Ki Horizons - [Litrpg, Adventure, Power Levels]

Poison sucks.

That was the core thing I was learning over the next day. This poison wasn't a joke. It wasn't… normal. If I hadn't been looking right at it when Master pulled it out, I would've assumed it was a living thing with a power level. One dedicated to making my life hell.

It was like my veins were full of crap and my blood was replaced with sewage.

And what I could feel that wasn't absolutely awful seemed to be almost… distant. Like I was slowly passing out or I was… fading away.

It felt like dying in a lot of ways. Not any one thing… but all of it together? Already, every second felt strange. We'd got here in the morning right? It had only been a little while…

Yet my Vambrace rang and vibrated, saying it was noon.

I opened my eyes, staring at the alarm on my Vambrace in horror and dread. I'd set that to remember to eat, drink, and use the bathroom. It'd be useless later when my hearing, sight, and feeling left me, but for now it was my reminder. But… it had only been a few hours though right? It couldn't… have all passed that quickly right?

The dread on my face was perfectly mirrored by my Brother's staring at his own Vambrace.

"We need to go, now." I said.

Vincent merely nodded.

We'd had a six hour plane ride. More than enough time to strategize a little bit. It hadn't taken much, because there was only so much we could do. We'd talked about how we could use Ki Sensing to replace all that we'd need and we'd come up shorter than I'd liked. But one of our main plans of survival had been simple. Mutual alarms and immediately rushing to get the basics done.

Rather than leaving to go and explore the city, something we'd need to do later, we tore open our backpacks and hurried to drink and eat the food we'd packed. Well, that I'd packed for both of us. Master hadn't left us much time but in the days when we had had time, I'd prepared. Dry long lasting food, water bottles, containers. I'd learned from my time in the sewers and being unprepared without the basics of survival was not going to happen again.

A quick trip to the bathroom and a shower for each of us and we ignored everything else to get back to it.

Time was running out. I could theoretically use my Ki Sense for 'seeing' or at least as a half shitty replacement, maybe. I didn't trust that I wouldn't walk right into the middle of a lot of things or into the street, but it wasn't my biggest concern. I could at least maybe know the direction of others and that was something in and of itself.

No, sight wasn't the most important or first thing either I or Vincent worked on. It was time itself. The importance of being able to tell time was something I took for granted far too much. I'd almost never thought about it till Master had straight up mentioned it.

On reflection, it may be the most important sense any creature in its existence possessed, especially a sapient one.

Without being able to tell the passing of time, seconds could feel like hours, or days, or weeks. That was terrible, to be trapped in that kind of horrifying infinity. The closest thing I had to feeling that way was the increased perception that came from our higher power levels but I hadn't specifically trained my senses in that way. I only really noticed that everything was 'slower' when I was trying to move faster than everything else. That thought almost distracted me. Perhaps there was someone out there who had trained like that… someone who could force themselves to 'speed up' to enhance their perception all the time. It was something to think about later, because it sounded devastating in a battle or even outside of it or before it. More time to think before anything happened…

I shook my head. Now wasn't the time.

The far, far, far worse version of losing your sense of time in my opinion was the opposite. Being trapped in a kind of infinity was torture, yes, but you could theoretically survive and get out of it. Disengage it. After all, you had the time to figure out a way. But what if it went the other way? Where hours, days, and weeks felt like seconds?

You'd be dead. You'd be dead before you even realized what had happened.

There wasn't an easy solution but we had thought of a solution. Attach the reading of time to something else. Ki was, similar to stamina, a resource. It wasn't quite like blood but it did 'refill' in a way over time. So long as you released a small amount of it, the exact same amount of it over and over again, and knew how long it took to refill…

The problems were many but it was our most viable option.

Sensing itself was the first problem. This wasn't a casual thing. Almost more than anything else, besides maybe moving, we had to have this down. Our survival depended on it. Which meant we had to be paying attention all the time. Even in our sleep. There was no point if we didn't even notice when we were full. We had to be aware of our Ki every second of every day.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

The next problem was refining. It was easy enough to release our whole pool and have scheduled actions when it 'refilled'. It only roughly took eight hours or so to fully refill and that was our major plan for sleep. We'd wake up and the only sign of that would be our full Ki.

But it wasn't enough for anything else. A lack of Ki made you exhausted and we would need to fight, move, and more using Ki. That was going to make our Ki go up and down wildly throughout the day. It would break our sense of time, so we needed more minutia as Vincent had called it.

