Chapter 45 part B

Later in the day, the gnomes threw us another good dinner; at least to them it was good. It was supposed to be some kind of meet and greet to get involved with their community but 99% of everyone couldn’t understand each others language. So we just kind of ended up nodding at each other.

Still it did show the gnomes were trying to help.

Many of us got sick from their terrible Spartan cooking but it seemed like it was some special gnome holiday but I was too tired to understand the specifics because of trying to keep up with helping everyone adjust. And because it was a holiday we couldn’t duck and cover to escape the terrible soups they made that resembled toxic sludge. It was supposed to be some kind of pea soup, except it wasn’t made from peas. It was…something else.

After dinner the gnomes acted out their history for us in a play format with the children taking on roles and doing most of the work while the adults watched. They acted out a few battles and narrated events that I think were showing how they’d gotten to this warren, how their first leader was chosen, and a few religious skits that made no sense whatsoever. Some of the skits looked like past battles to defend their colony.

The ones about the battles did sound interesting once I’d realized what it was. But it wasn’t always easy to understand their squeaky voices.

I hadn’t been able to meet with the gnome elder all day. They’d been busy preparing for this event. But it was annoying.

I was desperate for progress and hoping for a chance to have him teach me anything that might help us survive better. I wanted to ask him how the blue screens worked again. I still think he knew something. I’d have to trick him somehow into revealing it.

Still I wasn’t able to tell how to switch which dream state I went into or which girl I’d end up with seeing.

Then we all went to start to get ready for bed. This was a new development as I entered the tent. There was a partition in our tent to separate my side from Rina, Yumi, and Asakura’s side of the tent now. Naturally the partition wasn’t even so I got the small side. But what concerned me more was if my side would be cold at night since it was cut off from the others.

Who had put that partition there? Truthfully they needed it more for Yumi than for me.

I gave each of them a hug before going to sleep. Rina suggested it of course, but actually considering the awful amount of death and mayhem we’d seen in the past week it was a good idea.

Of course, Yumi declined the hug. Rina wanted to make it longer and tighter, and I had to push her away abruptly. She also needed a treatment before going to bed, which we took care of. Asakura was last and held me for quite awhile gently. It seemed like we didn’t want to part and it felt very warm. That is until Rina started making a ruckus, to embarrass us.

We both glared at her with daggers for eyes, but she was just happy she’d split us up again. She somehow went back into a tame Jekyll mode right after that. She put up such a good show, if it were any better she would’ve had a tail and it would be wagging.

The tent feels good so we don’t have to lay in the cavern’s dirt and rock floor. But there isn’t much here in the tent. It’s basically lying on the ground. Since Rina uses my school uniform blazer jacket as her shirt I don’t even have anything to use as a pillow or a blanket. At least the tent floor is good material and doesn’t absorb water.

I could be really angry or upset at our situation, but actually I’m grateful for a lot. Rina is still alive. I have weapons too. I just suddenly realized that this is a good situation to date Asakura in. With less distractions going on, it will be easier for us to think about accepting each other.

Gradually everyone started to go to sleep.

I’m a bit surprised when I feel a feminine hand grasp and feel at me under the partition. Someone is laying parallel to me. The hand feels up my side until it grasps my hand. It’s a good feeling. I start to relax more with the other hand holding mine even though it’s like in stealth mode. Innocence is wonderful it feels like. The hand’s grip gets tighter around mine. It’s not a tight grip but like a feeling of reminding me they are there.

Without looking I’m sure it’s Asakura. Rina might want touch but she would like overkill a handshake, so it obviously wasn’t her. What was I thinking? Her bust is totally real. She doesn’t not have implants at all; the spanking incident proved that.

I guess I don’t need public recognition for my private life anyway if it’s real.

Not long afterwards I found myself standing in the dream state.

But something was off. No one was here? That can’t be right. Why was I alone?

I ended up in the orc training room last night and Fox Girl wasn’t there, but she’d left me hand written notes on many sheets of native made paper which were pinned to the wall with instructions to practice and exercise with some sort of tai-chi like movements and some kind of chi focusing exercises outlined on some notes she’d done. Also because there wasn’t much in the room, it wasn’t that hard to find them.

