I spit on the ground. “Pathetic.”
There, that should motivate some of them. I know I am being hard on them; the first time a new cultivator expends all of his or her energy is extremely draining. But the longer they go on now, the more potential they will have later. Making a cultivator fight on while they are running on fumes is one of the better training methods I have found so far. Their bodies are normally filled with qi, which is constantly repairing and reinforcing their cells. Stress testing these cells in the early stages will allow their subconscious to notice what can be improved in the body in terms of chemical fine tuning. And a good way to stress test is to force the cultivator to keep on trucking while they have no qi repairing any damage.
This is, of course, all theory, but I have gathered enough circumstantial evidence that I heavily suspect it to be correct. I also suspect that a lack of training like this will limit cultivators at a later stage. You can supercharge an inefficiently working body with qi, but it will always perform less than a super fine-tuned beautiful machine of a body working on the same amount of qi.
Let me phrase it this way, if you don’t allow something to break down, you will never find the weakest links. A single process on the cellular level could hold back an entire organ. I personally went through a phase like that, I think. I didn’t know jack shit about cultivation back then so I didn’t bother to pay a lot of attention to details like that. This was before I got my braincore. Now the perfect opportunities to prove these theories are standing up from their sitting positions.
The abyss next to my walking path gets ignored by me. I know that below is a shortcut to the next level. I know that we could avoid all the spiders that way, but I am being hard on them. The least I can do is be hard on myself too.
Yeah, that sounded so cool. Truly what a wise teacher would think to himself.
I am overtaken before I can reach the first room. Surprisingly, by Bord and Selis. Ket is next, while Selis and Vox support an exhausted Angeta. An exhausted Angeta that is simmering with rage. I don’t even need to feel angry myself to feel her influencing the nature mana around us. Tess is… a black dagger flies by, suspiciously close to my neck. Yes, show some fighting spirit, you babies!
I start grinning as they decide to ignore my rules, they all pile into the big open room. All the bats and spiders are dead half a second later. They send defiant looks my way, I answer with a widening grin. I pick up my pace and follow them.
We progress through the floor smoothly after that. They are starting to learn how to best conserve qi, a necessity in drawn-out fights like this. Halfway through the floor, I feel someone pulling on my sleeve. I look down and see Selis looking up to me.
“Ca…” She takes a deep breath and tries again. “Can I have my cup from my hut?”
I smile and pull a delicate porcelain cup from the necklace. This was on top of her pillar. The only way to open the force field keeping the cup in place was to surround it with water, something she figured out pretty quickly by dousing the pillar with the contents of the pond. I hand it over and she darts back to the rest.
It’s an enchanted cup that cools the air inside of it. Any moisture in the air then condenses and starts filling it. She carries it around, giving her teammates a sip of water now and then. She herself uses it to grow the sphere of water floating above her. That cup can even produce water in a desert, so it seemed a fitting training tool.
Angeta is the next to come to ask me something. “Tea?”
“What tea?”
She starts to snarl at me but schools her face into an impassive mask. “Can I pl…”
She also takes a deep breath. “Give me my tea pl.. please.”
She nearly chokes on that last word. I hand her the tray without saying a thing. If only Bord had climbed his own tower, then they would be in fine shape in no time. Super compressed sugar and protein candy is exactly what they need by now, but Bord spent too much time crying in his hut. The tea will help though; it is similar to jasmine tea in the smell. It allows the consumer to think clearly, uninfluenced by emotion or fatigue. It also has a slight invigorating effect.
Angeta hands the set to Selis, who starts brewing with a flame that Ket provides. I hear them agree on letting the one to clear the next room drink a cup since water is a limited resource now. They have reverted back to the single person per room system it seems. Six rooms later, they all had drunk a cup of tea and various animals lay murdered on the ground. Slain by all sorts of creative and innovative ways. The bodies once again vanish the moment the last person is around a corner. The students’ complexions are much better now, the tea and water doing wonders. They really went all out on each other after Bord used his… unconventional room clearing tactic. Now that we are talking about mental invigoration…
They don’t need any supervision and I just got an idea that I want to check on. I motion Lola over, and I get ignored. I snatch at her with a qi thread, but she darts away. Insubordination! Has she finally decided to play out the old killed-by-own-disciple cliché? A single thought sends thousands of threads swarming towards the fluff ball. They snake around her as if alive, each following their own small bit of programming, wrapping the struggling bunny up like a mummy. I grin at the bunny that comes floating closer. Who knew those lessons about object-oriented programming can be used in such a way?
I shout at my disciples: “Just continue on and ignore me.” while grabbing the neat package from the air.
⁂
‘How does he control that many separate threads? I can control fifteen separate objects now, with my training speed I would need an approximate… carry the five… there is that weird curve again, I see it in a lot of sums I make!’ Ket is thinking furiously.
Any fledgling mathematician would recognize this curve as a parabola, something his teacher had not bothered to explain to him yet.
