Bao’s steps thundered along the sloop's deck as she breathed deeply, quickly moving aft, passed Ai at the helm. The scent of earth and water was in the air, meaning land was close. Arcadia. Bao smiled at the thought of the fortune waiting for her once they unloaded their loot. Soon.
She pulled her sword between her and the raiders. Having deflected one grapnel attempt, she stood ready to do so again. Their ship was locked in a dance with the larger and faster schooner, with only Ai's deft hand at the wheel and Yunfie’s air cultivation to keep them at a distance.
The raider was a sleek two-mast schooner with white fore and aft sails. Painted in dark blues and trimmed with oak, it flew the colors of their faction from their main mast, a black flag with a red trident. Bao recognized it from yesterday’s attack. That skirmish against a smaller vessel ended quickly, with Yunfie and Ai doing most of the work. Afterward, the golden ferrox extracted concessions from them. The next battle would be left to him. This battle. Bao stepped up, preparing to jump the next time they came within range. The stern deck rail bent under her weight.
The sounds of fighting caused Bao’s blood to boil. She could hear the loud clangs, bangs, and occasionally swearing coming from the raider’s ship. Sometimes she made out the tinkling sound of the golden ferrox laughing or his distinct voice using some words she didn’t understand. He is always using strange words.
She glanced up to the top of their mast, to its temporary resident cultivating atop a small metal platform. The sun was behind him, but even without that, he glowed with unbridled power. She thought back to his first attempt to cultivate aboard, and the close call as his presence caused the paint to curl and deck boards to catch fire. Now high above them and protected by a pale-gold platform tenuously balanced on the masthead, he could cultivate without harming everyone or destroying the ship.
“He’s fine. Let him have some fun,” Kai’s voice reverberated powerfully. Bao watched as Yunfie’s cultivation faltered, the vibrations from his voice disrupting the wind. She shook her head and glanced at him again. Is he even human anymore? Soulforgers were strange, part beast, part human, all cultivator. Still, she had to admit, for a soulforger, he was kind. Too kind if she were honest. He didn’t carry himself as a soulforger; he barely had the air of a cultivator.
Only the truly strong can be as they like.
She reluctantly stepped down to the deck. The schooner had eight crew; she could make out that much through the rigging, and the portholes, as they swung around it. This time, the red trident faction sent actual cultivators; some were even armed with spiritual weapons. She watched as the golden ferrox vanished from one location, only to be immediately in another. Translocation, he called it. Another big word.
A small part of her wanted the ferrox to falter so she could fight. Her lips turned down; she knew the raiders had their hands full. Most weapons would be ineffective against the beast’s fur; perhaps destructive lightning energy might damage him, but that was a rare energy to cultivate. She sighed and tightened the leather straps of her left vambrace. Armor wasn’t ordinary among cultivators in her realm, but her father had insisted. Hers was well crafted, tailored, and form-fitting, going under her robes undetected for the most part. Not that it matters if I never get the chance to fight!
She watched a man wearing a bandolier of knives jump overboard to escape the laughing ferrox. Knives. She shook her head. Cutting or piercing is pointless. Use a blunt weapon to stun him, and then you can try…
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It was a peaceful day. Kai relaxed on a small cultivation platform perched atop the mainsail mast. The world moved by slowly beneath him. Every so often, he would slow himself down enough to whisper something or answer a question, but most of his time was spent cultivating, a pastime he was learning to enjoy.
With the world moving languidly, he could accomplish so much more. This, more than anything, felt like a cheat. He had a long list of advantages over the average cultivator and a short list of disadvantages, but this went well beyond that. This changed his life in a way none of those other advantages did. An ordinary cultivator could cultivate eight hours daily, leaving twenty-two hours for meals, work, sleep, and the occasional battle. Kai learned he could stretch that same eight hours into sixty-eight days.
He idly wondered if all middle-rank core formation cultivators had the same experience. No wonder there’s such a difference in strength between ranks. Technically, I can’t transform eight hours of cultivation into sixty-eight days. Spiritual energy, he found, had an upper limit on how fast he could recruit and refine it. That meant that practically he could only increase his cultivation rate by a factor of ten.
Cultivating ten times as much wasn’t what changed his life; what changed his life was having all the time he ever wanted to think. He could consider topics from every angle, dive into every perspective, examine every stray theory, and organize and reorganize thoughts over and over. And he could learn at a prodigious rate.
