Chapter 12: I'm Sorry, What Did You Say About my Arse?

Isiah punched me in the face. It was a normal human level punch, I could have easily avoided it if I wanted to but I didn’t. He could have also punched with superhuman strength but he didn’t, so I took the punch on the chin, actually it was my left cheek.

“Ow, that really hurt!” I whined. It didn’t. He clapped me on the back, HARD, as if to console me. That did hurt and he knew it, my ribs were still sore from where he had broken them a few minutes earlier.

“You deserve it.” He said, his anger was fading but obviously hadn’t completely faded yet.

I looked around the clearing yet again. It was a mess. Several trees were uprooted, a giant crater in the ground, even a tree that was cut perfectly diagonally. “We need to fix this up, or someone’s going to realise there was a magic battle here.” I said to Isiah

“Yeah.” He sighed, putting his hands on his hips. “Wow we made a mess” he said looking around.

“What do you mean we, I only destroyed 1 tree. You destroyed half the forest.” I said exaggerating massively.

“And those two” he said pointing to the two I had been smashed through. He was making jokes, he would pull through.

“Humph” I sighed angrily, conceding defeat.

“Replant the uprooted ones as best as you can, we can store the rest in my storage space.” After breaking through to the true mage realm I was able to visualise the void space in my head and it was unfathomable, the area I could see was at least the size of a city, and I knew there was more. It was like looking at the ocean from the beach, you can only see as far as the horizon, but you know there is more.

I used my war sword as an axe to deliberately hack up the remaining stumps so as to make it look like the trees had been felled by axes and not smashed apart by my poor lower back. It really hurt, now that the adrenaline was wearing off, the pain was coming back. Although I had won the actual fight, I had come out of it as the clear loser. I had broken Isiah’s were-cat kneecap, but that was instantly healed. As soon as he transformed back, he was as good as new. I on the other hand had tender ribs, burst blood vessels in my lungs, a badly contused back and god only knows what injuries in my abdomen from being kneed by an 8ft tall monster.

I had a distinct disadvantage in that fight, although I was superhumanly fast, even when compared to other mages, I was always going to be slower than a were-cat. They were built for close combat, mages weren’t. We were meant to fight from a distance. I was trying to compensate for that using Eastern Taoist cultivation, which also strengthened my body. I had only won using the flexor reflex. Isiah was still in his growth phase, the first 10 years of a were’s life is the growth phase, after which their physical growth stops and he would lose the flexor reflex.

I sat down on the now flat stump and started meditating. I opened up a connection to the void rotating my energy core faster and faster. During normal condensing of my power, the void energy could be absorbed into my core by my quantum phased meridians, but when I wanted to accelerate the rate of absorption I still found it necessary to open an actual connection to the void. I started circulating the energy around my meridians faster and faster until I reached 298 rotations, which had been my previous limit. I was able to push past this limit and reach 299; I knew I was close to breaking through the 300 rotation barrier. This was the barrier to a middle phased true mage. This was a significant step as a beginner void mages power was limited, I had a void shield which was only useful for hiding at night as it prevented any light or sound escaping or entering depending on its polarity, but was useless at stopping physical damage. I could also maintain the destructive discordant edge around my hands for 10 seconds. I had a feeling that breaking into the middle phase would improve my combat ability tremendously.

The protostar in my core was rapidly siphoning off material from its accretion disk, turning gaseous energy into a liquid energy. Over the last four months the protostar core in my centre had grown from the size of a pea to a small walnut size, it was getting increasingly stable and more and more dense.

I was expecting to stop at 298 rotations, I was pleasantly surprised when I broke past 298 rotations to 299 rotations, but the energy kept going. I completed 300 rotations. I was expecting something to change, a minor subtle change that would increase my strength somewhat. What I didn’t expect was the whole process being changed. Up until that point I had been gathering energy from the outside and bringing it into my core but what happened when I reached 300 rotations completely surprised me.

