(The White Shadow's P.O.V)
5 days. That's how long I spent inside the depths of the ocean. Everything was dark all around me. This was not even the deepest part of the water plane. Yet it was a veritable void with tons of liters of water weighing down on me. For reference, the deepest part on earth was or had been, the Mariana trench located in the Pacific ocean. It measured more than a whooping 34,000 feet deep.
That was literally nothing compared to the deepest part on Gaea. The oceans in Gaea went deeper than 4 million feet. That is more than 1,219,200 meters deep. The water plane was much much deeper. To be honest, I had no idea how deep it went. I was already more than a billion feet inside. Yeah. That was why my theory of space being folded or stretched out in particular places was more than just a theory. It had some truth to it. I just couldn't verify it in this form.
I didn't have access to my spatial abilities so I couldn't accurately figure out the mystery myself. One thing I knew however was that there was more to this plane than the ashy landscape of the fire plane or the cloudy peaks of the air dimension.
The golden clouds... something was off about them.
Anyway, the reason I was deep inside the ocean was fairly simple. I was going about things differently. This time I wanted to begin my water bending by mastering a Subskill, to be precise it's solid form before the most common expression of the element, it's liquid.
The reason was that in my eyes, ice was not only more fascinating but was also connected to a certain Fundamental aspect of reality that I was coordinating with my original body to learn. I got the idea from Esdeath. If she could tap into time and freeze it then I could to. And if I could freeze it, then mission complete. I would have had a taste of time manipulation and could work from there.
Too bad Vaatu destroyed Kronos, I could have studied his divinity and copied it. So my first training aspect of water bending was trying to form ice. Not just any ice though.
The question comes in, if I was training to learn how to manipulate ice, why was I not in one of the ice islands floating on the surface of the ocean? Why was I so deep into the ocean that no ordinary life could be sustained by such an environment. Well, because of the very high pressure of the water, the ocean floor was nothing but a dense connective layer of 'ice vii' a crystallized solid formed by the high pressures in the depths of the ocean.
The whole sea floor was made up of ice. I meditated in those depths, trying to understand the process in which the ice was formed. And what caused the water above me to remain in liquid form while lying above a plate of ice that had no end. The crust, the core...everything below the water was ice. Yet, life lived.
How did the aquatic plants survive? Thick roots the size of storey buildings that stubbornly dug into the ice floor and then branched out into a mesh of branches and leaves that formed a fake sea floor. Above that fake sea floor, life thrived. Sharks, schools of fish, hybrid aquatic creatures...you name it. Too bad I hadn't seen any Mermaids, which was a bummer.
"Mermaid?"
A soft voice asked, straight to my mind. Aqua.
She would occasionally check up on me. I had deliberately let my mental walls down which was how we communicated. Through the same innate link I possessed with the rest of the kids. Aqua was so shy that she only said one word at times before retreating to where she usually stayed. Which I couldn't pinpoint exactly.
I sent her an image of what a mermaid looked like. I chose Ariel as an example, but changed her hair and tail into a blue color. I felt Aqua's emotions suddenly shift from cautious curiousity into excitement and happiness.
"Love."
She sent over before cutting off the connection, leaving me all alone in the darkness. Finally, I saw some results. I had been trying to understand the formation of water into ice and by the fifth day of my meditation, I finally succeeded. Just bleed out the temperature. Yeah it was that obvious.
I had thought there would be more to it but seems like I had been wrong. Or maybe instead of saying that that was the way, it was more accurate to say it was one of the ways of forming ice from water.
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Because I could not form ice vii, nor was my ice the normal type that could break apart into chunks and melt above the surface of the water. My ice was more akin to a crystal. It wasn't as cold as normal ice but neither was it as...weak.
To reflect on my progress, the display box accurately displayed my stats.
::----------------------::
Water (beginner)
-Ice
-
::----------------------::
With that out of the way and seeing no progress in freezing time, I decided to move on to actually learning how to water bend. My original body was still meditating on time and he was more than capable of handling that problem. There was no use in wasting precious time when I could be better off mastering my new Element as quickly as possible.
