69 - Through the Fire and the Flames

Once Sam leaves again, I turn on the air filtration and set the bed on fire. As promised, the air filtration is indeed “the best” and I hardly notice the smoke. I do notice the heat, but it doesn’t really bother me, so I sit down beside the burning bed and begin to meditate. Rather than drawing in any oum, I just use my senses to observe the flames and the oum within them. 

It’s a well-known fact that oum in nature tends to take on the attributes of that which surrounds it. In snowy regions, it will be cold, and in deserts, it will be hot. When there’s a fire, it will be fiery, when there’s a tornado or a hurricane, it will be like wind, if you go underwater, it will be water-attributed, and so on and so forth. So currently, all the oum in and around the bed is fire attributed. However, it’s not mine, so I can’t control it.

I mean, I can kind of influence it. Influencing the oum outside your body is the hallmark of a 3 star though, and is more or less impossible to do in any practical manner without being close to that level. Even for me, it’s so ineffective there’s no point in doing it. Now, the Phoenix construct is indeed close to that level, but not close to the point where she would be able to control oum that not only isn’t hers, but actually originated from someone else. And she says she doesn’t have any self-imposed restrictions that help her with this. That means it’s something that should be possible without reaching 3 star.

I focus on the fire oum created by the bed, and try to manipulate it. As expected, it’s difficult. I can make the flames slightly intensify, or slightly abate, but I’m not even close to taking it in as my own. 

I frown, then cup my hands and conjure a small candle of my own fire oum between them. I study the differences, and find that, as expected, they are obvious. My fire oum contains my own signature. It is obviously mine. Because of this, I can control it freely. The oum on the bed is not mine, and therefore, I cannot control it. I can gather it in and surround it with my own oum, and then I can sort of control it, and I can even diffuse my oum through it to make it kind of mine, but that dilutes my control as well. 

I can take it into myself and cultivate it, and then it becomes mine, that’s not what she did, and if I tried that with someone else’s oum, I would enter oum deviation and possibly die. It would be the same with her.

I meditate for half an hour longer, but make no progress, so I stand up, frustrated. I think that my experience is actually holding me back here. I’ve already discovered dozens of ways that I was either wrong in the past, or that I was just not understanding oum quite as clearly as I should have been, and I’m sure this is one of them. That Phoenix shouldn’t be older than 50, and she’s doing that effortlessly. No matter who her father is, if she can understand it, I can definitely understand it. I’m probably just looking at it the wrong way.

I need a break. The bed will be burning for a few more hours, so I can afford to leave for a little bit. 

I walk back out of my room just in time to find Timmy with a mushroom halfway to his mouth.

“No!” I shout, dashing forward to slap it out of his hand. “What are you doing?”

He cowers in fear as the mushroom falls to the ground.

“Hey!” I say. “Why were you doing that?”

He scoots backward, not making eye contact as his lower lip trembles. The oum in the air around him is vibrating as well. I stand where I am for a few seconds, the sigh and crouch down so that my eyes are level with him.

“I’m not mad at you,” I say. “But that was dangerous. Very dangerous. You could have been crippled. That would mean that you wouldn’t be able to cultivate anymore. You wouldn’t be able to make plants grow fast. Do you understand?”

The oum around him begins to calm down a bit, and after a few seconds, he nods. 

“So, do you want to tell me why you were doing it?”

“...I want to be strong like you.”

“And you were hoping that if you ate the mushroom, it would make you stronger?”

He nods.

“If you handled it properly, it might have,” I say. “But these aren’t quite suited for you. These have very strong fire attributed oum. If you controlled it properly, you could grow a bit from it, but it would be very efficient, since you don’t have a Transmutation affinity, so you wouldn’t be able to handle it as easily as me.”

The oum around him changes, and it somehow feels sad. I have a sudden urge to comfort him more, but at the same time, he needs to understand how dangerous what he was just doing is. The best way to make him understand would be to let him do it. Even if he had me guiding him, it would hardly be any better than just cultivating normally. Actually…

“Hey Timmy, want to eat the mushroom anyway?”

“No!” he says, shaking his head.

I guess there’s not actually any chance of him trying again. Looks like I scared him enough. But, there’s still something I want to try.

“I’ll help you process it. You won’t be crippled. It will actually help you.”

He shakes his head again, looking away.

“Timmy,” I say. “Look at me.”

He glances up, then looks away again. 

“Please?” He looks up nervously. “I’m not going to do anything that would hurt you. Do you trust me?”

Hesitantly, he nods.

“Then come over here and sit down and get ready to cultivate. I’ll help you. There’s no need to worry. I’ll make sure you don’t get crippled, and you’ll be able to cultivate normally afterward.”

It takes another few minutes of coaxing, but I manage to reassure him enough that he crawls back over to the edge of the mushroom-filled circle and prepares to cultivate. I sit right behind him with my hand on his back, and then after another minute of coaxing, he finally puts the mushroom in his mouth. 

The reason I wanted him to do this is partially to help him understand, but mostly for my own benefit. I wanted a change of perspective, and this might be the key. Helping someone else cultivate takes a lot of precision, but when an experienced master does it for a student, they use their own oum to guide the oum of their student. That’s someone similar to what the Phoenix was doing, right? Ideally, this will help me understand exactly what she was doing.

I feel the fire oum flood Timmy’s system and immediately inject my own oum in to help guide it through his pathways. For the first few minutes, its difficult for both of us. It takes all my focus to keep it on track and to keep it from ravaging his body, and even so, it still leaves him in a bit of pain. I can feel the oum around him trembling as he bears with it.

