For the next week Aaron’s schedule did not change. It felt like there was nothing but training and slowly grinding away at opening his hand meridian. But in reality he made a lot of progress. The stretches, while painful and hard to do, started to show a marked improvement in how he could move. This translated almost 1 to 1 to using Wind Steps, especially in combat. He also learned how to repair Qi veins and absorbed both the great master’s and Mei’s teaching about opening meridians and Qi veins. It felt a bit like going back to school, because it was very theoretical and dry. But unlike school he could use what he learned immediately.
Aaron took 2 or 3 days to repair and perfect every Qi vein inside of his body. This was necessary because healing after big injuries like he had sustained before did not heal Qi veins properly. Even though it felt perfectly healed, when he went into the areas that had been injured, he found a lot of leftover scar tissue especially inside of his Qi veins. Removing that took some time, but it was a welcome distraction from carving a new Qi vein connection into his arm.
He also finally perfected Wind Steps. He had made a ton of mistakes while creating the technique and it was much easier to perfect and change his body than create something new like opening a new Meridian. It felt a bit like doing micro surgery with a machine he reckoned. You went in there into utterly insane detail and changed tiny things to make everything work better.
So while Aaron perfected the techniques on a physical level, he also trained to use Sensory Harmony on a mental level. His new senses worked strangely sometimes, but they were such a big advantage he was blown away by how much they helped him. His focus turned into a honed edge, so concentrated he could lose himself in a task if he did not actively fight to stay conscious of his surroundings and other senses. And while that was a struggle, training his body and learning the Katas was a delight in comparison. He fought for hours every day, refreshed himself with the Rejuvenating Fist kata and kept going. His reaction speed had already slightly improved, but it was only the beginning.
The only thing that had basically slowed to a crawl was his cultivation. Carving out a new Meridian took as much, if not more Qi than he created in his cultivation sessions every day. Even though his efficiency and ease while Cultivating had almost doubled by his estimates. The problem was that there was no Qi in the tower. Changing mana into Qi was so terribly inefficient. Unless he blasted himself with concentrated mana through a mana stone he was not even making a dent anymore. It made him anxious and worried as he watched his supply of mana stones slowly run out, but he knew his Qi expenditure would sink after he was finally done opening his new Meridian.
It took him 15 days in the end until he finally broke through the final hurdle and opened his Hand Meridian. It was a struggle and for the last 5 days, after he had carved a Qi vein from his dantian in a convoluted and strangely circuitous path, he ended up at his hand. There he worked on clearing the meridian slowly and meticulously while burning through Qi like it was nothing. But once he finally broke through and mana rushed into his palm it felt like a real accomplishment.
Finally he could go to the next step. The Demons memory core answered a lot of questions he had while he opened his hand Meridian, but most of the time the Demon had told him to open the meridian first. Then he would get more information. When he inspected his work after he was finally done he felt satisfied and also a bit uncomfortable. The path to his hand Meridian was entirely done as the Soul Stealer technique demanded. In short it felt twisted and slightly unnatural, which was quite the difference to any other Technique he had created Qi veins before. The veins for his Fiend-god art felt like they had always been there, they felt like the center of the universe, like a blessing of power and his Qi veins leading to his feet for Wind Steps felt like pure Freedom. Made him want to run, to move, to fly.
The Soul Stealer, or rather Soul Catcher variant felt only like one thing. Ambition, need, desire. It was the desperate need to improve and Aaron concurred with it, although he felt that unlike the other techniques these desires were not pure at all. The Fiend-god art was proud and independent, fierce and domineering, but it still did not feel self centered. Did not feel twisted and ugly. Like a desire you wanted to keep from the world. A kink, an addiction. But Aaron knew in some ways he was just as twisted as this new technique of his and that this twisted Ambition fit him very well.
So he accepted the technique and he was really curious how the technique would work in the end. But he dreaded the next step slightly. It was the step he had been warned about during the discussion in the Prison as the most advanced thing to learn. But no matter, he was on this path and he would follow it to the end. He activated the Memory Core and found himself back in the absolute darkness of the pit. The Demon welcomed him boisterously.
