After a good sleep the trio of Dark Brotherhood’s founders met in the lab to find a perfectly ghoulish Harvy tidying up with Little Blue running around everywhere madly. The moment he saw James he ran up his leg and bit his arm.
“Ahhh! You little shit!” Once he gave a response, Little Blue let go and started madly running around again. He’d clearly been terribly bored being ignored the last two days and wanted to play.
James let out a sigh and against his better judgement tried to catch Little Blue. Half an hour and two new lightning ball holes in the lab later, Little Blue had finally calmed down and just quietly climbed up to James shoulder and started snoozing.
The group sat down to discuss their futures in more depth and just as they were finishing their discussion Anvil and Song stopped by. Before now, it wasn’t particularly appropriate for Elders to visit on lowly disciples but now despite having hardly any cultivation they could be considered esteemed allies and guests. This meant the Elder duo could come and explore their lab a little as they discussed in more detail the Hall of Forging and Dark Brotherhood’s collaboration.
“How’s preparations to create a seal? Have you created a design yet?”
Song was the first to ask anything, mostly because Anvil, whom normally was so excited, was somewhat dazed. Skay’s lab had a variety of obscure test equipment assembled on the fly that looked hardly safe or operational despite their lights glowing showing readiness to melt, cut, mix or destroy some material, plant, cute harmless creature or person.
Skay could be considered particularly careful for a madman, as almost every corner of his lab contained a hot glowing pit with the words “Caution: test subject disposal” scrawled above them in something suspiciously red, very much resembling blood and written with a person’s bare hands.
James too questioned this when he first saw it but after Skay side-tracked, distracted from or completely ignored his questions on it James stopped asking. Occasionally he thought he heard Skay mumbling “just like soul experiment zero zero one” whenever something he’d created, attacked him or exploded and he had to sweep it into a pit, or fight it in, which wasn’t uncommon when he got into the Gau Clans herb garden and fed something he wasn’t sure about to a creature he also wasn’t sure about.
This greedy and malicious zeal for science resulted in the gradual disappearance of all the other forest hoppers apart from Little Blue, whom James had prohibited Skay from touching without him present.
James was the first to respond as he waved his hands in front of Anvil who appeared to have had a stroke and turned red like he was about to explode as he just watched the tesla coils on the wall jumping great arcs of electricity around the place. Normally Little Blue would play in there when everyone else was busy which no doubt would have resulted in Anvil’s heart actually seizing had he witnessed it.
“Ahh ... Oh, yes we’ve had some ideas, I think we’ve decided on this though.” As he said that he handed a piece of paper with a rectangle about the length of a hand. In the middle of the rectangle was a very poorly drawn english number 7 encircled by an equally appalling drawn Ouroboros made of lightning. When Song looked it over he had a strange expression. Finally he couldn’t contain himself and asked about the significance of the odd ruin and the snake.
“On our previous world this was the number 7. In the folk lore of a certain religion it described 7 major sins. They were pride, gluttony, lust, sloth, envy, greed and wrath. There were also 7 major virtues which I can’t remember for the life of me. Can’t imagine why. Anyway, we intend for our guild to eventually contain 7 core members denoting these aspects. It’s my belief that in this world these sins reflect the true power and driving will of all cultivators. Err ... And the snake eating its own tail is an Ouroboros and is a sign of infinity. Meaning these 7 sins will always exist for as long as time runs forwards. It’s made of lightning because I’m the founder and that’s my most proficient element.”
Anvil finally woke up from his daze and was once again hit with a bombshell. “Wait! Lightning? You mean you have more than one element?”
James gave a nod as he and Jessy began to make some tea. Skay looked to be amusing himself over at a work bench with a whole bunch of random glowing herbs or strange plants.
The numerous glowing substances he’d poured into Harvy a few days ago appeared to have multiplied now and whenever the lights in the lab were off this workbench shined with a rainbow of colours.
“Tea?” Jessy asked the Elders. Song and Anvil both gave a nod. James sat down on a chair they’d flogged from the mansion somewhere. “So how does this seal creation work? You said you needed me to create a design and also need me present to forge it?”
Song and Anvil were still processing their shock at a double wind/lightning element. They both were now somewhat more accepting of letting the steppers go in their hearts. They could never contain James here, it would be a true waste of his talent. To assist someone so talented will only help their clan in the distant future.
