16 Chapter 16: New Understanding.

"Do you think it is wise to say no to a princess?"

"Maybe, maybe not. What I know is that if I did say yes, then I would have left the people here behind, just like everyone else did." I replied to the young girl who took a liking to my floating chair.

She apparently liked to spin on it, so much so that I had to make a second one just for her. Children were really needy, but I didn't mind it since it was Jasmine.

"Oh." I muttered as I felt the energy in my veins reaching the threshold and becoming a little bit denser than before, making my body more durable and resilient overall.

"Again? At this rate, it won't take you even 30 years to reach the sovereign profound realm, even if all you did was laze around and keep this up! This is outrageous; do you have any idea how much I've suffered to reach my level? All you do is stand there and exist while still growing stronger!" She finally snapped.

Honestly, it was kind of funny seeing her in that state, so irritated at my lifestyle being so different from other cultivators, at least compared to what she'd told me.

Spending time immobile, legs crossed, concentrating on breathing?

That seemed so incredibly dull; had I been forced to do that to save her, I might as well have lobotomized myself just to dumb myself down enough to find breathing an enjoyable pastime.

If that was a cultivator's life, it was no wonder they were so prone to violence; their entire lives were centered around gathering power, so it was obvious that they itched to use it to their advantage.

Stupid brutes they were, taking and taking without ever giving back to the community that permits their lavish lifestyle.

Without the farmers, they wouldn't have their food; without the miners, they wouldn't have their gold and resources; and without medics like me, the common populace would always itch to grow as powerful as they did to usurp power and begin as the new rulers.

This world is truly awful.

There were more beautiful scenes than I had ever seen; just the forests I had been in were more breathtaking than any place on earth, with trees taller and more majestic than I had ever conceived in my mind, but it was the inhabitants that made this place little more than anarchy.

"You know, Jasmine, if you want me to teach you how I did this, all you have to do is ask; having one more helping hand in my research would be much appreciated." I replied to the girl that was still looking at me in irritation, which only grew as I talked.

"Shut up." She replied, turning her head away and pouting, "I'm the master here; it is beneath me to learn from you."

"There is no such thing as being above learning!" I lightly reprimanded the girl, a girl more powerful than I could imagine but still a young one: "There is no progress without learning; to become great, you can never be so arrogant as to claim that there is nothing to learn from someone else. We have different life experiences; therefore, we know different things."

Sometimes I felt like my father, preaching my old person's wisdom to someone from a younger generation. It was fun.

A small smile grew on my face as I saw Jasmine turning away with a pout, but I did not reply; whether she took my words to heart or not was not something I could know.

"Anyway, I'm done with my Energy Resonance Imaging machine, or ERI for short. Want to try it out?" I said, finally standing up and cracking my back.

The machine that I had been working on was finally done, and it was far better than I could have ever hoped.

After various scrapped prototypes, I resigned myself to turning my operation table into a full diagnostic tool. The best thing was that it was mostly free to use, only using a little of the energy in my veins, so it was eco-friendly too!

It took a half-year of work and so much research on the true nature of this energy that if I wanted to know even more, I would have to create something akin to the Large Hadron Collider, probably not as big though.

First, I had to miniaturize my runes to make them fit; they were unable to accomplish any complicated task on their own, but when combined with others, they could be far more versatile than anything else.

"I still don't understand what it is supposed to do; this formation of yours is truly bizarre." She replied, not actually committing to a decision.

"I told you already, didn't I? People's bodies have an innate resistance to other people's energy, but from my experiments and research on Jing Yun, I found out that there are certain areas where this resistance is more pronounced.

From there I theorized that maybe this resistance is tied to the profound veins in a person's body, so I tried it out on Jing, but my own scan was too rudimentary and too inaccurate, so this is my solution: "This bed should take my energy and suffuse it inside the patient's body, and as the veins resist my energy more efficiently and rapidly, it should pick up on those low intensity spots and map out the vein network. After the analysis, the bed creates a luminescent impression of the channels. It's still bi-dimensional though, unfortunately, but it's enough to test my hypothesis." I explained, hoping to be as concise and clear as possible.

She looked at me with a very strange look on her face, as if she were scared for some reason; maybe she was just scared of my genius, but eventually she opened her mouth with the words, "Does it work?"

"I sure hope it does, but if it doesn't, then I would have learned that it doesn't work how I think it does, so that is still a way to go forward." I replied with a smile.

A mere failed experiment couldn't stop me from discovering more. If this didn't work, I would just repurpose it and rework it into a machine similar in function to an MRI, but I would have to find a different way to map the energy channels.

