The Dao of Magic

104 - Step

I frown a bit as I find the last member of my qi-powered entourage. Lola is making herself way too comfortable smack dab in the middle of the artificial construct circling around Tree. She is chilling on top of the massive hunk of jade that is the core of this construct.

Creating this entire thing took a lot of effort and time. Being the lazy braincore cultivator that I am, I didn't do any of it by myself, of course. I designed the thing but left the actual building of it to my qi clone. The very qi clone now floating in the middle of the moon's core.

Jade comes in two main forms, nephrite and jadeite. Nephrite is also called 'mutton fat' jade, a creamy opaque offwhite. Nephrite is a cultivator's beginners jade, comparable to a children's book. Jadeite is the good stuff, made up from a complex combination of sodium, aluminium, silicon and oxygen.

All of these materials are available in large quantities in seawater and the seabed. My qi clone has been filtering truly humongous amounts of the stuff to create this semi-supercomputer-database. Tree necklace is still floating under the ship, an automated process pulling in water and silt. This muddy water flows out under Tree in an underground cave, through a qi powered automated processing line, dumping the filtered stuff back out into the sea.

All of this is being processed and operated by my qi clone. Some people might say that locking up large quantities of qi into a constructed copy of my physical body might be seen as odd or inefficient. Those people don't realize what a life saving treasure it is. I could be dead, dying and qi starved, merging with my qi clone would replenish my reserves and allow me to heal my body in full.

And now I am using it as a glorified industrial process operator and database manager.

And Lola is using this complex construction as a bed. I feel her consciousness flickering through the stored info and analyzed data. I wonder what she is learning or searching for?

Anyway, I came here with a reason. I get back to my purpose, eager to get it going. I gather all the recording I just made, the full-HD, full detail holographic reports of cultivation progress from my students and Rhea. I gather the info and copy it into the computer. I then register a few new processes in my qi clone's brain, letting it pore over every detail of the info I just dumped.

People are never truly consciously honest to themselves, the very impossibility of a thinking machine fully analysing its own workings while it is in progress is muddling the waters with subjectivity. Each self-reflective thought causes changes that then needs to be analysed by the changed thinking unit. It's like trying to win a race with someone that is by definition a single step ahead.

Someone else can be objective however, and asking someone to summarize what they have been doing is a great way to get a feel for what they think is important.

Long story short, a hyper detailed analysis of the answers I just received will allow me to show them the best options for their growth. Each twitch and glance, down to the milliseconds they held eye contact can tell me a lot. I might not show it, but I do take this teaching stuff seriously. I give the occasional lecture, but more can be achieved by a single sentence at the right time than days of monologuing to a half listening audience.

The first few action points start flowing in my to-do list. Give Ket a hint about non-grid simulation solutions in a few days. Selis and Angeta should do some research about mana mutation, DNA and the effect forming ice crystals has on both. I should do bondage play with Rh...

I cough a bit and file that tidbit of analysed information away in a deep recess in my mind. Very useful indeed.

Lola should stop interfering with the data processing - here I sense some irritation from my qi clone - Ares needs more information about the electromagnetic spectrum, and I should tell Bord about the concept of polygonal rendering, forming the complex from the simple. My qi clone is using a part of the jade core to offload these processing tasks, causing lights to flash through the crystal underground.