The Dao of Magic

72 - Bare

I just want to sleep. My mind is a mess. I feel nothing and everything at once.

Forcing my eyes open, I notice that I am inside Tree. The small clearing is surrounded by tumbling debris. Massive chunks of stone and clumped dirt tumble alongside a myriad of small trees and loose blades of grass. I spot my castle, the student's houses, the library, the garden and part of the lake untouched. Half of the neatly sorted loot is also busy spinning randomly through space.

This is quite a mess. Tree is glowing golden as it forms a shield around itself and the nearby structures. Its lack of qi must have loosened its grip on the surrounding lands, causing them to disintegrate. I feel like I have to apologize to the poor thing, but the way I currently feel, I want the world to apologise to me.

With a start, I look down. I feel relief as I see her breathing still. I also feel anger, jealousy and am creeped out. The next moment I feel boiling rage and utter depression. Shit, I knew that fucking with my emotions was a bad idea. I decide to distract myself from the roiling mess inside my head by focusing on Rhea.

I breathe in the qi rich air while reaching for the naked lady. I freeze up as I realize that I succeeded. There is qi all around me, pretty dense too. More qi than this space ever had. Then I remember the black streaks splattered across the tower. It looked like someone dumped a whole lot of pitch black candle wax on top of the white structure.

The memories of that time seem very faint and send chills across my spine. I also remember finding that the black stuff is made from molten and burned metal and stone. Fire, metal and earth. I want to beat the everliving fuck out of that trio. First things first though.

Rhea is stable. Her cells are all shot to shit and she isn't getting any better. The qi inside her body is keeping her alive, but not by much. I can fix it, her human form is basically a normal, extremely mana sensitive human, with the exception of a small, additional organ just under her heart. It's a smaller version of the transformation lock organ.

I turn around and walk away for a bit. My mind is still a mess of overactive emotions. My entire body switches from cold hate to incredible lust to exhausting worry. I just wander around for a minute or so, moving my body around in order to calm down.

It isn't working at all. Tears stream down my face while I start trembling at random. I resign myself to my fate by walking back the still woman. I kneel down beside her in the grass and place a hand on her back. I spread a thin, fine mesh of augur across her body, filling half my mind with Rhea's physical form. I use the other half to start piecing her cells back together.

At least, that is the plan. I scratch my head a bit, wondering where to start in this case. It is as if Rhea, lying front of me is a horrible victim of radiation. Her cells are partly mush, so I start scanning them to check what parts are damaged. Arbitrarily starting with her muscle cells - I don't want to make mistakes because of inexperience when working on her brain - I scan them one by one.

A chaotic mess of macromolecules and proteins appear in my mind's eye. It looks familiar, but I have basically no idea how they work and interact in a healthy cell. I never had to piece back cells like this before. I have studied a lot of plant- and some animal cells, but the architecture of this one is alien to me. This task might be a bit much to ask of my fledgeling cultivation base. I will need to do this very smart or I'll be here for quite a long time.

My roiling emotions are not helping either. To be honest, I am feeling quite hopeless here. The complexity of this project is staggering, I am stuck on a primitive planet, this entire planet does not even have a millionth of the power the cultivation world had in total. Reaching ascension level was quite difficult there, how am I ever going to do it in such an energy poor location?