“I’ll head out first,” Ahja stood. Kai watched as the clearing became distinct everywhere Ahja looked, as though resolving into a high-resolution version.
“Remember what I told you about Relay,” Ahja reminded him. “He has been my greatest friend, so please consider it.”
“You have given me much to think about,” Kai replied. “I look forward to our next conversation.”
Ahja nodded before fading away. Kai remained in the clearing. He looked out over the peaceful meadow.
“It’s nice here,” his voice was quiet. He closed his eyes and felt the warm sun cascade across his skin. He thought back over the conversation with his former self, it was odd to think in those terms since his former self was so much more than his present self, but that was reality. He used to be that man, and now he was who he was. His former self had expressed some strong opinions, forceful even.
Ahja was fascinating; his curiosity matched his own. He asked questions Kai hadn’t thought to ask. He challenged Kai’s assumptions, made space for alternative concepts, and broadened his horizon. Ahja was a teacher that didn’t treat Kai like a student.
He was a man Kai could respect. It was encouraging to see what he managed to accomplish. It gave him some hope for the future.
Kai opened his eyes and let out a deep breath. Let’s go.
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Kai opened his eyes. Prismatic golden light spilled into the pod. His heartbeat echoed in his ears, a deep thunderous boom that brought him fully alert. It was warm, precisely twenty-two point four degrees. His soul light had increased in intensity, his eyes producing fifty-seven lux, which, though not bright, was sufficient for him to make out every detail around him.
His fingers explored the micron assembler around his neck. Formed from blocks of the highest-density metal they could find, each square was linked to another, creating a necklace decorated with symbols. The device was the transceiver issuing commands and receiving telemetry from his mechanical microns. Kai observed and decoded another data stream, identifying it as Relay’s connection to his avatar.
He felt the microns on his skin, all two hundred and thirty-one thousand, four hundred fifty-two. He breathed in and smelled the acrid scents of metal; he knew with precision the percentage of carbon, manganese, iron, silicon, phosphorus, and sulfur. No, now it was two-hundred and thirty-four thousand, three hundred and eleven. He wondered how he knew that with such precision, his mind took up the task of analyzing itself. The number of brain cells his mind recruited to work became an indelible fact he knew.
When he wondered how he could know how many brain cells he used to analyze the concentration of trace molecules in his lungs, his mind also took up that challenge, creating another thread. To this thread of thought, billions of neurons were dedicated; he knew precisely how many, and what’s more, the secs of spiritual energy required to sense those neurons using his God’s Eye, which he realized was tracking visible light, motion, and spiritual energy. He was carrying all these thoughts on simultaneously, his mind working on all these tasks. He felt like someone overburdened, taking on too much, and he kept adding more, but instead of trying to pile it up into his two arms, he kept growing new arms and hands to handle it.
Even this realization, this awareness he was thinking multiple streams, was a new stream that existed alongside the others. He tried doing prime factorization, cartesian products, elliptical curve functions, and oblex geometry but got bored after completing them in a few seconds. He analyzed the cross-functional neurons used by multiple simultaneous thoughts and traced them back to organic gates helpful in handling simple decision trees.
A flashing amber indicator appeared in the bottom right of his vision. Kai recognized it as the symbol for non-urgent messages. He dismissed it.
Now it was more microns, he calculated the replication rate, the differential between replication and energy expenditure over time, the conversion of raw to refined energy, the time between replication events, the distance between spawned microns, the speed of transference, the time between thought and micron energy processing, the duration of the electron chaining process of his receptor molecules, the synchronicity between electrons in the conversion. On and on, he ramped up his thoughts, analyzing everything and then analyzing his analysis. When he’d resolved all his questions about his mechanical microns and set them to do essential tasks, he turned his mind to his own body.
He knew his weight as a factor of his mass relative to gravity which he could quantify using a standard defined by measuring gravity in real-time between particles with fixed charges. He knew how many cells comprised each of his body's subsystems and how many hairs he had. His hair. He paused to briefly morn the loss of his long hair and noted the even distribution of his new follicles and the short crop of hair that had sprouted up. He could count each follicle, each strand. Now he had less and more; he observed the polarity in metabolic shifts, radiating a change from one energy construction chain to another through every cell simultaneously.
He knew how much energy he had, raw and refined, where and how fast it flowed. He could direct it to move in many ways, making multiple pathways simultaneously. He looked for oxygen and found it, his mind filtering out all other atoms so he could see them alone. He knew how many there were in that instant, and the next how many fewer, as his body shifted to catalyzing oxygen. The numbers were astronomically high in sextillions, but he knew them with precision. He watched as his body produced oxygen, consumed it, and made it again. It went back and forth endlessly, with water flowing in to supply the cells as they were depleted.
