Augmented Aspects: Chapter 223 Messing Around With Foreign Energy Sources, and Other Poor Life Choices (Patreon)

Chapter 223

Messing Around With Foreign Energy Sources, and Other Poor Life Choices

“Hello?” The voice of some supply clerk calls out to me. I hear them with my real ears, though I know they are secondary.

Staring.

Not that a blind person can actually stare, but I realize I am staring off into the distance with possibly a vacant expression.

At this I hold up one finger and try to get the person to wait.

“What?” They ask, at which point I turn around and face away from them. Sort of rude, but it is almost like they are listening in on this private conversation with my great granddaughter.

Cassidy is talking to me, and I can feel her mind. She is so unprotected and raw right now that if I wished I could easily take over her mind and body. I don’t want to, I do want to warn her about the possibility of possessions by doing this, but at the same time I don’t want her to not call me when she needs help.

“It’s not working,” little Cassidy says and just hearing her, I know that I am going to drop everything to make sure her problem gets fixed this time.

Just feeling her connection it is clear that she has been practicing nonstop on her mana movement since I created that training video with Jhonny for her.

“Calm down, let’s see what is going on,” I tell her.

“What is going on? You are supposed to tell me that.” The annoyed clerk lady states.

At that a grimace slightly baring what might possibly be teeth at the crazy lady who is talking to me as if I am talking to her.

Can’t she see that I am on a long-distance call from the real world? So rude.

Not even making a sound, as I know that will get transmitted back to Cassidy, give a quick slash with my finger telling her to be quiet. Then realize that I need some peace and quiet, so I in turn Teleport, straight up by five kilometers.

Poof.

From here, I am able to casually walk Cassidy through the problems she is experiencing. Overhealing her mother, I didn’t even know such a thing was possible, but it seems that most human bodies are not capable of processing structured mana. Well I don’t think it was really structured, just mana that was of the Life type and sent to run wildly within her mother’s body. That was the real reason the mana went wild. Sure, the body used the energy to heal all the damages, but then it didn’t know what to do with the surplus that remained. Fortunately, she called when she did as it meant that I could pull a bit of the energy back, and then get the rest to easily be absorbed into my granddaughter’s muscles to help prevent any atrophy that might arise from her length of stay.

From there I let little Cassidy collapse as her body and mind are clearly at a breaking point. I will make sure to tell her the dangers of channeling one such as myself into her, next time we meet.

And yes, I know there will be a next time.

She is a precocious child with a gift. Also, she is too adventurous to stop when she hits a wall, and smart enough to ask for help when she clearly needs it, that is how I know she will be back.

Also, this is her second time in contacting little old me, so I figure that my chances of hearing from her in the future are pretty good.

Now that everything is done, I am left with but one minor problem.

What do I do with this highly charged energy that I helped siphon away from Cassidy’s mother?

At the time I took it into me, as I knew Cassidy’s core was already full, meaning the extra energy had to go somewhere. Thus, I took it, thinking that it was the same type of mana that I use.

However, now that I have had time to feel its bright burning sensation within me, I realize my mistake.

I say burning, and I mean burning like your muscles at the end of a good workout kind of burn, not the I just teleported into the middle of an active volcano type of burn.

By merely holding the energy, I feel my cores, both of them come to life as both begin trying to help calm down and collect the different threads of energy from both and begin cycling them.

This is a problem, as I realize quite a few things all from the few seconds that I have to examine the foreign energy.

First and foremost, this energy is addictive.

Just feeling it course and burn its way through my body, I can’t help but feel alive. Like before this, the thrum of energy that I had felt and used that was native to this world was nothing in comparison. Now I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that this energy was something special.

Acid reflux.

I get a sensation that is similar to acid reflux within my body. Again, too much of a good thing as this energy is wild and uncontained. There is also the fact that it is now burning away my ambient mana and condensed Qi energy and creating a brighter charged ball of energy.

What started as a minor ball of energy has now begun to spin about and bloom into what almost feels like a wild ball of yarn that has many threads feeding into hit and helping it grow.

This is bad.

Fortunately, I am currently far away from anyone else, being the only creature brave enough to fly five kilometers in the air.

Jitters.

I realize this is likely one of those evolutionary points where I can decide what to do. I can possibly take the energy condense it into a more solidified structure similar to thick maple syrup and have it serve as a new stage of Qi.

Or I could also try to loosen the energy up, diluting it and making it a stronger form of mana. Mana that I would then need to use my Qi to create a stronger and more suitable core to hold the advanced form of mana.

