BAB3 -Chapter 21

# Chapter 21: Isolated Progression

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Xay hadn’t been alone—truly alone—in a very long time. Ever since Lexi barged into his life all those years ago, they’d always been in contact.

Then, after awakening, he’d had Dragon as a constant companion. Now, for the first time in what felt like ages, no one was around.

He wondered if being cut off from everyone—unsure of what or how they were doing—was part of the training.

A month felt like an eternity.

He could probably force his way out and teleport back. He could message his team through GRID.

He could even reach out to the twins in the Dream World.. but that would probably set him back in the long run.

So Xay took a deep, steadying breath—then another, and another.

He walked out over the sparkling spring and sat mid-air, crossing his legs in meditation.

He spent the entire first day just floating silently, eyes closed, inhaling and absorbing the dense vitality in the air.

On the second day, he let his mind drift, turning over everything he’d learned—his training, his techniques, his strengths, and his gaps.

Grandmaster Wu had been right.

He needed to internalize and refine what he could do, not just in terms of martial arts, but all his abilities and techniques.

He needed to better optimize.

To begin, Xay focused on breaking down his *Zen Meditation* technique.

Xay had developed the technique by meditating on open mindfulness—focusing on total awareness of the world around him.

It had been a major factor in his early ability to sense psychic force.

The technique was powerful, but Xay knew it wasn’t as efficient as it could be.

When he first created *Zen Meditation*, he had no idea what he was looking for, so it ended up doing a lot of things at once. It was broad and unfocused.

Attempting to develop something better, he simultaneously activated two instances of *Zen Meditation*, assigning each to one of his cognitive threads.

He directed one to constantly replay himself running through all the martial forms he’d learned, refining the image of his movements and flow.

Xay had the other focus solely on vital energy breathing and mana cycling, keeping them smooth, controlled, and integrated.

After a couple of days, nothing changed, and Xay realized it wasn’t enough.

He began looking at the problem from a different angle.

Normally, he kept just two cognitive threads active to avoid mental strain and overwhelming himself with sensory data.

He would only split his cognitive threads into four during short, specific tasks, when he needed parallel thinking on particularly complex problems.

But that system had come before his second awakening—before his stats had doubled.

Like all his other stats, his Acuity was now 6,500. Acuity represented intelligence, perception, intuition, and mental capacity.

And also like all his other stats, it needed conditioning.

So that’s exactly what he did.

Xay split his cognitive threads into four and ran four simultaneous instances of *Zen Meditation*.

One continued cycling through all his martial forms, mixing and matching stances.

Another maintained his vital energy breathing and mana cycling—including flowing mana through his brain and back out.

A third was mindful of his body and the world around him, processing subtle environmental changes and his place in it all.

The last analyzed his abilities, cataloging them and searching for possible refinements.

After a full day of this, a new notification appeared atop his vision.

**Technique Augmented: Dao Meditation**

***Dao Meditation (Mender Sphere)** - Contemplate the way of the world and further personal path, rapidly recovering mana, vitality, and/or mental fatigue.*

Xay grinned.

His first step was complete—and it had turned out to be more beneficial than he’d expected.

Not only could he now meditate and recover individual resources significantly faster, but he could still restore them all simultaneously when needed.

Even more impressive, he could now continuously manage full access to all four of his cognitive threads without overloading himself.

And that capacity would only continue to grow as he leaned further into his Acuity peak.

Xay continued with two instances of *Dao Meditation*.

One still flowed through his martial forms, the other maintained his vital energy breathing and mana cycling.

He freed up his remaining two cognitive threads to focus on his next task.

Carefully, he removed the Concord Flower Tyra had created and gifted him for his birthday. Xay sat it on a flat rock in front of him.

Still sealed in its glass case, the flower was mesmerizingly beautiful, but more than that, it radiated a deep, steady calmness.

Xay knew there was a lot he could learn from how the different types of energy within it mingled and coexisted in perfect balance.

One question had lingered in his mind for a while now: Could he apply elemental affinities to his psionic abilities?

At the beginning of Xay’s journey into psionics, he had defined psychic force as an intangible pressure that could be made physical.

But his fight with the Latch Stalker had proven it was far more than that.

The abstract nature of psychic force made his initial, simplistic understanding functional—but it also limited his applications.

To grow, he needed to broaden his perspective.

As he reflected, Xay realized he had been using psychic force primarily as a blunt instrument in most of the techniques he’d developed so far.

*Burst Flurry* detonated arcing kinetic pressure. *Force Ward* repelled elemental and magical forces.

*Psychokinesis* simply moved things remotely, and *Orbital Array* was a refined, specialized variation of that.

Mechanically, *Psychic Blink* was his most magical use of psychic force—but at its core, it still boiled down to relocating mass from one place to another.

By contrast, the Latch Stalker had used psychic force in far more creative and layered ways.

It melded with it to conceal its presence, spoke directly into Xay’s mind, constructed and controlled tentacles, and even emitted a kind of oscillating, violent static.

Xay assumed the concealment ability came from an in-depth psychic flow alignment, which he planned to explore later with *Flow State*.

