I think I hate meditation. It is a skill that is easy to learn and hard to master. I was currently sitting in my room, on my bed, with my hands on my knees as I attempted to meditate. Meditation requires a person to completely empty their mind of all thought. I just had too much to think about. I'd oddly already accepted everything I'd learned. Ki, Mana, Magic, Aliens, other Worlds, it all was pretty interesting.

My problem was my own Ki. According to the Gaian, my meditation was a good place to start. I had to figure out how to keep my Ki from leaving my body.

I'd actually had some small success in that direction. Now that I knew the feeling of my own Ki, I could focus on it. I'd followed one of the lines to my index finger and found that with a bit of focus, I could stop the Ki from flowing out of my finger. It was a bit like placing my finger over a hose. The Ki didn't want to be stopped, but I managed to stop it.

Unfortunately, the hose was full of holes. Stopping the Ki from leaving my finger only stopped it there. If I was right, it actually increased the spill from my other extremities.

Stopping the Ki from leaving every where else required me to be aware of all of my extremities at the same time. It was at that time that I noticed something disheartening. When there was no where normal for the Ki to leave, it began to seep out of my pores. That was much harder to stop. It'd taken me a day and a half to just stop it from leaving my hands!

If Heroes and other worlds, and magic existed then why couldn't this have been like one of those fantasy stories where I got a game screen that made everything easier?

...

...

No ding. That was disappointing. Oh well, the hard way it was.

Stopping the Ki from leaving my body was actually the easy part. However, it required my absolute focus, if I slipped on my control, even for a moment, it would flow out of me at an increased rate until it was back to it's regular flow. Another thing I found, it was painful holding the Ki in. My skin and bones ached. As I watched the lines, they would expand at a very slow rate, a millimeter every four hours by my estimate.

Given how small the lines were, it would take years for it to grow to a worrying size. At least at the current size of my Ki wisp. If I were to keep meditating, I might be able to increase the size of my Ki wisp and thus the rate of size increase for the lines.

But! I couldn't meditate and keep hold of my Ki at the same time. So I didn't meditate. I focused on keeping the Ki inside of me. At first, I could only do it while sitting and not moving. Moving broke my concentration. Sleeping also broke my concentration. Every time I went to sleep, I would lose my control and by the time I woke up, it would be back to square one.

A month. I did this for a month. During that time, I got to the point where I could hold it in while I moved around, but everything I did was impossibly slow. Sometimes while eating I would suddenly stop because I was too focused on my Ki.

I often went to talk to the Gaian, mainly to complain and get some pointers on what to do. She wasn't much help.

"My kind possess very little ways for our Ki to leave our bodies. We are stone, we enclose."

It wasn't any help. It was one of those things that was just figured out. Eventually, I did.

I'd read some stuff in the past, about martial artists who were capable of training their bodies to respond to a threat without their conscious mind having to think about it. They just reacted.

I think Ki is like any other bodily function. It can be trained. One morning, I woke up as usual, moved to the bathroom and began taking a shower. I felt...amazing. Better than amazing. The shower felt amazing, little drops of Mana striking my skin, I felt at peace.

It wasn't until I got out of the shower that I realized that I hadn't started my Ki control again. When I focused on my Ki, I found that it was already being held back. That was why I felt so good. My Ki was no longer struggling to break free from my body. If I focused more, I could see the faint yellow outline of my hand as the Ki moved along the insides of my hand, seeming to be barely held by my skin.

Every movement of my body felt smooth, like I was a machine that had been well oiled. I could understand. For all my life, this energy had been small and it had even been slowly leaking out of me. Now, it was being contained and nourishing my body. It was like I'd always been in the desert without knowing it and now...

I laughed, a solid hearty laugh.

After I was dressed, I sat on the bed and took up a meditation pose. A single breath in and a single breath out.

I could feel Mana now, not in the way I would feel other things, not even my Ki. It was a soft hum in the air, pressing against my skin and exciting my Ki. When I breathed it in, I felt my body react to it, the small lines of Ki in my lungs latching onto the Mana and holding it there.

The amount it could hold wasn't much, but it was still a new sensation. I could feel it as the Ki began to slowly refine the Mana into new Ki for my body.

I was suddenly struck with an idea. Every time I'd spoken with the Gaian, I lost feeling in my limbs when the Ki from them was drawn to create the connection. I wondered if I could do the same thing now.

I focused on the Ki in my feet and drew it towards the Ki wisp in my navel. Then I redirected the Ki towards my lungs in thin lines. In an instant, I doubled the amount of Mana I could turn into Ki. When I breathed out, more Mana remained in my body than previously.

With more lines working, the time it took for mana to be converted into Ki was shortened as well.

I got too eager...

I found out there was such a thing as too much Ki.