So paper technology did exist here in this world! That was an amazing find! It meant that if there was paper there could be stability. Stability was a sign of peace. It sounds silly to think paper in this world was fascinating, but living with civilizations like orcs there would no way in hell have paper. I’d also been looking for signs that this world wouldn’t be completely hellish in all its forms. Paper was a gift of hope against that idea.

I wanted to be able to write things down that were important to; perhaps things relating to magic research, and also things about how to live in this world and its peoples?

But before I could look at them I had to also decipher the proper order of which pages were first, second, and so on. Then I had to make sure I had organized them without making a mistake. It was very time consuming. Then there were additional pages of sub notes that didn’t correspond to the time line directly but were like sub articles connected to certain page numbers that had to be sorted out too. Figuring out what those were was a mess by itself.

I also couldn’t give up because if Fox Girl went through the trouble of doing all this she must have had a reason.

For the first two hours it was total failure, and some of them were mixed up, partly because the page numbers marked by Fox Girl were kind of a bad chicken scratch type of hand writing. But I was at least able to figure out the forms and positions better.

What was she trying to tell me? Think…

It had bizarre descriptions of various body postures and how to move in a sequence. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. It was very technical in nature but appeared to be mannequins of some kind. Then I went over it again, and again.

Why had she given me this?

Wait a minute.

They aren’t mannequin drawings at all. I’d just not read it right. It was some kind of exercise sequences with crude body movement drawings. The fourth time looking at it my dyslexia seemed to be cleared out and I saw it was called a cultivation pattern.

Was this real? Could it be useful to me? Was it a fox demi-human exercise, and would humans even benefit from it? It might be made for certain types of blood chemistry and bone and muscle structures.

Was Fox Girl trying to slow me down or secretly work against me? I felt paranoia and depression eating at me.

I wasn’t a martial artist either! What was she thinking? In the first place martial arts seemed silly when the enemy had long range and hard iron weapons and magic.

After trying to go over it again some of my confusion and distrust settled and went away.

Oh wait, but she knew that. She had intended this for mana cultivation and not for martial arts? Still it should boost and help with stamina and strength to subliminally also add to the mana cultivation by making the body hardier and more enduring, but focusing on the spiritual core within the soul.

But maybe I was complaining to myself too much, I thought as I started to sweat from going through the patterns. They actually were quite difficult and strained the muscles at first.

Perhaps she’d used too much energy in helping me already and needed to rest?

Finally on the second to last page she did leave me a clue. She did draw a picture of a sleeping fox at the bottom with a trail of Zzzzz’s coming out the top of it. It seemed funny too that Fox Girl’s writing looked a lot like what an elementary school kid’s writing might look like.

Was that because of she herself or because fox demi-humans didn’t use writing as often? I’d ask her about this later.

I did also realize how the extra time in the demon box dimension pockets could give me an advantage even without enemies being there. I would be able to concentrate my studies of many subjects, and perform exercises of all kinds, hoping to get stronger. In short I had an extra five to eight hours a day to work on my skills that other people didn’t have.

But it made me wonder…about Fox Girl and her people. She’d obviously written in my language; but what about her own language? For her to write in mine then she must have her own for some kind of foundation basis to have the change into and from.

Admittedly I didn’t know much, but I was able to work on the chi strengthening exercises that Fox Girl showed for quite some time. Then I alternated between it and focusing my mana into doing sand vortexes similar to what the earth manipulator girl was trying to do.

But at first I’m sure I looked pretty silly and extremely clumsy. I tripped over myself a couple of times and bumped into things. Then later I also realized I’d missed one of the ten sequence positions and had to relearn it from scratch all over again. It seems my agility and dexterity need improvements too, I realized.

But then I had this thought maybe it was because I had a negative attitude and thought it wasn’t working. My thoughts about Fox Girl trying to trick me were possibly part of why it was failing. I also remembered someone describing faith as believing in your success in reverse. Would that work I wondered? Did my thinking it was silly and useless block the reward of the effort?

