Walking slowly through seemingly endless stalks of tall grass, the young man stumbles and becomes dazed at fixed intervals. The reason for this is simple. Unable to immediately understand what the purpose of the ‘Heaven and Earth Refining Spirit Flame’ is, he simply chose to play it on repeat and treat it as a kind of podcast to pass the time. Even though the message within the recording is pretty weird, the man speaking the message has an excellent voice and his words were lyrical enough that it could almost qualify as a song.
Consequently, every twenty seconds the young man walking in the grass nearly trips over his feet as the roar within the recording fills his head. Three times a minute, one hundred eighty times an hour, the man stumbles about through the grass while searching for any sign of food, water, or even just a little bit of shade as he exhaustedly makes his way forward.
After a while, he grows used to the timing within the recording and paces himself so he has both feet firmly on the ground during the recording’s peak.
“This sucks!” He groans loudly and wipes a large amount of sweat from his face. He is pretty sure he’d been walking for at least a couple of hours, and he was right about the temperature being anything but perfect as the sun beats down on his head.
“Just walking isn’t doing shit for me! If I weren’t so close to the edge, I’d think I was walking in circles!” Bending over, he lets out a loud huff of air and considers what he could do to improve his situation. As it is, his little star is feeble once again and he doesn’t trust himself moving around at night, so he has to move during the day or just give up.
“Maybe if I jump?” He looks at the grass around him and, though it is taller than him by a decent amount, it doesn’t completely dwarf him.
“That might work. I just need to see if there are any trees or hills nearby that could give me a better vantage point.”
Taking off his hoodie, he puts it down by his feet and shrugs his shoulders a couple of times before squatting down and jumping straight up while facing away from the cliff’s edge.
To his surprise, he ends up seeing a tree a few hundred feet away from him. He excitedly ties the arms of his hoodie around his waist before heading in its general direction, and every twenty or thirty feet he makes sure to jump once to confirm he isn’t losing track of it in the process.
A couple minutes later he finds himself in the shade of a large pear tree at least sixty feet tall with hundreds of red and green fruits weighing down its limbs.
Looking up at the pears above him, he grumbles and asks, “Why couldn’t it be an apple tree? I don’t like pears. They’re always either so hard they try to break my teeth or just rotten…”
Sighing, he then says, “Fuck it. Beggars can’t be choosers.”
That doesn’t stop him from grumbling more as he walks up to the tree and slowly climbs to the largest, most steady branch he can find near its top. He then squirms along the wobbling branch, his heart clenched in his chest as he avoids looking at the ground thirty feet below him, and slowly parts the leaves in front of him and takes a look around.
From where he is in the tree, he finds that he is currently surrounded by an ocean of grass that ends with the sudden appearance of a large bamboo forest and green mountains hiding behind them.
Turning his head left and right, he is disappointed when he can’t see any signs of civilization nearby.
“Man, I really need to figure out where I am.”
***
Laying back against the pear tree with his left arm acting as a pillow, he holds a pear in front of his mouth and slowly consumes it while trying to decide what he should do next.
“If there’s any other food or water around, it’s either low enough that I can’t see it, or it’s in the bamboo forest or the mountains. So I gotta go to the bamboo forest for sure, but even if I do that I still don’t know where I am so I don’t know if I search for a map it might be a waste of an opportunity and I don’t quite see how a jade that talks about fire is going to help me with my little star.”
He turns his attention to the bamboo forest and considers how far away it is from the pear tree before groaning loudly.
“Man, that’s gonna be one long walk. I could probably get there in a day, but I feel like the grass is going to make it one miserable trip. And then I should also think about getting a weapon or something in case I see any wild animals.”
Looking at the trickles of light through the leaves and branches above him, he grimaces.
“I definitely need, like, a hat or something or I’m gonna be toasty if I spend a day or two walking under the sun. I could probably make one with the grass around here, but it’s gonna look jank as fuck and I don’t know if the grass would actually hold. And I also need something to carry a bunch of pears. These are juicy so they’ll probably be good for a temporary water source, but that’s only true if I can carry a bunch of ‘em, and my hoodie’s pocket is only so big…”
Thinking over his numerous issues, he decides, “Making a hat with this grass might be a huge waste of time, and I’ve personally seen Moxian making fire with just her hand, so that’s probably what I should focus on since animals are afraid of fire and I don’t have anything to make a weapon right now. Then as for carrying pears, I could just use my hoodie as a backpack. It will be uncomfortable, but I don’t think I’ve got another solution going for me right now and I can’t leave the pears behind until I’ve found another source of food and water.
I should also aim to sleep earlier tonight so I can wake up before sunrise and get to the bamboo forest before the sun bakes me alive. But for now, I should focus on figuring out the jade to see if it can improve my situation.”