As I was meditating, simply feeling the Ki and Mana interacting, my stomach suddenly began to heave and the Ki wisp within my stomach went wild, sending bursts of energy through my limbs. I was suddenly feeling sick as I moved to get of the bed and fell to the floor because my feet wouldn't respond. I'd kept the Ki from them for too long and now I was paralyzed! No wait...they just fell asleep.

Then I threw up. On my floor. Apparently I could also expel Ki through my mouth as a lot of the excess Ki I had gathered was immediately sent out of me as well.

This was my first experience with Ki Poisoning, something I learned from the Gaian after the fact. Absorbing more Ki than my body could contain was very dangerous. I was lucky I was a novice, my inexperience resulted in the excess Ki being evicted from my body. Had I been any better, I would have unconsciously held it in and died.

Well, for the first time I was thankful for being shit at something. At least I knew my limits. I had to wait for my body to adjust to the amount of Ki I had. It explained the pains I'd felt before.

After the feeling came back to my feet and I'd cleaned up the mess I'd made, I decided that I needed some fresh air.

Holding my walking stick, I observed the mana within it. I wondered if instead of mana, I could replace the mana with my Ki, but a quick look at my own Ki and I realized that I didn't have enough to do that. It was a thought for another time though.

The view outside was much more colorful. With the increase to my Ki as well as my control, I could see more than before. It wasn't a lot, but I could see the Ki in the trees and plants. An animal that ran passed me also had the smallest flicker of Ki as well.

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It was pretty amazing. We were all so different, shape, size, color, but we all held the same type of energy within our bodies. I looked to my left and saw two wisps. It was strange but...I knew they were my parents, even who they were individually. If mana felt like a hum, their wisps felt like the sun's warmth.

"What are you two doing out here?" I asked, smiling towards them.

"Enjoying this nice afternoon" my mom said, and I could hear the smile in her voice.

"How did you know we were here?" I still couldn't see, so my dad's question was the right one. I couldn't just tell them that I saw the life giving energy within them and knew them instinctively.

I gave a soft laugh "You know what they say about being blind, all your other senses get better" this was truer for me than they probably realized. The change in my Ki had also increased my senses, I could smell new things and my sense of touch was better. I could feel the moment the wind shifted before it began to blow "I could hear you two breathing"

"I see, that sounds cool, are you going for another walk?"

I nodded at my mom's question "Yeah, I want to figure out what I am going to do. I can't just stay here forever" among the meditation and Ki control exorcises, I had been wondering what I was going to do with my life.

My major goal was to learn Magic from the Gaian. After all, it is magic. But I wasn't sure what I was going to do in the meantime. From what I gathered from her memories, she could reach me no matter where I was on the planet so it wasn't a problem if I went somewhere else.

"Maybe I'll go to Tibet?" I wondered "I've been kind of enjoying this meditation stuff I learned, maybe I'll spend some time with the monks there" learning about this stuff on the internet was only half as effective as learning it from the people.

My father stood up and walked over to me, placing his hand on my shoulder "We'll support you in whatever you decide to do" he said softly.

I wondered what they thought of me. They'd lost one son, maybe they thought I was lost in grief and this meditation stuff was a way of dealing with it. Perhaps it was.

Nodding, I headed down the path. Maybe I should have said more to them at that time. But I didn't know what I was going towards.

"Things are changing Alexander. You are changing."

I was standing in front of the boulder once more, my hand pressed against it's surface. This sounded ominous "What do you mean things are changing? Some apocalypse isn't going to happen is it?"

"To my knowledge, no. It is not unheard of. At the moment, there are no signs of such an event" the Gaian's voice echoed in my mind "I anticipated your success with Ki control and I have enlisted the aid of a Deity who owes my kind a favor"

A Deity...that didn't sound so good. After all, it had been a Deity who had taken my brother and blinded me.

"Do not worry. This Deity is different from the one who damaged you."

"Right. I'm much better than that one" I made a face at the voice that appeared behind me. I didn't want to turn around. It sounded like a little girl.

But turn I did. What stood in front of me was...awesome. It was a solid yellow person, the same yellow as the wisps, except I couldn't see anything wispy about this one. Since I'd been blind, this was the first time I'd seen another person. I could make out golden yellow eyes and flowing golden hair. It was like staring at a statue of golden yellow energy.

I was right, it was a girl, but it wasn't a little one. I was nearly six feet tall and this woman stood at least a head taller than me.

"Sup." the woman nodded her head to me as her voice changed to be less...godly I guess. It also raised up to the voice of an actual woman.

"This is..." in an instant, I felt the Gaian digging through my mind once more. It was a familiar sensation. For the most part she had conversation down, I rarely noticed any change, but this once again informed me that the way she spoke to me and the way she thought were probably very different. Every so often she had to search for a word or phrase that her kind did not know.

"This seems accurate. This is Artemis, or at least the name your people gave her"

"Artemis...as in the Greek goddess?" mythology was always my favorite subject, though I'd never considered it.

