Kaz needed to find a way to allow more power to leave his core, without breaking it completely in the process. He decided to focus on the smaller, shorter shards first. They should be the safest ones to pull out, and with Li’s help, he could take his time to recover after each sliver. Once he was ready to try again, he first had Li slowly release her grip on the shell, making sure that the damage wasn’t getting any worse. So long as he didn’t try to force his core to produce more ki, but only used the natural flow, everything seemed to stabilize again, so he proceeded.
It only took a dozen small tugs to reduce him to a quivering, sniffling mess, and he decided that was enough for now. He knew what he needed to do, and there was no hurry to do it. Besides, he was already producing noticeably more ki, which put more pressure on his channels, and the sheaths around them. It was almost second-nature by now to maintain those sheaths, but he knew that he could still become distracted and let them slip. More ki meant more power, but it also meant more damage more quickly, and if he did get distracted, it would probably be at the worst possible moment.
Satisfied, he let his body slowly recover from the pain while he examined his core more carefully. The pieces he’d moved had been the ones that only stuck out above the surface of the core a little bit. They were more even with the others now, and ki flowed from them in a brilliant, colorful stream, merging with the rest of his cycle.
Kaz was turning away, ready to disengage his inner sight and finally get some sleep, when something glittered, catching his gaze. He turned toward it, focusing, and instinctively pushed more ki into his vision.
The ki exiting his core looked the same as it had a moment before, but there was something strange happening where the channel fed unused ki back into his cycle. It took him a moment, but he finally figured out what it was.
Kaz had struggled for years with too much ki, which led to it overflowing his core and causing strange things to happen if he didn’t shunt it off into living things around him. Since meeting Li and acquiring the seed, he’d been able to feed the excess into them, eventually achieving a balance between what he was producing and what he needed, so he didn’t have so much extra. What there was, he usually used himself, pushing it into his eyes, ears, and muscles during fights, or when he needed to see or hear something his base senses weren’t strong enough to pick up.
Now, however, the link between his ki and Li’s was stable. She didn’t need any more, and he was afraid if he forced the bond between them to widen, he might even hurt her. The thread between himself and the seed was tenuous, since it was hidden in the crevice outside the den. He tried, but it was too narrow, and couldn’t accept any more ki.
Which left him with far too much. The newly expanded flow was returning to his core, seeping in through the crevices in the shell of mana, and he could tell that soon the space inside would fill up and start pushing on the shell, just like the ki in his channels constantly attempted to leak out.
He had three obvious options. First, he could try to use up the extra power, pushing it into nearby plants and animals just as he’d always done, reducing the amount of ki within him to as little as possible, so it took a while to refill. The problem was, that would reduce him to nothing more than a normal kobold the majority of the time. He’d be too weak to protect himself and Li, leaving them at the mercy of others.
The second option was to try to push the slivers of his core back in, at least until he achieved balance again. That was possible, but he wasn’t sure what would happen if he tried it while his core was already too full. This was the option that appealed to him the least, not only because it would probably hurt, but because it seemed riskiest.
Third, of course, was his original idea of creating and maintaining a coating of ki like the one Li had used to hold everything together while he worked, keeping the ki inside the shell just as he did with his channels. The problem was, while letting ki seep out of his channels just resulted in him collapsing, forgetting to hold his core together would likely result in instant, painful death.
Kaz stared at his core, mind racing. If he left right now, he should have enough time to find a patch of moss or lichen, or, better yet, head straight to the Copperstriker’s water cave and push the extra power into the glow-worm colony. There would be hundreds of the little creatures, allowing him to spread out the power among them enough that it shouldn’t be noticeable. That would give him enough time to decide on a more permanent solution.
He was just gathering himself to rise when a fourth possibility occurred to him. Lianhua had mentioned that cultivators grew stronger by learning to compress their ki so it fit inside the space they had, rather than increasing the size of that space. Could he compress his ki so it would fit inside the mana shell?
Could he treat ki like a fungus, made of a spongy material that he could squeeze in his fist? But ki wasn’t solid, either soft or hard, and the image of it as something he could crush with physical strength wouldn’t form. Ki was more like a liquid, except that it seemed to actually be purified mana, which came from the air. Was ki a gas, then, like the air they breathed, and the odoriferous fumes that could sometimes be found in tunnels and caves when they were first opened after being unused for a long time? But while it was easy to imagine something solid being squashed so it could take up less space, neither liquid nor gas could do the same.
Or could they? In the mid-levels and the Deep, there were sometimes warm pools, flowing from cracks within the rock itself rather than seeping down from above. These pools could be pleasantly warm or hot enough to cook any kobold foolish enough to fall into one, but one thing was universally true; the water smelled bad and wasn’t safe to drink.
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Once, shortly after entering the mid-levels, when Kaz’s father was still alive, Ghazt had been training his son while Oda taught Katri back in the den. Ghazt had shown Kaz several plants that didn’t grow in the Deep, then stopped, sniffing the air.
Kaz remembered the warm silver eyes watching him as Ghazt crouched down beside him. “Do you smell that?”
