Chapter 369 - 24: Doing More With Less

Chapter 369: Chapter 24: Doing More With Less

"Okay," Ash said to the empty room. "Step one. Stop babysitting the loops."

He sat in the middle of the array and went through the idea out loud, because saying things out loud helped him think more clearly.

"Each loop runs in a circle. The energy goes around, does its job, and comes back to the start. So why am I pushing it the whole time? It should be built to run by itself."

The honest answer was that he had never trusted it. He had designed the entire technique, and he had never once let it run without watching every single step. The fear of making a mistake while cultivating—and possibly exploding—had kept him glued to the process. That was a habit, and it was costing him mental energy he simply did not have.

He started the skin loop and deliberately let go.

For the first minute he kept his spiritual sense locked on it, ready to jump back in at the first sign of trouble. "Come on," he muttered. "Don’t fall apart on me."

It did not fall apart. The loop kept turning smoothly. The skin cells continued refining without any guidance. He checked the Status Panel. Mental energy: 62%. A minute ago it had also been 62%.

"Ha. Not a single point. That’s good."

He did the same with the flesh loop, then the blood loop, then the muscles. Each one held steady on its own. With four loops running without his constant attention, his mental energy was draining at roughly half the speed it had that morning.

"That’s it," he said, a grin spreading across his face. "That’s the whole trick. I’m a genius."

He grinned at the ceiling.

That turned out to be the problem.

It was a small mistake, and it came from being too pleased with himself. Four loops had worked perfectly, so he assumed the other five would be just as easy.

He started the tendon loop and the bone loop and let both go. They held. Then he reached the three organ loops—the heart and lungs, the liver and kidneys, and the brain.

Organs are different, a small voice said in the back of his head. You know they’re different.

"It’ll be fine," Ash said, and let all three go.

The heart and lung loop stayed steady. The brain loop stayed steady. The liver and kidney loop did not.

First there was a tight pressure on his left side, just under the ribs. Then it turned into a hot, sharp pain, like a thick nail being driven straight into the tissue.

"AAAGH— damn it!"

He slammed the entire technique shut. All the loops stopped at once. The nine black holes shrank and vanished. He doubled over with one hand pressed hard against his side.

"Damn it, damn it, damn it— ow— ow—"

It hurt a lot. It was not the kind of pain that could kill him, but it was the sharpest he had felt in a long time, and it did not fade right away. He rolled onto his back on the platform and lay there, hissing through his teeth, counting slow breaths.

After about a minute he started to laugh. It was a thin, shaky laugh, and it hurt too.

"I guess I was getting overconfident," he said. He smiled and shook his head at himself. "Great job, genius. You almost cooked your own liver."

When the worst of the pain passed, he turned his spiritual sense inward and examined the spot carefully. It did not take long to see what had gone wrong. He explained it to himself in plain words, because that made it easier to remember.

"Organs are fragile. The loop has to stay exactly on its path. I wasn’t guiding it, so the pulse drifted. It hit the same patch of tissue twice in a row. Two hits in one spot. That’s too much."

He was not badly hurt. Nothing was torn. The tissue was simply overloaded and irritated.

Then, as he watched, it began to heal. The cells around the sore patch tightened and reinforced each other. The pain eased from sharp to dull. In a few more minutes it was gone completely, and the patch felt slightly denser and more responsive than the surrounding tissue.

It learned from the mistake faster than I did, he thought.

That was good news, but he did not feel good about it. He sat up slowly and stayed on the floor with his arms around his knees. For a while he said nothing.

He was frustrated. He had been so sure of himself, and one careless decision had hurt him badly. Underneath the frustration was a quiet, honest fear. He thought about what the instructors always said about brain refining: permanent damage, or a brain that simply exploded. Those warnings had been about people being careless.

He had just been careless.

"It was my left side," he said quietly. "What if it had been the heart loop? Or the brain—"

He stopped. For a moment he actually imagined it—the sudden loss of clear thought, the possibility of never thinking the same way again. The image was cold and sharp. He did not want to finish the sentence out loud.

Okay. Rule number one. Never let go of the organ loops. Not until I’m completely sure.

He drank some water and forced down a ration bar. Then he stood up, still a bit stiff, and started over.

The failure had not killed the idea. It had only shown him exactly where the line was. Some loops could run alone—skin, flesh, muscle, and bone. The ones that touched organs needed his full attention. That was a rule he could live with.

So he kept the organ loops under strict control and let the rest run by themselves. His mental energy now drained at about two-thirds of the old rate. That was already better.

But he was not finished. He had three more ideas, and he took them one at a time.

Step two was batching.

He had noticed something while watching the loops. Each one sent out thousands of small pulses, and each pulse went to a different tiny spot. He had been guiding them one by one because that was how he had originally designed the technique.

"But look at this," he said, focusing on the skin of his left forearm. "A hundred pulses go here. All in the same direction. All at the same time. Why am I handling a hundred separate pulses?"

He could send one larger, coordinated push instead, and it would cover all of them. So he began grouping them. He bundled every pulse that went to the same area—first in the skin, then in the muscles, one limb at a time. It was slow, careful work, and he checked each group thoroughly to make sure nothing was missed.

When he ran the technique again, the drain had dropped further. The same amount of refining was being done with far fewer individual pushes.

"That’s two," he said.

Step three was the black holes.

This was the idea he liked most. The black holes already crushed the energy and filtered it so only the cleanest, strongest portion came through. But after it emerged, Ash still had to shape it by hand—pointing it at the correct body part and adjusting its size and strength.

"Why can’t the black holes do that too?" he asked himself.

He tried it. He adjusted the angle of each singularity so the energy came out already aimed. He changed how tightly each one compressed, so the energy emerged at the exact strength needed for the body part it was heading toward. It took many small adjustments. The first three attempts failed.

"Too wide," he muttered. "Too narrow. Wrong spot. Come on."

The fourth try worked. The energy came out of the nine singularities and went straight where it was supposed to go. He barely had to touch it.

"There! Yes!"

He looked at the panel. The mental energy number was dropping so slowly he had to watch it for a full minute just to see it move. He laughed out loud, alone in the sealed room.

Step four was waste.

This was the same habit he had used the day before—looking for small gaps and inefficiencies. He went through every loop and searched for work that was being done twice.

He found it quickly. "Two loops are checking the same blood vessels by the collarbone. Why? One of them does nothing." He cut it. "A double pass on the bones that does the same job twice." He merged it into one. "A full-body check at the end of every cycle, when the nine loops already check each other." He deleted that too. Then he found several smaller redundancies and removed those as well.

"That was sloppy," he said without any real anger. "Past me wasn’t careful. That’s fine. That’s what editing is for."

Each change was tiny, but together they added up. That morning, with all nine loops running, he had lost twenty percent of his mental energy in ten minutes. Now, with the same nine loops doing the same amount of refining, the pure consumption had dropped to roughly eight percent over four hours.

He ran the improved technique for four continuous hours that night.

When he finally stopped and opened the Status Panel, the number made him freeze.

Mental energy: 68%

He had started the session at 62%.

Ash stared at the panel for a long moment, then slowly sat back.

"Wait... that can’t be right."