… I gave up on sleep after about 5 minutes. Stupid idea anyway, sleep. Not like I had anything important to do tomorrow. So I began meditating again, focusing my attention on figuring out what the heck the Celestial had given us. I wasn't even sure where to locate it at first, but from context clues that I gathered from Mark (we had avoided going into specifics, for obvious reasons) I knew it was likely related to the Celestial's book, and would be easily accessible via the soul-link (which I could only access while astrally projecting my consciousness into my 'soul-cloud' form).

The 'gift' was remarkably easy to find after I completed a brief meditation session, although it might be more accurate to say that it found me. There was a blurry 'coming into focus' sensation as it established contact immediately after I began considering how to begin my search... yet before I had even started looking. When it showed up I found myself reminded of those 3D art puzzles made out of dots, the super frustrating ones which tend to come into view only after you relax and stop looking. It was like a formless blob of information, concepts, and feelings; but it was also a space I could enter (like a room); a mirror I could see my own reflection in, and also... it was nothing at all.

The 'gift' just kind of shimmered into existence, and straight away I knew with certainty that I had seen it before, without even noticing it, back in the stone fortress when I had first figured out how to access my soul and astrally project. This nebulous thing had always been there; I just hadn't been looking.

It seemed hard to work with, and there was an oddly pervasive sense of resistance while I waited for it to show me how it worked, or what exactly it did. After a moment I realized that the sense of resistance came from me, not from it. I had been expecting it to be difficult to work with, and I was feeling that reflected back at me. It was responding to my thoughts and expectations and was, in fact, showing me precisely how it worked... by becoming just as mysterious and unknowable as I figured it would be.

I took a moment to relax and refocus my thoughts on myself, blocking out any external influences. What exactly did I want from this thing? How could it help me find a 'path,' when I didn't have any idea what a path was...

Well, since this crazy 'gift' seemingly didn't want to guide me in how to use it (not surprising at all, given the context under which it was presented), I could hopefully use it to gain information somehow since the Celestial had mentioned 'knowledge' in his message.

Alright, so apparently it was possible to absorb energy from the universe - that was pretty clear from the message. Great. So if I assume that gathering energy is what the Celestial's book is helping me do - through its strange sleep-cultivation (if that was even what was happening) - then there must be a way to quantify, or measure, that energy. And not only for the amount that was collected but for the amount that had been used or stored (if any).

My thoughts were interrupted when I unexpectedly received feedback from the mysterious blob of infinite potential. It was providing a stream of information that let me know I actually did have some kind of energy stored up! The precise details of where the energy was located were unclear in a very specific way (a strange concept in itself), but I soon figured out that it was only unclear because there was no fixed location - and it would be up to me if I wanted to change that fact.

In addition to the energy that I had stored up, there was feedback on an amount of energy that had been used already; the majority was showing as currently allocated, but some was just... gone. The allocated energy was distributed evenly throughout my entire body, and I wondered if that is why I always felt so amazing when I woke up. It was only a small percentage of the total energy collected so far, but even as I focused on it I could tell that the amount was slowly increasing!

It struck me that this was too easy, and I grew concerned that the mystifying cosmic play-doh might simply be telling me what I wanted to hear. I tried for a while to alter the reported ratios of 'energy used' to 'energy stored', or even convince myself that there was no energy at all, but the only thing I could modify when it came to the raw input was to turn the whole feedback system thing off and on again.

No matter what I tried, the results were consistent: Total energy collected was static; allocated energy was increasing very slowly; free energy was decreasing just slightly faster than energy allocated. It struck me that the information was very basic, and not very useful to me in its current form (it was, in simple terms, not very 'human-readable'), so I decided to play around and see if I could make it a little more intuitive.

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First I tried to create an additional data point that would help me track energy usage, which seemed like a big concern. I wanted to set expended energy to be exactly the difference between the collected and free. Being a nerdy engineer, it didn't take me long to work up a quick formula:

Collected - Free = Expended

And next, I defined 'energy loss' to be the difference between expended and allocated energy. Energy that was truly lost worried me a lot more than energy marked as having been already absorbed by my body (whatever that meant).

