‘BE A BALL, A BIT MORE ROUND, good, HOLE IN THE MIDDLE, INVERSE SPIKE, GLOSSY FINISH‘

I fit the branch that is now a ball of wood on my spear. It doesn't fit.

‘HOLE DEEPER, MORE NARROW, TAPER, WIDER OPENING’

The ball subtly changes in my hands and I fit it on the spear again. Perfect fit. I now have a walking stick. Speak softly and carry a big stick with a nasty spear hidden in it. I always liked that saying. My roiling qi settles down as I stop the mental shouting. It is still night and I have the bunny in my pocket, asleep.

I decided not to do any destructive experiments on the bunny, so it needs a name. Fluffy seems oddly fitting but it just doesn't click. Bugs? No, Lola would be better. Lola seems nice. I rub the little gal’s head and she wakes.

“Bugs”

No reaction.

“Fluffy”

She just looks around.

“Lola”

Completely ignored.

“Misses Fluffingsworth”

She thinks the grass is more interesting than me, the head poking out of my pocket just looking around.

“Carl Marx”

Thankfully she ignored that one too.

“Hopper”

Alright, this isn't going anywhere. I’ll just name her Lola I guess. Filling my finger with a bit of my qi I rub her head.

“Lola”

She looks up now, staring me straight in the eyes while keeping one ear trained on me and swivelling the other around. The little twitching nose is just too cute.

“Lola”

She looks at me for a little while longer and moves around a bit. The name will have to do. I rub her head a little more and she closes her eyes in delight. The cultivation world didn't have any cute critters. Any feature that does not aid in survival got culled quickly there. Any cultivating beast acts and looks as imposing and intimidating as possible. There are no immortal herbivores, only predators tend to live long enough to get anywhere with cultivation.

The forest stopped getting darker and denser a couple of hours ago, I should be walking towards the spire I saw in the distance when I left the mountains, that should be some sort of tower. Probably a mage’s tower or a cultivators abode. Maybe with a city surrounding it. It didn't seem sturdy enough to keep itself upright so I guess some sort of mystical art was used in its construction or maintenance. A quick mental calculation tells me that I’m only a tenth of the way there. With the pace that I'm currently walking it will take a week at the least.

That suits my plans just fine, I want to have a solid core when I reach proper civilization. The woods should give way to grassy plains by morning though, maybe there will something else interesting to look at then.

I didn't see any more wasps that had beef with me. Maybe the stinger in my spare keeps them away? Wasp type creatures tend to be solitary bugs, the stinger is a clear indication that it was more of a predator. Bees in both worlds I saw them in had hooks in their stingers, making them poisoning kamikaze bugs, giving up their lives for the greater cause when they stung someone. Hostile insects doesn't require such a sacrifice, but beasts like bears get their noses stung at the price of a bee’s life. Only thicker mammal skin has the sturdiness required to get a stinger stuck. A shiver runs up my spine as I remember the ten-meter big bee that sacrificed itself to kill the third realm cultivator that was trying to steal their Heavenly Honey. The pulsating and pumping poison sack that was stuck to the murder weapon gave me nightmare fuel enough for all three worlds I've been in so far.

I keep walking, occasionally scanning with my narrow beam qi radar to keep track of anything around me. Just trees and small forest animals. I really hope that the lack of any bigger predators is caused by a wasp nest nearby. Anything else would probably be worse.

Yep, I jinxed myself again. A bear is trouncing through the woods. I didn't need my qi to sense it, I could hear it walking through the forest from a kilometre away. I look around for a proper climbing tree. A low hanging branch on a tree to my right gives me enough leverage to climb into its crown. Qi pumps through my legs as I jump from tree to tree. A dense fog of qi around my foot dampens any energy in it, muffling the sounds I should be making. I can't do anything about my smell at the moment so I will have to be fast.

Why the fuck is this bear blue? Is it a water bear? I didn't see any seas or lakes nearby, does its colouration have anything to do with mana affinity? I scare myself shitless by imagining myself powerless while locked in a room with said bear. Also, I’m a girl in this setting, for some reason. And the bear has a randy look on its face. Dark blue tinged mana swirls now visible around me but the bear doesn't react. This emotional mana sensing stuff has a limit of a few metres, so I can’t sense if the bear emits anything. I get excited at all the stuff I still have to learn here. So many opportunities to try out new cool shit. A lighter blue now swirls in front of my eyes.