“Ah, my pupil, finally we are at the second step. Congratulations, I am sure it was an ordeal to get here. Now you will learn something that is entirely above your understanding. So you have to learn first the fundamentals of what a technique is. As you have probably already guessed Qi veins twist and lead Qi in Formations that interact not just with the body, but with Qi, with your mind, sometimes even with your very soul. The mechanics of how that works do not matter for this. But to say it as simple as possible: The universe has laws, fundamental truths we call Dao. These truths are a path to Transcendancy. To comprehend a Dao, a path, a truth, is to know an immutable truth that will change your understanding of the world forever. This is one of the reasons why the Dao is not taught. You seek a Dao, you find a Dao, but you never learn it from someone else. It can’t be taught.”
The demon paused and then snickered.
“You probably think I have not answered your question at all, but to make it clear, how Qi veins create effects, how the basics of cultivation works is intertwined with not just one but dozens of Daos, of truths and paths to enlightenment. Which is why none of us can comprehend it in its entirety, which in the end means that it does not matter. So, now that we have this out of the way, you have to understand a second thing. You can recreate effects of Techniques if you build them in three dimensional Formations. This is hideously complicated and a thing Formation Masters make their students do as a sort of graduation task from Novice to journeyman. Multidimensional Formations are not something you should ever tangle with. But in a way, that is exactly what we are going to do now.”
The demon stretched out his hand and summoned a picture of an arm and half a torso into the air with glowing lines of blue force. Inside of it pulsed the Soul Catcher technique in red, its Qi veins apparent.
“To internally use a technique you have to recreate it in miniature inside of your dantian or even more advanced inside of your head. We will start with the dantian. If you use Soul Catcher as it is right now you will grab and pull the Spirit off a Vessel. The Spirit will flow into your body and will seek a new home. It will inevitably be repelled by your cultivation and it will settle at your solar plexus in a way some cultures call Possession. Sometimes on the battlefield wayward and vengeful souls cling to the bodies of their killers where they try to fester. I am unsure if this is the case in your universe, but there are cleansing rituals in most cultures where these vengeful souls are removed as is the guilt their killers are supposed to feel.”
The Demon snorted in derision.
“They do not realize the power of what they cleanse off them. But I did. The problem for us is once we became “possessed”, that the Spirit is now in a strange place, not really there in a metaphysical or physical way, but still it is stuck to your body. It won’t have any averse effects at first, but depending on how strong the spirit was you will start to hear whispers or see things after about a week. So always process a Spirit after a week as a rule. To absorb the Spirit we need to pull it into our dantian and there we need to force it with our will into the center or into your core. There the sheer potency of your Cultivation, of your Qi will start to burn the spirit. Dissolve it into usable Qi. Mind you this is only possible because these Spirits are protosouls. The real thing is quite a bit more complicated and requires more finesse. With a real soul you have to take power, attributes and knowledge from the souls you have imprisoned with the technique. This imprisonment is not possible for you, since the only place you can imprison real souls is inside of your Golden Core, which you don’t have and won’t for a decade.”
“Real Souls are also dangerous and if handled wrong they might shatter your core, a thing more painful than death and more detrimental to a cultivator than losing both arms and legs. But for you these Spirits you will hunt are just soul constructs. They are not really alive or conscious. They are made out of a sort of Spiritual Qi and before you ask, no I won’t explain what souls are made out of exactly. That again is part of a Dao. As you will find out all the most interesting things are part of a Dao.” The Demon smirked again.
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“So back to the topic. You carved out these Veins yourself and opened your Hand Meridian. Now you need to recreate the formation of the Soul Catcher with Qi inside of your dantian to pull the Spirit into your center of power and absorb it. As you know and can see, the vast majority of the formation is created in the path from your dantian towards your arm, not inside of your arm. There are some reasons for that. First we will replicate this Formation exactly inside of your dantian and then stretch out a feeler of Qi towards your solar plexus through this Qi vein.” He indicated a vein that ran almost straight towards his solar plexus form his dantian and Aaron nodded to himself. Okay. This made sense. You pulled the spirit off a Vessel and then you pulled the Spirit off your solar plexus again and into your dantian.