Not to mention this lab. If this was what they’d set up in what... 6 days? Then what would they have created in 6 years or 600 years? They didn’t realise that a great deal of this equipment was the debris they hauled back from the Gateway site.
Actually, they could barely tell what half of it did but the magnitude of such a scene was still enough to slow there motions. As people who created magic artefacts and weapons they could tell this equipment wasn’t just here for show.
“Elders?” When he saw them both in deep thought, he grew a bit worried. ‘They aren’t planning on reneging on their words and forcing us into submission just because I revealed double elements are they?’
“Ahh. Oh yes, sorry. I’m just surprised. Double elements are rare. Even in our entire empire there may only be a small elite group of other double affinity cultivators. You truly were destined for greater things than our little Gau city. We just hope you remember our oaths and kindness should the time ever come that we must call on you.” Song let out a sigh when James called out.
“Oh and the seal. Hmmm ... Well let’s say that your soul is necessary for the creation of the seal. Essentially the material used to create it comes from a fairly rare beast known as the One Heart beast. By carving your seal from it’s horn and mixing its blood with your fresh blood, along with holding the seal, then you can bond your soul to it and by extension bonding your soul to whatever it represents.
“That’s why, guild masters, sect leaders or clan heads generally remain in that position for life. When you swear in guild members they will be swearing to the seal and not yourself. Even when you’re not nearby, if someone makes an oath to your guild in front of someone from your guild, you will know. This is actually one of the most complicated artefacts we can create and it requires hundreds of intricately carved array patterns. There’s actually quite a number of different seals and ways to make them, but we only can only produce this one.”
At the mention of something interesting he’d never heard of Skay perked up from whatever he was working on. At the same moment he poured a little too much of something labelled as ‘unknown 15’ onto a little vine that had been sitting in a pot. The moment he realised his lapse, it was already too late as the vine rapidly grew out from the pot and started whipping violently around.
Skay was struck back and Harvy and Jessy had already run to a wall with a rack of shovels and machetes labelled ‘lab accident fixer’. Harvy collected a weapon and ran towards the vine but Jessy had already leapt through the air like a barbarian women and slashed off a dirty great vine.
Harvy then joined in to start hacking away until the plant couldn’t keep growing at the rate they were dismembering its limbs. Once it only had a few feet left on a handful of vines, Jessy launched forward and gave the pot an excellent 3 point kick and it shot towards a furnace pit in the corner.
For the whole ordeal, Song and Anvil just stared dumb founded while James calmly poured their tea. Never in their few hundred years of life had they seen someone able to aggravate a Soft Vine to such an extent it tried to kill something.
The whole scene of Jessy and Harvy’s practised execution of said normally harmless spirit plant led the two Elders to question just what sorts of abnormal things they’d been creating in the little lab. If it was anything like this they may need to be slightly more apprehensive about letting them set up a lab in the inner city.
After this whole incident, Skay climbed back up off the ground, gave his lab coat a few pats and straightened himself up. Then pulled a chair over and poured himself some tea, like that whole thing was just an everyday occurrence here and nothing to be concerned about. Finally he asked. “What are these array patterns exactly?”
Anvil finally started and awoke, then with a wry smile at what he’d just witnessed he explained. “By now you should be aware that spirit energy is everywhere and in everything. Array patterns are a means to harness the spirit energy of the world into a confined area and is usually used as a means for advanced law manipulation. The monolith for example, is covered in obscure array patterns that no one can understand and all attempts to alter or study the monoliths have ended in failure. A long time ago a group wanted to try and build more to cover the eastern continent that is widely considered barbaric because it’s never had any monoliths and the majority of people living there are from sects or clans that don’t speak common.
“Haah ... But I have digressed. Essentially array patterns are a means to channel spirit energy for very particular uses. Because they’re ancient and not wide spread, meeting someone skilled with them is rare and it’s even more rare to meet one that would want to pass their knowledge on to anyone. The seal is only a lower level array magic and our clan only won it through auction in the Empire’s capital.”
Skay and James we’re both lost in thought until Skay looked at James and then James looked at Jessy. Jessy was confused for a moment when everyone started looking at her. When James gave a nod towards the Elder pair to suggest something, she cottoned on.
“Ahhh ... I see, well ... Um if these array patterns are so rare what would it take to trade for all your knowledge on them. Let’s throw a ballpark figure out and offer you...” Jessy looked around the lab for a second then she thought for a moment. “If we offer to sell you the means to create electricity ... Ahh, artificial lightning. We won’t sell a method but a device. If you can reverse engineer it then more power to you. What do you say?”
