The Dao of Magic

07 - Core

'BE A BALL, A BIT MORE ROUND, good, HOLE IN THE MIDDLE, INVERSE SPIKE, GLOSSY FINISH'

I fit the branch that is now a ball of wood in my hands on my spear. It doesn't fit.

'HOLE DEEPER, MORE NARROW, TAPER, WIDER OPENING'

The ball subtly changes in my hands and I fit it on the spear again. Perfect fit. I now have a walking stick. Speak softly and carry a big stick with a nasty spear hidden in it. I always liked that saying. My roiling qi settles down as I stop the mental shouting. It is still night and I have the bunny in my pocket, asleep.

I decided not to do any destructive experiments on the bunny, so it needs a name. Fluffy seems oddly fitting but it just doesn't click. Bugs? No, Lola would be better. Lola seems nice. I rub the little gal's head and she wakes.

"Bugs"

No reaction.

"Fluffy"

She just looks around.

"Lola"

Completely ignored.

"Misses Fluffingsworth"

She thinks the grass is more interesting than me, the head poking out of my pocket just looking around.

"Carl Marx"

Thankfully she ignored that one too.

"Hopper"

Alright, this isn't going anywhere. I'll just name her Lola I guess. Filling my finger with a bit of my qi I rub her head.

"Lola"

She looks up now, staring me straight in the eyes while keeping one ear trained on me and swivelling the other around. The little twitching nose is just too cute.

"Lola"

She looks at me for a little while longer and moves around a bit. The name will have to do. I rub her head a little more and she closes her eyes in delight. The cultivation world didn't have any cute critters. Any feature that does not aid in survival got culled quickly there. Any cultivating beast acts and looks as imposing and intimidating as possible. There are no immortal herbivores, only predators tend to live long enough to get anywhere with cultivation.

The forest stopped getting darker and denser a couple of hours ago, I should be walking towards the spire I saw in the distance when I left the mountains, that should be some sort of tower. Probably a mage's tower or a cultivators abode. Maybe with a city surrounding it. It didn't seem sturdy enough to keep itself upright so I guess some sort of mystical art was used in its construction or maintenance. A quick mental calculation tells me that I'm only a tenth of the way there. With the pace that I'm currently walking it will take a week at the least.

That suits my plans just fine, I want to have a solid core when I reach proper civilisation. The woods should give way to grassy plains by morning though, maybe there will something else interesting to look at then.

I didn't see any more wasps that had beef with me. Maybe the stinger in my spear keeps them away? Wasp type creatures tend to be solitary bugs, the stinger a clear indication that it was more of a predator. Bees in both worlds I saw them in had hooks in their stingers, making them poisoning kamikaze bugs, giving up their lives for the greater cause when they stung someone. Hostile insect don't require such a sacrifice, but beasts like bears get their noses stung at the price of a bee's life. Only sticker mammal skin has the sturdiness required to get a stinger stuck. A shiver runs up my spine as I remember the ten-meter big bee that sacrificed itself to kill the third realm cultivator that was trying to steal their Heavenly Honey. The pulsating and pumping poison sack that was stuck to the murder weapon gave me nightmare fuel enough for all three worlds I've been in so far.