Ashlock watched Stella reluctantly get up from the bench with the scroll still in her hands. From how she looked at it, like a boomer trying to read a textbook about coding, Ashlock concluded she was struggling to understand it.
Her deep frown, furrowed brows, and random huffing were also a clue.
"This makes no sense!" Stella tossed the scroll onto the bench and sat in a cross-legged position on the floor. Calming her breathing, Ashlock saw purple flames appear around her fingers.
With her eyes closed, Stella reached forward and brought her fingers together. She then slowly pulled them apart with spatial Qi violently arcing between her fingers. The area between her fingers shuddered and crackled like space tearing apart.
Then it popped, collapsed, and exploded in her face, sending Stella falling onto her back.
She pouted at the sky, "Stupid technique scrolls written by overhyped idiots that can't make their instructions clear!"
Ashlock sneaked a peek at the scroll. It was clearly written in a language he had never seen before, but his {Language of the World} allowed him to get the general gist of the text.
And sadly, he had to agree with Stella. It was a load of mumbo jumbo that was of little help. He would even go so far as to call it a scam, as it read like a suspicious pamphlet advertising a nonsense meditation technique mixed with sci-fi terms.
But this was a cultivation world, where a scam back on Earth could be a disguised treasure. Assuming Stella wasn't totally scammed and this was indeed a technique that worked, then he had all the intention to try and learn it.
The scroll had a mixture of complex diagrams showing hand movements and how to circulate spatial Qi to achieve the desired effect. From Stella's actions, Ashlock assumed she had just looked at the pictures and ignored the text since the words clearly stated you had to mark the target node first.
A portal had an exit location that had to be anchored before the tunnel through space between the portals could be established. Stella was trying to do it in reverse, meaning she opened a crack in space that didn't go anywhere so it would instantly collapse.
Another explosion went off—Ashlock saw Stella fly across the courtyard before crashing into the far wall.
"Augh!" Stella pushed herself out of the wall and stomped toward Ashlock. Dust dyed her blonde hair, and her white clothes had become filthy, but she didn't seem to care and instead sat on the bench with a huff and angrily picked the scroll back up.
She stared at it while mumbling about cursing the author's nine generations and how much she hated reading.
It was at this moment there was the sound of rushing water. Stella slightly lowered the scroll and looked over the top. Her eyes wandered to the hole in the ground that led to the hollowed-out root.
She then yelped as Diana shot out the hollowed root in a ball of dark blue flames and showered everything in water. She landed perfectly in the courtyard's center and shook her hair to remove the water.
"Oh hey, Stella." Diana waved at the drenched and frustrated girl.
Stella just glared at her over the top of the technique scroll.
"Oops, let me clean you up." Diana opened her palm, and all the water in the surroundings rushed toward her hand and gathered in a murky ball—which she then dropped to the ground.
She came and stood beside Stella and peered at the scroll in her hands, "The technique scroll we bought from those merchants? Did you try and teach the Patriarch yet?"
Diana then shuddered, "After seeing what he did in the mines, maybe giving him portals would be unfair on the world."
Stella shoved the scroll into Diana's hand, "I don't understand it. Why are the words so cryptic? Create a fold in space, puncture a hole, connect to the anchor node, stabilize rift, blah blah."
To Ashlock, those sounded like simple-to-follow instructions... well, as simple as creating a portal out of soul power could be.
Was his {Language of the World} helping him translate the true meaning behind the metaphors and flowery language that seemed to puzzle Stella?
Stella crossed her arms and leaned against Ashlock's trunk while Diana read through the scroll.
"So, what was down there? Did anything interesting happen?" Stella asked while closing her eyes and trying to calm down.
Diana chuckled, "Nothing much, just some pest control. Found an abandoned mining town, and Ashlock started controlling a massive slime and used it to pulverize the rodents."
"Oh." Stella nodded as if it all made sense, "Mhm, yes, as expected of Ash."
"Stop acting like everything that tree does makes sense!" Diana rolled her eyes, "And are you really allowed to keep calling the Patriarch that name?"
"What name?" Stella blinked innocently and waved Diana off, "Just tell me how to decipher the meaning of this scroll. You know how to read them, right?"
"Nope." Diana handed it back, "Not a clue, and even if I did, this technique is for spatial Qi users, not water Qi like myself. Comprehending this may negatively affect my understanding of water Qi, so it's best I don't even look at it."
Stella frowned as she took the scroll back, "That's a thing?! I have never heard of it."
"It's superstition." Diana shrugged, "But it's not worth it for me to test if the theory is true or not. The one thing I have going for me is my deep understanding of water Qi and my high-level techniques. So I am not willing to throw that all away... why don't you ask Ashlock for help? He has almost perfect spatial Qi."
Stella stood up and showed the scroll to Ashlock, which was funny because so long as the scroll wasn't face down, he could see it from all angles.
"Tree, can you read this?"
Ashlock ignored that Stella had switched her naming convention and flashed his Qi a single time for yes. He could read it and even slightly understand it.
"See? I knew Tree was smart." Stella nodded to herself, and Diana grumbled from the side.
There was just one big problem. He had no fucking arms to do the hand techniques. He remembered when the Grand Elder that visited all those years ago said there were no meditation techniques designed for trees, and it seemed that problem carried over to the other techniques.
They were designed with the human body in mind. But Ashlock was skeptical of how vital these hand movements truly were. Even from the descriptions, they seemed superficial at best.
"What I really need is a 'cultivation for dummies' book. I have no idea what I'm doing or how to use my Qi away from my body..." Even though he understood the scroll on a fundamental level due to his knowledge of science, he was sadly not a protagonist that could use water magic just because he knew how a water molecule was structured.
