The Phoenix [Cultivation, Reincarnation, Tower Climber]

I'm not a sadist. I don't enjoy inflicting pain just for the hell of it. I would never go out of my way to cause my enemy undue pain unless they did something to really deserve it.

That being said, some kids just really need to be taught a lesson. They get good at something, and they let it get to their head. They get cocky, thinking they're on top of the world, and when that happens, they get annoying, and when they get annoying, I get cranky, and when I get cranky… Well, one thing just leads to another, and you end up with the current scene.

As it turns out, this sparring ring does not have those shields that the sparring hall had. Or if it does, they aren't turned on by default. This is quite unfortunate for Kat, because I have now vented most of my annoyance, and she had to take every ounce of it.

To her credit, she's holding up pretty well, all things considered. She's still conscious, at least. I did my best to keep her that way, but still, she's withstanding the pain quite well.

Generally, sparring with someone above your skill level is more fruitful than sparring with someone below. However, this is only true if you're within a certain range below the other person, and are still capable of understanding and somewhat reacting to their moves, and unfortunately for Kat, I currently outrank her in skill, experience, and even oum, now that I'm middle 1 star. She hasn't even gotten a chance to properly attack me yet.

The first "match" ended in less than a second as I delivered a swift punch to her liver. The second ended the same way, though this kick was between her legs instead. I thought she would give up after that, but she remained defiant. Maybe she thought I was just showing her the difference in skill, and that I would tone it down after a couple matches or something?

Wrong.

The third match, I swept her legs, dumping her violently on her shoulder. In the fourth, I kicked her thigh so hard her leg quivered and buckled. In the fifth, I slapped her in the face so hard she blacked out for a second before coming to. In the sixth, I fractured her forearm. In the seventh, I knocked out a tooth.

By this point, the excitement was entirely gone from her eyes, and I really thought she was going to give up, but she kept going for some reason, so in the 8th match, I punched her in the liver again. In the 9th, I switched it up and decided to kick her in the liver this time. In the 10th, I was getting bored, so I just kicked her in the solar plexus, sending her flying back and knocking the wind out of her, and bringing us to the present moment.

I'm not sure what I should do next. I doubt she wants to do it any more, but- oh well, looks like I was wrong.

She struggles to her feet, and raises her fists in a fighting stance.

"I-" she wheezes. "Can do this- all day!"

That's my line! I think. The way she says it makes me vaguely remember something though. A movie? Did I steal that from somewhere?

Well, it doesn't really matter. She definitely can't do this all day, but I don't really want to find out how much longer she can go. I'm feeling pretty satisfied right now. Continuing would be tedious.

"Cool," I say, turning around and stepping out of the little arena.

There is a sizable crowd hanging around, but all of them rapidly get out of my way when they see me approaching. Vanessa and Jacob rush to Kat as she collapses to the ground, still struggling to breathe. Ganyu gives me an odd look, but I ignore him as I leave the room and head back to my own room.

Am I proud of what I just did? Yeah, actually. She'll be hurting pretty badly until she gets some healing. Or if she decides not to, it will take at least a full week to recover. That should serve as a good lesson for her. Better for her to learn the hard way now than to get over-confident and suffer later. I did a good deed.

I also relieved some stress. Well, I'm not sure if it's stress. I don't know what to call it, but my mind feels clearer now. Even though I was trying to ignore it, that sparring show yesterday had me in a weird mood, as indicated by my dream. And though Kat did remind me a little bit of Harbek just now, it's not like I need to continue entertaining her challenges if she wants to go again. I can just say "no."

No more getting distracted by the past for me. The Tower has given me an opportunity, and I'm not going to waste it. And now that I've gotten that over with, I've got the rest of the day to kill.

