World Keeper

Chapter 65: Waterfall

To my surprise, it took the entirety of the second day before I had been able to finish converting all of my ki to elemental ki. This was because the process slowed down the further I went. Since I was only sending out the unconverted ki, the amount that actually did convert became less every time. When it came down to the last ten points, I had to spend multiple attempts just to progress a little bit.

Next, came the part I had been most unsure about. According to Ryone, the method my Host mentioned ended with this. Yet, would my body just immediately adjust to the new ki? That didn’t really feel right. As an experiment I knew I’d regret, I sent about ten points worth of elemental ki into my surroundings, letting it fade away. Then, I waited patiently for it to return. At the time, I wasn’t hungry, so eating wouldn’t help me.

Sure enough, half an hour later, I had regained ten points of normal, unmodified ki. This led me to thinking about what my Host might not have mentioned. Something that would seem obvious to someone figuring the process out themselves, yet might get lost when giving instructions. Of course, this was while I was working on getting those ten points converted again.

Ultimately, I was able to come up with one answer. I had used the world to refine my ki, yet every time I had kept the changed ki inside my body to prevent it being wasted. This meant that I had not really done anything with it at all. I had refined my ki with the world, but now I needed to refine my body with the ki.

For a moment, I thought about how I would refine my body in a way that would make it automatically produce elemental ki. My Host had mentioned that the only step for the entire process was to channel the ki out of the body, and then pulling it back in. If that was the case, the important step should be to have the elemental energy flood my body in a repeated fashion.

I thought back to what Bihena had said about the humans creating ‘ki paths’ in their bodies to increase the recovery. Doing that would certainly accomplish my goal, but I was not sure how high the cost would be later. Bihena. I prayed in my mind, calling the human goddess.

Yeah? Was the response I got, her voice seeming somewhat distracted.

Is it possible to undo the creation of a ki path? If they can be made, it should be possible to unmake them, right? This was my main concern. If that was not possible, then I’d have to do this the hard way, which might take several more days before it was completed. Don’t give me wrong, I loved hanging out with slime one and slime two. Okay, maybe that was a lie, but still. I miss the comforts of a modern home!

It is, though it requires the same amount of effort as creating the path in the first place.

With that reassuring answer, I could get on with my plan. Okay, walk me through the process of setting up a ki path.

As she spoke into my mind, I focused myself, making sure to listen to her instructions. First, I pulled back all of my ki, hiding it all within my heart. According to her, this was where ki originally came from. I considered simply letting the ki rest there, and have it change naturally, but doing this should make it much faster.

The second step was to design my ki path. According to her, the easiest ki path to design was one that was kept entirely in the chest, since limbs move around frequently and would need extra focus. For my path, I opted for a figure eight which passed through both sides of my chest, with the heart at the center point.

Next, I had to carefully guide a single strand of ki along the path I imagined, preventing it from wandering outside the area I designate. This was the only hard part of the process, as controlling one individual strand of energy so precisely was something I hadn’t done much. In fact, I failed repeatedly because of that, having to start from the beginning.

I forgot how many times I actually tried, but by the time I finished making one complete cycle, the sun had already fallen. The problem was, I didn’t just need one cycle, I needed ten. Each cycle would bring with it a little bit more of my energy, and also flow more easily. Although I still had to restart from the beginning a couple times, I did eventually get to the third cycle. After that, it seemed to be more natural, my ki following it even without my control.

Yet still, I continued to control it for the remaining seven cycles, until my full ki pool was constantly circulating in that figure eight. And that’s how you do it. Good work, Dale. Bihena said with a proud voice. Now, when you want to stop it, you’ll have to do much the same thing. But, instead of making it follow a new path, you will want to stop it a little bit at a time. If you try to force it all to stop at once after a ki path has been created, it could cause internal damage.

I mentally thanked her for the warning, glad that I asked in advance. My Keeper health likely would have been able to save me from dying like it had when I blew myself up experimenting with chakra, but I had no doubt it’d hurt like a bitch. Seeing that there was not much for me to do but wait, I decided to go ahead and sleep, allowing the ki path to work overnight at it while I slept.

Once again, I set up the fire trap spell I had used to safeguard my area the night before. Though this time, I made sure to remember about it when I woke up in the morning. Almost roasted the two slimes before I managed to throw them out of the area. Surprisingly, they did not splat on landing, and were able to recover just fine. More surprisingly, they did not run away after being burned, and slimed their way back to me.

After making sure to throw the slimes out of the spell area BEFORE I set it off, I once again inspected my ki. As planned, it was still following the same pattern as before, flowing through the path as if nothing had changed. So, to test it out, I forced some of my ki away from the path to send it out of my body. Bihena wasn’t lying when she said that it became harder to access the ki, since it felt like I was trying to pull a boat upriver.