James and Skay were both satisfied with this. It was an eventuality that they would trade them something like this for resources later. The fact that it was sooner rather than later didn’t bother them. They had an entire world of more advanced technology they could create and sell to the Gau Clan. Actually they were quite pleased with Jessy, they were both thinking of selling the broken arc cannon for them to play with, even if they didn’t particularly want to. They never even considered starting lower than that, such was their terrible negotiating ability.
Anvil and Song both looked at each other having a sub-vocal chat. Song started off. “It’s a very tempting offer. We only have a few dozen lessor patterns we understand anyway. The clan ancestor was the only one who really knew what any of the other patterns did, or had the knowledge to use them.”
Anvil thought silently for a moment then replied. “I agree. We know they don’t intend to step into any of our business so it wouldn’t hurt to let them see our research knowledge. Like you said, even we can’t explain the older arrays we have. What if we have them share anything they discover from looking them over? That way we get a lightning device and can learn anything new they learn about them.”
Song turned to Jessy with his ever present slight smile and gave a nod. “We accept, however we have an extra condition. Anything new you learn from your research we’d like shared with us.”
Jessy quickly agreed with these terms. They then discussed other future co-operation between the guild and the clan. Once the tea was cold James agreed to go with them tomorrow to the Hall of Forging then once the seal was complete they would have a signing ceremony.
Once the Elders left, James turned to Skay. “Old Madman, how much longer do you need for the breathing techniques?”
Skay scratched his head then went to a computer and began typing. “It’s actually even more difficult than I thought. From discussions I’ve had with cultivators in this universe the breathing techniques aren’t even about a pattern of breathing, but a method of channelling the flow of refined spirit energy through the body in a set pattern then having it return to your spirit realm. They envision their spirit realm in their Dantian, just above the waste. When they discuss a breathing technique they’re not discussing your lungs breathing but the spirit realm in their Dantian breathing out spirit energy into your body and breathing it back in along with primal spirit energy.”
Skay started to madden as he slapped the bench. “They follow some fucking superstitious ancient Chinese mumbo jumbo bullshit about following fucking meridians and breaking through bloody acupuncture points, which just makes it all the more difficult to discern how exactly their stupid fucking breathing pattern and their piece of crap spirit energy path is effecting their control.”
Skay then started getting rather riled up and swearing about meridians and Chinese acupuncture. After a solid ten minutes of swearing he calmed down enough for James to understand him again, at which point he questioned. “So explain to me why this is making it so difficult. Can’t we just design a system that utilizes every ahhm ... Meridian path? and just create a generalised breathing technique?”
Skay took off his glasses to wipe them and then pressed a button on the computer allowing it to resume spewing out continuous random drivel across the screen. Once he’d finished he put his glasses back on and repositioned his Spider Eyes then sat down. After signalling Harvy to make some new tea he continued.
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“My boy, it’s not so simple as that. Meridians as they call them, are an imagined system the ancient Chinese used to try and describe the flow of life energy or some such crap through a person’s body. It has no bases in real medical science therefore we have no way to speed up the computation as we did with our universal meditation technique by using information on meditation from our universe. Apparently just flooding your body with spirit energy and trying to recall it into your spirit realm has the least effectiveness and is almost pointless. We have no way to fucking measure it or discern what exactly it’s doing or how in the fuck it’s doing it when it runs around inside you!”
At this point Harvy poured fresh tea for Skay and James sat down to enjoy a cup as he began to consider this problem. Jessy who was also somewhat interested sat down to discover what she could about the one piece they were missing from their cultivation. As she began to think about the problem, she asked a question to herself aloud. “I wonder what other cultivators with rare elements do at this stage. Surely breathing techniques must have come from somewhere?”
Skay clicked his tongue. “Not just a pretty face after all. Your right, I was also curious and was told by Hao that normally at later stages in cultivation a person develops their own breathing technique and meditation techniques. In fact they often begin developing their own martial techniques well before then. He couldn’t say what other rare element users did in their early stages though, because he’s never met one.”
James frowned slightly. “How do they develop their own? If they can’t accurately measure its effect, do they just randomly pass their spirit energy through millions of different patterns until it feels like it’s doing what they want it to do?”
