The thirty-metre long blueprint is made up of glowing lines and my disciples are working hard. They’re cutting down trees and drying them out. They cut timber into the required shapes and place them inside the full sized blueprint.
“Teach, how long does the qi gathering stage usually take?”
Vox’s sing-song voice shakes me from my musings and I reply distractedly. “Usually a year. The sets of fighting techniques I gave you all are extracts of the massive tomes they had to read through. Here, tell me if you find anything useful in this stuff.”
I pull a small piece of jade from my ring and upload an entire manual into the gem. It is the “Celestial Guiding Paths” cultivation method, and I throw it to the redhead who just dropped a massive wooden beam on the grass.
“Tell me what you would rather be studying, that thing or ‘Rapid Swift Speed?’”
Vox blinks multiple times as he looks through the jade. “Wha-what is this shit?”
I grin back at him. “My thoughts exactly. Ninety-nine out of a hundred words are totally useless. It’s just old guys rambling on about superstitions.”
He throws the gemstone back to me. He then stands still in front of me and bows.
I wave him away. “Don’t be so formal. I think that you all should be able to condense liquid in a few more weeks at most.”
Bord runs past me, carrying two entire trees. He is muttering about triangles as he runs back into the forest to gather more wood.
“Bord, wait up.” I throw him a piece of cloth. “Tie the piece of jade with your techniques to your forehead. That way you can access them anytime.”
He catches the strip of dark cloth and looks at it for a bit. He then rubs his ring and retrieves the green gem. He fumbles around a bit until Selis helps him bind the stone to his head. He smiles widely while thanking her.
“Thanks Sel, thanks Teach, I keep forgetting this complicated stuff.” He runs off again, now with a bounce and a weird roll in his step.
I cast a glance to Vox. “I think they used needlessly complex manuals to prevent others and body cultivators from gaining proper power. It was dantian or die.” I focus back on my work.
Ket motions to one of the trees as he controls a few iron knives. The metal whirlwind trims the tree into a log. Tess then slices through these logs with a rapier-like sword made from black qi.
Selis proceeds to pull the water from the wood while Vox and Angeta work the finer details. Drying wood normally takes months at best, or at least two weeks in a kiln. Cultivation is such a cheat, I love it!
I then place the wooden planks in the glowing wireframe and use my augur to meld the planks together on a molecular level. I don’t merge it into a single whole because wood needs to be able to flex a bit. We are making good progress; this type of easy work is a welcome break for my tired disciples. The trek over the mountains wore at their spirits and qi reserves, so I let them have a good meal before we started making the ship.
“What should we call her?”
My disciples glance over at me but continue working with serious faces. Their speed and precision are getting better by the minute. Their initial cuts produced useless and crooked timber. I felt the Tree becoming irritated at the wastage. They have improved drastically after some practice, now Tree is even helping out with growing specific tree shapes.
Vox is the first to reply. “She? Ships have manly names, you know.”
I blink a couple of times. Earth has a deeply rooted culture of calling the sea and ships by female pronouns. I guess it was pretty stupid to assume it would be the same here.
“Alright then, what should we call him… it?”
I continue to run my hands over the planks I am welding to the frame. The skeleton is done by now, a ribcage in the form of the ship reaching its wooden fingers into the air and I am starting on the hull cladding.
“Tess, make the next planks a little thicker please, I want to able to repair this ship while pulling wood from the ship itself.”
She nods and replies. “Okay, how about the Ascent?”
I look at her; that is not a half bad name.
“For some reason or another, I don’t think this ship will be stuck in water its entire life.” She is looking at the glowing lines delineating the form the ship will take with an enthusiastic smile on her face, so I nod at her.
“The Ascent it is! You might well be right. Not soon though, we will be stuck on this rock until I can find a large energy reserve that I can steal without big repercussions.”
I adjust the blueprint to include the name in local writing. I smile to myself as I continue to glide my hands across the smooth wooden planks, fantasies of space filling my mind again. Should I make a moon base first? Maybe a spinning circle space station?
An alarm pulls me from my crafting trance as a proximity alert goes off. Something is snuffling around the mountain where I laid my Tree pendant down.
⁂
A white dragon is soaring through the skies. Where previously the dragon could only fly to the edge of the clouds, some ten kilometres up in the sky, it now soars through the much thinner air. The dragon’s neck is bent at an angle, allowing it to scan the ground constantly. A bubble of air paints a distortion around the winged beast, the contrast between air thickness distorting the light.
This dragon is Re-Haan, of course. She has been stalking the cultivator for a few days now. The experience of losing herself in a massive whirlwind left her shaken, so she spent a day meditating and reading the small red book. She calmed down a lot after that and the bruises the weird man left behind on her body had faded by that time. She observed the bustling city below her for a bit, watching the small insignificant figures repairing the damage she wrought.
She then cast a last look at the white blur of a spinning circle. Her skin broke out in goose bumps every time she laid her eyes on the thing. The bubble around it was still there, smoother than glass to her frictionless touch. The small bright dot in the centre was growing brighter imperceptibly. Then she jumped off the jagged Tower top and shot into the air, only turning into a dragon at great heights.
