“What should I do with you now?” I asked as the little rat stared at me. I doubted it could understand my words. The creature had barely any Qi in it right now, nowhere enough to have a mind capable of thinking proper thoughts.

Kneeling on the floor I set my hand with the rat in it down and the rat squeaked once, shivering in place as it stared at me. Perhaps in surprise that it was still alive. Making sure to not make any sudden movements, I took out my Qi refilling pill, and brought it near the rat.

“I know you like this, go ahead. Take a bite,” I said, despite knowing it could not understand me. But something about a fuzzy little creature being terrified of its life in my hand just made me wish to talk in a soothing manner to it.

The little rat’s nose twitched, as it inspected the pill for a while before it quickly began to nibble at it. I let the rat go, keeping my hand nearby to quickly grab it if it tried to escape.

“Stay there. Got it?” I said, infusing my words with Qi. A neat trick I’d learnt while studying. The rat’s Qi pulsed in response and I took that as an acknowledgement.

I moved nearby. Going through the textbooks I’d been given by the Old Man before I quickly found the one mentioning spirit animals. A quick read confirmed my thoughts to be true. The rat was a spirit animal.

I stared at the little rat, still eating the pill. From what I knew, occasionally, animals could gather Qi and form a core in their bodies. The majority of spirit animals were born with Qi, but some could gain one further in their lives as well. And at a high enough cultivation realm, they could take human forms as well. Typical cultivation stuff.

I didn’t care much about the human part, though the process itself was something I’d love to study, but my interest lay in another area entirely. Their ability to smell spirit herbs.

Spirit animals were uncannily good at finding spirit herbs, usually found near areas filled with them. And the rat, being a, well, rat. I suspected if I could tame it then it could completely solve my spirit herb problem and remove my dependency on Su Lin.

“I wonder if you’ll stick around,” I said out loud to the little creature, before digging out some of the other unfinished pills that had failed. They still contained qi in them and were made of herbs, nothing that would harm the creature. The rat’s nose twitched once more as it shot towards the pill in my hand, grabbing it as it began to devour the treat.

I smiled, petting the rat on its furry little head. It squeaked once, before it continued to devour the pill like the greedy rat it was.

“You wouldn’t happen to know how to shoot lightning right?” I said to the rat, who turned towards me for a moment, and returned to its pill soon when it couldn’t decide what I meant.

I shook my head, setting my jokes about electric rats aside for the moment, as I turned my attention back to my notes.

My little project that I’d so far been working on was a standardised refining process to create a Qi refilling pill. The first goal was reducing the time of refining, which tended to be around fifteen minutes to half an hour of time. And that variation was nuts. You don’t cook something for fifteen minutes more and get the same results, you just don’t.

So I looked away from the physical, and tried to delve into the magical. Here was where things got rough. To understand magic, I’d first have to understand Qi. And I had no idea whatsoever about how Qi worked. I could feel the Qi in my dantian, and I could even draw it out and use it. The only technique to directly apply Qi that Lu Jie knew was the basic technique given to all outer sect disciples of the Cloudy Peaks sect.

Serene Mist Arts, it was called, a lesser version of the Celestial Peak Arts. The technique was about all the martial arts kung fu jazz of sitting down and doing nothing while gaining powers. You’d think with how much the stronger cultivators meditated they’d be wise and shit, but here we are.

The art was useless to me, as the technique was about light steps and martial arts and I sucked at those. The thing that was good for me was the ability to reinforce my body with Qi. That and the ability to reinforce other things with my own Qi.

The former was very easy. I could easily use my Qi to run a bit faster, jump a bit higher, be more aware, all that jazz. It was fascinating and I planned to dissect how exactly a human body can generate superhuman strength like it doesn’t make sense considering the muscle fibres should rip apart but then these guys can shoot light- the rat squeaked interrupting my thoughts as it walked closer with its eyes staring at me in anticipation. It stood on its back legs, extending both of its front legs out as if begging for more.

Smart rat.

I smiled and took out a spirit herb this time, and gave it one tiny leaf. That would be it for its treats today.

Anyways, where was I? Right, Qi reinforcement. It was quite useful as it allowed me to study how exactly things worked when infused with my qi.

I brought up the spirit herb in my hand, looking at the little plant. Outside of the Qi present in it, there was nothing special about it. It was just a small leaf. But, here was the interesting part. A pulse of Qi going through the plant made its leaves shimmer. There was a very thin layer of coating forming over the leaf itself that gave it the shimmer. If I added some more Qi, the plant would glow a bit brighter before it would reach a saturation point. If I pushed any further beyond that, then it would shrivel up and die as if drained of life.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

It made no sense to me why it behaved this way. The shimmering may be due to the Qi agitating the plant into releasing some chemicals that shone in the light. Or it could be a layer of Qi itself. But why did the plant die out when excessive Qi was passed through it? Did the Qi burn its insides?

