I spend the rest of the day just playing with my Qi, trying to understand it a little bit better.

I find that no matter how quickly I withdraw it or what technics I use, the quicker regen sped is only effective while I’m below 10% in my pool, but that is barely a problem as long as I have proper stores of Qi elsewhere to call upon.

I ply with it trying to get the most out of the technique, but a 10 fold increase in my normal regen rate is the most I can do. Which is not that much more than the roughly 8 fold increase of my deepest meditation sessions by themselves. Best of all both increases stacks on top of each other. With a normal meditation, I managed to increase this 10 fold factor to about 13 times skyrocketing my regen rate, and I can probably get around 15 fold if I train the simultaneous deep meditation with cycling Qi out of my main pool.

That is less than an hour to fill my pool if I could sustain it the entire way.

I keep growing the Qi I’m cycling inside the inner world. Though as I find out, it is even easier than mana to control it taking an even smaller sliver of my concentration. I already had to keep in mind the entire time like the inner world’s gravity, lights and other aspects like projects and small experiments I run continually and even the runic works that I grew every spare moment I had to store data, growing the power of the village or the size of the inner world. With all that already on the pile, any reductions in the mental load are very welcome.

The storage runes are a failure. Even trying to bypass the problem entirely by storing my own mana away and then refilling my pool with it seems to strip it of the needed qualities to transform it back into the base state that can be made into Qi. Given the impression I get from Qi, I feel that even developing a rune specifically for it wouldn’t be enough. Trying to contain it, is worse than working with Hydrogen. It may look and feel like Mana, but it has its own particularities. Now I just have to find its advantages to make up for stuff like this. Any small crack that any other liquid and most gasses would not even notice becomes a highway to penetrate, corrode and escape. An atomic sized threat that cannot be contained, only mitigated, just like Hydrogen.

Trying to create a space that has a natural pull doesn’t work and simply sealing the surroundings with runes, no matter how precise they are made and placed all prove to be fruitless endeavors.

Qi like movement, and even inside my pool, it has yet to transform into actual Qi, with the resource feeling closer to mana, though I believe it is a protonic form of my own will ready to be transformed in whatever resourse I desire.

I test all the Mana regen ‘potions’ I have helped make and occasionally put a few minutes into them to see if there are any easy gains to be had increasing their potency, and like I expected, they work just fine. I eat one last parsimon with my meal just so I can enjoy the mild, if not insignificant increase in regen speed.

What I settle on in the end, is to leak the power into Aspen, and make the path to return the most tortuous and long that I can. IF I lose control of it, It will just pool around me and stop any future regen, but otherwise, this will just create a long loop where a constant stream of Qi is coming back to me in a perpetual cycle.

Through it all, even in my failure I still leave with the biggest grin I can muster. This is finally mine. A power I can call my own that goes way beyond the familiar Vigor. Though I could probably find other uses for Vigor, especially as I learn more about the whole triad, but this is outright external magic and I can wondrous things with it from the outset. The system doesn’t interfere with it, maybe it can’t considering its rules, at least not directly. But even if it stopped subtly helping similar to the way it does with all mana, its control of my resource is very much limited, its attempts in the Trial were pathetic compared to its control of mana.

With this already mostly taken care of, though I will come back to it often, I think of what to do next. I go through my usual list noting down a few more items as they come to mind, but from its very beginning, the thought of trying to use Qi instead of mana on the blacksmith doesn’t leave me.

It might not work at all, given that it is a different resource and the system is the one artificially reading and ‘allowing’ the smith to show a little more of his skill. But if it fails, I will have wasted all of… 5 seconds.

There had been plenty of new developments with him, but even if it was interesting and I was going to do all I could to progress over there, what kind of druid would I be if I just spend day in and day out banging metal?

“Ha.”

I’m no Druid, I’m One with the World and becoming One with Nature is just an aspect of the whole. Though I got to admit, it is a dear facet of my powers.

I get up to go to the village and set aside the next hour and a half or so.

Getting there, things start as usual as nobody else even looks funny at me simply heading to my spot just as Mr. Blackwood is starting the next weapon and even that ‘coincidence’ that happens nearly every time I come over is not enough for them to take conscious notice of my actions.

The familiar ash and steel smell hits my nostrils bringing back memories from all the time I spend over here at the very start, and the decent chunk I sprinkled over the weeks and months since. Though that assumed that I was in the village, given that the root network doesn’t transmit smells yet. Remote work may be convenient, but there was no substitute for being somewhere physically.

As he finishes his work and puts a pair of steel billets ready to weld in the fire, I send my Qi into the plate. For an instant, it hesitates over the loose pool of energy, but after a brief halt, the input plate ‘decides’ what to do with it and I go with the flow replacing the mana with Qi. I need a few slight changes on how Qi interacts with the runes and the couple spots where stagnation threatens to activate its desire to space the runic work but none of that should affect his work.

At first glance, I even notice that the smithy seems to have a little more freedom in movement, only a slight jump, but I reduce my perception field all the way down and come back and pay my full attention to the mana input plate;

I draw a smooth and linear flow of Qi and let that become my world, then as I had grown used to do, I push the middle of the ‘pond’ in a rhythm making and letting the Qi flow like that.

I repeat it every time the lowest point passes, building and building the resonance and giving greater amplitude to the waves, to the perfectly smooth waves.

Only they exist in the world and any time anything else there is to rear its head in my thoughts, I simply encapsulate them into a cloud and let them float away.

Push,

Hold,

Push,

Hold.

With a channel precisely cut, I only have to disturb the flow of water and my will is no longer part of the equation in getting the Qi to the input plate, just a conduit. Before, I could do something similar, but with mana the channel upstream.

