Guiying ran around a bit, bouncing randomly in a nearly gymnastic manner. Finally, she was free again!
Xiang merely smiled, and shook her head. Her goofy bun wasn’t at a hundred percent yet, but two weeks of enforced bedrest would’ve had her doing binkies the moment she could get outside again too.
After burning off the excitement and pent-up energy, Guiying finally settled on the odd bottle-shaped furnaces just above the river’s floodplain.
“Hm… ah, the fuel is fed into a ring around the middle, air pushed in from beneath at pressure, mhmm mhmm, precious metals used to catalyze the particulate out of the smoke and generate extra heat in the process, water pipes placed inside to heat up and pressurize steam for generators which are wired into lead-acid batteries that can be used to draw power directly into the dungeon! Wow, highly efficient. Good way to make the most out of fossil fuels, especially since we seem to be drawing the hot water from the generators into tanks for use on demand. How’s the power rating, Rhys?”
“According to my display, we’re currently generating a surplus of 10 megawatt hours, and I’ve been using it to build influence range and refine my core. Says I hit the next upgrade level when I reach a full kilometer radius, reach five centimeters in core diameter, and have a permanent population of one thousand.”
“Upgrade level?”
“Yeah, there’s a progress menu for it when I look at my resources in finer detail. There was more to it, but I’ve checked off a lot of boxes already.”
Guiying blinked. Did she have something like that?
“Check your stats and skills,” her mother prompted.
“Oh.” Yeah, there it was.
Monk: Advancement Requirements
*[ ] Reach a minimum of 15 in all stats.
*[ ] Master the elements!
**[ ] Fire
**[ ] Ice
**[X] Lightning
**[ ] Air
**[ ] Water
**[ ] Earth
**[ ] Light
**[ ] Shadow
**[ ] Life
Inflated, but not really that different to what it was before. Master the use and refinement of elemental qi, build yourself up to a certain threshold. Looking at a quantified list just bugged her, though. Only one item checked off?! This would take forever!
“Don’t worry about the quest, just do what needs doing for a while and think about the steps. Try following all the energy going through the furnaces, for example.”
She did, and could feel the air and water flowing through. Wasn’t just by chance things moved the way they did… no… heat. The heat of the fire drew in more air, which was pressurized by the shape of the airways above and below the furnace. The result made the fire hotter than it would otherwise be, helping the difficult-to-ignite anthracite burn at its full potential the moment it was tossed into the firebox.
Warm. Yes, warm. The cool water had to follow gravity to enter the boilers, but the manifold system they were shaped in quickly brought the thermally-stable liquid up to a boil, and the steam escaped through pipes much smaller than the ones the water entered. Then it spiralled up, until it was shot through the kinetic spinner of the generator, where it rotated magnets on an axis around copper wiring before the spent moisture was distilled out into a cistern, which retained much of the heat still.
Warm… warm… fire? Fire wasn’t technically an element, just a chemical reaction caused when sufficient heat was applied to rapidly change materials on a chemical level. So if she chased the warm far enough, wouldn’t she start understanding fire?
No. Not just fire. Because where that energy wasn’t, there was cold. Cold was just the lack of warm, a reduction in stored energy either intrinsic or as it moved from one point to another…
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
Skills Learned!
*Fire Affinity Level 1
*Ice Affinity Level 1
Guiying blinked, but went right back in. She could figure it out more. Yes. How much energy was stored in something was directly related to how warm or cold it was. If it had too much energy, it would change states to dissipate it. This was how most substances went from being solids, to liquids, to gasses. There was more to it, because something could hold more energy in a state if kept under pressure, and some solids simply went straight to gas form under normal conditions… huh. So that was what air, water, and earth were about.
Skills Learned!
*Fire Affinity Level 2
*Ice Affinity Level 2
*Air Affinity Level 2
*Water Affinity Level 2
*Earth Affinity Level 2
Skipping a step? Well, it only made sense, all of this was integrated.
All of it was integrated… “Of course!”
Yes, lightning was what happened when energy went from one point to another really really fast! She’d already learned that part, but why hadn’t she made the connection before? It’s like her mother said, energy is energy! Everything connected to the same source, even if it did so through different means! And when you put enough energy into something to undo it at the smallest level…
“Light.”
Skills Learned!
*Fire Affinity Level 3
*Ice Affinity Level 3
*Air Affinity Level 3
*Water Affinity Level 3
*Earth Affinity Level 3
*Light Affinity Level 3
*Shadow Affinity Level 3
She reached out to the wheel in front of her, not even seeing it. She had no idea when it got there, or why it was perfectly adapted to her. But the clay sang between her fingers as she shaped it, putting everything she’d learned into the pot. Except… it wasn’t a pot, not really.
“Fire, ice, lightning, just forms of energy! Well, lightning’s half-energy, half-matter, but that leads it into the matter categories! Solid, liquid, gas, plasma! Light and shadow exist beyond these, but they’re still just the presence and absence of specific things around you, and behave by their own rules! But life…”
A second set of hands guided Guiying’s, and she felt her mother’s qi. Yes… life. Who would have a better handle on it than her own mother, who dealt with life on a daily basis? From the smallest things, undetectable by normal vision, to the largest she had ever seen. Xiang Tuzi knew life on an intimate level, and had saturated her very being with the power to wield it. She gave life as a mother, as an alchemist and apothecary, and as a midwife and healer… but she had also taken more than her share as a warrior, as a housewife… and even as a farmer. That which lives must die, and to live even an hour required the sacrifice of others. You only hoped to give as much as you took, in one fashion or another.
The spark took, at once from all of the elements, yet distinctly no element in its own right. The power surging through her hands instantly bisqued the clay she’d shaped, then… transmuted it?
And suddenly, she had a beautiful living egg in her hands.
Congratulations! You have successfully created a new life-form!
Mystery Egg: Created by Guiying Tuzi. A compilation of her thesis on life on a quantum level. Contents unknown. Proof that the creator has fully mastered every element and integrated them into her actions and physical nature.
Skills Mastered!
*Fire Affinity
*Ice Affinity
*Air Affinity
*Water Affinity
*Earth Affinity
*Light Affinity
*Shadow Affinity
*Life Affinity
All elemental skills mastered and integrated! [Elemental] Affinity skills are now Elemental Mastery!
Skill Mastered!
Elemental Mastery
All stats increased by 5 as a result of your efforts.
Congratulations! You have reached level 4 of the Monk Class!
Monk Advancement Requirements:
[ ] Reach 30 in all stats.
[ ] Attain Cosmic Equilibrium state.
“Whoa. Okay, head rush.”
And as Guiying collapsed backward from the sudden influx of power and understanding, her mother caught her and eased her to the floor.
“See? It’s a lot less work than you realize when it all comes together.”
Guiying smiled, nodded, then felt an odd surge coming from within the dungeon.
“Who broke the scouter?”
Xiang smiled, but didn’t even try to understand what her daughter was talking about this time.
“Zuk wanted to learn a bit about cultivation. Feels like he just did. Let’s go see what it was.”
And with that, Xiang teleported them to the dungeon’s entrance, egg and all. Guiying really wished her mom would walk like a normal person sometimes...