. A planet can exist without air, and oxygen and hydrogen molecules can float through space without a planet, but combined they make a greater whole than the sum of their parts. Any part influences any other part, the only difference is the amount of influence.
So when I say that the energy ecosystem of the girl lying in front of me is royally fucked, I hope you understand what that means. She hasn’t had qi in her system for her entire life, and now it’s coursing through her veins. This is like dumping a moon-sized amount of water on a barren planet. It usually ends catastrophically when done haphazardly or without a professional’s help, which in this case would be me. This is also why I worry about releasing qi into this planet’s ecosystem. Without a proper manual to guide the energies, qi poisoning is a lethal phenomenon.
Cursing at the dumb rabbit that caused all this, I grab her by the neck. Glaring into her eyes she just swishes her ears around and twitches her nose. I keep repeating to myself that she is not a week old yet. She is acting suspiciously cute and innocent though.
Dropping Lola to the ground I grab the girl and throw her over my shoulder. She is covered in loose-fitting clothes so her lack of weight comes as a surprise. She must be malnourished with how little she weighs.
Walking down the stairs I scan the bundle over my shoulders thoroughly. She doesn’t have a shred of energy in her body left, her superficial fat stores are non-existent and her intramuscular fatty tissue is all gone. She must have exhausted herself over the course of an entire day to get in this bad a shape. I shove some more qi into her and put temporary fixes on some of the worst issues I find. She has a lot of stab wounds in non-fatal areas that have barely started closing. I don’t want to know how she got this good at getting stabbed in places that will allow her to survive.
I slide a small ball of qi through her body, trying to find the best place for her to form a core. Qi is lethal to people that don’t know what to do with the stuff, and if I don’t do this now she will die before the end of the week.
I first try her brain. The qi just sits there, not even moving when I release all control. She isn’t a mental type I conclude, feeling a tinge of disappointment. Her heart starts beating erratically when I let the qi sphere touch its outer edges, so I slide it downwards to her stomach. Of course, it settles in the most boring place possible. I mentally apologise to the girl for what is about to happen to her. I can postpone the true core formation for a few days, so I give the ball of qi a spin. A small rune in the form of a rounded arrow forces the qi to keep moving, preventing it from forming an effective core. She shouldn’t notice anything wrong with her body except for a slight improvement in her physique.
I reach the end of the stairs and am greeted by perfectly square tunnels. Growling noises and barely audible ultrasonic screeches come from further ahead. Dogs and bats in this level?
“I don’t want to fight right now; you take care of them. Thanks to you I have to change all my plans so take responsibility!”
A pair of round, black, and moist eyes stare at me. I grin and wave my hand dramatically. Lines snap into place as I cast my scanning spell. Lola jumps away from a line about to go through her. I grin wider at her and wave her forward. She warily eyes the glowing lines around her, but the spell has filled the entire level by now and winks out of existence. Looking down the tunnel going towards the exit, I see glowing eyes once again.
Squeaking once, Lola gives me one last look before sprinting forward. What follows is a truly impressive sight. Instead of going for the throat like another rabbit I know, she just strategically rams into anything in her way. She seems to be learning fast, her first hit is without any qi. The two-metre high racoon dog stumbles but stays on its feet. The next impact caves in its chest with a white flash.
When we are halfway to the exit Lola comes hopping towards me. She shuffles around a bit, seemingly mentally preparing herself, and looks me in the eyes. She opens her eyes further, making them bigger. She must be begging for a qi petting; her core is nearly empty. She must be using more qi taking down these bigger fellows. I must resist this cuteness; she should work on gathering qi herself. One of her fluffy white ears slowly droops to the side and she slowly tilts her head.
I grumble to myself while rubbing her head with a qi loaded finger. “This is a cuteness overload. It is unfair that this vixen can already manipulate me like this. You are one dangerous rabbit and will someday make a buck either very happy or very scared.”
She tilts her head further under my ministrations and starts rumbling softly. After petting her for a while, I stand up and give her a kick. “Your qi was full ten seconds ago, you shitty rabbit. If even one hair on my body gets bothered by these mutts, I won’t pet you for a week!”
Shouting after the disappearing fluff ball, I keep walking. I kicked her with a slight angle, so she reaches a wall the same moment a bat flies by. She kicks off from the wall and plunges headfirst into her next victim. That was a coincidence, of course, she needs to figure stuff like wall jumping out herself. I did not wish to see a wall jumping rabbit, no, no, she needs to learn this herself, yes, yes.
Done deluding myself, I focus back on the girl over my shoulder. I caught traces of a faint unknown energy in her body a while ago but I can’t seem to get a grasp on it. She has some sort of power flitting throughout her body but it seems to escape direct observation. This reminds me of pure shadow qi. Instead of containing multiple elements at once, this type of qi is formed purely out of elemental darkness particles. A particle of normal qi and shadow qi are the same size, same energy capacity but they are of a wholly different flavour. It seems to elude observation by its very nature.
