GxG 4
With first light creeping through my bedroom window, I finally awoke. I felt much better after sleeping off whatever knocked me out yesterday.
My first experience with the supernatural was not fun, and I'm honestly lucky I didn't die when I absorbed some of that nature mist. Nature energy? Natural energy sounds the best. It's not matter and it seems related to the natural world, ergo natural energy.
After my morning ritual, which is basically just going to the bathroom and putting on some clean clothes, I decided It was time to review what actually happened yesterday.
The most obvious thing is that I got overconfident and almost paid dearly for it. So far, I have been coasting on my training ability and the safety net that I could train away injuries. I never stopped to think what would happen if I got soul whammied or even if I died. For all I love my Body training, I am simply an apex mundane human. A three year old at that.
It didn't matter how perfect I am, one wisp of natural energy was enough to hit me so hard that the only reason I don't have any permanent physical or mental damage is because of how reinforced and streamlined my body is. It's like one of those 'you must be this tall to ride' signs at roller coasters, but natural energy has a 'you must be this strong to interact with' sign instead.
That level of strength should be around a very athletic adult, and I'm only alive because my body refinements are slightly out of context. I've been putting it off, but I think this is enough motivation to finally dial my motes to have more of a supernatural bend. Before yesterday, this would have just meant tweaking my motes to focus less on refinement and more on raw growth. The addition of Ki changes that drastically.
Ki is amazing. It's warm, vigorous and comforting. I can feel it everywhere, a part of myself that has always existed and I'm only now discovering.
Philosophy aside, the tangible and immediate benefits of unlocking my Ki are immense. Just lighting that spark has caused my strength and endurance to roughly double. I couldn't accurately check, but I did test out with some pushups in my room which were both much easier and I was able to do more. I feel more alert too, but that is less 'magical Ki alertness' and more 'the Ki boosted body naturally has more energy, which leads to feeling well rested for longer'.
I got two new motes as well during my rough testing. Lifeforce Manipulation and Lifeforce Sense.
Lifeforce Sense got grouped with the other sensing motes, and was created when I spent some time meditating to observe my Ki. Lifeforce Manipulation meanwhile was accidently created while I was doing my pushups as I unconsciously moved some Ki into my arms and core. It didn't change much, as the Ki concentration only went up a few percent in those areas, but it was enough for the mote to catch.
A very interesting thing is that both Lifeforce Manipulation and Lifeforce Sense considered both Ki and natural energy to be lifeforce, which had some interesting implications that I will definitely have to investigate at some point.
I left Lifeforce Sense to train without any input as I have no experience with it, so I think a well rounded approach is best for now. Almost dying was a real kick in the ass, so Lifeforce Manipulation has been set to prioritize my internal Ki manipulation, with a focus on hiding my Ki. Once my Lifeforce Sense is better I can copy how the Ki of other kids looks and feels so that if someone who can sense lifeforce comes close, they wont notice anything wrong with me.
My Ki mote seems to relate most to my Ki stores directly and has very little to do with actually using my Ki. I set it to focus on increasing the density and purity of my Ki, as ballooning my Ki stores right now would hurt my goal of hiding my Ki from the wider world.
The biggest and arguably most important change though, even more so than gaining Ki itself, was the change to my training ability. I had figured out before that any training my motes do is limited to roughly 8 hour in terms of what my current status can handle. What that means is that my training is largely bottlenecked by being three years old, but the limiting factor is current status, not age.
This means that over the last 2 years my training effectiveness has increased across the board for 2 main reasons. The first is simply growing older, as age IS the root of my current limits. The second is that the more I train, the more I can handle training. What this means in practice is that if today gave Body a +0.01, keeping every other variable the same means that tomorrow Body would give me +0.011. While those numbers are not accurate in the slightest, they are enough to show that I am at the start of a nasty exponential growth curve.
The reason I bring this up is because the me of yesterday is not the same me as today. Unlocking my Ki was quite literally like rain during a drought for my motes. The simplest way to explain it would be like if all my motes got an XP multiplier while unlocking new skill trees.
My Sense motes are all training to incorporate Ki enhancement, both passive and active. While they are are hamstrung by my utter garbage Ki control, that will get trained up by Lifeforce Manipulation rapidly.
Breathing is focusing on how to sync my breathing patterns with the way my Ki flows naturally, which feels really important. I can also feel how the mote has the option to train to breathe in sync with natural energy, but that feels like a bad idea for many reasons. The main one is that I am not ready to try anything with natural energy for a while, but also that breathing with nature before I breath with myself is dangerous. While the mote training it won't cause any direct problems, if I copied what the mote was doing I would seriously hurt myself. It feels like some kind of 'master yourself, master the world' type of thing, which fits in nicely with my cultivator theme I want to make.
Something that really surprised me was how much Consumption and Excretion were soaking up Ki. Consumption was training specific ways to use Ki in my digestive system to compliment it's earlier training goals of extracting as much as possible from food while also expanding what was edible. I also felt it had something for consuming natural Energy, so I set some training time aside for the mote to focus on that as it seemed very important.
Excretion on the other hand was training on using Ki to remove and reject things from my body. Great, I shall be having Ki powered super poops soon. On a more curious note when I was poking around to see about removing natural energy from myself, as the mote definitely trained in doing so while I slept, I got the feeling that simply excreting natural energy was not the optimal thing to do, at least not as I did. It needed to be altered? Changed? I needed to do something to the natural energy before Excretion could do its job properly.
That was something to mull over.
The final mote of note was Body. I was surprised to feel that Ki and Body don't have a direct 1:1 relationship. They are definitely synergistic in a way my motes have not been before, it was not as much as you might think. A strong, healthy body has a strong Ki, and a Strong Ki usually means a strong body, but it is not equal. A years worth of physical exercise is probably only worth a few months of normal, non-mote Ki training, and vice versa. This is probably the reason why Ki training isn't something mainstream, as you would either need stupid amounts of strength to get your Ki unlocked, or do it like I did and have an esoteric effect unlock your Ki. Doing it my way means your body and Ki would be much weaker than if you unlocked it from raw training, so its probably not used.
This was not a problem for me though, as I finally set my Body to finally train my strength and endurance directly. Now I would just have to train to make sure I don't look suspicou-
There is my Body Control mote. I guess I never really needed it until now. Set that to focus on keeping me seem in the normal strength range for my age before it focuses on all those crazy supernatural stuff like heartbeat control and such.
Good old passive training, gotta love it.
Back to the Body mote, this isn't 8 hours of conceptual body training. This is 8 hours of conceptual Ki enhanced body training, which is an entirely different beast. Just the feeling from the mote of how much I'll start improving almost makes me pity the wider world.
This young master is going to be THE punch wizard.