There is also the idea that I could just take the foreign energy and expel it from my body entirely.

I am heavily leaning towards the third option when I get a new system message.

New World Quest Received: Don’t Expel the Foreign Energy: You have somehow contracted energy that is unstable for both yourself and the world. You must now find a way to stabilize the foreign energy within yourself. Do not let this energy get released from your body for any reason. Rewards: The World Lives, Variable.

Seeing that message, I can’t help but wonder if the world is once again messing with me, or if this is really that dangerous of a situation.

“Again, I get it, playing around with magic and foreign energies as if I know what they are and can do is bad. I got it,” I say, pantingly as I clutch at my chest and realize I must do something.

Yet, I can’t help but think that mixing this with either my Qi or Mana will cause irreversible damages. I can only imagine trying to cast spells with this apparently new and heightened form of mana. Then again Qi would also be crazy, as I would feel my Regeneration constantly needing to be engaged just to maintain my regular cycling.

No, instead, I had to think of this as a third and much more volatile form of energy that didn’t seem to like being contained here.

The first thing to note was that this energy was more of a dense liquid than anything. By this Qi would be a semi-solid calm stream. Mana would be a vaporous current of air. While this energy would be a dense moving and churning torrent of energy.

Now I had a few things I could do.

The new form of liquid was still able to be moved, the same way holding your hands tightly together could be used to guide and push liquid in an intended direction. That said, I needed to either force the energy to go into a condensed ball. A ball of highly condensed and volatile energy that could break free at any time and thus cause a violent eruption.

This method would effectively give me a third distinct core of energy. However, that seemed like something I would do if I was able to either recreate, reproduce, or have time to fully understand this energy.

As it was, it seemed that the world itself did not want me playing with this energy, thus the warning quest. I do find it odd that that the world finally gave me my own warning quest for when I was doing something stupid, though I guess getting Mallory out up here to slap some sense into me might be a little too distracting at this time.

As such I focus on another option, one that didn’t involve trying to replicate this energy that clearly didn’t belong in this realm of existence. Instead, I focused on trying to disperse this energy in as simple of a way as possible.

Remembering what I did with the energy within my granddaughter, I just focused on taking the wild and chaotic energy and trying to get it to meld and fuse with my muscles and my body.

Spasm, crackle, crunch.

The moment I try that on the muscles first, I instantly regret that decision as my muscles tightened and solidified so much that they literally snapped my bones apart.

To make matters worse, my instant reaction as a healer was to try to of course, Heal the issue.

What a moron.

Pop, shatter, crunch.

This was apparently the exact wrong answer as it only caused the lighter energy of mana to be absorbed by the dense and flowing foreign energy. Which of course led to even more tightening of the muscles and thus more ripping and tearing of my bones.

Panting.

Fortunately, I am weightless out here, so all my spinning about and flailing around means nothing in terms of my chances of falling to the ground. That is the good news.

The okay news is that with the addition of structured mana, the foreign energy seemed to have been diluted a bit.

Of course, this leaves the bad part, where now I have broken and fracture bone particles lose within my body, while my muscles are slowly being turned into a form of muscular stone.

On the bright side, at least I didn’t try to fuse this energy into my brain thinking it was some type of super psychic energy.

No, I needed to slowly unweave the coiled ball of painful energy from my muscles, stretch it out slowly so that a thin stream is present in both my muscles, bones, and organs, and then hope that this is enough.

To do this, I first encapsulate the entire mass within densely coiled Qi. Since Qi seems to be the most resistant of the two energies I have present. I use it to form a base structure. If everything else fails, then a second solidified chunk of Qi will be used to forever hold this energy in place.

With the energy successfully closed off for a moment, I pause for a moment and then let out a breath as I finally let my mind register the pain that I am in.

“OUCH!”

From here, I breathe out and cast a simple Nerve Dampening spell that will make it so my body no longer sends pain responses to my brain.

At that, I pause, waiting for a moment as the last traces of pain slowly begin to fade from my mind.

“This was so stupid, Cass!” I say to myself, as I now realize this could have been really bad. As opposed to the mildly annoying bad that I was currently dealing with.

“Foreign energy sources from the land of the living. What were you thinking? Of course it is going to be different.” I say to myself, speaking my thoughts out loud as the residual pain sensors are taking away a few of my inhibitions. “And of course like always, you are like, let me go and pull it straight into myself. Not even thinking about how different energy from the two planes of existence will be.”