Closing his eyes, he opens the Omega Browser’s Space and examines the ‘Heaven and Earth Refining Spirit Flame’ jade more carefully. To him, it looks like a rock. He can’t understand how a message came out of it every time he prodded it with his thoughts, but since he feels fine with his food and water situation for the moment, he decides to devote more of his focus to it than just absently listening to the message and blankly staring at the pictures of fire it creates while he was walking.
For what has to be the several hundredth time, he prods the jade again. This time, he pays close attention to the words spoken and watches as projections of fire are emitted from the jade and briefly flash into existence within the Omega Browser’s Space before disappearing.
Red, blue, green, white, silver, purple, orange, black, there are so many different fires that he can’t be bothered trying to count them. Some of them look like traditional flames, some form animals or monsters, and some look like swords, spears, arrows, or even giant cauldrons, but despite spending all of his focus on them, he can’t quite figure out what it is he is supposed to be getting from this.
After several iterations of this, he decides to just ignore the images for a while and pay more attention to the spoken message while hoping he had just missed something.
“The FIRE that BURNS brightest is not the one that IGNITES within the Earth nor the one that FORMS within the Heart, but the FIRE that ORIGINATES FROM ONE’S OWN WILL!”
“From my will?” He wonders while replaying the jade yet again.
“Am I just supposed to imagine fire being there and, ‘POOF! Fire!’?”
He shakes his head in disbelief.
“No way. If that were the case, Chuunis would have taken over Earth so long ago.”
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He plays the jade again and turns his focus back to the fires.
“Maybe I am supposed to imagine specific fires?”
He watches the jade several more times while slowly searching for any fire that seems easier to imagine. Unsurprisingly, it isn’t simple. In part because they are flickering in and out of existence so quickly but also because there are just so many of them with different qualities. It’s incredibly difficult for him to imagine just one kind of fire when he’s looking at possibly millions of them.
After a while, he decides to rethink the problem.
“The jade is inside the Omega Browser’s Space, right? And the projections also appear within the Omega Browser’s Space, right? So I already know I have no clue how to make the fires but assuming all of the projected fires are real, then their representations exist when the jade projects them. And since I know that this has something to do with soul cultivation and if I decide to operate under the idea that my soul is the Omega Browser’s Space, then if I can pin down one of the fire projections and just… hold it there or something, then maybe I can use that as a point of reference for whatever it is I’m actually supposed to do to make it work.”
His thought process seems flawed, even to him, as he is only operating under a bunch of assumptions that could very easily be wrong. But, he figures this is a good learning experience regardless as it might very well offer him some insight into what else the Omega Browser and its Space are capable of.
He doesn’t waste any time getting started as he plays the jade again. This time, instead of trying to figure anything out, he just looks through the numerous types of fire to see which one he wants to start with. Since he’s not really sure if any one of them is as good as the rest, he decides to go by the rule of cool and just choose the one that looks best to him without appearing too edgy.
That automatically excludes numerous black and dark-green fires that look like corpses, skulls, and ghosts, but he doesn’t feel too bad because he imagines that, other than using the fire to scare off animals, the only thing he could think of using it for was cooking, and he definitely didn’t want to cook food with fire that looked like it crawled out of a graveyard.
Then he starts excluding all of the fires that look like animals or monsters in any way because, given how lifelike they look, he was worried that he might need to feed them and if that was true, he did not know how to take care of a fire pet at the moment so it would probably die.
After that, he takes a look at the flames that look like weapons and decides he probably shouldn’t choose any of them as a point of reference for making his own fire. It’s not that he doesn’t want one of them, but that he doesn’t think he’d be able to use a fire weapon even if he created one.
Simply put, he had the feeling that regardless of which fire he tried to create, how weak his soul is would be the limiting factor for the size of the fire or the duration he could use it— just like with his little star. And since he was out in the wild, the first fire weapon he looked at was the spear. This means that if he got a downgraded fire spear, he would probably be working with a fire stake or even a fire pencil.
He didn’t even want to think about the fire arrows or the fire cauldron. What was he supposed to do with whatever downgraded version of those he ended up with? Throw a fire toothpick at wild animals and then cook them in a fire bowl?
He shakes his head thinking about it before turning back to his task.
“I don’t need a specific fire weapon right now, I need a fire that I can use to cook, boil water, and scare off animals. But I guess I don’t need the fire itself to do all of that. I can just light some wood on fire and use that for food and boiling water once I get a pot or something, and I can use a torch to scare off animals at first if the fire I make can’t do that for me.
But that just makes me sound like a human lighter…”
He sighs while looking at the numerous flames he still has to choose from and starts slowly categorizing them based on how much he likes them.
In very little time, tens of thousands of fires are mentally categorized as being less than the rest. The reasons aren’t always consistent and include everything from how they look to how they smell— he had found out that, beyond just existing within the Omega Browser’s Space, they are also interactable to a limited degree.
