Fate Shift - Chapter 9

The next day’s cultivation went by in much the same way as the previous day. D’Gedda opened four more meridians, bringing his new total up to 21 opened meridians. The most interesting portion of the day was spell practice.

D’Gedda’s strategy for creating spells with multiple powers was to first select a normal novice spell as a foundation. Once he had a novice spell for his foundation he’d experiment with various combinations of powers. The first novice spell D’Gedda tried using for his foundation was Water Missile.

Casting Water Missile normally would manifest a small sphere of water and then launch it in a specified direction. As an attack Water Missile was pathetic. It lacked the speed and power needed to be a serious threat. The most it could do would be to drench someone’s clothes.

D’Gedda began his experiments with Water Missile by pairing it with each of the other six powers and observing the changes. D’Gedda created Ice Missile by adding cold easily. He was also able to infuse a Water Missile with the strength of lightning quite easily. Adding heat formed a Steam Missile, wind made a faster Water Missile, and earth formed a Mud Missile. Thunder was the least impressive power when combined with Water Missile, as the only new effect was that the splashing sound of the Water Missile hitting the ground was increased somewhat.

Using these results D’Gedda began working on further fusions. Some powers seemed to work well together while others were worse than some of the two-power spells. Casting Water Missile with the powers of water, heat, and wind created an even stronger version of Steam Missile. On the other hand using the powers of water, lightning, and earth together resulted in failure.

D’Gedda quickly discovered that each additional power added to a single spell increased the difficulty of casting the spell significantly. As someone who’d once been a powerful cultivator, controlling these spells wasn’t a serious issue but it was still difficult. D’Gedda was truly coming to realize just how much he’d relied on divine sense in his past life.

With divine sense it would not only be much easier to observe the spells he was casting, it’d also be much easier to control them. It was like trying to sew a blanket without the sense of touch. Even if he knew what he should be doing he couldn’t feel what he was doing. On the rare occasions where D’Gedda made a mistake it always led to the spell he’d been trying to cast failing outright.

This wasn’t a big problem with these novice level spells but what about the future? Even in D’Gedda’s age, the skill required to cast apprentice level spells was completely different from novice level spells. The gap between journeyman and apprentice was even larger. Put simply, D’Gedda had to solve this issue before it became too significant. Rather than focus on that problem, D’Gedda chose to continue working on his novice spells for now. He could contemplate how to deal with his future problems while cultivating.

Although it wasn’t caused by a lack of control or skill, D’Gedda soon hit a wall in his spell practice. While he could combine four or more powers together using Water Missile as the foundation, the effectiveness of those spells became worse. Right now his strongest spells only used three powers, an unacceptable result. D’Gedda ended the day’s practice thinking about possible solutions.

Over the course of the following days D’Gedda made great progress with his spells. One of the major improvements he made was in learning different ways to use and combine the seven powers.

In terms of pairing two powers together, some pairings boasted great enhancements. Heat and cold had the strongest synergy of the pairings. Combining heat and cold made it much easier to heat or cool something. The second strongest pairing D’Gedda found was lightning and thunder. Other pairings, like lightning and wind, didn’t accomplish much of anything.

As he continued using the seven powers D’Gedda began realizing that he was approaching his spell fusions in a very simplistic manner. Thus far he’d simply tried to take a novice spell and cast it with multiple powers. Sometimes this worked well but often it didn’t. He began to believe that in order to create spells that fused many powers together successfully he needed a deeper grasp of the seven powers. He also wanted to try casting the novice-level spells differently. For instance, what if he added a power to a spell mid-cast or even after it’d already been cast?

This line of reasoning led D’Gedda to greater success. At the same time though he soon found that the practice area he’d been going to wasn’t equipped as well as he needed it to be. To more accurately estimate the power of his spells he needed targets.

D’Gedda brought his problem up with the bored girl who worked in the lobby. Although she didn’t seem impressed by D’Gedda’s request she explained that he could use an apprentice-level training room. The apprentice-level rooms came equipped with puppets for combat training. She specifically said “Even an apprentice can’t break ’em, so you shouldn’t worry about that at all. I wouldn’t recommend fighting one though; they won’t kill you but they don’t show mercy either. I’ve seen some overconfident fools get injured so badly by the training puppets they never walked again.”

In response D’Gedda politely thanked the girl for her advice and swapped to an apprentice-level room. The apprentice-level rooms were down the opposite hallway from the novice-level ones so it wasn’t hard to find one. Unlike the novice-level rooms, some of the apprentice-level rooms were actually in use. Still, more rooms were available for use than not.

Once D’Gedda entered his new training area he quickly noticed some of the differences between it and the old one. For one thing, there was a podium in front of the entrance with a scroll laid out on top of it. It listed some guidelines and instructions for training in the room; the scroll also acted as a record of who’d used the room. Another difference was the room’s size and structure. A slightly raised platform the size of one of the novice rooms was positioned in the center of this room. The final change between rooms D’Gedda noticed was that three alcoves were positioned in the center of every wall except the entryway’s wall. The alcoves each contained a wooden, humanoid puppet.

D’Gedda walked up to the podium and read through the scroll carefully; once he was certain he’d grasped everything he sent a thread of Qi into the scroll. Near the bottom of the scroll a line of text appeared.

Following that D’Gedda walked over to one of the alcoves and set some Qi into a puppet. His Qi activated the puppet but D’Gedda didn’t really have control over it. An object that resembled some kind of seed was fused into the alcove’s wall. It had previously been hidden behind the puppet. A thick rope of Qi extended from the ‘seed’ to the puppet. This was the treasure that allowed apprentices to direct the puppet’s behavior. Using it with his Qi, D’Gedda had the ‘seed’ direct the puppet to the center of the arena, the raised platform at the room’s center.

