I saw the qi. It was the first thing I saw, and it rushed towards me, forcing me to absorb it. As the qi washed over me for what felt like the thousandth time, I felt a feeling of it concentrating within me. I focused on it, and slowly moved it towards my core. As the qi reached my core after 28 short Mercurian years, I began to feel a sense of impurity inside of it. Slowly but surely, using all of my concentration, I managed to rip the impurities from the qi and convert it into a piece of controllable, profound qi. It made me feel happy. And then it made me feel hungry.

I hungered for physical energy, which I had an overflowing well of, so I simply absorbed more of the energy created by my nuclear fusion than normal, decreasing my radiating energy flow by a small percentage. I continued for around 224 Mercurian years until I was full. After I became full, I realized something that I didn't notice when I had first received the qi. I could see qi.

Not only could I see the qi, but I could command and absorb it with my own qi. There was a lot more of it than my own qi, and there were tiny little specks inside of it that contained emotions, memories, personalities, and blessings. There were not very many, though, likely less than six. Suddenly, my memories reversed to back when I had first absorbed qi, and how it felt so good. It couldn't hurt to try some more, right? The qi swirled around me in an arc that eventually entered my material form. As it entered, it bound to my atoms and pulled them downwards.

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The qi spun the atoms in concentric discs that spiraled downwards into my core, rapidly decreasing my lifespan through increased fusion. My core became an ultra dense ball of gyrating qi and atoms binding, unbinding, and rebinding to each other. As within under a hundredth of a Mercurian year, I began to shrink, I thought about how much it hurt to try some more.

As I began to shrink, I realized that it was because I was not outputting enough energy to stabilize the force of the inpouring qi. I solved this problem with fission. I had discovered that atoms could be split by particles of qi. The chain reaction that this would create would allow me to re-fuse particles that were too heavy for fusion, like iron.

Upon preforming this process, I managed to find an equilibrium point around 1/4th of my previous radius where I would not expand nor contract. It was around this point that I realized how much destruction my brightness had caused. The terrestrial planets had each been turned into spheres of liquid hot magma coated with rock vapor, and Mercury had heated up so hot on just one side that it had been flung into the outer solar system due to heat propulsion.

I looked around at the qi. I know I could've died the last time but it couldn't possibly be as bad this time, right?

No. It couldn't be.