Learning how to create ice using the little control over water I had, came to be a blessing in disguise. It opened new avenues of training that I was all too eager to try.
I stood bare chested on a small piece of ice that was softly swaying on the surface of the water. It had already been 2 weeks for me. Most of the time after learning how to freeze water into ice had been spent trying to take it's temperature lower and lower, approaching absolute cold. It hadn't happened but that precise ice control came in handy now.
The ocean all around me added to a feeling of immense tininess I only felt when staring at space. All I could see, horizon to horizon was water and golden clouds hanging low.
The sheet of ice I was standing on was about one inch thick and could barely handle my weight. If it broke, I would unceremoniously be dumped into the water. Now, my body could handle the cold easily but getting wet is not always fun. My long hair especially was a bitch and a half to dry without access to my other elements like air.
I breathed out as I readied myself. All the distractions left me. My mind became focused, falling into a rhythm with my body, where thought and action were separated by a very small margin.
Water bending was an art that was very similar to Tai Chi, an elegant and flowing style that is in constant motion. This type of bending required deep breathing and fluidity of the physical body and of the mind.
It was all about the push and pull, a cycle sustained by the flexibility of the wielder. It could change from calm to angry like a storm in seconds. Water bending was arguably the best bending art in the Avatar world.
You could heal with it, form water from the atmosphere, bend an enemy's blood ( I can imagine being able to bend an entire army simply by wanting to), could form ice, control plants by bending the water inside... honestly, despite my love for Fire bending, Water bending took the cake. And I couldn't wait to see how I could break it.
The basic moves of the art were clear in my head. The moves emphasized going with the flow, the sway, the motion. When water meets a rock, it flows around it, unobstructed and uncaged. Different from air that had less mass and could be released in short bursts, water had to be coaxed but in return brought with it more power behind each move and better control.
2 water benders were equal to 4 fire benders, it just made sense. Which was surprising because the Fire nation had managed to almost destroy the Southern water nation.
The purpose of the thin ice platform was to teach me how to go with the constant roils, twists and laps of the ocean water under me. I swept my leg from the front to the right. The motion rocked the ice sheet and I tensed, locking my body to stop from breaking through the ice.
A second later the sheet cracked in to tiny ice plates and I was dumped into the water. Inside the blue depths, I blew out a raspberry before coming up to the surface and trying the test again.
The water solidified into another thin sheet of ice. I stood atop it and tried to fall into the rhythm. My eyes closed. I stretched my hands to the sides, as if painting a picture on a canvas hanging in the air.
The motion of my hands followed a set of moves that emphasized on stretches and coils. My fingers bent, followed by the arm, then the other hand followed the same motion closely... I breathed out, sweating a little because it wasn't easy trying to maintain the structure of the ice.
I lifted one leg, held it level to the knee of the other leg and then crouched low, sweeping out the leg to the right along with my right hand. And then came the spin...
The ice sheet broke and I fell into the sea. I swam up and spit out the salty water. 'Okay...maybe this is not going to be as simple as I envisioned.'
I considered using the Spark of Enlightenment but then decided against it. It would have been such a waste. Why was it so hard to get this! I was frustrated, I was angry and I was irritated.
I calmed myself down and got back on the horse, I hadn't come all this way just to give up now, right? I was the Avatar. This shit was in me, I just had to pull it out.
Once I was back on the sheet of ice, I stayed still, just feeling the effects of the water's bouyance on the sheet of ice. One thing I noticed was that the sheet of ice did not try to counteract or restrict each and every action the water did. If it roiled, the sheet roiled with it and by concequence, I roiled with it too.
Huh, so it wasn't trying to adjust itself to fit by the waters' rule, instead it simply allowed the water to do what it wanted. It was going with the flow and the motion because it was in the water's domain.
My mind buzzed. That's it.
I had been trying to copy the motion and do the basic move sets of water bending according to an order.
What I should have been doing...is surrendering completely. If the sea raged, I would rage. If it was calm, I was calm.
True Harmony.