Telepathy might be useful, but he didn’t see much appeal in linking his mind directly to an enemy’s—or developing something invasive like Dante’s *Mind Spike* to attack a mind from the inside.

Xay preferred to fight straight up—man to man. Or monster. Or.. whatever.

As for tentacles, he wasn’t touching them—not for any specific reason, just.. no.

Besides, his Jetnir Orbs were more adaptable and, in his opinion, better all around.

But the psychic static—that had originally sent Xay’s mind reeling.

He wanted it.

As an experiment, Xay lifted a hand, shaping psychic force above it.

With a concentrated effort, he twisted it, vibrated it, and oscillated it in varying patterns with mixed results.

When he hardened a ball of psychic force and then spun and vibrated it at high speed, it sparked—but only due to air friction.

Xay wasn’t impressed.

Sure, he could vibrate his Jetnir Orbs and electrically charge them.

He could, and probably would, explore electromagnetism later.

But for the purpose of this experiment, he wanted something deeper. Something more intrinsically magical.

Having already identified the issue, he started over from the beginning.

Xay returned to his original definition of psychic force and holistically reassessed it using his expanded cognition and multiple cognitive threads.

Xay had first envisioned psychic force as a kind of permeating pressure—but now he realized he’d been overlooking several key underlying principles.

Psychic force wasn’t just the fuel of psionic abilities, the way mana powered magical ones.

It was also the instruction set, the transfer medium, the manipulation or creation, and even the laws that governed the final outcome.

Originally, Xay had lumped all those distinctions into a single amorphous monolith.

Worse still, he’d approached it with a striker mentality. Xay thought like a fighter.

If he wanted more from psychic force, he’d have to approach it like a caster would approach magic.

So he expanded his definition, breaking down psychic force into four distinct aspects: intent, energy, manifestation, and logic.

Psychic intent was the idea or purpose he wanted to accomplish.

Psychic energy was the fuel required to create and sustain that intent.

Psychic manifestation was the intent in action, the idea made real.

Psychic logic determined how that manifestation interacted with the world around it, its structure, behavior, and boundaries.

As the concepts settled and took root, Xay felt them resonate deep within him. He was on the right path.

His first idea was simple: create a spark—not through friction or by manipulating physics, but by generating one as if he possessed an elemental affinity and then fueling it.

Xay cleared his mind, fully releasing his old image of psychic force as an ocean of kinetic pressure.

Instead, he envisioned an open space filled with free-floating latent potential, untethered and unfettered.

Xay lifted his hand once more, cupping his fingers as he willed a spark to jump from his thumb to his index finger.

He didn’t try to define how electricity should function. There were no calculations of voltage, resistance, or polarity.

He simply allowed it to follow the natural laws of the world and behave as any real spark would.

Xay commanded a spark to exist, guided by his refined understanding of psychic force.

After several moments of intense concentration, something finally happened.

An iridescent shimmer jumped between his fingers, shooting a buzzing jolt through his arm.

Xay grinned.

The spark itself wasn’t visible, only the mystical effect it had on the world around it.

He tried again, this time instructing the psychic logic of the spark not to harm him.

When the shimmer manifested once more, there was no jolt, but the energy still pulsed radiantly against his skin.

Xay kept experimenting, making multiple invisible sparks arc between his fingers.

He eventually shaped a web of sparks in his palm, then flung several strands of electricity at the cave wall.

It made a slight divot, burning the moss and charring the rock around the point of impact.

He quickly realized he couldn’t generate anywhere near as much power as someone like Tyra.

She was wildly destructive, though, so maybe that was not the best standard against which to measure himself.

Still, he kept working through the problem.

With psychic energy now separated into its own distinct aspect, Xay became acutely more aware of its limitations.

Even with ambient psychic flow, psychic energy was a depletable resource, similar to mana.

Because psychic force was such a complex concept, it didn’t exactly disappear. But when its energy aspect dropped too low, it slowed, becoming harder to bend, shape, or command.

*Dao Meditation* let Xay both recover and expand his total capacity, but he wasn’t limited to just one energy source.

Xay created another spark, but this time, instead of relying solely on psychic energy to fuel it, he channeled his mana as well.

An iridescent shimmer crackled to life in his hand, but it was accompanied by a bright flash of light.

Silver-white lightning with an iridescent outline danced across his fingertips.

Through a mutually beneficial layered resonance, the voltage surged exponentially, far beyond anything he’d produced before.

Xay flung it at the same spot on the wall. It carved a deep furrow into the rock and shook the ground like an explosion had gone off.

It still wasn’t quite at Tyra’s level, but it was definitely something Xay could call lightning.

And he didn’t stop there.

Drawing inspiration from Dragon’s *Omni Flame*, he created silver-white flame, then silver-white frost, and finally silver-white crystal.

Once he’d perfected their internal and external psychic logic, he got a surprising notification.

**Technique Detected: Psi Element.**

**Technique Acquired: Psi Element.**

***Psi Element (Caster Sphere)** - Generate and command psionic elements with psychic force and mana.*

Xay snorted, then laughed—and then laughed louder, full and just slightly evil.

