Axiom ~ 27!

~ 27 ~

“Artorian! You explain yourself right now!” Yvessa refilled the water cup and handed it over, glaring at him as she waited for an explanation.

“Make me! …Just teasing, please don’t.” He flashed her a playful smile, though she didn’t relent in the slightest. As her face puffed up, so he quickly got back to it.

“As I was saying, I can squeeze and condense Essence down so until it fits in the tube. Even then, I can only condense so much into the rings before I reach a critical mass and… hmm, pop. I am already at the point where my circles are expanding in size, which leaves the spot closer to the middle of my center a little vacant. So, I will be adding additional circles for further and further refinement and containment. There will come a point where I run out of room, but I’ve a plan for that!”

She was clearly displeased with him as he told her this. “You are just allowing corruption to accumulate? What’s wrong with you? That’s a massive disaster waiting to happen.”

Artorian’s waving hands were instantly back on the defensive. “No, no! I have two methods to my madness! One, confining the corruption not only neatly stores it in my circles, but prevents it from roaming about inside of me and doing harm. Since the types I have are rambunctious, corruption is instead pulled out of my body and stored in my center.”

“Two, the compound Essence I absorb purifies me as I actively cultivate. As I take in new Essence, the starlight that strikes my center also burns off some of the corruption I’m keeping trapped in my center. I’m not sure what to call that kind of lost corruption, but the light just shears it away and it flows out of me. So long as the starlight blazes, and my circles rotate, I am losing more corruption than I gain on a daily basis.”

Having the wind taken out of her sails, Yvessa just shifted in her seat. Rather ladylike even, but it came with the distinct emphasis that she wanted to backhand him. With a hard stare, she moved on to the next question. “Rotate doesn’t sound the same as spin. I think that you are playing with forces that no one understands, that you are going to make a mistake and there will be no one there that can help you. There is a reason we all use the same or similar cultivation technique.”

Artorian was at a loss; for once, he didn’t know how to explain himself. He started with the cultivation motions. “It goes up, and… around, and they all sort of move like a ball spinning in a ball, which is also in a ball…”

“Just... just watch. Easier to show you.” He stopped speaking, losing the thread of his own explanation. His mind dove to his center. Yvessa cycled Essence to her eyes and watched, hoping to be able to save him if he started to accidentally kill himself. Artorian’s center began to glow as he shifted into active cultivation. Concentrating, he let the suction of his center grow beyond the confines of his being.

Rather than omnidirectionally pull from the land around him–as was typical for cultivators–he aimed to only take from the direction of the sun above him. The influx of Essence changed to an upwards cone, and Yvessa saw the Essence flood into him faster. From a cone, it focused again, reshaping to a pillar angled towards the sun. Yvessa had to hold onto her seat when she felt the *thrumm* of energy moving around her. Her hair frizzed, and little pops of static snapped over her garb.

When the raw energy of the heavens crashed into the old man, his center exploded with resplendent starlight. The innermost ring began to rotate on a new axis, rather than merely spin in place on a flat plane. The circle-tube itself still spun in a variety of directions to control and contain the Essence flows, but now the entire assembly of rings moved as a whole.

She started to understand his earlier explanation after seeing it. When each ring spun and rotated fast enough, it had the appearance of a ball. Each ball fit inside of another ball exactly large enough to hold it. The celestial Essence ring started getting up to speed after the purified Essence one. Then the air ring followed suit, then fire. After a long minute, all the rings were spinning, and raw Essence and corruption was filtering between them at an astounding rate. It was a conflux of denser things moving to the outer edges, while the lighter energies moved further and further inwards.

The bright blaze collected itself in his center, visibly bleaching and searing off scraps of colored corruption in the outermost layers. Yvessa likened it to a fence which had the paint stripped away over a great many years, but in fast forward as the compound starlight Essence streamed in at a pace beyond her comprehension. The sheer amount of Essence he was taking in outstripped her personal cultivation by leagues. Even if her spiral was better than the circle at protecting her from corruption in the first place.

Yvessa’s attention snapped to an out-of-place bubble of Essence developing in his center. It didn’t follow the patterns of everything else going on, and she watched it move out of his center entirely and travel to the back of the old man’s shoulder. It was clear that Artorian was intentionally moving that little bubble, since the nesting spheres continued without pause.

In a dark spot on his back, deep down in the smallest parts of his body, that bubble drew out corruption and scooped it up. Dark masses collected in the wobbly orb, one group of thick energy after another. Even some blood and tissue when he wasn’t careful enough; the process wasn’t flawless. The gathered corruption had been causing him pain there. With it gone, he would no longer feel it. Or, at least it would hurt less.