I jump from tree to tree on my original path, pushing the matter of the blue bear to the back of my mind. I wonder if the beast has a house nearby? No, that house was blue, not the bear. Then I realize that the light blue mana was present in the same quantities as the dark blue mana. So far the dark side of mana was way more prevalent, did the bear absorb it, causing both sides to equalize there? Why did it leave the lighter water mana alone? So many questions and all the time in the world to figure them out. With a grin on my face, I return to walking on the ground.

A shaking in my pocket alerts me to Lola, who acts scared.

“Not a fan of heights huh?”

She looks at me with an angry glint in her eyes. That intelligence should not be present in an animal not a week old, did qi do this? Maybe the lack of qi in the world amplifies its effects? That gives me an idea and I want to try it out immediately.

I jog an hour through the forest when I reach a clearing. The circular hole in the forest is filled with long grasses and various shrubs and plants. I sit down in the middle and slowly do a long range scan.

Pouring the majority of my qi through my mouth I make it vertical sheet a few meter high. I slowly drag it around me, looking for any dangerous wildlife. Finding nothing I begin my plan. I drag the qi around me in a sphere, slowly spinning it. I breathe in deeply, using my qi to drag in all the mana it can hold. Breathing out the mana deprived air I reuse the qi to drag in more colours with the next breath. I hold my plan firmly in place and use big portions of my mind to automate the process. A quarter goes to spinning the qi, it's more than needed but this speed but gives me room to spin the qi whirlwind faster. A knob set in its lowest setting appears in my mind's eye, going from one till eleven. Another quarter goes to breathing in mana and qi, while only breathing qi out. Another quarter goes to guiding the energy to my head. The moment I snap the partitions in place I feel the world dull.

Spinny thing too slow, faster. Broken qi come to me! I want all. Swirly whirly around me, come to me! Breathe the colours, send it to head. Knob to three now, colours getting more and more now. Puff out white stuff, more swirls are fun. Knob to five and the blue sticks with green hair disappear. See only white and colours now, wooo, so fast. Dizzy, don't look at swirly whirly. Colours go to top, into glowy ball. Glowy ball now even more glowy! Glowy good. More white stuff through mouth, more colours in. Knobby nobby at sevensies now. Whirly twirly pretty. Coloursies more, wooohoo.

The rest I don't remember. I gain back my full mind an unknown amount of time later, a tornado of colour still around me. A blur of fun and joyous colours getting sucked up by the glowy ball is all I remember after the knob was on seven. A splitting headache is now going through my mind, my sight blurry with tears. After my plan was accomplished the sectioned portions of my mind automatically un-section themselves. The condition for release was the knob at eleven, which should be enough to gather enough mana to form a solid qi core. I recognise qi deprivation for what it is. A normal cultivator would be sucking up as much qi as possible right now, but there is only mana available. This is an issue I should have predicted.

Locking away three-quarters of your mind is basically always a bad idea. A really bad idea. Here is how this process should normally go:

Step one: gather qi in your gaseous core until it seems solid.

Step two: When enough qi is gathered your core will form automatically.

That's it, nothing too complicated. The qi in your core collapses into a fluid that automatically sucks up more qi. Evaporating water into steam increases its volume by nearly two thousand times, and qi works in a similar way. The qi in the atmosphere is then absorbed to make up the same volume of liquid as you had previously. So you would need to absorb a few thousand times more qi than you had available until then. This world doesn't have any qi to automatically absorb and my mind was not here when the process started.

All of this means that my core is still liquid and absorbing qi like a madman. Qi that isn't available in this atmosphere, so it sucked every last drop from my body. Lola seems fine, qi under control of living beings is notoriously hard to influence subconsciously. Even consciously one would need to be many factors stronger than the target to influence its internal qi. A splitting headache brings my thoughts back to the present. I breathe in some mana through the pain but it just swirls around in my bloodstream, no going anywhere near my core. Cant the core absorb more mana? Maybe it can't generate this suction and piece qi back together at the same time?