He had just given himself psionic versions of elemental affinities, and the Awakened System had actually acknowledged it.

Now, though, he had a lot more experimenting to do.

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For the next few weeks, Xay’s body and mind stayed in constant motion.

Two of his cognitive threads remained deep in meditation, while he switched to moving his physical body through his forms against his still-running mental stances.

It was like a very cerebral version of shadow boxing.

At the same time, he pushed the limits of all his techniques, refining and reworking them one by one.

His stats and constant meditation had significantly reduced his need for sleep.

By the start of his final week in isolation, Xay had gained far more than he’d expected.

With his now internalized new insights and greater martial prowess, Xay’s first technique, *Burst Flurry*, became something entirely new without losing its core identity.

**Technique Augmented: Martial Burst Engine.**

***Martial Burst Engine (Striker Sphere)** - Flow through martial forms enhanced with mana and kinetic bursts of psychic force, increasing speed and power with each successive strike.*

The first version of *Flurry* simply increased Xay’s attack speed and allowed him to stack a (+10%) damage bonus with each successful hit.

But the stacks were limited, and the effect ended after a set number of strikes.

*Burst Flurry* improved on that by adding kinetic force bursts and removing the end condition. It let Xay keep attacking as long as he kept the chain intact.

However, the stack cap still remained at (+100%).

*Martial Burst Engine* stripped away all limitations, while also linking speed directly to damage.

The stacking rate was lower than a flat (+10%) per hit, but it never stopped. As long as Xay didn’t miss or run out of energy, the power just kept building.

*Martial Burst Engine* shared a conceptual design with Rox’s *Juggernaut Drive*, though the mechanics were different.

Her ability ramped up her physical stats through pure momentum, which meant Xay had to work harder to keep pace—and unlike her, his technique offered no boost to defense.

Still, Xay thought it was amazing and knew it would be a crucial pillar to his *Psionic Monk* fighting style.

The other pillar was obviously psionics. With his deepened understanding of psychic force, Xay pushed his pure psionic abilities to new heights.

For one, by leaning fully into his Acuity with all four cognitive threads, he expanded his total number of controllable Jetnir Orbs from twelve to forty-eight.

He also discovered that he could split and shift the anchor of *Orbital Array*.

That meant he could have some Jetnir Orbs circling his left hand, while the others orbited his right.

Or, as long as he was nearby, he could set the anchor to something other than himself.

He couldn’t think of a solid combat use for that, but he found the idea of his entire body casually orbiting Lexi absolutely hilarious.

She’d hate it.

Those new insights weren’t enough to augment *Orbital Array* itself. They were just a deeper understanding of what was already there.

But collectively, they were the final components the system needed to acknowledge that his first-ever psionic ability had become something far more.

**Technique Augmented: Supreme Psychokinesis.**

***Supreme Psychokinesis (Caster Sphere)** - Remotely move and manipulate significant amounts of matter and energy with psychic force.*

Over the last few weeks, moving things with his mind had become far easier than ever before.

At one point, Xay even accidentally picked up the spring itself, automatically splitting it into several streams that flowed directly into his *Orbital Array*.

The technique scaled with *Supreme Psychokinesis*, and if he wasn’t careful, he’d end up with several hovercraft orbiting him just by walking casually through the city center.

Xay didn’t know the upper limits—and he wouldn’t be able to find them until he left isolation.

*Surely I can’t move a mountain.. right? Maybe a baby one?* he daydreamed.

But more than just increasing the amount of movable mass, his psychic dexterity had improved greatly as well.

He figured all that time spent practicing with his puzzle box had helped immensely.

There were no direct changes to *Psychic Blink*, but with Xay’s increased cognitive power, psionic depth, and expanded sphere of perception, he knew the range would likely skyrocket.

Additionally, through his experiments with *Psi Element*, Xay discovered he could augment the composition of his *Force Ward* with elemental properties.

**Technique Augmented: Elemental Force Ward.**

***Elemental Force Ward (Defender Sphere)** - Generate a protective forcefield fused with psychic force and multiple psionic elements.*

As long as it wasn’t outright overpowered or destroyed, *Elemental Force Ward* could absorb damage and nullify opposing elements.

Xay also discovered that he could integrate it with his serene aura, making the forcefield easier to maintain, denser, and far harder to break.

Xay left *Tranquil Palm* alone for now. He already understood it as an internal attack and had recently augmented it with his own internal energy.

*Roar of the Dragon God* was similar—he couldn’t think of any meaningful refinements for it at the moment.

However, he did figure out why it left him feeling so drained afterward.

The attack functioned like a release valve for nearly every type of energy—mana, kinetic, thermal. It was total a complete free-for-all.

If Xay didn’t charge up enough beforehand, it would even start to disturb his vitality.

Fortunately, he found a solution. By spiraling his internal energy while using the technique, he could mitigate the fallout without burning through all his mana.

With everything else settled, and only a few days remaining in isolation, Xay turned his full attention to his Skill Talent.

As it stood, *Flow State* was purely evasive—but now, Xay had developed the perfect conditions to change that.