He opened his mind to see his whole body at once, to know every structure, every molecule, every cell. He watched the flow of molecules slowly move through his veins; the sugars get absorbed, the minerals utilized. Even the vast weight of observing and quantifying every biological process occurring inside his body in real time wasn’t a challenge. He continued his examination but began considering other vital areas as well; he thought back to his conversation with Ahja and the many questions he posed. One in particular stood out. It was simple but challenging for him to answer.
What is cultivation?
All of Long Yuan was built on cultivation, but what was it? He was taught a cultivator required spiritual energy to refine his body, mind, and soul. What else did he know about cultivation? He’d seen an archive full of different ways to approach cultivation. They all, presumably, required spiritual energy. His mind created new jobs to analyze spiritual energy. What made each type different from one another? What made it spiritual and not just energy? Kai understood energy. He had harnessed it all his life, but it was never spiritual.
That was it. He had never encountered spiritual energy before Long Yuan. Here, in this world, energy was different. He created some threads of thought about that. Here there was ice energy, fire energy, life energy, and so on. He created lines of thought to analyze each unique energy type he considered. What made that energy distinct? What made it the same?
What am I doing? He considered his current state. A part of him understood he was having a singular moment, that the rapid infusion of new mental capacity, combined with the overwhelming amount of new sensory data, had pushed him into a hypercognitive state that made complex associations possible. He discarded this thought as unhelpful and continued to consider cultivation.
Spiritual energy was an animating force. Did one of my instructors teach me that? A new thread was created to consider it. What was the goal of cultivation? To acquire insight into an eternal aspect of oneself, and in doing so, to shed one’s mortality. Textbook. Some described it as finding one’s path, others finding a Dao path, and others as just gaining insight into a Dao. He created threads to consider these.
What did he know of soulforging? How did soulforging allow a cultivator to avoid the final step of gaining insight? What did he know of spirit beasts and how they increased in power. He created thread after thread, considering it all. He thought about his own cultivation method, experience refining his energy, knowledge of advancing his cores, and observations of others. Threads. Dozens and dozens of lines spun out in a grand tapestry to consider every aspect of what he knew of cultivation.
When he could think of nothing else, he stopped and waited for his thoughts to find their end. As each conclusion returned to him, Kai began fitting them together like so many puzzle pieces. A picture began to form.
Baboom. His heartbeat echoed out again.
Refinement. Spiritual Energy. Animating Force. Eternal Aspect. Dao. Path. Core. One by one, each piece was added to the whole. When the last part was placed, Kai took a mental step back and looked at it.
Cultivation. It was simple, elegant, and even beautiful. Like he knew how many pores he had and how many water molecules were inside his body, Kai knew what cultivation was. It was a singular moment of enlightenment. The revelation came to him with such sureness that he didn’t entertain the possibility of being wrong.
He began considering the implications but forced himself to reign in his enthusiasm. From this concept, this singular conception, could he create some testable hypothesis? He spun up thoughts to consider it.
He waited about three one-thousandths of a second before the thoughts came back. Body refining. He hadn’t done it. That caused his spiritual energy to be so damaging to his body that he burned himself to a crisp. An ordinary cultivator went through foundation establishment, where the entire body was refined with spiritual energy before the core foundation realm. Then as one made qualitative improvements in spiritual energy, one’s body would likewise improve. Cultivators could refine their bodies multiple times as they progressed realms.
I have access to an unrefined body, raw and refined energy. That I can work with. But first.
Kai closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he stood on the upper deck of the pagoda in his soul space. He pulled the illuminated lantern from its place before walking to the lab. There he found the broken glass containment unit as he had left it when he pulled the cricket’s soul gem free. He discarded the fractured pieces and set the remaining cricket fragments aside for further study.
With a thought, he rebuilt it, then transferred the new soul into containment.
“If Ahja was right about you,” Kai lowered the brass containment seal, “then I expect you’ll have a gem just as impressive as the emperor cricket.” Kai engaged the X-rays on low power. The red soul vibrated and swelled. As the X-ray’s power increased, the circumference of the soul increased until it fractured into a blur of rotating mass surrounding a larger core. The fragments spun in a blur, indiscernible, until Kai cycled down the X-rays.
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“There you are,” the stones slowed until they circled around a solid core. Shining amidst the rough cut, asymmetric chunks was a perfectly cut red gem. Polished to a nearly perfect sheen, the stone seemed to glow.