We had to know, instinctively, how long a minute's worth of Ki regeneration was. How long ten minutes was. How long an hour was. And that meant letting our Ki emanate out our body and 'staring' at it as it filled back up.

What any other day might have been boring, was now nerve wracking. It'd apparently already been six hours or so of doing this. The Vambrace was doing more for me at the moment than I think I'd ever given it proper credit for. It had slight vibrations set for every single passing minute and stronger ones for an hour-

It rang and vibrated again, and I stared at it in horror, realizing another six hours had passed already somehow.

We'd sat here, staring and watching our own Ki, for nearly the whole day.

"Well, Master was right." Vincent said, his face slightly pale but mostly grumpy. "If we don't die from this, this is going to be by far the best way to train our Ki Sense. Just wish we could have done it back at the Dojo."

"Ha. With the safety net of the healing pods and Master nearby?" I chuckled darkly. "There's no way he would've allowed that. We were always going to be screwed with this."

Master, more than anyone else I'd ever met besides Vega, knew how to fuck you over.

We might have been talking, but we hadn't stopped. Dinner via lots of jerky and some water was already being devoured. A short reprieve later, and we got back to it.

We continued on, learning, releasing Ki naturally through our skin alone, and watching it refill. By the time the alarm for bed rang, I had to admit, I felt like I knew my Ki better than the literal back of my hand.

Was this how those monks that were rumoured to spend years in meditation felt? Time passing them by while they absorbed information steadily, all while years went by?

I reflected on that, but not for long. I pushed all of my Ki out of myself, not in a destructive form of a ball, but the same way Master had when filling up the room. I didn't have the Control, Sense, or Volume he had though, so it dissipated quickly. Vincent followed suit.

As we lay our exhausted bodies down, my Senses never left my insides. My Ki.

The effects were only going to get worse from here.

*******

Waking up, I found out, wasn't going to be as hard as I expected in the short term.

Because I woke up in agony.

"AHHHHH!!!!!!"

Screams filled the air from both my and Vincent's mouths as we writhed on our beds. Pain! So much pain! W-What was going on?!

My heart thumped in my chest so hard I felt like I was dying. Sweat poured off my body as a cold chill coiled around my body like the very breath of sickness itself.

It felt like every part and piece of me was being extinguished and made undone. Like where there'd been a single piece or part of me clean, now there was none. Dirty, my whole existence, what was left of my body, dirty. Like every cell had been infected with the sewage of poison.

Slowly, painfully, the pain receded and my heart slowed and the sweat stopped.

But when I opened my eyes, everything was different. Blurry. Worse than yesterday. My ears made everything seem dull and muffled. My skin felt closer to rock than wood and the sensations around me were lessened. My awareness around me seemed to flicker out almost.

I got up to stand and I stared at the ground as if it had become an alien. It was… it was like I'd lost fifteen levels worth of power. My balance felt as if I'd time traveled back to right after I'd been healed from the Smile Company headquarters destruction. I looked up instinctively, fear snaking its way up inside me, only to feel a burst of relief.

[50]

Still the same.

I stared over at Vincent who was gritting his teeth and still dealing with the aftereffects. He seemed to stare down at his body in horror.

"My eyes… I'm losing my eyes… my hands… I'm losing all of my self-"

"Pay attention to your Ki."

His head snapped to me, a brief moment of uncharacteristic vulnerability going over him, before he nodded, resolute.

"Right. Right. Of course. This is… just training. Another way to train. Just like the fighting. Just like the Ki training before. Just, just another step to-"

"It's scary." I admitted. I didn't know why, but I could see it. This training was hitting Vincent even harder than me. Something really wasn't sitting well with him with this. "It's really scary, but we are going to be okay Vincent. It's only temporary and we'll simply replace every single damn sense with our Ki Sense anyway."

I didn't know if that last part was true, but it simply had to be true enough for Vincent right now. Hell, we really would find a way if need be. I didn't doubt that for a moment.

Vincent took a deep breath and nodded, centering himself.

A knock came on our surprisingly sturdy thread door.

"Is everything okay? I heard screaming." Came Maurice's voice.

I smiled wryly.

"Well, I'll go explain to Maurice that this is probably going to keep happening for the next week or so. New part of our training, I'm sure he'll understand. As for you, just get ready. Because after we're both prepared?"

I took a deep breath through numb lungs.

"It's time to go explore this city."