The Dao of Magic

58 - Appropriation

I decide to ignore the frolicking dragon and bunny for now. I have some free time while the Tree absorbs more dirt, so I sit down to meditate.

I focus my sight inwards, looking at both my cores. The moment I focus on both of them, I am surprised, the small solid cores are not that small anymore. My braincore is now filling a good quarter of the available space and my heartcore has grown to a similar size. I think I have sufficient mental power to compress my liquid qi into a higher stage that should speed up the core forming process significantly. I won't do that out here though, I prefer the safety of an owned dimension for that kind of stuff.

I take a better look at my braincore and see every process I have running. I look at my danger analyser, as it takes up a good chunk of my available thinking space. I think with my brain, the separate areas in my mind still do their own thing. I still use my hippocampus for memory storage, for example. My danger sensing process runs on my braincore with a link to my actual brain.

You can see it like this; my brain is the overseer housing my consciousness. It then uses the braincore for dumb slave labour in the form of automated processes, by placing semi permanent circuits. That means that that part of my braincore is now doing its own thing instead of boosting the brain. I can carve permanent circuits into my braincore, these programmed processes would run with a few percent more efficiency.

I don't do this for a few reasons; I would lose the circuitry when I perform another density increasing crunch and messing with permanent circuits is risky. I can't really pause the process to make changes, it has to be modified in real-time. Short circuiting something important while changing the process is a rather painful, unpredictable and messy experience. So I will gladly lose a few percent of efficiency for the increased ability to change processes on the fly.

I take a better look at my heartcore, it wobbles around a bit as my heart pumps blood around my body. As usual, the core is both physical and immaterial. I can see and feel it, but cutting my heart out would not give you a physical thing. I suspect that the core is being held together by my consciousness somehow, my death would release the qi back into the atmosphere. I could have performed experiments on live subjects to find this out, but human experimentation is a line I feel very hesitant about crossing.

I know that I am experimenting on my students with my unorthodox teaching method, but I am not cutting them open while they are alive.

I stare at the process inside my heart for a bit longer. I breathe in mana and guide it to both cores with a fifty-fifty split. The transformed heartcore qi gets bound to the blood when it gets pumped through both ventricles. It then passes through the body, slowly getting released along with the nutrients and oxygen my cells need. The qi then follows these resources and reinforces the places where they are being used.

And I suddenly understand that exercise and training is potentially useful for heartcore cultivators. I did a lot of experiments back in the cultivation world in terms of exercise and improvement. It is utterly useless for a braincore user, but muscles that get used a lot get reinforced more by the heartcore. This means that it is also moderately useful for dantian users, they get a small amount of automatic body reinforcement from the blood flowing through their guts. A rather small portion of the qi they gather in their core gets released in the bloodstream, like a weaker version of a heartcore.

I look at my muscle cells and I see a difference in passive qi density. My skin has a lot less qi reinforcing it than my leg muscles. My heart has, even more, reinforcement than the rest of my body. I check my brain and see that the qi is denser still. That explains why I have access to my augur already, I use my brain the most out of any body part, so that area received a relatively large amount of oxygen and nutrients.