A few days earlier, she saw just white fluffy clouds hanging in the skies; now she sees them as the warm, rising columns of air they really are. The air gets colder and squeezes the water out of itself, allowing it to condense into a fine mist. She does not know why cold air can carry less water yet, but she suspects that the human has answers to her questions. The mountains are now easily recognisable as barriers that force the air to become dry, thus explaining the deserts to the south.
She revelled in her newfound realisation by flying higher than ever, causing the still imposing Tower to shrink down to the size of a wooden splinter. After coming down from that high, both literally and figuratively, she called to the wind to form a lens, allowing her to see farther than before.
With that system of compressed air lenses, she scoured the roads until she found him, riding a dumb looking blue bear. A few other figures followed him, but they were so unimportant in her eyes that she didn’t even consciously take notice of them.
And it is a good thing that the temperatures so high in the sky are this cold, otherwise, we would be observing a blushing dragon right about now. Because dragons worship one thing, and one thing only. This one thing is strength. That human stopped her maximum speed charge with a single punch. That human quelled the wind that was ripping houses apart. That human casually threw her a small booklet filled with the secrets of the wind that doesn’t even exist in legends.
So Rhea has been feeling all hot and bothered for a few days. She felt hot because of those casual yet domineering feats of strength and bothered because she felt that way about a human. She would gladly sacrifice every single human on this planet if it meant that she could save one of her fellow Flight members. But now one of these humans has been doing this to her, which bothers her greatly.
She wanted to fume with anger, rage against the injustice done to her ego and pride. But then
she felt the wind running along her wings and she understood the mechanics of that wind and that anger slipped from her grasp.
And just when she was hyping herself up to fly down there and try to fight that small figure to regain some of her former glory, a mountain disappeared. It must be said that blowing up mountains is more like a pastime hobby for dragons; it’s pretty cool if one can accomplish that feat, but nothing to write home about. But making an entire mountain vanish, leaving only a smooth plateau behind?
The moment the group left, she turned into her human form and let herself fall to the earth. She then studied the massive smooth surface but found not a single clue. There were no mana disturbances, not a single tool mark left behind on the mirror-like surface. She looks at her own face for a while, sliding a finger across her sharp cheek. She neither liked nor disliked her human form, but the human had a weird sort of fascination on his face every time he looked at her.
Now she is flying high in the skies again, observing the group jump from peak to peak. He looks to be casually strolling around as if walking through a sunlit field of grass. The figures following him are all fighting hard to keep up, deploying a wide variety of methods to do so.
Then Re-Haan sees them stop. The humans gather, and the important one fiddles around for a bit. She blinks and they are gone, leaving only an empty crack in the mountainside behind. The large, white dragon narrows her eyes and re-adjusts some of the air lenses. She sees a small black spot stuck in a crack. Her toothy maw displays her fangs in a teeth-filled dragon smile as she banks down, diving towards the mountains below.
Chapter fifty-three
Instigate
‘ANOTHER WORLD ANOTHER WORLD HE IS FROM ANOTHER WORLD ANOTHER WORLD!’
These words keep bouncing around in Ket’s head since he heard them. Teacher had said these words in passing as if they don’t hold a lot of importance, and while the rest must have missed this bit of information, it is fucking with Ket’s head big time. Theory after theory got made, examined and trashed.
‘Sun is just a star? Stars are suns. Planet circles around the sun, then do stars orbit each other? The band of white across the night sky, that’s more stars? They are falling so fast they escape, right? Cluster of stars, are there more star clusters? Do star clusters orbit each other slowly? Need to ask Teach for books about space, start recording stars?’
On and on and on his thoughts go. He has half his mind locked up in theory-crafting right now. The fraction of his mental powers he is using to control the tree trimming knives is inconsequential, giving him a lot of space to think while he chops the trunks Bord is hauling into neat cylinders of wood.
‘No, this world has no qi. Not this world, the world outside this pocket space. It has only mana. Qi is a higher form of energy, another place? Like the Tree, but bigger? Are they side by side or completely separate from each other?’
He has read all the available books, their information recorded in his memories. But each book is so dense, each page filled with important theories that need to be examined. Then there is the hologram projected in the air. Sleek lines that will carve through water. He optimises the path of a knife, shaving another millisecond of his average branch cutting time per tree. Then his Teacher stops running his hand over the planks and looks to Tree.
‘Planet, planet and moons, sun and planets, cluster of stars, group of star clusters, groups of groups of star clusters, does this apply the other way around? Bigger is the same, so smaller is the same? Cycles in cycles in cycles but where is the end?’
Teach then walks over and puts his hand on the golden glowing bark. He then frowns, opens his eyes a fraction and smiles, in that order. A rather mean-spirited smile, if Ket has anything to say about it. The Teacher analysis process he has running gives him the needed info, that smile is one he makes just before pulling some kind of ridiculous scheme. A ridiculous scheme that has a predicted near hundred per cent chance of going well.
