It wasn’t humanly possible. The amount of time it took to channel a mere five Iotas had to be less than a twentieth of a second, but he couldn’t be sure.

Channeling was like squeezing water out of a tube; once the tube was squeezed, it was nearly impossible to control how much water would come out. On top of that, there was simply no way for his channels to squeeze out a mere five Iotas at a time.

He also had no way of figuring out how many Iotas there were; a mere five Iotas was not enough to make the card change color at all! In short, this was an impossible task

Solera tried again. This time, it looked like the card had changed color only very slightly. He presented it to Abkariya, who ran a finger along the card’s surface before flicking it out of Solera’s hand.

“Look, buddy. You can’t just make shots in the dark like this. You’re not proving anything. Even if you can magically get five Iotas, I’m just going to ask you to do it again, and again, until you can get it right a hundred percent of the time.” Abkariya sniffed.

Solera would’ve been extremely angry if this wasn’t a man who could vaporize him in under a second. But he needed to be careful. Abkariya had been able to send him flying through the air without him even realizing it, and had even injected him with that strange droplet of red power.

He was an erratic man, so Solera didn’t want to try anything.

“How many Iotas was it?” Solera asked as he picked the card off the ground.

“87. That’s the last time I’ll answer that question.”

Solera looked sullenly at the card. In truth, it was far closer to orange, which signified a hundred Iotas, than it was to red, which signified zero. He had tried to convince himself it looked like five Iotas, but clearly Abkariya had seen through him. Or maybe Abkariya hadn’t, and was just pulling things out of his ass?

“Is there any advice you could give me?” Solera pleaded.

Abkariya gave Solera an annoyed look. “Nope. I don’t know how idiots learn these things since it was just too obvious for me. The only thing I can do is show you what’s possible. And it’s possible, see?”

He snapped his fingers and a wisp of red gas floated out. “Five Iotas, accurate to thirty decimal points. So easy.”

Solera glared at the fog, then back at the card. This “teacher” was of absolutely no use at all! He concentrated as much as he could and tried again. Just like before, it was almost orange. After another ten minutes of failure, Solera flopped to the floor, exasperated.

There was no way! It was absolutely impossible! He couldn’t stop and start channeling fast enough for this, and he strongly doubted anyone could. The more powerful someone was, the more Iotas would shoot out at any given moment, after all. This task would actually be harder for someone more powerful, and it was already impossible for him to do it.

“You know, there are many ways to do this. All they take is control over some fundamental skills, or some creativity.” Abkariya lounged on his hammock, a lazy smile on his face.

Many ways? What ways? Was this man actually saying there was more than one way to channel? That was absurd. Of course there-

Solera’s eyes widened. No, there truly was no other way of channeling. But there was a method of controlling the power! His third eye!

He was submerged in a ocean, standing atop a planet of mud. Everything was brown, and yet transparent at the same time. His vision cut through the earth to the tangle of roots at the core of his Lake. The roots stretched away into the nothingness which Solera knew was his material body. With a thought, he willed the mud to push his soul through the Lake and into the roots that were his channels.

This was such a counterintuitive method, Solera thought as he propelled himself through a labyrinth of passageways. He had not even considered using the third eye, because he had assumed nobody but him had it and thus the solution did not require it; after all, he had never heard of the third eye before. The name of the ability had been granted to him by the mental imprint of the codex itself!

But could it be that he was just uneducated, and knowledge of the third eye was actually widespread? That was totally possible, Solera realized. He knew nothing about channeling. Maybe Abkariya knew about the third eye, and was actually expecting him to use it to solve this problem!

Solera found himself at the end of a tunnel, staring out at a giant, clear film which covered the entirety of the space beyond the tunnel. He had traveled through his channels to the one at the tip of his index finger. And, as he had guessed, he was able to see the card itself, using his third eye!

The third eye… it was turning out to be incredibly useful, and he only had it for a day now. He felt he was only scraping the surface of the third eye’s potential. Undoubtedly, there was much more he could be doing with it.

Solera willed the power to trickle forward, out of this singular channel and into the film. This was different from channeling, which squeezed the power out by using the roots as pumps; this was him willing the power itself to surge forward!

When the power reached the edge of space, at the thin nothingness which separated the end of his channel from the clear film, it stopped. Frowning, Solera pushed harder. The power shivered, then launched a large droplet of power, nearly as large as his soul, past the tunnel and into the film.

Yes!

Excited, Solera willed another droplet to shoot out. It seemed to be the same size as the previous one, and with that he abandoned all hesitation. He did it again, and again, and again, until five droplets had shot into the film. He traveled back through his channels all the way to his Lake and opened his body’s eyes.

To his surprise, he was slumped over on the ground, his right hand still barely touching the card. It seemed that at some point, he had lost control of his body without even noticing!

