The question of whether or not that refinement of my energy actually worked to become an element wasn't going to be easy to test. I nodded to myself, ready to begin though.

Ash apparently noted my determination and spoke up. "Nicole, it took me days to learn this. Don't force it."

I shook my head. "I'm not going to force anything."

"You could at least explain what you're going to do first, you know." Danny spoke up. "Melissa and I would love to know, since we're both using internal energy as well."

Danny then motioned behind me. "You've got a few people still here as well. Maybe explain to everyone how you got from Ash's external fire to whatever your internal one is?"

I turned slightly and noticed there were still a few others in the meditation area as well, mostly focusing on me. "You know, you reserve the rooms for yourselves right?" I said to them with a rueful grin. "Not that I don't end up working with people in here anyways."

I rolled to my feet, dropping the baton on the little table. "Let me get one of the big screens real quick."

"You're supposed to be taking it easier." Melissa threw a look while grabbing the daggers, putting them back into sheathes and setting them aside.

With the work of a few minutes, I'd gotten one of the breakthrough projections pulled up to a group of eight. "Alright, Danny and Melissa are internal energy. Anyone else?"

One of the other four raised a hand.

"Alright. I don't think you have a specific element in your energy?" He shook his head. "So three internal, five external. One internal without a specific element." I looked over the others. "I don't believe any of you aligned yourselves to an energy type?" I didn't get any disagreements. "Five external with no specific element as well then. Finally myself, internal and no element as well. Let's call this a small group testing of energy type extraction."

I looked over, and Karen had her tablet set up on the table for recording. She nodded.

"First thing, names and breakthrough numbers please." I mentally assessed everyone first to assess my own sensing as well.

Ash three, Karen three, Melissa four, Danny three. Our other internal energy guy was Will at two, one external lady at two, and two more guys at four. Matched with what I thought.

"You guys push through recently through fourth?" Two agreements. "Congrats on that. It'll be helpful for what I'm hoping to see here, I think."

I then addressed the room. "Alright, I'll go over how I understand this from Ash on the external side. I one hundred percent want anyone to interrupt if your energy does something different, if you don't understand, or if you want me to shut up and let Ash explain it." I got a few laughs from that. "Seriously. I want to make certain what I'm thinking is actually how this works for you all. At each point, I'll go over what I think are differences with internal."

I clicked the image over to the external dantian image and pointed to the spot near the stomach. "When you cycle energy, you pull energy from the world around you into your dantian. Once you do that, it becomes your own energy. Correct?" Too bad we didn't have anything that could on the fly mark this up. Oh well.

A murmur of agreements from that. I then swapped the image to the one with the internal dantian and pointed to it, right under the heart. "For those of us using internal energy, our cycling generates energy on its own. I'm not certain if it's faster or slower than external energy to build up. Thoughts there?"

"I've wiped myself a couple of times." Will answered. "Seems to recover slower than my wife. She seems to just pull more back in faster than I can generate." He motioned to the lady sitting next to him.

"Never really measured that myself." Melissa shrugged.

Danny shook his head. "Me either."

"Slackers." I grinned to take the sting out of the comment. "However, what I do know is that cycling external energy becomes harder once you're over the earth's breakthrough level. Correct, you two?" I pointed to the others.

"Yes ma'am."

I nodded my agreement. "Internal, I don't have that issue, or at least haven't so far. I've been as far as four breakthroughs above earth level and my energy doesn't 'get thinner' or 'not fill as deeply' as I've heard complaints."

"Now, what happens with that energy in breakthroughs. According to Ash, the energy is pretty jumbled when it comes from your dantian and flows through the first breakthrough. For Ash it primarily starts to balance out into the elements of the earth's breakthroughs, does it do the same for you all? Fire, Earth, Air, Water? Wood very recently?" I paused and took in the uncertain looks. "Take a few moments to look at your energy. If you can't tell, that's fine."

Three different cyclings picked up as I watched them all pull harder at the energy; I then looked at Danny and Melissa and caught Will's eye as well. "It doesn't seem to me we have anything that really happens with us in the first breakthrough. Unless any of you have a different experience?"

"Nope." "No." "Not that I've even tried, Ms. Firen." That last comment from Will.

"Alright. We'll give our other three a few more minutes before I move on then." I nodded to the still cycling others. Karen had started cycling too but had managed to keep her attention more on me.

"The elements are fairly even here, Nicole. It's hard to say it balances when it's not super unbalanced with what I'm cycling it in." Karen said after a moment. "Unorganized after being cycled together, but nothing really more than the rest. And yes, all five."

"Alright then." I nodded. It made sense, and we could probably test the actual balancing in the forest or somewhere else.

Once the others had more or less the same grasp on the concept, I continued. "Now we get to what Ash does with his Imbue the Flame technique, and what I hope can be done with any of the elements you're cycling." Ash rolled his eyes, but my other external cultivators were paying close attention. "As part of the technique, Ash overflows just the fire portion of his energy out his breakthrough and into a flame."

"You're about a quarter right." Ash interrupted me.

I paused and took a half step back. "Go for it."

Ash's wheelchair didn't really allow for him to easy move forward without getting the table out of the way, but after a moment we'd adjusted.