Expended - Allocated = Lost

When I tried turning the ratios into numbers I struggled for a moment since I hadn't really done any math since I had been back on earth, but eventually I came up with something that fit fairly well: Collected to Allocated to Free to Expended to Lost came out at around 1024:17:983:41:24 (the last four numerals constantly changed very minutely, but it was only visible if I expanded them out to several decimal places).

Even for me it was a dizzying string of numbers, and I wanted to laugh at my own insanity for creating such a monstrosity - but it did tell me one thing; I had lost just over 2% of the total energy I had collected so far. It wasn't a huge number, and the rate was raising so slowly that it should never even hit 3% as long as the Celestial's book continued collecting energy, but it clearly needed to be investigated further.

Digging deeper into the lost energy ended up giving me so much information that I was quickly overwhelmed, as there were thousands upon thousands of things listed, maybe even millions (I didn't bother counting), with some of the bottom levels having examples like 'cell division required for left index fingernail growth'. It was just way too much detail, and the amounts listed for things like that were so small that it hardly seemed to be worth documenting.

Also, shouldn't that have been counted under the energy that had been 'allocated' to my body?

Regardless, many other entries were more interesting (and less disgusting), such as 'personal alignment field' and 'background radiation nullification'. Everything I found either barely fit my understanding of the world, or were things I could guess at given the descriptions (I had a few wild theories on what an 'alignment field' might be), and I wondered if the list just automatically stopped right before I would hit the point of total bafflement. My theoretical knowledge of biology pretty much ended after cell division, for example, and so did the list. It didn't seem to matter that I could infer the existence of even smaller and more complex systems - none of them were listed anyway.

Quite a few entries were related to my astral projection as well, and many of those were increasing continuously at a much faster rate than the body-related items... which is how I discovered that astral projection wasn't free, just 'almost free'.

I focused on collapsing everything into broad categories, and I was quite pleased when the list auto-sorted itself upon my command:

Body stuff: 0.0257%

Aura stuff: 0.7432%

Astral stuff: 2.2842%

Containment loss: 96.9469%

And since my definition of 'containment loss' had specifically related to free energy slipping away because it wasn't being utilized, the results were clear: My losses were already pretty small, and they operated on an almost entirely 'use it or lose it' basis; all I had to do was figure out how to make use of the energy and the losses would all but vanish. I had no idea what 'cultivation' would entail, so I decided to keep that in reserve if I couldn't figure anything else out.

I played around with a bunch of random ideas for a while, getting more comfortable with how things operated while also wondering what I could spend my free energy on. I flashed back to what I had been doing just before the message had popped up: Trying to shoot a spark through my fingers. Not very super-power-like, but it was a start!

However, I still needed to quantify the energy - assign a unit perhaps - so that I could measure how much energy would be spent on my little spark trick. What should the unit of energy be... well, how about 'Soul Points'? No... that sounded dumb, and I regretted it instantly.

Free Energy: 1.0000 Soul Points

Again with the four decimal places! The feedback came right away, assigning a unit of exactly one Soul Point to whatever random amount of free energy I happened to have at the moment, but changing it was as simple as deciding to do so. How about 'CE', for 'Cultivation Energy'... or maybe 'CP', for 'Cultivation Points'. Actually, CP could also work as 'Character Points'! I suddenly felt like I was making progress.

Free Energy: 0.9999 CP

Dammit! Even my very small loss was able to break a perfect 'one' almost instantly. I changed the value of a single CP to a tenth of what it was previously and decided not to spend any fractional points. That way I would always be working with precise whole numbers, which should help make my experiments easier - the last thing I wanted to do was introduce rounding errors.

Free Energy: 9.9997 CP

Better! Next, I tried sending a query about what kind of effect I could get if I spent 1 CP on a spark... and the answer was a bizarre warning in the form of a concept-image showing a massive lightning bolt that broke the sky, shattered the earth, and would consume all 1 CP worth of energy in that single event. It also showed me being instantly vaporized, along with half the village, of course. How thoughtful.

Alright, so this kind of energy didn't seem to be the kind of thing spent in single-use attacks... good to know.