The Fifth Realm

by Michael Chatfield

  Delilah made some quick notes and Old Hei sat down on a couch.

  “Fights are rare there. Everyone who has reached that stage is a powerful Expert. There are many competitions, sects actively looking for the most powerful stars to grow their strength. In the lower realms, one’s birth is enough to secure them a position, then one’s overall level. In the Eighth, one needs to prove themselves against others to draw the sect’s interest. Even the associations get in on the competition. People sell lessons there. Ingredients and mana stones are used to increase one’s Strength. Bartering is more normal to the people in these realms.”

  “People use the competitions in order to fight over resources and power in the higher realms—why doesn’t that happen in the Fourth Realm?” Delilah asked.

  “Life is cheap in the ten realms, it makes more sense to have people fight it out and increase their level in the fourth realm, prove themselves before powers are willing to invest more resources into them. Having someone who knows how to kill is a powerful asset. Although people here might be able to change the fate of a small battle, the power of people in the Seventh and higher realms have much greater effects. Melee types who disappear as they move, mages who can cause the ground to shake and destroy mountains.”

  “If they only know how to compete against one another, they’ll lose that killing edge that they could need in a real fight.”

  She doesn’t shy away from the realities of the Ten Realms. It is a battlefield where the strong use or prey on the weak. Thinking we live in a world of peace is for the ignorant or arrogant. Old Hei privately praised his grand-student for not being blind from the realities around here even if she had grown up rather sheltered.

  “Correct, strength gains you power, and enemies,” Old Hei warned.

  “I have heard that people from the Seventh Realm don’t descend, that the mana down here is too thin?” Delilah asked.

  “Yes, in the Sky realms that start at the Seventh Realm, people are usually very sensitive to the ambient mana. If they are not in a highly concentrated area of mana, then their Mana Gathering Cultivation starts to decrease. Think of it like a cup of tea: if it is surrounded by water, then it will remain full, even if upside down. Now you take that cup of tea and turn it, the water, or mana, comes out, but the power left only decreases. The power of that water or mana within the cup can change continents but once it is gone, then a person only has the peak power of the Sixth Realm. It will take them a lot of time in the lower realms to recover their power, or a lot of resources to increase their Strength.”

  “If someone was able to fill an area with a lot of mana, then would that prevent the person’s power from decreasing?”

  Old Hei scratched his face. “I don’t see why not, if the ambient mana is at the same density as what is found in the Sky realm. That would be a ton of mana and you would need powerful formation masters to do it.”

  The two of them fell into silence, each with their own thoughts.

  “Thank you, Grand Teacher, for all you have shared with me.” Delilah bowed to Old Hei.

  Old Hei stood up and patted her shoulder. “I’m just happy that my student was able to find you. Remember, if you ever have trouble, I will be there,” Old Hei said seriously.

  Erik and Delilah gave his life some color and seeing them driven to improve, lit his own competitive fire. He had laughed more, been more motivated with them around than he had in his life before. Having people to share in your happiness is a powerful thing.

  Delilah hugged Old Hei, shocking him a bit before he laughed and hugged her back.

  “Now, don’t think that you are getting out of your afternoon lessons that easily! We’ll be going over the core theories of Alchemy.”

  ***

  Deep in the earth, a man lay on his back, his body making painful noises. He let out a hoarse noise, his throat dry and raw from screaming and groaning in pain.

  The air around him was thick with a brown haze that he drew in with every breath.

  The man opened his eyes, looking ahead. Just a few feet ahead was the center of the formation. He pulled himself forward, inch by painful inch, his eyes filled with determination. He collapsed within the center of the formation.

  The surrounding Earth mana was pulled in through his nose and mouth, through his mana gates.

  Erik didn’t know how much time had passed as he waited for his body to get used to the new changes happening within.

  The Earth mana entered his lungs, entering his blood, staining it brown as it moved through his body, reaching his bones. The powerful vitality of his body fought to repair him as the Earth mana worked to break him.

  Earth mana traveled through his mana channels, coating the inside of his body and flowing into his bones. The power was too much to deal with the demands of the Earth mana.

  His bones continued to crack and reform. It must’ve happened hundreds of times in the past. A black sludge covered him. His Poison Body removed the poisons from his body. The Fire mana within his body purified the Earth mana as the Earth mana broke his bones. The Fire mana refined his bones, fusing the Earth mana completely into his body.

  As his bones started to crack less, Erik pulled out enchanted needles and stuck them into his leg.

  His bones continued to break less. Runes started to form upon his bones. Runes from the Poison Body and Fire Body appeared across his body. They weren’t part of any known language but contained the power of his temperings.

  Erik used more needles, then he used the dagger. Days passed as his bones settled down again, the Earth mana fusing into his entire body.

  Erik studied the power of poison, Fire, and Earth within his body, watching them working together and acting in ways he didn’t think possible.

  Unknowingly, Erik sunk into thought, studying the human body and the mana system, and contemplating Mana Gathering and Body Cultivation.

  Egbert looked up from what he was reading and then looked back down.

