The Dao of Magic

113 - Doorway

This is infuriating! My soul connection is too strong? What kind of baloney is that? I calm my roiling temper and try to find my centre again. Sitting on the bow of my ship, I let the seabreeze cool me down. Ignoring Rhea's hair tickling me in the neck, I clear my mind as much as possible and let it all fade out of focus.

A wire extending past infinity shifts into view, stemming from the centre of myself. The centre of my physical body is the stomach. The centre of the body's strength and vitality is the heart. The centre of the spirit self is the brain. The last one is the centre I need.

Looking closer, I see a collection of wires clustered together inside the plastic casing. Looking even closer, I sense sixteen separate signals inside the cable...

Didn't cat six cable have eight wires?

Wait, there are fifteen signals going back and forth? What the heck? I count again and find fifteen signals. That's not right at all. I start pumping my qi through my mind, blasting my brain with concentrated liquid power. Only when I have three quarters of my foundational cultivation base rotating inside my brain do I sense the direction in which information flows.

Six signals uploading, nine are downloading. What the fuck does that mean? This is not making a lot of sense, why do I have a lot more bandwidth going in towards me than going out?

"Rhea, this isn't making any sense. I have six outgoing and nine incoming data streams."

Pale eyes blink open and look at me. "What did you have before?"

"Don't know. I only did stuff with my soul, never really developed it. Everytime I tried peering into my own soul, the world itself rebelled. There were some heavenly laws soul-blocking everyone, was my conclusion."

"You reached a much higher level of power before?"

I nod in return. "Yeah, this is nothing compared to what I had." I clench my fist as I fight off the fear and dread. I will find a solution to the lack of power, even if I have to speed up the pollution of the sun. Reaching the foundation realm required me to siphon off significant percentages of this world's power. And the foundation realm is basically the start to true cultivation.

"Then your soul must still be vast. Your current level of power is not sufficient to require a lot of uploading."

I wrinkle my brow. "It's not that simple, right?"

"I have commanded my soul to be a rope. It narrows down my view, I do not like it. I am going back to the pile of treasure."

I am halfway back to looking at my soul when what she just said strikes me. It narrows her view. Sometimes having a lot of experience is detrimental, it blinds you to new possibilities.

'LET THERE BE A HUNDRED SIGNALS'

The cat cable bulges as it expands. And I see everything. Things I didn't quite put together through brute force thinking are clear now. An overview of my knowledge is just there for the taking. I grasp the entirety of what I know about atomic physics and realization strikes me.

This is what the law of multiple proportions truly means. Oxides with one, two or three oxygen atoms. I nearly giggle as I truly understand this implication.

'BACK TO THE NORMAL AMOUNT OF SIGNALS'

And I am dumbstruck with how dumb I just was. Of course that's how atoms work, you idiot! I shiver a bit. That's how heartcore cultivators must feel all the time, the knowledge is all there laid out before them, the size of an ocean. It's just a shame that it has the depth of a puddle.

It's a hyperbolic curve once again, a spectrum of two extremes. I narrow the amount of connections down to ten total. I feel my mind speed up, thoughts flitting by faster and more precise. I introduce connections one by one until it feels comfortable. I check and see sixteen wires inside my soul cable.