Ki Horizons - [Litrpg, Adventure, Power Levels]

I had once, foolishly, thought that our current training was awful and boring and desperately wanted to seek any form of progress in it.

Oh, what an absolute fool I had been.

If training without being able to sense Ki was hard, training while being able to do so was like burning in the middle of a sun. Master's Ki was so overbearing, so mightily above mine, and had so much damn fucking quantity that I felt like even a breath was like choking on a hot coal. If I was a thousand miles away and felt this Ki, I'd have been running for at least ten thousand more. Never before had I been so overwhelmingly positive that Master could snuff me out like a candle in the wind.

Worse, it made it incredibly, incredibly hard to focus on anything else. Ki sense? What Ki Sense? Does a man really need to learn how to sense fire when they're being burned alive? Water when they're drowning? How about the earth when they're buried all around in it? Worse, Master seemed to want me to improve this sense, something that was rapidly happening all throughout the damn day.

Like a blind man, I began to see.

And see.

And see.

And with every minute and second, I realized that Master's Ki was stronger and more plentiful than I had ever even considered. Every second a new understanding. Every moment a new mental shock down to my bones as I saw more of what was already there. As if I had mentally dubbed a certain maximum for his energy's strength, only to be proven dead wrong time and time again. By the end of the eight hours, I'd barely meditated or even thought about the strange person in my head. No, no my entire focus had been on the ever growing, unstoppable, unbelievable might that was my Master.

"Alright-"

The second the word left his mouth, I was gone. Moving so fast that I was positive I'd left an afterimage. The doors of the Dojo slammed open, and I was at least five streets past before I took a deep breath like I was choking and simply leaned against a random wall.

I stayed like that, feeling like I'd stared at the sun for eight hours except it had decided to personally try to kill me as well. I shuddered.

If that was master just releasing some of his ki…

Never before had I so desperately desired to never fight master again. Even when I'd nearly been killed by him and thought I'd been walking to my doom the next moment, I had never felt like this. It took a while for me to stop being blind, and that wasn't a metaphor. My Ki sense had been so absolutely broken over that every other sense in me had seemingly stopped working. There was no 'blind' or 'deaf' with this new Ki Sense. It berated and slammed into you, and when it reached beyond what you could handle, it didn't turn off. It merely blocked everything else out.

So I was fairly surprised when half an hour later I looked up and realized that Vincent was staring at me with a look of concern and that we were in a random alleyway away from anyone.

"Can you hear me now?"

The words were muffled, even as my Ki sense still slowly bled down. The very memory of it seemed to be interfering with everything else, like sunspots in the eyes after looking away from the sun.

"Barely."

"I'd heard that it could be intense but… it's really that bad?"

Vincent frowned, his manly earrings and ponytail swaying in the wind.

"It's… Master… He's a monster Vincent. A Monster. It was like… it was like my depths of reality were being shaken over and over again. How… how can anything… how anything be that powerful Vincent? How can… how can anything… be like that?"

I felt his hand clap on my shoulder.

"You know, sometimes I forget that always being a step ahead, means that you slam face first into the walls. Sometimes literally."

"It was my back, you bastard."

"Details. Anyway, Mutai. We're going to reach that point too, someday. Don't freak out over how strong someone else is. That doesn't really seem in character for you."

I raised a disbelieving eyebrow.

"I have literally always run when I found something too strong for me to beat."

"You told me you killed a triple digit."

"I ran from him to start off with. Not my fault I needed to go back and help keep Cooler alive."

"And the rats?"

"I tried to run! I told you so! I just had to fight to survive."

"Mhm. And Ragual?"

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"I needed the water! Are you just going to be annoying all day?"

He laughed and I sighed.

I ignored him, the prick, and went to looking at my Vambrace… only to stop.

Now that the Ki sense beating I had gotten was done with and I was out in the city… I could feel it. So, so, so many different Ki… signatures? So many different people. But compared to Master's blazing inferno sun of hell… they were like candles. Some were even less, like sparks, and I was shocked that I could feel them at all.

"You okay?" Came Vincent's worried voice at my slackjawed expression.

"Just… so much Ki. Not Master's, it's just… There's so many of them!"

I didn't have a metaphor or a way to describe it. I could only sense a 'bit' around myself but it was still enough to sense… so, so many people. So many different sizes and strengths and types… all unique in a way. Sure, so many were close and I'd probably need a whole shit ton of training to be able tell someone apart from another… but all together those little differences began to sparkle and shine. Like… like a sea of life or creation. And I was barely sensing a single street or so. Hell, probably less.

