Chapter 516: Wind Attunement

Omilaena sat with her arms folded, glaring at her materials through her goggles, willing them to cooperate.

Now that she had extra-spatial storage space, she could accumulate all kinds of junk, which meant she had a whole collection of pharmaceuticals from across Deadwaste, Rosemount, and Cloudspire. There were connections between them, some obvious, some obscure, and some annoyingly teasing at the edges of her conscious theory. Those were the ones that currently pissed her off.

Growing up on Rosemount, it was just taken as a universal assumption that you could absorb physical materials into yourself. There were stories of nobles seeking the rarest spices to awaken new powers, and the poor would often chew on a favored material in generally-doomed attempts to find some little-known ability.

And things just didn't work that way elsewhere, or really any location where chakra didn't predominate.

Mana on Deadwaste hadn't been all that hard to understand: it was basically pure energy compared to chakra, more intense but less permanent. Concrete forms of mana could produce surprising results, and there was actually more to explore there, but she had discarded them as short term boosts. When mana potions produced enduring Power it was solely as a catalytic.

Now that she had spent some years on Cloudspire, however... qi was more obnoxious. Qi pills weren't themselves formed of qi, they needed a physical substrate, so they weren't like chakra pills. Every theory she'd read or heard on the subject was frustratingly vague: cultivators just seemed to assume that qi was in everything, or at least everything affected qi, so they couldn't explain the details she needed most. They overwhelmingly fused qi into solids to make pills, but she didn't know if that was a necessity or they just preferred that form.

If only she could uncover the principles underneath all these traditions, she was sure that she could gain meaningful insight that could help them with further breakthroughs. And yet all the arts she had learned remained separate, refusing to cohere into a meaningful deeper theory in her mind.

She wasn't going to make progress now. Omilaena sighed, took off her goggles, and went to refresh her mind by messing with the others.

First she checked in on Kai and they discussed potential methods for him to advance his chakra arts, which always kept her grounded. He had an understated intelligence and perceptiveness that her more frenetic mind could play off of well, so even though that conversation was uneventful, it centered her. Omilaena wondered if that was the sort of thing that lovey-dovey spouses should tell one another explicitly, but decided against it. She could pay him back for it later, in a more fun way.

After that she would usually work with Zin Nim, but their wife was involved in boring cultivation that left her unable to talk. Eh, Omilaena wasn't going to break through any time soon anyway. That fucking "Brightwind Meridian Perfection" was another thorn in her side that she didn't even want to think about.

Instead she went to check on the Deadwasters. Starting with Cragrila, who was her favorite experiment: the crystals were still growing well, but no dramatic developments. After that she hunted down Inafay and Orotaisin, who she found seated opposite one another, holding hands.

"Oh my!" Omilaena covered her face in mock-horror. "Am I interrupting something?"

"It's just attunement," Orotaisin said with a shrug.

"What's that?"

"A traditional training method in the Elemental Nations."

"Ah, and after years of training you can move past the 'hand-holding' stage and advance to, I don't know, a kiss on the cheek?"

"We've kissed more than that," Inafay said with a wry smile. "What's up, Omilaena? You just looking for someone to harass?"

"Trying to figure out something, not sure what." Omilaena sat down between them and put her hand over theirs, mostly to tease them and partially to feel the energy, yet she couldn't. "Hmm, so this isn't open to a threesome?"

Unfortunately, neither of them rose to the bait - she generally couldn't get them, though that didn't stop her from trying. Inafay only frowned and looked over at her partner. "Is it possible to attune with more than two people?"

"It can be done," Orotaisin explained, "and frequently is in the Wind Nation. But the more people you try to attune, the greater the similarity required. Between the two of us, we can bridge the gap to your Goralian wind abilities, but with three we couldn't."

"Hey now, this is the first I've heard about this." Omilaena looked between them eagerly. "I know you two have been 'attuning' regularly in your room, but what's this about?"

So the three of them talked theory for a while and she filled in a few gaps in her knowledge of the Elemental Nations. She had already known that Elemental powers operated differently from Essence powers, achieving advancement through methods other than absorbing more of the substance. Apparently one of the methods was attuning to another source of the relevant element, which could be another person.

