As the improved spell came flying back into my core area, rocketing out of the black hole that housed my immortal soul. It was further ejected from the inner zone that was now down to just a few stray motes of Chaos continuing to drag my consciousness along with it. I expected it to end up in the middle zone where the Mighty Blow core had taken up it’s orbit, but we rocketed through that area as well. I could see we were on a course that was set to slam into the core wall and I mentally braced myself for the pain that I was sure this was going to cause my body. Doing everything I could to try to improve my chances of staying here and not getting kicked out of the core space before I figured out how to activate my new healing spell.
As the tangled strips that seemed to be the roots of the spell approached the walls of the core, I saw them stopping at the very last second before impact before being drawn down further and the ends of the spell form actually entered the wall of the core. I watched as the Order of the spell drove into the Order of the walls and was partially absorbed into them. As they balanced out and we now stood like an elven skyscraper that was fused onto the side of the wall. I could see that the Chaos that had been bound into the spell was starting to rotate into the core walls while being continuously replaced by Chaos I had thought had been locked into the honeycombed walls of my core.
While I watched the mesmerizing motes rotate into and out of the spell, I felt something start to click into place. Breathing deeply I could feel the mana start to swirl through my core and I could almost see it as it started being dragged in through the vines that were swirling upward from the wall. Dropping into the meditative state I tried to focus on bringing more mana into my core. Trying to focus on pulling it in through my lungs and rotating it through my channels. But as I did that I lost the feeling of connectivity that I had with the spell.
Letting go of the feeling of pulling in the mana, I realized I had lost touch with the spell and I was back in the middle orbit of my core, just outside the Chaos repulsion zone. Searching around I looked for the massive structure I had just attached to the walls of my core and I found that there was nothing to see. Searching around the walls I finally began to comprehend just how big this core actually was. I know I have compared it to a mountain before but we really don’t understand as humans how immense of an object that is on the inside. We see a skyscraper from far away and think the reason it looks so small is because it’s far, all the while ignoring the fact that if you put a building on a mountain it will disappear miles before the mountain vanishes from your sight.
As I searched around for the immense spell that I had formed I was swiftly coming to realize that I may have lost it. I mean I knew it was still part of me, so there had to be a way to find it, but I couldn’t afford to fly around for days looking for it. As I was thinking that I started feeling the pain that I had been ignoring was starting to lessen, so I let myself finally be pulled back into my body.
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Opening my eyes I found myself lying on my belly, nose pressed into the ground, feeling several bodies holding me down while a long rough tongue scraped along my hamstrings. Panicking I rolled hard to the right, flipping the bodies off of me while I started grabbing around my my knife and club that I had with me. When my hand managed to grab onto the hilt of something I swung it in a wild arc to clear the space around me before sitting up and trying to take stock of what had been trying to eat me.
Looking around I saw the older kids picking themselves up from the dirt, while Gaian was turning his head to look at me like I was an idiot. As I looked around the room, it was obvious I had been out of it for a while, either my time in the soul dimension had taken an extraordinary amount of time, or it wasn’t subject to the same time slow that my core space was. I’m guessing it was the former as it couldn’t have been easy to reform my id and ego.
I saw that all of the bodies of our enemies had already been reclaimed by the dungeon, I can only hope that the kids had managed to get some of the loot to safety before it had also been taken. As Gaian started to nose me back down so he could treat my legs, I patted him on the muzzle saying. “Give me a sec, I managed to finally absorb that healing spell and I want to see if I can activate it on my own first.”
The older two were walking back over and I could only make an exaggerated shrug to indicate I was sorry for the tumble, but before I could start making excuses I was hit in the back by a flying tackle of a fifty pound little girl. Despite the immense pain that started jabbing me in the legs, I pulled her around into a hug, patting her on the back while I did my best to calm her tears, trying to tell her without words that I was okay and going to live.
As her little fists started pounding into my shoulders as she expressed her displeasure at my having scared her, I just tucked myself closer into the blows and rode them out until she was eventually pulled off of me by her older sister. As she looked to transfer her anger and start attacking her sister I clapped sharply and put an angry look on my face while shaking my finger at her. Looking closely at her face, I could see her eyes were still a little wild and the hamster in my brain started trying to spin the wheel I had locked in place, trying to get my attention.
