PtM Book 16 - Chapter 34: Fusion

2/3 this week.

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Between Elder Azure Crimson Tempest and the sect master of the Azure Tempest Sect was a hall, and in that hall was a test. A gentle wind blew through it, sending pain lancing through Cha Ming’s body with every step he took.

The wind is hitting me internally, Cha Ming observed as he rose and put down his foot once again. I can’t paint this. I can’t defend from the outside. I can’t block it. He inspected his body but did not discover any problems. The pressure did not come from his physical self. Is it my inner world? He took another step, and that step caused him to cough up blood and made his mind spin, but Cha Ming saw no affect on the many planes and stars inhabiting his body.

Deeper. I need to go deeper. He focused on the very core of his being. Specifically, he looked at his energy pool, which was currently separated into three rings. When eh took his next step, the golden divine pool began to spin clockwise. His eight-colored qi pool began to spin counter clockwise, and his spiritual energy pool spun clockwise, adding yet another layer of friction.

I see what’s going on, he thought. Like my twin tempests, the wind in his hallway is agitating the different forces inside my body and causing them to conflict. It’s introducing shearing forces into my three energy pools, which creates a cascading effect throughout my inner universe and therefore my body. To proceed, he would need to negate this turbulence.

There were a few ways he could approach the problem. The first way was to try maintaining his divine energy, qi, and spiritual energy pools in a state of quietude. If he could resist the force that caused them to spin, he would be unaffected by the pressure in the hallway.

Alternatively, he could try to spin in the other direction just like he had with his twin tempests. The risk was that he’d be clashing directly with the entire hallway. If he managed to resist, that was fine, but a single bad clash could harm him irreparably.

Cha Ming stopped to think. The wind did not halt, but since the force acting on his three energy pools did not increase, they reached a steady state. It was the unsteadiness that caused damage, and not the steadiness. The sudden increase was what caused the most friction, and therefore the most destructive inference.

Since this was a test, Cha Ming was in no hurry to make his way through the hallway. He was not a mortal, and besides, Sect Master Azure Wind could live up to 4,000 years without any major loss in vitality. She would certainly be a patient woman.

He sat for three days before opening his eyes. Freezing my energy pools in as option, but then they would no longer be mobile, he thought. I could also form runes in the energy pools, but that will take a lot of trial and error. Therefore… I choose to fill each ring in my energy pool with destructive interactions. If there’s too much interference, how can they be shocked into motion? I’ll do this by absorbing all the momentum in my three energy pools to create tiny points of localized turbulence.

He held out a hand and summoned a ball of liquid qi. I was very thick because of his additional carvings and his creation and destruction rune pairs. He focused on the ball of qi and painted tempestuous energy inside it, creating thousands of tiny turbulent eddies that clashed and collided but didn’t cause much damage. The sphere itself did not spin, however. There was stillness in the sphere despite the micro-agitation.

Now then – let’s see if this works inside my qi pools. He focused on the azure wind energy pouring into the core of his inner world from the hallway and concentrated them. Tiny turbulent eddies appeared inside each of his three energy pools. Good... Not good! He suddenly realized his mistake when turbulent eddies crashed at the boundaries, causing even greater fiction.

Cha Ming coughed up a glob of golden blood, and Elder Crimson Tide, surprised at the development, but still standing respectfully outside the hallway, moved to help him.

“No need!” Cha Ming said, raising his hand. He eased himself to the floor and reflected on what had just happened, what went wrong, and how he could fix it.

It took a day to clear out the turbidity in his three energy pools. The clash of energies had been so damaging that the three incompatible liquids inside it had mixed together. Most of them had separated over time, but a thin layer of mixed energy remained at the boundaries of the three rings in his energy pool.

Cha Ming suddenly had a thought: What if this was the key to the Azure Tempest Sect’s success? Perhaps this step was unusually difficult for him because he had three different types of energy. Most people only fused two types of energy. In that case, it would be just like having two opposing tempests. There would be a high mixing zone at the center which would constantly fuse the different energies.

Mixing spiritual energy and qi was possible. Mixing divine energy and qi was also possible. He wasn’t so naïve as to think that the Heartforge Realm was the only one with cultivation fusion techniques. It was just that these techniques were extremely difficult to master.