Skay nodded. “Most likely that’s exactly what they do. I wouldn’t be surprised if these savages just sit around for hundreds of years meditating in different ways, to try and develop meditation techniques.”
James shook his head. “Well I don’t want to wait around hundreds of years to try and find something that works. Old madman what if we measured brain activity while trying different patterns?”
Skay lifted an enquiring eyebrow and gave James a look suggesting he explain his thoughts.
“When we measured Harvy during his breakthrough to True Spirit Realm, his beta brain waves which are his consciousness leapt up to match his alpha waves. Which is the gateway subconscious we call our spirit realm. If these two levels are feeding and matching each other at true spirit realm then most likely increasing one will increase the other. Your meditation technique, for an example, allows you to enter your spirit realm and increases the brain power of your spirit realm, or rather your alpha waves.
“I recken your meditation technique and breathing technique essentially do the same thing, but in different ways. Perhaps the flow in which your spirit energy takes is like muscle control for your spirit realm. The more you practise with it the better it gets, which is how it increases your ability to control it. Maybe the more complicated a pattern we can make with it and consciously repeat, the more it learns to properly control spirit energy outside of the spirit realm.
“It makes me question though, why does each element have different techniques for meditation and breathing? You’ve said meditation techniques are filled with specific knowledge that a cultivator tries to learn to help understand their law. Since we don’t need that, the meditation techniques could be simplified by your computer to a level that just allows us to enter our spirit realm. When we’re in that state we naturally have high alpha brain waves which is why we can draw primal energy in and control spirit energy more easily. On the other hand, breathing techniques have no such laws, so maybe they’re specific to an element for some other reason?”
James took a brief moment to stop and sip his tea before continuing. He was actually rather surprised at his ability to articulate his thoughts on the subject and could only assume it was the assistance of his spirit realm with his conscious minds operation. After this distraction he continued.
“As a side note, when I envision a part of my body being empowered or spirit energy flowing out of my body it just appears there. It doesn’t flow from anywhere and after arriving just ... I guess dissipates once I stop thinking about it. I don’t have a place it comes from because I think of the spirit realm as an intangible, imagined place and so spirit energy isn’t limited in how it comes or goes in my body and just does whatever the fuck it likes to achieve the goal I’ve set for it. Like making my arm faster or my perception faster it just appears in my arm or brain then just as quickly disappears.”
Skay’s eyes widened somewhat. “Oh? ... Oh! Hahaha I’ve been a fucking idiot! Since I asked Hao I’ve been envisioning it coming from this Dantian place. To think I’d allow some superstitious nonsense from these hicks to limit myself! Boy do you realise this changes everything? We’ll have to develop our own techniques anyway. Because if we envision it this way, it’s not limited to flowing through a certain path. Instead we will have to develop a method in which it appears and disappears in a certain way.”
Skay jumped up spilling his tea across the table and ran to his computer. “You know what the most difficult thing in creating a breathing technique was for multiple elements? It’s limited by the number of elements you can control at one time. If you want it to cycle through a set pattern in your body you have to cycle them one at a time and the effects it produces are limited significantly. If we use your method of envisioning our spirit realm, we can create a pattern that almost instantly cycles through your elements, increasing the effect of ‘breathing’. The only thing is ... How does it return to mirror the act of breathing?”
James closed his eyes for a moment and controlled his spirit power to pump into only a finger on his hand. Instead of just forgetting about it and letting it dissipate he instead tried to command it to return to his spirit realm. After a moment of his mind trying to process a new sensation he felt his energy return to his spirit realm. Not only that, he could intuitively sense that for a brief instant his rate of refinement jumped slightly.
When he opened his eyes he saw everyone else doing the same thing. The first person to open his eyes was Harvy who had a deranged fanatical expression. “Truly the Great Evil Overlord. Your methods are beyond my understanding but this envisioning without a spirit realm is truly godlike. I feel no delay in my spirit energy control now, as if no longer being limited by my meridians and unbroken acupuncture points.”
Jessy looked like she hadn’t experienced anything particular spectacular, as she just opened her eyes calmly and drank some tea. Clearly she was much like James in that she didn’t envision spirit power coming from anywhere and it always just appeared.
Skay finally opened his eyes with a strange gleam. Then instead of typing further he sat down heavily. He gave James a peculiar look. “Boy I wouldn’t hate a chance to figure out how your brain ticks. Why not donate your brain to science should you ever meet an accident?”
