The Phoenix [Cultivation, Reincarnation, Tower Climber]

By the time I find a cave where I can clean myself off and change my clothes, it's already past sunset. That's probably for the best though. I got attacked by a small pack of those leech-mouthed wolves on my way here. They left after I killed two of them, but not before getting even more blood on my clothes. I should have brought more changes of clothes. I don't have enough oum yet to be able to efficiently clean them when they get dirty. Even if I don't get impaled again, I'll probably look like a mess by the time I return.

After changing, I go out of the cave to look for some firewood. The moon is full and bright, so I don't even have to enhance my eyes to find what I'm looking for. There is howling in the distance, possibly the rest of that same pack that I ran into earlier, but they don't seem to be getting nearer, so I ignore them.

Firewood is a bit scarce, but eventually, I find a fallen tree. A quick inspection shows that it was probably knocked down by a single powerful blow, which is mildly concerning, but it doesn't look fresh. I've noticed some claw marks on some of the trees around, also not fresh. This was probably the habitat of a Winter Bear– basically an even bigger polar bear– at some point, but as far as I've seen, it's long gone by now. It might have been cleared out because it was too dangerous to have it living so close to the entrance. The quest board recommended a party of Late 1 stars to hunt it, at least.

When I return to the cave, I get the fire going, then call Trinity out of her voidspace and start cultivating with her. The oum out here is… not denser, but it feels better. More natural. The oum in the city is fine, but it feels very controlled. Uniform. There are still occasional currents, but it always evens back out quickly.

Out here it's more random, and more interesting. One moment, there will be a gust of oum, and I'll be inundated with more than I can handle, and the next moment, it will feel almost empty. The variation was something I enjoyed forcing my students to get used to back on Earth, since it's great for training reaction time and control.

While I cultivate, I also think a bit more deeply on affinities, and more specifically my Transmutation affinity. I've been using a bit of transformation while walking just to warm myself up, and like with my healing, it feels ever-so-slightly more efficient. Just having the knowledge of affinities seems to have affected my subconscious positively all around.

Once I feel I've done enough normal cultivation, I stop and open my eyes. Trinity almost immediately disappears back to her voidspace. She's clearly not a fan of the cold. What I should do now is go to bed, but inspecting my oum as I warmed my body got me thinking… I can afford another hour for experimentation.

Fire and heat are easily the transmutations I'm most familiar with, but they are far from the only one. There are the other elements, obviously, and Ganyu mentioned a few dozen more less intuitive ones I could test out. I had the vague idea of limiting myself to only fire again to boost its power, but I should at least try out other things before I make a decision like that.

The first other element I test is water. I focus on applying the properties of water to just the oum on my arm, and it feels surprisingly nice. I keep it at a relatively low level, but even there, the oum feels more fluid. It also seems to protect me from the cold almost as well as heat and fire. I hold up my sheathed sword and drop it onto my arm from a foot above. As soon as it hits, small ripples spread out along my skin from the source of impact as the energy of the fall is dissipated. I barely feel it.

Water's main properties, at least in my mind, are its adaptivity and resistance to forced change. Water will take the shape of any container it's in, and will change its flow to move as efficiently as possible through its environment, but at the same time, anything entering it is slowed, and trying to force water to leave its current state takes a lot of energy. The resistance is why my arm feels insulated from the cold, and also why my arm rippled, but the adaptivity and flow…

I think for a moment, then transmute all the oum in my entire body to have the property of water before trying to circulate it again. As expected, it feels sluggish. It's resisting my will, not wanting to exit its static state. I push back, forcing it to move anyway, and after about a minute, I get it up to full speed, and then I stop concentrating. I open my eyes, and even stand up, and the oum in my body continues to circulate. It gets slower with every second, but I'm not focusing on it at all.

Before it dissipates too much, I open some of the pathways in my arm as I punch the wall of my cave. The torrential flow sends the oum rushing out at nearly full force on its own without me even commanding it to, and the impact forms a crack in the stone and sends dust falling from the ceiling.

While not the most efficient, since it took me a full minute to set it up, I am very pleased with this discovery. That specific method is impractical for combat, but I can already see other possibilities for how to make this work. The power itself isn't anything special, and I could achieve that without the water transmutation with relative ease. However, it would either be much slower, or I would need to expend a lot more mental energy to keep my oum flowing that rapidly as I fought.

If I added a water transmutation to my oum during a drawn-out battle, I could gradually ramp up the flow of my oum, and then the longer the fight took, the more of an advantage I would be at, as I could unleash powerful blow after powerful blow without needing to charge up my oum or waste effort keeping the flow at maximum speed.

I spend the next 5 minutes testing exactly this, and am very pleased with the results. I never spent much time with water-based cultivators in my past lives, and though I did occasionally fight with them, I never really devoted the time I should have to understanding how their techniques worked. This actually makes a lot of sense, since I remember them being a difficult force to defeat in large battles, despite not actually being that strong individually.

The experimentation took most of my oum, so I sit down to meditate and replenish a bit more before moving onto some of the other elements.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Wind is almost the opposite of water. It's hardly resistant to change at all. Transmuting all my body's oum to wind makes it incredibly easy to get it up to maximum speed, but it returns to nothing very quickly too. It's also difficult to condense as well, making it less than ideal for attacking. This tracks with what I had expected, and what I remember from wind-based cultivators on Earth. They were always very quick, one moment standing still, and the next using a movement technique to nearly disappear. It made for difficult fights, since their speed wasn't something easily kept up with, but their attacks were weak, and could be borne until they wore out.