Exhale.

With that exhale I get all my frustration and self-loathing for putting myself into another stupid and clearly avoidable situation out of my mind. Now it is time to think and to act.

Dissolving.

The foreign energy is currently devouring my muscle and bones the same way highly volatile acid would. At that, I realize that I have to act quickly.

For a second, I think about regrowing my own muscles and bones first, but realize I have already wasted enough time on this process.

Focusing on the threat, I realize that I can still likely get the energy to meld and fuse with both my bones and muscles, but I will have to do so in a very fine amount, and do so relatively quickly. I know I can create Qi channels that could theoretically hold the energy as I dissipate it throughout my body. Though the Qi channels will be slower than the speed of the volatile energy. Mana would be faster, and able to be used as a rabbit of sorts to draw out the foreign energy through my solidified Qi channels, but this would require me to do something I hadn’t been able to do up until this point. That is use Qi and Mana together without causing problems.

For a moment, I almost wonder if this is some impromptu test given by the world to make me figure these things out on the fly, but then I quickly dismiss that thought as I realize at the very least this stuff HURTS!

Focusing, I create a secondary channeling path, one that goes through my major organs, muscles, and bones. I use Qi to create a semi-solid but dense tunnel. To make the tunnels I have to constantly circulate the Qi, I go for a clockwise direction for this energy to have a uniform direction. Effectively I am forcing my Qi to take more than ten times longer to cycle through my body, as it is now making multiple spirals through each of my major areas.

Then when I realize the foreign energy is at the point where it is finally dissolving my cute little muscle and bones, I attract the now free energy with a wisp of mana. To make sure the mana doesn’t get caught and interact with the Qi, I violently spin the mana counter-clockwise at a speed that should be twice as fast as the flow of the Qi tube that the mana is rolling around in.

Singe.

There is a slight burn as the quick moving liquid moves slightly faster than I originally thought, causing me to reduce the number of rotations by my mana and instead focus on directing the mana out of the small tube faster than originally intended. This is not a want, but rather a need to make sure that my mana does not get caught by burning hot liquid.

Somewhere in this whole ordeal I apparently opened up my third eye, as I used it to scan my internal organs and ensure the process was being met.

At about the halfway point, I realize something sort of crucial. Namely just hitting my stomach, intestine, kidneys, heart, and lungs, along with the arms of my arms and legs would not be enough. No, I apparently also needed to cycle this energy through my epidermis, to my spine, my head, my brain and all three of my eyes.

I thought about opening up the rate of energy, but then realized that even now the energy that was being channeled through my body was almost too much. Even factoring in my four wings, and the muscles there, I would still have too much to just leave alone and hope it somehow stopped destroying my body.

Fortunately, by the time I got to my brain and eyes, I would be done, as the energy would almost be completely useless by this point. Unfortunately, it also meant that if there was excess it would be stuck going to both the brain and all three of my eyes.

Somehow, I thought this was an odd restructuring of my original Royal Bloodline awakening, where I had to do something similar and build out how I would evolve.

That thought hit me, but then again, I instantly discarded that thought as irrelevant. It was clear that this was meant to be a process that killed me if I failed. I kind of deserve this for constantly charging into things, but at the same time, I wished the world was a bit more forgiving for failed experiments. Then again, I guess this is what every inadvertent bomb maker thought, when they first mixed acids and bases together trying to create the world’s best cleaning product.

I can focus inwardly, until we get to the brain. Well not the brain exactly as I first tried to see if I could run out by going through my eyes. Making sure to dump off as much as possible into my two non-functioning eyes. Unfortunately, there was still more. From there I spun up to my third eye, creating not one but two streams from my two primary eyes to my tertiary eye. I even looped in my ears, my hair, and every other organ I could think of, but nothing was left.

Finally with a deep reluctance, I realized I still needed to make at least one more connection.

Not having much time to think about anything, I focused on the connection and made one massive swoop around my brain. I had just completed a full loop around and was about to create a second loop, when I felt the burning white hot pain of the foreign energy enter my brain.

The moment the energy filled my brain, I felt the world and my connection to it pulse once, then twice.

I was losing consciousness, and I desperately tried to continue, but then realizing it was too much I quickly pulled the fast swirling mana away from the tunnel, before creating a stopper like effect by sealing away the final end.

Then the world began to burn as I felt my mind feel like it was melting under the pain and pressure. At this, I realized I might have really messed up.

Darkness.