The DAO of Magic

by Andries Louws

  “Controlling blood felt really gross, so thanks for warning me about that. Pulling the stuff from the blood so I got water was really hard in the beginning. It felt like there were a lot of small things that did not want to let the water go? As if I was compressing wet dough in my hands, only to have it squeeze through my fingers. Hmmh, these sausages are the best, so good. Do you have any sauce? Anyway, I also learned that water wants to flow, so I am now guiding it instead of commanding it. That’s how it feels anyway, a lot easier that way. Wow, this green and yellow thing is so crunchy! Hmm.”

  She seems content after that waterfall-style speech. I don’t know how to respond to that, to be honest. Fluid dynamics are incredibly resource-intensive to calculate, a lot worse than calculating wind flow. She seems to be on a correct path, anyway. Water just isn’t my style. I will let her read whatever scientific stuff I have on hydraulics and aqua-dynamics. Is that even a word?

  Angeta is looking at the plants around her arms. She must be thinking about something really deeply. The rest continue to nibble on the leftovers while she ponders. After an entire minute of thinking, she softly speaks a single line. “I don’t need a forest; all I need is a single seed.”

  So she glimpsed some of the potential that qi holds, great! Now that that’s done, let’s have a nice chat.

  “Ket, could you give me some estimation on how the city would fare if the dungeon is not accessible?”

  I interrupt his discussion to ask this question. I am curious how a local braincore user would answer this. My estimation is that the city will be largely abandoned in a month. Maybe even deserted within half a year. Ket looks to be thinking hard, the only reason his head isn’t heating up again is because he has expended most of his energy.

  “A week. The nobles would bail after… three days. If they do it silently without sounding the alarm, the first commoners would begin to starve within a week. Maybe two weeks until the entire city is abandoned.”

  Oh, okay. A bit worse than my own predictions.

  “Projected casualties?”

  He looks at me weirdly, running through my exact words to decipher the meaning. “Around half, no nobles or people with influence.”

  I really should leave the dungeon in working order, got it. I still think it’s weird though. Why doesn’t this city have a backup food source? “Do you know the concept of farming?”

  Angeta replies with “humans are too lazy for farming; they think it’s beneath them. Their holy dungeons give all, after all. The goat-tribes are the best farmers in the entire world! One farmer can feed himself and three others. They have mastered the seasons and can feed entire villages with their fields. That’s also why humans raid them so often.”

  That is below medieval level farming efficiency. I can vaguely remember some information about how twenty dark aged peasants could feed themselves and eighty others. That comes down to one farmer feeding five people in total. “Do the beast people not have access to dungeons?”

  “The humans would have a hissy-fit. Our Guardian told us that humans need dungeons because they’re weak.” She snarls a bit every time she says the word human.

  I hold in my laughter; the thought of a racist cultivation god is incredibly funny to me. If we all ever reach the higher realms, I hope that she will still be the same. She will be such a pain in the ass to all those stuck up immortals, absolutely hilarious. I decide to continue my questions. “So… anyone want to tell me why you all had entire armies chasing you?”

  The silence stretches on for a while. Just as I am about to speak up again, I notice a missing rabbit. When did Selis kidnap Lola? Her water glasses are now dark spots on her clothes, so entranced is she with petting the content rabbit. The white fluff ball is radiating happiness while lying stretched out on the blue-haired girl’s lap.

  Vox and Angeta have been whispering to each other, so it does not surprise me when Vox speaks up.

  “There are a few establishments in the Tower city that have met with some setbacks. A rather large group of oppressed people have now regained their freedom.”

  So they freed some slaves and beat up some scumbags, good for them. “Why the army though?”

  “We might have put skills on display that only a full mage can pull off. And we might have caused a big alarm, causing the air mages to transport the elites of the army ahead.”

  That at least explains why I saw no air attacks, only fire and water. The air mages must have been exhausted after transporting a large chunk of the army. “What happened to the people you freed?”

  “Why? They are free?”

  Angeta jumps in with a snarl. “If they can’t keep their freedom, they don’t deserve it.”

  I reply. “If you hadn’t freed them, they wouldn’t have needed to?” I lazily sit back in my chair. “I wonder how much worse they are treated now, as runaway slaves? I don’t think they could have made it far with an entire army marching to the city. Is there a big difference in treatment between good, hardworking slaves and ones that have run away?”

  I see Vox pale, while Angeta is very silent all of a sudden. I turn to Tess. “What about you?”

  She knits her brows. “I was just walking on the street when a group of guards came and arrested me! I went along with them to see why, and I got accused of robbing Lord Fellis! They accused me and any other dungeon sneak they could get their hands on of raiding his private vault. They even asked me if I went into his cellar, as if I would ever enter that disgusting place. So I beat up that fat prick and caused a distraction by having a fight with the guards so the other sneaks could run away.”

  She looks mighty pissed now, if her furiously dismantling a piece of fried vegetable with her cutlery is any indication. I am partly responsible, so I will say no more. I rub my spatial ring as I look at Bord, suspecting that he might know more about the basement.

  “Selis and I were eating. She showed me the place. But I didn’t have any money, I never needed money!”