Earth is interesting. It hardly flows at all, making it absolutely abysmal for any kind of quick attacks, but it is more resilient than even water. When I drop the sword at my arm, the oum stops it entirely. Excellent for defense, and for heavy attacks where the oum is already in the right place in my body, but not much else.

Just this experimentation alone has made it really difficult for me to say that I still want to cut off the other elements. Even without testing other types of transmutations, I can see just the other basic elements being useful. Wind for movement techniques, earth for defending attacks I can't avoid, water to keep my oum flowing during longer battles, and fire for offensive power.

At the same time though, I did some brief testing and swapping between the transmutations to gain the benefits of all doesn't really work. Trying to use water to keep the oum in my body, then switching it to fire as I attack is simply impossible. I have to switch it back from water to unaligned then to fire, and not only does that take time, it eliminates all the beneficial aspects of water, making the end result just a normal fire attack. And since oum flows throughout the entire body, trying to use wind on my legs for movement and fire in my arms for attacks doesn't work too well either.

Limiting myself so strictly to a single element would lose some overall versatility, but probably not any combat power. At least not in my current state. Maybe once I reach 3 star and beyond, there will be a way to do it.

Actually, that might be the answer. When I reach 3 star, I will be able to reform my oum core as I like. In the past, I just used that to make a perfect oum core… but what if I made a custom one instead? One with multiple distinct pathways to allow for different types of oum to flow through my body at the same time. That might be interesting.

That will be a little while though, and I'll definitely need to do more research before I commit to anything like that. Maybe I'll try to find someone from the Elemental Academy to teach me how they do it. I'm sure they've had the same idea, and even tried it themselves.

For now though, I definitely shouldn't make any permanent decisions. There's still far too much I don't know. Even tonight, I have a dozen more things I want to test, and I'm running out of time. Not that I'm on a schedule, but I want to keep moving further into the mountains, so I can't just stay up all night and sleep through the day. I probably have maybe an hour before I really need to get to bed.

There are a dozen other elements I could test, like steel or electricity, or light, or gravity, and I definitely will later, but for now, it's time to move on to non-elemental transmutations.

The first thing I try is making my oum sticky. It works, and I'm able to hold my sword in the air, stuck to my open palm, but I'm not entirely sure how useful this would be. Maybe if I got into a grappling fight, but I suspect that as the power levels get higher in the upper floors, proper grappling matches will become few and far between.

Next, I try adding sharpness. I'm not entirely sure how it should work, but Ganyu mentioned it being a common choice while he was lecturing, so I know it's possible. At first, nothing seems to happen. I can tell my oum changed, but it feels the same, and it flows the same. Almost.

I hold out a single finger, and concentrate more oum than usual on it, to the point that the oum starts to manifest outside my body, and then I see it. Rather than just flaring out undirected, it takes on a natural blade-like shape. I'm not even trying to do that. When I do try, the blade becomes much firmer, and much sharper than I normally could do. I run my finger across a piece of unused firewood, and it makes a small incision with almost no force applied.

As soon as I witness this, I let the oum disperse and stop. That took a lot out of me, since manifesting my oum outside my body like that is difficult before 2 star. It's impossible for most, actually. But the sharpness transmutation is very interesting. I can see why it's common, despite being somewhat of an abstract concept. Though at the same time, it seems like a bit of a crutch. I could make a blade like that on my own with just a little more effort. I'll have to ask Ganyu if it is a crutch, or if there are other ways to use it that I'm not thinking about. Or maybe I'll find a different instructor specialized in transmutation.

After sharpness, I try heaviness, and this time, the effects are apparent immediately. They are also utterly unsurprising. My arm feels heavier when transmuted this way, but my blows are also stronger. The results are a bit lackluster though. As an experiment, I try transmuting to gold, and I actually achieve better results. My concept of gold, at least when it comes to transmutation, is tied to its density and heaviness.

I think about why this might be the case, and conclude that it has something to do with visualization. As with sharpness, heaviness is an abstract concept. With sharpness, after spending half my lives with a blade of some kind in hand, I have a much deeper understanding of what sharpness is, while heaviness isn't something I've thought as deeply about. Having a more concrete idea in mind, like gold, makes it much easier to achieve the desired results of "heaviness."

I test a few more abstract concepts like lightness, speed, strength, resilience, and things like that, and each time I notice that the results are lesser than the ones that I get from the elemental transmutations. Wind is better for both lightness and speed than direct lightness and speed transmutation, strength doesn't seem to do anything that normal oum enhancement can't do, and water and earth are both better for resilience than just "resilience."

That makes perfect sense to me, actually. It also explains why elements and other specific examples are used for transmutation, rather than concepts. Maybe at higher levels, I can advance to just pure concepts, but for now, elements should be the way to go. Though, sharpness actually worked pretty well…

I test out a few more transmutations over the next quarter hour, but none of them really grab my attention like the elements or sharpness did. I'd like to continue, but I really should go to bed, and I have way too many ideas to actually get them all done tonight. It will have to wait for tomorrow.

I stand up and grab a sleeping roll from my bag and curl up next to the fire. It takes a little while to fall asleep, because my mind is still racing with possibilities, but I am able to force it to be still and soon sink into a peaceful, dreamless sleep.

The next morning, I stomp out the last embers of the fire, repack my back and set out for the foothills of the mountains. Let's see if I can actually find some of those mammoths today.