It makes sense to me, you don’t see shadows, you see a lack of light. A shadow is not directly observable; it is just a gap in a light stream. I can’t gather shadows but I can gather light. I think this also has to do with the fact that one can only see the surface molecules of an opaque object. All the other particles that make up the object never directly bounce back light unless you fracture said object.
So closing my eyes for a bit I retract all my focus from the girl’s body, just passively looking at her through the small connection I still have to the qi inside her. My eyes open wide as I recognize the flow. It might be an energy I don’t know about but the way it flows through her body is a dead giveaway for a shadow affinity. I already suspected that the emotional mana is just a first layer. I already knew that there had to be more to this planet’s energy ecosystem than just emotional linked mana types.
With this in mind, I make a decision. If I can find more of these affinities, I will have to try my plan out after all.
I retract my focus from the girl and passively make some plans as I look at how Lola is doing. It seems like the accidental wall jump gave her some ideas. She is bouncing around the tunnel like a maniac. As we reach another open room I see a rather magnificent sight. A white blur bounces from bat to dog to bat and so on. Within a few dozen seconds the group of a few dozen beasts are dead and done for. Lola hops over and looks at me again.
“Want me to praise you? I’ll start praising you once you don’t waste qi like that. Do you know how inefficient it is to just bludgeon things with non-physical energy? I don’t think you do so let me tell you: it’s extremely inefficient.”
Looking down at her I decide it’s time for the next lesson. Putting the girl down I crouch beside the little rabbit. “Here, feel your fur moving?”
I put a finger on her back and fuse some qi into her fur. “Instead of just throwing out qi, use
it on your fur.”
I make some patterns in her fur. I did not write temporary obscenities of course. A rabbit with a big “fuck u” on her side isn’t funny at all. Making the fur form a beard and moustache isn’t hilarious either. I cough and go back to serious business after I stopped giggling. Putting my finger between her ears I gather a lot of qi in the fur of her forehead. She seems intent on continuing her head-butting habit, so I might as well teach how to be better at it. “When you hit someone with your head just pulse this right after impact, okay?”
Feeling for the roots of her fur I use my qi to make all the hairs stand up at once. A microsecond later her forehead poofs up to thrice its usual volume. I lay it flat immediately after and command it to jump upwards again. “Try it out now.”
Blinking a few times, she sits still for a little while. She then disappears with a poof. A white sphere of fur is now acting like a bouncing ball, rebounding at breakneck speeds around me. Scratching my head, I think about how this rabbit never does anything the way I explain it. I pick up the girl and walk on.
Lola’s new attack strategy becomes apparent when we reach another big room filled with dogs and bats. She stops in front of me and pushes against my foot.
“Alright, I’ll stay here and watch you go to town.” Talking to rabbits is healthy right? The way Lola is progressing should allow her to understand human speech in a few years so it’s preparation for that okay?
Any further thoughts are swept away at the sight of a white cannonball obliterating the horde of monsters. If she was a bouncing ball before, she now looks like hyperactive flubber on steroids. Not even ten seconds later the ball deflates and Lola begins stumbling about. Unsteady on her feet, she wobbly makes her way over to me. I smile wryly as I notice that she has used a fraction of the previous qi. With this, the basic rabbit education has been completed. From qi assimilation to basic abilities, body cultivators don’t use fancy techniques, they just need to train in order to control their bodies.
I’m sure all the tamer sects in the Cultivation World would be coughing up rivers of blood at my work ethic. It was taboo for the general public to inject qi into infant animals. The top families and sects had to find some way to keep their position of power, using public opinion to keep the common man weak is effective after all.
I pick her up with my free hand and walk on. There is no big boss on this level and that was the last room. Looking behind me at the twisted remains of the dungeon monsters I decide that maybe having a pet isn’t so bad after all. Let’s go and see what level nine has in store.
Chapter fifteen
Horn
Ialways thought that becoming really super smart would be awesome. Solving mind breaking math problems with little effort, having a photographic memory, these types of things seemed really fricking cool to me. Then I came to the Cultivation World and I could actually become smarter with the help of qi and an unconventional core location. Since then I’ve learned that having an absurdly high IQ isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.
I think I went insane by the time I had cultivated to the, as I call it, third crunch solid core level. I remember that I once calculated my effective IQ, it netted me a result of around seven hundred. Earth’s IQ system and tests don’t scale that far, but I made some modifications that improved the system. I revelled in the fact that I could count all the blades of grass in a kilometre radius under a millisecond, got immense satisfaction from calculating the millionth digit of pi. I kept all that brainpower active and ready to be used.
I don’t remember much detail from the couple of years after that, but by the time I accidentally got myself sane again half the sects in that world wanted me dead. I had so much thinking power that I couldn’t imagine other people not being this smart. Somewhere in between all the numbers I was crunching and all the data I was analysing, I lost the entirety of my emotional quotient. Stories of the rogue cultivator that miraculously won a tournament without lifting a finger and running off with the prize meant for this or that chosen inner sect disciple circulated the mortal words for many generations after that.
