The Dao of Magic

111 - Patterns

I look at the statistics ticking by with a fraction of my concentration. Some more beastkin have proven to the database that they have a solid grasp of basic knowledge. My students are now messing around with them. The only two humans who have landed here so far are Valerius and Ares's old master, Danarius.

A couple of dozen people have been transported to the mainland out of the few hundred I kidnapped in total. A few humans are about to reach that level too as they play catch up. The beastkin got really pumped after that little beast girl was the first to reach that level.

As for the old fogies, it turns out, the mages are too stuck in their old ways and thinking patterns to admit to not knowing basic knowledge. The only mages in my school are Ares, Valerius and the old guys about to become crystal skulls. I'm guessing that the crystallized part of their brains set their characters traits, literally, in stone. I did a little bit of research on that subject and have found nothing so far to disprove that hypothesis.

The forming mana core is at the exact location where I can sense the soul. The middle of the brain, above the brainstem, seems to be the place where the soul has the most solid connection to the material plane.

I learned quite a few new bits of information about the soul these past few days, much to my surprise. I sink further into meditation, closing off the weird sounds penetrating my castle walls, as I prepare my next experiment.

Breathing out, I dump an immense amount of qi into the atmosphere. Reaching the foundation realm with the concept of nothingness and pure potential did away with any solid form of my cores. To be more precise, I can make my braincore whatever I need it to be at the moment. I can shape it into a book, similar to my previous cultivation, without much effort. A fraction of a second later I can turn it into a sword, vastly increasing the cutting power of my qi. Then I could switch it to an ever-burning fire, etcetera. It's slightly less efficient at those tasks than a dedicated cultivation method, but the pure versatility wins out in the end.

My heartcore is somehow still there, largely unchanged except for a massive increase in power density. The few body cultivation methods I found all focussed on training the physical body, so that makes sense to me.

Having said that, I shape a sensor array in my braincore. I focus all the dishes, antennas and telescopes on Tree, aiming at the one dimensional portal inside its large trunk. The ship becomes clear in my mind, now a lot closer to the other continent. Still no land in sight though.

*HHHuummbbRRtTTrrrRRGbrrWUGAWU*

The wave passes across the ship again. Now only passively observing instead of letting it wash over me, my soul and mind remain unrattled. I notice a slight variation again, the surreal feeling of it giving a slight variation to any I have sensed before.

I collapse the cloud of qi into a single rope and snake it towards Tree. That single rope contains a couple of times more qi than this entire dimension contains. I mentally chuckle at that. I poke it through the portal while keeping the feeding line underground, splitting it in two the moment it emerges from the necklace. I thread one rope to the bow, the other to the stern of the ship.

Then I weave the complex interlaced structure of the rope tighter, completing the core. A highly dense 'T' shape of qi now extends from me. I shield the entire thing, only letting the two ends of the 'T' open to outside influence.

Qi can transmit information, but like sound, the speed of said transmission depends on the density of the material. Sound travels through metal nearly fifteen times faster than through much less dense air. Information like mental images travel through qi based on some sort of vibration. These vibrations can propagate much more easily when there is a lot of the medium to propagate through.