Chapter 76: Death by a thousand cuts

Spatial Qi felt odd to use, but was it really that much different from the other affinities?

Ashlock had made a few observations recently through his demonic eye that could see the color of the ambient Qi.

He had always wondered why the Winterwrath cultivators appeared weaker than the Evergreens even when their cultivation realm and stage were equal—the same could go for the Redclaws—Larry had been able to subjugate them with little effort.

But he had already discovered the answer to his question when he'd learned how to create portals.

He had needed an anchor of spatial Qi somewhere to open the tunnel and used Stella's ambient Qi the first time and then switched to his roots.

He had assumed this was just for portals, but it was for almost everything to do with Qi. He couldn't command earth Qi to form a portal, for example. That was like commanding a fish to fly. But if he was surrounded by spatial Qi, he could make portals wherever he wanted.

His Star Core produced spatial Qi on its own, which had been a massive boon to his Qi generation as his Soul Core had previously taken in the turbulent untamed Qi from outside and forcefully converted it into spatial Qi.

Basically, what Ashlock concluded was if a cultivator fought in an environment that was abundant in their Qi affinity, then they would be able to regenerate Qi faster as their Soul Core wouldn't need to do any conversion, and their techniques would have more reach and power as they could manipulate the Qi tuned to their affinity all around them.

If the Evergreens fought within a forest, they would be surrounded by nature Qi and wouldn't need to form roots out of pure Qi but could command the existing roots instead. Another example could be a water Qi cultivator fighting near an ocean or stream compared to in a desert.

That is why the Winterwraths were so weak in this warm southern climate—they had to expend a lot of Qi to wastefully convert their surroundings into frost Qi—basically turning themselves into an airconditioning unit.

The Redclaws had been the same when they fought Larry. They were surrounded by lush forest and rivers, so the area was abundant in nature and water Qi rather than fire.

So what did all of this mean? Ashlock was a spatial Qi user, and to make the most of being a spatial cultivator, he should stay near an area of spatial Qi...

Diana had previously mentioned that there were few spatial cultivators—at the time, he believed she was referring to the fact that learning spatial techniques was too dangerous. However, he now knew she was referring to the fact that spatial techniques had to be cast so near the cultivator's body due to the lack of ambient spatial Qi in the natural environment.

Where would there even be natural spatial Qi? Near a black hole? Or near those rifts that the merchants delved into?

Luckily, Ashlock could get around this nonsense with his abnormal body. Short-range portals became as long as his roots spread out as wherever he could generate some spatial Qi, he could cast spatial techniques.

For Stella, telekinesis would be rather useless. She could use it to shoot a pebble out of her hand like a railgun... or maybe have a shield orbiting her body and blocking attacks from blind spots? But the second the item she was trying to control left her area of altered Qi—almost like an aura around her body—it was out of her control.

Ashlock got rid of these thoughts and focused on his meditation. Step one of learning a new technique was to convey to the heavens what he wanted to achieve.

Hours went by as he focused on the stick in the courtyard. He felt like he was back on Earth as a bored kid in class, glaring at a pencil and trying to make it move with his mind—except in this world of Qi, it was possible.

The sun set and Ashlock began to feel sleepy, so he allowed the slumber to overtake him and woke up to the chirping birds the following day. Meditating was much easier when his mind was sharp, and the sun warmed his leaves.

It wasn't until midday that Ashlock almost freaked out as the stick wobbled. It hadn't been a gust, wind, or a creature trying to break out of the ground beneath the stick. He had done that with his mind.

Ashlock couldn't tell if managing to make a stick wobble after only a day of meditation was good or not. Without hand gestures, it seemed harder to convey to the heavens what exactly he wanted to happen.

"Are hand gestures just sign language cultivators invented to talk with heaven?" Ashlock mused to himself as he felt happy with his progress. He made the stick wobble but was distracted as Stella walked into the central courtyard while stretching—a massive smile was plastered on her face.

"Tree!" Stella was ecstatic as she summoned a light purple flame to her hand, "The truffle worked!"

She then strode over and sat on the bench, clearly no longer mad at him for interrupting her enlightenment. "Senior Lee was right." She began as she leaned back and rested her head on his trunk, "The degradation of my spirit root happened so slowly throughout my life that I didn't notice. I should have been smart enough to take cultivation more slowly and solidify my foundation."

Stella watched the lighter shade of purple flame flickering in her hand with a fondness that was hard to describe. "But the Qi flows so smoothly throughout my body now! And I can already feel my Soul Core growing faster than usual. So reaching the Star Core will be a breeze now!"