Take his Divine Law Spirit Stitching scripture, for example. To begin fusing his energies together, he first needed to achieve a balanced state. Once his divinity, qi, and spiritual energy were on the same level, he would be able to begin fusing his three energy types. Fusing thirty percent of each pool would count as a small success, 60% a great success, and 90% was considered completion. As for 100%, it was theoretically possible, but in practice quite difficult to achieve.

But what if I could use the Azure Tempest’s influence to accelerate the process? Cha Ming wondered. The Divine Law Spirit Stitching Scripture has suggested methods, but according to the technique, it can take centuries. He immediately rejected the thought of forcing his way through the hallway. This wasn’t a test – this was a gift from the Azure Tempest Sect!

Since introducing micro-eddies was too ambitious, Cha Ming decided to take things slowly. If he wanted to cause friction between each layer of his three ringed energy pool, it would be best to take it slow. Besides, he could feel that the azure energy hadn’t completely dissipated. It had sunk deep into his energy pools and would surface when he began moving again.

Cha Ming had mostly recovered from the shocking mixture of his three energies, so he started walking again. He took slow and methodical steps and allowed the pressure in his body to gradually build.

Walking wasn’t so painful now. The initial forced fusion between all three of his energies had only left a small quantity of mixed energy, but even that small amount was enough to smooth over the collision between all three rings in his energy pool.

The zone between each of the three rings no longer clashed as badly, so stepping forward was tolerable, but it still felt like getting raked over hot coals intermixed with razorblades. In the end, Cha Ming’s body was made of divine energy. By fusing it with qi, he was altering the very foundation of his physical being. The same applied to his qi pool and his spiritual energy pool.

A hundred steps in, Cha Ming was forced to stop again. The clashing caused by the opposite rotation of each ring was too extreme. Currently, there were five different types of liquid in his energy pool: golden divinity, eight-colored qi, jade spiritual energy, and two nine-colored hybrids of qi and either divinity or spiritual energy.

It took a few hours for these energies to balance out, and only then did Cha Ming continue walking. He continued doing so until two hundred steps in, the smallest ring representing his qi pool began to warp and wobble from the turbulence.

Cha Ming had expected this and knew that while he would very much hate how this felt, he needed to collapse the middle qi ring to mix all three components evenly. He therefore took a gamble and teleported fifty steps forward. The central qi ring in his energy pool collapsed – and so did his body. He chuckled painfully as it reassembled itself bit by bit.

It took over a day for the pain to subside enough for him to inspect his inner world once again. He was relieved to see that his efforts had paid off. His energy pool no longer had three rings. Instead, it had a large golden outer ring, a small jade inner ring, and eight spheres of eight-colored qi suspended in a new type of liquid that contained ten colors.

The golden outer ring still spun clockwise, as did the jade inner ring, but those eight spheres of eight-colored qi now spun counterclockwise independently.

The growing region of ten-colored energy didn’t spin at all. It remained still as the other energy pools gradually mixed in their energy and established a balance.

Despite being able to sit, Cha Ming’s body was still weak. He was forced to continue sitting until he made sufficient modifications to his internal structure. They were hasty modifications, and fortunately, the partially fused energy did not seem to require that much adaptation. In fact, the adaptable nature of this energy was to be expected. This was one of the eventual benefits of fusing one’s energy pools.

Eventually, his body was sufficiently strong and his energy pools sufficiently stable. He stood up and walked forward another fifty steps. Once he crossed the three hundred step threshold, the azure energy that was causing his energy pools to spin suddenly stopped pouring into them and instead began to pour into his mixed pool.

Tiny azure specks appeared in the mixed energy pool. They did not cause the pool to spin clockwise or counterclockwise, but induced local turbulence that mixed the ten energies together.

Three hundred and fifty steps in, the ten-colored energy turned transparent. By then, it contained fifty azure specks.  The next fifty steps introduced thirty more azure specks, and the fifty after that introduced twelve.

It was then that he realized that he’d almost reached the end of the corridor. Another eight steps remained before the hallway’s mysterious effects ended. He also happened to have reached a bottleneck.

There are a total of a hundred specks inside my mixed qi pool, Cha Ming thought. A hundred and eight is an auspicious number. Furthermore, the ten-colored energy is almost completely transparent and on the verge of a qualitative change.

Further, his intuition told him that if he stopped now, everything he’d done until now would eventually become undone. Only by continuing on his current course and finishing his traversal of the corridor would the change become permanent. But if he continued on his current course, he risked damaging his foundations.

The danger comes form my spiritual sea, he realized.It’s damaged despite all the merit I’ve been accruing and might not be able to handle the change in quality of my three energies.

