Chapter Five
I've got to get back to basics, I have been pushing too many random buttons, just hoping for the best. I need to understand what is happening, formulate a plan that is going to work, and then execute it properly. I'm going to have to be sure of what I'm doing before I start, because you don't get second chances in the stories when you form your core. Maybe they got it wrong, but I would rather bet on the side of not ending up a cripple. If whatever process I start with is the one I'm going to end up with, I need to set a goal that I can live with. Throughout my life I have been okay with failing the first time, for that matter failing many times has never been a problem. It took me fifteen tries before I had my first satisfactory bread board, and blowing my first vase, I must have shattered the glass over twenty. I have yet to find anything that I have picked up expecting a perfect run on the first try. And I've always thought that is okay, failure isn't an F word, success is never guaranteed! All failure means is you have learned what doesn't work, you can cross it off of your list and go onto the next thing. You learn more from failure than from success and while I would rather be observing someone else's failure normally, I've had plenty of opportunities to pick myself up out of the dust and go again. But, I had also never tried free soloing a mountain before. Zero points of failure wasn't an option I was happy with. I preferred to get down and dirty, trying the same thing multiple times with miniscule tweaks was my happy spot, but it looks like the universe didn't care about me being happy.
With that in mind I need to go back to the basic view of the body, the energy is forcing its way through my bloodstream and I have two options. Strengthen the blood cells, and use them to infuse and power up my muscles, making my body stronger first. Or, I can strengthen my arteries, veins and capillaries and bring the energy back into a core first. In this analogy, the blood is a truck and the circulatory system is the highway. Well, when I look at the problem like this, the solution is obvious. Fifteen years of driving a fully loaded, Eighty Thousand pound, truck over the garbage that are California highways. The best truck in the world will still send you bouncing around all over the place, breaking your back and butt, when you hit endless potholes.
The beginnings of a proper plan in mind, I marshal my thoughts towards buckling down, and starting the execution of it. I look back into my body, and get to the edge of where the energy is pushing its way through my arteries. I see how the blood is getting forced back, their individual shields locking together like the Spartans at Thermopylae. Unfortunately it seems that these Spartans have found another opponent, instead of coming up against the Persians; my blood seems to be set up against the future Romans legions, now in their prime. The avalanche of energy is forming a shield wall of its own, but instead of being locked into the slow hoplite formation, close together with unwieldy spears, making every step an exercise for the entire group. The Romans are marching its Cohorts around, breaking up first into Centuries, and then from there breaking up further again into smaller sections. Before diving in jaggedly and sawing up their enemies. Thankfully not many cells are getting destroyed, but they are still getting pushed inexorably back, while the stragglers are getting surrounded and left behind. Order and Chaos mixed together, the invading energy is chewing up the lower order of energy that my blood has holding it together. Abandoned in my blood’s slow and steady retreat, this is starting to increase my blood pressure higher and higher; as more and more blood is slowly getting stacked up with the blood behind it.
Ignoring the plight of the abandoned blood for now, I have to focus further back, in the parts of the blood stream that they have made their orderly retreat from. Examining the walls closer, I look at them, with their own energy tightly locked together, forming an impenetrable wall. Letting neither the energy of the invaders nor defenders through, with nowhere to go the blood is forced back farther in its retreat. This new energy is undoubtedly hoping to force my own blood to break through the walls for it, so it can continue its rampage through the rest of my body. Looking closer, I recognise the way the shield looks from my first trip into the river of entropy. While similar to the metaphysical walls I saw and broke down, which turned out to be the stupid action that eventually got me into the situation I am in now. I realized that these metaphysical walls were partially linked into my real world artery walls. Overlaying and strengthening them. So instead of breaking them down completely like I had when I first started slowly learning to move, I was instead going to have to find another solution.
With a thought, I sent my consciousness back to that fateful quarter inch. My savior, the tiny little part of me that kept me awake as I was getting trapped in this hell. Oh, how stupid are instincts that betray us. In trying for freedom, I awoke something I was not intended to receive. Instead of being frozen in time, propped up, oblivious; like every other blissfully, ignorant, living organism in this lightless hell. I was instead awake and fighting for my life. Forcing my brain away from that fruitless dead end, I instead started working on a solution. The energy had also been entering my body here, but instead of building up pressure and exploding my finger off my hand, like a bottle rocket on the fourth of July. That hadn't happened and now I needed to figure out why, come to think of it, why hadn't my finger shot off? For that matter why hadn't my arm and face exploded. It just didn't make any sense… At the very least shouldn’t my body have started to absorb this power to grow, and get stronger?