That’s not to say that he could do whatever he wants with them, but he is at least able to ‘sense’ the qualities of the fires themselves and shift their positions. He found this out when he was looking at a particularly yellow fire and found discovered that it smelled like sulfur. Needless to say, he started ‘sampling’ any of the other fires that caught his attention as well.
Consequently, there were entire sections of fires that were excluded from further consideration not because there was anything wrong with them, but because they were ‘contaminated’ by their proximity to other fires that he judged and found disappointing, discomforting, or even absolutely repugnant in the case of one yellow, black and green fire that he could only imagine smelled like a thousand rotting animal’s uncleaned bungholes being fermented in an enclosed room.
That smell had been so bad that he did the mental equivalent of narrowing his vision before ignoring the hundreds of thousands of fires in that fire’s general vicinity.
It made sifting through the fires much easier, however, as he frequently found more and more reasons to avoid entire areas— such as one time when he saw a black fire that made him feel like he was having a staring contest with the grim reaper and another when he found a fire that constantly changed colors that made him feel like he was tripping out on something.
Thankfully, there were still plenty of fires that he found to be interesting and even a few potential candidates for his first attempt at creating a fire. The list was pretty small because he was afflicted with the ‘choice overload’ disease, but he still picked out five fires for differing reasons.
At the top of the list, and solely there because it was the first cool fire that he found, is a golden fire that seemed to continue burning by constantly incinerating colorful strings. He had no clue what the strings were, but they flowed endlessly into the fire and formed a rainbow-colored whirlpool that he found highly visually appealing. If he could, rather than using it as a fire, he would want to keep it as a desk ornament and just stare at it for a while.
After that was a white fire that, rather than being hot, seemed to be freezing. He had no clue how it managed that, but it was cool enough for him to immediately throw it onto the shortlist despite being pretty sure that it was the exact opposite of what he was looking for right now. Plus, the thought of having air conditioning sounded extremely appealing to him— even if he knew he shouldn’t choose air conditioning over the ability to start potentially lifesaving fires.
Then there was a fragrant green fire that smelled like a day spent relaxing under the warm sun while laying in a field of flowers. He added it to the list partially because of the smell, but mostly because looking at it made him feel peaceful. He was pretty sure he wouldn’t choose it, though, because if he found it pleasant, he was willing to bet other things would as well.
The last significantly interesting fire that he found was a purple one with red and gold streaks running through it. He had no clue what it could do or why it had its coloring, but purple is his favorite color and it didn’t seem to have any weird smells or any other ‘effects’ that concerned him— there had been one red fire that had extreme effects on his ‘mood’ that nearly made him forget about his task as his attention shifted toward the image of the fox girl nearby.
In the end, after spending more than an hour just trying to choose a fire, he decided he wanted the purple one with red and gold streaks.
His decision wasn’t made overly complicated. He liked the color purple most and though all of the other options might have seemed cooler than it, literally in the case of the white one, he realized that he would rather not try to figure out which among the millions of fires had the coolest effect to it. Purple fire was cool enough as is and if he really needed to, and his experiment worked this time around, then he could always try to go back later and figure out a better fire.
Having selected the fire he hopes to create, he tries to hold it in place using his thoughts. Unfortunately, when the recording inside the jade turns off a few seconds later, the purple fire disappears.
“Okay, so no easy route. Got it.”
He activates the jade again and holds onto the purple fire once more, but this time he ends the jade early. Once again, the purple fire disappears.
“It’s okay. That was just two attempts. I just have to think of something else.” He says to himself and considers what else he can actually do. The answer isn’t encouraging.
“Okay, I’ve pretty much done everything I can do already.”
Exiting the Omega Browser’s Space, he scratches his hair and starts eating another fruit.
“I’m either doing something wrong,” he says around a mouth full of fruit, “or it’s impossible.”
He thinks about it for a second and says, “It’s not impossible. Even if it is, it isn’t until I give up. So how do I get it to work?”
After a while, he wonders, “What would happen if I try to use some of the little star’s energy? It’s kinda tuckered out right now, but maybe there will be an effect?”
After thinking it over, he decides, “I’ll try it once. If there isn’t an immediate and obvious difference I will give up for today and try again first thing in the morning.”
Having said that, he closes his eyes once more and returns to the Omega Browser’s Space before starting the jade up once again.
This time, after quickly locating the purple fire, he pulls it away from all of the others before slowly and carefully inching his little star toward it. Unfortunately, even when they are directly touching, he finds that there is no effect.
“Fuck!” He grumbles. “I really hoped that would do something!”
Staring at the purple fire, he wonders if he is just going to have to give up for now. Then he thinks about how Moxian was able to easily create fire and how the bubble of blood seemed to interact strangely with the Space earlier.
He has absolutely no clue what the blood bubble is for, but he does know that Moxian had been attempting to make him her pet right before she smeared blood on his soul projection.
“Fuck it,” he mutters. "It isn't even mine so who cares if I ruin it?"
Looking at the blood bubble, he mentally flicks the purple fire into it and waits to see what happens.