GxG 12
[10 Years Old]
"Bye mom, I'm going to the park for a bit" I called out as I was putting on my sneakers.
"Alright honey, be back for dinner. I'll text you if anything comes up." she replied from the living room.
"Sounds good, see you later."
I was currently on my way to my super secret base.
It all started once I got way better at senjutsu and had chewed through all the basic formations I was given.
Our yard was starting to look suspiciously better than the neighbors by a wide margin, to the point my parents were getting suspicious.
Not suspicious of me exactly, but I noticed them acting weirdly about it so I decided it was time to figure out a new place to practice.
Thankfully by then it was already the summer after the Japan trip, so sneaking out a window and going into the night was no problem.
I was also able to combine Martial Arts and Touki into a pretty decent flash step, where I flare my touki at the perfect moment in the perfect way, which gives me a massive burst of speed for barely any cost.
Using this I was able to scout out my whole town over the span of a week using Lifeforce Sense, but it was outside the town where I struck gold.
A couple miles out of town I found a minor leyline near a decently sized pond. As soon as I saw it I knew that it was my new base location.
Actually building the base was a joy as well. Between my spatial pouch for smaller items and using senjutsu for the structure, I had a very cozy hideaway within a week of on and off work.
Over those few months my senjutsu plant techniques had progressed to the point of plant manipulation, and I used that to the fullest effect. Weaving and shifting the nearby trees into a watertight structure while still being healthy trees was an exercise in planning and fine control that I was not expecting, but it made sense in hindsight.
I had to be careful to not cut off the capillaries while shifting the trees around into my base, as many times the 'easiest' way of building out of a branch caused it to kink and die, like a very sad hose.
Once I had a decently sized hut made, Using formations to implement some basic amenities was a breeze.
Heating, Cooling and airflow were beyond simple. The hardest part was modulating the temperature formations to not burn or freeze the wood they were on.
I had also figured out a trick with touki where I refine it to a point on my finger and use that to inscribe the formations directly onto the living wood of the house.
Usually putting formations on living things is risky because living things change, but somehow using touki for the inscription process interacts with the lifeforce of the living thing to force scars.
On an animal this would not amount to much, as their lifeforce is so vigorous it forces out any foreign Ki, but on plants it effectively locks in any formation's design.
I abused this effect greatly while making my base.
After I had the basics of the hut made, I had to prepare the area as well. Thankfully, my primer books had just the thing for that.
The Repelling formation was used to keep anyone below low-rank from getting near them. The basic version I had was only good for a few dozen meters, so that just means I had to set up a bastardized array of them around the area of the pond, my hut and the leyline.
I even tuned them so anyone who gets lost in the array magically finds themselves stumbling towards the nearest road. I don't need any heat from people going missing in my forest. I don't think my array would survive a grid search.
Since then I have spent as much time as possible out here, sneaking out during the night when I could and spending most of my summer days here too.
Finally arriving at my base after a few flash steps, I called out.
"Gregory, you here bud?"
"Mrow" was the only response I needed.
Gregory was a stray cat I found injured in the forest last year. At first I was just going to heal him up as practice and let him go, but after I healed him he kept showing up and sniffing around near my wards.
I instead decided to take him in. My parents don't want a pet, so I bought a collar for him and added a key formation linked both to him and my array, so he can enter my base as he pleases, but nobody else can even if they get his collar.
Gregory has been my first experiment in raising the strength of others using senjutsu. I've already healed my parents extensively, I think I even nipped some cancer in the bud for my dad as his ki was knotting really weirdly in some spots in his lungs.
Even though I'm confident in healing them, I am nowhere near competent enough to start augmenting my parents reliably.
That's where Gregory comes in.
He's been the recipient of all the little ideas I've had, both on my own and from copying ideas my motes spit out sometimes while improving myself.
Of course a mouse or ten is tested first, I don't actually want to risk my baby boy.