  He sounds like a whiny child, all nasal tones and whimpering. I guess that he has recovered from whatever shock he went through. Fighting for your life does tend to put things in perspective; I call it combat psychology. Depression and mental issues are less important when you have to beat up tiger sized beasts with your bare hands.

  Selis is burying her face in Lola’s belly, who is loving it. Her paws are stretched out while she enjoys the pettings. I can’t break up such a blissful scene, so I leave her alone.

  The food inside my student’s bellies is doing its work. I see signs of their cells becoming healthier and gaining efficiency. I put a bowl of qi chips on the table and they all grab some. We chat some more while I wait for the qi to finish repairing their bodies.

  Chapter forty-one

  Augur

  Isaw that everyone had recovered to full health after half an hour of munching on chips, chatting and chilling. Selis spent all this time petting Lola, who didn’t seem to mind at all. Ket started talking a bit more while Bord still seems as dumb as a brick. Let’s start phase two of the training!

  “Alright, I am busy with something in Tree, so you guys should train yourselves for the next ten levels. One thing I want you to train in is fighting with sensory deprivation.”

  I pull six strips of cloth from my ring and throw them at my disciples.

  “I want you to blindfold yourselves in the next floor. That way, you will be prepared if you ever have to fight without sight. Plug up your ears with the cloth in the next level, so you can train without relying on hearing. Do the same for your other senses.”

  I think for a bit; what else is useful at this stage?

  “I also want you guys to switch it up a bit. Let’s take Selis as an example.”

  She looks up startled, nearly dropping Lola. Focus for once, girl! “She can reach immense heights if she continues to fight with pure water, but when she ends up in a desert where there is no water at all? Then she is royally screwed. Or what if she gets stuck on a pole? There will be
water everywhere, but she won’t be able to influence ice without melting it first.”

  I focus on her, turning my body to face her. “So you should try messing around with fire, lightning, earth and everything you can think of. I don’t need you to be able to control masses of flame or anything, but I want everyone here to be able to light a campfire.”

  I spread my right-hand open, grabbing at the air. I open my hand to show them a freshly condensed globe of water. I open my other hand and start ripping carbon, hydrogen and oxygen bonds apart. Letting them recombine gives me a small pale flame hovering above my palm. “Extracting water from the air is also one example. Learning new elements will become immensely more difficult when you reach the solid core stage. Just try a lot of different things.”

  I turn around and walk over to the table, depositing the entire dining set back into my ring. “Alright, don’t go through the right door, that will eat up all your qi.”

  I pick up Lola from the floor and look her in the eye. “Give me a signal when they need help, or when they reach another room like this, okay? And keep this safe again.”

  She gives a small nod and I rub her head. I wrap the necklace around her body again and drop her to the floor. She wiggles around until she is comfortable with the added weight.

  ⁂

  I immediately continue my practice the moment I am back inside my Tree dimension. I tie my shoes and feet to the ground and grass, using a spider webbing of qi thread under tension. This stability allows me to move my hip and ankles in order to rotate my head in horizontal circles. I vary the speed and size of said circles randomly. A quick nearly vertical spin is followed by a sudden slow turn that has my head halfway to the ground.

  I am doing these weird gymnastics in order to find something. The brain of a cultivator will eventually start to generate a type of secondary energy. This process starts once a certain level of passive qi density is achieved inside the brain.

  Passive qi is energy that has naturally reinforced the workings of the body. It sort of deactivates itself in order to help the body out, integrating into the bodily tissues. This is then no longer available for use by the cultivator and is therefore passive. I also refer to this qi as structural qi.

  Body cultivators, with their highly qi infused physiques, generate this energy a lot sooner than dantian cultivators. This is also why heartcore holders tend to be the best crafters, for reasons I will get to in a moment.

  These weird movements are the best option I have if I want to move my head freely and quickly. I want to move my head freely because I am searching for that secondary energy and quickly because that’s a decent way to start sensing it. I call this energy augur. The body houses qi, qi houses the augur.

  The best way I can describe what that augur energy feels like is by comparing it with qi. Let’s say qi is comparable to rocks. I can make sturdy buildings out of rocks, but I won’t be able to get much fine detail from that building material. Then the augur is a powder so fine that you can leave fingerprints in it, one of those high-tech nanoparticle powders. That fine energy can be used for scanning, for understanding the world. With qi you feel the shape of the world through its voids, the augur flows between the quarks and passes through the bosons and the leptons.

  I got the name from some half-remembered history lessons. Augurs were old Roman priests that predicted the will of the gods through bird flight observation. That is a line from Wikipedia that I still remember. When I read this article, I had this vision of two priests chatting to each other:

  Augur 1: “And what did you auspice yesterday?”

  Augur 2: “The duck I followed around all day turned a total of sixteen circles to the right. That means it will rain tomorrow.”

  Augur 1: “Hmmh, good read. I got bird shit on my head three times today. The harvests will be plentiful.”

