Calculating Cultivation

Chapter 91: Marooned

Looking up at the pale white star in the sky, I sat on top of a mountain taking a break, enjoying some reconstituted paste and water. I had lost track of how long I had been traveling on foot, it had been years by now.

The Calm Ocean had been difficult to cross on the raft, but it was something I had managed to accomplish. With my sword and what little energy I had, it was easy to cut and hollow a large chunk of stone. The currents then carried me across and none of the large water beasts had bothered me. It was surprisingly anti-climactic.

After that came some tundra, or stunted grasslands with small shrubs. The white light in the sky had been less at the horizon and moving directly above me in very small increments as I traveled. Eyeballing the white light in the sky, I estimated that it had shifted from around 10 degrees to around 12 degrees. If it was directly over the center of this place, that meant I had a long way to go.

I had kept my mind trying to work out the math as I traveled. But it wasn’t as simple as each degree being a percentage. As I traveled the angle would change more rapidly. Since I wasn’t traveling along a circle, but a straight line I had to start digging out my math skills I hadn’t used in a very long time.

Who would have thought that geometry could be interesting, but there was nothing else to do while traveling. There were only small bugs and worms as land creatures. Nothing in small bodies of water either. I had been expecting a larger food chain, but the outer portions of this place appeared to be devoid in life. The further I went towards the center of this bubble, the more life seemed to thrive.

My guess it had something to do with the atmosphere. While I still needed to breathe, I could survive fairly harsh conditions. I had no expertise in working out the exact composition of air that I was breathing. I had lived far too long in the Forever City and traveling, that it was hard to remember what regular air was like. As long as I wasn’t choking to death that I hadn’t really paid attention. I didn’t want toxic yellow clouds ever again. Yang Heng might have loved the Forever City, but he grew up in a literal gilded tower. I had seen the outskirts of that massive place, and it was hell.

My current goal was trying to figure out how long the trip would take to keep my mind occupied, while trying to conserve what little energy I was able to draw in. I was traveling along a chord, which was a geometrical term for a straight line between two points of a circle that did not pass through the center.

The total length of the chord could be worked out with the Pythagorean Theorem, ‘a’ squared plus ‘b’ squared, equals ‘c’ squared. I needed half the chord length, so I didn’t multiply things by two. The length needed to reach the center was the square root of the distance from my starting location to the white star minus the distance from directly beneath it to the white star. Unfortunately, I had no good way to guess at these measurements. Anything I came up with could be wildly off.

That was the problem with such guesstimates. That left trying to work out the distance based on the angle. I had to really dig into my memories to remember this, which was radius times the sine of half the angle. The sine was opposite, divided by the hypotenuse.

Which meant I was completely screwed in terms of calculating the distance using mental math. That was why I was stopped at the top of a mountain range I was crossing over, since there was a very large flat rock easily the footprint of one of the towers from the Forever City. I carefully drew a massive circle into the flat stone. Marking out the center point, I then cut a line straight down. I then began carving out lines dividing, up a quarter of the circle.

First 45 degrees, then 22.5 and 67.5 degrees, then in half again, 11.25, 33.75, 56.25, and 78.75 degrees. After dividing things in half once more, I got the angle 11.25 which was close to what I wanted. I could now carve the chord across the bottom of the circle and take physical measurements to compare the chord to the angle based on the intersection points between the angled radius lines from the center and the chord itself.

I then measured the distance between each segment of half the chord. Despite my best efforts, I was eyeballing things. That was why I wanted such a large place to carve out a circle. Using my sword to measure the length of each section of the chord between intersection points, I got a total of 1,940 sword lengths from the edge of the chord, to the center, which represented the edge of this place to underneath the white star overhead.

I could then work out the percentage I was to the center for each 5.625 degrees traveled. The first part was 817 sword lengths between 11.25 degrees and 16.875 degrees, which represented 42.11% of the total distance. That meant I had traveled about 4% of the way to the center of this place after two decades, based on my sense of time. It would take approximately another 480 years to each the center of this place if there were no major delays.

The last 5.625 degrees was only 27 sword lengths, since the angle was much steeper, the distance on the chord was less. That 1.39% of the total distance. It was a good sanity check to make sure my math was on point. The closer I got to the center of this place, the faster the angle change per distance traveled.

“That was worth a day,” I muttered as I looked over my drawing. Would some person or being eventually stumble upon this in the future and wonder what it was? Or would they be like Yang Heng and just ignore everything they didn’t deem important. I set off once again.

I traveled in a straight line as much as possible. The only exception being large bodies of water which forced me to go around if I should see the shore on the other side or be subjected to the currents that controlled the waters of this place.