James could tell the old madman was being serious and his face became stone. He then turned to Jessy. “Jessy, I’ll help you unlock another element on the condition that should I ever die, you will cremate me immediately!”
To James their little side project with Jessy was less important than himself. If that madman got a hold of his corpse then it would be no small certainty that Skay would find some way to raise him from the dead. James simply couldn’t let that come to pass. The last thing he wanted was to become another Harvy, or worse than whatever Harvy currently is.
Jessy’s eyes widened when she heard James mention getting a new element. She was so excited at the prospect she could barely contain herself. Although she’d come her current spirit energy as a part of her she was so excited she didn’t even think to look into the possibility that James knew for quite a while how to unlock other elements.
After a brief moment of explaining their theory on how unlocking new elements was dependant only on how you envision your energy, Jessy had unlocked water element without even needing the stick. Her water wasn’t a calm flowing water like many cultivators envisioned the laws of water, instead hers was violent and acted like it was under absurd levels of pressure. Being a hydraulic fitter, that was the state of liquid she was most familiar with. That wasn’t to say she couldn’t control it like flowing water but rather she preferred it as she’d first envisioned it.
Before she even mentioned gaining more, James stepped in to stop her. “We don’t know the effects of accumulating multiple elements yet. I should warn you that I have three elements and I already feel somewhat more restrained when I try to control them in my spirit realm. I get the feeling that there may be a limit to the number your subconscious mind can assist you to support.
“Also since Harvy can’t unlock new elements now, we’re convinced that they can only be unlocked at the spirit barrier realm. We intended to unlock more earlier but I’m now glad circumstances limited us in the sense that we now understand it may be dangerous. Perhaps it’s only because I lack the control yet to sustain three elements but I feel we need to wait and do some tests before we try and gather more than three.”
He then stood up and walked towards the operating table. “Old madman hook me up to your brain scanner. I want to try something.”
As Skay’s eyes lit up with a mad light James added another sentence that crushed any weird ideas he may have been building up to trying. “Old goat, if you try to stick anything into me I’ll let you play with Little Blue next time he gets bored.”
“Humph! Can’t handle real science!” Grumped Skay as he placed a mesh helmet on James then flicked the monitor on. It had 4 wavy lines and one flat line.
James watched the monitor as he flooded his body with lightning element. Then wind and finally plasma. He didn’t use plasma much because it made his nerves feel like they were on fire so he avoided practicing with it like he did with the other two.
Each time he released a different spirit energy, the magnitude of his alpha and beta waves jumped around, interestingly the greatest reaction came from his Plasma element and not his lightning element like he’d expected.
He then briefly entered his spirit realm, then jumped back out after thirty seconds. He didn’t trust his body in meditation to be left too long in the same room as Skay, lest the madman get any strange ideas. When he jumped back to his body he noticed that his alpha and beta brain waves had momentarily leapt up almost triple of what they had when just empowering his body.
He began to randomly send spirit energy from each element to different areas of the body and pull any unused energy back to his spirit realm. After cycling through his elements and different parts of the body he looked at the lines showing his conscious mind and spirit realm. He noted that generally they both flared in magnitude when using spirit power and that occasionally his beta waves would jump to almost the same magnitude as his alphas.
“Old madman. Is there a way to see the difference in average magnitude before and after I’ve practiced breathing? I suspect it will have to be accurate down to at least ten decimals.”
Skay moved to his computer then started typing. After a brief moment he looked at James with an excited expression. “Boy, it looks like you’re onto something. The magnitude of activity after your playing around has increased by a tiny fraction. With this equipment I can only measure to 7 decimals but that whole moment of ‘breathing’ has increased you activity by one one-millionth.”
Jessy had a confused expression. “Why do you sound so excited? One one-millionth is like... 6 decimal places right? That’s nothing.”
James grinned slightly. “It may seem like nothing, but consider this. That’s one one-millionth in what, 2 minutes of playing around? If we could make a proper technique it may be dramatically higher. But the main point is that there’s 1440 minutes in a day. If we sleep for six hours that’s err... 1080 minutes left. Now consider how long these people cultivate for. Harvy’s the same age as me and has only just entered the true spirit realm with 9 years and a great deal of hardshhh ... Lets call it assistance.