I ignored him for a minute while I gestured to Lotus to come closer. Holding her hands I started taking exaggerated breaths and holding them until she eventually caught on and followed along with me. After about a minute, she started to get to the point where she was almost hyperventilating, so I slowed down and let her go. Looking into her eyes as she resumed her normal breathing, I was happy to see that most of the wildness had departed. I gestured back to her sister and the little girl ran over to give her a hug and start babbling to her, in what I could only assume was her trying to apologize for getting ready to take a swing at her.
Leaving the kids to sort themselves out for the moment, I closed my eyes and tried to focus on anything that might give me an idea of how to activate the healing spell. Going back to my trusty breathing pattern as my first step, I started sending the mana rocketing around my channels. Drawing more of it in and trying to send it into my core, I began to feel it expand slightly, and it gave me a tiny jolt of pain in my chest. But when I compared it to the shooting agony coming from my legs, it was easy enough to ignore. After a couple of minutes of focus, I really started feeling it though and I had to stop and let it go. Holding my hand up towards the ceiling a light blast of the gathered power shot through the palm of my hand and if I used my imagination to its fullest, I thought if I had aimed it perfectly I might just have been able to use it to take out a butterfly.
Laughing to myself despite the pain coming from my legs, I started to think how I might go about it. I think the trick would be that I would need to aim the gust so it brushed by one of its wing quadrants, but it would have to be when it was over water, otherwise, it would no doubt easily recover on the ground and take flight again. The water was the key, it could soak the wings and cause it to drown. As my rules lawyering hamster chimed in, stating that it would be the water taking out the insect and not me, I just ignored him and gave him an imaginary middle finger.
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Rolling back onto my stomach, I called out to the bear. “Okay, I’m out of ideas, I don’t know why my stuff is so much harder to figure out. Must be nice to have an easy button.”
Snorting and putting his nose back on my legs, the bear started up with his healing spell that I had been nice enough to donate to him. I had an insane itching feeling that I had to force myself to ignore as I started to feel the muscles stitching themselves back up before the skin stretched itself back into place. It was a very eerie feeling and almost enough to distract me from the resonance I started feeling coming from my core. I tried to dive back into it, but without the exp or dao to guide me I still couldn’t manage it on my own.
Closing my eyes I tried to ignore what my legs were signaling to me as they continued to heal and focus on connecting with the energy that was building a resonance with my core. I tried to imagine it as green energy causing my legs to regrow, but that didn’t end up getting me anywhere. I started thinking back on how I felt when the spell started to form in the core. My sense of smell had been the first thing to categorize the different layers that made up a healing spell.
Trying to focus on memories that had vivid smells in them I started thinking back to different experiences with my kids. Running the gambit from Camping in a wet field to teaching my son to cut the grass, nothing seemed to be working until my mind flitted to a memory of my dad, my brothers, and me. We had been burning a small field on our farm, rather than taking the longer time that cutting the grass with a mower would have needed.
It had been wet enough that it hadn’t been that big of a blaze, only slowly had the line of fire been able to eat away at the grass, leaving us time to walk around the edges with shovels, slowly tamping it out when it go to the area’s we were content to let grow free. It wasn’t the burning that was calling to me though. Instead, the part of the memory that was calling to me was waking up the next morning after the storm that had passed by had mixed the ash into the ground.
It seemed to my young mind that the grass had already regrown a tremendous amount and was filling the air with the most remarkable scent of freshness. Similar to what you get after you cut your grass, but cleaner, fresher, and more full of life. Looking back on it now, I could tell that this wasn’t the exact memory, but some part of the Dao that I had used to fuse the spell together was calling out to me, changing it slightly to influence me.
It was calling out its strengths, life will always go on no matter how far back it is burned, the fire will sputter out and wood will spring back stronger than ever. I had always thought if nature had a personality it would be either indifferent or caring, but this was rank arrogance coming from it. One thing that had always drawn me towards Eastern philosophies was the need for balance. A glut of anything can be just as bad as having nothing although many people don’t like to see it that way.