It couldn’t hurt to try.

How long would it take to see results?

I then somehow after another hour or two managed to make a small noticeable visual effect with the exercises I’d adapted from Miura the spy’s results. I still couldn’t move sand, because I wasn’t an earth element. But something had swirled there thought it was a tiny, tiny speck about the size of a pen tip as I cupped my hands trying to circulate the energy over the air.

Was it just air I was circulating or a grain of spark of mana? At first that was my first thought. I thought I’d made a small tiny almost invisible air spiral. But then it went out. I still hadn’t figured out what I’d just done, only that something had either almost happened, or barely happened to the point of not being able to tell what it was.

What was it? The pin point went away when my strength wavered from the fatigue buildup. Moreover as I tried it again I realized I was feeling something moving inside my chest. It was a gentle almost unnoticeable tingle near my heart area and between the lungs under my sternum.

I tried to focus on the flow again.

Also was this body I had the same as when I was on Earth? If it was different that might explain being able to do magic? What had changed to allow magic to be workable?

Was that where the magic energy came from? It wasn’t centered from the hands, but had traveled down to my hands from other areas. Then I had to think about my other limbs. It wasn’t also from the head, to my surprise, nor my legs.

The magic wasn’t coming from the outside environment around me either. The pocket dimension was magic true, but I wasn’t borrowing it as an energy source, and it was sustaining itself. Perhaps I was also able to gain quicker because of time space being a bit different in the pocket dimensions which may allow the body to adapt quicker.

I paused to work through it again. I had to go step by step. I had missed something somewhere I think. Everything had to be carefully analyzed again if I was going to figure out how it worked. Then I could use each step and magnify it until I could make everything known and scrutinized properly.

Also to work on both exercises I ended up scratching out the foot patterns on the floor to help smoothen things out and reduce my chances for fumbling everything. I wanted to be efficient too.

I didn’t make any more progress for another hour and then had to alternate chi training exercises in with things when I felt I was too tired to produce more mana. Still after some time I could feel a very, thin faint pulse of energy in my chest again during the chi exercises.

There was also the possibility I might be doing the exercises wrong. Fox Girl wasn’t there to show me how stupid I looked or what I did wrong either.

They were working?!

Impossible!

I tried it again to be sure.

Sure enough, the exercises did seem to be boosting my mana cultivation. I was sure I’d never be a martial artist but they did help in making the energy tingle pulse a tiny bit stronger. The gain was so small that it was hard to tell.

I tried again, over and over desperate to strengthen it and get tougher. Then I tried to focus on making that bead of magic in my chest feel brighter.

It didn’t seem to be growing any stronger right now, but at least I was able to make it more consistent. Instead of a faint dying heart beat, it was turning into an almost Morse code like pulse with clear rhythm.

Now I also had to figure out how to go visit Sunghee again too. I knew there was a way and I’d even seen Fox Girl do it but I didn’t know how.

I was also partly scared to see Sunghee. What would happen if I did see her? I was terribly afraid of what I’d do if I was alone with her for a long time when she’s totally naked. I might need time to rehabilitate her too.

When I was almost out of time and my stopwatch timer was going off I knew I’d been asleep while working in the dream for nearly nine hours. That meant I would probably wake up soon.

But I had a thought before I woke up.

Everyone has been busy lately. They’ve accepted that we have to work for our own living now. They are also trying to prove themselves to the gnomes and sweat it out since they are afraid of what will happen to us if the gnomes get upset over anything.

After thinking about it during the training at the end of the dream state I realize that I went to an empty room because Fox Girl manipulated the demon box’s dream state. So I have to learn how to manipulate switching between the girls in the dream state to avoid going to a room with only myself in it. But it may take some time to figure out what the trick is.

Did I end up in the training room because I’d had so many magic questions? Was it also because of my wanting security and ending up thinking of Fox Girl first because she was strong? If so maybe if I experimented with thinking of other things I’d be able to lock in on how to visit Sunghee instead.

I had also confirmed from the previous day’s hypothesis about consciously thinking of entering the dream state being true.