It must have been when he had left the Lake to enter the channels, Solera figured. For some reason, it was incredibly difficult to see inside his channels clearly without actually being there. Every time his channels pumped, his vision of them would go haywire.

Whatever, it didn’t matter. Solera rubbed his cheek, which had hit the ground a little heavily, and triumphantly handed the card over to Abkariya.

Abkariya traced the card with his fingers again, then snorted. “I don’t know what hocus pocus you were doing just now, but that’s still not five Iotas.”

“Yes, it is!” Solera glared at Abkariya, feeling his fury well up. Five droplets, five Iotas! This man really had just been messing with him all along, and didn’t actually know how to count Iotas!

“No, it isn’t, but I know your mistake. That’s 435 Iotas, or rather, 5 packets, each of which contain 87 Iotas! That’s your power purity, by the way. 87. Pathetically weak. Honestly, you should be ashamed of yourself. But anyway, there you go. There’s a lot of ways for you to do it. Consider alternate flow instead of direct flow. I don’t know why nobody uses alternate flow. It’s great.”

Solera struggled to understand Abkariya’s explanation. Packets? Alternate flow, direct flow? The fuck were those?

The droplets, they were packets. But according to Abkariya, a single one of those droplets contained 87 Iotas!

“How do I split a packet from 87 Iotas into 5? And I still can’t even tell how many Iotas are inside the card!”

Abkariya raised an eyebrow. Solera wasn’t sure, but his expression seemed to be one of condescending incredulity.

“Can you really not see, or feel the difference? Really?”

“No,” Solera muttered.

“This is so stupid,” Abkariya grumbled. “I can’t believe you can’t do that. A card is made up of billions of components which change shape when you add power to it. They change shape so drastically that they change the way they refract and absorb light! So even the color of the card changes along with its texture! How can you not tell something so obvious?”

“Never mind.” This man and his explanations were useless. Solera resigned himself to just investigating with his third eye.

After draining the card of power, he laid down and made sure to rest a finger on the card before exiting his Lake. Soon, he found himself facing the blank film again.

He had a power purity of 87, apparently. This meant that the packets he shot out could only hold 87 Iotas. And yet, he was supposed to make sure only five Iotas could be released into the card.

He first tried shooting a packet into the card, and then sucking the power back out so that maybe there would only be 5 Iotas left in the card. Yet he found that he couldn’t suck the power out of the card because suctioning required the channels, which he seemed only to be able to do in his Lake. It was impossible to do both at the same time, because he could only see when he was in his channels and suction when he was in his Lake. So this method was out of his capabilities.

After some thinking, he understood. What Abkariya wanted him to do was stretch his power, make it less dense! It was the reverse of what he had done in his fight with the Gray, or when he had tried to capture the blue string of power. There, he had made his muddy power more like rock, and his liquid power more like mud. Here, he was supposed to make his liquid power more like gas!

Rather than try stretching his power first, he simply swiped some vaporous power from his Lake and lobbed a packet of it into the film. It worked, but Abkariya said the vapor packet had 10 Iotas. He then tried stretching the vapor into something thinner, but he could only get it down to 7 Iotas. Once again, he was stuck.

This was the solution Abkariya wanted when he had talked about fundamental skills; he wanted Solera to be able to change his power purity at will by controlling his Lake to stretch and condense his power, and he wanted Solera to get an intuitive feel for what constituted five Iotas! But getting his purity all the way down to 5 was physically impossible. There was nothing more he could do.

Well, even if he couldn’t do it, that was fine. He had actually gained a lot from this strange, off-the-cuff lesson. He had learned about power purity, and that it was possible to change power purity by condensing or stretching his power. He had learned he could use the third eye to navigate through his channels, and see external objects with his internal vision. Not bad for a few hours of work.

It also didn’t seem like Abkariya knew anything about the third eye; he had casually probed Solera as to why he was on the ground “like a retard,” but Solera hadn’t answered.

“How much time before I can go?” Solera asked. Several hours must have passed since he had started this strenuous exercise, and it was probably time.

“Dunno. You can go either when someone important busts down that door or when you finally figure out this basic basic channeling.” Abkariya was still on his hammock. He had not gotten up at all this entire time.

Solera looked at the door and blanched. It, and the entire wall, shone with a faint light. Abkariya had reinforced it with some sort of enchantment!

“This is crazy!” Solera shouted. “Let me out!”

“Nope. Wait, you could try breaking the encryption on the door. That would spare us the tedious pain of a future lesson.”

Solera shook his head in disbelief. This man was insane! How could he just lock a student up in a classroom? And what would the Grays do when they found out about this?

Bah, it didn’t matter. Who knew how long it would take before the door could be broken down? He needed to find some other solution to this problem. With a tortured groan, Solera went back to his third eye.