“Why is this even necessary? Like why doesn’t the technique just pull the Spirit directly into you dantian?” he asked and hoped it was a question the Demon had anticipated.
“Because even Spirits will fight you if you try to dissolve them too early. What we are taking advantage of is the natural instinct, the very nature of a soul. Every soul needs a body, no matter how that body looks. Some Souls can survive chained to an object, to a thing, not something alive, but they all need to be tethered to something. If they are not they will either dissolve if they are too weak or be reincarnated. If you pull a spirit off a vessel the first thing it will try to do is bond with their new host body. But since you have Qi it will find itself unable to do that, so it is stuck in limbo. This weakens the Spirit tremendously. If you tried to just absorb a Spirit instantly there is a chance you would have to fight a battle of wills, soul combat with the spirit. Which again is a chance you do not want to take.”
“Why is a battle of wills so bad?”
“A battle of wills happens if you face a Spirit or soul too powerful for you. The easiest explanation is if you imagine two parasites fighting over a host. The fight will damage not just the souls in question, but they will also damage the host during their fight. Even if you may win such a battle you will find yourself spiritually injured as well as physically. And spiritual injuries are not so easily healed. They take years to heal and sometimes they never fully heal. These scars stay with you not just for one life, but for all your reincarnations as well. This is why you do not fight spirit battles unless you are a master in them.”
This sort of answered Aaron’s question, but only sort of. It was dangerous that much was clear but it did not go into a lot of detail. It felt like a cookie cutter response to all sort of questions about this kind of topic. Which was what Aaron usually got from the Demon. Still considering this was a recording made in less than a second this was impressive.
“Now where were we? Ah yes, I want you to start building this formation inside of your dantian, to do that you need to understand how to properly use Qi as a solidified building block that does not dissipate quickly. Qi inside of your dantian, Qi you have total control over, can take on more solid shapes although this will be considerably easier the higher your cultivation rank since Qi density naturally increases. To do that you need a mental picture of something strong, iron, stone that sort of thing. Take a really solid rock and hold it in your hand, visualize its solidity, its strength. Then you try to imbue Qi in your dantian with the same attributes. Go ahead and give it a try.”
Aaron gathered a rock from a nearby stream, a solid bit of granite, and then proceeded to prod and feel for it in his hand. His increased sense of touch made him aware of the material in meticulous detail. It was not as smooth as it looked, it had some harsh edges still and yet he tried to focus on how hard it was, how solid and kept that in mind. Then he took a strand of Qi and tried to imbue this solidity to it. It took him hours to actually figure out how to do that. It was part visualization, part giving the Qi an actual task like building one of the Qi veins it needed to depict. Once he was finally done with this step he continued with the Demon’s lecture.
“Build this formation slowly. The problem at first will be to built it at all, then the complexity and in the end to create the whole construct in less time. Eventually you want to be able to create an internal Qi Formation in less than 10 minutes, but it will take you considerably more time at first. Once you are done with it and you felt the Formation activate when you lead the final strand of Qi outside of your dantian, then it is finally time to search for a victim.”
It took Aaron more than a week to be able to do this, a week spent mostly on training and then sitting still and trying to build this horribly complicated Formation out of thoughts. It was like trying to build a sand castle with his mind, because at the start if he was too slow the Qi he had started with lost its solidity and got reabsorbed into this dantian. Overall he could see why it was so important to do it quickly. The drag and pull of Qi inside of his dantian did not vanish. It was one of the most frustrating things he had ever tried to do in his life. Eventually after a week he succeeded in creating a working Formation in his dantian that lasted exactly a second before breaking down again. By this time he was already running out of mana stones and was seriously frustrated.