“You’re doing great,” I tell him. “It’ll get better in just a few minutes.”

I don’t know what his tolerance for pain is, but I doubt it’s high, so he needs all the encouragement he can get to get through the opening salvo safely. It will get easier as his body gets used to it and as the initial burst of energy dies down, but for now, he’s going to have to bear with it.

We continue like this for a quarter of an hour before the oum starts to calm down a little bit, and I can afford to relax. With my mind no longer 100% devoted to keeping the oum under control, I can put a bit more of my attention into studying exactly what’s happening. Unfortunately, it doesn’t help as much as I hoped it would. I am indeed guiding oum that’s not mine, but it’s not the same. This is oum that he has accepted into his body, and I am coaxing it to move along the paths that his body wants it to move along. I’m not twisting it to go where I want it to. Just guiding it to go where it wants to.

I let out a small sigh as the effort turns out to be a bust, but then, something strange happens. The oum in the air around us changes. It becomes hotter, and suddenly, Timmy starts handling the fire oum within him even better. I observe dumbfounded as his body slowly becomes more and more attuned with the mushroom’s fire energy until he’s absorbing it even more efficiently than I am. I even go as far as to take my hand off his back and stop guiding him, and he continues to absorb it just fine.

“How…?” I mutter under my breath.

He’s definitely not a Transmuter. His affinity is 100% Life. From what I understand about affinities, what he’s doing shouldn’t be possible. He’s aligning his oum to the mushroom’s fire attribute even better than I can, and while is absorption is sloppy, and he’s not getting anywhere near as much as he could, it’s not damaging his body. I stay confused for almost a full minute before it hits me. He’s not transmuting his oum to match the fire. He’s resonating with it.

I look closer through this new lens and see that my initial observation was incorrect. His oum isn’t fire-attributed. It’s still neutral, but it’s resonating with the mushroom’s oum so perfectly that it basically nullifies the incompatibility of the attribute.

I watch as he finishes absorbing the mushroom, trying to glean as much insight as possible as he works, and when he finally opens his eyes again, he looks surprised to see that I’m no longer helping him.

“That wasn’t so bad,” he says. 

“No…” I reply. “No it wasn’t. Want to do it again?”

He hesitates before nodding his head, and then I get in position behind him as he eats a second mushroom. This time, I don’t help him at all. His oum is already resonating with the mushroom, so he re-enters that state easily and begins absorbing. I once again observe until he’s done, trying to get a feel for exactly what he’s doing. His physique makes what he’s doing seem very easy, but it’s actually very complicated. It would take me some time to replicate it. But now that I’ve had a chance to see Timmy doing it, I’m confident that this is exactly how the Phoenix construct was doing it. 

Once he finishes, I stand up, and he looks at me, confused.

“Good work,” I say. “You can keep eating the mushrooms without me if you want.”

“Huh?”

“That time, you absorbed that all on your own. I actually didn’t help you at all. You can keep doing that if you want. Actually, you should. It’s good for you. I need to go back to my room though, so you’ll have to do it on your own.”

He looks down at the small mushroom grove apprehensively.

“Don’t worry. They can’t hurt you anymore,” I say. “But I really need to go. Good work, and thank you!”

With that, I turn and practically sprint back to my room. I spent so long with Timmy that my bed is nothing but a pile of smoldering ashes and embers now, so I call for Sam again. He appears staring at the remains of the bed with a bemused expression.

“Can I have another bed?” I ask.

“Are you going to set it on fire again?” he asks.

“Yes. I might need a few more in the future too.”

“Also to set on fire?”

“Yes.”

“...I have a better plan.”

He snaps his fingers twice, the first time to remove the ashes, and the second time to create a fire pit and a pile of wood in the middle of the room. There’s enough to make a bonfire that will last for days.

“Oh, this is perfect!” I say. “Thank you!”

“No problem. Anything else?”

“Nope!”

As soon as he’s gone, I get a fire going and get right back to meditating. This time, instead of focusing on trying to manipulate the fire’s oum, I try to resonate with it. This isn’t something I really did much of in the past, because the old way of using oum was almost entirely focused on internal martial arts, but I did have a life where I looked into it a bit more extensively. Clearly not extensively enough, since I only remembered it after seeing Timmy do it, but enough that I’m able to work out the method fairly quickly.

Still, it takes two more days to really get it right. All oum resonates, but not always at the same frequency, and not always with the same pattern. However, there are similarities between like types. All fire oum resonates in roughly the same way, with fine details changing based on various factors. Tuning into that resonance is difficult, but between watching Timmy and observing my own oum compared to the natural fire oum, I’m able to figure it out.

At the end of that second day, I stand up, smiling. The fire has been burning non-stop the entire time, and I’ve barely slept, but I feel good. Very good. I don’t remember the last time I’ve felt this way. I forgot how exciting learning a new technique could be. 

I look down at the fire, and then send a bit of my oum toward it. I resonate my oum with the fire, and after a second, I have the whole fire swirling upward. I bend it so that the spiral is pointing away from me, then punch forward with a bit more of my own oum, sending the whole column shooting forward.

“All fire is under my command.”

I take a deep breath, and then send out some more of my oum to mingle with the fire. Once I’ve got it all working for me, I take a deep breath, and then with a sharp exhale, I disperse it all outward. The fire coats the entire room, washing over me like a warm wave, and once it dissipates, it’s gone entirely. The bonfire is out. 

I almost skip back out of my room and toward the challenge room. This is cool as hell. Let’s see if it’s enough to pass the first challenge.