It goes a little like this: a top-level qi-gathering cultivator has half again the energy available to a normal mortal. The way in which this energy is used is of lesser importance. A heartcore will use it to become two times as strong but once as smart. A braincore will use it to become twice as smart but once as strong. Stuffing that power into a spoon will make the spoon twenty times as strong and the person itself one-point-one-times as smart and strong. A person could become three times as fast, five times as nimble, ten times as ambidextrous, or twenty times as good at sewing clothes.
Teach seems to have this as one of his mottos. Neutral mediocrity or specialized and narrow power. The location of the core seems to be but a way to see, store, and interact with the power, merely a manner of communication, not the message itself.
So Ket decided to try it out. He gave up his fully-formed, solid-core cultivation base days ago, vomiting his organs and life force out in the most miserable manner possible, and he reformed his core in the most technical and calculating way he could think of.
Now his head is adorned by the physical representation of an abacus. Not a normal one, sliding beads on iron rods would be too open to interpretation, after all. No, Ket went and bothered Teach until he divulged the basics of calculators and processors.
Instead of thinking about numbers, Ket is developing an actual central processing unit around his head. Iron wire sliding across a narrow metal ruler represents a stored number, rows of the strips representing registers. Complex equations are done through an improvised and custom-built, metal contraption, ticking away in all kinds of obscure and impractical numbering systems.
Ket has formed his power base into a literal number cruncher, and it shows. Calculations that used to take seconds can now be done in a flash. He can represent more complex equations and problems, like a weighted chance and decision tree, through actual numbers or through having the scenario play out in a wireframe simulation. Precision or speed.
A negatively inclined person would describe this phenomenon as something coming at a price. You can have that thing, but only at this cost. Ket has decided to look at it from a positive viewpoint. Each cultivator gathers a certain amount of capital worth of energy, but what aspects they spend their money on usually is decided largely unconsciously, through the three-core system. Taking manual control of this process through custom core placement and intent-based cultivation can skew the areas in which this capital is spent.
One more interesting thing to note is that the actual core size seems nearly irrelevant. A few students went down the blood-core path, arguably giving them a core the size of their entire body. They bottlenecked at the same energy threshold - the top of qi gathering - as their previous cultivation base. The same steps from gas to liquid and solid seems to remain, as do the energy quantities needed for advancing.
Making one’s core bigger in an energy-quantity sense turned out to be extremely taxing and impossible for anyone that tried. The fact that Teach's double core location is only feasible due to his previous experiences and possible soul strength, due to his previous cultivation base attainment, was the general conclusion from those experiments.
Then there is the newly formed hypothesis that saturation by ambient qi kills talent. Multiple people reported a slowing down of their cultivation speed after spending significant amounts of time in Tree’s qi-rich environment. An examination found that neutral qi got stuck in their systems, hindering their own qi. Spending time on the moon and allowing it to strip their bodies of all but their own structural qi has been tested and verified to fix this problem.
Ket worries about Tess for this exact same reason. Her skin is literally glowing with power and is probably trapping the polluting qi inside her body. Her assurance that she will re-cultivate alongside him eases this worry significantly.
Ket decides to stop thinking about complicated things. Tess is looking at his crown of whirring contraptions in annoyance. The wiggling wires that crown his head calm down a bit now as he stops thinking about qi and its many mysteries. The couple has reached the central gathering place, a cordoned off area near Tree’s trunk.
“Can we go yet? Those tentacles look tasty.” Bord slurps and swallows his excess drool while looking at a small projection of Teach’s fight. The other people, all the original students, don't even spare the fat kid a glance.
“Why are we helping those mage dickwads anyway? Their dress sense should be a crime.” Tess mumbles the last sentence to herself.
“Who knows. I’m sure Teach has his reasons, no matter how idiotic they might be. Let’s go already, I want to go all-out for once. We’re allowed full qi usage, right?” Angeta is bouncing on the balls of her feet while impatiently looking around.
“The chance that Teach is setting up a show for the mages is a near certainty. He is fighting below capacity and performing useless manoeuvres for the sake of positioning enforcer-class mutants.” Ket chimes in.
Tess rolls her eyes at his way-too-complicated speech, but admits that he has a point. Looking through the image projected by Database, she can see Teach and Lola working together, fending off the large monsters and letting some through at the same time. Tess realizes that Teach is planning something dramatic again.
Smiling at the chance to strut her stuff and put on a show, she awaits Teach’s signal.
chapter thirty-eight
Protraction
Chatter enters Bord’s ears and is processed by his auditory centres before passing out the other ear unheard. The people around him always talk, always needing to express their opinions by flapping their mouths. Bord does not see the purpose of this. Why talk when things are so clear and easy to understand? Food is good, triangles are good, and when you want something, just want it and you will get it!
Take Ket, for example. Always doing stuff in the most difficult way possible. And Angeta, with her plants. Bord does not understand. A vegetable will never beat a triangle, so why bother?