‘Subtract fifteen parts of the hundred… around fifteen hundred years? I would need over a millennium to control that amount of objects simultaneously. Probable speed increase being limited by a bigger training difficulty is taken into account, perfect.’ Ket thinks that word a lot lately, perfect. He’s wrong though, mental training speed scales exponentially with realm, not something he is taking into account.
The world used to be a murky place for Ket, filled with slightly incomprehensible things happening all the time. People acting in ways he could absolutely not understand. There was this disconnect between him and the real world. It was basically as if he was looking at his own life through a dirty window.
Instead of getting angry at the incomprehensible place, he just learned how it worked. People acted in a certain way, so that would have to be enough reason for him to act that way too. There was a limited success though, the way other kids talked to each other, the manner in which his peers’ actions and reactions changed as they grew up, and it was all a bit much to casually remember and act out later. So in the baggage carrier’s social circles where he ended up, he was misunderstood a lot while he understood even less. Instead of continuing through the murky swamp of social interaction, Ket became silent and sullen.
Then he was kidnapped and shown the light of numbers. Now Ket praises numbers daily. He swims in them, and he loves them with all his heart. He figured out how to apply statistics to large volumes of data two hours after being shown this wonderful number system. He was passively observing what the hell was going on when he woke up, not from the insides of his cheap hut, but from inside another world. Then his wonderful teacher cursed at him for a little while and punched him in the gut. His mind went weird from that point, and he could recall every single moment and thing that happened. He could leaf through his memories like a book. He absorbed the basics his teacher lectured and thought about them a lot.
The next morning, a black rectangle appeared from nowhere and his… his teacher - Ket decides to call him that for now - his teacher showed him these symbols. And then he showed him what they meant, how they can be used and co
mbined for bigger and bigger numbers, counting past a thousand suddenly became trivial. Then four more symbols used to modify these numbers with each other caused his brain to spin into overdrive. He overclocked his own brain through braincore usage for the first time while he was learning numbers. Ket does not know about imprinting theories, else he might just look at his number obsession in a different light.
That morning, he had been feeling rather foggy, unable to focus fully on a single thing. It was as if he was extremely bored while just thinking, but all of that was gone after learning about numbers. The world suddenly made sense. Simply observe what happens on all levels and note down the measurements and numbers, then analyse and predict. That entire process is now applied to everything he does. Every single data point is analysed, its history traced and its future plotted. And he loves the structure he has. He finally feels in control.
So he proceeds to analyse the movement of the threads of qi his teacher is using to catch his pet rabbit. Such power and technique, used in a game. Ket is doubly amazed, once at the skill on display and once at the casual use of such profound magic.
A thousand possible answers come rushing at the question Ket is asking himself; why is his teacher whispering in the ear of his rabbit? Why is his black tree necklace tied around the bunny now? More possibilities, old memories are dredged up and used for reference. He is not happy with the shitty memory resolution of his pre-braincore period. More questions and numbers, more things to check keep tumbling through his mind.
Every social interaction he experienced is recorded and analysed, he is currently using the largest part of his thinking capacity to analyse social rules. His brief sojourn through the Tower city let him record a lot of these small conversations. He sees his own social faults every time a new social norm is identified and proved with evidence. Every awkward conversation and every time someone called him a creep, finally he understands the “why” of them.
Ket breathes in deeply, looking at the five other kidnap victims. He isn’t sure that he will suddenly turn into a social butterfly, talking a lot still isn’t his thing, but he can make sure that none of his fellow disciples will start hating him for reasons he does not understand.
But one anomaly sticks out, his teacher does not follow any of the conventions he has learned from observing ordinary people. But now he sees a path, a way to unravel the mysteries. Through numbers, he will understand.
Chapter forty
Talk
Long story short, I jumped inside the necklace while Lola kept it safe for me. I then stood in the middle of the clearing for a few hours, moving my entire body in horizontal circles. I will talk about that later because I asked Lola to let me know when the group reached the tenth floor. The incessant squeaking I now hear coming from Tree should be her.
I cast a last glance around the pocket dimension. I spot my white-faced qi clone in the corner of the field. I need to do something about that thing soon, it is slowly disintegrating now that the constant stream of my signature qi has stopped coming in from the Tower.
I appear above Lola, who immediately jumps away from under my feet. Animals with qi are not really smart, but I swear they can read minds when talked to clearly enough. Their instincts get a massive boost through qi, giving them supernaturally good senses. Lola will understand me if I talk to her while showing everything on my face. Complex stuff will not get through though, so I won’t bother with math lessons for the bunny. I unwind the necklace from her body and put it back on.
I take stock of my environment and see the small room I remember from the tenth level. Two doors, one with stairs going down and one with a dark swirl, fill the back wall. The dark rock walls are smooth with rounded ceilings, just like the rest of this level. The room itself is the size of a bedroom, a little over five metres wide and long, thirty square metres. Big enough for a little break.
My students look horrible. I see burn marks all over them; the flaming dog must have given them trouble. Ket is smiling, the metal affinity spider must have been easy for him. Or maybe the dungeon switched things up since I went through here? It’s irrelevant though, so I stop thinking about the subject.