Yvessa couldn’t believe what she was seeing. He was cleaning his body just by shaping and moving Essence? By the celestial… he was expelling impurities! She tried to think about the situation logically. Sure, this was great for his well-being, and might even let him steal a few years back, but overall the damage was done! Or… was it? 

The bubble filled with corruption, but the large patch was also shrinking. Looking closer, a lined network of Essence was being used as fuel to sustain the shape of the scoop. It took Yvessa several minutes of deep observation to see that Artorian was pulling Essence from the celestial ring and re-filling the cells with it after he stripped out the corruption. Body repair with celestial Essence? No wonder his progress was slow, he was literally patching himself up from the inside out!

Yvessa closed her eyes, retrieving the Essence from her eyes to her center. Her fingers pressed to her stressed temples. “You made a cultivation technique, found a way to remove corruption from your body, and managed to find an Essence source that satisfies all four of your affinity channels at once. All this… in the span of a few seasons?”

Artorian heard her, given that he had been expecting her to speak eventually. He began slowing and stopping the process of his active cultivation. It took a full minute before she had her response, and his voice intoned a profound tiredness. Each step of properly starting, maintaining, and stopping his method took effort.

“Not quite, my dear. I made the concept, and now I’m building it after finding methods that work. I have some nasty anecdotes of failures and accidents I’d rather not speak about. The reason I know where to look for certain corruptions that have filled my body, as example my entire left shoulder, is my own fault. I lost control of my corruption tubes due to a bad Essence weave, and flooded myself with corruption wherever the leak happened. I was so panicked that I shoved my purest Essence out of me. I would rather have my progress abandoned than it get devoured by all that corruption.”

Yvessa had one of those looks again, and Artorian twiddled his thumbs. He was about to get a not-informative lecture, and he knew it. “Yes?”

“Then why do I think that not only did you not lose your Essence, but the corruption didn’t get it either?” She spoke slowly, with deliberate words. Artorian looked like he was about to try to weasel his way out of speaking like a petulant teen, but she snapped her fingers at face to force him to focus. “I’m on to you. Tell me.”

The old man hadn’t wanted to touch on this yet, “I may have accidentally discovered how Essence is stored in an Aura. I didn’t lose a single drop of Essence; I just found a… new storage space. In truth, I’ve been using it to hide what cultivation level I might be at from all of you. I don’t know how the system works when I’m not playing by the normal rules, and I will likely never have a fractal.”

“An Aura is incredibly useful as a storage shed, and every aspect I’ve told you about so far still has leaps and bounds of potential for individual improvement. Since I know you’re going to ask. I’ll give you the list again: your center is a bucket. Your body is a well. Your Aura is a village. When I prodded before, I couldn’t begin to understand all that beautiful space. How could I not make it where I store all the good stuff while my center is a canvas of struggles?”

“I’m a child exploring the forest, gleeful to discover what I’ll find next. I have such ideas for techniques, but I won’t spend a drop of effort on them until my bases are covered. With my current progress, two years is about where I see myself properly being able to walk again.”

He trailed off, and Yvessa pushed his drinking cup into his hands, reminding him to hydrate. “Oh, thank you, my dear.”

She nodded and scooted her chair closer, scraping it across the floor. “Listen… Artorian.”

Her voice was soft. Yvessa didn’t want him to make himself suffer like this; all that internal Essence moving must hurt. She also found, very suddenly, that she didn’t want to stop him. “Just don’t go overboard, or get to a point where you can’t call for help. Now that I’ve seen what you’re doing, I know exactly how wasteful it is. This is not something an F-rank should be doing, if you can even be considered in that rank at all. This is upper-D kind of stuff at the minimum, and I don’t know of a single person not in C-rank that figured out how to use their Aura.”

“Eventually you’re going to find something by accident that isn’t healthy for you. Not to mention the problems you’ll run into from a technique that nobody else uses, or can support you with. A way to clear out corruption? Even if it is slow? The progress you’re making has me incredibly jealous, and I don’t know how I’m going to explain this to the others.”

Artorian tensed, “I don’t suppose I could convince you… not to share this? I don’t mind knowing you all read my notes. However, I don’t like the idea of my personal growth being shared. I can’t imagine that… Tarrean, for instance, would be pleased with me.”

Yvessa shook her head as a firm no. “I don’t believe he would, no. But this is something I feel needs to be shared, Artorian.”

