Getting up and waddling over using what my small legs can manage, I can gauge the bear is still alive.

Looking back in the other direction I can see the tribe I belonged to already far in the distance. And not particularly seeming like they are about to come back.

With the spiritual bond I now have with this bear maybe I can forge a means of survival.

Focusing on my bond with them all I can sense is the darkness coming from their lack of consciousness… it seems likely I will need to wait for them to wake up. I really hope they actually wake up.

—

With no sense of vision I can’t quite tell the difference between night or day, but based on the way we were moving and how long passed since then, it was likely nearing night time when the bear woke up.

As I focused on the bond/electron I could feel it’s thoughts coming through.

I could feel a sense of grogginess and confusion as it came to, and then a bout of ‘still being tired’, then additional confusion as it realized a bond of some kind between it and the snack in front of it.

No, not snack, another cub. Just a weird looking one.

Where did that herd of prey it was chasing go?…

Whatever, might as well sleep here then.

It went over to the other cub and cuddled up to it, going to sleep.

—

In the morning I woke up feeling thoughts through the bond.

It seems like it is probably morning, rough intentions seem to be communicated just fine over the bond even without necessarily using words.

The bear seems to be prodding me that we should go and the bear seems to consider me as a smaller brother that needs help like it did when it was smaller. It prods me to get on it’s back. A memory of the little bear on the back of another bear the size of a rather large building echoed in my mind.

I comply and get on the bear’s back, and he immediately took off and settled into chewing on a cluster of berries.

I guess bears are omnivores here too? As I watched the bear chow down on the berries his name was decide, we are gonna call you Berry.

Berry seemed to realize I had just associated him with the berries he was eating and my intentions to refer to him that way.

Berry seemingly tired of caring about my errant thoughts continued feasting on berries. Stopping to think I also got down and started to squash and drink the juice from some of the berries.

Considering according to normal advice I’m not supposed to be eating solid foods yet, I need to either find a way to secure some milk or find some equivalent that can keep me alive. Regardless I am going to need to depend on Berry for help.

Either I need to track down a herd of people I can get some milk from or I need to figure out how Spiritual Energy or Qi as a substitute for nutrition. I don’t have any Qi, but Berry certainly does.

Considering my survival is on the line and I have no idea what direction my herd went towards, I ask Berry if he can find them.

(Berry) Can’t smell, no. When smell, can hunt.

(Me) ..If you smell them, let me know, okay?

(Berry) Okay.

I feel a bit better having ate the fruit juice and some of the softer fruit pulp I could pull out with my not quite yet dexterous hands.

I climb back up onto Berry’s back.

Focusing internally, my soul seems to have gotten erratic after giving one of the orbitals to Berry.

Trying cultivate spiritual energy just does not seem to work, it feels as though I can eject my other two orbitals if I want to and maybe that would stabilize it, but simply ejecting pieces of my soul seems like a bad idea. It bound me to Berry when I sent it towards him, no idea what would happen if it went off towards nothing.

The entire cultivation concept was based on a perfect balance and throwing one electron out seemed to throw them all out of balance.

In other words, I’ve hit a hard wall on spiritual cultivation for now, which sucks.

Underground, I spy a rabbit only a bit smaller than Berry digging tunnels through the ground. I’d seen these mostly subterranean rabbits a few times before but only ever seen them tunneling or running through their tunnels.

When they are tunneling it is easy enough to see them. I can find the animals hiding throughout the forest easier than almost anyone. Which gives me an idea.

Since I’ve already gone in the direction of becoming a tamer (albeit on accident), I could simply go further in this direction. Once I empty out my orbitals I should be able to re-cultivate them all at once. I just need to do something productive with the remaining ones and then figure out where to go from there.

Although I cannot cultivate Qi, some animals definitely can. If I can tame Animals and derive their cultivation methods from the inside, then maybe I can start making cultivation methods for normal people.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

..I need to confirm this idea with Berry.

Focusing on my connection, I try to feel out the inner parts of his soul through our bond.

I can feel a pull and begin to see through his eyes. Feel through his body. He is still in the drivers seat, but I can make ‘suggestions’ to his mind on how he should move and act, I can feel it. I can also feel my own body still though it is a bit more numb and distant, but it is enough that I can still feel my grip on the bear to where I would not fall off even while moving.

I can feel the Qi moving through Berry’s body, it flows naturally and disperses evenly throughout his entire body into every minutia of him. It strengthens his body, helps him in his growth, just stomach efficiently turning all he eats into qi to distribute through his body.

He is a Body cultivator through and through. From what his mother looked like this method of body cultivation also makes the animal bigger and bigger over time. While ensuring a strength to match the size.

Do all Origin Beasts use a similar pattern? Or are they different?

There is a slight Qi that comes off of the subterranean rabbit’s soul. I somehow doubt it uses Qi to grow larger. Maybe it uses it for burrowing or strengthens its limbs for burrowing? Sensing vibrations through the earth?

In any case, in the time I spent pondering on it, the rabbit was already long gone.

I’ll need to find another candidate for taming.

For diversity, since I can only have three for now, I should cover the land, sea, and air. If possible. The air is gonna take a bit of luck, or a trap of some kind. The sea… well, the closest I’ve seen is the nearby rivers, so that will do for now. Those rivers were huge and deep regardless.

I relayed to Berry wanting to go to the river, and he complied. It seems he likes eating fish.

