Lan Jin watches the content in the Heaven and Earth Refining Spirit Fire jade for several hours. Since all it takes is a thought for the jade to play, it is the simplest thing in the world for him to put his own purple fire where the old man’s fire will form and then play the jade on repeat. And though the progress is slow, Lan Jin discovered that there was indeed progress as his little purple fire slowly grew larger and larger as time crawled by.
Granted, ‘larger and larger’ was only relative.
His little fire started out being less impressive than the fire coming from a lighter. It could burn things, as evidenced by the partially-blackened pear in Lan Jin’s lap, but it took a very long time. Even when all of the heat was focused directly into the hollow he dug out of the pear, it took around fifteen minutes for a tiny strand of purple mist to be released. Now, Lan Jin’s fire could only barely be considered to be larger than the flame coming out of a lighter, but he already knew the amount he had available would decrease as he used it. So he wanted more of it before he started his next session of burning things.
Fortunately or unfortunately for him, that meant that he wasted away the rest of the day. He appreciated it because it was no longer so hot, but he had hoped that he could at least get his little fire to be the size of the flame coming out of a butane torch before going to sleep. However, from the looks of things, that would take him all night to do and he still wanted to head to the bamboo forest first thing in the morning.
“Should I burn the pear now or not?” He wonders while looking at the Auspicious Tri-Colored Flame in the Omega Browser’s Space.
“I’ll be walking pretty much all day tomorrow so I can always just play the jade on repeat while I’m doing that. There’s no way in hell I’ll be playing with the purple fire when I’m walking since it will already be hot out, so it should have a chance to get pretty big if I use it now and then let it grow tomorrow.”
He shrugs his shoulders, his decision made, and he grabs the pear again and holds it above his head before changing his mind and tossing it far away. Then he climbs the tree and grabs another pear before descending once again and sitting down.
Taking a bite out of the new pear to make a hollow section, Lan Jin holds it above his head with one hand and summons the purple fire beneath the hollow with his other hand.
Twelve minutes later, Lan Jin sees the purple mist form again and quickly places his mouth on the pear and sucks it in. Once again, he is assaulted by a nasty, burnt flavor, but the nastiness is instantly forgiven as he feels a sense of lightness throughout his body and the world seems brighter to him for just a moment.
He really wants to know what that sensation is, but he doesn’t even know which words he would use to describe it. The closest experience he has that can even relate to the feeling is when he was high after having his wisdom teeth removed, but even lasting for only a second, the feeling he got from breathing in the purple mist was so much more intense than how he felt back then.
Closing his eyes, Lan Jin looks into the Omega Browser’s Space and sees that there is a new strand of purple mist floating around aimlessly. Curious to see what would happen if he got the two strands close to one another, he controls them and makes them collide. They immediately fuse together, but when Lan Jin tries to pull them apart, he discovers that he can’t.
“Okay, so what is this stuff good for anyways?”
He examines the purple mist closely, but just by looking at it he has no clue what it can be used for. All it does is float around inside the Omega Browser’s Space.
After thinking about it for a while, he remembers Qingshui mentioning something about Qi. He doesn’t know if the purple mist is Qi though. To him, Qi only existed in anime and the first thought that comes to his mind when he thought of it was Naruto, but the Qi in Naruto was running through their bodies and not inside of a dark space. So Lan Jin simply doesn’t know what to do with the purple mist. He doesn’t even know how to control it outside of the Omega Browser’s Space, so he couldn’t send it into his body to see if something would happen.
He looks around the interior of the Omega Browser’s Space once more and remembers he had already tried mixing the purple mist with the fire only to discover it didn’t work. The only other things within the Space right now were the little star, the blood bubble, the silver ribbon, the jade, and the image of the naked woman. He didn’t want to experiment with the blood bubble or the ribbon because he now knew Moxian was somehow connected to the blood bubble. If that was the case, then the next logical step was that Qingshui should also be connected to the ribbon somehow.
He worried that, if he tried to mess with either the blood bubble or the ribbon, then one of the two girls might have some way to trace it back to him. He didn’t know if that was actually possible, but since it only took him a day to create a fire and start playing around with it, he didn’t want to know what two girls who had presumably had much longer to learn about these things than he had could do.
Out of fear of what could happen, Lan Jin turns his attention away from the blood bubble and the ribbon while focusing on the remaining choices. Lan Jin immediately took the jade off the table because, no matter what, he didn’t want to mess around with it. He had a process going with the Auspicious Tri-Colored flame and the jade, and he didn’t want to ruin that out of sheer curiosity. As for the image of the naked woman, with people like Moxian and Qingshui existing in the River of Fate, he didn’t want to mess around with the image anymore.
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That just left that little star to experiment with. He already knew that it recovered after taking a nap, but the whole point of downloading the Heaven and Earth Refining Spirit Fire jade in the first place was that Lan Jin wanted to help the little star recover faster so he could search for more things. When he had searched for it, it had even been with the words ‘soul cultivation’.
When he considers that, he decides that he wants to try mixing the purple mist with his little star, but before doing that he tries to use the purple mist to write something in the Omega Browser’s Space. Interestingly enough, it ‘works’, but it lacks the same feeling of using the little star. In reality, all he is doing is making the purple mist look like one letter at a time, but the mist quickly loses its shape unless Lan Jin uses his thoughts to force it to stop moving.