Artorian shifted uncomfortably, considering less than savory alternatives. His voice was pensive, but low. “What if I were to give you some cultivation? Boost your rank? A small bribe between friends?”

Yvessa felt electricity course down her spine, and jumped from her seat in shock. “Long beard, don’t you dare lie to me about a possibility like that. I have been struggling with growing my spiral and that is a horrible slap to my face now that I know just how quickly you gain... you gain...”

She was shaking, her breath unsteady. Yvessa had her hands balled so tightly her knuckles were white. Artorian regarded the borderline enraged Cleric, and shook his head because he wasn’t playing with her. “Not a lie. A trick I learned from Jiivra that would allow me to directly push my Essence into your system. Perhaps not your center, but certainly the system. Before she left, she tried to heal me and pushed Essence into my chest. I was still awake, not that she could tell.”

“If I take the time to tap purely from my celestial source, I believe I could do it. We’d have to hold hands, where one of our hands pulls Essence while the other pushes. I’m reasonably confident of the safety. I really don’t want you to tell them, and if it costs me my time and effort to bribe you to look the other way… well… I am willing to pay that cost. Are you?”

Without further ado, he held both of his hands out to her and sat up with a grunt. Yvessa was clearly a person torn. On one hand, speaking out was the right thing to do; the proper thing. On the other… a gain of Essence was unbelievably beneficial. Unlike her, who could only cultivate a few hours per day, Artorian could afford to cultivate nearly non-stop. If he wasn’t actually asleep, or doing some other activity, he was gorging in the influx of Essence like an endless feast. Not only did he pull in mountains of the stuff, but he had the type she needed neatly sectioned off and already corruption scrubbed.

She had no idea just how much Essence he was hiding in his Aura, or even how to read one. Since he had so forwardly offered, the sacrifice he was making wasn’t irrecoverable. But if she took his hands, she would be hiding important information from her order; she would be complicit in losing what could end up being an amazing option for her order. But she would gain something amazing for herself. “Abyss it.”

Yvessa took his hands and drew a firm breath to steady herself. She could already feel the push of energy building against the skin of her left hand. It was deterred from moving as Artorian only formed half of a conduit, and so the energy just waited. With a hesitant acceptance, the young priestess began cycling her Essence through her body as if she was starting active cultivation. She pushed her Essence out from her right hand and had the horrible fright that she was about to lose it for good.

Then she felt the connection knot together like two loose ropes being tied, their hands acting as the bonds as she willingly completed the conduit. With a short gasp, she instinctively pulled from her left. Heaving, her stomach exploded with tingles as a sensation of numbness coursed through both her arms. The right felt drained while the left was overburdened, but the Essence… oh, the Essence.

Instead of the slow, melodious pull to her center that she gained during daily cultivation, this was a torrential river that slammed into her core. Yvessa directed the energy to siphon straight into her spiral, allowing her body to store it in her cells. Doing this, she realized why it was so valuable for Artorian to externally cultivate with his Aura. He couldn’t store a lot of energy in his aged cells. His body was still nearly completely tainted, which must be why he was cleaning it up.

Artorian funneled from the celestial energy circle, but was pushing it with outer energy that Yvessa could feel crackle and pulse as it danced along her fingers. F-rank Seven. F-rank Eight. The ebb and flow of cultivation level spiked as her cells saturated in what seemed to be minutes, but was instead hours of real time. F-rank nine.

“Stop, stop! I feel like I’m going to burst!” The flow of energy halted slowly, the knot of their hands tightening and forming a blockage. She ceased giving him refined bits of Essence to keep up the bond, and stopped drawing in rivers of it via her other hand. She was bordering the upper limit of her current rank, and her spiral roiled in a whirlpool of activity, further refining the energy. Unable to keep up with the previously unseen volume, her spiral just did what it could.

With a final crackle, Artorian released some Essence to close off the connection, forcibly sealing the openings on Yvessa’s hands as well. He collapsed onto his bed, out of breath, drained, and exhausted. The old man was sweating, and his hands, wrists, and arms were bright red from swelling and internal injury. Yvessa’s hands conversely, were spotless. The clear difference between a clean young body that held Essence, and an aged, tainted one.

“Oh, that rather hurts.” The diminished old man’s voice was weak, yet Yvessa reeled with power. She was drunk off the rapid rise, but forced her head into reality when she gathered just how taxing it had been for Artorian.

“Well. *gasp* Why don’t. * gasp * Why don’t we wrap those up after treatment, with all this extra time I have from not making a report?” She spoke the words, but realized they went unheard; the old man was out cold.

Yvessa broke into the D-ranks a month later.