The Dao of Magic

51 - Exploitation

Angeta breathes in the cold air through her nose and jumps. Her powerful feline legs propel her through the air at speed. The wind screams in her sensitive ears, the cold makes her eyes water. She does not feel comfortable at all, but neither does she mind it. She lands with a willowy grace, almost as if she sheds her momentum through roots worming their way into the ground.

She straightens her posture and takes in her environment. Her mount is in the Tree hanging around her Teacher's neck. She would love to warm her hands on its searing scales, but the big rodent would probably freeze in these temperatures. The inner peace the animal seems to radiate feels soothing to the troubled woman. Mountains stretch around her, an endless range of jagged peaks and steep cliffs. Some rivers run through the valleys, but most of the water is locked up in thick packs of snow.

Multiple thumping sounds alert her to the arrival of her fellow disciples. It hits her all of a sudden, she now truly thinks of this motley collection of humans and a single scale touched as her fellow beings. It has not even been a week since she was suddenly kidnapped again. From certain death or slavery to a total unknown was a hard pill to swallow at first, but the proud beastkin can see that her situation improved immensely.

She stretches her body according to the method described in the fighting style she received, the plant like movement warming her cold limbs.

"Can't you guys speed up a bit?"

A drawling voice tinged with some annoyance reaches her ears. She, like the disciples beside her, look at the source of that sound. There he stands, his simple but clean cut clothing somehow untouched by the wind. His dark short hair flutters about his face as he stands on the air.

"If w-we weren't freezing, this w-wouldn't be so hard." Her old snarky self can't help but surface now and then. Her teacher just clicks his tongue in return, makes a single step and speeds away again.

"Are you guys too dumb to use your qi to warm yourself? You learned to make fire, right?"

It always goes like this. He says a few things in passing, and they make her head explode. How come she didn't think of that before? Such a simple change of looking at things, but Angeta has to admit to herself that she would have continued to do what obviously isn't working. Instead of simply pumping the qi through her body, she now thinks of sitting in front of a warm fireplace. Warmth spreads through her bones and her shivering stops. She feels a tiny portion of the qi leaving her, but taking deeper and faster breaths than usual should compensate for the loss.

Teach had told them about mana turning into qi during the slow trip from the Tower city. Angeta keeps both things in mind, both the fire and the image of multicoloured streams turning into a single white energy, and jumps again. She soars over another kilometres wide valley while swooping through the air.

She notices that she won't make it, this jump will also cause her to smack face first into the cliffside. She already dreads the rattling shock that will go through her body again, normal beings would learn after doing that a few times. This would be the twentieth such blunder she has made today alone.

Then an image flashes through her mind. Back in the beastman forests, there were these trees. They produced seeds that rotated, allowing the wind to carry them far while spinning. She now feels the wind fighting her, pushing her back. 'So that's how those seeds fall so slowly, they use the fighting winds against itself.'

Other tidbits come to her mind, the few books that she has started reading are starting to make sense. One book implied that air had weight. She had scoffed at the idea, thinking stuff like: 'Yeah? How come I am not being crushed right now? Stupid book.' She can feel it now, though, the wind below her is pushing just as hard as the wind above her.