I had to stop for a second and really think about what it was trying to tell me, rather than reject it out of hand. Too easy is it to go with something that you know because it sounds better and you have already come to accept it as truth. Maybe it was wrong and I was right, but I couldn’t just reject it out of hand because my philosophy was more palatable to me.
It was only true to me in the contexts I have tested it in. Diving deeper into the feelings the Dao was sending to me, I started resonating with the spell on a higher level than just memories and smells. I began to lose myself in the feelings it was sending my way. I know from my studies that despite the fact that it is shown as a circle, wood has interaction with all of the elements. But what the dao was trying to point out to me right now was specifically its interactions with fire.
Going back to my memory, the fire had consumed the life force turning it to ash which belongs to the earth, but not fully. Ash is a great source of minerals and nutrients that the water distributes so that life can come back even stronger than before, keeping in balance.
All of that I agreed with, but what the Dao started sending to me next was images of times when fire wasn’t able to consume the wood, Rainforests where it is almost impossible to start a fire, and if you do manage it, it certainly couldn’t do much more than smolder. Rampant growth that choked out water sources. Roots that dug deep into the earth, stealing the minerals it had hidden and consuming them to empower its growth.
I again started to reject the idea as not being in balance, I could swear I felt a huff of exasperation as it reached out to slap me across the face and tell me to stop being an idiot. Going back to my original memory it kept replaying over and over again in my mind. The grass being burned, the rain coming down and melting the ash into the earth, and the grass coming back even faster and more full than before.
I felt it practically shouting at me, making me feel like I was a worthless idiot for not being able to grasp such a simple concept. Feeling the bear’s healing spell regrow my legs, it suddenly hit me. There weren’t any scars coming back, they were being perfectly put back together. In fact with the influence of the small bits of dao energy that had been imparted to my body so far, it could be said they were coming back even stronger than before.
I could feel the impartment from nature telling me that this was partially right, but that I wasn’t fully there yet. I tried to think about what it was telling me. I questioned my prejudices telling me that being out of balance was bad. Trying to listen to the Dao and understand what it was telling me rather than just going with what I knew was better. As I felt the bear’s spell continue to do its work I realized that it was pulling from my body to help add the materials it needed to grow my legs back better. It wasn’t just taking the energy it needed from the spell.
That’s when it hit me! For a healing spell to work it needed to be out of balance! Balance was taking the time to heal naturally, letting scar tissue form, and maybe never walking again if the muscle didn’t regrow properly and there was too much scarring. This was clearing out the dead tissue, consuming it, and replacing it by rampantly providing energy for the live cells to come back even stronger.
Out of balance cycles were bad in the long term but nothing was ever to stay perfectly in balance at all times. Everything needed to ebb and flow, going from the creation cycle to the destruction depending on the circumstances. A cycle staying perfectly in balance was stasis, and stasis was just a different version of the Order bricks. Life needed Chaos in it as well. Chaos is just another word for entropy or energy and that was what my body needed right now!
It needed an excess of the entropy so I could continue to grow and heal. I could feel the Dao as it seemed to sigh as I had finally managed to grasp such a basic concept. Part of me had never been so insulted, but most of me understood. This was the distillation of one of the secondary forces of the universe and my little monkey brain wasn’t qualified to even see a part of it, let alone the whole thing. But somehow I had been able to gain access to it. It wasn’t a repository like a library, it was part of reality itself, any imperfections in my understanding were mine and mine alone.
It could highlight certain aspects it felt I needed to learn, but it was on such a different level than my pathetically small brain, that even my finally grasping that simple concept was like a monkey learning to add two plus two. That monkey might be a genius and worthy of recognition by humans as the Einstein of monkey science, but when compared to physicists and theoretical mathematicians, there wasn’t much difference between it and a mushroom.
There is no insulting in reality, either it is or it isn’t. I shouldn’t be feeling anything other than happy that I had managed to finally grasp a concept so far above me. I hadn’t just memorized some words, I had felt the concept take hold in me!