Chapter 97: Something From Nothing

The initial result was underwhelming. It took him a few tries of bashing the particles of qi together to achieve anything.

Paike had started out just knocking them together hard, but that didn't seem to do much. But it didn't do anything either. At first, he wasn't sure if he was hallucinating it, but after a few more tries, he was certain that the particle started to quiver.

So he just hit them harder. By the time he finally got a real reaction, he was accelerating them to as high a speed as he could in opposite orbits. Each loop, they were moving faster until they were whipping around in a blur. Then he nudged their orbits ever so slightly, and they would crash into each other with as much qi force as it was theoretically possible to have from his understanding of Elder Song's theories and the force he could make.

This was when it finally happened. The particles didn't just shiver, but they exploded. Each was made of several small pieces of Ruby qi, but not the same amount.

These small bits of Ruby qi felt odd in his dantian, like a rock in a shoe, but they didn't seem to be doing any damage. What got him more interested was that they seemed to be moving faster than they should have.

The Ruby particles were moving faster than the Topaz particles around him. He touched one, trying to feel it, but it slowed down substantially until it was moving at about the speed of all the other bits of his qi.

He let them meld back into his qi, and he found that the qi absorbed them and remained unchanged. It was just a mass of Topaz qi, as before. He could detect no noticeable difference in either the quality or the sheer amount of power.

So naturally he did it again. This time, he paid closer attention, counted the number of particles, and tried to measure their speed.

Over and over, he collided these bits of qi, and by the time the next morning finally came, he was in a familiar situation. Surrounded by scribbled notes. This time there was something a bit new. Instead of just squiggles representing the meridians or qi flow, there were several equations that he had tried to replicate from memories of his conversation with Elder Song.

The only thing was that it wasn't adding up. He found a few plausible explanations, but the math didn't work out.

There was a paper he was holding; looking down at it, he wanted to tear his hair out in frustration, but he showed restraint.

No matter how he rearranged the numbers and tried to make them work, they just didn't line up. Taking into account the realm, his qi factor, and the speed of the particles, there was a discrepancy.

The resulting speed of the Ruby particles was too high. If he added them all together, there was energy being added to the system somewhere, but he wasn't adding it. It was infuriating. He tried over and over again, but even with the Topaz qi removed from his control as much as possible, there was some energy making the Ruby qi go faster than it should be. Faster than he could make it, which explicitly shouldn't be possible under Elder Song's theory.

Clearly she was wrong. Paike was almost disappointed by how many of the supposed higher-realm cultivators who were supposed to know everything turned out to be fallible. At least he was pretty sure that Elder Song would be excited to learn more of this.

Stolen story; please report.

After one more attempt, where nothing changed, Paike finally put the graph down. He had been trying to figure out the correlation between the mysterious added energy and anything. It seemed to line up best with how many more Ruby qi particles came out. The more there was, strangely, the more energy was mysteriously created.

He didn't know what to do with this information, but it seemed important in a vague, abstract way. There weren't even any applications that immediately came to mind, as it had with all the other ideas that had gripped him. For all its intensity and purpose, it seemed just like an interesting, yet irrelevant fact. Despite how much he tried to move past it, though, he couldn't seem to shake the idea that it would be important in the future.

Right now, the energy wasn't too much. It was hard to even notice, even for him. But what would happen in higher realms?

He left the room. He had totally gotten sidetracked from his original purpose for the cultivation session. He had made no more progress toward Topaz, just learned a slightly interesting bit of information.

After a quick bite to eat and checking up with Guan Li, he returned to his cultivation.

This time he didn't get distracted. Instead of looking at all the particles of qi as individual entities, he went back to looking at them as a flowing mass. He needed to find a way to concentrate them so they would reach the next stage, pushing him a step closer to Emerald.

From what he had learned in his little experiments, the differences in realms made more sense to him if he ignored the mysterious energy. But the stages now were a bit confusing.

In Ruby, it seemed that the stages came from a general amount of qi held in the dantian. This triggered some sort of change in the cultivator's spiritual biology that allowed them to better take advantage of the power in the qi. The qi didn't actually change; rather, the cultivator's understanding and control did, making it appear different.

If that was the case in Topaz, Paike would be in trouble. However, the dantian didn't need to grow in Topaz to move through it. At least if it did, that wasn't the main focus.

So how did cultivators normally advance through Topaz? Clearly, one of his assumptions must be wrong.

But was it the qi that changed, or him?

As he pondered that question, he realized there were many kinds of changes something could undergo. For example, his physical cultivator was a different version of him, one that was changing. But qi combining was the only kind of change. If you boiled water, it turned to steam. If you froze it, it turned to ice.

Metal could be bent, melted, or cut. So what else could he do to qi?

Paike took a bit of qi and tried to squeeze it together. That didn't do anything. He pulled it into a string as it spun. It looped back on itself like a rope.

Then he had an idea. He twisted the qi into a knot. Just a simple twist and loop. He then took hold of each end and pulled as hard as he could. The knot cinched tight, but the geometry of it applied more force to the center than he could get by just crushing it into a ball himself.

The strain was intense, and he could feel sweat building on his forehead, but he didn't give up. The knot gave up under the pressure; it started to fuse with the rest of the qi rope despite his attempts to keep them separate.

It was something odd to see, different from every other type of change he had witnessed before. He examined the qi, and it felt different. But he couldn't tell what was different.

There wasn't any major change in the rest of his qi or his own senses, but that bit of qi felt different.

It made some sort of twisted sense to Paike. Tying your qi into knots sounded just like something he would expect to be the next stage in some cultivation method, once it was explained. He didn't know if this was how others did it, but he believed it would do something.

Curious, he took a bit of his changed qi and re-ran his collision experiment. After several trials, he was convinced the amount of extra energy had increased. By about the proportion of change he would expect from the first stage of Topaz. This convinced him that he was on the correct path.

He was curious what would happen if he gathered more qi, but wasn't about taking the time to heal again if he didn't have to.

So instead, he buckled down and started tying knots, changing all his qi bit by bit.