Emerson Fortier
patreon
Chapter 46 - Testing Space
🕑 Added 2022-10-30 19:46:44 +0000 UTCFor two hours, Yi Cao did nothing but experiment with his bubble of Ki. At Yi Cao’s request Zihan threw minute bursts of fire at his bubble, and even walked through it, warping, and splitting, and sliding aside as the Ki seemed to push right through him.
“Did you feel anything?”
“Besides the Ki?” Zihan asked. “Not a thing.”
Gradually, Yi Cao began to find the limits of the simple bubble he could conjure. It could flex, but that flexing didn’t exist in the real world, he could stick parts of himself out of the bubble to interact with the physical world, but he couldn’t manifest the bubble without some part of him inside, some part with channels still cut into his actual flesh, to manifest the sphere. Without putting his feet through, he couldn’t even interact with the floor to move.
He spent some time wandering around the room as a disembodied pair of feet and head, looking down at the “him” he could only sense and not see, frowning at the space his body should have occupied and, quite literally, did not.
“You aren’t going to touch the law of space your first time playing with it.” Zihan told him with a bemused smile from the other end of the training room.
Yi Cao looked up and found him fiddling with his void wallet, tossing it up and down while he drank from a bottle he must have pulled out while Yi Cao was preoccupied.
Yi Cao looked back down at his chest and gestured with arms that even he couldn’t see. “But this doesn’t make any sense.” He said. “How does… this aspect… make me invisible? Intangible?” He let go of the technique and felt the Ki dissipate. For a moment nothing happened, then the technique fell apart and he appeared. He could have blinked and missed it. “The aspect is about… space, and dimensionality, and… I don’t know how to explain it. Like the water in a lake, only it’s not the water, but what… gives the water its shape.” He looked up at Zihan. “It’s not a mirage technique, or something like fog that should let me disappear.”
Zihan emptied his bottle and shook his head. “That bubble you’re forming. The way you describe it, it sounds like you’re just spitting out raw aspected Ki. When I manifest raw Ki.” He lifted his chest then belched loudly, spitting fire that swirled and disappeared into the scripts. “It summons fire.” Zihan wiped his mouth with a forearm and turned back to Yi with a ridiculous grin. “You said your aspect is space. When you spit out raw spatial Ki, what do you think it manifests?”
Yi Cao looked dumbly at him for a couple of moments. “Space?” He asked.
Zihan gestured with the empty bottle. “There you have it.”
He dialed open his wallet while Yi Cao felt at the Ki bubbling inside of him and mulled it over for a moment.
“But how does that work?” He asked. “Space is… it’s just…” He waved a metal hand lamely. “You shouldn’t be able to manifest space.”
Zihan shrugged. “How does force work?” He asked. He tucked the bottle into the wallet then closed it up and tucked it back into his robes. “Or life? Or any of the conceptual aspects? Darkness. Great example.” He pointed at Yi Cao. “Darkness is not a thing. Literally. A shadow is not a thing. It is a lack of light, yet, when we summon shadow Ki, it doesn’t get rid of light, it summons a shadow, and the shadow gets rid of the light. How does that work?”
He shrugged again. He lifted a hand and there was suddenly fire. Tiny white tapers flickering and dancing across his palm. “You have to stop thinking of Ki as the thing it summons. Ki isn’t a thing. It’s the law of the world. It is the will of the heavens as a spiritual substance, the same will that brings the stones, and the sky, and everything into existence then governs its interaction. Call on the law of stone, and you get stone. Call on the law of force, and that stone is suddenly flying away from you, but the Ki is not the rock, and it is not the force that threw it. It is the law that governs it. I don’t eject fire, I eject the law of fire, and where the law says there must be fire, there is fire.”
He shook his hand to put it out the flames and failed.
“Ki is the spirit of the world.” Zihan said as he continued to bat at the flames. “When we take it from the world, we take the power to command it from the world. It no longer needs to follow the rules of the natural sciences, but creates its own, or, in the case of the immortals, it is bent to their laws. Throw light on a normal shadow, and the shadow, which never possessed existence in the first place, disappears. Throw light at something touched by the law of shadow though, and no light will touch it. Toss out some interdimensional Ki, and what you get is… well… probably something like your own little pocket dimension. Separate from the world.”
Yi Cao knit his brows. He started to stroke his chin, but stopped when he felt the cold metal of his new hand on his face.
