Of course, the author of the notes didn’t just leave things at that. It is just the needed part to make the information all come together was of course in a different location than what it went with. The author’s method of growing his Energy was treating the process like digging a ditch off of a river. The more that was dug out the more would come through. What is important about that isn’t the actual visualization, but rather the fact that a visualization worked. You have to find something that is consistent with your internal view of yourself.

This would make most other players laugh and then begrudgingly start adding points to their Energy. After all, Power stats can be increased with stat points and it isn’t like the System can read their minds. Except of course Jason knows better now. Somehow players are connected to NeoRealm and their thoughts can affect it. Still leaves him to figure out his own methods, again.

Honestly, he should be used to it at this point. Taking the path less traveled means you don’t have others to lead the way. At least with this, he has the natives treading the path before him. Any fellow players who did so in the past obviously won’t be sharing. And he has a decent starting point for his visualization, so there is that. What with already having viewed his Energy as threads and string. Jason just needs to figure out where the source is and braid some more lines onto it.

Jason puts the book away and sits back. ‘The source of my Energy shouldn’t be too hard to find. It has to be in my core after all. Of course that brings up the problem of figuring out how to look inside the core in the first place. Viewing the core itself is a bit hard right now. Even with how little Energy I have, it sure has coverage. Well, not much else to do but try.’

Jason closes his eyes and focuses inward. Shifting away from physical senses, to a more mystical view. And there his core is, looking more like a fuzzball than the perfect sphere he knows the core to be. Before he had pushed aside his Energy to get a glimpse of the core, but that won’t work this time. At least not for his first attempt. While he didn’t have a solid plan, Jason did have a loose strategy for his first foray into his core. After all, his threads of Energy came from there, so why not follow them?

It takes him a hot second to separate out a single thread to follow. Though most of that time was more because he would get it mixed up with a neighboring thread. By the time he managed to follow one to the core, the process had become a training session for his mind’s eye. Still, with perseverance he manages.

Not only does he manage though, he overshot the goal. Without noticing it at first, Jason has followed the string down to his core and right through the shell. While this was his goal, Jason had not expected it to be that easy. Especially as his previous pokes at it had failed utterly. In the end he can only chock this up to the fact that this time he did follow a thread instead of clearing them out of the way. Maybe they create some sort of passageway through that he can follow, or they go out of phase with the core.

What really matters is that Jason is now in. In where though is the question as it very much does not look like the inside of a sphere. At least it answers the question of where he connects with the Energy source. His core is in and of itself the connection point. All that encompasses the inside is a direct view into wherever Jason’s Energy comes from.

The only confusing thing is that it should be a completely foreign place. From what Jason can feel though that isn’t the case. Something about the place he is pulling the Energy from feels familiar. Not in a way he can put his finger on, but enough that it isn’t his imagination.

Familiarity aside though, this view into the outside and otherness of Energy’s source gives a good reason for all the water analogies used in the notes. Going by the rest of the book and his personal guesses on the subject Mana is like a gas, Qi is a solid, while Energy is a liquid. The three most common states of matter you will find on an inhabited planet. Sure there are some fun extra stages out there, most common of which is plasma. But a potential fourth basic power source won’t help him much right now.

Instead, Jason either has to figure out how to confine a liquid into thread form or completely rethink how he looks at it. Because as things stand, either reality has to admit it is wrong, or he needs to admit the views he based his entire cultivation on is wrong.

At the most basic level, his threads exist as a solid and yet are made of Energy. And this isn’t as simple as comparing it to water and claiming the threads are ice. In such an example Qi would be ice, Energy is instead the liquid form of the mystical water all of NeoRealm’s mystical side is based on.

Still, this isn’t the first time he has heard of personal views being at odds with how reality seems to think things work. With the right finagling, neither sides have to be wrong. Now he only has to figure out how. And Jason has just the starting point to continue his search for the truth of NeoRealm’s most fundamental parts. He had focused on the System’s threads and since they completely matched his Energy had figured, they had to be just that. What if the structure of the threads were instead like roots? Before starting NeoRealm he might not have thought of this, but for some reason things keep coming back to plants for him.

Akhier

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