The Dao of Magic

17 - Ground

A growing red mist hangs around me. My heart is twisting in relief and guilt as I watch two faces fade away into the red haze.

With a jolt, I wake up and sit upright, feel something launch of my chest followed by a high pitched yell. It's pitch black around me, what is happening. My confusion fades as I take stock of my surroundings after shoving some qi in my eyes, I am underground.

Yeah, I made a small cave underground before taking a nap, how did I get transported to a massive gaping cavern? Looking upwards I see a small pinprick of light. Looking downwards I see a little tree standing in the middle of the bowl shaped floor and a sulking rabbit. The rabbit I understand, she must have been sleeping on my chest, the tree is the problem here. Walking towards the middle of the cavern I see the tree in the middle of a slow motion dirt spiral.

Taking another look around and a few calculations tell me that this tree must have absorbed five hundred thousand cubic meters of dirt by now. My compressed earth bed is still intact, how did this tree dig the ground from under me without me noticing? Forcing the tree into a usable artifact must have taken a bigger toll on me than I thought, I must have been deeply asleep for a while.

I pick up the tree with a stand of qi. Floating it over to me it seems no different from yesterday. That end as soon as I shove some spiritual sense into it. Pushing myself in further, I see the glowing tree, a blue sky and a massive plane of dirt. I need to put some controls on this thing, if I leave it alone who knows, it might even swallow up the entire planet after a few thousand millennia.

Tutting at the over-ambitious tree, I pull my necklace over my head. The flat black sphere reflects the single point of light while the finely wrought chain glitters softly. Plucking the tree from the air I talk to it.

"Good job, not killing me overnight..."

An awkward silence lingers for a while.

"I got this neat necklace with a ton of fancy functions. You want in?"

A white trickle of qi flows from the tree over the necklace. I grab Lola and shove her inside.

"See how it works? Can you integrate these functions?"

The tree understands because I'm talking while keeping in contact with some qi, ideas and concepts are more important like this than the words I choose to say. I pull Lola out of the necklace, I don't want her turning into minced meat because the artifact is changing. I feel her nibbling on my calves to show her irritation. I ignore her and after a minute the tree starts shaking. Taking that as consent, I lay the tree on top of the oblate spheroid. I am blinded by a flash of light.

A millisecond later my eyes adjust again and I see a thing of beauty. An incredibly detailed tree seems to be merging with- or coming out of the hanger. Parts black relief and parts natural miniature bark, the entire crown has flattened to follow the spheroid shape. Miniscule leaves adorn the branches, too small for a mortal's eye to see. I push my entire being into the necklace and the cave around me disappears with a rushing feeling.

I appear a few meters away from the big tree. I gambled that I could enter the necklace but wasn't completely sure. It was a partial leap of faith, if I had pushed myself into the necklace previously, it would have ended pretty badly. Try shoving a human into a box less than a meter wide. I would have broken various bones at the very least and more than likely lost some limbs on the way there. The tree obviously upgraded the necklaces capacity, so it was a pretty safe gamble. Sending some qi out around me I notice that the earth layer is just a few meters thick. I can't see the edge but I feel it a few hundred meters away from me.

All in all, this is pretty neat. I didn't want to make any high-level artifact, they just create dependency, but this end result is even better than the plan I had in mind. And I'll get to do gardening, all the time. I will repeat that for you. I can do gardening all the time. I might not look like it but growing magical herbs, fruits, and various plants is a big hobby of mine. After a thousand years of wandering the cultivation world, I had started little gardens everywhere. Any special spot with a special type of Dao or qi I could find have been turned into small gardens by me.