Then again, he still had a protective medallion guarding his spiritual sea, and he had his angelic Blessing of Tenacity. This made him extremely resilient to soul damage.

It’s true that I’m healing. But I can also sense that I’m running out of time. The second phase has been too peaceful. Something will happen soon to upset the balance, and I need to strengthen myself.

In the end, Cha Ming made the only decision he could – to move forward and not look back. His teacher had sent him to the Heartforge Realm to remake himself, and though he’d been resistant to this fact in the beginning, he was determined to make full use of this opportunity.

He opened his eyes and rose again, then took a single step. The hundred and first azure speck lit up. Tiny hints of ten-colored light appeared inside the mixed energy pool.

He took a second step, and the hundred and second azure speck appeared. The mixed pool began glowing faintly.

The third and fourth steps added two more azure specks. These also caused the glow in the pool to intensify. A frightening pressure began to emanate from the pool that wasn’t limited to the muscle empowering, rune gathering, or middle transcendent soul realms.

Fusing all three energies didn’t just mean an increase in total available energy for each type of cultivation he practiced. Doing so would also increase the overall quality of his energy. Currently, his body’s divine energy was a half step into the shell marking realm, his qi’s quality was roughly equivalent to the peak of the rune gathering realm, and his soul’s spiritual energy was a half step into the late transcendent realm. Therefore, the fully fused energy would surely be firmly in the law-stitching or shell-marking realm.

The threat he sensed to his spiritual sea stemmed from this more powerful energy. Specifically, the sudden transition in energy quality would shock the mixed energy pool just outside his spiritual sea.

His spiritual sea was like a cup – it could contain either hot tea or an icy beverage. But if it was forced to quickly change from one to the other, the cup would break. That was especially the case since in his case, the cup was cracked.

Cha Ming took the fifth and sixth steps before sitting down cross-legged. Two more azure specks appeared in his mixed energy pool. He waited for the brightness to increase, and also for his divinity, qi, and spiritual energy to change their relationship with that energy. Only in this way could he minimize the shock to his spiritual sea.

The conflicts between all four energy types sent ripples across his entire energy pool. These ripples caused his spiritual sea to shake and shudder, but no permanent damage resulted.

He took a day to adjust his condition before taking the seventh step. This time, his body shook and split, spilling ten-colored blood onto the hall’s stone flooring.

No matter how my energies mix, my soul is still my core. If my soul in unstable, if my spiritual sea is destroyed, my body will also be destroyed. If it is damaged, my body will also suffer damage. Fortunately, my spiritual sea only suffered small cracks. It’s nothing that can’t be healed over with a week of recuperation.

He took three days to rest this time, and during that time, he added two defensive layers to his spiritual sea. The first layer came in the form of five familiar poetic talismans. He didn’t often use them often these days because his comprehension of these talismans hadn’t caught up to his cultivation. Still, they were one of the few items that could reinforce his soul, albeit for a short while, so he used them despite their lower quality.

The second defensive layer was a spirit doctor technique. It was used on patients with severe soul trauma to stabilize their spiritual sea. He inserted a hundred and eight Yin-Yang Spirit Threading Needles into the outer shell of his spiritual sea, and connecting each of these needles was a thread of ten-colored energy.

It’s do or die, Cha Ming thought. Well, probably not die. More like severely injured. He knew he was being greedy, but the possibility of fusing his energies prematurely was too great to pass up. Not only would he gain much greater flexibility, but his combat strength would raise a half step. Defending himself against early law stitching cultivators wouldn’t be impossible.

Cha Ming’s body shook and bled the moment he took the eighth step. The hundred and eighth azure speck appeared inside his mixed qi pool, then, and each of the hundred and eight specks began revolving more quickly. His ten-colored energy began to churn and shine as they were brought closer and closer to a perfectly mixed state.

The initial mixing brought Cha Ming to his knees, but that was only a prelude of what was to come. The more the ten energies mixed, the higher their energy quality climbed, until suddenly, it let off a blinding light.

The energy had broken through and could now be considered law-stitching grade energy! The change was immediate and sudden, and the aftershocks of that transformation rocked all parts of his energy pool.

The remnants of those aftershocks collided with the walls of his spiritual sea. His five poetic talismans resisted for all of three seconds before their power was used up. The walls cracked and broke, and needles began popping out.