So in an effort to distract himself, Aaron started to explore the first floor. His new senses ensured that he would not be surprised, even though he had to stay conscious of all of his senses to make full use of it. It was something he learned to do, to keep his senses in balance. More than anything, balanced senses gave him the most advantage possible. Only when one of his senses found something interesting he focused only on that sense to enhance whatever he had found. Be it a smell or movement in the distance.
Slowly but surely he left the more uninhabited parts of the first floor and started to smell humans. Usually the first sign were camp fires, the second the smell of leather, wet cloth and polished metal. Aaron found a foot trail leading through the trees with many different tracks. He followed it cautiously in the trees until he started to hear a small river. Brooks and small streams all converged in the river and the path followed along its shore. After following the river for an hour or so, he found his first group of people. A relatively small group of men and women who came down the track.
Aaron stayed hidden and out of sight as he listened to their conversation. He had smelled them way before he heard them and he could hear them even though he was perched up on a tree almost a hundred meters away.
“I hate herb picking duty.”
“You just hate going out of town, Greg.”
“I mean yeah, its dangerous out here.”
Aaron heard one of the women snort.
“There are only a few bears and wolves on the first floor, what is dangerous about that?”
“Yeah, well these wolves are guarding the herbs for some reason. Like its unnatural, they don’t even eat herbs.”
“The deer do, I don’t think its that unnatural.”
“Oh common, you want me to believe that wolves are smart enough to camp the favorite food source of their favorite pray?”
“Yes.”
“Either way it does not matter. The wolves are spawned in monsters. You all learned that and the bounty on herbs has tripled over the last month. This is a good chance to get some guild merits and manastones for ourselves. So quit bickering and concentrate on the road.” a man cut in and shut the conversation down.
Aaron considered following this group, but if they stuck together there was a good chance he would have to wipe them all out and that was a good way of attracting attention. No, for now he needed to find ways to kill and disappear people in a natural way. Which was easier said than done. He would have to get more information about how the first floor actually worked. Apparently there was a guild who gave out bounties on stuff and the wolves were the first enemies the tower threw at the Aspirants. That made some sense and while he itched to finally be done with learning this new technique, he did not want to attract any attention any time soon. He needed more information, So instead of following this group he decided to follow their trail to where they had come from.
It was simple once he had their smell in his nose. He simply followed it to its source. The river got bigger and bigger as he followed the road and eventually Aaron paused as he heard something that did not make much sense to him. He leapt up into the crown of the tree he was currently standing on and peered into the distance.
And there was what he assumed was the Town of Beginnings. It was a city with European looking buildings, shingled roofs and towers that reached into the fake sky. Some multistory buildings were visible as well. The city was not necessarily beautiful from a distance, it looked more dour and utilitarian than luxurious or beautiful, but it was still beautiful to Aaron. A city. Civilization. He had missed that more than anything else he realized. Well he missed taking a shower more than most of civilization, but besides that he missed people who were not trying to kill him.
The wind turned and now Aaron could smell the stench of shit, ash and smoke with an undercurrent of spices and roasted meat that made his stomach growl. He had not forgotten the feast they had prepared for the newly arrived Aspirants all those months ago. He could not help himself and stealthily moved closer to the city until he came to about a mile of open cleared land that stretched from the forest to the city. The city did not have walls, but a deep moat that stank diabolically. It looked like the city gathered their waste in the outer moat and then, well he was not sure what they did then. From the smell he suspected they let it rot in there. Which seemed like a terrible idea and very uncomfortable to live close to. But then again he had a better nose than a dog he suspected, so maybe he judged it to harshly. He could see a hanging bridge over the moat in the distance where people came and went. A group of guards stood on the bridge, their armor glinting in the fake sunshine.
He had a decision to make now. He could try to infiltrate the city and then take someone there to test or he could follow the groups he saw leaving the city and find his victim that way. As much as he wanted to just sneak into the city, he did not think that was the best idea. Instead he stayed where he was and used his mana sense primarily to gauge the strength of the groups leaving the city. Now all he needed to do was to stay patient and find an opportunity to snatch someone and try out his new technique.