Kai disengaged the containment and reached to retrieve the gem. He brought it up to better inspect it, taking a scan of it for later. When Ahja explained what his genetic scan of the spirit beast determined, Kai immediately planned to harvest a soul stone from it.
Now holding it in his hand, he wondered how such a small thing could hold the key to such a significant transformation. He shook his head.
Kai returned to the pagoda deck and, stepping off, floated into space. He transformed into his energy avatar, a golden aura surrounding meridians and cores that shone with radiant gold prismatic energy.
“No mistakes this time,” Kai’s voice resonated with the power of his energy. Focusing on his empty cores, he pressed the energy in his cores back, exposing the socket at their center. He brought the gem to hover over each socket. He only went through two before the stone jumped from his hand and socketed itself. His abdominal core flashed with golden energy before sending out a red pulse, then settling into a brilliant red. The newly socketed core thrummed with power.
He released his grip on his energy, allowing his cores to flow normally before closing his eyes. When he opened them again, he was back inside his pod.
Now for an experiment. He picked a cell on his palm and, with his awareness, analyzed it at the microscopic level. If my hypothesis is correct, my spiritual energy is aligned with a concept of balance, symmetry, or something related. Refining this cell with my raw energy should alter the cell to reduce the resistance to this concept.
Kai rerouted his soul tether through the meridian nearest the cell in his palm, then pulled the flow of energy through it, saturating it, repeatedly, with his raw energy. He watched as the cell was damaged under the constant assault of his powerful energy and marveled at the nearly instantaneous regeneration that followed. That’s the power of the axolotl at work.
Typically, body refinement would have to be slow, done by measures over a long period, in preparation for the final purging of the cell to complete the transformation. With the regenerative powers of the axolotl, Kai was sure he could compress the time needed to refine a cell to moments.
He watched as each time the cell was broken down and reformed, it returned stronger, lasted longer, and was damaged slower. After a few minutes, it remained stable. The energy flowed through it without damaging it. Kai cut the flow and analyzed the cell. He wiped away some residue and peered into the cell's internal structure.
Huh. At first glance, Kai observed no symmetry or balance; the cell still roughly looked the same. But as he continued his analysis, matching organelles, counting minor organelles, and measuring the distance between cellular parts, he was struck with this modified cell's redundancies.
There was more of everything, energy production, protein assemblers, and stronger cellular walls. Then he saw it. It was a change so glaring he wondered how he missed it at first. Inside the nuclear envelope, a pair of nucleoli rotated around each other. Binary nucleoli.
Next step, then. Kai rerouted his raw energy back to a core to continuously refine, then sent his refined energy to the newly refined cell, using the same methodology as before, saturating it over and over. While the raw energy had lost the ability to damage his cultured cell, the new energy could. The cell was continuously broken down and repaired itself, over and over, until after a minute, the destruction slowed to a crawl and then stopped altogether.
Kai sent his energy back to his core before analyzing the cell. The very structure of the cell was re-arranged to have an even distribution of organelles surrounding a perfectly centered nucleus containing two full-sized nucleoli. Hypothesis confirmed.
So, bodily refinement means bringing one’s body into alignment with the animating force inside one’s spiritual energy. This idea of an animated force, a high-level conceptual reality, was referred to in various ways in his cultivation manual, The God’s Eye Art.
Since I’m not eager to burn myself to a crisp again, let’s go ahead and complete the foundation-establishing realm.
Kai wiped his palm off, then took a comfortable meditative position inside his pod. What he knew about the foundation establishment realm could be written in one sentence. He knew bodily refinement targeted central systems, refining one system at a time until they were all done. That was it. He didn’t even know which to start with.
I don’t want to start with my brain just in case I make mistakes early on; I’d prefer it not to be with that. So that leaves out the top two cores. I’ll start from my lowest core and work up from there.
Kai focused on the core in his pelvis, sending energy through the most significant meridians to identify the organs it served.
Starting with my genitals and kidneys, then. He rerouted his raw energy there, bathing the organs in raw power. The pain was unexpected, but he endured. It felt like radiation burns on his inside.
He decided to refine his body in two stages, with his raw energy first and then his refined energy last. That is how he would have done it had he been a typical cultivator. Kai didn’t know enough to take creative liberties with the process. He watched as the organ’s cells were destroyed and rebuilt repeatedly until, after a few long, painful moments, they were no longer damaged by the continued infusions.