"Vincent… you have got to learn this. It's like being in a whole other world. I… I think I want to learn how to paint this. Someone else must have. Oh my god…"

"I'm working on it. Speaking of, you wouldn't happen to have any tips there would you, my dear brother?"

"No, no, not really. It really was just… one moment I didn't have it, and the next moment I did. I guess… I at least knew it was going to happen that day. A sense of expectation. I don't know if that's normal though."

"Hmm, well, I shouldn't be too far behind unless you're a freak in Ki sensing too. Now, what do you want to do to celebrate? Go out to eat?"

"Oh no, I know exactly where we're going."

************

The pool and the waters around me were nice. So, so nice. I felt like I'd been inside a pressure cooker and now could finally decompress as I floated along in the waters. Only my healing tank could be as nice, but I sure as hell wasn't going back to that dojo till I had to. Hell, I might even pay for a room at a hotel just to stay away for longer.

I shook my head. Now wasn't the time to think about that stuff. It was finally time to address the T-Rex in the room. Namely, the man. No, not just the man, but the visions as a whole.

Even now, they're broken up, but I can still remember the dreams and some of them. How that first one had slowly started to spark something within me. How it showed me such horrible things and gave so many varieties of impressions. Only now, in hindsight and with new understanding, could I realize what I had been being shown.

Ki.

The white energy, that golden energy, that blue atom of energy that I think was me… all different kinds of Ki. Little more than a year ago… I'd begun to get those visions. When I first woke up from that drunken stupor…

When I'd used ki for the first time to save Ragual…

When I'd used it again against the Director…

There may have been other times, I realized. Not other times I used Ki, but other times the dreams and visions had hit me and that I just had forgotten.

And what the visions showed… was terrifying.

Clashes on a universal scale. The literal end of everything. Ki enough to blow up planets. It boggled the mind. I didn't know what it meant and wouldn't have known what it meant but…

He called them prophecies. So that was… what, the future? No, he said as much. Not exactly the future, but not exactly not. So what, possible futures? Shades of the future? Partially right and partially wrong?

Can I even trust anything that strange man told me? He appeared in my god damn head as soon as I connected with Ki. Hell, his first words had been-

"You made it. Congratulations."

He'd been waiting for me. No, not even just that-

"Don't worry. You've made it right this time. The connection will be closing soon enough."

Not just waiting then. Had he been there when I made connections earlier? Or had he just been waiting for me to do it the first time? He'd known about my previous failures at connecting. He's the one that told me they were prophecies and visions.

Sigh.

This is a mess. But… I don't think he meant any harm. Did he? Could he have? All he had told me and warned me of… was to relax. To not stress over all of this. That seems like a pretty minor thing to dedicate your time and attention to. Who tells someone to relax at such a pivotal moment and time after all that?

The only reason is either he doesn't want me to get involved, which…

Snort.

Maybe I'd have thought like that if I hadn't just had my Ki Senses beaten raw and black and blue by Master. I wasn't so important except for my potential. Wait… maybe that was it? I wasn't really that strong now on the grand scheme of things, definitely not at whatever levels lets a person casually reach out and walk into someone else's mind... But I had potential. I could be something, I could beat Vega. It was that possibility that had Master taking me in.

So telling me to relax… maybe he was worried I'd go and get myself killed chasing this down?

It made as much sense as anything else but I simply didn't know.

Powerful people, especially powerful and weird people, had so few reasons to lie to your face. They could punch your head off or force you to do anything they wanted. It simply wasn't necessary, usually, to do some conniving bullshit when you had all the cards in your hands. It really wasn't likely the man had lied to my face. What would he have even lied about? My visions and dreams weren't prophecies? I mean, who cared one way or the other?

I didn't have any sort of information that truly mattered and that I could tell people that would matter. What would I even say? "The world might end sometime in the future, because of Ki." I might as well just say "Vega might blow up the planet someday."

And the future aspect… it hadn't been the first time or last time.

The strange feeling of fate when I'd refused those gangsters…

When I'd nearly died to that turtle and predicted the next few seconds…

And even most recently…

And when I felt like I knew that Master would kill me if I told him about the man.

There'd been other times but… yeah, alright, okay. I had a weird… fate sense? A future sense? Something like that. I wasn't exactly seeing the future or anything. Just knowing that my doom for sure lay in one direction, at times. I sure as hell hadn't always known at all times. Otherwise, it'd have screamed at me a million times more. So, random, rare, sometimes being able to tell when my actions will lead to my doom?

And not only that… weird visions and dreams somewhat telling of a maybe, kind of future? Also telling of doom?

Am…. am I a prophet?