EG Book 7 Chapter 14

*** AUTHOR’S NOTE ***

I hope everyone had a great holiday, and a merry Christmas if you celebrate it! Ours was pretty good, with a high in the upper forties after our ridiculous cold snap. Here is the next chapter! As a Christmas gift, I’m going to put out at least 3 chapters this week!

*** AUTHOR’S NOTE ***

I woke up groggy, but the migraine that had dominated my thoughts before collapsing was gone. I shifted slightly, about to roll over and stand up when I realized that Vaya was still sleeping on my shoulder. Unfortunately, she stirred just after I did. “Sorry,” I whispered, worried she’d still be in pain.

“It is fine,” she said, then yawned hard enough I thought I heard her jaw crack.

Yawns being contagious, I immediately began one as well. Once I had my face under control, I asked her, “Do you feel that?”

She gave me a confused look. “No?” She asked back.

“Huh,” I said, “I can feel the others outside, gathering I think. It’s hazy instead of clear, like seeing through cloudy glass.”

“I cannot,” she said. “I am hungry, though.”

“It is about time you woke up,” Sia said, then he chirped a laugh, letting me realize that he’d been in the room the whole time. “Why did you stumble into here? Drinking already?”

“No,” I groaned at him, “training with Knight Kaminski. What have you been up to?”

“Sleeping,” he replied, “until someone woke me with their snoring.”

Vaya laughed softly, poking me in the side.

“I was talking about both of you,” Sia said smugly, then squawked when she threw a pillow at him. He chirped another laugh afterwards, then flew towards the door. The door opened for him before he reached it, without him using his Aether as a telekinetic hand.

“Nifty,” I said. “Automatic doorways.”

Vaya turned over and stood off the side of the bed, then flipped me off the other. I thumped to the floor and then got to my feet. “Fine, fine, let’s get food.”

We left my room to find Jon sitting at the table, dejectedly poking at a book instead of reading it, with his head resting on his left hand. The expression of pain and misery on his face let me know that he hadn't recovered from our training session yet.

Vaya hurried over to him and put her hand on his shoulder. “Do not bother,” Jon whispered. “Jamila could not help earlier either. It is as Knight Kaminski said, I just need time to recover.”

“You need sleep,” she told him. “It helped us, and it will help you. Now, up and to your room, or I will have Aiden drag you.”

Jon nodded, the motion causing his eyes to squint harder, then he carefully stood and shuffled out of the room.

“Well, I guess it’s good to know that sleeping is a good way to recover Geist,” I told her.

“Can you sense how much you have?” She asked.

I tried to feel inside my own head, but didn’t find anything. “Nope,” I said with a frown. “That’s not useful.”

“I will collect some food for us,” Vaya told me, “you look into the Legacy and find something on gathering Geist. I want to get better with it as well as Aether.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said with a grin. She shook her head at me and walked towards the kitchen. I watched her leave, then plopped down on a lounge cushion.

It took some digging, but I found the Geist techniques before Vaya returned. They were in the Core Level Gathering Techniques Knowledge Stone. As when I examined the core runes, I was scanned by the door and limited in what I could see.

There were dozens of options, from extremely simple techniques used to bring someone’s Geist levels up to a minimum standard, to tempering techniques where you used the Geist your brain and spirit naturally developed to forcibly enhance your meridians. “Huh, this is what I’m talking about,” I said, picking up a jade tablet and letting the knowledge of the Enhanced Natural Geist Growth Technique enter my mind. Its description stated, ‘The best technique for mid-level Geist cultivators to grow their capabilities without strain, creating a solid foundation for future advancement, both in Geist and Aether capabilities.’

I laughed as I pondered on the technique. “Okay, set up an Aether circuit in my head, then move the Geist that naturally rests in my brain along it in a spiral,” I told myself, “and once that is set up, do mentally challenging activities. Seems simple enough. The author of this jade recommends math puzzles. I could do Alchemy too, I guess, but I’d be worried about wasting ingredients if I got distracted.” I brightened. “I know, I can teach people Latin Squares or Sudoku. I wonder if they have something similar here? Could probably play board games too. Anything that stimulates the mind will result in the production of really tiny amounts of Geist, and the Aether circuit captures and refines it so it stays around longer. That’s so cool.”

“You are mumbling to yourself,” Vaya told me from the table.

I looked up and said, “Oh, sorry. So I found a good technique, I think, for all of us to use. Well, it does require that you have enough Geist to start with, and it was in the Core area of the Legacy, so maybe only us four can use it? I don’t see why the others couldn’t, though Sam might not have the requisite Geist capability yet.”

“Well, what is the technique?” Bridget asked.

I shrugged, then gestured in front of me. I formed the Aether circuit in mid-air, then said, “You need to form this in your brain, so the runic structures here and here are tiny.” I pointed to either end of the oval-shaped Aether flow, where a series of seven runes anchored it. “Then you’ll have to take Geist and wrap it around like this.”

I combined Fire and Air into Joy Aether, letting the bright pink Aether be my visual cue that it was supposed to be Geist, and twined it around the Aether circuit I had floating. “Once you’ve got this stable, you need to do something that is mentally challenging.”

“That seems, difficult,” Vaya said, her lips tight as she concentrated on the image I had created. “Just maintaining this technique will be challenging at first.”

“That might count, honestly,” I said with a shrug. “The jade recommended math puzzles, and I know a couple different logic puzzles that might be fun to learn.”

“My village had some good puzzles too,” Bridget said. “Though they were more to help the farmers with thinking about planting their crops.”

“Neat,” I said, giving her a grin.

“I need some paper to show it,” Bridget said, hopping to her feet and brushing the crumbs from her sandwich off her pants.