As I take a metaphorical step back, and look at my arm in its entirety, I see that it is still fully extended, with all of its fingers locked up. Vibrating, outstretched in pain. With it clearly no longer moving, this line of thought doesn't seem to be helpful… wait, that's not completely true, now is it? Vibration is a motion, so it still has some ability to move through the molten lava, now pouring into my lungs. Zooming out a little, I move back over to my right side, which I had not gotten to yet, in my disastrous bid for freedom. Yes! That part of my body is still completely stuck, its arms and fingers motionless. The pain is there, but it is locked, frozen in place . Okay, Now we are getting somewhere, something is different between the two and I can only hope I have both the Intelligence to figure it out, and the Wisdom to correctly use it. To save myself from the situation, my Haste and Ignorance has currently gotten me stuck in.
With a quick zoom down, to make sure I fully remembered how everything was the way before I meddled. I confirmed that I had a rigid wall surrounding my skin, with the energy pressed tight up against it. Bowed slightly back, the interlocking blocks were holding up admirably to the pressure, not giving the slightest bit. Yup, that all checks out, as I start heading back over on my left side I freeze metaphorically. Wait… no, that isn't what was happening when I first started freeing myself, ages ago. Where is the avalanche of energy pouring through? Crashing down, through a hole in the sky, before rebounding off the wall and being sent back out to rejoin its brethren.
Okay, before I meddle anymore, taking small steps into the unknown. Paving the way to hell, let's go back and think everything through. I still had a nagging feeling that I would only get one shot at this, and with the energy continuing to roll in I can't afford to go with instinct just hoping I will get everything right. As instinct is clearly what has gotten me into this situation, and I could feel myself inching closer and closer to hell.
First of all, I've got to get into the right mind, science isn't going to hold the answers for you. Or if it does, well you've got no degree, and all you have are the street smarts of a blue collar trucker. So, let's stop calling it energy for one thing. It is, but that is flavoring your thoughts to the scientific and this is clearly more mystical. Yes, I know the trite phrase, magic is just science you don’t understand yet. And sufficiently advanced technology is magic to the uninitiated primitive, I tell myself. Well, guess what stupid, you clearly don't understand this, so that makes it magic. So that bit of logic out of the way, let's begin the process of understanding what we got in front of us. We only likely have one real shot at this, I tell my body, so let's make it the best one we can. After all, even a broken watch is right twice a day… Well an expensive one, not the cell phone clock I lazilly use.
This is magic, and I have already clearly decided that this is analogous to a cultivator novel. So from now on, in my own head, at least I am going to refer to it as Qi.
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And with that thought, the pressure building up in me, noticeably lessened.
“Okay,” I thought to myself. “That was unexpectedly easy, where is the other shoe?” Pausing a beat to let the universe drop its next hammer, when nothing happens, I think, “Okay, now we are getting somewhere. Let's dive more into the why of that.”
Once again, with nothing in reality to go on, I can only fall back on sci-fi and fantasy. I still used them to religiously escape the concrete jungle I lived my day to day life in. I used them when I was unable to escape to where the wilderness meets the ocean… like the spot I had been captured in.
Sci-fi being out, as the only possible technology around that I didn't understand might be the giant ball that had captured me and several square acres of ocean and beach. Seeing that I was still unable to interact with that, even if it was technology and not metaphysical, that left only the fantasy genre to help me. With Qi invading my body, I clearly needed to continue my dive into the cultivation sub genre to look for more guidance. I thought about trying to rename it Mana, Rage, or any of the multitude of names people use when they are creating something. Not feeling anymore lacking of pressure, I decided to not reinvent the wheel and continue with recognizing it as QI. So if naming it had lessened the pressure, why and how did that happen? The first and obvious answer that sprang to my mind was that by naming it I was claiming ownership of it. I both liked and hated that answer. Liked it because it was an easy answer and hated it because all of the novels I had read told me it was a high level technique that only geniuses and century old masters truly understood. And with the pressure lessened and not completely shut off. My non-genius monkey, button mashing, butt; that had two strikes on it, would undoubtedly whiff on this third chance. Leaving me with the Big K in more ways than one. Seeing as how I was no Kvothe, able to understand concepts at the drop of a hat. I decided to leave my right arm and go back to my center, where the pressure was still noticeable, even though it had lessened.
Back to the center, I dove down deeper into my bloodstream. Upon arriving there, where once before I had found the Roman invaders driving my hoplite armies back. Instead of Romans, I now found the Germanic hordes, flinging themselves onto the spears of my Spartans. Despite the individual bits of energy beings, flinging themselves to their death on my spartan spears. The press of bodies was still forcing them back, just instead of with the swiftness of an avalanche cutting through a mountain. It was now, the inevitable pressure of the rising tide. Clearly naming the energy didn't seem to have given me the control that I had thought.
Doubting I had the centuries needed by the old masters in my books to fully understand this Qi to the point of being able to command it with just my thoughts. And without the genius of the ones who sprinted up the mountain, quickly consuming their rivals, I needed a new plan. Or maybe not a new plan… Instead maybe I needed to go back to my old plan… the one that started this mess. Before I had used the Qi of my own body to slowly undulate itself back and forth giving me the slightest bit of freedom in the morass of outside Qi that was pressing down on me. If I can't command, then that only leaves suborning the foreign energy. Whatever was empowering it on the outside, had clearly lost its advantage once it had entered me and I had started the process of making it my own by naming it. And if I hadn't fully been able to take control of it, I had at least freed it for my own possible consumption.
