Obtaining power

With Song Xuan dead, I am safe for the time being. I quickly search around the courtyard and find the senior's weapons. I casually pick up a sword and behead the three disciples. I throw their corpses in the kitchen's freezing pit, and prepare myself a healthy breakfast while I am here.

The food helped alleviate some of the fatigue from expending all the spiritual energy in my body with that punch. I still need to gather more to be able to fight cultivators, but I am at least safe and well fed for the moment.

I try to analyse how to move the spiritual energy around my body, but I quickly gave up on the idea. I realise I could only roughly transfer it to a part of my body, strengthening it, anything more sophisticated than that would require some kind of special technique. And I can't afford to experiment with it either, since gathering energy was slow without special meditating methods, and I am running short on time. If somebody visited Song Xuan right now, I'd have to run away with all my might just to avoid the retribution of the sect. But as far as I know, Song Xuan always trains by himself until at least noon, and those who would visit him would also take this in consideration, so I should be fine for a couple of hours. Nonetheless, I need to raise my strength quickly if I don't want to become a fugitive.

I try to contact Eve's hidden consciousness, since if I can get some kind of benefit from her being with me, I surely won't be in any more trouble. And, as I thought, while she herself was asleep, she left her analytic functions on standby. I only have to concentrate hard and I am be able to use them freely. This gave me an idea, and I start to analyze 'spiritual energy', to come up with a meditating technique to gather spiritual energy faster. I could be done with it in three months. That was way too long though, so I drive whatever little spiritual energy I managed to gather so far into my mind, to speed up the process. It is a resounding success, since most of her processing is power-based, that is to say, the more energy is provided, the faster her thought processes work. And spiritual energy is currently an excellent alternative to electric power, since she is a spiritual consciousness.

The estimated time required for the analysis dropped from three months to three seconds. It almost cripples me, because all of my spiritual energy is being sapped dry, while I try to keep up the acceleration for as long as possible. Luckily the analysis throws out a rudimentary meditation technique, so it should be smooth sailing from here on out. I meditate for a while, then retry the analysis for a more powerful method. I repeat this process a few times, until the analysis tells me that it would be impossible to further improve the last method I obtained. With that, I start meditating using this method, and all the spiritual energy in a 100 meter radius surges inside me in just a few seconds. If the other cultivators knew about this, they'd go crazy over it. My dantian completely fills up with all that energy. I start analyzing the 'cultivation system' of this world with all the spiritual energy I accumulated. After spending most of my spiritual energy, I got a good idea about the first few levels of the system.

It was time to increase my battle prowess though, so I start a different analysis. 'Power unrelated to cultivation level'. The analysis quickly starts to fill my mind about all the skills and powers a cultivator could possess regardless of cultivation level, like states, wills, domains, laws and special knowledge and techniques, like appraisal, camouflage and spiritual detection. Along with the basic introduction to these, the analysis also turned out some basic methods I could use at my current level. Most would either have a huge spiritual energy expenditure or would be useless in battle, but there are a few that piqued my interest.

One is spatial manipulation, which depends on both comprehension of spatial laws and cultivation level, but one could be substituted for the other, meaning that I could use some simple techniques even as a non-cultivator, if my comprehension was top-notch. The main problem is that the comprehension level needed is way too high, which is why most cultivators never even learned a basic spatial ability.

Another interesting one is temporal manipulation. It relies only on comprehension, since it utilizes the world's energy, instead of one's own. But it is also way harder to learn and utilize than spatial abilities. The analysis shows, that there might be some geniuses that can use some basic spatial laws in this medium-sized sect, but there is no chance of there being a time manipulator, even among the upper echelon.

Other things that seem interesting are the abilities that I can use right off the bat with minimal spiritual energy expenditure, like 'Basic Appraisal', 'Basic Life Sign and Spiritual Energy Detection', 'Basic Stealth' or 'Basic Energy Masking', and a few powerful body cultivation techniques, that can not only raise my battle prowess, but also change my appearance if needed. With these I don't need to sit still and hide anymore, since even if I get caught, I can disappear easily in the crowds of the outer sect.