I had started thinking so much I couldn’t do anything else productive. All that mattered was the flow of data; other people were anomalies that didn’t fit into my prediction models and got in the way of efficiency. My rescue came from finding out a way to automate things. Repeatedly locking a piece of my brain away with a simple repetitive task ensured that my IQ slowly dropped until I started thinking properly again. I guess by cultivating my brain I accidentally made myself a mini-singularity, my thinking processes ascended beyond mortal comprehension. By the time I woke from this stupor I had thousands of processes running, multitasking a million tasks a minute.
That’s why I do regular mind maintenance and checks, to prevent myself from becoming too smart for the lower planes. It also explains why I never met another mind cultivator. They must have tried it in the ancient past, causing the practitioners to become insane. They then must have ruled that cultivating the brain leads only to madness.
So if I come across as a dumb retard that can’t see what’s in front of his eyes. It’s because I don’t want to become a raving lunatic out of touch with the world again. So I keep myself a bit dumb. Taking into account the fact that my solid core is minuscule, my total IQ would be nearing two hundred. I have a minimum of a quarter of my mind locked up in automation.
One of my favourite ways to remain sane is automated planning. I allow a large part of my mind access to all the information on a certain subject and let the process slowly figure stuff out. Money making opportunities, information analysis, potential enemy categorization, I have been doing these kinds of things since I reached the core forming stage.
That’s why when Lola saved the girl I could throw the majority of my plans in the trash and had to think up a whole new set of plans. Significant and meaningful contact with the indigenous population this early was so unlikely and unwanted I hadn’t even started thinking about potential consequences yet. I have a choice to make: do I continue on my path of a one-person exploration team like the previous world, or do I want more people contact. My plan-making process told me to kill the girl. It was simply too early to bother with this stuff. It deemed personal strength and safety a much higher priority than a bystander’s life. I disagree with this analysis and now I must stalk and kidnap more people for my new plan to work.
“Speaking of work, you did good on this level so far, but I am not helping you with these bosses. Figure out how to take them down safely yourself.”
Lola’s left eye twitches. Ha-ha, I can see through you, you simple creature. The tenth floor is a recap of all that came before, except for the weird gold level. Big racoon doggies, gnolls, bats, and spiders, this level has them all. I don’t need to lift a finger to handle these beasties. My murder fur ball takes them all down with commendable efficiency. She has figured out how to use the fur on her paws as a springboard by the time we are halfway to the exit. She now extends the fur on the bottom of her hind feet proportional to the extension of her limb. She’s jumping with telescoping stilts.
We are now in front of the boss room. One of each animal is standing in the middle of the room, each one has differently coloured stripes running over their bodies. The dog has a red line on its muzzle and head, like a racing stripe. Faint flickers of fire can be seen. The spider has shiny grey-tipped legs, the gnoll has dark blue and lighter green stripes crisscrossing its body, and the bat is a spotty dark and light brown.
“Kill the tall guy first. Positive anger and recklessness seems a dangerous combination.”
I keep standing in the doorway, enjoying the show while Lola prepares. I sense her with some qi and see that she is circulating her own qi through her legs. She suddenly disappears when she has three-quarters of her total qi infused in her hind legs. Taking the strengths and weaknesses of all involved into account, this should be a tough fight for Lola.
Keeping an eye on her I look over her progress.
She is starting to move her qi along with her movements. The moment her feet leave the ground she jerks all the qi forward, giving herself a little extra speed and readying her noggin for the coming impact. I barely see the gnoll dodge. Lola flies over his head, flips herself in the air and smacks into the opposite wall. The other beasts start moving too, the bat charges without finesse, the spider’s legs start glowing grey and the dog catches completely on fire.
I make a mini qi tornado in my brain and the world slows down as my brain speeds up. The dog snarls in slow motion while Lola has jumps towards the ceiling. The gnoll is waving a staff around, gathering two-toned streams of mana. The bat receives a kick. Lola is spicing things up! No longer a head-butt maniac, I’m truly proud of… hmm, I can now see that the kick was an accident. The ceiling was too smooth and Lola couldn’t find any grip. She basically slipped and fell from the ceiling, accidentally kicking the bat into a pulp while flailing about.
The gnoll is now spinning his staff around, streaks of blue and green following the gnarled wood. The hottest new item, the dog on fire, has done nothing so far except for spreading a pleasant barbeque scent. The spider skitters towards the tangled-up bat remains and a certain rabbit, grey tipped legs now leaving a small trail of glittering dust.
The bat explodes into a fine mist. Lola’s fur is standing straight up again. She slims down just in time for the spider to reach her. Four sharp spider spikes are dodged by a narrow margin. Make that margin bigger next time stupid rabbit, one spider leg grazes a fluffy ear. Small grey sparkles are now clinging to the furry appendage; they seem to be turning her fur into metal somehow. Lola jumps away but the graze distracts her enough that she took her eyes off the dog.
The DAO of Magic Page 12