He was doing it right now, watching the youngest Lunar Temple cultivator Yunfie as she cultivated wind energy. He observed how she created a sympathetic flow within her meridians and pulled her energy through them. She didn’t generate wind from the energy she collected. Instead, she controlled her internal energy in such a way as to draw down the wind around her.
She was speaking with the wind but felt more like children playing. There was something distinctly whimsical and playful about wind energy, and Yunfie could play with it to get what she wanted. When she did cultivate, pulling meager amounts of wind energy into her meridians, the wind seemed excited to be drawn in.
The girl who the wind loved.
There. That’s what I’m talking about. I don’t remember having time to entertain such thoughts before. He briefly considered writing a poem about the girl. His mind recalled experiences with the high-level cultivators at the Celestial Temple. No wonder they somehow seemed elevated above the world if they could all experience the world this way.
Yunfie, young and free,
Wind's whisperer, spirit soars,
Nature's child at heart.
He smiled and watched the wind cultivator, watching her cultivation method. He had time to examine everyone’s cultivation methods. He had time to observe the world around him, notice all the spiritual energy, and interact with and experience it. Kai had time to invent new cultivation experiments, like the one he was practicing. He saturated his body with as much energy as was safe for those around him, pushing that energy out from his many cores into his organs, muscles, bones, tendons, his every cell. Then while he held that energy there, he refilled his cores with new primal energy from his soul tether before refining it.
After refining was complete, he would release the energy from his body back into his cores, overfilling them and slightly expanding them. The process was slowly growing his core capacity.
Kai kept his eyes closed. He could cultivate with his eyes open, but filling his eyes with energy tended to damage the ship where he was looking. He didn’t need his eyes to see, so he kept them closed while still seeing perfectly. Better than perfectly since he could see in every direction around him at once. He’d been practicing this new form of sight for days now. It was starting to come naturally. He moved his awareness over towards the bandit’s ship.
“You having fun over there?” He sent a mental communication.
“Kai, I’m having fun; their weapons are junk. I thought I’d get a decent meal, but all this stuff is low quality,” Relay replied directly to his mind. Thankfully Relay’s mind was more than capable of receiving and transmitting messages at whatever speed he was at. He attributed that to him actually being back in his soul space. Relay, he discovered, was a bit of a mystery.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Kai couldn’t see his spiritual energy at all. He attributed this to golden ferrox’s metallic skin and fur, made from the same material as his pod. Kai retrieved enough of the pale-yellow metal to create an armored breastplate, so at least he had something to wear. Relay ate the rest.
The golden ferrox then slept for a day, nearly doubling in size. Now he was too large to sit comfortably on his head, but he could still hang around his neck, riding on his shoulders comfortably. Kai didn’t find it odd that he couldn’t see Relay’s spiritual energy. Oddly, he couldn’t sense a soul from him either.
Right. That’s another thing I can do now, see the souls of others.
With his soul light, he could see the aura of living souls around the bodies they inhabited. Each of the four Lunar Temple cultivators had a distinctly colored aura. Ai was surrounded by a dark mist, like smoke, Bao had a brilliant green aura, Song’s was a feisty yellow, and Yunfie’s a white translucent aura. Relay had none.
Kai believed it was because Relay wasn’t really in the genetically modified body of the spirit beast. Instead, he was remotely piloting it using some clever virtual reality interface. Still, it was strange to see a living creature with no soul.
Kai opened his eyes momentarily to glimpse the bandit’s craft. He could see the cultivators' motion through the vessel's hull, identifying them all, but he needed a clear line of sight to see a soul. He found three he could see before he closed his eyes.
“Not killing them, I see,” Kai sent the message using their technology-enabled telepathy.
“Why? Should I?” Relay asked in reply.
“No. I didn’t know how much control you had over that form yet; accidents happen.”
Kai released the energy in his body back to his cores, overfilling them. He kept his brain and sensations working at optimal speed. Just when he felt his cores stretch almost to breaking, he pushed the energy back into his body again.
When Bao looked like she was about to join the fray, Kai pushed some of his energy from his mind, slowing him down long enough to speak.
“He’s fine. Let him have some fun,” he whispered. He learned he needed to be cautious with his voice. Was it his throat core? He didn’t know. Kai was learning how delicate everything with low spiritual energy was.