Although D’Gedda was tempted to fight the puppet he knew better; he simply had it wait in the arena’s center. D’Gedda walked over to the arena and began practicing. He started by testing the puppet’s durability with the spells he already knew worked from weakest to strongest. None of his spells harmed the puppet; it was left unblemished. Having confirmed the girl’s words to be true D’Gedda returned his focus to his normal training. Although it would’ve been easier to tell how powerful his spells were if the puppet had taken damage, it wasn’t something worth worrying over.

The more time D’Gedda devoted to spell practice the more he realized how little he actually knew about using the seven powers. He could already tell that there was no way he’d be able to make a novice-level spell with seven powers. In fact he wasn’t certain a spell that fused all seven powers could possibly be novice-level at all. Such a spell would be too strong and too complex to be novice-level. It’d have to be at least apprentice-level, maybe even journeyman!

Although he wasn’t going to be able to cast a single spell using all seven powers anytime soon, D’Gedda grew increasingly accustomed to using each power. While he kept practicing fusing multiple powers together, his focus changed from the number of powers he fused to how he fused them. One of the very basic tests he performed was with the familiar Water Missile. D’Gedda cast a normal Water Missile spell to the side of the puppet. Right as it was about to pass the puppet D’Gedda added the power of wind and pushed the Water Missile left, making it hit the puppet.

Changing the Water Missile’s trajectory after he cast it by infusing the spell with the power of wind was rather easy. Unfortunately it consumed much more Qi this way, as D’Gedda had to maintain a thread of Qi between him and the spell to enact this change. Had he possessed divine sense he’d have been able to simply manifest the power of wind from the Seven Powers Qi the spell was formed from.

Although the lack of divine sense was frustrating, D’Gedda was also certain he’d hit upon the great strength of Seven Powers Qi with this particular test. In order to cast any spell D’Gedda had ever heard of, some amount of Qi was always required. For novice-level spells the Qi required might not be much but for higher level spells the costs would only grow increasingly greater. This was why the Qi a person chose in the Qi Birth Realm was so important. Every type of Qi was more effective when used correctly. For example, Wind Qi boosted all wind spells. At the same time, all spells that didn’t use wind would be much less effective.

In the case of Seven Powers Qi, only the seven powers benefitted from increased efficiency. Using any one power alone only provided a small boost in efficiency though. If someone with Wind Qi cast a wind spell, it’d be far more effective than the same spell when cast by someone using Seven Powers Qi. Naturally this meant that fusing the seven powers together would raise the Seven Powers Qi’s efficiency by a massive margin.

On the surface this might seem to be a good trade but in reality it actually wasn’t. Qi Cultivators needed to specialize to become strong. In the case of someone with Wind Qi, they just had to learn how to use wind. A Seven Powers Qi cultivator would need to learn how to use seven powers in conjunction; the challenge this posed was in an entirely different spectrum of difficulty from what the Wind Qi cultivator needed to face. Even if one argued that the versatility Seven Powers Qi offered made it worthwhile, D’Gedda would disagree. Having seen just how powerful Qi Cultivators could become, he knew that that wasn’t good enough. It didn’t matter how much versatility one’s Qi offered if they were too weak for their variations to have meaningful effect.

That said, D’Gedda had just discovered what he believed was Seven Powers Qi’s ‘hidden weapon.’ When he cast the Water Missile he retained a connection with it via a Qi thread; however he didn’t use any new Qi to add the power of wind to his Water Missile spell. The Qi used in the Water Missile spell’s initial casting was all the Qi needed for the introduction of the power of wind. This was important for two reasons.

The first reason this knowledge was important was because it suggested that a spell cast with a single power could manifest all seven powers in any combination the caster chose, so long as they retained a connection with the spell after it was cast. If someone mastered this usage of Seven Powers Qi they could use it to turn a seemingly harmless attack into a devastating one. It also meant one’s options in combat would multiply.

The second reason this was important was all about sequencing and timing. In his test D’Gedda added the power of wind to his Water Missile, redirecting it into the puppet. An opponent that wasn’t stationary may have avoided such an attack, provided they reacted fast enough. Even if the change in power was sudden, it needed to be timed very carefully to be effective when used in such a manner.

D’Gedda had already come up with a simple solution to this problem though. He looked at the puppet which was still soaked from his last Water Missile and, using his Qi thread, electrified the water. He followed that by freezing the water using the powers of heat and cold.

So long as a spell didn’t consume all of its Qi upon contact with the enemy it could be used to induce the effects of other powers at a later point in time. So long as even one spell connected with the enemy, even if the initial hit didn’t cause injury, the remnant Qi could be used for one or more follow-up attacks. This would create an immense psychological pressure for an enemy if even a single one of these follow-up attacks caused significant damage. It would also mean an enemy without sufficiently strong defense would need to avoid all future attacks!

The threat didn’t end there either. In a real battle, an attack didn’t have to deal damage to be useful. Simply slowing an enemy for a fraction of a second could be pivotal! Besides that there was also the possibility of combining the effects of multiple spells together to consider. Even if a single spell’s variations couldn’t be used to create an opportunity for victory, using multiple spells in conjunction could perhaps be enough to tip the balance in D’Gedda’s favor.

This ‘hidden weapon’ D’Gedda had discovered was truly quite strong and justified the difficulty of mastering seven separate powers. Still, it wasn’t like this strength was perfect. Without divine sense D’Gedda would have to use Qi threads to enact changes on his spells after they’d been cast, which would be far too obvious to anyone he was fighting. He’d either have to gain divine sense or come up with a different solution if he wanted to make the best use of this ‘hidden weapon.’