Today is the first day of that lecture from Organa on anatomy, but it won't start for a couple hours, so I head back to my room to cultivate with Trinity for a bit. As I walk, I realize that I haven't checked my ranking since my spar yesterday. I pull open the rankings while I wait for the lift to reach the top floor. My rank didn't go up as much as I thought it would. It still jumped quite a bit, and I'm now at 24,008, but I honestly expected more. It makes sense that it would be harder to climb ranks as I got closer to the top, but if Jin Hayou is ranked 6 and only an Early 2 star, I'd have expected that a Late 1 star from another Ascendant family wouldn't be too far behind. I guess he wasn't actually ranked that highly then.

When I return to my room, I immediately head to my bed and start cultivating with Trinity. I have no idea if it's actually doing anything. I can vaguely sense the connection between us, but I can't tell if it's getting stronger, and I don't feel any closer to being able to access her void space. I know Nadia said it could take years, but it's still a bit annoying for her to be stealing a portion of my oum all the time.

After cultivating with her for a bit, I put my altered outfit on again, then leave for the Lesson. Unsurprisingly, there are a lot of people waiting outside the dorm for me. After yesterday's sparring, it seems everyone wants to recruit me. I tell them all to go away, of course.

More accurately, I say, "I'm busy. If anyone keeps bothering me and trying to recruit me right now, I will reject your offer out of hand."

That works surprisingly well, and though I still have some people following me, no one stops me. I should get someone to handle all these people for me. They're annoying. Vanessa's good at handling people. I could ask her… but that might give her false expectations of being able to Climb with me if she continues doing the same. I should just ask Hana. She'll probably do it if I say she can accept bribes. I'll figure it out later.

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Organa's Lesson is… surprisingly normal. It's just anatomy. That's what I hoped for, but I was kind of expecting there to be something more. That she would either openly favor me in a subtle recruitment attempt, or maybe subtly go against me because she's angry at me for selling the fact that she tried to recruit me, but she does neither. She just gives a very professional anatomy lesson in which I learn a lot. She doesn't even stop me after the Lesson ends to give me another pitch.

I leave the Lesson feeling a bit disappointed, but I chide myself. Why am I disappointed that it was uneventful? Uneventful is the best.

I make it back to my dorm also without incident and immediately get back to cultivating. As I absorb the oum from the air around, I start to think a bit more about affinities and restrictions. When I made that plant grow for Timmy earlier, it felt much easier than something like that would normally have been. I wasn't doing anything differently, but I think that learning about affinities made something subconsciously click.

I meditate on it a bit longer, then stand up. Trinity is napping on the pillow of the bed, so I move carefully so as not to disturb her and head back to the kitchen/dining room area. There, I grab a kitchen knife from one of the drawers and make a small cut in my forearm. I watch carefully as I mobilize my oum to heal the wound. It once again feels easier than it should have, so I repeat the process a few more times until I think I have a good idea of what's happening.

It's very, very subtle, but I'm moving my oum a bit better. Usually, when healing or growing things with oum, you have two options. The first is to just flood it with an excess of oum so that the body can take it and use it to repair itself. This method is best for emergency treatment when precision isn't an option, and can lead to some unintended results. The second, and the one I prefer, is to send the oum in with surgical precision and strong intent to do exactly what it needs to do and nothing more. This way is much more efficient and produces much better results, but takes immense control and a lot of practice.

What I'm doing now on my arm is mostly the second method, but less controlled. It's not that I can't control it, or that my control isn't stable, but rather that I'm intentionally drawing back just a bit to let the oum move through the body on its own. Whenever I do draw back, the oum naturally follows the nerves and blood vessels for a short while before beginning to disperse, at which point I nudge it again to push it in the right direction.

Once I realize this, I make another connection. Strengthening the body with oum is something that anyone can and should do, but usually, that strengthening is temporary. You channel the oum through your body to enhance it, making you faster, stronger, and more durable. However, there were other cultivators though who took a different approach, training their bodies to be strong even outside of combat.

I tried this once or twice in my past lives. It was a long and painful process that involved getting hit repeatedly without using oum to defend until the body adapted and strengthened itself. It also generally didn't work well, and most of the people who tried such methods would be killed or crippled before they achieved any results worth having. When it did work though, those cultivators often became some of the strongest on the battlefield. Because they didn't need to use as much oum to strengthen their bodies, their stamina was unmatched, and when they did bring the full power of their oum to bear with defensive techniques, they were almost indestructible.