Nevertheless, I did manage to send that ki out of my body, letting it disperse naturally into the air. Then, I waited for my ki to recover to see whether it had changed or not. My Host had said that this process would take hundreds of attempts before it worked, but he didn’t know about the ki path methods of the humans. If he did, it might have only taken two or three attempts, and then letting the converted ki follow a path like this to stimulate the production. Of course, that was only a theory.

Sure enough, just a minute or two later, my ki was back at full, and it was still entirely converted. Now, it was time to see just  what it meant to have elemental ki. I assumed that it brought changes to the normal applications of the energy, but I wasn’t sure how big the changes were. First, I once again pulled up my status window, to see what changes had taken place. While I had been converting my mana, I had managed to gain a total of two Monk levels.

Overall, not much changed, so I was not expecting too much. Especially since the status window still read the energy as ki, rather than elemental ki or something like that. Maybe it just doesn’t recognize it on the status windows since I didn’t buy the class. I briefly considered that, nodding my head. It was definitely a possible answer.

Before I could begin my experiments, I had to take apart my ki path. Following the instructions Bihena had left previously, I grabbed a little bit of my ki at a time, slowly making it stop at my heart with each passing cycle. Doing it this way took roughly ten or so minutes, and then I was done. Honestly, I think that I may have rushed it a bit, for two main reasons. One was the slight chest pain I was feeling after I was done…

-10

-10

The other was the fact that my health began slowly ticking down whenever I grabbed a slightly larger cluster of ki… Thankfully, it only lasted for a brief moment, but even that had caused enough ticks of damage to remove half my health. Anyways, now I can get on with it.

For my first test of elemental ki, I decided to go with one of the most basic ki techniques I knew… walking. Normally, channeling ki into my feet would cause a literal explosive burst of speed, propelling me through the air for a distance dependant on the amount of energy I used. Logically, I did not expect this to be much different.

However, once the energy was channeled to my feet and I took a single step, my entire perception of the world changed… As if everything I knew was turned upside down.

-5

Mostly because I fell back and hit my head on the ground. The moment my foot touched the ground, it began sliding forward as if I was walking on ice, causing me to lose my balance. I felt my brows knit together as I worked my way back to my feet. This time, I channeled ki into both of my feet, that way I wouldn’t lose my balance so easily as I had before.

And indeed, I began sliding forward as soon as I made the slightest movement. It truly felt as if I was skating on ice, my speed increasing or decreasing with the amount of movement and the amount of ki I put into it. My only concern was that my initial direction had been facing the forest, which at the time was the largest straight shot available to me. Now, however, those trees were looking awfully close.

My second discovery about moving with elemental ki, or at least what I assumed was water element ki, was that directions could change far too easily. The moment I tried to adjust my legs to turn slightly and avoid one tree, my body rapidly changed directions, my movement instead propelling me into another tree that I should have passed right by. A moment later, I was once again seeing stars as I looked up to the morning sky.

-15

Note to self, water ki requires very fine control when moving. I was suddenly very glad that I would be able to go to the Admin Room soon, where pain was practically nonexistent. The only test I had left to make was the ki punch, another basic technique for monks. If I could understand the changes to these two techniques, I might be able to use that to understand the overall change of water ki. Before I could get on with that, though, a window appeared in front of me.

Well, that’s something. I’ll have to take a look at that later, probably just an upgrade to the basic Trainer’s Talent. Releasing a short breath, I slammed my open palm into the bark of the tree, using the full force of my normal body to propel the energy from my hand into it. I waited, and waited, but nothing seemed to happen to the tree… I could clearly feel my ki entering it, and even flooding all throughout a large section of the tree. I had honestly been anticipating an explosion of some form, but nothing happened. Thankfully, I also didn’t feel any backlash from hitting the tree as hard as I had, or I might be seeing another damage value appearing over my head.Choosing the tree that decided to get in my way before while I was walking as my target, I brought myself back to my feet, bring a single hand back. Since this was my only opportunity to test this attack right now, I decided to put the entirety of my remaining elemental ki into my palm. With this, I should easily see what the difference between the two techniques would be.

Knitting my brows together once again, I decided to ask Tryval later if he had noticed anything in regards to the uses for water ki. Although it had only been a few years since its discovery, he should have been able to see how my Host used it, and some of the effects that it had. In the meantime, I went ahead and selected the option to head up to the Admin Room, letting Aurivy know that she could take the slimes to her dungeon.

On a deserted continent, between a vast lake and a massive forest, one man and two slimes seemed to disappear with the wind. Shortly after, though, the wind caused another change. One of the shorter trees in the area, standing only thirty feet high, started emitting cracking sounds near its base. Birds flew from the tree and all others nearby, noticing the change.