The Ogre Strength Fairy and the Eldest 'Son' Chapter 424 - My Methods Are Harsh, But Effect-*Stomach Nois

The illusory blueprints floating around Elua’s ditation space looked like the nonsensical, fevered dreams of an abstract expressionist painter. Dozens of translucent overlays showed the so far tested energy mapping she’d done.

Each one of them was actually itself hundreds of snapshots of a different attempt at letting the energy settle on its own, a different configuration of an attempt to control it, and altogether different failures or partial successes. Articulated with a varied intensity mint glow where things were good and darkening violet where things were bad.

They flickered as semi-randomized ’slices’ traded the information between them in search of things too complex to judge by focusing on the single failure or success. Because sotis what worked for the start only required a small variation up the pathway to fail worse later on.

Two of the most recent blueprints hovered as progress examples. The difference between them was subtle - a slightly angular rerouting near her left shoulder led to a smoother flow through her core organs and a reduction in the stuttering bottleneck at her lower extremities that had been plaguing her lower back for the past week.

"Efficiency improved by... maybe five percent. Shoulder mobility now increased at full energy circulation, but at the cost of a pressure rise in the left arm. I guess that’s my next sticky issue."

Her flat toned voice spoke out like docuntation to the empty air, as if presenting her findings to a colleague. Ripping a third specific blueprint out of the whole mix - iteration thirty-one - she studied this early attempt that had seed promising... until it catastrophically failed during a simple reaching motion that pinched a nerve.

For most, cultivation started fairly natural and was then nudged into more ’perfection’ as ti and quality of understanding rolled along. Currently, Elua felt like the raw opposite of a genius... she was actually highly constrained by all of her ’instinctive’ knowledge of what perfection was like.

"Every attempt to replicate my previous circulation patterns, even heavily modified ones, creates cascading failures in critical organs and... the brain hormone response is especially... touchy."

She made careful annotations on floating, not-really-there charts. Tracking asurable variables using a suite of spiritual techniques - such as energy density homogenization ratios, pathway diaters and lengths between forks, flow rates and attritive loss.

As well as dozens of other factors that would have made Continental Guild researchers weep with envy. To be able to obtain such an analysis of a cultivator’s body was beyond all but the most specialized processes... and never to the level of detail that the ancient cultivator had refined them..

As ever, this was her hard at work. thodical and obsessive. Five thousand years had taught her that breakthrough monts in any field were rarely as random as they appeared to so. Often, they were built on foundations that others did not acknowledge.

’The genius Fire Elent user may know instinctively what the temperature of the fire is. May even be able to tell by sight when their food is cooked. But that doesn’t an they understand what is edible without learning it, what sorts of recipes are good to use... they look better on the backs of the hard work that had been done around them.’

And Elua was also well aware that those sorts could go ignored, underutilized, or perish before their aberrant nature was even able to have a storied end. Sotis that was due to the hubris of finding such ease in the field with which they were a savant in. Just like she had been handling things.

"I am not brilliant enough to imdiately solve this through insight, epiphany, or lucky guesses. But I am stubborn enough. To test every possible variation until I can at least hold my head high... instead of low. Even if I am looking weak to others, I should never let myself actually be so!"

mory crystals - crude ones she’d crafted from the Exclave’s abundant materials - held all of these recordings. Protecting the spirit fragnts that she slivered off of herself and inserted into the rituals carved inside. Preventing the risk of any contamination as she subjected herself to the tests that could sotis fluctuate her emotions.

With them, she could replay the exact feeling of every sensation and every internal energy fluctuation if needed. And she did... sotis with many of them all at once that followed similar structure - because the visual-form confirmation was not quite all that ’good’ at translating back to internal control.

Not as much as the feelings inside of herself were, judging what felt correct and what felt wrong. She was growing close to a baseline establishnt that she could begin to work even more ’kinks’ out of. But she was aware there were still significant gaps in emotional regulation and stress response.