Ashlock was also thrilled that the truffle worked for Stella's sake and also for his plans to build up the Ashfallen sect. Since everyone around him was already part of the Blood Lotus sect, he would need to raise new disciples from the mortal population. After seeing what happened with Diana, he also wanted to avoid demonic cultivators.

The spirit root-improving truffle was the key to his sect's future. Now all he needed was for the Redclaws to learn how to read the ancient runic text, and then he could command them to go out and source him new disciples.

Stella's eyes then drifted across the central courtyard and naturally noticed the wobbling stick due to her supernatural senses. "Tree, are you trying to learn telekinesis?"

Ashlock flashed his leaf once to convey yes.

Stella nodded to herself, "That's a great idea. Of all the spatial techniques, I feel telekinesis would be perfect for you..." She trailed off at the end with a slight frown forming on her face. "Say, Tree, you will still need me around even if you could speak, right?"

Ashlock wished Stella would discard her silly insecurity, but it made some sense in retrospect. He was a man-eating tree, and although he had shown intelligence, in her eyes, he was likely still just a very smart tree that lacked human emotions.

He flashed his leaf to show his answer was yes. Now, he was even more determined to learn telekinesis to write a message on the wall without using a corpse's blood. No matter how desensitized a person was to death, Ashlock doubted he could convey his affection through words written in the blood of others on a wall.

Stella seemed very content with his answer and decided to lie back down on the bench, and with a flash of gold, a leatherbound book engraved with the golden text Spatial Techniques of the Azure Clan once again appeared in her hand.

To Ashlock's surprise, she seemed engaged in the book this time, mouthing the words to herself with far less confusion. So, even though her enlightenment had been interrupted, had she gained some greater understanding of those flowery words?

She then reached the chapter about telekinesis and read aloud, likely for his benefit.

"Chapter two—Basic Technique: Telekinesis," Stella said with far more confidence than last time. "Once a spatial cultivator has manifested their ego in the form of a Soul Core under a particular domain, and the heavens have acknowledged the chosen path, they are ready to enforce their will upon the world—and the easiest way to achieve that is through telekinesis."

Ashlock felt silly being told telekinesis was the beginner technique when he had jumped straight to portals.

"Telekinesis is the ability to manipulate an object's relation to the spatial plane." Stella continued, "First, the cultivator must isolate and detach the object from the world by wrapping it in spatial Qi. Only then can the object be manipulated according to the cultivator's will."

The leatherbound book slammed shut as Stella set it aside and found a pebble nestled in the purple grass at her feet.

She picked it up and then sat crossed-legged on the bench. She rotated the pebble in her hand and glared at it as spatial Qi flowed around her.

Ashlock was surprised—the book had given him a vital clue.

Honestly, he had been lost on how to move the stick with his Qi. He hadn't been some astrophysicist back on Earth—just an average guy with good grades. So when faced with the problem of conveying to heaven how exactly he wanted to move a stick with his mind, the first solution he tried was getting his root close enough and shoving a lot of spatial Qi at it.

That had made the stick wobble but not float like he wanted. However, the wobbling had given him a false sense of progress, making him think he was on the correct path.

"I should have just waited and asked Stella to read me the book somehow... everything makes a lot more sense now." Ashlock felt dumb, but to be fair, spatial magic was a lot less intuitive than a more straightforward element like earth.

The book had once again reminded him of the spatial planes' existence, something he had heard about before. His portals utilized the spatial plane by connecting two locations and tearing a rift through the spatial plane to connect them.

Why he hadn't thought that the spatial plane was responsible for more than just portals and could be applied to everything was an oversight on his part. Focusing on his meditation, he channeled spatial Qi through his root near the stick, making an area of dense spatial Qi.

Of course, the stick began to wobble as its spatial anchor in this world was tested as dense spatial Qi whirled around it—Ashlock had thought if he pushed enough spatial Qi at the stick like a gust of air, he would be able to make it float, but what he was supposed to do was wrap the stick in a vacuum seal of spatial Qi to cut it off from this world.

It took some time, as he had to convey his will to the heavens, but with a lot more of a plan in mind, it only took an hour until the stick had been successfully sealed off from the world and with its new anchor linked to the spatial plane that was under Ashlock's control anywhere his body was.

At this point, it felt as easy as dragging the object across a phone screen and watching it move.

"You did it!" Stella's shouted as her eyes snapped open to see a stick flying around the courtyard like a witchless broomstick.