My favorite part was going down mountains. I would leap forward and plummet through the air. I would spread my hands and my martial robe to try and get a bit of gliding in, instead of running down. I had been getting better over the years of traveling.

Reaching the bottom of the mountain, I paused as I came across a stunted tree, not a shrub. This was definitely a tree. I had altered my course slightly to look at it. I walked up and put my hand on the tree. It had been far too long. I missed stuff like this. Human being were not meant to live in boxes. While cultivators might have adapted, some primal part of me liked the open skies and trees.

It was tempting to call all this fake, but it wasn’t. The white star in the sky was real. It was tempting to try and work out the distance to the star itself, but there could easily be spatial shenanigans in play. I just knew that the angle changed. By comparing the length of the shadow of my sword to its sheathe laid out on the ground, I was able to see that the angle to the white star had been changing over time.

That was why I had taken a day off to do these geometric calculations. I wanted to know how long I was going to be stuck in this place. With my luck, I would reach the center and there would be nothing there. Yang Heng wasn’t sure how long I would live more. Someone with my triple cultivation would live a very long time, far longer than other cultivators since my cultivation was superior.

Yang Heng had said hundreds of thousands of cycles, using the time measurement of the Forever City, but it basically meant years. I still didn’t like that description of time. I preferred years personally. Regardless, that time would be less here in the Mechanical Layer with less energy.

He had no idea how long I had. The Heavenly Alliance, didn’t send people as weak as me out to the Mechanical Layer, since they were treasured scions that the inner part of the super-organization had invested in. There was no point, since there was very little value out here for cultivators, since cultivators focused on energy and refining that energy.

Half a millennia of travel, it was far better than being locked in a small room. But that was time I couldn’t afford. I did not have hundreds of thousands of years. Maybe I had a thousand, maybe a hundred thousand, there was no way to know for sure.

While my cultivation was a three-path cultivation of mind, body, and soul, the steps taken to get where I was were different than what the Heavenly Alliance normally did. So, there would be even more variation. Yang Heng had thought I had at least ten thousand cycles, with the energy he had found for me, those crystals would add on decades to my life.

“I really should have packed a flying sword,” I muttered as I continued running across the grassy landscape. It would have been nice to have anything to automate travel or go faster. But I had nothing on me that could do such a thing. There were no civilizations, and it was just wilderness.

Why had anyone set this all up? That was why it was tempting to call all this fake, but it wasn’t. It was all real. Why there might be energy to waste on the continent to create a better illusion, this place wasn’t like that. It was very real, with little to no energy shenanigans. That was the problem, there was no energy.

That was why the other thing I had been focusing on during my travels was preserving what little energy I had more than ever before. Even the hovercraft had small traces of ambient energy inside of it. Even Yang Heng gave off energy. This place was completely and utterly dead in terms of energy. Either the super ring around this bubble was drawing away energy, or something else.

Regardless, I needed to work hard to maintain my levels of energy, or it would just disappear. Even single bit that I was able to draw up, I had to work to hold onto. That would help slow down my aging and give me a reserve to draw on in case of an emergency.

At least things were slowly changing as I traveled. Looking up at the sky, it had been mostly cloudless, only the occasional rainstorm sweeping through the area I was traveling. I tended to stop traveling on those days, where I could get turned around. Without the white star to follow, it would be all too easy to go off track.

I refused to backtrack. I had enough travel to get through without making extreme detours. Spending a minute to go out of my way to look at the first tree I had come across, spending a couple minutes next to it, doing math to figure out my travel time, weren’t huge amounts of time. The time not spent traveling would add up, but even with my impressive constitution, it was exhausting to travel year after year.

I was missing Yang Heng more and more. He had been a great person to talk to. He would be okay, but he would be out of commission for a long time. He had said this place was a trap. I didn’t think it was a trap for us or cultivators. One didn’t make all of this for something so simple. It would be a trap for energy based beings or any number of things. It was impossible to say for sure.

It was hard not having someone knowledgeable I could ask questions of. I had been spoiled by Yang Heng. Leaping over a river, I continued onwards to the center of this place. If I got there and there was nothing, I might actually die. Cultivators didn’t get sick unless it was some weird energy based disease, even more so after the first breakthrough.

But if there was nothing at the center of this place, I might actually die for real. It would be impossible to find my way back as well. The sheer size of this place, meant that the Super Mountains where we had crashed were too numerous. If it took 500 or so years to get the center, then it would take over 3,000 years to circumnavigate this entire place on the outside.