Zihan snapped his fingers for Yi Cao’s attention and gave him an understanding smile. “This is stuff you’ll start to understand more as you use it.” He said. “Right now, that understanding isn’t important. What you need now, is to understand what your aspect can do. You’ve played with the raw Ki for long enough.” He grinned. “We won’t have this room forever. Why don’t we try manifesting some of the other abilities you told me about.”
Yi Cao nodded.
Some of the abilities were easier to manifest than others.
“Ki is responsive.” Zihan told him after his first couple of failures to make his Ki do anything other than form the bubble. “Remember, it’s more conceptual than material. You don’t need to shape it with your hands, but with your mind, then manifest that will in the movements of your body. The Ki will follow.”
He demonstrated in what was obviously some part of a fire based Kata. Three steps, a controlled breath, and a thrust with both hands that sent a gust of fire into the walls, overloading the scripts so that they pinged and rippled with light again for several moments.
“Don’t try to manifest the effect.” Zihan told him. “Try to replicate your desire when you manifested it.”
He’d tried to see what was biting his leg.
Yi Cao tried a kata of his own. Something awkward and impromptu, three steps to help him focus, then, instead of a thrust, just a ready stance while he pulled on the source at his chest and tried to see… something.
Ki bubbled up around him again, only this time, instead of sealing him in his own little pocket dimension, he felt it leap from him to a dozen points around the little hall. Scripts across the entire training room lit with gentle blue ripples, and he suddenly saw dozens of scripts haloed in small lenses a foot across as though mere feet from him.
Zihan circled him as Yi Cao reached towards one of the scripts through the lens. There was some resistance as his fingers cleared the boundary of the lens and a sense of stretching, then brass touched the surface of a wall on the opposite side of the room.
Zihan glanced between the fingers now touching a rippling script a dozen feet away and Yi Cao. He nodded. “Gating.” He said. “A teleportation technique. That’s useful.” He looked around at the dozens of lenses manifested around Yi Cao. “Weird looking, but useful.”
Yi Cao traced the outline of the script. “It’s not teleportation.” He said. “Muchen… one of the cultivators who ambushed me, the water ones. He used a water technique to transport us when he tried to take the source from me, but this is different. This… It’s right here.” He ran his finger around the edge of the lens and watched the light reflected off the brass ripple across the edge of the lens. “It brings it to me.”
Zihan studied him. “Do you think you could move through one of those gates?” He asked.
Yi Cao studied the way his Ki moved from his chest into the construct of lenses around him. When he tried to pull his hand from the lens, it popped free as though pushed. When he touched another lens, this time with both hands, he felt the resistance increase, the sense of stretching grew more pronounced, and the Ki flow grew significantly more strained.
“I don’t think so.” He said. He pushed two fingers through a lens above his head to touch a script on the ceiling. “Feels mostly one way.”
The strain on the technique overloaded it, and Yi Cao felt a sudden ghostly spike of pain as his metal hand registered damage to the fingers he’d pushed through the lens as it collapsed. He jerked it back and looked with dismay at a pair of horribly bent and disfigured brass fingers.
“Shit.” Zihan muttered.
Bo Bo pinged in his ear. “What did you do?” It asked him.
Yi Cao opened his mouth to answer.
“Well?” The spirit asked.
“I broke my fingers.” Yi Cao said. He held them up to his face and studied them. They hadn’t just been broken, they’d been stretched horribly by the failure of the technique. He could make out metallic tendons and tiny servo motors inside that should have been hidden by the warped and buckled plating.
“No shit.” Zihan remarked.
“I can see that.” The pistol huffed. Its tone abruptly changed. “You couldn’t involve me in your masochism?”
Yi Cao wrinkled his nose. “It wasn’t masochism.” He muttered. He glanced at Zihan then flushed and looked away. “It’s complicated.” He said.
It did give him an idea though. He glanced at his hand again. Then he took two steps, assumed the ready stance, and pulled on his source again.
This time only three lenses appeared, drifting around him like motes in an eyeball, with him at its center. He pulled Bo Bo with his good hand and pointed the weapon through one of the disks in his vision. “Practice mode.” He said. “Lowest setting.”
He pulled the trigger.
A single narrow dart of silver steel spat from the pistol’s tip and fell through the disk in front of him. The needle bounced off the wall on the other side of the room and tinkled to the floor.
“Pew.” The pistol said without enthusiasm.
Yi Cao holstered the pistol and looked around at the other two lenses pulling the walls to within mere inches.