Kai frowned. The foul smell of the cast-off residue from his bodily refinement filled the small pod. He re-directed his mechanical microns. Moments later, a couple of ports opened on the sides of the shell, allowing water to enter the chamber where he sat. The water crashed over him, cooling him and washing the filth from him. An exhaust port opened at the top of the shell forcing the water up and out.
He smiled when he realized he wasn’t breathing and didn’t need to. He hadn’t even thought about it after his initial breath.
Once cooled and cleaned, he drained the pod and started again. His abdominal core glowed with ruby red light and was connected to the large and small intestines, the prostate, gallbladder, bladder, and spleen. He purified those organs with raw energy for a few excruciating moments.
He repeated the same water cleansing ritual and refining process as he went up his body. He refined his pancreas, stomach, liver, heart, blood vessels, lungs, muscles, tendons, esophagus, vocal cords, tongue, eyes, pineal gland, pituitary gland, brain, and skeletal system.
He was hungry when he completed refining all of those systems. All his fat stores had been depleted. Kai broke for food, eating from the reserves scavenged by his microns. That meant he ate a well-cooked slurry of starry tiger and bear beast. It wasn't appetizing, but Kai slurped it down like it was his favorite meal.
After washing the meat pudding down with a large drink of water, Kai analyzed his body for any systems he missed by flooding his entire body with his raw energy. That’s when he made his first mistake. Pain shot through his whole body as all his skin and every nerve ending roasted alive for three long agonizing minutes. Still, he persisted. Once the refinement was complete, he collapsed.
Kai flooded the pod with cool water and relaxed for a long time before draining it again. He clenched his fist. His hand snapped closed like an autospanner. He felt amazing. He’d already felt amazing, but now he felt a new strength and more energy. It was indescribably euphoric. He spent a long time analyzing the organs, noticing changes in whole systems and how they became balanced and symmetric.
When he realized he was stalling, he smiled and started again.
In the same order, with only slight changes, Kai refined his body for the second time. He refined all the nerves and skin in each area he targeted, having decided that leaving it all for the end was not a good idea. He fell into a ritual pattern. Refine. Wash. Purge. Eat. Repeat.
When at last, he sent his refined energy throughout his entire body, there was little left unrefined. Just a few missing tendons and small bones; the final refining wave was anti-climatic.
He purged his body and drained the pod. He was done. There was nothing left to do. Kai recalled a memory from during his death. As he sat helpless in his soul space, Kai had promised himself that if he managed to revive his body, he wouldn’t treat the opportunity lightly. He promised himself that he would use every advantage he could.
He’d done what he could. Kai called back his mechanical microns. His army of molecular minions marched onto his wrist and linked together to form a pair of light-gold bracelets. This was an advantage he had that he would abuse if he could. With the last of his microns settled, he finally completed everything.
Kai summoned the dismissed notification from earlier. An amber screen materialized before him.
While you were recovering, we were approached by four cultivators from the Lunar Temple. You will recognize three of them. Using my new avatar, I got them to redirect the water flow here, which should accelerate your recovery.
We are camped up at the rim of the lake. I told them I was your curator, referring to you as the young master. I didn’t give them my name. I haven’t selected one yet. Take your time recovering; I am having fun getting to know them.
Kai smiled. So you are my caretaker. In a way, you are.
The shell of his pod opened, allowing Kai to swim out.
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The golden ferrox watched the Lunar Temple cultivators struggle with the claws Bao had retrieved. The unwieldy oreclaws proved themselves resistant to any damage the four could inflict.
He hopped down and made his way to assist. Halfway to them, a notification appeared, notifying him that his message had been read. Relay turned towards the lake.
“He’s awake.” the golden ferrox informed them.
Bao dropped the claw to the ground and turned to watch. A moment later, her hand came to her chest. She felt a subtle pressure there, inexplicable.
“Do you feel that?” she asked.
Yunfie was gripping her chest also. Song stumbled to the ground, her hand going to her head.
“Yes,” Ai managed. Her brow furrowed as she examined the niggling pressure building in her abdomen. The pressure grew, a light touch becoming a solid force. She felt the weight of it and struggled to remain standing.
From the corner of her eye, she registered Yunfie collapsed to her knees. The pressure continued to increase. The pressure doubled again, making it difficult to breathe. She fell to the ground, the weight pressing her down. It felt like some invisible force was squeezing the life out of her.
“This was a mistake,” she breathed in short gasps. Spiritual suppression. She’d never felt it like this before.
“What’s going on?” the golden ferrox padded over to them, seemingly unaffected.
Bao was the last to fall, her knees crashing against the glassy rock with a crunch.
Relay watched as the four Lunar Temple cultivators slipped into unconsciousness.