I switch my focus to my students’ bodies. They are still running on qi fumes, and a close-up internal inspection shows me torn muscle fibres and a general lack of stored energy in all of their bodies. Bord is in the best shape, and I did not expect anything else. He is not showing any signs of slimming down though, his mental image of himself must be a fatty.
I take a moment to search through my spatial ring and pull out an entire dining set a second later. A thick and sturdy Shining Moonwood table with complementary chairs - big enough to seat ten - appears in the room. I sit down at the head of the table as I pull out some food. “Have a seat.”
They each slowly find a chair and start plopping down. Lola hops on my lap but I put her on the table. The first thing I do is pull out some qi loaded grasses for her to munch on.
I will give the rest enough food to refill their energy levels, but rationing the amount of qi inside the food will be crucial here. I want to feed them barely enough qi to completely repair their bodies. This will allow their subconscious to fine tune things on a cellular level and fix any chemical imbalances. I will repeat this until no more changes are being made, this being an indicator of a fully optimised physique.
I place wooden plates and cutlery in front of each participant, floating the items through the air using qi strings. They all sit down, looking at me expectantly. I look through my ring, pondering on what food to serve. They need high calorie, low qi food at the moment, so I pull out a lot of snack food. Mundane animal sausages with a few percent, high-level beast meat inside, various kinds of vegetable tempura and a few jugs of light fruit juice. The feast starts the moment I make the food appear. The battle that immediately starts is even fiercer than the one they had previously.
I sit back and enjoy the show. Bord is punching at any techniques coming his way, Selis guides a large portion of the fruit juice directly into her mouth and Ket is surrounding his food with high-speed projectiles. It is a good thing the table is stronger than steel; even I am currently not capable of leaving a scratch in the thing. A minute later they are all eyeing each other suspiciously while zealously guarding their own foods and munching furiously.
“Alright, now that that storm has passed, what have you guys learned so far?”
I pour myself a nice spirit wine while looking around the table. I see Vox and Tess exchanging glances, and Vox speaks up. “I think Tess and me might be opposite elements, but we don’t suppress each other unless we want to. We have instead found a few tricks to boost our strengths while cooperating.”
I see Tess nodding her head. That is a good starting answer, but I want to hear more about it. “Why?”
“Uuuhm…”
Tess speaks up at this point. “I need shadows to move around, and it is too dark here for that. And we found out that alternating light and shadow attacks do a lot more damage than using a single element.”
“Why?”
Vox replies again. “Darkness becomes more obvious if it is surrounded by light, and light becomes more obvious in pitch blackness?”
I nod my head in praise. “That’s called contrast.”
I move my hand through the air while releasing a cloud of white qi. “This has little contrast. I can punch someone with a qi covered fist, but it will not do a lot of damage. Now if I introduce more contrast, like forming a spiked gauntlet, for instance, the vague line separating the cloud from the air becomes a lot clearer.”
I do as I say and form a wicked looking white gauntlet over my hands. Long spikes jut out from my knuckles. “Contrast is just an increase in obvious separation. Dark on top of dark is good for hiding. Light on top of light is good for discovering and healing. Neither is really excellent for fighting. You need a little bit of both in order to maximise damage.”
I nod to both of them. That contrast speech has another
reason though; shadows make for great disposable weapons. The weapon that was on top of Tess’ challenge pillar is an abstract concept given physical form. It was the shadow of a normal dagger that I poured a shitload of qi in during an experiment. I wanted her to struggle a bit, but she flashed under its shadow and was the first one to get to her pillar’s top. That weapon should have been great inspiration for her to start forming her own shadow weapons, but I haven’t seen her do it yet. Let’s hope the hint was obvious enough this time.
I look to the rest of the group. Bord has a glint in his eyes, and he proceeds to speak while spewing crumbs. “I’ve got to want gulp it myself.”
Wow, he understood that point this soon already?
“I got…” He shifts around a bit, sliding his jiggling ass over my chair. “I got angry, and the thing I wanted to be able to do became a lot easier.”
He performs a few phantom jabs while continuing to eat.
So it was an accidental discovery. Now, do I explain it or do I let the others figure it out themselves? I rub my beard a bit while thinking about it. Will and desire are at the root of cultivation, after all. I decide to let Bord try to figure it out first. “Why? How?”
He is silent for a while longer, everyone now peering over at the munching meatball. Then his eyes light up in understanding
“Goal!”
He seems content after saying that one word. This is good enough, so I nod at him and look at the last three. Selis is messing with her floating water glasses while nibbling on a piece of fried vegetable.
Ket looks over at Bord with a complicated look on his face. “I realised that there are some things that numbers cannot hold.”
He must have met his first statistical anomaly. The real world is the real world, after all, and any abstract method that represents the real world with just numbers is bound to have blind spots. Ket needs some more lessons in statistics if the sudden change in Bord’s behaviour caught him off guard. Maybe I should allow them to read some of the basic sciences books in my ring? I begin designing a small and cosy library before I stop and refocus on the leftover two.
The DAO of Magic Page 32