"Exactly. Got you with that high voice bit too" she grinned at him. It was weird being able to see someone, even if they were completely yellow "I know what you are thinking. Artemis was supposed to have less than good relationships with men. Humans exaggerate, though I'm assuming you know that already.

Some things are right though. In my world, I am worshiped as the Goddess of Challenge, your people picked up a few things when I visited before my ascension to a Deity. I was asked to come here and put you under some strain. Unlike the Gaians who posses a nearly infinite lifespan, you have a limited amount of time to learn this stuff"

I'd figured that out before. From what I'd learned from being connected to the Gaian, their concept of time was really stretched out. They even passively absorbed mana and turned it into Ki. It had taken me a month just to control my Ki.

"A humanoid being is much more adept at teaching a humanoid being. Artemis possesses the necessary abilities to give you a challenge. To my knowledge, humans develop the most in conflict"

"So I am going to give you some conflict. You already have the understanding you need to use magic right?"

I frowned at that as I tried to remember if I'd received any instruction of using magic. Right, it was the act of using your Ki to change mana into the form you wanted it to be.

The goddess smiled at me before grabbing my hand "Lets go" she said before the world shifted around me. At least I assume it did, the only inkling I actually had that my surroundings had changed was the sudden pull of mana on my body as well as the connection between the Gaian and myself breaking.

"Where are we?" I asked. I could feel sunshine on my face as well as the wind so I knew were were outside of the cave.

"Olympus" Artemis said "It's been left untouched on your world for some time so there isn't much damage. Magic is useful that way. Same reason you humans haven't found it. I can train you here without being disturbed"

She touched my forehead and my eyes began to burn. I tried to flinch away but I found myself unable to move. I could feel her Ki enter my body. That small thin stream was greater than my entire body's worth.

Then she released me and frowned "I can't fix your eyes. It is so bound to your your Ki that I'd need to destroy it to give you new eyes" she sighed "Can't do that without destroying who you are though"

I gave a sigh of relief at that. A being like her could crush me with a blink. I'm glad she didn't.

"Also, you've been looking right into my eyes for some time now" she said looking him in the eyes "I was told that you had special eyes, but you are definitely blind right?"

I nodded "I can only see mana, ki, and the interaction between the two"

She looked surprised "And every cell in my body is made of Ki" she covered her chest "I wish I'd known that"

I rolled my eyes "Your clothes look like they are made out of Ki too, so it isn't like I can see through them" she was wearing what I'd imagine a huntress to be wearing. What I'd expect a ranger to wear, though it was as yellow as the rest of her.

She shook her head "You are no fun" she said before shrugging "Alright, first things first, we will teach you the basic magic. Moving stuff."

It sounded like telekinesis. Cool. Moving stuff with my mind would be neat.

She pointed ahead of her and I watched as a single strand of Ki left her finger and raced through the air. It hit something and slowly surrounded it. It took me a second to realize that it was a rock.

"Moving things is the simplest magic because all it does require is making your Ki interact with the Mana of an object. Once connected with the mana, your Ki can move it like it is part of you" she flicked the rock towards me. It struck my shoulder making me wince.

"Simple as if you'd just picked up the rock and thrown it" she said grinning.

"Why didn't you then? It seems as if you could save Ki just by moving stuff physically" I said rubbing my shoulder.

"You could with a small rock. But the interaction of Ki with Mana enables you to ignore weight to a degree equal to your Ki level. With my strength, I could move stars"

"Deities have limitations as well?" I asked. That was news to me. Yeah, she could move stars, but I would have thought that a god could move galaxies or even universes.

"Of course. Our bodies are capable of producing Ki in every single cell, however our strength is set as a constant. We can't train and get stronger than we already are. It is why we go to worlds and become 'Gods', mortal faith has more power than you know"

I nodded and looked down at the rock that had been thrown at me. Kneeling down, I picked it up in my palm. I moved a line of my Ki towards my palm and gently allowed it to leave, touching the Mana of the rock. Upon leaving my body, it quickly dissipated into the surrounding ambient Mana.

Artemis chuckled "It isn't that easy you know. Without your body to hold it, the Ki quickly returns to it's original state of Mana. You have to hold it in it's form"

I frowned "So after a month of training my Ki to stay in my body, I have to now train it to stay out of my body?" I asked.

"Pretty much. Life isn't easy. It is always a struggle to take even one step forwards. You think I was always this powerful?"

With a sigh, I used my walking stick to find a good place to sit down and play with my Ki. The thought that I was probably surrounded by beautiful architecture crossed my mind. After all, supposedly I was in Olympus at the moment. The beautiful home of the Greek Gods resting upon a mountain.

Magic may help me find a new way to see. So, I focused on moving my Ki, sighing as I watched it disperse into mana again.

I did that for a while until the surrounding air began to cool off. The sun seemed to be going down. I didn't mind though.

At least until I heard the wolves.

Conflict, right.