Kai returned to his meditative speed, and the world slowed down again. The wind was calm, the sounds were muted, the colors vibrant. He took a deep breath. He was ready.
He shifted his awareness to his soul space. Arriving at the hub, he stepped lightly down from his dias and looked at the screen. Displayed on its surface was his fourth revision of a yantra. The first three revisions had failed but yielded important data nonetheless. With those failures in mind, he created this.
According to The God’s Eye Art, a yantra was a combination of modifiers constructed together for a specific task. The more specific the job, the more effective and efficient the yantra could be crafted. He composed this yantra to precisely manipulate matter at a molecular level using the data he had already collected about energy cost.
He reviewed it again, double and triple checking it. When he was satisfied it was as correct as he knew how to make it, he moved his awareness back to his body.
“Going to try again,” he sent to Relay.
“Good luck! Oh, this is something good…,” Relay replied.
Kai smiled and concentrated. He sat in Blooming Lotus and brought his left-hand palm up in front of him at about navel height, his right palm down over his left. Hands in position, he sent the commands to build the molecular scaffolding to his microns. The pale-gold bracelet on his left arm shifted, a string of microns stretching between both palms.
With that done, he moved his mind to the yantra, the complex interlocking combination of thirty-four modifiers made to push a singular molecular change into the world. Here goes nothing.
Holding the yantra in his mind, he layered over his meridians that specific intent. This is what I want. The image of the completed yantra blossomed in his mind, and when it looked perfect, Kai released his spiritual energy. His energy flooded all his meridians to complete the picture. A light blossomed between his palms, an implosion of mass and energy. He held his hand fast, forcing the forces to comply.
When the light and heat faded, Kai looked between his palms. There in the center between his palms, a chain of microns dangled. Between the broken segment of microns, a single atom floated. Kai focused down to the level of the atom and explored it. He checked the nucleus, counted the neutrons and protons, and measured the electrons. He’d gotten this far before. But the last time the orbits were wrong, the valences shifted outward. He double-checked every sub-atomic component. When satisfied it was correct, he analyzed the number of microns he’d sacrificed to complete it.
Expensive. He knew it would be. This metal, unknown to him, was the metal that surrounded his soul core. Analyzed and copied from his soul space, this metal was denser than celesium by a factor of four; he expected it to take four times the number of atoms; it cost twice that. So eight celesium atoms can be forged into one… whatever you are, for about - he reviewed the sec cost - he’d drained half his cores.
Still, that means I can create two molecules every five hours. If I don’t mind spending five hours of downtime doing nothing.
Kai did some rough calculations. That means a well-designed yantra can improve the efficiency of molecular manipulation by about two thousand percent.
Kai was begging to see the potential of the Eye of God skill. He just needed to come up with a practical application and practice it.
Not that you aren’t helpful, he turned his attention back to this foreign atom, born into this world for the first time. He collected it with his microns and stored it away in his bracelet. He mentally added this to his daily practice. It was obviously pointless to create a single atom every five hours. He would need to figure out a more efficient process, but it worked. He had built a new metal and introduced it to Long Yuan. Possibly. For all he knew, this element already existed somewhere. With that success, he smiled and relaxed. Now, he could turn his attention to experiments in efficiency. What would a micron assembler for this look like?
“Hey,” Relay sent him, “did you know the keels of these ships are made of metal? It’s tasty too.”
Kai let his energy flow back into their cores. There was room for all of it now that he’d used up so much with the God’s Eye skill. Slowing down, he dropped from the masthead, landing on the deck with barely a sound.
Kai joined Song near the bow. The mysterious masked cultivator was watching wide-eyed as the raider’s schooner floundered. First, the mast tipped violently one way, causing the sails to rip through the wind; the motion threw the helmsmen from the ship, and she vanished overboard with a long scream. The boat righted itself just as quickly and tipped the other way. The deck boards warped and splintered as the hull twisted. Then, without further warning, the ship fell from the sky.
The tattered fore and aft sails billowed against the updraft but were helpless to slow the descent. The forward jib snapped, leaving a flailing sail trailing behind the sleek ship as she slipped into the clouds, disappearing from view.
“Relay?” Kai sent. He stepped to the prow and looked down through the clouds. He could see the ship dropping further and further away.
“He’s gone?” Ai asked, stepping forward, her lips turning down, her eyes growing wide.