Still, it wasn't all that bleak. Having identified the problem, I set about solving it, and in any case, I had no intention of stopping my efforts to improve my control over life energy. Sooner or later, this difficulty would resolve itself.
As for, well, let's call it the "aggressiveness of chi"… the solution was obvious. True, there were nuances here as well, but to understand the essence, we once again have to turn to history—more precisely, to the moment when the Lion Turtles granted people the Gift of the Elements.
What is that from the point of view of energybending? A donor animal injects a large amount of energy with an "elemental coloring" into the body of a human recipient, and that person is initiated, using that energy to awaken their own "source," a chakra of a particular type: Fire, Earth, Water, or Air, depending on the donor's coloring.
Where is the difficulty, and why study energybending for initiation?
The thing is that life energy is unique to every living being. Even close relatives have chi that may be similar, but is still different. The task of an energybender during elemental initiation is to process the received energy into their own while preserving its elemental coloring.
If they succeed, their own source starts up. If not… well, in the best case, the unlucky bastard gets hit with "Gentle Fist" so hard it's not even funny. In the worst case, they burst like a hamster from a drop of nicotine.
Reigniting a source is, of course, somewhat easier than activating it for the first time, but the general rules are the same. And there are no energybenders here. Converting my own energy into the proper kind of "nutrient slurry"... in theory, I knew how to do it. In practice, it's complicated.
Right now, I could probably pull it off with Fire, and even then certainly not on the first try. But waterbenders would be exactly those "hamsters." Just like ordinary warriors during an initial activation—because of the sheer complexity involved and the fact that they had no idea how to use energy. And former benders as well—only in their case because trying to reawaken a Water chakra with fire chi is, to put it mildly, problematic. And as I've already said, there are no energybenders among them.
But let's return to the problem of removing the suppression from benders who had already been processed. If fire chi wasn't suitable, then the logical solution was to use water chi. The catch was that I didn't have any.
But if Wan had managed it once, then why should I be any worse?
So, the task was simple: awaken a Water chakra. Options? The first thing that came to mind was the Fish. For greater spirits, this would be no problem at all, and I should be skilled enough at energybending to "digest" their energy. All in all, the ideal solution.
Unfortunately, our relationship was, to put it mildly, less than stellar.
Which meant it was time for Plan B: drain a waterbender and use his chi to activate my own source.
As usual, the practical implementation of the plan ran into a number of complications. Constant firebending training, the upgrades from the dragons... While my practical skill level (damn Lightning!) still fell short of the Masters of Fire, my chi was already in the same league.
A proper activation of a Water chakra required energy of roughly the same caliber as that normally flowing through a Fire chakra. Not that less wouldn't work, but the result would have been correspondingly underwhelming.
The problem was that none of the prisoners possessed anything even remotely close to that level of energy. Which meant that if quality wasn't available, quantity would have to make up the difference.
Not that there was any shortage of the latter… Or that I found the process particularly unpleasant… Though that hardly matters.
The important thing was that it worked.
And the result was... strange. Difficult and strange. First, I hadn't expected draining a bender completely dry to result in such a thoroughly unpleasant death, although... even if I had known beforehand, I doubt it would have changed anything.
In any case… it was worth it.
A smooth movement of my hand, and droplets of water condensed out of the air. Another seemingly slow, flowing gesture, and the gathered droplets transformed into icy arrows. A third motion sent the projectiles streaking into the wall, where they left noticeable craters. One more gesture restored the damaged ice to its original state, and a grin spread across my face.
Someone was in for a very unpleasant surprise.
In truth, everything I had done had been done before. There were, however, several important differences. Take "Gift Theft," for example. At first glance, if every bender is theoretically capable of mastering all four elements, why are there no records of people who actually did so?
The answer is simple. Energybending had already begun to fade into obscurity even during the era when humanity lived atop the Lion Turtles. Back then, people interacted almost exclusively with members of their own tribes, with only the rarest exceptions. Humanity didn't settle the "Great Land" until Wan's time, and it was only then that contact between different peoples began—contact that rapidly escalated into skirmishes and full-scale wars.