Zihan studied the same lenses with a speculative expression. “You said this was the technique that manifested before you were blinded?” Zihan asked.
Yi Cao holstered Bo Bo and nodded. He looked at one of the lenses, then let it collapse and turned to face the Young Master. His electrical eyes buzzed, bringing him into focus.
“The last thing I saw was the sun.”
Zihan nodded. “So.” He said. “Not really a movement technique, and not just a telescope, but something in between.”
Yi Cao nodded. “Something in between.” He agreed.
“In better knews.” The pistol announced from his hip. “Better than whatever that was all about, your augment’s self repair functions are going to, mostly, be able to restore functionality to the hand in a little under an hour. Mostly. You’ll need to visit an engineer to get the kinks out though, and you’ll need to replace a couple of external plates.”
Something began to steam, and Yi Cao looked down to find smoke rising from the contorted metal of his twisted fingers.
“They’ll be needed as raw materials.”
“Convenient.” Zihan noted. “I thought I might have to buy you a new hand.”
Yi Cao looked up and met Zihan’s eyes.
Zihan smirked. “Perks of getting you the best.”
He permitted Yi Cao no more than an hour to play around with the lenses before he insisted they move on to manifesting the other techniques he’d described during his breakthrough. Each of which proved far harder to reproduce.
The awareness had come first. In the breakthrough Yi Cao had been at his limit, panicked, and scared he was going to die. He tried a dozen different intentions as he sought to manifest the technique, but each time, the Ki either swirled into the bubble or popped unhelpfully into lenses drawing the scripts closer. It wasn’t until Zihan told him to change the way he interacted with his Ki that things began to change.
“Ki is like will. You can focus on changing the outside world, by manifesting it there, but there are other techniques meant to change who and what you are. Reinforce bones with stone, change you into another type of material, or as I’ve done with my own cultivation, make you invulnerable to fire and heat, or nearly invulnerable. When you do that, you don’t eject your Ki, you pull it in and suffuse yourself with it.”
The first time he tried he felt sections of his insides bubble in and out of existence and nearly vomited onto the floor. He collapsed, groaning to the floor, doubled over as he fought waves of nausea in the failure’s after effects.
“Whatever you just did, I lost signal with some of the sensors attached to your major organs after your augmentation.” Bo Bo told him. “Don’t do it again.”
Yi Cao grit his teeth and staggered back to his feet. He stared at his hands and thought of his mother’s voice and the twelve years he’d spent watching others advance while being looked over.
He lined brass fingers up and pressed them together, then focused inward. He pulled, and doubled over as soon as a Ki bubble swelled within him.
On his fifth try, he got the intention right. This wasn’t a technique about seeing, or manifesting Ki, but of knowing what was happening to the space around him. Knowing. Not seeing. The difference was dramatic because the Ki didn’t just bubble into his chest and guts and start forming their own little pocket dimensions there, it flowed into him, became him, and simultaneously transformed him.
Space rippled around him, only it wasn’t just space as the ripple moved from Yi Cao’s source. It carried him, became him, showed him the world as he’d seen it in that brief second, drifting within the void between the stones of the Tangle.
He felt the room, felt Zihan standing at one end. Felt them, not as if he’d touched them, but as though they were him, down the granular texture of the panel that hung on the wall behind Zihan, to the thickness of the paint that coated the walls, and the angle of the bolts in the latch that held the door closed.
Ki flowed, and the ripple expanded. He left the walls of the training room. Became more. Saw the tunnels and halls of the Firefly Sect and the maintenance tunnels that honeycombed the rock around them. The world itself warped where up and down changed within the concourses of the rock. It twisted and curled, like water around a stone in the middle of a stream. He watched people walk in the embrace of that field, watched them everywhere, felt their bones shift, their skin wrinkle, and the air swirl around the fingers of their hands.
His brain wanted to explode from the level of detail, yet his vision continued to expand.
He left the stone of Six, saw Five, saw Three, Saw One, saw the trillions of rubble remnants and the dispersed dust that filled the empty space fo the void. Felt the tremendous vacuum of that space, and the weight of the Guild Ship they’d come to steal upon the world as it reached with rippling forcefields into the planetary fragments to realign them.
He tried to cut off the flow, but the ripple moved beyond the broken planet. He felt the star, and knew then that the weight of the guild ship was like a speck of sand on the fabric of reality. Saw its force like a vortex in the void, felt the currents of the other planets caught in its orbit and the greater current, like a vast wind, that held the star itself in its place within this universe.