  Gilly seemed to have gone to sleep, drawing in Earth-attribute mana. She was undergoing a massive change as well, transforming her body.

  Both of them are monsters. They’ve been in there for three, almost four weeks.

  ***

  Qin looked up as she felt the power shifting around her. She frowned; it felt familiar. “Is someone making a breakthrough to Expert?” Qin’s head cleared a bit. “Julilah!”

  She put down what she was working on and headed to the workshop at a run. The door was closed and she waited there impatiently.

  She had waited ten minutes and was thinking of knocking down the door when it opened.

  Julilah stood there, looking tired, but there was a triumphant look on her face. “Hah! Did it!” Julilah grinned.

  “You—” Qin held what she was going to say next and shook her head before laughing.

  “Couldn’t let you get that much of a head start. I will become the department head!” Julilah said, looking even more sleep-deprived with her announcement.

  “What technique were you able to create?”

  “I call it the Pressed Formation technique!” Julilah yelled.

  More people were coming over, having heard Julilah yelling or felt the amount of Experience that was flooding the area.

  Qin took Julilah back into the workshop and closed the door, sealing it.

  “See, what I do is I create a print in the air with my mana. Then I press it into the metal, stamping a formation upon it. It takes more time to prepare and a lot of mana to strengthen until it is completely impressed into the material, but with the prep time I can make much more complex and intricate formations, also smaller formations as I am using mana to shape it. What I need to do is create a tool that I can create the mana imprint on, then it will save it and then I can print that into the metal. I could make the prints so that they could be used without my mana. I could make much stronger formations, just need to draw them out on that tool if I could. Take like a day to prepare it, then support it with mana from a sto
ne and then bam, formation in a few minutes.”

  Hearing Julilah talking, Qin was shocked.

  “You could mass-produce formations with that kind of tool,” Qin finally said.

  “I guess that you could.” Julilah yawned, not getting the complete implications that Qin had fallen upon.

  Qin wanted to shake her as Julilah fell into a chair, her eyes half-closed as she kept on yawning.

  “It was strange. You know, as a kid, I thought that smiths just hit the metal once and formed it into a shape. I thought it was pure magic. When I watched smiths, they were just hammering metal together. When I watched Tan Xue, then I saw all the preparation. She took time organizing everything, then she would work the metal as if it were a system. I liked the order of it all. Sure, she hammered out the metal, but it was methodical, with steps, you know. So I took that with my formations: lay out everything ahead of time and then carry it out. I thought it would be funny if I could create a small formation with my mana, a mana blade that was in the shape of a formation. I was going to use it on the formation plate, but then I stopped. I knew how much work Tan Xue put into it—shouldn’t I?”

  Julilah shifted in her chair, turning it from side to side as she let her head hang back, resting her eyes.

  “So I studied the metal, methodically, took the time to understand it. I looked at how it had been formed. Then I created a formation that added to the materials and shape. You know, like how some people paint—they have the finest papers and brushes with them and they can bring out the greatest beauty. Sometimes formations do not need to look pretty—sometimes, they just need to do the job.”

  Qin looked at the formation that was on the workstation. She pulled over a formation-enhanced glass on an arm. It looked rough and not elegant at all, but as Qin studied it and the formation plate, she found that they were in harmony with each other.

  “Harmonizing the workmanship of the smith and altering one’s formation to it.” Qin held onto her chin. “I looked to draw out the power of the metals and the weapon, but I didn’t think of the smith’s workmanship—I just thought of the overall stats.

  “This formation has only been carved out, but it is of the Expert grade already. Looks like you are a half-step...” Qin turned to face Julilah and her words trailed off.

  Julilah’s head was over the back of the chair; her arms and legs hung down limply.

  Qin cringed seeing the way that Julilah was sleeping. She poked Julilah but she was already out.

  Qin used a weightlessness spell on Julilah, reduced her weight and then put her over her shoulder. She cleared up her friend’s supplies with a wave of her storage ring and walked out of the Expert-level workshop.

  People had gathered there, seeing Qin, one of the three Expert-level formation masters, carrying a passed-out Julilah. The two of them were the leaders of the formation department.

  “Don’t you have formations to work on?” Qin asked, trying to sound serious as her friend shifted and snorted in her sleep.

  The different formation masters had awkward expressions as they quickly disappeared and Qin stood there with a red face.

  “Couldn’t you be more lady-like!” she yelled at her friend, who lazily hit her. But with where her hand was, it just smacked her in the backside.

  Qin stared at Julilah, her gaze filled with accusation. Aren’t you a great Expert-level formation master now!!

  Qin shook her head, her image of Expert-level crafters ruined as she carried Julilah off, heading to their quarters.

  People saw her walking through the school grounds with her friend passed out on her shoulder.

  “The things we do for friends,” Qin lamented.

  ***

  “George, watch where you play with the lava!” Rugrat said as he used his sword domain to strike the lava that was coming for him out of the way.

  George pouted and lowered his head into the lava, his breathing making bubbles in it.

  “Go play in the deep end with your friends,” Rugrat said.

  George raised his head with a pleased smile and doggy-paddled deeper into the lava. The group of fire lizards he was playing with followed.

