14 - Chapter 13 - Day 1752
Adya had been taking her time to progress. She had asked for permission to visit the regional capital to start to get first hand experience. It seemed she had become careless and complacent. In a way, it was only to be expected. She had more than 10,100 years of memories. In all her remembered lives she had been an adult for a long time and held both personal and political power. She had not hesitated in wielding the power to advance her agenda. She had become so used to it, she had not allowed for the fact that she was a child again.
Her family had become acclimated to her idiosyncrasies over the last five years, and they probably didn't even notice how strange her behaviour was compared to an average five year old. However, going into a city with only retainers, ordering and even threatening people, flaunting a significant amount of wealth, standing up to and even ignoring a noble.
All those actions would have stood out to anyone that was watching. Add to that the fact the bandits had been captured, and unless she planned to kill them, or even if she did, the rumours would leak. Oh, no one would be disloyal, or go out of their way to harm her or the family, but people were people, and someone would get drunk and brag, or a guard would want to show off for a girl and would brag. If she allowed the men to live, then their families would find out a version of the story and it would spread even faster.
That was not even taking into account that when what passed for an elite unit of the shadowed hand didn't return, it would be a massive red flag, and would have about the same impact as showing one to a bull. Whomever had tasked them to contract the bandits and sent them after her would know exactly who the target had been.
Her family and their retainers were a known quantity, or at least could be with a little coin spent. They would know what the retainers were capable of. With the capture of the bandits, none having any injuries, the wipeout of the assassin team and the complete lack of injuries on the retainers, it would paint a pretty clear picture to anyone with half a brain. For anyone tactically minded, it would scream out her carefully kept secrets.
She had forgotten the lessons hard won in her youth that carelessness kills and complacency kills. The two combined can bring down nations. She had to change her behaviour, and control her exposure. She would also need to undertake damage limitation. Again not something she was capable of as she was.
Adya had been taking it easy, she had not fully pushed her capabilities. Sai and Mai were more imaginary friends rather than tactical weapons. Her cultivation, more of a theoretical exercise, an academic pursuit rather than survival necessity.
She had not pushed the limits of her system, not wanting to be pushed to stats above 10 and losing whatever nebulous protection the scion protocols provided. She had not experimented to understand the limitation of passive skills, or even attempted to work out what an active skill would be.
Finally, she had kept her supportive family fully in the dark. Part of that was an innate fear of rejection. A part of her thought they would not see her as a true part of the family, or worse they would denounce her as a demon and try to kill her. They were irrational thoughts, but then all fears are irrational.
She had so many strengths that she could leverage, that she had ignored. She wanted to be fully independent, but she had forgotten that did not mean she had to be alone. Her outlook had to change, and she had to take calculated risks. She needed to make a prioritised list, just because she had already made mistakes, didn't mean that she would run to make another, different set of mistakes.
So what was on her todo list. She had to create her first core to start cultivation, and more likely she would need to condense all three cores simultaneously.
She had to work with Sai to create her own language for formations, arrays and runes. She wanted to get to one overarching language model that she could add to as she learned more.
She needed to come up with her version of the loyalty tattoo she had seen on the assassin squad, so that she could deal with the bandits. She didn't want to lose the resources if she could avoid it.
She needed to better understand the system and the limitations around passive and active skills. She also needed to understand the difference, if any, between spell and skills.
She needed to work out what to tell her family, how much of the weirdness that was her life, and how to limit any damage. She wasn't ready for her situation to become widely known.
She needed to deal with the aggression from and the knowledge held by the shadowed hand, and anyone else they had contacted.
And finally, she had to deal with any potential fallout from the idiot noble she had snubbed.
The list was not insignificant. Anyone of those would be a significant task by themselves, each creating opportunities and risks.
Adya: Sai lets conduct a SWOT analysis of each of the items on the todo list.
