The Dao of Magic

61 - Tests

I take a deep breath of the fresh ocean air. Salty air invades my senses, the smell of brine overwhelming my nose. I rub it in irritation, having my body automatically grow stronger has its downsides too.

"Here is the button. Twist and push with quite a bit of force. See?"

A small section of the steering wheel pole sinks down under my finger. Mechanical noises are heard as the rowing oars retract into the hull, wooden hatches falling back into place. I press it again and the entire process reverses. I move my finger to the opposite side of the wooden pole.

"Here is the basic protection formation control. Twist in the opposite direction like so." A refractive field shimmers into existence around the boat, flattening the waves in a circle around the ship. The entire thing becomes entirely invisible a second later when the startup of the formation finishes. "An entire mountain can fall down on this ship and we would only feel a slight rocking throughout the ship."

I admit I am bragging at this point. Only Ket seems impressed though, he is also the only one that slightly understands how powerful these enchantments are, the rest are just staring at my gloating face with dead fish eyes.

"Those are all the controls so far, take care of the ship, I am going to do some experiments. "

Tess speaks up in a slight panic. "Where are we going to?"

I reply with a single raised eyebrow. "Do I look like a man with a plan to you? Just float wherever you want to."

I see that she wants to retort several times but fails to find the correct words to say. With a skip in my step, I leave the clump of disciples standing on the upper deck above the captain's quarters. I walk to the blue bear chilling on the foredeck. The rest of the animals are scattered around the ship, the snake and rooster are respectively coiled around and sitting on the masts. The rest are either on deck or inside the ship itself. I scratch him across the spine and he lazily opens a single, big eye. All the animals are acting very calm, the qi forming in their hearts must have some sort of influence on them.

I open a hatch on the deck and make my way down the stairs. I rub Lola under her chin while humming a tune. She didn't even whine at me while I gave my mount some attention, so she deserves a good scratching too. I have a rabbit on my shoulder instead of a parrot and I am totally fine with that.

The below-decks is entirely empty except for some supporting beams and pillars. I pull some planks from the Tree and make an improvised room in the ship's bow. It's rather slipshod work, but it isn't load bearing, so it's fine. A crude door hanging on crude wooden hinges gives me a private laboratory.

I then pull out a small wooden table, I made several of these knee high things in preparation for the following tests. I manually burst a blood vessel in my finger and let a small droplet of blood fall out. I then make a very simple circle similar to the very first circle I designed. This one only attracts two sets of mana, positive and negative fire and nature mana. A small compression symbol in the middle completes my first test setup.

I repeat this process five times in total, each one attracting one more set of positive and negative mana. I figured out five of these by myself, namely nature, fire, earth, metal and water. I learned about air mana and its connected emotions from Rhea. I look at the five tables that are now bearing increasingly complex circles and snap my finger. The circles all activate at the same time. I made sure to not overdraw a single type of mana, only water is used relatively often. But we are in the middle of a shitload of water so that mana is relatively abundant here.

I freeze it all a single second later. I approach the first table and flash joy, anxiety, compassion and anger in quick succession. I do it again while looking at the other tables. The amount of gathered mana is similar enough for my tests. I grab the gathered mana in a qi sphere and breathe it in. Instead of letting it flow through my lungs, I manually guide it to my braincore. A small shiver runs across my spinal column as the clump of mana and qi crosses through the back of my mouth, through my spine into my brainstem. Here I let it combine into qi.