Mitch sat on his couch, thinking. What had he learned from Kanshou? Not very much, but could those scraps lead him to anything else?

Consciously controlling the energy was a concept that blew his mind, but what did that mean really? Was it just internal control; moving it around in the body to strengthen or heal? That would just be beefed up traditional martial arts. So could the energy be manipulated externally? If so, what were the limitations? Just shooting fireballs and flying around anime style? Or could chi be used in complex systems? Would chi be the electricity of the future?

He was getting ahead of himself. Before he worried about any of that he needed to figure out how to control it in the first place.

The other thing that came along with that was calmer energy being easier to control, not surprising if you thought about it, and having stronger effects on the body. But what were those effects? Clearly, they were responsible for the freakish strength and muscle density of the Bradrock and Loud Man. Probably the unnatural speed of Mutter Master, as well as, now that he thought about it, his reactions being so fast when being chased by that wisp of mist and during his fight with Bradstone. But, seeing as how they had only surpassed two of the nine Tollings he couldn't believe this was the limit of the effects that would be seen from the returning energies. Especially considering that the next Tolling constituted what the Messenger had called a stage.

No one knew what that meant yet, but Mitch was convinced it would be significant.

Keeping his energy calm would be a challenge. He was comfortable saying that the passivity of his energy which Kanshou had remarked upon was the result of his nine-day meditation and destroying the vortexes in his channels.

He was also convinced that somehow his use of the formation was causing these disturbances.

This meant he had to meditate to fix those maelstroms, but he had to keep using the formation to survive: it was the only thing that had shown potential to improve his ability to survive the next Tolling.

The only thing that he could figure to do was to continue using the formation but to follow each session with meditation to keep his energy from becoming too turbulent.

For the next week, this was the pattern he followed: exposure training in the formation; meditation to clean up the damage that did.

Mitch ran into a few problems with this scheme. When the meditation was successful, it seemed to take about twice as long as using the formation itself, which already required at least a couple of hours to reach his limit. However, the real issue was that he was not always successful when meditating. Sometimes it took almost a day before he was able to enter the state needed to enter his channels and clean up all of those perturbances. All of this conspired to slow his pace drastically. Where before he had been using the formation several times each day, now he was down to once a day or even less.

This left Mitch highly dissatisfied. He had just over three months left until the Tolling: he needed every moment he could scrape together to improve his capacity enough to survive. He had to survive. He couldn't follow... follow what? He shook his head. He had to survive.

Amidst everything else, he spent several days thing about this occasionally. On the fifth day, he realized that a good portion of the time he spent in meditation was used just finding the points of chaos within his energy flows. Whether there was one disturbance or one million he had to search through every single channel he was able to access to make sure that he had eliminated them all. There had to be a better way.

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After a while about thinking about this idea and rejecting several possibilities, he settled on the chambers within the channels. Those spherical regions where many channels entered and exited. Was it possible that if he parked his mind in those places and tried to feel for unstable energies coming in or out that he could isolate the problems faster and reduce his time spent in meditation?

The next time he was successful in reaching the proper meditative state he gave it a try.

The lowest nexus of channels was in his groin. As far as he could tell these chambers corresponded to the Chakras from the middle eastern traditions. Most of the channels from this nexus seemed to head down into or come from his legs. He started by sitting in the middle of the nexus and trying to feel where the energy was unstable, but unfortunately, this didn't seem to work. Every entrance and exit seemed equally turbulent.

Next, he tried going to the mouth of each channel hoping that any instabilities would be easier to detect directly in front of the openings; no dice.

Frustrated he attempted to punch something, but being nothing but a disembodied ball of consciousness, it didn't quite work out that way. What did happen was that his body, or whatever you would call this form, pulsed, sent what could only be called a pressure wave out in all directions.

The wave expanded in all directions, some of it slammed violently into the inner surface of the nexus, the rest rushed down the channels at a speed that Mitch could not have kept up with if he tried. Suddenly the inbound channels which had been blocked with the outgoing wave exploded with the force of a dozen fire hoses and swept Mitch away irresistibly down the channel he was standing in front of.

It was incredibly forceful, unlike anything he had felt before in this place, but at the same time, he didn't think that he was in danger. It may have been the strange calm that always came over him during these sessions, but it felt almost like one of those roller coasters with the electric rail launch. Strong, but not violent.

After a while he ended up back in the same nexus he had just been swept away from. But it was now much calmer, almost placid. The energy within the nexus was barely spinning, and it felt smooth. Smooth, but much more dense. Mitch felt like he was being squeezed by deep water. But, calm was good.

Excited, he moved the next chamber and did the same thing. It took a few tries, but he managed to send out another pulse, a bit weaker than the last but overall just as effective. He ended up back in the chamber which now had minimal movement and significant pressure.

He kept going until he got to the last two nexuses located in or on the head. He had a strong urge telling him not to do the same thing here. It was not something he could explain; it was an irrepressible sensation from his gut. No matter how he tried to force it, he could not make himself emit a pulse in either of these two locations when he attempted it a mindnumbing depression swept over him preventing him from completing the pulse. Eventually, he filed that away for later and just went through and cleaned those channels out manually. There was still more motion in these nexuses than the ones where he had successfully used the pulse, but it was still quite calm.

Satisfied he found the exit point in his brain again and stepped out of the meditation.

Mitch looked at the clock. He had shaved about an hour off of the typical time he spent in meditation, and that was with all of the time he had spent trying to figure things out. Feeling rather pleased he went to get ready to shower before bed.

As he entered the bathroom, he took off his shirt and was surprised when a bunch of body hair sloughed out of his shirt and straight into his face. Spitting chest hairs out of his mouth and rubbing more out of his eyes he stumbled around a bit bumping into the walls and shelves before he managed to sit on the closed lid of the toilet.

When he had finally cleared his orifices of hirsutia, he looked down to see a prepubescently smooth chest and hairless stomach. He quickly yanked off his pants and found his legs to have nary a single active follicle remaining.

Horrified, he slowly reached up and ran his hands through the hair on his head. Relieve both to find it still there and to see that when he brought his hand in front of his face, there was no hair pulled off on to it. Next, he felt about his face and found his beard and mustache still intact.

He let out a profoundly relieved sigh. At least he only looked like some metrosexual. Honestly, he had always been a reasonably hirsute guy; which hadn't always been the most edifying experience, and he was somewhat relieved to have all of his body hair gone.

Wait, all of it? He had one last place to check. Standing up he dropped his underwear to the floor along with the remains of his manbush. He was as smooth as a pornstar from the neck down.

Fuck.

This could be very good, or very bad.