Contrary to popular belief, Bord things lot. He thinks about thinking a lot. The fact that his conclusions are nearly always “not worth thinking about” does not deny the fact that he does actually think. He mentally steps away from reminiscing about that one full-bosomed girl that cooks delicious food in order to listen to what his fellow students are talking about.
“-away your entire powerbase days before a large fight is just stupid, though.” Selis chatters at Ket and Vox.
“Nuh-uh. I’m only, like, a little bit less powerful than before. Doing it again is a lot quicker. Unlike some other things that are over within seconds the first time.” Tess throws Ket an odd glance, and he visibly flinches.
Vox rolls his eyes. “At least it's better than not cultivating at all. Do you know what Ares and Danarius have been doing? Their levels haven’t risen at all over the past few weeks.”
It’s all pretty uninteresting to Bord, to be honest, but he knows that keeping up with gossip is what people are supposed to do, so he listens with half an ear, eyeing the voluptuous woman near the cooking area in the meantime. The way her slender hands turn tasty stuff into even tastier stuff is truly miraculous.
And then Bord is suddenly staring at a mud-brown wall that has cracks running through it, his location changed in an instant. Blinking against the sudden light, he gawks at his surroundings. The robed people around him stare back at him. Bord blinks some more and looks behind him. The array of monsters towering into the sky, the kilometres of an aquatic horror show startling him a bit.
But not as much as the sudden light show above him. A fat guy, eyes closed with a happy smile on his circular-face-the-size-of-a-small moon is hanging in the air, face down. Bord admires the guy’s physique and thinks about asking him what food he eats. Nobody gets fat from disgusting food, so this large guy must know some delicious eating indeed. The guy is dressed in a white robe that stretches taught across his belly and glows a majestic golden colour.
Slowly the guy’s arms move, his fingers twisting in some weird sh
apes as he does some stupid arm dance. His massive mouth then opens slowly. “Rejoice! Salvation is near.”
Reeling from the thunderous voice, Bord is suspicious. That image smelled like Re-Haan, but the drama looks like something Teach would do. The robed people around him are now all cowering on the floor, heads pointed upwards as they peer through their fingers. “Assist my disciples, Ambu Dala.”
And the big guy is gone with a flash of white light. Yeah, Bord concludes, that’s totally that dragon chick. Those last words where odd though, they reverberate through his very bones, one level below his physical form. A muffled instinct is telling the fat boy to obey her words, but Bord suppresses the annoying impulse.
The mages around him seem to be affected in a different way. One of the brighter clothed ones is grasping at Bord’s pants. “A-Are you a disciple?”
Flicking a booger from his finger, Bord looks down “Yeah, I guess.”
“Then what w-would you have me do?” Shaking and stammering, the mage seems to be having quite the internal battle.
“Ah, I know this one. What was it again?” Bord looks downwards and thinks hard. He is pretty sure that the mission description Database forced him to read contained some information about what to tell the mages, but he didn’t really pay attention. Giving up on exerting more useless mental energy, Bord looks around.
The floor under his feet is made from a dull brown material, reminiscent of matte sandstone. The faint outline of a fish, fins and all, is visible on the cracked surface. Around him, the drab and shoddy architecture continues, buildings that are slightly crooked and towers that tilt a bit too much for comfort form a hive-like warren.
Walls and defensive positions point towards the tumultuous sea, the original glossy smooth black of the dungeon supporting the small city here and there is visible in-between vertical walkways.
Bord looks up and is reminded of what he is supposed to tell the mages. A white web of gauze - finely woven symbols, runes, lines, and geometric forms - the size of the Mana Dungeon unrolls in an apparently impossible manner. Supposedly having started at a single point, the round piece of fabric a kilometre in diameter is unrolling, softly undulating, and dancing in the wind.
“Right! Send your mana to that thing.” Pointing upwards, he instructs the mages.
“Obey the disciple! Send mana to that thing!”
“I listen and obey! Mana to that thing!”
“All our Mana to that thing!”
Bord watches as the surrounding people all start raising their hands, faint streams of colour travelling upwards. The edges of the nearby walls and roof start crumbling. An especially crooked chimney breaks, showering Bord in a dust cloud as the chunk of disintegrating stone smashes on his unmoving hair.
“Except the earth mages,” he belatedly adds. The brown robes humans look half disappointed as they stop pulling the Mana from the stones under their feet. Bord feels his entire body break out in goose bumps at the glassy eyes of the mages. He decides that he has done his duty and looks towards the sea just in time for one of the kilometres high fish-faced lobsters to smash itself against the Mana Dungeon’s structure.
The cloth has finished unrolling only moments before, the spokes running through the entire sheet, glowing with absorbed mana. The multicoloured streams reach certain points, transforming into qi in highly intricate woven formations.
This means that the previously fluttering formations that need qi to function activated moments before the gargantuan beasts’ impacts. The beast's scales are shredded by the cloth that has suddenly turned harder than steel. The entire thing has also started rotating, effectively turning it into a massive, spinning grater.
Bord has enough foresight to know what’s coming and is speeding across the water before the deluge of pulped sea creature lands. A good quarter of the Mana Dungeon behind him is suddenly bright red. Bord looks upwards, his eyes searching for the tastiest looking morsel.