Sai: task one, create a cultivation core. If only one core is created, we may lose the chance to create further cores in the worst case, and make it significantly harder in the best case by raising stats, thereby forcing up the initial core size. Creating the combined core would allow us to better defend ourselves, but will make us a target for more powerful cultivators. The level of risk is not known as the number and power of cultivators in the local region is not known.
Sai: task two, is actually in progress. Version one should be ready for testing in hours. It would give the opportunity to create formations, arrays and runes. However, leveraging them would require either family support or another organisation to act as an intermediary.
Sai: task three, requires a decision. Killing the bandits limits exposure, but would mean going back on our promise. That would damage our reputation with our own retainers. Keeping them alive and controlling them is possible with the completion of task two, but will leave us open to scrutiny without support.
Sai: task four, is actually a nice to have and is primarily a research project. It has the potential to increase our power significantly, the negatives are totally unknown apart from potentially additional scrutiny. There are also potential synergies with task two.
Sai: task five is again a decision on whether to reveal our secrets, and if so to what extent. There is a non zero chance that the disclosure could cause substantial risks, however the probability is statistically small.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
Sai: task six, is both an opportunity and a risk. There is a significant probability that the family is already taking action against the shadowed hand. The risk is that their actions may reveal our secrets to the family. If we take direct action, we could still reveal additional capabilities to family agents. If we reveal enough secrets to the family, we could leverage that protection to act in concert with family agents to achieve additional benefits.
Sai: task seven, there is a significant probability, based on displayed behaviour charitably characterised as young master syndrome, that the individual in question will seek to escalate the incident to save face in light of the perceived slight. There is a significant probability that it will cause issues for the family. Due to the family being unaware of the incident, it is highly probable that the family will be blindsided.
Mai: task eight, we are not using the spiritual / divine sense abilities at all. It is a strong capability that would give us advanced warning of potential attackers.
Adya: thank you both, that is indeed the current situation. The question becomes what actions we take, how long will the actions take to complete and what risk are we accepting.
Adya spent time going through all the permutations of her tasks. In the end, there was only so much risk she was willing to bear in the current situation. She needed to tell her family about her situation, that would get her support to act more overtly, help her contain the risk of the shadowed hand, potentially flipping a liability into an asset, and allow her to more easily deal with the irate noble. It would also allow her to keep her word and convert the bandits to productive retainers.
The issue was that it would leave her at risk, however small, of being betrayed. She also would need proof, apart from a child’s word to convince her family. That could be solved by both starting cultivation and finalising the ability to create formations. Even though formations, arrays and runes were described as different things, they were in essence the same. They were a circuit that directed energy in a specified pattern to achieve a specified objective. The only differences between them was the medium used, the duration of the effect and the scale of deployment.
Adya: integrate our knowledge of hardware design, specifically circuit design into the analysis of the formations.
Sai: Analysis parameters increased, time to complete increased to 24 hours. Additional energy required to enhance processing, passive creation of mana stones and willpower stones suspended. Sai will be non responsive for the duration.
So that meant Adya had a day to push herself and create her cores. She would need to hold and manipulate a minimum of 16.5M mana, 16.5M will power and 62.5K stamina simultaneously to create all three cores. She could risk one day to become a cultivator and provide definitive proof of her abilities to her family. She just hoped one day wasn't enough for things to spiral.
Adya called Philipa in to see her. “Philipa, can you please take a message to my mother,” said Adya. “I am going to be in seclusion from now until tomorrow midday. I need my mother to take lunch with me. She will also likely spend the rest of the day with me. I can’t tell her why until tomorrow. Lastly, can you please relate the incident with the noble brat that we ran into on the way out of the city, so the family is not caught flatfooted. The incident with the bandits made us forget to mention it.”
If Philipa was surprised by the instructions she didn't show it, she just left to carry it out. “Sally, please get me several jars of drinking water,” said Adya, “Also draw me a full bath, cold water is fine. Once that is ready I need you to ensure no one disturbs me until I come out, not for any reason.”