While the arc could be cut down to some degree, it would be too easy to get confused which direction was back the way I came once I reached the center. Once the white star was directly overhead, I would lose all sense of direction.

Time to go up another mountain and it was snowing. I rarely ran into snow. If there was precipitation it was mostly rain. But this time I had ran right into a blizzard, not paying attention. With no threats except the large creatures in the water, I zoned out most of the time while running across the land. I knew the direction I needed to go and went in that direction, occasionally looking up. Mostly I just used the angle of the shadows so I could watch my footing.

I had been traveling for so long, that my subconscious had taken over. It was only when things got tricky was when I started paying attention. Like this blizzard I had just run into. I was on the side of the mountain, still going up. Everything had turned white and gotten even colder.

At least my clothes were of high quality. One thing the Forever City did well was making stuff that lasted, forever, or at least a very long time. I would call the equipment robust and useful. I pulled out my sword and went over to a large boulder.

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Channeling a small portion of energy, out into my sword, I began to cut into the rock. I would be making a small shelter to get out of the storm. It wasn’t like cutting butter, but more like cutting stiff cheese. I had to be careful to make sure the sword didn’t get stuck. That had happened a couple of times in the past while making a shelter or a boat. It was a massive headache to get it back out and an experience I didn’t need to repeat.

The trick to making a shelter was to cut deep in a rectangle pattern to lay out the interior, and then cut across the rectangle to help break apart the stone. Occasionally, I had to pull the blade back and yank it out when the stone compressed in a weird way. I couldn’t tell if this was normal or not. What I really needed was a tower cutter, but I didn’t have one on me. I had only taken what I thought I would need and I didn’t expect to need something like that.

So, the hard way with a sword it was. After making a cubby hole, I easily pushed out the remaining debris and cut the boulder out a bit more, so I could stretch out my legs. Once that was done, I had an large ‘L’ shape to sit in.

I then pulled out a blanket and hung it up to block the entrance. It was a simple matter of wedging it into small cut out portions of rock. It wasn’t great, but it kept the worst of the blizzard off me. I wouldn’t die, my body was too tough to be harmed by a little cold, but it would be annoying. Impacts on a person’s face were incredibly distracting.

That was when I rested, I preferred to not be resting in the open air, in case it rained or snowed. I quickly drifted off to sleep and when I woke up I was buried in snow. The snow was more than twice my height in terms of depth. No wonder why there were no creatures on land. If there were any kind of seasons, or this happened, anything but worms and tiny bugs would die off.

It was a simple matter of forcing my way back up to the surface. A little snow wouldn’t hurt me. I had been traveling for years and this was the first time I had run into a storm like this. When I emerged, it was still snowing as well. Everything was super white, the sky, the ground, everything.

With the dim light from the white star, it was even darker. I looked at the hole I had climbed out of. Going back down would be pointless, since it was completely wrecked as I left. I didn’t want to sleep on snow, where it would melt. I also had gotten more than enough sleep just now, so another break was pointless.

Unlike the other problems I had faced, I had no idea what to do now. Waiting wasn’t palatable, but I would also quickly lose any sense of direction. I also had no idea how long the storm would last. It could be days, months, years even. I doubted it would go on for that long, but I hadn’t run into a storm like this since I had started traveling.

I picked the direction I had been traveling before and set off across the top of the snow. I would travel until I got tired again. It was what I had been doing and it seemed to work well enough. I went up the mountain and then heading down was a lot of fun. I didn’t leap like before, I just pulled out two pieces of wood to use as skis and slid down the mountain, building up quite a bit of speed. I was able to get quite a distance across a flatter section before coming to a stop.

The blizzard finally stopped a couple days after it started. Everything was white, but it was simple enough for me to run across the top of the snow. I left huge billows of snow and depressions in my wake, but I didn’t sink if I moved fast enough. While I could run on water for a short distance, it was too dangerous if I got tired and didn’t have a place to rest. The super storm was just another minor event on my journey to the center of this place.

With how much travel time it was taking, it was a joke in my mind, that it would be faster to start up a civilization to reach the center of this place, rather than trying to travel on my own. Perhaps this place was a prison, and there was a super being trapped here. Perhaps we would be able to make a trade.

Maybe other cultivators got stuck here in the past and started up some sort of civilization somewhere near the center of this place. It would be hard for regular people to survive and there was no energy, but I was hopeful there would be something.

If I was truly trapped here, then my only hope was to try and return to the hover craft and use Yang Heng as an energy source. It would be incredibly hard to advance my cultivation and survive, but it was the only option I could think of.

