From Basics of Jade Use

Authorship Unattributed

Jade is among the most versatile substances currently known. It is able to act, essentially, as an extension of the mind. Through an effort of will, a user of jade will be able to imprint their knowledge, thoughts, and even their memories within the stone to be accessed by whomsoever they deign worthy.

This, however, is only the beginning. A knowledgeable person may even induce jade to perform calculations independently, at a rate so close to instantaneous so as to be immeasurable.

Additionally, a jade which has been bound to another can be used to communicate across vast distances within a realm instantaneously, even were that distance to span the void betwixt galaxies.

Communication between realms, however, requires a particular type of jade, imbued with a precise function. Thus far no method has been found to extend the use of an interealm jade beyond a single instance. Interealm communication, therefore, is extremely limited as one half of a bound interealm jade must be delivered from the source realm to the realm with which communication is desired. It should go without saying, but travel between realms is exceedingly difficult and is generally only able to be accomplished by those of exceedingly high status and wealth.

A poor person might save for an eon without being able to gather the resources necessary to transport a single individual from one realm to another.

Additionally, even if a person were able to gather the immense quantity of spirit stones required to power an interealm compass, the labor of an array master of sufficient skill to create such a compass would need nearly as many more spirit stones in exchange.

This leaves control of such arrays in the hands of the exceedingly wealthy individual, or the power of sects and guilds which find an advantage in such interealm exchanges. Generally these are created in lower realms to allow access, however limited, to the resources of higher realms.

All of this should make clear the difficulty of interealm communication, as well as the versatility of jade. That a simple jade chit can be used, even once, to communicate across the realm void should be seen as nothing short of miraculous.

With the use of imbued functions, many other applications may be achieved. When provided the proper set of instructions the sensitivity of jade toward energy allows it to measure the capacity of an individual for either mana or chi, as well as their ability to emit it from their bodies, which is an essential metric of one’s preparedness for learning skills. Most technique manuals include both a capacitance and emittance requirement, although this is not an inviolable figure.

One may also use jade to record the imprint of a technique and instruct the jade to record the minimum and maximum capacitance and emittance figures for that technique without the conscious effort of the user. One should not, however, expect jade to perform any functions which have not been defined by the user. Jade is not all knowing and must be ‘taught’ everything that is required of it.

However, when used correctly, jade can be an extreme boon to its user.

Joel began to reach for the pearlescent pebble before him and adrenaline immediately surged through Mitch’s body.

“Don’t touch it!” Joel paused midmotion and looked at him quizzically.

“If that is what it looks like, we have no idea how stable it is. If you touch it, it could explode and take your hand, or worse, with it.” Joel snatched his hand back as though it had been burned.

“I thought you didn’t know what it was?”

“I don’t, at least, not for sure. But, the more I look at it, the more it looks like compressed mist, belmist, whatever, which is itself condensed energy. If that’s true, we have no idea how much energy is contained in it, or how much or little is required to break the equilibrium it has achieved.”

“So, how do we figure that out? We can’t just leave it sitting here.”

“Of course we can’t. Let me think.”

So Mitch thought. He was not a scientist or an engineer. All he had was a casual enthusiast’s knowledge of physics and technology. What little knowledge he had was pointing his mind, again and again, toward Einstein’s most famous formula: e=mc2. Energy is equal to mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light.

Breaking this down: every gram of matter contains twenty-one and one-half (rounding up) kilotons of energy or one-point-four times the power of Little Boy. This, of course, assumed a conversion efficiency of one hundred percent (aka. perfect), which Mitch did not feel could be ruled out based on the fact that this was, possibly, matter formed before their eyes out of energy.

Mitch thought about all of this a lot. There was no way he could conceive of to test this item’s stability without risking death. Poking it with a stick, or picking it up with tongs, was just as likely to break its equilibrium as grabbing it in his hand: any of which could result in the equivalent of up to one-point-five Hiroshimas.

In the time it took Mitch’s mind to process all of this, his body had stepped forward within arm’s reach of the probably dangerous, undoubtedly beautiful, orb that was the source of his vacillation. Deciding to be daring rather than cautious for once, he snatched it up.

It was mildly warm to the touch and unbelievably smooth. Glass had nothing on this little bit of magic. He got the same sensation from this as he did the spirits stones: well, not quite the same. The feeling he got from the upper realm spirit stones was much slower and more intense than what he was currently holding in his hand, but Mitch could not deny that the similarities were uncanny.

At least now he wasn’t going to run out of ammunition. If the beam in his apartment had been worth one-fifth of a spirit stone, he was sure whatever weapons he would be able to come up with were going to be incredibly power hungry. It was a rather massive load off to be able to know that he would be able to run them long term. Now that he had seen how this one was formed, he thought he might even be able to improve upon the process: there were already a couple of ideas banging around upstairs.

“What are you doing?” Joel asked him emphatically. It seemed his cogitations had taken barely a moment and Joel was now, rather than calmly awaiting his reaction as he had thought, reacting to his decision to grab the object. “You just said not to grab the thing because it could blow up, and now you just snatch it up like that?”

“If it were going to explode we would not have been able to get far enough away and still figure it out.”

“How does that equate to just grab it and hope for the best?”

Mitch didn’t really have an answer for that, so he just shrugged. He held the sphere up against the fading sunlight and looked at it more closely. The thing really did look like a pearl, or maybe mother of pearl considering that if you looked at it closely enough, you could see individual colors floating around in it. Energy made matter by some squiggly lines of salt. All Mitch could do was shake his head in wonder.

“The good news is that once I have made some weapons, we won’t run out of ammunition.”

“That’s if we survive you making the things in the first place.”

Had Mitch been paying attention he might have taken offense to that, but his mind was already gone. There was so much to do: make weapons, make better versions of whatever you wanted to call this thing he was holding, kick ass, survive. What little attention had ever been assigned elsewhere was back where it should be, thinking of the placement of his work pavilion, what tools and materials he would need, and what his first round of experiments would look like.

The Historian sat in his chosen perch on the rim of the quarry watching the two below him. After some initial standoffishness, they appeared to be figuring out how to work together. This was good, he hated wasting time.

What was even better was that the obfuscations he had placed on Mitch’s relay seemed to be working as intended. The warden might be stronger, but he was no match in terms of knowledge of compasses and arrays, and the continued lack of his presence indicated that things were working correctly. The Historian grinned briefly at the thought of one-upping the warden.

This most recent development was exciting, but there was more to be seen before it would be possible to see whether or not it would be useful. If what had been done just now could only be accomplished with mana it was virtually useless beyond this realm. Still, there was sufficient reason to keep an eye on this as well.

That being said it was time to move on. Other people were beginning to do very interesting things. While these two had been the first, they were never destined to be the only people of interest in the world. Thousands of people were beginning to gain strength each day, and a very few of those were doing so in a way that was unique enough to merit his attention. Still, they did add up.

His clone was sending him reports from the sensor array every five minutes via jade with instructions to ping him if the warden made any moves. He had three candidates queued up already.

This planet was positively festive.

Kanshou checked his link to the boy’s relay. There was nothing worth mentioning going on just yet, although he appeared to have arrived at his destination. He had almost stopped the boy when he left the city but decided against it. It didn’t really matter where the kid ended up. It was less convenient for him, his skill at teleportation had never been very high, but it would still only take about ten minutes to complete the jumps needed to get there. Besides, there was nothing the boy could do without his knowing about it through the relay.