She'd joked about it, but the two of them really did get stronger by fucking each other. That was just another tantric art, or dual cultivation, or whatever. What interested her more was how this attunement seemed to be purely spiritual, modifying their souls in some way she couldn't exactly measure, even with her blue goggles.

"So what about the physical changes?" Omilaena asked. "I know you Elemental Nation types get weird hair and other things. If the two of you stick together, will Inafay get wavy hair too?"

"They told me probably not," Inafay said, but her eyes wandered to her partner.

"Elemental powers change a person," Orotaisin said. "It's more difficult for people from other nations, so we don't usually see any differences. The body needs to be suited to the element, and it takes great discipline for the body to change."

Omilaena nodded along. "So the physical changes are a side effect, right? Flame hair doesn't make someone stronger, but someone with fire hair has changed their body to be better suited to fire?"

"That is my understanding, yes."

"That's not far off what I'm doing. Could I found the Poison Nation?"

"I don't think it would be a popular one," Inafay said with a smirk.

Actually, Omilaena had only been snarking - her abilities were based too much in essence, even if she had moved into elemental abilities with the Heart of Poison. So her heart had actually changed, and probably begun running poison through her veins...

Abruptly she sat upright and began tapping her fingers against her thigh as the thoughts fell together. Inafay and Orotaisin weren't used to her behavior and looked over in concern.

"Obviously everyone has methods of 'perfecting the body' aside from Physique," she explained distractedly, even while she was figuring out the answers herself. "The power, whether it's qi or fire, has to flow through some sort of channel, so how well-suited the channels are to the ability itself makes you fundamentally stronger."

Orotaisin nodded in agreement, while Inafay frowned. "I'm not sure if I've heard of anything like that for Classes," she said.

"I think it's a universal principle, even if it doesn't exist in every location. So chakra growth is the same principle as elemental attuning... and so is the Brightwind Meridian Perfection."

They both sat up straighter, understanding the importance of her revelation even if they didn't grasp the details. Actually, given their wind focus... maybe they did understand. Omilaena whipped out the blue coil and began waving it between them.

"Cultivators use meridians to channel qi, but even they need to use chakra to maximize their overall power. Seems like the Brightwind Sect figured out a way to make themselves attuned to wind, which probably strengthens them as a side effect. Fascinating."

"Then... would it work for him?" Inafay glanced between the coil and Orotaisin with a smile.

"It also might make you explode," Omilaena said, "but let's find out!"

In the end it took them over a day of experimentation, but she was sure of the basic principle within minutes of starting. Making the body suited for a given element seemed to be a universal, it was just a matter of using the proper methods for a person's balance of power.

And, like Inafay had intuited, the Brightwind Meridian Perfection was an unusually good match for Orotaisin. The coil might risk killing a cultivator, but Orotaisin had been breathing wind elemental power since he'd been a child. After some work, he managed to absorb part of the coil into himself, which shot through the spiritual veins of his body and made them suited to wind in an entirely new way.

With a lot more conditioning, maybe a year or more, Inafay might be able to do the same thing. But they had a limited amount of the coiled material, and Omilaena had a higher priority anyway: their main goal with this had always been Zin Nim.

"So this would make me more suited to wind," Zin Nim said once she understood. "That... may not be good. I already access fire via the Coldfire Corona."

"But if I'm right, we can purify this coil." Omilaena waved it eagerly before tossing it into the pill furnace. "You throw in your mana fire and we'll reduce it down to the essence. It should make your meridians more powerful without specifically conditioning them to wind."

"Is that wasting the material, though?"

"Only by the sect's standards. I think this should help pave a road upward for you, preparing you for your next breakthrough."

They set about figuring the details together, and fortunately the mana flame proved compatible. In fact, the whole thing was pleasingly symmetrical: the coil was fundamentally chakra, the refinement method used mana, and the end goal was a qi channel. There were a few problems to figure out, but the principle was sound.

That was great, and Zin Nim was quite pleased, smiling regularly at her. Unfortunately, that also made her eager to cultivate instead of mess around, and Omilaena couldn't exactly fault her for that. So as soon as she'd done her part, she left Zin Nim to work and headed out.

Not that she wasn't going to celebrate. Omilaena found Kai and tackled him to the deck.