He then pops out of existence with a muted flash. The group of disciples around him stop working for a moment. Bord comes bouncing back into the clearing, carrying two trees. He drops them and then catches another pair of trees that come falling from the sky. He seems to be muttering while working up a sweat.
‘Two times more, that’s double? That’s double. Why is the boat not triangular? Wait, it sort of is. Squares with the points connected are also triangles?’
It seems like Ket is not the only one using his brain at maximum capability while enjoying the rewarding work of qi-crafting something. Ket diverts his quest for answers to crafting possibilities for a bit. They spin and flow through his head, from minuscule statues to how to craft the biggest buildings from stone.
Answer is a pyramid. The top part of the library is also triangular. A pyramid can support its own weight the best. Ket looks to the rustling bushes Bord just walked through, off to get more trees. Maybe he is onto something with his mutterings about triangles.
He stops this train of thought before it can spiral out of control. A sudden presence makes him drop the knives working on the trees and look at the Tree again. Teacher is back, but why is there a tall lady with him? She seems slightly familiar to Ket, but he has trouble recalling where he has seen her before.
⁂
I feel the wind steal my warmth as I appear on the mountainside. It is still night, but there is no way in hell I can miss the huge dragon’s head a few centimetres from my face. Instead of panicking I smile lazily. I extended the protection bubble around the Tree necklace upwards to include myself, the air around me shimmering with power. I try to give off a lazy smile while shouting some words at my qi around me.
‘CHILL, RELAX, NO DANGER, RELAX-E-RODEO, TAKE A CHILLPILL!’
I see the metres long dragon head sniff me, my clothes flap in the warm breath she exhales. I sniff my own armpit. I don’t think I smell?
Sniff sniff
Yeah, I don’t smell bad. I have some small cleaning processes take care of sweat and grime. Let’s see why she is here?
“Hello, Rhea, how can I help you?”
I think I see the dragon frowning to herself. I am not an expert in reading a dragon’s facial expressions though. She isn’t moving any other part of her body; is she shocked at my appearance? A low grumble starts to come from her throat, and I think she is talking to me.
“I don’t speak dragon, what do you want?”
The dragon head makes a tsk-ing sound, so that expression of annoyance is universal? I have to praise her for being able to put so much exasperation in a single sound; that can’t be easy with such a toothy maw. I wonder how far I can annoy and push her? I feel the wind swirling around her scale-covered body. I consciously begin to feel admiration for her impressive form, and the faint indigo trails of mana surrounding her become visible. Back when I first met her, on the broken Tower, I only sensed some white-ish trails of mana circling around her. So air mana is actually a purple-blue to my senses?
The mana inside her body seems to be roiling as if she has trouble controlling such dense energies. She must have gained heaps of power from reading that book. That small book only has the basics of aerodynamics, enough to get a feel for the scientific field, but not enough to make one an expert.
I feel inside my core for the contracts I have running. The student’s contracts are small pinpricks of light compared to the blazing inferno of power that represents the agreement between me and this dragon. She must have gained more power than I thought. I wonder if she is aware of it yet? At this power level, she shouldn’t be able to think about reporting my presence to third parties without the contract activating.
The dragon growls for a bit but backs off after poking the shield with her nose. A flash of light later, I see the female form of Rhea standing before me. That process used to take a few seconds at least, now it’s done in a flash. Another indicator that her power shot up over the last few days.
“Give me the next book.”
Ah, so it was as I suspected
. You don’t need much intellect to realise that the book that she is now holding is only a beginner guide. I want to see how far I can push her before she starts fighting back for real.
“Sure, I only ask that you do one thing for me.” I smile at her. Doubt is clearly written across her face; let’s up the ante.
“That book seems to have increased your power by quite a bit. Surely one request is worth more knowledge? I don’t think you can find this…” I pull the second volume out of my ring and wave it front of her face, “…anywhere else on this dirt-ball.”
This volume is also red, that was the type of leather I had on hand back when I made this. I have primers on all the elements, and I put protection formations on each one of them. I added the gemstone to this second volume a few days ago, when I was temporarily stumped on a design problem for my airplane. It starts smoking because only I am allowed to see it, so I quickly add Rhea’s aura signature to the acceptable people list.
Her hands twitch the moment she sees the small book, but the shield around me is stopping her from taking action.
“What do you want this time?”
Suspicion is truly dripping off her face now. This is going to be fun. I give her a coy smile and explain.
⁂
I begin another small lecture while sitting in the clearing. “In my previous world, cultivation was also known as going against the heavens. This is both true and utter baloney. It’s true because cultivating extends a being’s lifespan. You guys will live for a few years longer with the power you currently hold. I am at a power level where my natural lifespan is at least doubled, same for you guys if you reach the core forming stage. You will be functionally immortal if you can reach the foundation realm.
“It’s also true because this longer lifespan allows you to learn a lot. Ten thousand hours of work are needed to become proficient in a field; cultivators can thus become proficient in any field they choose. This is of course apart from the fact that cultivators tend to learn faster, but they can develop a single field further, so it evens out.
The DAO of Magic Page 42