Kaz had sniffed, wrinkling his nose against the faint stench. It smelled like sulfur, which was a pretty color, but smelled really bad. He nodded.
Ghazt reached out and ruffled Kaz’s fur, flopping his ears playfully. “That’s a gas. You can’t see it, but you can smell it, and it tells you there may be something dangerous nearby.”
Kaz’s eyes had widened, and he whispered, “What is it?”
The big blue kobold stood, chuckling. “Nothing that will come to get you. You remember that hot pool near our old den? The one I used to boil jiyun?”
Kaz nodded again, and his father went on.
“My old tribe found that pool. My father told me the story. A long, long time ago, before the Deep was the Deep, they were digging out a vein of iron when they smelled sulfur. They wanted sulfur for something.”
He grinned down at Kaz. “I see the question on your face, and I asked my father the same thing. What did they want sulfur for? The stuff is mostly useless except to stink up a den. He didn’t know either, so I can’t tell you.”
Kaz’s ears drooped, and his father’s big, warm hand stroked them gently before tugging on one.
“Anyway, they went after that smell, hoping to find a good source of sulfur, but it seemed like the scent was coming from a tiny crack. Of course, they set to work, digging it out, but when the leader’s pick finally broke through, he was instantly blown back as the cavern beyond exploded.”
Kaz yipped in disbelief, but Ghazt nodded. “It’s true. Those hot water pools release gasses that can build up in enclosed spaces. The pressure inside gets higher and higher, and then if some fool of a kobold opens it up, all the gas inside comes rushing out. That gas plus a spark thrown from an iron pick striking iron ore equals an explosion that killed almost everyone in the area. A few survived to tell the tale, and now when we smell sulfur, we make sure not to bring fire anywhere close until we’re sure where the smell is coming from.”
Kaz looked at their firemoss torches, and Ghazt patted him again. “That’s right, pup. We need to turn back until a female can come this way and check it out. That is, if your mother thinks it’s even worthwhile to bother. She’s going to declare luegat on the Gorebellies in a few days, and once we win, we’ll be back in the Deep, even if only by a level.”
Even then, Kaz had already seen his mother’s overambitious plans come crumbling down more than once, and he’d leaned closer to his father. “Will we really win this time? I want to go home.”
Ghazt’s face had stilled, and his voice grew harsh. “Never say that. Never question a female’s decisions, especially your mother.” He grasped Kaz’s chin and turned his face up so his silver eyes could stare into his son’s blue ones. “No matter what you think, keep your mouth shut. Never question. Do you understand?”
Kaz shook his head, shaking off the memory. He hadn’t thought of those days in years. Honestly, he’d nearly forgotten his father’s face, much less his voice. Had seeing his own reflection in Lianhua’s mirror been enough to bring Ghazt’s face back so clearly, or was it something about having more ki flowing through him?
Either way, the memory was more of a warning than a help. Right now, Kaz pulling ki from his core was like the miner using his pick to break the wall. The ki contained inside was under too much pressure, and it would blow out, exploding in the process. Which meant Kaz needed to reduce the pressure, right?
But what if he didn’t? What if he increased it instead? What if he did allow it to build up, creating more pressure inside the core, rather than less? Wasn’t that how the smelly gas in his father’s story had been compressed? It made no sense, and yet everything in him said that this was the right answer. He needed more ki in his core, and he just needed to make sure the ‘cavern’ didn’t explode while he did it.
Kaz looked at Li. “Can you force my ki to stay inside my core? Not for long. But I think I need the pressure to build up. More than it ever has before.”
Li hesitated, her eyes spinning from golden to pure white. Then she nodded her head.
Kaz felt the shell begin to crack.
“Do it.”
The full force of Li’s stubborn, fierce will clamped down on Kaz’s core, and his body spasmed as he gasped for air. Li’s claws caught in his fur, pulling her up onto his chest as his back arched, joints popping.
Blackness began to choke the edges of Kaz’s vision, but his core continued to churn, producing ki from whatever source it drew from. Kaz could see it, there, just inside the mana shell, and as it thickened, the colors darkening toward a hyper-pigmented black, he could finally see that the shards had disrupted its spin.
Whether it was a core or one of the human’s dantians, they were always spinning. Even the one in Raff’s chest that held wild mana spun, at least a little. Kaz was sure that his core had once done so as well, but now the flow was split as it traveled through and around the splintered interior of the core.
But right in the middle, where no shards remained, there was an open space. Here, and here alone, he could sense a small amount of ki still spinning.
He lost his vision first, then his hearing, and finally his sense of smell. He sank inward, focus tightening on that one, small space. The one place where everything still functioned exactly as it was supposed to, even though it was also the one place which completely lacked any semblance of a core.
And he spun. Like a pup with a round stone, he spun in place, both the spun and the spinner, feeling everything close in around him. The pressure built, the last thing he could sense, other than the eternal revolution. Faster and faster as more ki came from everywhere and nowhere, and the pressure mounted, and he could barely breathe, but then he wasn’t breathing at all, and everything…
Compressed.