Thinking this over any more won't do me any good, I need to do something. I focus on my swirling core. A white liquid is spinning rapidly, desperately searching for more qi. I impose my will and command it to stop so it can condense into a solid core. It slows a bit so I start mentally shouting at it. A couple of minutes later it slows enough to start forming a crystal at its nexus. My headache lifts as the tiny amount of liquid gets solidified rapidly.

I scratch my chin as I stare at my core. It is minuscule. I don't think that this has ever happened before. Qi was everywhere in the cultivation world. Any used was quickly replenished and qi free areas were impossible unless you expended massive amounts of effort to absorb it fast. Just to give a picture of how difficult this would be, around a hundred sect master would need to work together to keep one single square meter free of qi. This was used in one place that I know of, a prison for demonic cultivators at ascension level. About five hundred top-tier experts used to man that place in order to keep any qi from going near the individuals.

The solid core inside my head is about a thousand times smaller than anything I’ve ever seen. Not even the scrubbiest of scrubs without an ounce of talent would have a core this tiny. More unknowns and I'm bumbling about in the dark, just the way I like it. The bigger the unknown the bigger the payoff when I make that problem my bitch.

I’m not really worried though, solid cores grow slowly but steadily. You can see the core as a control centre while the liquid or gaseous qi around it is the stuff being controlled. There is just a shred of gaseous qi present at the moment, so I perform another qi radar sweep. I don't seem to have attracted any attention yet, despite the flattened ground fifteen meters around me. I close my eyes and assign the same three partitions I did before. They take up just ten percent of my mental faculties now, a sure sign I’ve stepped into the first realm of cultivation. The knob gets set to eleven and a fierce tornado springs up around me.

After breathing like that for a couple of hours I feel full. Active qi absorption like this is suicide in any qi rich environment, it’s like pumping crude oil in your car, but I made this qi so it’s my bitch immediately upon creation. It’s not about purity or impurities but control. Just absorbing some random energy doesn't instil confidence that one can control it, and thus causes problems. I made this qi from its components, so a stronger sense of ownership can't really be achieved. A look inside shows me liquid qi swirling around the miniscule core. It will have to do.

I assign a few automated mental processes. The qi radar for starters, one short range sweep a second, and a longer range sweep every ten seconds on its lowest density setting. The audio files get a few percents of my brain, continuing the similar word tally. Passive cultivation is the last one I assign, with a standby mode for when I'm full up.

That done I look up. The whirlwind is just dissipating now, and the first qi radar result comes in.

DANGER DANGER, multiple animals around me. Mister blue bear with friends. I send qi surging through my body and sprint away, taking a massive leap into the crown of the nearest tree. The animals startle and seem to wake from a trance. They scatter immediately as I see an entire zoo of animals with various shades and colours sprinting into the foliage. Something feels off about these beasts though, they feel like badly remembered renditions of animals I’m familiar with. A deer-like being with feline paws and a yellow stripe along its back is just one example. The big blue bear seems to have no ears, too many eyes and teeth sticking out of its mouth. A big black raven with fluffy feathers flaps its wings as it gains altitude, allowing me a view of its red belly along with its… flippers?

That was potentially very dangerous. I scold myself to keep better watch as I continue tree hopping. Lola is shaking again and I absentmindedly rub her head with my finger and some qi. She calms down and nuzzles my hand.

A few hours later the sun comes up and I slow down my walking pace. I let Lola down and she hops around but she doesn't stray more than a meter away from me. Seems like I’m not the only one that got a scare back there. I absentmindedly throw my spear. It pierces through a peeping squirrel, whom I proceeded to skin and cook with my qi. Cooking is a joy with my new solid core, no more fires needed, I simply shape sharp edges and flames with my mind. There is no living consciousness to get in my way, so my qi has free reign inside the critters corpse. Organs plop out of its rear end, blood gushes from its mouth as I use its heart to pump it dry while the skin unfolds itself. A pleasant smell spreads around as the meat browns, and I dig in the succulent and perfectly cooked meat. I leave a trail of bones as I enjoy this unnecessary meal.

The sun is halfway in the sky when the underbrush thickens, a sure sign of a clearing or the end of the forest. It turns out to be the latter as a wide-open plain comes into view while I claw my way through the bushes. The spire I saw before is a lot clearer now, it's size and scale still indescribable without anything nearby to compare it to. A single greyish tower pierces the sky just over the horizon. New walking goal found.