I felt a small surge of Aether, and every bit of food that touched the ground vanished in a swirl of it. Auto-cleaning, nice!

Bridget hurried to her room, then came back and sat down. She quickly traced out a grid, then wrote numbers to the left and above it. “Each number tells you how many squares in each row or column need to be filled in,” she explained after finishing. “And only that many can be filled in.”

“Picture square!” Vaya exclaimed, then her face fell. “I used to do these with my mom, before she got too busy for me.”

I pulled her into a hug, “Well, now we can do them together.” I looked at Bridget. “May I use this one to try out the technique?”

“Go ahead,” she answered me. “I have plenty of paper to make more.”

“Why give it up though?”

“I only use it to practice some Inscriptions before actually creating them. I think this will be a better use of the paper,” she said.

“I have some as well, and I’m sure the others do too,” I said, “Thank you for offering.”

“Well, go on,” she said. “Try out the technique and let us know how it works!”

Vaya rubbed my back and said, “I will be watching, just in case.”

“Sure,” I laughed, “thanks. I don’t think it’ll be necessary, but it's still nice to know.” I smiled at them both, then dropped into my center. With a few mental adjustments, my perception moved from my chest to my head and encompassed it utterly. I’d been doing this for nearly a year now, and it still was amazing that I could see my body like it was a model, or one of those exhibits at a museum. I traced the different parts of my brain, following the bumps and creases. I could feel my synapses firing off, my perception somehow looking at my perception. Trippy thought, I giggled to myself, then mentally shook my head. Focus.

I pulled a strand of Aether from my center, naturally formed from a balance of Elements equal to my Affinities. I formed the circuit, creating the oval of Aether that mapped to the inside of my skull minus a centimeter, then peeled off pieces to create the runes. They were pretty complicated, taking me several minutes to form correctly. Twice I messed up, a tiny surge of Aether springing from them that made my head spin for a second. Don’t like messing with my brain, I thought after the second failure. Hopefully this is worth it.

After finally getting the Aether portion of the technique set up, I was ready to start on the Geist piece. I reached into the center of my brain, where the Enhanced Natural Geist Growth Technique said I would find the pool of mental energy. It took another minute to find the subtle off-white energy blending into how I perceived the brain matter around it. My imaginary fingers pinched the Geist and gently stretched it out of the pool. I then wound the thin streamer around the Aether circuit and carefully pulled more to finish the technique.

It took about a third of the Geist in my mind to create a long enough spiral to fully circle my brain and return to the pool. Once ready, I opened my eyes and looked at the picture square puzzle. It hurt to think and the world felt like it was wrapped in cotton wool. “Ugh,” I groaned for a second. “Concentrating is hard. I can see why I wouldn’t want to do Alchemy while using this.”

“Are you going to be okay?” Vaya asked, healing Aether flowing into me from her without finding purchase.

“Yeah,” I said, my eyes squinched only half open. “Just a headache and brain fog.” She pat my shoulder, and I bent over the puzzle. I worked through it, eventually creating a set of back and forth lines down the page like alternating rows of crops. It took me at least four times longer to work my way through the fairly simple problem. I did notice the extra Geist that the technique generated, though it kept getting swept into the spiral so my thinking ability didn’t get any better.

After finishing the puzzle, I checked my Geist pool, and saw that it was a tiny bit larger. “So, did it work?” Bridget asked, leaning in to look at the paper.

“Yeah, but it’s not a large increase,” I said. “Maybe one percent. Maybe. It was enough that I could tell my Geist increased, but it will take a long time to get much stronger with this technique.”

“Were any of the others better?” Vaya asked.

“Again, maybe,” I said. “Several of the others would have helped at the top of the Stairway of Determination, so if we can go to the Weltreich at some point to use their equivalent we’d get better results. There were a few techniques I couldn’t look at, so maybe once we get enough Geist, or hit a threshold of capability with it, or something we’ll have access to better ones. For now, I think this is the best one to use. It just sucks, well, like most tempering or gathering techniques do.”

Vaya shook her head while Bridget snorted at that. “Well, let’s draw out a couple of puzzles for each other and try out this technique some more.”

“Oh, I can teach you both a number game from Earth,” I said. I drew a nine-by-nine grid, then thought back to when I played Sudoku all the time at the Academy as a mental stress relief. My memory was still hazy, but I could bring up the occasional perfect glimpse, giving me a single beginner puzzle to show. I wrote the initial numbers, glad yet again that Craesti used a base-ten number system. I showed it to the girls, then tore the paper in half to repeat the puzzle for Bridget. I explained the rules,

“Huh, that is a bit more complicated than Elements In A Row,” Vaya said. “It is played with an eight by eight grid, and each row and column can only have each Element represented once.”

I thought for a second, “Yup, very similar. Each Sudoku puzzle has a single unique solution, and I think an Elements In A Row puzzle might not. Still a good challenge.”

“There is also the Unique Elements Puzzle,” Bridget said. “It is also on an eight-by-eight grid. You have to put each Element on the grid without overlapping in any direction, including diagonally.”

“Oh, that’s the eight queens problem from chess,” I said, excited. “I know how to do that. Neat!”

We talked for a few more minutes about different puzzles, and then both Bridget and I went to our rooms to get more paper. I wrote out a dozen different Sudoku puzzles, Vaya wrote a couple Elements In A Row she remembered, and then Bridget put together twenty Unique Elements Puzzles. Once ready, we swapped with each other. I ended up with an Unique Elements Puzzle, but I didn’t start gathering yet. I watched as Bridget and Vaya both set up the new technique, instructing them on a few missteps that they made and ensuring that they were stable.

Once both of the girls were working on their respective puzzles, obviously moving slowly and carefully as their headaches exploded on them, I dove back into my center to create the Aether circuit yet again.