He needed to build up his knowledge, start from the ground and work his way up. And the first step of that process was working out how to either adapt human techniques to ones applicable to trees or create entirely new techniques.
How? He honestly had no idea—and it was infuriating. Qi was his one ticket to being independent of the system's gacha draws.
"So Tree, if you can read it, can you show me the technique?" Stella asked with expecting eyes. She looked so excited—
He flashed his Qi twice for no, and Stella's face fell into a state of contemplation. She looked back at the scroll, scanned the diagrams, and then a realization dawned on her, "He has no arms."
"Duh." Diana quipped from the side, "Can't he use his branches instead?"
That was like being told to make hand signals with two sticks. His branches did have a vague human arm shape, but he lacked fingers, flesh, or really anything an arm really had. He was a tree, and trees didn't have arms.
But without having an open mind, he wouldn't get anywhere. If he doesn't have arms, how can he get arms? His spiritual sight drifted to the silk bag containing a few corpses left over from earlier.
Human corpses had arms, and he could control human corpses. Picking the body emitting the most Qi, Ashlock cast {Root Puppet}, and within ten minutes, he had control over a tall man with a bare chest that made him think of a monk.
"Daym, I miss controlling the slime... slime is a bad name." Ashlock liked to name things, so they felt more personal to him, "Let's call him Blob? Bob? Yea, Bob sounds good. Okay, so I miss controlling Bob... human bodies are iky."
Something about feeling every inch of a human body, brain mush, and organs included, made him mentally shiver—likely because he was once human. His soul still had some phantom feeling of what being a human had been like, and this feeling was so far from what was correct that it was jarring.
Bob was better. Controlling the slime felt like putting his hand into a bowl of warm soup... much more pleasant.
He could still feel the distant sensation as he had never entirely cut his connection with Bob and left him down in the cavern. A choice that was consuming an enormous amount of his Qi.
It was hard to convey just how much Qi it cost to move up a single stage in the Soul Fire realm. How humans were walking this planet in the higher realms baffled Ashlock—no wonder they were willing to face beast tides just to live in the most Qi-dense areas; otherwise, ascension would take thousands of years.
Anyway, keeping control of Bob was using around half of his Qi. The rest was split between digging deeper through the mountain to have the entire mine under his root's control and furthering his cultivation—which at this point felt like dripping water into a swimming pool.
He needed more Qi generation.
"A problem for another time." Ashlock got the root puppet to stand on shaky legs and wander to the center of the courtyard with a black root snaking out his gormlessly open mouth.
The two girls gave the corpse a wide breadth and watched from the side with excited chatter.
As unsettling as it was, Ashlock focused entirely on the corpse, trying to use its senses to see and hear rather than just command it from afar—he wanted to get the full human experience in hopes it would shed light onto cultivating as one. It was disorientating, to say the least, but he bared with it.
There was a moment of silence as the corpse stood deathly still... until its eyes snapped open. Ashlock could see like a human for the first time in a decade.
It was limiting and blurry, which was to be expected. Ashlock looked left and right, rolled the man's shoulders, and clenched his fist into a ball. The body felt strong—the muscles barely bulged but produced such strength.
"Still have no idea how to cultivate as a—" Ashlock shut his mouth as he realized he was trying to talk aloud with the corpse and sounded like a dying bagpipe. The judgmental and intense stares from the two girls didn't help make it any less embarrassing.
He lowered his head and looked at the floor...
Wait.
Why was the grass glowing?
It was subtle, but there was a faint green glow.
Ashlock switched his view to his main body and opened the forbidden eyelid. Both Stella and Diana shuddered and summoned their soul fire, which appeared as blindingly bright blobs of Qi in his red-tinted sight.
Looking at the corpse with his demonic eye, Ashlock confirmed his suspicion. "This cultivator is an Evergreen with a green Soul Core, no wonder the grass glows green for him."
Ashlock's spiritual sight allowed him to see the faint flow of Qi in the air, but his demonic eye could see elemental Qi. Such as the wind Qi in the air, water Qi around Diana, and spatial Qi around Stella...
Through his demonic eye, capable of seeing the threads of all types of Qi, Ashlock used the corpse as a puppet to be his arms and went through the steps of the technique.
His demonic eye shifted to stare at Stella. He saw thin waves of spatial Qi wafting off her into the surroundings before dissipating. Identifying the area right next to Stella's head as having the densest waves of spatial Qi, he picked that area as the node or anchor for the portal's destination.
He then made the hand movements with the corpse and realized a fatal issue. The corpse had residual nature Qi, not spatial. Deciding to go for it anyway, Ashlock surged spatial Qi from his own Soul Core through the connection, shattered the corpse's Soul Core, and flooded its body with spatial Qi.
The corpse's skin melted as it set on fire, but Ashlock persevered for the final few seconds. The stupid hand sign was done, spatial Qi arched between the corpse's fingers, and for the briefest of moments, a tunnel through space had been formed.
He then made the corpse poke its flaming finger through the portal, and to his delight, Ashlock saw it reappear and poke Stella's face causing her to understandably yelp.
Ashlock had cast his first-ever cultivation technique in the most roundabout way possible.
But there was little time to celebrate as both portals collapsed, and the corpse's severed finger fell to the ground beside Stella.
"Oh, not again," Stella shouted and tried to leap away.
"What—" The portal exploded in a brilliant wave of spatial Qi, and Diana was thrown through the wall.
As the dust settled, Ashlock decided using corpses that melted and then exploded after just a few seconds was less than ideal. If only he had something he could control that was also attuned to spatial magic.
"Wait. What about Bob?"
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