When I reached the next large body of water, I paused to consider my options. I hadn’t bothered fighting the large sea creatures under the surface. I hadn’t sensed any energy from them, but it was tempting to see if they had anything valuable. But it was too big a risk.

I got out my rock boat. It was basically a rowboat, made out of rock. I had to be careful with it, since it couldn’t withstand my full strength. The important part was that it floated. I tossed it in the water and got out my stone oar and began rowing across the body of water. It was salty, so an ocean.

Over the years I had considered trying to make an actual glider and flying long distances. The problem would be speed. I would have to lose altitude to gain speed and even then, it would be about as fast as my running. I only went slower to move around the occasional large obstacle and travel across water. There was no faster way for me to travel.

Even my knowledge of arrays and formations was only enough to troubleshoot them and do basic tasks. In this no energy environment, that knowledge was even more useless. The hovercraft was the most efficient flying vehicle possible in terms of energy usage. The Forever City had a fully built out cultivation tech tree. If the hovercraft didn’t work, anything with energy had no chance.

Creating anything from technology wasn’t going to happen. I couldn’t even remember sine functions that well. The possibility of me building up any kind of infrastructure or technology using raw materials was less than nothing. The necessary material science and other knowledge that wasn’t tied in to cultivation and energy just wasn’t there.

Yang Heng had been no help in that regard either. He looked down on technology, since it was limited in what it could accomplish. Having some basic knowledge of fundamental physical principles was limited in use. The ability to take various ores out of the ground and actually make something useful out of it was beyond me entirely.

Energy was too much of a massive cheat. Like having the cheat codes for the universe itself. The power to use one’s mind to alter reality. That was why I had been focusing on keeping every scrap of energy I could get within me and using every bit of energy as efficiently as possible. I had done so before, but now, with no energy in the air and my very life related to the amount of energy I had, it was more important than ever before.

It was also tempting to try and measure energy in discrete amounts, but Yang Heng had warned against such a practice. It led to inflexibility and would contaminate one’s techniques with things not related to the technique itself. I recalled his words on this matter.

“Measuring every last bit of energy is something to be avoided. Such a thing seems counterintuitive, but it places barriers on future techniques you might develop and refining them further. Going down the path of numbers leads to more rigid thinking, like a calculator or an array. While you might gain greater understanding of how much energy you have, you do not gain a better understanding of utilization.”

“That seems like an arbitrary distinction. Using numbers helps quantify an issue.”

“For anything other than energy that is the case. Imagine a cultivator is a river. The water flowing through is the energy you use. Using numbers, is like making a dam. Even if that is not your intent, you will never break boundaries to grow further once you are an immortal.”

“So it is a future problem then?”

“All problems are future problems. But if you go down the path of measuring every last drop of energy, you will go down a path that is limiting. This is the experience that we have gathered over the ages. Hone yourself and not your perceptions. Ultimately it is your choice, but focusing on progress and numbers will distract from actually making progress.”

I hadn’t been entirely sure about this line of thinking. But Yang Heng had been forthcoming in all other aspects about cultivation and reality itself. That was why I focused on improving my control and use of energy, and didn’t quantify every last portion of it. It was frustrating to do so. I liked the hard reality of numbers, but that hard reality would be a shackle imposed upon me.

Still, I was improving. I knew that much. What had taken a larger portion of my energy before, now took less. It was about focus and visualization. Just like I had improved my cultivation, using what energy, I had involved such a technique.

A perfect example of this was using energy to boost my body, beyond the base level of my cultivation. Focusing on the energy inside of me, willing it to better assist me in specific ways became easier with time. The same was true when using my sword as well. The improvements were small, but they were there. Each incrementing on the previous. This allowed me to focus on other aspects of energy use.

If I had spent my time working on math and quantifying everything, then it would be harder to improve. I had asked Yang Heng what the smallest bit of energy was and he had told me that, this kind of question showed I still had a long way to go to achieve understanding of energy.

This went against all my sensibilities, but I decided to put my trust in the immortal I had traveled with for a while. He had not betrayed my trust a single time. And while we had gotten off to a rocky start, he had always supported me in a way no other cultivator had in the past. While my first master, Yi Rong had a special place in my heart and had helped me. It was nothing compared to Yang Heng.

Over the years I had become more and more disillusioned with powerful cultivators. The older and more powerful they were, the more scheming they appeared. I guess it was the lack of perspective and scramble to the top, while Yang Heng already stood very high up.

He had never mentioned how high up he actually was and appearances were no confirmation. Also, he was here in the Mechanical Layer where his power was limited, so even with my vision, I didn’t have any good comparison for how powerful he was compared to the other immortals I had met in the Forever City. I would guess more powerful, but it was hard to say how much.