She looked at me, her gaze intensifying, so I just asked, "Is something wrong?"

"No, you're getting close; that is all. What should I do?" She replied.

"Close to what?" I asked back, curious as to what caused the usually haughty little girl to react in such a weird, almost scared, way.

"Nothing; it's not important, not for now at least. Continue with your experiment." She replied, putting a clear stop to the conversation.

"Alright, I'll respect your boundaries then," I replied. I trusted her enough to know that if she said that I was getting closer, it wouldn't be long until I found out what she was hiding anyway, and where would the fun of discovery be if I was spoon-fed the answers? So I went back to explaining, "Since your body is a projection, I don't think it will work on you, so I'll use myself as a test subject. All you have to do is put your palm over there and provide a steady influx of energy, not too much though; I don't want to explode."

She had already been putting her hand where I told her to when I finished my words, which probably unsettled her as her hand shot away from the ERI, a motion faster than I could possibly follow with my eyes, as she looked at me seemingly horrified.

"Are you stupid!?" She asked with a shout, "This thing can kill you?"

"I mean, yeah, but only if you input too much energy at once. I still haven't put any safety net in it since it's still a prototype, a working one hopefully, but still a prototype." I shrugged in reply.

"What if I wanted to hurt you?" She continued, "What if I actually wanted to kill you and was only waiting for a chance to steal the Sky Poison Pearl?"

"Other than the fact that if I die, you will come with me?" I replied with a raised eyebrow. I really didn't see where she was coming from.

"That's just what I told you!" She shouted back, clearly angered for some reason that I couldn't understand—women were weird, "What if it was all a lie to get my hands on the heavenly treasure?"

I sighed and played her game, so I replied with a shrug, "If I die, then so be it; I don't care. I'm pretty sure that Miss Yang and the old ladies of the neighborhood would be sad though."

I truly didn't.

"What do you mean you don't care?" She blew up again.

"Listen, Jasmine, if you actually wanted to do that, we wouldn't be having this conversation; I would be gone, so why are you making a deal out of nothing?" I asked the girl before she could go on anymore, changing the subject.

"Because... because yes! Don't change the subject!" She replied.

I sighed again. "Jasmine, if you wanted to kill me, you would have done so; you're way too powerful for me, remember?"

"I know." She stated without a hint of hesitation in her voice, which I didn't exactly like, but I let it slide, "But you are still giving me power over your life right now, why?"

She finally calmed down, it seemed. "Jasmine, I trust you; that's all there is to it. Now, could we go back to my experiment and be done with this discussion?"

She looked at me straight in the eyes, nodding meekly shortly after, so I laid down on the table and said a short "Thank you."

I had never thought that being a parent to a thirteen-year-old would be this hard, but it felt rewarding in its own way.

At least I skipped the whole awful newborn to toddler to child phase; those kids were awful.

I felt a weird sensation spreading through my body as I stayed perfectly still so as to not screw up the analysis. It took half an hour to actually finish the process.

I would have to speed it up a lot.

"Finally, thank you, Jas." I said to the girl as I shooed her to the side, looking over the rough drawing that had successfully appeared over the ERI table.

"This is incredible," mumbled Jasmine, but I was too concentrated on the image in front of me. Suddenly, a lot of hypotheses that I had made were proven wrong, but a lot were now correct.

In front of me lay a drawing of a circulatory system extremely similar to a blood's circulatory system, with the major veins being the same ones that I could feel when I actively searched for them inside of me with the energy sense.

But there was also so much more; my hypothesis of a whole bunch of microveins too small to see was correct; there was so much untapped potential that it wasn't even funny.

For example, with that movement technique that Jasmine had given me, I could most probably apply the principles so much more easily now that I actually knew what my body looked like.

With this, it would become a joke to master all of the stages of that technique, but it also meant so much more.

I spaced out, looking over every possibility, every single teeny tiny bit of information that I could infer from the image. I was on the verge of something; I could feel the energy in my veins boil, roaring for something, just a tiny hint of something more.

Something that I couldn't find forced me to go deeper to get more data; my very body demanded it.

"There is truly nothing better than the feeling of being right, isn't that so, Jasmine?" I grinned as I looked at the girl; she then just turned around and disappeared in my hand.

I pouted; I wanted to rub it in her face a little bit more, but she was just a sore loser, so I couldn't do much beyond just go back to work. I might as well apply a lot of my new knowledge of this body to perfect that technique.