So far, with my constant senjutsu therapies and boosts I've turned Gregory into a super cat.
He's bigger, faster, smarter, better looking and he doesn't even smell even though he lives in the woods full time. He is nowhere near any level of spirituality, but I would say he's smarter than the smartest dogs now and would probably blow any mundane show cat competition out of the water.
My newest project with him is trying to teach him how to actively use his ki.
A while ago his lifeforce hit critical mass from all my senjutsu usage on him, but he just can't seem to use ki at all. The most I have observed from him is a slight strengthening when he is about to pounce on prey, but it is never much and never deliberate.
It seems to be some sort of instinctual usage, but it is very crude and I want to see if we can do better.
Walking into my base, which had been expanded a few times over the last few years with a few new rooms and even a basement, I took note of Gregory laying near the cooling formation.
It was the middle of the day during summer, so that makes sense. He's still a lazy cat unless he's hunting for his food in the forest.
Squatting down to pet him, he leaned into my hand and I ruffled his fur.
"Hey Buddy, I'm starting a new project today." Of course he just meowed at me and rolled over.
Once I had finished reading all the books Yasaka gave me I knew what my goal was. I wanted to be a Sage. The highest level of senjutsu possible.
There was honestly a suspicious amount of material on Sages, as every other topic had information on the basic level, how to progress further on my own, and maybe some handwritten notes expanding upon ideas introduced in the basics.
That suspicion was amplified when I got to the texts describing the 3 paths of Sagehood.
While all three paths can be progressed nigh endlessly, hence being called paths, there are distinct minimums needed to progress to the next path.
For the Path of Body, that minimum is absorbing a wisp of natural energy and not dying.
I knew that I had barely survived that because my body had been improved qualitatively by my motes, but reading deeper into the path gave me my answer.
The Path of Body is about preparing oneself to survive interacting with natural energy.
Body too weak? You die from the overwhelming power.
Sense of self too weak? You get overwhelmed by the negativity held within natural energy and die.
All my mote training had achieved those goals from a different direction.
Turns out I am also decently along the Path of Breath too, but that also has a few more years left even with motes.
From the texts given and my own experience, the difficulty of the Path of Breath isn't simply syncing one's breath with one's ki, it's keeping it synced.
Sure it's easy to do when you are meditating in a silent room, but while you're walking? While you're fighting? While you're generally living life? That's a whole other beast.
Unfortunately the agreed upon method to progress is to simply live life. This is why it takes decades to centuries for other people to progress, as you have to experience 'everything' to be able to react and keep your breath synced during anything.
Of course, I am cheating heavily. Between Breathing working directly on the problem slowly, and all my knowledge motes baking new information into my brain daily, I should be ready to start the Path of Nature when I'm around 18.
While reading the Path of Nature portion of the books I read a very interesting tidbit about natural energy and Sages.
When people refer to Sages 'purifying the land' or something similar, what they are referring to is the process in which a Sage cleans natural energy of its emotional charge.
It turns out that natural energy is actually made up of two parts. There is the lifeforce component, which makes up most of the power associated with it, but there is also the emotional charge, or the intent.
When a ki user moves their ki, they do so by adding their intent to it, thus causing it to move and change. Meanwhile natural energy also has an intent, but it is pure malice.
What Sages do is take in the natural energy of the world and effectively strip the emotional charge from it before releasing the subdued natural energy back to the world.
In return the tiniest fraction of lifeforce, along with all the malice, is absorbed by the Sage.
From that description alone Sages sound like borderline cursed spirits or some type of emotional vampire, but the extensive training of the Three Paths prepares a Sage to avoid any negative consequences.
They use a strong and steady Self to wear down the malice as it is being assimilated into them, thus being left with a sliver of lifeforce and some raw emotional energy. Most just toss the latter.
My point is that most of what a Sage does is emotional cleansing. Since it is going to take me at least a decade until I am a decently powerful Sage, I'll just have to make something that does the cleansing for me.
Simple, right?