It took us a number of hours to get there, we found some Berry patches nearby and grabbed some lunch.

Berry enjoyed himself splashing about in the shallow part of the river, grabbing up fish here and there. I was probably about a year and some months old by now, though I had no way of tracking the time. So, I could probably eat some fish if I had a way to get the meat?

Or maybe a softer meat, if I could find some shellfish. Eating only berries is bound to eventually start being a problem. It is tiding me over for now but I need to find some variety in my diet. Though, since Berry’s ability seems to strengthen his stomach and vitalize his body with Qi, maybe if I can mimic that it won’t be as necessary.

I could use Qi Cultivation to ensure I get proper nourishment regardless of what I eat.

What about the side-effect of getting larger though? *grrrrrr* My stomach does not seem like it cares about the side effects. Survival comes first, hopefully it won’t cause too big of a difference.

Syncing with Berry I try to get a feel for how his cultivation works again. There is no breathing in the qi involved in his ‘method’, he truly just depends on having an awesome stomach, and the liver is the core of his Body cultivation method, refining both the stomach and it’s contents into Qi.

His brain has an innate ‘instinct’ of how to empower the liver with Qi using his soul as the medium. It was this instinct I would need to start copying if I wanted to be able to survive off of Qi.

I tried mimicking it as I ate some more berries… I didn’t really feel anything from it yet, but then again it takes a while for anything to reach the digestive system.

So, I kind of just did a start-stop approach. Purposefully focusing on it at times, and then wandering around. After a few hours I finally felt some trickles of Qi going to the rest of my body.

It works! I can at least manage to not die from malnutrition now. So that’s great!

I found after a few hours that I was more satisfied from eating, but I was also eating a good bit more and had the impulse to eat more consistently. Probably because of the lower conversion efficiency of transforming parts of the nutrients I’m eating into Qi.

Not that I really had another option. We moved along the side of the river by the beach. After a while I saw another underground soul nearby, under the sandy beach of the river. As we neared it I realized how large the soul was, it was almost comparable to Berry, and it had a hint of Qi to it as well.

For whatever reason it wasn’t moving.

I convinced Berry we should dig it up, the soul was at best equal to Berry, so even if there is fight we should be able to escape from something that tunnels or burrows.

We dug for a while until Berry’s claw hit something hard.

*ting*

A sound like scratching metal rang out and Berry pulled back his paw in pain, whining softly.

After a few minutes Berry helped uncover it more slowly, it was still unmoving. It revealed what looked like an almost perfect metal ball, with slight imperfections, which made it look similar to an egg.

A spherical egg, made of metal, buried under the beach by the river.

I’m not 100% on what this thing is, but I know if it is by a beach and has Qi and Metal properties, it’s something cool.

Berry can’t even try to eat it because it is made of metal. So what else to do? This is going to be Partner #2.

I make the bond almost instantly. The impact is not quite as devastating as it was with Berry. The soul is more fluid still, the same process but more smooth. A piece of the electron dissolved as it passed through the soul. Some of the soul stuck to it as it went out the other side, the dispersion of the soul and completeness of the bond actually being a bit more thorough.

I could sense what was inside of the shell now. It was a baby sea turtle. Even within the shell, the baby sea turtle cultivated. This method was different from the bear’s. It was also an instinctual cultivator, but the core of its cultivation was through the lungs and kidneys.

The kidneys would process the water it took in, processing and storing nutrients, salt, oxygen, and metals separately, then combining them using Qi to form a special bio-metal nutrient that then went out from it’s kidneys into it’s blood.

This special nutrient primarily helped make its shell and bones stronger, though it also strengthened their muscle fibers to better enable it to move through the water at high speeds.

The nutrients in the bones around the spinal cord, brain, and other nerve centers also differed slightly, they had… higher salt content? Lower metal? Probably more conduction resistant.

So it doesn’t produce just one metal nutrient, the kidneys produce multiple kinds of nutrients. In the lungs, the Qi empowers the flow of water through them.

Extracting the oxygen into the blood stream, and encoding red blood cells to find and deliver both oxygen and nutrients through the body in a more ‘intelligent’ manner. And channeling more ‘nutrient-rich’ trickle of water down to the stomach as the stomach empties.

The Turtle cultivating inside its shell would get all the nutrients it needed. Not only from the amniotic fluids, but from the shell itself slowly dissolving bio metals and salts left behind by the turtle’s mother.

Only when the shell lost all of the metallic content would the baby turtle awaken and break out of its shell. Burrowing out of the sand and presumably into the river.

Unlike on earth, it seems this turtle only lays one egg at a time. But since the entire turtle and their eggs are made up mostly of bio metal, they probably have not that many predators who can do much to them… then again, the ocean could easily be much worse than land, especially in a world with Qi.

Maybe metal turtles are an easy snack for some of the predators out there.

…it also occurred to me that this could fix a lot of water problems. I have no way to ensure the water I drink is clean here, but with this my kidneys would filter the water using Qi. I could even drink salt water and still be fine.

So, now I have amazing solutions that let me be extremely flexible in terms of both food and water. Methods of body and blood cultivation which should be compatible. And I happened to discover them via the first two animals I bonded with…

Is this what it is like to have plot armor? Even my daily needs like food and water can be taken care of with ease?

More importantly, would I be able to breathe underwater with this turtle breathing method?