This too had been charted in great spiritual detail. The spikes of frustration that had disrupted her careful work. The valleys of despair that made her want to quit entirely and just go back ho. The rare flat peaks where everything seed to click into place for precious minutes and she thought she might have done it - before falling apart again.

Hours went by for the brunette, inside the rotating constellation. Looking for the pattern of patterns, all visible trends that could be used to further aim the next set of experints that had already eaten through two-thirds of the consumable material she prepared. By the end, she allowed herself to smile.

"Soon, I’ll be able to just eat things that taste... okay. Though I’m starting to regret what I told Sevra about her mories."

After all, the sludge crawling through her insides felt like sothing that should indeed be locked away and forgotten. Her head tilted as the smile increased into a more vicious smirk.

"Actually, I should keep so of this stuff on hand when I go back. It would make excellent punishnt for anyone that has inconvenienced my beloved. I’ll just need to find a way to put it in a nice, tasty, scent blocking shell."

⟠ ⟠ ⟠

When Elua er Goltbred woke up the next morning, the scent of death was in the air. One different from the acrid scent of her veritable witch’s brew. Moreover, it was not organic in the way of plant matter... but instead in the way of a fresh corpse.

Following her nose led her to the outer periter of her defenses, where a massive form lay crumpled past the carved barriers. The creature was beautiful in its way - easily twelve feet from long beak to tail, with leathery wings that spanned twice that when she carefully spread one to examine it.

"Well, that’s convenient."

The beast looked like an experint with combining the features of avian and reptile- or so missing link in between. Sleek feathers covered its body in deep dark blues and blacks, while its wings instead bore a thick mbranous structure more bat-like than avian. Altogether, it was sothing she could probably claim to co across before.

Exploring the world and other worlds for so long tended to make most creatures bleed together into their categorizations after a while. The differences in what made them a ’unique species’ were often so banal that it eventually boiled down into whether they could be eaten or were eaters of you.

Whether they had reasonable uses if befriended or turned into livestock... Aggressive, passive, there were certainly things that could be learned, if a cultivator found the ti to waste. Of course, the feather tips on this one were one of those such matters.

When she extended her spiritual senses toward it again, it seed to slide off and scatter. She nodded to herself, realizing it was no wonder she couldn’t tell what she was even approaching before she got there. Such a feature would make it nearly undetectable to spiritual perception during its nocturnal hunts.

"I wasn’t sure I would be able to get any of this in my world. A sha you tried to land where you shouldn’t. I guess scattering spirit was not exactly an evolutionary benefit this ti, hm?"

Her sigil defense would have been sending warnings for the creature not to approach, before it was wrapped in a cocoon of an asphyxiant it couldn’t escape. Ozone was quite deadly and painful to a creature that inhaled it. However, it’s unlucky loss was her gain.

She rolled up imaginary sleeves, no need to bother actually making illusions of them with no one else around, and got to work. Normally the at would need to be processed quickly in the Exclave’s type of climate, but her carved protections had kept it practically vacuum sealed and temperature regulated to refrigerated levels.

"Preserved corpses often have more use than decayed ones, even beyond eating. The oxidation the wings would have endured should be just enough..."

She rubbed the mostly undamaged mbrane with a bit of a pleased feeling. Sterilized, but still hydrated... she would later freeze-dry the sections in preparation for tanning. The ice crystals inside, once frozen, could be sublimated and maneuvered out of the fibers as water vapor.

"But I can work on that later. I haven’t had at in... well, weeks."

An hour later, after using jets of steam to loosen every follicle and pluck each feather... she had choice cuts of at set up in a marinade of local herbs she’d gathered from around the Exclave. The prospect of eating sothing that actually tasted good rather than her awful supplent made her stomach constantly rumble with anticipation.

’I know the real prize is the hide. I can make another outfit in my spare ti while practicing energy control in motion. But food! Qat, I love you so much, but when I first get back... if you aren’t imdiately close enough for to sense with my spirit...’

"I might go to a spicy at stall first... I’m sorry..."