The entire structure began to collapse as his spiritual doctor defences failed,

Then pieces began falling off the glassy membrane, shacking his entire mind and soul. After all the preparations he’d made, it just wasn’t enough.

Cha Ming did not have many items that affected the soul, but the Ninesky Seals were one of them. He summoned it at the last second and covered his entire soul in nine-colored light like a protective cocoon.

Energy rushed into his spiritual sea, washing away his knowledge and concepts. His mind became a blur, and his memories were scrambled.

In the outside world, his body came apart and regenerated thousands of times in a few seconds, and in the end, all that remained of him was a pool of ten-colored divine blood that glowed with brilliant ten-colored light.

Inside his inner world, all that was left of his energy pool were remnant puddles that worked frantically to pull him back together.

***

Not far away from where Cha Ming was undergoing his life and death crisis, a woman with long azure hair opened a single eye. Her eyes were the same azure coloring as her hair, and her skin was extremely pale, to the point that it seemed transparent.

The collapse of Daoist Clear Sky’s body was unexpected. She’d seen some instabilities on his person, but compared to other cases she’d seen, they weren’t so bad. In theory, he should have been able to successfully complete at least a preliminary fusion of his energies.

Given her realm of cultivation, she could infer many things with limited information. For example, she knew there were four types of energy on Daoist Clear Sky’s person, which was normal. What wasn’t normally was her inability to sense his soul.

So she dug deeper. She sent her own soul to observe him on a more fundamental level. She was surprised to discover very little resistance.

And no wonder. When she forced her way into his inner world – a first for her, because typically you went straight for the spiritual sea, as her sect regularly fused body and law components, but not their soul – where she found a strange mixed energy pool and a shattered spiritual sea in the center. There was a soul, but it was wrapped in nine-colored light. A seal?

She sank deep in thought and wondered what might cause such an injury. After eliminating most possibilities, she settled on the obvious explanation: a prior soul injury, and a bad one at that.

She wondered if she should be worried or not. On the one hand, his soul was sealed and his entire spiritual sea a mess. Then again, there were still puddles of fused energy lying about, which meant that his body was not destroyed, and therefore neither was his core or his soul. If his soul had been unsalvageable, the mixed energy would have ceased to exist, for it was ultimately the soul that gave everything form.

Crimson Tempest had naturally witnessed Cha Ming’s collapse and was already on the way to help Clear Sky. Upon arriving, however, he was at a loss for what to do. She wondered why he’d even bothered – picking up a body was one thing, but what did you do about a pile of blood? Did you mop it up throw it in a wash bucket?

The elder shook his head wistfully. “What a shame. Bit off more than he could chew.” He moved to sweep up the puddle of blood, and the sect master of the Azure Tempest Sect was forced to intervene.

“He’s not dead,” she said. “Leave him. He’ll reform in a week or two if he’s lucky.” Then a thought occurred to her. “Do you still have that Azure Spirit Potion?”

Crimson Tempest hesitated. “I do.”

“Throw it on him,” the woman said.

The elder looked about the floor. Some parts were smeared with more blood than others. “Where?”

“Anywhere is fine,” she said. “Just make sure its on his blood.”

The elder sighed and took out a glowing blue potion. He unstopped the cork and unceremoniously dumped it onto the messy puddle. “Why can’t I have nice things?” the elder muttered, probably for her to hear. “This was supposed to be a retrieval mission, not an endless sink on my finances. First the flower, and now my potion?”

“Perhaps things would have been different if you’d warned him not to clash with the Azure Tempest,” the sect master said. “Or if you’d simply escorted him here like I asked. As for this situation… well, it’s not your fault. But I don’t have my Azure Spirit Potion. I gave it away.”

The elder squirmed in discomfort. All of this was very unfair to him in truth. Normally she would care, but the elder had already wasted so much of her time. “I’ll see myself out then,” he said when she did not offer him any compensation.

He left the hallway and the puddle, and when he was gone, another vial appeared atop Cha Ming’s body. It was also an Azure Spirit Potion. She’d lied, obviously. The ten-colored blood puddle drank in this potion just like it had the other.

Perhaps such a remedy wouldn’t be effective in normal circumstances, but energy fusions had their benefits. Technically, this blood was his body, but it was also his spiritual energy, which had a deep connection to his soul. She could therefore feed a spiritual healing potion directly to his body by mixing it with his blood.

“There,” she said. “Now it should only take you three days to recover.” If there was one thing she hated, it was waiting, and she’d been doing far too much of that of late.