If he had enough control over his soul, he could stretch his power to become 5 Iotas and this problem would be solved in an instant. But as it was, all he could do was stare at his Lake.

His third eye could only see his Lake parts of his channels, as long as their was a string of unbroken power that stretched all the way into the Lake. But apart from that, his third eye was blind. It couldn’t see external objects, except for a few hours ago, when he was at the Tornado Tower. If he could see the insides of the card…

Solera bolted up from the ground, then laid back down in anticipation.

The bathtub! The bathtub held the key! When he had touched the bathtub this morning, he had seen its inner world too! Why? Of course, of course! The bathtub had latent power inside it, and had created a direct connection all the way from the channels in his hands up to his arms and into his neck and finally to the Lake in his head!

Yes, this idea had to be correct! The Tornado Tower had vaporous power shooting around everywhere! Because his Lake was in direct contact with that power, he was able to see everything that the vapor touched, and that included other people’s souls! His third eye simply used power to “see,” and if his soul came into contact with foreign power, such as with the Tornado Tower’s vapor, then he could see everything that power came into contact with.

It was complicated. But in essence, all he had to do was create an unbroken flow of power between his soul and the card, and he would be able to see it.

Solera activated his channels and flooded the card with a continuous, stable stream of power. Slowly, something came into focus. It wasn’t a network of tunnels like the bathtub, or a misty sea like the Tornado Tower. It was just a rectangular sheet, connected to the channels in his hands!

Not a rectangular sheet. A stack of them. He watched as the packets crossed into the card in a connected line, and then flatten out into a thin rectangle. The rectangles would then split apart, becoming even thinner until every individual sheet became almost invisible. On a whim, he sucked the power back, and watched the sheets peel away, merging together to turn back into a packet and then crossing back into his channels. When only a little bit of power was left in the card, the vision started to fade away, too weak to be seen in any detail.

Cards were black magic. They took in power and flattened it into rectangular sheets! How did it do that?!

No, it didn’t matter. Solera stopped suctioning power and poured power into the card again. He stared intently at a singular glob of power as it turned into a rectangle, and then split into two rectangles, then four, then eight… eighty… eighty six, eighty seven! 87, one sheet per Iota!

That was it! All he needed to do now was suck the power back so that only five sheets were left in the card!

But how would he do that?

The answer dawned on him. He couldn’t do it inside his own body, which only took in and shot out a single packet of power at a time. He had to go inside the card itself and extract the power!

His soul… it could leave his Lake and enter his channels. But could it leave his channels and enter this card? And what would his body do if his soul left it?

Everything should be fine, Solera reasoned. He was already not really controlling his body when he entered his channels, but it still seemed to be breathing and whatnot. Without any further hesitation, he entered his channels again, encasing his soul in several packets’ worth of power and flying across the thin nothingness into the card.

The card was a strange place. It exerted a crushing pressure on him, struggling to flatten his power and his soul. Too late, Solera realized he had done something extremely dangerous. This pressure was not too heavy, but it could’ve been! Would his soul have been flattened here, destroyed and left to rot inside a money container?

Solera shrugged. It didn’t matter because it didn’t happen. He seized control of the power inside the card, ripping sheet after sheet away from the rectangle until only five were left. With some difficulty, he shot across the chasm between the card and his finger, the rest of his power in tow.

“I got it!” Solera leapt up, handing Abkariya the card in a fit of excitement. There was no way he was wrong now! He had made sure only five sheets were left in the card!

Abkariya touched the card, then pulled it out of Solera’s hands.

“Took you long enough. If I’m willing to put myself through this torture again, we’ll do some more basic basics tomorrow.”

Personally, as a reader, when I come upon a chapter like this (like in World of Cultivation with the dude staring at his inner lake thing, or killing ants with his spiritual sense) I have to raise an eyebrow. This is so random, so technical, it doesnt really make sense, I want to see some people getting ripped apart instead.

I know some people like some infodumps, but as I see it its been four or so chapters in a row of strange things. Maybe too much for some people.

That’s my opinion, might not be your opinion. The vast majority of readers are silent so I don’t know what you guys think, and I doubt that the frequent commenters, because they are among the few who frequently comment, are a representative opinion on whether readers are interested in an entire chapter of Solera just dicking around with his third eye.

I tried to make info dumps very unorthodox, but its still really random. But they do lay down the groundwork for a lot of Solera’s future abilities with his third eye, so these were necessary. I don’t think it’ll ever get this technical again. Cheers, guys, and I’m looking forward to going back to just casually dropping information as the story progresses.

EDIT: right, so I've been thinking about the concepts explained in this chapter for months, and I really have no idea if they make sense to the casual reader. If something is confusing please let me know!