  “Aw, look at the puppies, so well-trained and they listen.” Rugrat closed his eyes, extending his senses out to the section of rock in front of him. Well, sometimes.

  Rugrat cracked half an eye open and he saw George playing in the lava and on the different rock islands.

  Erik probably finds this floor easy to be on. Damn, I’m sweating my balls off! My ass is burning through my pants!

  Rugrat pulled out a shield, put it on the ground, and sat on it. “Better. Right—rock research.” Rugrat cleared his throat.

  Since he had his idea at the top of the Sky Reaching Restaurant, he had started heading to the lower floors of the dungeon instead of smithing.

  He reached out and touched the ground, his senses moving to the stone in front of him. He had needed to get Davin to go to the bottom of the lava lake and get the rock.

  Just standing there, the surrounding area was heated up by the rock. There were different layers to it, some compressed to the point that they had been turned into gems. Decades had been turned into thin lines.

  It created a record of the floor and of Fire mana.

  Rugrat looked through the different layers of the stone.

  He pulled out his spell, smithing, and formation crafting books, checking the information within.

  “The cycle of stone and metals is much like the system of water, with more sediment thrown in and more processes. Water evaporates, rain clouds, comes all back down as rain. The planet’s surface is always moving, pushing things up or down. As that gets lower, it heats up and starts to rise through any opening they can, like steam through a steam cooker. The heat, the pressure, the compounds included, change the composition of the heated materials. This way, we get different deposits of different metals.”

  Rugrat’s Simple Inorganic Scan had grown in leaps and bounds, using it while he was smithing and most of the time without even realizing it. Combining it with his heightened sense and control of mana, when he looked at the stone now, it told him a story.

  He could see the flow of power that moved through the rock and its different layers.

  “Mana isn’t sentient, but it follows a path, like how creatures might move around an area throughout the year, a place to give birth, different feeding grounds, so on. How animals know how to build a nest, how they know how to walk at first. Mana is just like water; it flows through its own path, following its own rules. It doesn’t mean to shape its environment; it just does.”

  Rugrat sank into thought, thinking on the Fire mana, thinking on the Metal mana, the Wood mana, pure mana. Each of them were connected, just different states of the same item—one water, one solid, one gas—all the same, but having greatly different effects.

  The difference between mana and water is that in their different states, mana acts much more wildly than steam, or ice. Rugrat halted his line of thinking. “Is water that tame?”

  Rugrat thought of the times he had been aboard ships, looking over seas and oceans that stretched to the horizon. Heard as ships were torn apart by those forces, the high possibility of being injured if one was boarding or dismounting from one ship and a smaller craft. How the waters could swell and crush a person. It wasn’t tame in the slightest, it was a raging beast fueled by the power of nature, able to turn on those that relied on it in a moment.

  “Maybe to tame it, I just need to get used to it like I got used to water?” Rugrat continued to study as George and the newly tamed lizard beasts of the Fire floor swam in the lava lake.

  ***

  Bai Ping sat down in the cafeteria in the barracks.

  Peng Yi sat down with him and pulled out a book. He started to read as he was eating.

  “Where did you get that from?” Bai Ping asked.

  “I rented it out from the library. You can take some books out from them,” Peng Yi said, not looking u
p as he ate his noodles. His eyes followed the words on the page.

  “Are you that addicted to reading now?” Bai Ping asked.

  “The more you read, the more you will know,” Peng Yi said.

  “What’s the book on?”

  “It’s on animal husbandry,” Peng Yi said.

  “So on how to raise animals? It doesn’t sound that useful to fighting,” Bai Ping said as he ate his food.

  “It might not sound like it, but a beast master can tame all kinds of beasts—those that fly through the sky, or go through the ground. Both can gather information for their master without being detected. Also, it teaches how creatures can have their strength increased through training, through consuming different resources. If they get sick, different ways you can test what they’re sick with and how to treat them.”

  Bai Ping fell into thought as Peng Yi kept reading.

  Once I’m done training with mortars, I should take a look. Next is learning higher level magic, though; that’s going to be hard to learn by itself.

  Bai Ping snorted. I once thought that being a soldier was just learning how to fight with others. It might be how other groups operate. Here, the Alva Army works together, different parts all working as one to win. Using everything that they can. Who knows, maybe if the beasts are sick, then Peng Yi can help heal them, allowing us to ride them and go forth to defeat the enemy.

  “Don’t you have mortar training starting today?” Peng Yi asked.

  “Yeah, starts this afternoon. Moving my stuff over and then training for three weeks.” Bai Ping checked the time. “Which is in ten minutes! Got to run!” He got up and ran out of the hall. He dropped off his cutlery and tray before he ran through the barracks.

  He saw others running to the parade square.

  They were all in position as a sergeant marched out to them. He stood in front of them all.

  “Some of you might know me. My name is First Sergeant Sun Li. I am in charge of you all for this training period. You will create first and second mortar squads of Third Artillery Training Company. You will understand how to call in artillery in a fluid manner. You remember the basics from your sharpshooter courses?” He looked around at the general nodding of heads.