My original plan was to strengthen my circulatory system, and that seemed more likely now that I seemed to have cut the Order from the Qi, leaving it the chaotic mess that it now was. Diving down into my blood, I quickly started maneuvering it. I started at where it was meeting the foreign Qi, and slowly started the process of driving my blood forward through the center of the tunnel. As it drove forward, it began to leave room along the edges of the walls of my circulatory system. Immediately, I felt a lessening of the pressure as the blood that had formed from the build up was able to go forward again. Confident I was on the right track, I let the pressure force my blood back to its starting point at my heart, all the while centering it in the middle of the road, that was my circulatory system. As the Chaotic Qi continued its flow on the outside of my blood, yet inside the walls that penned it in it, eventually made the full circuit around and back to my lungs, where it met its still Ordered brethren forcing its way inside of me. With nowhere to go but out, it drove a channel straight up through the middle of the Order iceberg. Flowing back out into the ocean of power outside of me, like a rip current back out into the ocean. All the while more of the Order Qi continued to force itself farther inside of me to become Chaos as it lost its connection to whatever was empowering it on the outside.
Now, with the Qi having a safe path out of me, and the Order that had been the ferocious Roman legions was gone. With the leaving of only the Chaos of milling peasants in there place, I only felt a small bit of pain as my veins and arteries bulged, but nothing like the impending heart attack I had felt coming on before. With safety assured for now, I had to make a decision to gamble or not.
My original idea had been to strengthen my circulatory system, but the pain told me that that wasn't happening. All that was going on currently, was the outside Qi was forcing its way inside, being depowered like a magnet erasing a computer, and being forced back outside into the environment. I still didn't seem to be gaining anything through this. Now, on one hand that was fine and a big part of me was still okay with that. After all, my goal was always to survive this. But there was another huge part of me that was greedy. Greedy for the power coursing through me!
Metaphorically sitting down, I took the time to look deep inside myself, and really go over my reasons for being willing to grab at this chance. I first found myself in this situation through blind panic, desperate to avoid being trapped in nothingness. I somehow maintained the slightest bit of control over the smallest part of me. That led to a crisis of sanity, choosing the path of self determination, I slowly crawled my way back into control over part of my body. That choice triggered the current crisis that I managed to survive, and now it seemed I finally had the time to actually make an informed decision, before mashing any more buttons and getting me back into the hot water bath.
Do nothing, and be as close to certain that you can, that you will be there when this nothingness finally ends; or gamble, gamble and try to consume and use this Qi to power yourself up. A simple choice with an easy decision, Right? Unfortunately, when you are always able to look at both sides of any problem, it is incredibly easy to argue with yourself and almost impossible to be happy with any decision you can make. My mind then seemed to split itself into two to argue it out.
The side that still maintained its youth and freedom immediately shouted out. “This is it, the moment you can finally give yourself magical powers! You have always wanted magic and now you can have it! What can you possibly be waiting for? You have to take it!”
The older Father in me simply replied. “Nothing is ever simple. And having some power doesn't make you invincible, oftentimes it merely paints a target on your back. Having something that other people want, even if they aren’t able to take it, just means they will resort to other ways of forcing you to then work for them. The most likely way would be using the kids as hostages. The tallest grass is quickly cut down.”
Taking a beat, my opposite shot back. “Okay, that might be true. But not having any power means that if they think you have it and are unable to give it to them. You won't have any recourse when they go for our kids.” With a sigh, he seemed to age and become the other one's twin. “You know what it is like to be powerless. We both remember the feeling of those handcuffs closing over your wrists, and being stuffed into the back of that police car. You know you can still feel both the fear of imprisonment even though you had done nothing wrong. You remember the glee and elation you felt, when the officer was pulled back by his partner and they had to let you go. You remember the resentment at having to let him do that to you. What would have happened if his partner hadn't pulled him back? Would the worst have happened? Would you not be here in this moment? Would your children never have been born? You have always hated having to deal with other idiots rules, always you have been a barbarian getting by in the civilized world. Hating the bonds that others seem to revel in. If the worst comes to it, you can't depend on law, order and reason to defend your family… If civilization breaks down all that you have is yourself and the individual bonds you hold with others. You know you can't take the chance this isn’t some kind of world ending disaster. Any chance at all you have to consume this power to protect the kids, and you have to take it. We will always choose the path that gives us the ability to protect our own, rather than rely on others.”
Nodding back, my older self let out a sigh and as they started to merge back together said. “It might end up being the wrong choice, but we will always pick the option that leaves us able to defend our family. Ok, let's get down to it.”