“Elder Gau’s lived for hundreds of years in order to achieve the spirit palace realm. Imagine how many years of life a cultivator in a higher realm has lived. If we can increase our alpha wave strength by one one-millionth in 2 minutes then in a year we could achieve something like ahhh...”
James cupped his chin a moment then Skay interrupted. “Firstly its important to know that brainwave activity like this is measured in microvolts. Which is one one-millionth of a volt. Normally, alpha activity is between 20 and 200 microvolts. Beta activity on the other hand is generally measured between 5 and 10 microvolts. When Harvy stepped into true spirit realm, both his beta and alpha waves matched in magnitudes and increased to nearly the limit of this measurement at just short of 200.
“I’m actually surprised the brains of cultivators don’t explode from heat. I can only assume that at that level your subconscious is protecting your brain by using spirit energy as some kind of insulation or cooling. Regardless of why it doesn’t kill you, the fact remains that over a hundred years this level can be raised by double the level at which we normally measure it. Once again that assumes the increase remains constant. That means you’ll be measuring alpha and beta brain waves between 200 and 600 micro volts by that time.”
James gave a nod. “Precisely. It may not be much for short term but if you can train yourself to do it even when your not thinking about it ... Like breathing, then you could essentially raise your level of control dramatically. From what we know, I suspect that moment of enlightenment Harvy had when merging with his true spirit is actually his spirit realm trying to teach his conscious mind how it controls spirit energy. This way not only is the conscious mind controlling spirit energy but it’s still gaining assistance from the spirit realm. Harvy, when you merged with your true spirit describe again what it was like.”
Harvy thought for a moment then replied to his dark lord’s commands. “Master it felt like I grew to understand more than I ever had in my life. Like all the questions I’ve ever had became clear but at the same time, although my control became stronger, I don’t think about it any more than I did before and I haven’t learnt exactly how spirit energy is controlled.”
James thought to himself for a bit. “Perhaps I’m wrong? I had assumed that the magnitude of the brainwaves on the conscious level had increased but perhaps it was the operation of the spirit level increasing in frequency to the same level as the conscious mind?”
Skay’s eyes brightened somewhat and he voiced his rapidly forming thoughts. “Boy that’s not a wrong assumption. This equipment is vary roughly constructed and can’t measure to the depth that it can differentiate parts of the brain. Perhaps the spikes we see showing both frequencies having higher magnitude isn’t because the brain waves of the conscious mind are increasing in magnitude. It’s more likely the brain waves of the spirit realm have increased in frequency. It’s surely computing thousands of things in order to assist in the control of spirit energy.”
Jessy had once again been mostly lost by the conversation and looked to James who appeared to have just had an epiphany of some sort. After the short time since they’d explained how to gain a new element she’d come to the realisation that James most likely new how she could escape her current element back since he discovered the wind element.
Instead of exploding she decided to just hold onto it till she needed it. She was now somewhat invested in the discussion because it was about how cultivation worked. “James not all of us have such a disturbed mind as you two. Could you help me understand exactly what your talking about?”
James pulled the mesh helmet off and while in his usual thinking pose sat back down. “Well, hmmm, how do I explain this to the challenged individuals? Ah, okay, so basically you don’t need to worry about the brain waves and such, just consider it this way. Your thoughts and stuff like when you think about sex, which no doubt is endlessly, or when you try to encourage your spirit power to do something are all done by your conscious mind. However it can’t handle certain things, like all the movements you need to take to throw a ball. It only tells your body to do it. Your subconscious then goes and calculates all that nonsense like bending the arm, holding the fingers together and so on.
“Basically what we’ve been discussing is that when you tell your spirit energy to do something your subconscious or rather the part between your conscious and subconscious which is your spirit realm, is jumping in to do all that boring calculating stuff. When you reach true spirit realm it’s constantly doing it. Probably because if it stops it’ll be engulfed by the tidal wave of your spirit energy. All you need to understand though is that the boss part of your brain sais “do this” with your spirit energy and your subservient part which is your spirit realm goes “yes sir!”
Finished with his childishly demeaning explanation he took his cup of tea and had a sip. Jessy looked mad, but if she was being realistic it was easier to understand this way. Those two oddities that seemed to live for this stuff could worry about the boring things as long as they simplified for her. Every time James was a dick, she just added another mental note and patiently waited for an opportunity to make him suffer. That was the cycle of karma after all. After a deep breath she just smiled sweetly which made James slightly worried, normally she’d have reacted to his goading by now.