Awakening

Wu Bao sat in a lotus position inside the collector.

Mr. Zang said he could use it all night, until school started the next day. He obliged, perfectly content to skip dinner, breakfast, and all eight hours of sleep to make the most of that opportunity.

In practice, that was hard to do. After sitting there for a couple hours, he started to get bored.

He turned his attention to the seal that covered the walls and the floor. The room was perfectly square, the seal covering each surface and having epicenters on the floor and the roof. It was fairly complex, but Wu Bao identified a few basic elements and deduced the functionality of the rest. It was unfortunate he couldn't see the other side of the wall, which hid the rest of the seal from prying eyes.

Finished looking at the seal, he felt his body.

'Now.' He thought. 'If there was ever a time to awaken, it is now. Now. Now.'

He urged his body to do something. Repeatedly, he chanted in his mind.

'Now. Now. Now.'

His hair swayed in the wind as he chanted. Wait. Wind?

It was like a damn had broken. A small vortex picked up in the room as the spiritual energy started rushing around him, consequently moving the air.

Wu Bao looked at his fluttering clothes in shock as he realized what was happening.

'Ah! Ah! I must apply my seals,' he thought, bringing out his first and weakest seal. 'Hopefully the mind calculator seal will have enough energy from this.'

A normal person, upon looking at Wu Bao's immense energy, would have fallen over in shock. He was trying to apply such a low-strength seal to THIS amount of power?

The mind calculator seal quickly filled and looked like it was about to burst.

'Ah! This is the indication that it is full! I should apply the second one, my custom telekinesis seal.'

Wu Bao applied the seal, but it was also filled in an instant.

'That was my strongest one! Why is this happening?'

Inside his mind, he suddenly heard the roar of a dragon.

'What now?'

Unbeknownst to him, the Dragon Sealing Talisman was trying everything it could to absorb the energy flooding Wu Bao's body.

Since this particular seal was intended for an adult, it couldn't understand that Wu Bao was only eighteen and was undergoing an awakening. It searched around for a cause of the disturbance and found three seals. The two that Wu Bao was trying to apply to himself, plus the one from the collector.

["You are truly remarkable, successfully activating a theoretical seal to gather spiritual energy. but I am strong enough to lock every other seal known to man."]

Wu Bao watched in shock as his two paper seals suddenly sank into his body. Then it turned to panic as the very room started to collapse. The seal from the collector turned illusory and also rushed into him.

Still, his awakening was not finished.

The high density spiritual energy continued to rush into him until it was all gone. Then the other collectors started to vibrate.

["It still comes?"] The Dragon Sealing Talisman had a hard time keeping up with the spiritual energy. It could feel it's own reserves filling up, which was impossible! For all practical purposes, it's capacity could be considered bottomless.

The other collectors burst and the spiritual energy from inside, energy that was one-hundred-twenty times denser than normal, rushed toward Wu Bao, quickly absorbed by him.

["It's too much. It's too much!"]

As the hours passed by, Wu Bao couldn't leave the area because of the wind vortex created by his body. The spiritual energy contained in the other collectors provided the perfect fuel.

The Dragon Sealing Talisman, a seal that was stronger than hundreds of seals combined, a seal that was not meant to be broken, was filled like any other.

Finally, the wind died down as his awakening came to an end.

Wu Bao felt unexplained pain and touched the back of his neck. The Dragon Sealing Talisman, which had been hidden beneath the surface of his skin his whole life, had emerged.

He ignored the pain for now and looked around him.

'That was longer and more intense than any awakening I've heard about.'

His own collector was completely destroyed. The others, while they could still work, were completely deprived of energy. He heard the door on one of them open as someone walked out. They wanted to know why the spiritual energy had suddenly dried up.

Wu Bao didn't want to answer them. He grabbed his stuff and fled the area.

When he got home, he checked the mirror.

'What the heck is this?'

He examined the black bead on his neck, which was slightly blacker than his black hair. Suddenly the bead's dimensions, as well as a few calculations and other numbers, appeared in his mind.

'Is this the mind calculator seal?'

After a quick test, he found out that the mind calculator seal worked perfectly. He could perform many math calculations inside his head. He could also measure the velocity of a car that passed outside his house. They were speeding, of course.

'Powerful people have access to this seal, yet only a few have it?' He scoffed. 'Such fools. They only think about physical strength and beating up those who are weaker. Why doesn't everyone have these? They could easily pass their tests while fields like architecture and computer sciences would benefit greatly. Society would be elevated to new degrees. Who cares if the seal can't level mountains?'

Wu Bao stopped grieving for society as he remembered the second seal. Telekinesis. He went to his room and found several objects of different size and weight.

Unlike the mind calculator seal, he had to direct his spiritual energy outside his body in order to use the custom telekinesis Seal.

After feeling his body for a few minutes, he found something new somewhere around his stomach area. He had spiritual energy!

Since he had grown up learning about spiritual energy his whole life, he knew exactly what to do. He wasn't the clueless protagonist of a common xianxia web novel who had to relearn everything for the audience's sake.

He cleared his mind and focussed on the blackness of his mental space. Inside the space, which was usually empty, he saw four seals. There were the two custom seals he made himself, the seal from the collector, and a terrifying-looking seal that was so complex that it looked like it was alive. He decided to leave that one for last.

He molded the energy in his stomach and guided it to his mind, making sure it maintained a connection like a string. He guided it through the spirit root and into his mental space. Once he was there, he connected the line of spiritual energy to the telekinesis seal and finally to the third eye, where he could extend the energy outside his body. He released his hold on the spiritual energy and the string stabilized. He could use telekinesis now.

Outside his body, the spiritual energy was like an invisible hand. Which he could feel but not see. He extended it toward the items on his desk and picked them up one by one. They all felt… light.

Moving on, Wu Bao molded another string and sent it to his Mind Calculator Seal. The string snapped into place and he gained new clarity. Because of how the seal functioned, it was good for a few other things besides math. By reinforcing his connection with it, he could use it to permanently store mental notes. If he stored more information he would have to expend more spiritual energy though.

Next, Wu Bao curiously looked at the third seal, the same as he recognized from the collector. When he connected a string, a slight breeze blew in his room as spiritual energy started going inside him. Immediately, Wu Boa nervously cut the string, turning it off.

This violated a fundamental theory he knew about seals.

It was well known that seals placed on living things could only store energy, not collect it. Otherwise, the world would be full of ridiculously powerful immortals. The heavens didn't want that. That is why energy gathering seals could only be placed on inanimate objects such as the collector. Gathering energy from the environment depended on one's own talents.

How was it possible for such a seal to exist inside Wu Bao?

He turned his attention to the last seal, which was the likely culprit.

As he approached it in his mind space, he noticed a recursive pattern. Inside the seal, there was a smaller version of itself, inside a smaller version of itself, inside an even smaller version, and so on… In addition, the seal changed from moment to moment, making it impossible to study. Looking at it for a long time made his head hurt, and when he got closer, it growled at him.

Wu Bao shivered and left the mental space.

'Nope. Nope. Nope.'

Satisfied with his gains, he decided not to tempt fate and simply went to sleep.