Yang Heng would say that rarely were such comparisons that useful. To fight with one’s life online always creates uncertainty. An opponent might have a trump card, or there could be outside interference. The older the cultivator, the more adept they were at survival, creating even more trump cards to ensure their safety.

There were hierarchies, but just like how immortal cultivators didn’t apply rigid rules and numbers to the energy they used, they also avoided direct comparisons of power if possible. Sure there were people higher up, and the Heavenly Alliance stood at the top. But it was rare for cultivators to fight each other. The ones who liked to fight, left the Forever City to seek their fortunes.

Reality was infinite after all. If one was strong enough, they should be able to create their own Forever City, pushing back other super-organizations. That was how cultivation culture continued. The Firmament, where the Forever City was based, was infinite. There was no need for immortals to fight each other.

That was why there were minor skirmishes in the Forever City constantly looking to take more territory or gain some kind of advantage over another faction. The entire culture was unique, and it just rubbed me the wrong way.

But that was the past, and this was the future. I needed to focus on continuing to travel as quickly as possible while also honing my ability to retain and use energy. Another thing for me to work on while I traveled to keep my mind occupied from repeating scenery that passed me by.

I reached another large body of water and got out my small stone boat and checked the sky. Almost no clouds, just the white star in front of me like usual. I set off on the small boat, using a stone padel to propel myself forward across the water.

There were fish and other aquatic creatures in the water of all sizes. I had only spotted the shadow of the larger creatures, but I wasn’t concerned. Having a large body might make a creature hard to kill, but it also made it hard to move around and to avoid being detected. Larger was not always better, but it did provide a bigger target.

Once I got to place where I could sense the current was heading in the right direction, I stopped paddling my stone rowboat to rest and enjoy the breeze. Being able to travel without having to exert myself was a rare break I enjoyed when I encountered a body of water. Even after all these years I still had not come across as anything as the Turbulent Ocean and the Super Mountains where I had first crashed into this bubble of reality.

Sensing something large to the side, a massive sea snake rose up out of the water. It wasn’t angled at me, it was just breaching the surface. Its dark scales glinted in the white light. It was above the water for a moment before quickly submerging. It didn’t even twitch in my direction, which was why I remained relaxed as my boat continued to go over the water.

Perhaps I would need to make a sail of some sort in the future. The boat I was in didn’t have a rudder, I had to use my paddle to direct it. My crafting ability was not high either. In the past I had just purchased everything I had needed. While I could survive with the equipment I had, I would not be able to thrive. Even if there was energy.

If this entire place was all water, I might have tried to tame a leviathan to carry me. And while some trips across the water lasted weeks or even a couple of months, they eventually came to an end with more land. Most terrain features were perpendicular to the direction I was traveling. This implied that the entire place was built like a spiral.

Perhaps the water was connected at various points, since the creatures seems to be fairly uniform throughout it. I had seen leviathans in other bodies of water I had crossed before. While it had been at a greater distance and less clear, they were there, which implied that the water was connected.

Or that could be foolish thinking, since this place was constructed. Perhaps the creatures were seeded across everybody of water, perhaps the water had been higher in the past, perhaps there were underground tunnels. The list of possibilities was endless, since it was very hard to rule anything out when energy was involved.

“Goodbye leviathan,” I said quietly as the giant water monster swam away into the depths. I had long become immune to beautiful vistas and amazing sights. While I wouldn’t claim to have seen everything, traveling through the Mechanical Layer had shown me quite a bit already in terms of amazing vistas and weird creatures.

A giant sea monster, while interesting was not that impressive anymore. I was becoming an old jaded cultivator. It made me chuckle. I had always considered myself young compared to the immortals I had met, but it was more about experience than age at this point. I had already experienced so much as well as understood my situation that I was no longer young and naïve.

I had a lot more traveling to do, but I would only get better over time. This journey was a form of cultivation in its own way. Before, I would never have focused on using energy so efficiently at such a small scale. It just wasn’t needed or possible. But this environment forced me to treat energy in an incredibly precious manner. A drop of energy here would be quite a bit. Now, every small bit was rationed immensely.

Regardless, I enjoyed traveling more than sitting in a dark box trying to advance my cultivation. I had no desire to undergo such techniques again. And there was something to be said about living. Yang Heng had a life to him that other immortal cultivators seemed to lack. I guess it was the fact he didn’t hide in a place of power, but actually traveled about.

Was it living if you didn’t do anything with your life?

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