  And it’s weird, I know. But it’s similar to the way my augur works. I will immediately know everything there is to know about an object I scan with it. I have found no credible scientific reason for the amount of information that can be learned from using my augur. I understood exact elemental gas volume percentages the first time I spread it through the air. I saw the ratio between oxygen and nitrogen. I could feel all the trace noble gases in the air, I could write down the exact percentages of each.

  Every internal fibre and alloy change was easily visible, but it was a bit more. It would provide me with accurate information I didn’t consciously know about. I could replicate any alloy, puzzle out the source materials of any potion and feel an object’s molecules one by one. I had an actual, up to date atomic level three dimensional map available for further processing. Augur is the best CAT scan you could ever hope for.

  That’s why I am trying pretty hard to find it this early. I miss the feeling of truly understanding everything about an object. The rings I made were crafted by pushing molten metals around. Through the augur, I could manually place every molecule. That is a pretty big difference in crafting quality.

  Now you should know that everything has inertia. So when I move my head, some aspects of it follow slightly behind. Most obvious, my hair. Slightly less obvious is the fact that my qi follows behind my body. There is a delay of a few picoseconds between when the body and when my qi starts moving.

  And my second energy then should follow a few picoseconds behind my qi. So I look at my brain’s internal structure, at the place where that energy should follow behind. So far it still eludes me. I previously gained this energy just before I started foundation building at the third crunch, so I was hoping that having a heartcore would push this date up a bit. I am not even close to a full first-crunch core now, so I might be a bit premature.

  I think that this energy gets created when massive amounts of qi flow through each other. The passive qi inside the flesh will channel the active qi, and the results of this friction is the augur. The brain has the most qi activity, so it is only natural that this finer energy shows up there first. It feels like the rocks that represent qi smash into each other, working like a ball mill to create a fine powder.

  I move around like this for a few hours at least. I get one useful thing out of this bizarre dance though; I end up fine tuning my muscles to perfection. All this moving around allows me to feel the electrical impulses running through my nerves, from its inception to the actual muscle movement. So that’s pretty neat I guess.

  An even longer time later I start to fall asleep. My mind gets drowsy while my body has started sweating from all the exercise. And then I feel it. A film over my brain. I reach for it and it is gone.

  That’s not right, I don’t need to reach at all. That energy is inside my brain whether I want it to be there or not.

  And that small shift in thinking allows me access. I feel the film covering my brain, feel the augur sitting on top of my thinking. I gently pull it to the back of my head, mentally blowing on the thin mist until it reaches my core.

  And then I feel it. Every single detail of the small ethereal rock floating in my brainstem. Each time a particle of compressed liquid qi settles down on the surface and crystallises, I feel it. Each part of my core that is running a process, I feel it.

  I burst into laughter. I spend the next five minutes in absolute joy. A pre-foundation cultivator that has divine sight, such absurdity is simply impossible, yet here I am. I swirl my augur through my brain and I can see the process of its creation. I push a little bit through my veins and through my finger into a single blade of grass. A molecular map of the leaf fills my mind.

  I stand up and look around. A fidgety Lola is staring at me. I jump at her and manage a tackle before she can escape. I roll around, hugging her and throw her into the air. She squeals while I catch her. I run around in pure joy for a little longer.

  Chapter forty-two

  Leisure

  Ikeep Lola clutched to my chest while I walk over to the tree. She is struggling but I am not letting go until I know why she is here. I put my free hand to Tree’s
trunk and push a trickle of qi through. I feel the forms of my disciples sitting around. They are in another small room with two doors and a hallway on opposite sides. This must be level twenty.

  I jump through the dimensional portal and see six dark figures lying on the ground. Shit, are they breathing? Yes, they are just totally exhausted. I drop the struggling Lola and force some qi into their unconscious forms and check their conditions. They are totally devoid of any energy. I pick up my Tree medallion from the floor and smile wryly while pulling the entire dining set from my ring again.

  My silent humming, while I’m setting the table, wakes them one by one. I pull out a big pot of stew and ladle some into the bowls. Lola gets another pile of leafy greens. I put some Heavenly Grain bread on the table and pour myself a nice glass of spirit wine after sitting down.

  My sorry group of students seats themselves one by one. They eye my smile with suspicious faces. I can’t help but be happy right now, deal with it. Bord has emptied his bowl before everyone is seated and is now scarfing the bread down.

  “Floor twenty?”

  Tess replies weakly while picking up her spoon. “Thirty.”

  “Wow, that’s impressive.”

  I did not expect them to have such tenacity.

  “Any big problems?”

  Ket replies with his mouth full. “I predict we will be able to reach level forty with our current strength.”

  I nod my thanks. “Enemy types?”

  It seems to be Angeta’s turn to speak. “More animals. Mirror maze at level nineteen. Level twenty-five was just clouds. They get faster or stronger or bigger each level down, but not both.”

  They all nod with tired faces, agreeing with the beast woman. We eat and drink with only slurping and chewing sounds sounding out for twenty minutes. The entire pot of stew is empty at that point and Bord is scanning the table for any leftover crumbs. Their bodies are fully restored now. I sense a lot fewer changes in their physiques, so one more cycle will take care of their biggest problems. I see that they have all developed some muscle and Bord is still as fat as ever.