A connection to the void opened up in my core, engulfing the entire region. Void energy flooded in and the core seemed to expand to the size of a watermelon. A thought went through my head {if these were actual objects inside me, instead of energy projections, I would have literally burst apart}. The void energy particles in the centre, which were solid due to the incredibly high density, seemed to compress in on itself due to the high density and started to fuse, this fusion created energy which was used by the surrounding particles to also fuse together, this created a chain reaction. This fusion caused the watermelon sized energy ball to shrink, condensing back down into the size of a walnut with a surrounding accretion disk the size of a grapefruit. The core fusion reaction continued to shrink until the true fusion core was the size of an olive surrounded by a plasma ball the size of a lemon, which was surrounded by a grapefruit sized accretion disk. An energy force seemed to radiate out of the core, this caused the accretion disk to disperse and form a nebulous cloud around the core but it was not connected to the core.

There was a fundamental difference in the energy flow from before. Up until this point the energy flow direction was going inwards towards the core, at first to form the core and then to stabilize and ignite the core. However, now the core was using collected material to fuse void particles creating void energy photons. These void energy photons could be used to actually do things, and affect the real world. This had been my biggest problem; my power so far had been useful for storing things but not much else. It could not be used to defend or attack. Now it could.

I opened my eyes and was greeted by the sight of a dead deer’s face right in front of my nose staring at me. “WAAH!” I exclaimed toppling over backwards, my arms windmilling backwards.

“Hahahahaha” I heard Isiah laughing. I got up off of the ground brushing off the dirt from my shirt. “Funny, weren’t you supposed to replant the trees?” I snapped back.

“That was an hour ago, you seemed busy so I thought I would go out and hunt our supper, changing always makes me really hungry.” He said.

“An hour?” I had lost all concept of time while meditating; I thought at most 15 minutes had passed since I started.

He started to skin the deer carcass, making quick work. His years of experience hunting showed in the way the blade moved. Nothing was wasted, the skin could be used to make clothes or bags, the internal organs would be used in stews or sausages, even the blood could be used to make black pudding by mixing with oats, onions and spices. Of course hunting game was illegal and considered poaching, but we had been here long enough to establish some illicit connections.

The black Market was a necessary evil in the 6^th century as things like meat and fish were regulated by the local lords. Even the grain production was regulated, 90% of the production of wheat was for the lords and the rest was taken up by the rich. The rest of us had to make do with barley and rye. The lords and nobles were known to show off their wealth by having elaborate feasts made and only eating tiny bites whilst throwing the rest away. A common way to judge the character of the particular noble you worked for was, whether he let the servants take the leftover food downstairs into the kitchen or whether it was deliberately thrown out.

The 6^th century was different from modern times, 95% of the wealth was owned by 5% of the population ... oh wait, Nevermind. It did feel different than modern times though, the quality of life for the average citizen when compared to the ultra-rich was better. 21^st century laws may be lenient towards the rich, but at least it existed. You couldn’t openly get away with murder (OJ doesn’t count, that was prosecutorial incompetence), unlike the 6^th century. That actually happened, the third son of the duke of Glouvia, modern day Gloucestershire-ish, was known to have sodomised and killed over twenty teen boys, he was never even questioned. The woman who poisoned him, a mother of one of his victims was whipped to death in the middle of the town square.

I shuddered and then shook my head, trying to clear my head of the disturbing thoughts. As an experiment I formed an imaginary edge on the fairly blunt war sword, using the new void energy photons. I touched one of the felled logs with the edge. The log fell apart into two clean slices, upon closer inspection these slices were the cleanest slices ever, they looked like they had been polished. They were shining. A spatial edge, my first attack skill was a spatial edge...

I swiftly cut up the log into small pieces suitable for a fire, I arranged the cut up logs into a conical structure with twigs and small wood chips in the middle. I used a fire striker to ignite some saw dust and used that to make the fire. I had to make the saw dust, normally cutting a tree into logs would generate bags of sawdust, but the spatial edge didn’t even leave a spec behind, so I had to use a saw to create some sawdust.