As the stick was coated in his spatial Qi, Ashlock used it to create a portal right in front of it, and before long, he had the stick popping in and out of tiny portals across the central courtyard with pops of air.

He brought the stick up to the wall and tried to mirror writing, but his control over telekinesis was a bit lacking—it felt like trying to write on a whiteboard with a pen duct-taped onto the end of a mop.

However, with some effort, he wrote with the sticks sap, You are family to me. But the writing was sloppy.

Stella was clapping and cheering for him despite his poor control, which he found rather sweet.

He needed a little more practice, so Ashlock thought about what to do.

While he mused to himself, Stella carefully translated his sloppy words, and he saw a tear run down her cheek and over her light smile.

"Thank you, Tree. You are family to me too." She said and ran over and hugged him.

"But your writing is so crappy." She giggled to herself as she broke the hug and wiped the tear, "I almost couldn't translate it."

Ashlock patted her on the shoulder with the stick in an attempt to return the hug.

His control may need some work, but it was the little steps that mattered.

A while passed, and eventually, Stella calmed down. All of her self-doubts seemed to have vanished, which made Ashlock happy. But he still felt frustrated about his lack of control with telekinesis. He looked around for something other than the stick which could allow him to practice.

What about leaves? Ashlock had the idea of turning his leaves into flying blades to kill the birds long ago, and now it could be made a reality.

He could use spatial magic to sever his leaves from his body and use them, but cutting off his body parts to hurl at people seemed counterproductive.

Casting {Eye of the Tree God}, he zoomed away from the mountain and into the forest. Despite being late afternoon, it was mid-July, so summer was full swing. He searched the forest near the stairway to the mountain peak but couldn't find much wildlife.

"Did the sudden surge of demonic trees scare off all the wildlife..." Ashlock wondered as he continued to fail to find anything other than birds.

Deciding to search the forests east of the mountain with all the small villages and where Larry had hunted the now eradicated Winterwrath and Evergreen families.

He passed over a few villages, and much like Darklight city, people were cooped up in their houses and refusing to venture outside.

"Once the Redclaws move in, I will have them return life to normal—well, at least close to normal," Ashlock thought as he continued searching for prey.

Eventually, near the border wall that lacked any guards, Ashlock found a monster. It was a weird insectoid thing that looked like a mantis and stood over eight feet tall.

It seemed to be hunting something—slashing away at a hole in the ground covered with a stone. Ashlock could tell something was alive under the rock through the mycelium network, but his roots weren't quite close enough to describe it.

"Might be a squirrel or something." Ashlock didn't really care. He had found a mid-stage Qi realm beast to practice his flying leaves technique.

Ashlock returned his sights to Red Vine peak, opened a portal in the central courtyard, and used the stick to point at it.

"You want me to go through?" Stella asked, and the stick moved as if nodding. "Alright..." Stella shrugged and made her way through.

She popped through and gasped as she saw the monster standing before the wall. She glanced over her shoulder and saw the eastern side of Red Vine peak. "A monster over the walls? Do you want me to kill it?"

Thankfully Stella didn't rush in and kill the monster, even when it slowly turned as it noticed her. It was rather funny how calm Stella looked, with her relaxed posture while facing a monster that towered over her.

If this mantis existed back on Earth, Stella wouldn't stand a chance even with a gun, but in a world of cultivation, a big body or lethal blade for arms didn't matter when Stella could kill the oversized insect with a Qi-empowered flick.

Ashlock's crackle of spatial power severed hundreds of leaves from a nearby tree by opening and collapsing a portal. Ashlock watched in amusement as the insect backed up toward the wall after detecting his Star Core realm Qi. He wrapped the leaves one by one as quickly as possible—the insect was on the run, but it didn't matter.

It began to scale the wall with its large wings beating wildly, but it was useless—it hadn't even gotten a tenth of the way up the wall before leaves coated in lilac flames shot through the air causing sonic booms and ripping its body apart.

Dark green blood stained the grey stone wall as the insectoid body pinned by leaves slowly fell and crumpled on the forest floor below with a thump.

Feeling proud of himself, Ashlock looked back at Stella, expecting to see her surprise at his new capabilities, but she hadn't even seen it!

She was too busy crouching down near the hole covered with a rock. Ashlock could hear some wailing from within and was just as curious as Stella about what was inside. She pushed the rock to the side and revealed one of the last things Ashlock expected to see so close to the wall and far from civilization.

How the hell did he even get here?