In contrast to the spirit herb, normal plants seemed to barely react unless excessive Qi was passed through them. In which case they usually burst into pieces as if bloated from the inside. I did find that very careful application of Qi could make the plants grow faster, but I wasn’t good enough to produce visible results from that. I didn’t have the needed control. At least for now that is.

Man I wish I had a microscope to shove all this under. Maybe I could make a simple one given time. Just another dream item for my quickly growing list.

I was also testing if feeding a certain amount of Qi to a plant everyday would result in that plant turning into a spirit herb. It would be a massive waste of Qi even if it did. Unless, I managed to produce a completely new type of herb not seen before.

That, and I wonder how cross pollination and or grafting etc would work for these plants. If there were spirit herbs, then surely there would be spirit bushes, and berries and trees out in the wild right? They’d probably have a developed ecosystem that may have a whole hidden layer that was dependent on Qi, which may just be key - pun absolutely intended - in finding out how Qi interacted with living things.

One thing was for sure, it wasn’t any of the fundamental forces of nature that were found in my world. It did not depend on materials and particles and laws but people. I could manipulate it by thought. Perhaps there was some organ in this body’s brain that could move the physical or energy form of Qi around but I doubted it. Then what I was challenging here was an honest to god super natural force that was layered on top of normal physics and could interact with it without breaking reality as we knew it.

Magic.

I scribbled down on my notes, trying to come up with theories and possibilities as I thought about other things I wanted to test.

I returned to my notes on the Qi refining process going through the various factors I’d listed out. There was the temperature, the properties of the herbs themselves that formed the pill. The time spent in the cauldron was the mixture of various ingredients which wasn’t much like chemistry outside of herbology or just cooking. Just throw the herbs in, mesh and blend them together, and it was done.

The problem I was facing was in narrowing down the factors that made the pill work. There was firstly the essence of the herbs themselves, that is to say, the Qi in them, which gave the pill its ability. The time spent in refining was solely focused on drawing the Qi out of these ingredients and melding them. The melding process was where things tended to get drastic. A small mistake in coaxing the Qi together could at times be explosive and make the Qi explode outwards.

The interaction between the various Qi of the herbs and their bodies was dependent on both how I manipulated my Qi, and how well I maintained the flame and a Qi-pressure around them.

The Qi-pressure was what I’d named the process of surrounding the cauldron with my Qi and pushing from all sides uniformly. It sort of worked like an ideal gas in that sense where it followed the gas laws of pressure, though I doubt it did so as an ideal gas would. But the fact that pressure increased boiling point seemed to be true. There was a very fine margin of pressure under which I’d found that the Qi seemed to mix together very well with one another, melding into a singular uniform solution that formed the pill.

But so far, I’d been unable to replicate my one time success.

“Maybe if I can find some sort of reactive reagent of Qi? Perhaps treating the Qi as a chemical reaction would be better. Treating each element’s Qi as a separate chemical to be mixed in a reaction. I could try feeding some Qi to the rat to see how my Qi reacted with a spirit animal.”

A chittering voice broke me from my thoughts as I saw the rat climbing up my leg as its nose sniffed around my pouch.

“Bad, bad rat. Stay put,” I said out loud, and to my surprise, it stopped, and climbed back down onto the ground. Perhaps it was smarter than I’d thought.

I was contemplating what to do with the rat, perhaps I could teach it to come to me for food every so often. I hummed to myself in thought about the little critter I’d caught when it used the most ferocious move any creature could use.

The cuteness attack.

Its little pink nose twitched, as it let out the most pitiful squeak I’d ever heard and my defences started to crumble. I steadied my heart looking it in the eye with a stern expression. Two black beady eyes stared at me as it lifted one paw, rubbing it against my leg.

I felt my heart melt, as my cute meter exploded from overdose. I tried to resist, yet all was futile against those pitiful eyes, their cuteness surpassing all under the heavens.

I dug out a little bit of my remaining pill residue, handing it over to the rat who gladly began to chomp down on its feast.

“You, you evil smart little creature. I’d say you’d make a fine assistant. I think I have just the name for you as well,” I said out loud.

“Lab Rat. That’ll be your name. Labby for short,” I said, gently petting its head as Labby squeaked once more. Perhaps out of delight from the petting, or the pill I’d given it.

“Got my first cultivation pet. Time to catch 'em all?” I smiled, snorting at my own lame reference.

A horde of ideas began to flood me. The possibilities of being able to test on a spirit animal exciting me. I wouldn’t harm Labby, he was too precious. And I wasn’t cruel enough to be able to kill something I’d named. No, Labby would live as my assistant as I broke down the mysteries behind his magic.

I turned towards Labby, as he froze from my glance. I flashed a grin, that even I knew must’ve looked quite evil.

“We’re gonna have some fun times together, my new friend.”

The little rat squeaked quietly and I cackled with all my mad scientist glory. I would untangle each mystery this world had to offer me.

Beware ye secrets of magic, I come for you!