"I cycle and push the fire portion of my energy into my breakthrough specifically faster than the rest of it. Then overflow. The overflow is then fire, which I then use on a flame." Ash pulled out his lighter and clicked it. "Damn, burned all the fuel. But yeah, more fire in the breakthrough than anything else and I get fire specific energy when I overflow, rather than a little bit of everything."

"I heard you talking about trying second and third breakthroughs." One of the guys spoke up. "What's the difference?"

"How much fire I can get and how long I can keep the fire going." Ash answered. "Energy going into my second breakthrough is still a lot more tangled together than it is going into my third, which means I can't get nearly the same amount split out to overflow. And even then, using my second breakthrough I'm skipping out on the extra pool of energy that is the third."

He nodded, thinking for a moment. "Huh, so at four I'd have even more time and maybe a better flame? Or water, or whatever?"

"You still have to do something with it." Ash answered. "It took me days to learn to adjust the heat of the flame and it's size." He clicked the lighter again. "And it still uses fuel, so no playing firebender. At least so far."

"You could pull off a Colonel Mustang though." Will piped up and got a couple of curious looks and a fond sigh from his wife. "Ah, Full Metal Alchemist. He used fire sparks to create really huge fires."

"Huh, not something I thought about." Ash looked at lighter and sparked it a few times as he cycled. "Doesn't work with what I normally try with my technique though."

"How about us?" Will asked. "I'm not cycling in elements and don't naturally have a fire or lightning to play with." He motioned to Danny and Melissa.

I nodded. "As far as I can tell, we instead refine what we have. Starting at my second breakthrough, parts of my energy get more refined with each breakthrough it passes through. My thought is to take some of that refined energy and see what I can get out of it. Instead of it just being my energy, can I push the refinement to fire? Or metal?"

"Which I do not recommend anyone explicitly trying tonight." Danny called, standing up. "Ash said it took him days to get the fire overflow and then days more figuring out how to explicitly imbue the flame. And just because you have a good idea," he nodded to Will, "obviously doesn't mean it worked out immediately even for Ash who already had fire."

"Unfortunately, Danny's right. While I would love for all of us to walk out of here with a new technique tonight, it's not going to happen." I looked at a clock hung on the wall. "It's already pushing seven. We'll get this cleaned up and posted to the Seeker site for everyone."

"I'll even put up a bounty." Danny added, drawing looks. "A once per person payment for anyone who can duplicate Ash's technique themselves or come up with something new. It has to be something explainable either through Nicole and Ash's overview today, or you have to be able to explain how it works if not."

After we'd gotten everything cleaned up and mostly gone home, I caught up with Danny in his office. "What's up with a bounty?"

"Ash's initiative to go learn his technique was one of the very few leads on that sort of thing that's panned out. You're putting up everything we learn for others, but we get very little back. Hell, I would have expected a few more things to come down to us solely from the military, but it's all been supplies and materials."

"I've got four different energy cycling plants including one with fire of all things, half a dozen critters that do the same, and Brent just provided us with how the geodes work." I argued. "That's definitely something."

Danny shook his head. "But until the geodes, nothing explicitly useful for us. A lot of things to study and make useful, but shouldn't someone in the US military have come up with a technique or two? We've got nearly four hundred people in the Seekers, but most of them treat this as a new sort of gym membership. They come to us for improvement, they're not dedicated to trying to create something new."

I slumped down into Danny's guest chair. "So what, DARPA and the military are screwing us over? Couldn't it just be they're already doing a lot of other normal military stuff?"

"I don't think they're screwing us over." Danny disagreed. "I just think we're being left to our own devices until we explicitly need something or hit some other issue. If a soldier came up with a technique to make a bullet pierce someone at a high breakthrough level? We probably wouldn't be told, short of finding out Barry finally got shot. And the military hasn't got a lot of people just sitting around doing nothing. They're out digging ditches."

I laughed. "Digging ditches? Dad called makework that."

Danny pulled something up and then turned his monitor towards me. It was a news story from near DC in a place called Newport News. "Army Corps of Engineers Continues to Work with Navy to Refloat Shipyard," I read off. Glancing through the article it was about the efforts to create locks to refloat the ships and get them out to sea again. There was a larger map in the article as well, with an outline of Virginia and a lot of extra land going east, with a line drawn to the water.

"We basically lost the entire eastern seaboard's access to water in the first breakthrough, remember? Everything that wasn't already on the seas has been stranded on land until someone can get them back out to sea, sometimes a hundred miles or more. And everything that was still out there needs some sort of dock to get to, to unload. Miami and that area were the least affected from what I've read, so that's basically become the eastern hub for the entire US." Danny explained. "I kinda think if we hadn't been hit so hard by Barry and the Earth Liberation Front elves, we would have been completely left out of the military thing and just stayed with DARPA here."

"Huh." I still had a hard time wrapping my head around it. Things had gotten a little more bare in Rolla and Leonard Wood, but nothing to that extent.

"So unless we explicitly go looking to come up with a cultivation fix for a current problem, I think we're basically being treated as a thinktank. Good ideas and things come out of us, and other people put them to use. Coming all the way back around to your original question, the bounty is there to get people to actually bring us things they'd rather keep to themselves so we can continue to do stuff and not have to reinvent everyone's wheel. And you can quit trying to make nice with ELF. Or at least their more insane leadership."

"The others talked to you about that, huh?"

"Yeah."