Bright lances of power shoot overhead, one of them hitting the delectable looking octopus Bord was eyeing. The blue beam turns half of its protruding head into ice. Bord frowns as his treat falls back into the waves. A slimy looking crab in front of him explodes into goo as it is hit by a red beam. Dodging the splashes of black goop, Bord decides to stand still and wait for those dumb braincore guys. They should be done playing with their toys in a few minutes, right?
⁂
“Well done, Lola. Your power use is limited to only using four times as much power as you need. Great progress!” It hurts me to praise the dumb piece of fluff for that accomplishment, but limiting her power overkill from fifty times to four is pretty praiseworthy. The first few monsters she killed turned into ice entirely. Even the monsters she kicked got turned into dice-sized shreds.
My drones have been reporting more and more underwater shapes travelling this way, so I told her to start rationing her power, promising her scratches for each beast she kills. Even this under-brained dumbass can reason that overkill means quicker power depletion and that efficient fighting means more scratches.
She nuzzles me some more as we look down. I’m hanging above the Mana Dungeon, watching the battle unfold. It’s quite a nice sight. I saw a lot of crazy shit in the Cultivation World, but this one reaches my list of top thousand impressive battles, no problem.
Beasts are emerging from the sea, a dark circle a dozen kilometres around the black spherical Dungeon filling with leviathans. These massive behemoths are then cut down by my students before they can even touch the defensive formation, a kilometre-wide piece of cloth work.
Beams of scintillating light are now concentrating their diminished rays at the toughest enemies, namely the ones with thick armoured carapaces. The qi power banks powering the impressive array of qi-cannons have largely run dry and are being manually refilled by meditating students. My original students are all keeping watch on a portion of the defensive sphere but have done very little so far.
The stream of large behemoths is being supported by a steady flow of smaller mutants. These are being taken on by the rest of the students, fighting on the lower levels of the stone complex.
I have spotted Rodrick having an absolute blast, his axe a blur around his large frame as every single mollusc, lobster, and other horror of the sea is turned into sashimi by his weapon. He seems to be in the middle of developing a certain type of cutting intent. Axe intent, maybe? Instead of the usual cold but elegant sword-like cutting power, he just wants to cut regardless of anything else.
The two fighting scientists both look beaten up and are timidly monitoring the status of their beam-cannon army. They are guarded by my students’ last line of defence, a ridiculous group of idiots wielding door-sized swords. They are calling themselves fullblade wielders and I do not know who gave them that absolutely idiotic idea.
I squeeze my own sword some more while glaring at the ring of morons.
The purple lady and pale thin guy are also pretty effective. She is riding on his back while flinging knives as he kicks all the threats coming too close. They have been running around, followed by a small gaggle of absolutely terrified people.
Nearly all the special snowflake cultivators are useless though. Well, except for one kid. He is accompanied by a small black girl who points things out to him. He then goes and kicks the crap out of it in a highly incompetent manner, often getting gravely injured. I saw the little boy’s leg getting chopped off, but he just rubbed the wound while putting his leg back into place and moved on.
Ares has been trying to get them to leave, but the two kids refuse. She has compromised by giving the boy healing pills and salves when he gets injured. I need to keep an eye out for those regenerating bloodcore types. You don’t develop an ability to regenerate wounds without liking pain, I think.
Ares is part of the medical corps, together with Vox and Danarius. They are running around and distributing their healing products.
The kid with the spoon is useless. Some other people went down the external
core route, but only a single human man is effective. He has been pouring all his qi into a gun he bought from Database and has been shooting nonstop. Some other students have supporting roles, but they aren't really useful here. This situation is basically a tower defence scenario, no tactical support needed.
I look at Rhea, who is floating in the air next to me. She has her eyes closed while faint white lines flow downwards from her head. Her qi is thick in the air, a clear sign that she is keeping watch on everything. Lola and I are taking a break from beating up the several-megaton-heavy boss monsters.
That’s because those way-too-large monsters swimming here are actually dungeon bosses. The other continent has inverted, inside-out dungeons, with circles around the dungeon core demarcating the level increase. It totally makes sense that some of those dungeons are underwater.
Here is where it becomes speculation, but I think that land-based dungeon bosses remain in their area more often than large aquatic bosses. The dungeon then needs another boss, and because willing water into non-existence costs much more energy than air, it’ll probably modify an already existing dungeon mob into a new boss. Thus, a new deep-sea leviathan is born.
All of these large suckers are traveling this way. I totally welcome them; they might be big and contain a lot of mana, but they can’t fight us underwater. They end up using their mana to stand upright, leaving little available for long-range attacks. The lowest remaining structures on the Mana Dungeon are a hundred meters above sea level, so they need to emerge to attack anyway.
I wonder why they don’t simply blast us with mana attacks while sticking only their heads above the water? Then again, the true reason they are attacking this area is still unknown to me. I get that detecting foreign energy signatures is bad, but why keep sending half-controlled forces if previous attempts have proven unsuccessful?
The Dao of Magic: Book 3: A Western Cultivation Series Page 33
