AIR Chapter 172

Chapter 172

“It’s called self reflection,” I stated. “Its a technique that revolves around finding out your instinctive weaknesses and growing beyond them. It works at any rank and is useful for refinement, though I haven’t used it since achieving my current rank.”

“You make it sound meditative,” Chin grumbled. 

“It is,” I stated. 

“No,” Chin said, looking from me to the reflection of me standing next to him. “Its not.”

There were two of me now. Both me and me. 

“Well its meditative in the physical sense.”

Chin just frowned at me, and then switched to frowning at the other me. 

“Which one is real?”

“Both,” I said. “Like I said, its self reflection.”

Chin had on that ever annoyed frown and I cringed in sympathy. 

“Alright, alright, I’ll be more direct. It pseudo simulates a consciousness. Basically, your mind temporarily splits in two and it able to--”

“Be two--” The other me said. 

“Different--”

“People--”

“At once!”

“Basically,” both of me said. “Both are me. Its like talking to yourself taken to a whole different level.”

“So you can both work?” Chin asked with the slightest sign of enthusiasm. 

“Oh no Chin, you can’t use this technique for farming.”

Chin crossed his arms and leaned back unimpressed. 

“Then what’s it good for?” He asked. 

“Like I said, self reflection. If you do it right, then you can reflect on yourself. It’s a technique I picked up in the Silent Prisons of Ez.”

“Where’s that?”

“Its a place deep within the Chaos Lands, a place where the concept of senses aren’t allowed to exist-- It’s complicated. But the point of the technique is to allow you to see yourself in the most truthful way from the outside in. It was originally developed as a scouting technique of sorts, see if you have no senses, then you aren’t able to fight or even know if you had killed anyone, aside from the obliteration of your consciousness. There’s no pain, no touch, no sight, no nothing, but with this technique you were able to create a seperate sense of self, that was still connected to you. You’d push out one of your reflections and explore and if one of them got crushed, then you’d know not to go towards whatever direction they went too.”

“How do you know about direction if you can’t get a sense for it?”

“Well, you can sense where your right arm is relative to the left one right? Even in the dark? It’s sort of like that. Its a tough technique and the Silent Prisons of Ez aren’t meant to be explored anyways.”

“Who’s Ez?” Chin asked. 

“Some dead God-King, not important. What’s important is that this technique is the most widely known splitting technique and has many uses, one of which is training.”

“Does it matter if its widely spread?”

“Aren’t you chatty today?”

Chin just shrugged. 

“And yes, the more widely known a technique is the more counterable it becomes, but this generally isn’t a combat technique, its a meditative one. So its been refined over endless time to deliver the best effect for said cultivator and many sects still incorporate it in their meditation rituals to this very day.”

“Why Ez?” Chin asked. “If it’s so widely spread then why not pick it up from anywhere else? The Quiet Prison sounds dangerous.”

“The Silent Prison,” I corrected. “And every place is dangerous. Ez is actually less so relative to the Chaos Lands. It contains maybe one or two fifteenth rank beings but mostly it contains fourteenth ranks and weaker individuals. In Ez, no one below the sixteenth rank can sense anything so it was really hard to kill anyone on purpose. Mostly, things are trying to escape rather than kill.”

“Why go there then?”

“Treasure? Techniques? Inheritance? Some people are thrown in there and others use it as a place to hide. Some creatures just cultivate a similar dao and find the place to be useful.”

“Sounds awful,” Chin muttered. 

“Oh you don’t know the half of it. The whole place was used as a prison cell for so long that occasionally it spits out creatures no one has heard of.”

“How’d you get out?”

“If Ez is a prison then I’m like a mouse. I was too small to be noticed and too insignificant for the realm to care about me. And the prison has layers, the deeper in you go the harder it becomes to get out. Now back to this technique.”

I walked parallel to myself, each step in sync with, well, myself.

“See the cool thing about this technique, or at least this variant of it is--”

My mirror image hit me.

“You can fight yourself with it,” mirror me said. 

Chin looked, first at the me on the ground then the me still standing. 

“All that just to punch yourself?”

“Its training! Real, actual combat training!” I said as I stood up slowly from the ground. 

“And here’s the cool part! This was developed for use in Ez, meaning that its external combat impact is zero. A normal punch from me would break this universe into pieces, but since all the attacks are designed to not wander away, it basically makes my fights look like normal fights. See in Ez, while you can’t feel damage you also don’t know if you’ve caused damage. The only thing you’re aware of is yourself. So if you attack randomly, something of a higher rank might be hurt and attack back. This technique was designed to create a bunch of micro consciousnesses and make them super delicate. So that when the consciousnesses died, you would know that you were being attacked. You might not be aware of pain but you’d be aware of yourself.

“Of course I can always dodge my attacks but I can offset the burden of those attacks into something else. This technique basically allows me to train against myself and practice combat!”

Chin just stared. 

“So you can use it to farm?”

“Well, technically, yes, but there are better techniques to use for farming if that’s what you want to do.”

“Better than having two people?” 

“Yes. Cloning techniques are hard and complicated and this technique is beyond those. A good technique focuses on the outcome rather than the process. If you want to farm, then you focus on moving the earth and the water, you focus on understanding life and death and how to cultivate that cycle into being.”

“Death?” Chin asked.

“Isn’t half of farming harvesting? Killing? Cutting? Planting crops just to cut them down next year?”

Chin nodded and thought about it in the corner. His dao was growing at a great pace. 

A month or two and he would be at the third rank. He was guaranteed to reach the fifth, most of the people cultivating were. Reaching the fifth rank was easy enough if you had the resources. But reaching beyond that was what made a cultivator. 

That was why the ranks below immortal were called the mortal ranks, not out of disrespect but out of honesty. A man that aged was still a mortal man. 

They were still bound for death. 

But I was certain Chin would make it past that. You had to be an interesting person to get my attention after all and Chin was interesting enough. 

“How do you move the earth?” Chin yelled at me. 

“Just shove your Qi into it.” 

He eventually had clumps of earth floating around the place. 

It was crude and inefficient, but part of cultivating was figuring things out yourself. Mistakes could become discoveries and faults could become strengths if done correctly. 

I frowned at that thought. 

And I imagined a certain monkey would be laughing at me if he knew what I was thinking. 

Esoteric open ended responses sucked, but give someone a direct path and they would never really make a choice for themselves. Mistakes were a part of the journey. 

This time I really did hear a monkey laugh in the distance, even Chin looked around curiously. 

“I hate Imperiums,” I groaned.

The monkey kept laughing.