Now, I have complete, if still infant power over Qi. Altering the ‘height’, so it perfectly matches the input plate, or even if I desired to, pushing it higher child’s play. All I need for my Qi to leak is to sustain a channel of such depth and breadth to get the flow rate I desire.

But for my purposes, I keep both at the same height with a simple straight channel connecting the plate to my own Qi pool. The height of the wave by itself determines the output at any one instant, transporting itself as I just pay attention to producing the waves.

With nearly half of the work gone, much more attention can go to the main part of the job and the results really show themselves.

I’m not very used to this way of doing things, so I chose not to head too deep in the meditation session for the first weapon, but even then I can see that Blackwood's moves are more fluid and free.

The minutes pass and my control slowly improves. I make fewer mistakes getting used to the constant draw, that doesn’t have to be forced in any one direction, just naturally flows as it wills. Thinking of it as the water is the perfect mental picture, at least while it is inside my pool.

The rhythmic pounding is precisely my push and therefore the low point f the waves. A strange synergistic field forms and everyone else moves away from the increasing fires just on the off chance that it will help our efforts.

The pounding of metal reverberates in the relatively small shop and the smith seems to grow into something larger than life, but even as all that begins to build, I find balance and let go.

I simply let go of the reins, trusting my instincts on how to proceed while completely surrendering myself to the task.

-----------------

Li Wei’s POV.

I watch as Nash simply obliterates my every concept of what is possible in an instant. The task he is undertaking is not actual smithing and even Merlin without any skill for metals comes regularly to work on his mana control along with a developing horde of mages. Nash can actually forge decently well, but nothing like this.

Even with little practice, I doubted his works would be any worse than mine and Jack’s.

I look at my buddy. The one person without which even keeping up with Nash’s skills would be too hard.

We were still stuck at level 50 given we didn’t want to choose any random common class, but even without a single subclass for smithing he continues doing the impossible.

And what he is doing right now, in front of us… it should be impossible, at least so soon after his level increases. If it took him a couple of days to do this, what could he do in another week or month?

My magical senses are more refined than Jack’s, but even he can tell, Nash isn’t using Mana. He is actually using something else and the result is astonishing.

I pay close attention to the smith’s movements, without missing a single muscle twitch, trying to not only learn the actual moves but the very intent behind them searching for clues on how we can improve in our craft.

The small blacksmithing Mithril priced book I read multiple times gives me context, but this is learning in the practice, and witnessing this is reality changing.

Sooner than I would have guessed, the spell is broken as the second finishes before Nash opens his eyes.

“Goddammit boy, you have done it again.”

He looks confused and dazed at the smithy who looks at him meaningfully and continues:

“From every single one of the possible ways you may have to cheat the machine and get the max level sooner, I never thought you would go this route.”

“Did I already…?” Nash replies as I hold my breath in anticipation.

“No, not even close, but believe me, you will get it. I can pretty much guarantee it won’t take a year if you apply yourself to your new thing. Another week should push you a couple more levels but it will plato soon little after that. Reaching +20 will take longer. Just know… reaching the higher levels will have restrictions of their own, but you don’t have to worry about any of that for months at the very least.”

I find the undertone of his voice strange, but he never lies to us. If we could unlock the real knowledge behind the weaponsmithing….

“Thanks.”

“A little hint, be careful. One resource is fine, but two causes conflict, only move that way when you are confident you will get the third one at the same time.”

“Why?” Nash sais a little high strung.

“Long answer short: so you won’t pop like a balloon from the imbalance.”

Nash gives the strangest laugh I ever saw like someone is choking him just after he saw a kitten die in front of him. It is an unnatural sound that gives me shivers.

“Too late.” He burst out almost unintelligibly.

“What?”

“It is no longer a concern,” Nash says with hidden meaning and Blackwood stares at him before relaxing and smiling.

“You bloody boy… You really like the play grenades, don’t you?”

I don’t quite get what they are talking about, so I just turn my mind to my own business as I let the excitement build from what I’m about to learn in equal measure to frustration.

Ughhh… Why does he get all the luck??

That’s really not fair.

I watch him leave with a pocket full of money. Two weapons, a +9 and a +10. That’s over three gold coins. And that as much money as he can make every day.

He doesn’t even bother to stay for the explanation. Though a scribe is coming to write down everything Blackwood is saying and that slightly mitigates the tragedy it feels like he doesn’t care. Though my head knows that his time is more useful in other endeavors than spending a whole day here, my gut reaction doesn’t change.

He shouldn’t be taking this apprenticeship, even if my head saw no reason for him to reject it. Just because he focused more on magic and half a dozen other things doesn’t mean that he isn’t stupidly talented in his own way, nor should I be envious of someone else’s position. I need to find my own way into the world.

The smithy seems to heat up even more even if the actual temperature is dropping, as Blackwood starts making a + 8 weapon by himself. Something even better than our previous best. So I let this feel forge impregnate me. I absorb it all, even as I try to release the remnants of ugliness at the unfairness of it all.

It doesn’t matter if he is blessed by the very heavens, I know that I can eventually reach the same heights and likely even surpass him, at least when it came to smithing, and that is all I care about, smithing.

Pushing things slowly is not enough. I won’t wait for my skill to slowly increase, I will build it at a breakneck pace.

I look at Jack ready to call him to my side, but I see the same determination that is perfusing me reflected in his eyes and with a simple nod, we throw ourselves into the work aiming for the stars.

We are not going to be outdone in our own field by a casual. That would be too much of a shame.