Determining that the purple mist can’t be used to search for things, he grabs it and brings it closer to the little star. Worried that something bad might happen, Lan Jin makes sure to slowly bring them closer together while keeping a wary eye on both of them. His worries are unfounded, though, as even when one end of the strand of purple mist and the little star is touching there is hardly any reaction. In fact, the only interesting thing about the two of them interacting is that the purple mist starts to slowly wrap around the little star.
Lan Jin pulls the two apart and sticks them back together multiple times, but it doesn’t seem to matter how he does it because nothing seems to change. In the end, he chucks the purple mist at the little star and watches as the mist sticks to the little star. It looks like nothing more than a piece of spiderweb hanging from the wall and Lan Jin begins losing interest in messing around with them.
“Well, that was a bust.” Lan Jin sighs as he exits the Omega Browser’s Space.
With nothing else to do, he looks up at the leaves of the tree above him and decides to rest for a while. He hadn’t really done much today, but he was mentally spent after dealing with Qingshui and watching the same video several hundred times.
As he closes his eyes, he lets his thoughts run free as he thinks back over the events of the day and decides that he wants to learn about cultivation so he didn’t have to fear insane women who want to kill him or make him their pet.
***
Lan Jin’s sleep is restless, his thoughts full of his purple fire and his expectations for the coming day. When he wakes up, he is immediately alert. He opens his eyes and looks up at the sky, and as he does, he is surprised to find that it is still dark out and that he had only been sleeping for a few hours. But, strangely, he doesn’t feel tired at all. If anything, he feels as though he had too much sleep.
He doesn’t know why he feels this way. He distinctly remembered being mentally spent right before going to bed, but now, even though his body was still fatigued, his mind was operating at full capacity and he felt more clearheaded than he had in quite a while.
While he considers the state of his mind, he also opens the Omega Browser’s Space and looks within. For the most part, everything is as he left it. However, two things have still changed. He had expected one of those changes and it had to do with the little star. Lan Jin is happy to see that, after napping, his little star was energetic once again.
He was pretty sure that this would happen, but it takes a weight off his chest when he realizes that he would definitely be able to use the Omega Browser to search for things in the future. With just one instance of the little star getting its energy back after he napped, he was still slightly worried about what might happen. But now, he felt that he could relax and just search for things that were most relevant to his current situation without worrying about whether he’d have another opportunity in the future.
The other change is that the tiny strand of purple mist that had been hanging off the star like a spiderweb had disappeared. He isn’t sure if it went away or if it was somehow absorbed, but with his current state of mind being very clear, he considering his unusual state of mind right now, he guesses that the purple strand was absorbed somehow. Though, he doesn’t know why it happened during his sleep and not while he was practically smooshing the star and the purple strand together.
Then again, his little star also seemed to regenerate in his sleep, so maybe that had something to do with it.
He spends a few minutes thinking about it, but he really doesn’t know enough to figure it out. His guess is that sleep somehow allows his soul to do things that he can’t control while conscious, but since he can’t confirm something that he isn’t conscious to experience, he has no way of finding out for certain.
“Now what should I do?” Lan Jin looks out over the field of grass and determines that it is still too dark for him to start moving, and since it probably will be for a few hours yet, he pulls off his hoodie, pats it to get rid of some of the dirt covering it, and climbs the pear tree before gently dropping more than two dozen pears to the ground below.
When he descends again, he shoves most of the pears into his hoodie and ties it into a backpack. It looks terrible and lumpy, and he can only imagine how uncomfortable it will be to carry, but it is all he has for food and water right now so he has no choice. What makes him nervous is that, even if he eats several pears before taking off, he doubts he will be getting many calories from them and even the twenty-or-so pears he fit into his impromptu backpack will only last him a day, maybe two if he can’t find another source of water.
He’s also not looking forward to needing to relieve himself for the next couple of days, but that’s a different story.
“I am not looking forward to his.” He mutters and begins munching on a pear before sitting down and playing the jade within the Omega Browser’s Space again.
***
Several hours later, Lan Jin tosses away the burnt, hollowed-out pear in his hand and wobbles slightly as he feels the strange, momentary high of absorbing the purple mist. When the feeling fades, he immediately opens the Omega Browser’s Space and puts the strand of purple mist he just obtained against his little star to see if anything happens. Unfortunately, whatever happened that caused the other, larger strand of purple mist to disappear doesn’t seem to occur again while he’s awake so he can only be disappointed.
When he looks up at the sky, he sees that it is still dark but there is a hint of light on the horizon that announces the break of day so Lan Jin immediately stands up and climbs the tree one last time to grab another couple of pears and to confirm his direction before descending for the last time. He then hefts his lumpy backpack over his head and onto his shoulder and starts doubting himself. The weight of the pears is nothing, but just putting the lumpy backpack over his shoulder already makes him miserable as the sleeve he is using as a strap digs deep into his collarbone. Considering the many miles he has to walk today, he can only begin to wonder how much the next several hours are going to suck.
He sighs again and takes one step forward with a grimace on his face, and as he begins to move, he wonders what he should search for next.