He saw more. More stones well beyond Aarrppaa’s orbit, clouds of diffuse gas caught in the winds of this dimension, ripples and folds that made no sense and had no source, then, near the edge of his perception, he spotted a gap in the world, then all sense within this perception failed.
Vast currents moved beneath the three dimensional world. Dimensions that frothed within, and yet beyond, depths of madness where leviathans swam, and other spheres of order and three dimensionality lay suspended like hidden stars within, bubbles of other worlds wrapped and veiled by chaos while hidden creatures prowled the infinite depths, infinitely distant, yet, it seemed, so close he could reach out and touch them.
Something felt his gaze in that vast place and a huge eye opened somewhere in the depths. Like a whirlpool opening in the heart of a lake, the currents of the unseen world warped as that eye opened, moving the hidden worlds like bubbles on a shifting sea. They whirled around him, and Yi Cao felt their own world move closer beyond the three dimensions, not their world alone, but a tangled knot of worlds all stuck together in a mess of flotsam cast up on a shore he never knew existed. The eye opened its maw, though it had none to open, and somewhere, far away and yet somewhere immediately present, Yi Cao opened his own mouth to scream.
He woke to the taste of blood.
Zihan sat in one corner of the room. Smoke curled from the tobacco stick in his mouth as he read from a book by the blue light of the technomancer’s star floating beneath the protective scripts.
Yi Cao sat up. He had to snort to clear his nose. Touched it with a brass hand, miraculously repaired, and came away with blood staining the metal. His channels felt ragged and overstretched. The Ki in them moved sluggishly.
Zihan closed his book with a snap and turned to face him.
They sat in silence for a moment until Zihan raised one eyebrow. “Well.” He said. “I have no idea what you did, but you sure burnt through a lot of Ki.”
Yi Cao felt the source at his chest, hot, despite the layer of cloth that lay between his skin and the stone. He touched it, and found that his fingers had been completely repaired.
Zihan took a long hit from his smoker and let the smoke roll around in his mouth. “Learn anything?” He asked.
Yi Cao thought of the eye and the vast distances he’d just… been.
He nodded.
Zihan dabbed away the ash from his smoker then watched the flakes turn to sparks and incinerate before they could hit the ground. “Worthy of calling it a technique?” He asked.
Yi Cao shuddered and picked himself up. “Maybe.” He replied. His head ached like he’d been hit with a hammer.
Zihan sucked down the last of his smoker and turned the stub into smoke. He waved it away and watched Yi Cao get to his feet. “You should probably take it easy.” Zihan told him. “I had to hit you pretty hard to knock you out.”
Yi Cao touched his nose again then turned to stare at Zihan.
Zihan snorted and half smiled. “Much more of your Ki, and you might not have come back from that technique. Not human, anyways.”
“Elemental?” Yi Cao asked. “I thought that didn’t happen till the second testing.”
Zihan shrugged. “Enough Ki, it can happen to anybody.” He replied. “Not usually enough Ki to overwhelm your natural law is all. Not till Node forming starts.”
Yi Cao put his thumb to one side of his nose and snorted out the last of the blood. He wiped the thumb on his robes then wiped at the blood still staining his upper lip and shook himself. “I’ll be more careful next time.” He said.
Zihan’s smirk turned into a grin. He pushed himself to his feet and stood facing Yi Cao. “I thought I’d like you.” He said. “The moment I saw you grab that case instead of running for your life.” His grin turned predatory, showed too many teeth. “You’re stubborn, without an inch of give.”
Yi Cao thought of his decision before he had his breakthrough, to leave. Thought of Elder Xia’s demands, and his decision to bow to the possibility of being responsible for his cousin’s death at the man’s hands, even partially, and the oath he’d sworn in favor of death.
“Don’t act like you know me.” He grunted. He took up his makeshift stance.
Zihan winked. “I defied fate to save you.” He said. “I’ll act as I please.”
Yi Cao shrugged to try and loosen the knot of tension in his shoulders as he prepared to pull on his Ki again. “Suit yourself.” He said. “Just… don’t let my Ki get me. If it happens again.”
Zihan gave him a mocking salute. “Whatever the Young Master requires.” He said.
Yi Cao scowled, then reached into his Ki, and became the space beyond himself once again, just, much, much, closer, this time.