Looking back, this was probably just a poor and uninformed method of utilizing a strong life affinity. When the body used its oum to heal the wounds gained, it would repair the body in a way that made it stronger, but it only worked properly for those whose oum already had that tendency. I don't really want to do anything like that in this life, but I can probably take advantage of my life affinity to do something similar.

It's tricky though, because I suspect that the old iron body training method only worked because it convinced the body that the strengthened state should be the natural one. There are other body enhancement methods, but they all fade and the body returns to its natural state when the oum stops flowing. So I need to somehow use oum to trick my body into thinking it's supposed to be stronger.

I focus just a bit of oum on my forearm in the same spot I've been cutting and try to make it alter the skin to be stronger. I don't tell it to do anything specific, but I do try to give it some general guidance. It doesn't work.

I can feel the oum somewhat trying to do what I tell it to, and with my experience, I even know how it should work, but it's like something is stopping it. It's as though there's an invisible barrier between my oum and my body, keeping it from making any undirected changes. I push harder, forcing my way past the resistance, and immediately, my skin starts thickening rapidly. I feel my oum getting sucked in as a tumorous growth starts on my arm, so I cut the flow immediately, then cut off the section of skin that was growing wrong.

"Mrraw?"

I look down to see that while I was lost in thought about the oum, Trinity woke up and walked over, probably smelling the blood. She is now sitting down, her tails flicking, and staring directly at the small piece of flesh I just cut off of myself.

"No," I say.

"Mraw!" she says, jumping up to put her paws on my leg.

"I said no."

She sits back down and cocks her head slightly.

"...Mrraw?" she says softly.

"...Fine."

I toss it to her and she catches it in her mouth, swallowing it almost immediately.

I probably shouldn't have done that. She already eats too much human. When she gets stronger, she might start killing people so she can eat them. That would be bad. I'll need to train her better to make sure that doesn't happen.

She looks up at me, tilting her head again as if begging for more.

"I don't have any more," I say, showing her my hands.

She doesn't seem to believe me and keeps begging, so I just turn away and focus back on my arm. She circles around to try to beg more, but I ignore her, and instead cut my arm open again. This time when healing it, I try to focus on strengthening it. It seems to work, though only barely. When I cut the same spot again, there's just a tiny bit more resistance.

As I heal it back again, I frown. This is certainly an improvement on the old method of hurting yourself and hoping it heals back stronger, but it's still not ideal. I feel like there should definitely be a way to do this without hurting myself first and without causing any side effects. I also feel like it's somehow related to what I noticed earlier with the half-controlled healing I've been doing since learning about life affinities. I probably won't be able to figure it out right now though. Especially not when I just burned through almost all of my oum.

I sit down to meditate again, Trinity hopping in my lap, and for the rest of the day. I switch back and forth between gathering oum, and experimenting with healing and strengthening my body. I don't make any significant progress, but I feel like I'm moving in the right direction.

That night, as I fall asleep, I think about my plans for the next few weeks. I want to go out and look for the ginseng Nadia mentioned, but with Lessons from Ganyu every day, and Lessons from Organa every other day, it's hard to figure out a good time. It will probably take a couple weeks at least, which means I need to go soon, or else I won't have time before the Starter Quest, but can I really miss that many lessons at this stage?

Organa's are less important, so I'd be fine with missing them. The new anatomy is interesting, but it's roughly the same as Earth anatomy, so it's not that big of a deal to miss the ultra fine details. Ganyu is giving us a cram course on the Tower though, and I don't want to miss that. I'm going to be here for centuries, so I want to know as much as possible. I'll have to ask him tomorrow if there's any way to make up missed Lessons. It would be kind of weird if there isn't, but then again, the Tower hasn't seemed like a particularly charitable or generous place so far. Hopefully there is, in which case I'll ask the same of Organa and then leave for the northern region.

Soon after I plan this, I fall asleep, and I dream of giant, man-eating cats.