Sally acknowledged the order and rushed off to complete it. While Sally was making arrangements, Adya started to plan out her core placements. She experimented with coalescing all three cores, thankfully all three cores were ephemeral with just a spot that anchored the core in the physical plane. That made things much simpler. Adya decided on the standard placements for her cores. The abdomen for the mana core, the chest cavity for the stamina core and the skull for the will power core. There had never been any evidence that the location of the cores made any difference, but it was traditional. The issue would always be the meridians she would have to construct to circulate the energy from the cores.
Once Sally had completed the arrangements and Philipa had confirmed that her messages had been delivered, to a very unhappy mother, Adya kicked everyone out of her suite and locked herself in.
She disrobed, and sat next to the filled bathtub. When she succeeded in creating her cores, impurities would be expelled from her body, and she didn't want to ruin her clothes or her room. The bathtub would probably have to be thrown out though. With the skill advancement, Adya felt that she would be able to create her perfect starting cores today, the only question was how painful it would be.
Once she was situated, she dropped into deep meditation. Due to the low regen rate of her stamina, she would not be able to create the stamina core to the same size as the other two cores, but she still wanted to push it to the maximum size that she could manage. The energy was easiest to control. She started the process of core creation and started feeding energy into the core. She would take the full 24 hours and pump the entire stamina regen into the core. The process was actually simple, and Adya experimented with the process. She found that once the process was started Mai could take over the process and maintain it while the core filled. She would have to take over control when it was time to crystallise the core, but until then it was essentially automatic. She posited that the core would be around 0.5M points, or just under a thirtieth of the size of the other two cores well within her limit for energy manipulation.
The will power core would take 1000 seconds to fill and the mana core would take 100 seconds to fill. She worked on increasing her energy control while the stamina core filled ever so slowly. With a regen of only 62 per minute it didn't strain her at all. The core design, based on a buckminsterfullerene design, was the most efficient. In the old world, a hexagonal structure was used, but with her understanding of molecular science, she felt that the buckminsterfullerene design would be superior.
As the hours went by, Adya pushed her energy control abilities to the limit, then slowly expanded those limits. It took her 23 hours to push the limit of the control past the minimum thresholds. She took a small break and checked in on the progress of the stamina core. It was already past the 0.5M mark and steadily climbing.
Adya played around with both energies, and found that will power was much easier to control, as it required itself to coalesce. She thought about making the will power core bigger, but there was no real advantage at this stage. Besides if she was right, the tier 2 core would need to be substantially bigger due to her stats increasing.
Just after 7 hours from starting the process for the stamina core, Adya started the process for the will power core, she held it as the core filled. At 16.5k per minute, it was substantially harder to hold in place. The difference between filling a balloon from a dripping tap, to filling the balloon with a hosepipe. Around 17 hours later the core was full. The stamina core was still filling.
Holding both cores in place, Adya started the process of filling the mana core. If the stamina core was filled using a dripping tap, and the will power core with the garden hose, the mana core was like trying to fill a balloon with a fire hose. The strain increased rapidly, forcing her mind to its capacity. Thankfully she only needed to hold the pressure for 100 minutes. The 100 minutes passed excruciatingly slowly, with each second increasing the pressure on her mind and body. It was with great relief when she finally managed to get the core past the minimum point. She also stopped filling the stamina core, it had reached just a tad over 0.5M. Both the other cores were holding at just over 16.5M each. She stood, shook out her body and climbed into the bathtub.
Everything was as ready as it was ever going to get in the current situation. Adya took a deep breath and braced herself for the pain to come. Then she forcibly compressed all three cores. It wasn't just about squeezing them, she also had to hold on to the design she wanted the cores to be. She held the shape in her head, three cores, each the same size as the stones she normally produced, but holding literally millions of times more energy. She felt like she was ripping her body and soul apart. Had she not expensed the pain in her previous lives, she would not have been able to hold on. In her last life her cores had contained a small fraction of the power that they held now, but it was at least a familiar pain.
Finally, after an hour of the worst pain she had endured in any life, the cores finally clicked into place. As Adya felt a rush of notifications hit her, she passed out in the bathtub.