The Ogre Strength Fairy and the Eldest 'Son'-Chapter 536 - Little Bonds & Big Behaviors Held By More Than Surface Tension
The second jade flask was noticeably lighter with an asterisk pattern, though they looked to be the same size outside and inside to the Water cultivator. She knew this weight difference was because the contents inside were less viscous... both by trying to swirl it around with her Element control and with a manual swish in a circle.
"Whew, strong."
"Don’t drink that."
"I wasn’t going to!"
On the recipe card, it had listed the solution as a drier-popping carrier liquid that was significantly composed of ethanol - intended to be used with the third of the sintered stone gem artifacts. Similar in outward size to the other two, but with a different sort of stopper system.
Where the first two had a bit wider single pieces of the petrified wood, the third had a whole bouquet of smaller stoppers that plugged the honeycomb of tubes. Inside each were additives - aromatics, essential oils, raw alcohol, vinegar concentrate, and other liquids that usually only needed a drop or two added to a surface or significant amount of water for an ample effect.
Most were also toxic if ingested or mixed at severe quantities, but Elua trusted her disciple to follow the math she’d written down and not to eyeball it like a bad baker. The first that Nohre tried removing - with a floral motif symbol - taught her that the tops were full on droppers, with differences in design meant for pulling up the liquids intended to be stored.
It also taught her that the woman couldn’t produce everything on her own, here. The recipe for the essential oil, made from a lavender plant on the continent because the Exclave lacked any sort of nice smelling flower... and a solubilizer extracted from the seeds of a different but common enough plant in the southern coastline farmed for slow-burning substance quite similar to castor oil, was one that the heiress would have to promise to produce alongside her in the future.
’I suppose I could have made something like that from the petrochemicals I had been separating. But honestly, the ethylene gas I would use for making any of the detergent and surfactant components I know would be worth it... scares me.’
The brunette still floating out on the water, as her darker-haired friend read and bravely sniffed at each liquid, already had it in her head once to deforest the continent because of this place’s trees. And while she had many, many other terrifying methods to chemically ruin flora if she wanted to be the least bit creative with her ancient knowledge stolen from some of the cosmos’s best chemists, the fact that she was hesitant the most *here* said a lot.
The speed at which drifting a controlled cloud of ethylene over some of the spiral stalk flowers had led them to just completely shed and wilt their leaves in a ’willing’ hormonal reaction... was as disturbing to her as the rapid Decay of her composting tool experiment. It truly made her slightly terrified of the Pheromone cultivator she was raising up as well, considering the comparison there was a ’suggestion’ implanted through biochemical means.
A suggestion which felt a lot like *asking* the plants to die for her in a way that was not anything like breaking a will, but instead just taking advantage of an inability to refuse. There was no sport in that for the little Ogre, as her spiritualist-first past had already learned viscerally to avoid the ’shortcuts’ of such easy manipulation unless her life or that of her beloved’s was on the line.
She’d learned that the physical laws that governed the equal pushback in the cosmos, like how the extra-dimensional layer of essence also had its own laws of conceptual saturation and a sort of ’thermodynamics’, actually had a spiritual counterpart... and the ’damage’ it did in an accumulation of unrefined, chaotic blips of noise was added to her spirit whenever she broke the ’rule’ of hers.
’Attempting to equalize effort with gain... or at least put in unnecessarily high effort for even a small gain, burned off the disorder introduced on its own. A simple enough protocol to follow along the path, in order to avoid nearly the same sort of burst of unfathomable spiritual energy that accompanies a death - as the man watching us from afar once struck me with and caused us to be here.’
Rather than someone just dying in the area as their existence shattered to pieces, Madrigil’s fractured spirit being *aimed* her way was closer to knowingly killing someone without proper barriers of protection prepared. This same quirk of a reason is what *sometimes* kept every Defier from massacring everyone around.
Occasionally the situation was such that one of them thought of a novel way that made it especially dangerous for them and therefore possessed of ’merit’ if it made their long path more interesting. Other times, one also just didn’t mind the hit they’d take to their spiritual energy if it meant clearing some other goal. Boredom was a real problem for long lived beings.
Uvraneht herself had caused some collateral damage while furthering her own survival... or avenging the death of a partner. Which is how she had learned the ways to shield herself from the backlash, especially after the betrayal of the one who had killed the former version of Leysah. Boredom and seeking challenge that furthered growth was also what kept ancient cultivators always fighting each other in between Descents.
And part of the purpose of the Descent and the Three Trials.
"I’m choosing to believe that reading every bit of those is just the thoroughness I instilled and not any sort of reluctance."
"Master, there is a lot of math here and I do not have all of your mental tricks yet. I do not think my brain and spirit works close enough to yours to copy all of them into memory in less than a minute."
"Probably not. Recipes work best by combining them with the process of making it, otherwise they are just words and numbers together and not a true experience. Which is why I thought you were on the right path by trying things a bit ago."
"You handed me a strange staff with moving parts, hollow insides, and... very pretty vessels, thank you. Reading seemed wise since you seem disinclined to give me explanations directly in person."
Elua swam to shore and sat on the dark sands. Patient in the way that only manifested around the people she had decided to teach - which was to say, not very patient at all, but aware that interfering too early defeated the whole purpose of letting them succeed or fail on their own to forge their spirit.
In that regard, she also still considered herself Qat’s teacher... but was never going to say out loud any time soon after returning, that staying away these years was ’for the better’ for the blonde swordswoman herself. Though she was sure her ’fortress’ may have already thought the same, some things just didn’t need to be poked at!
Unlike the bead on the staff, which Nohre pushed forward to contract the braided silver wires toward the hoop interior and expand the size of the central ring. The mechanism leading from the reservoir, feeding from a manifold, was designed as a capillary system that she had felt immediately as a Water wielder.
The liquid didn’t just sit inside the hollow handle, it crept along the channels of threaded wire. Drawn by surface tension and assisted by the geometry Elua had milled into the interior, lowering the amount of control needed to either slow the liquid creep to a halt - or push it out faster until the wires wept with the soapy film, manually expanding it out over the nearly two and a half foot wide new circle at the center.
’She also could have flushed out a lot of the liquid at once - letting the soap film complete on its own by the material composition and physics alone... instead of using it like a fine control exercise! Maybe I will cheat her growth and teach her that method later. Not *everything* has to always be harder~’
Nohre drew the wand through the air at a steady pace and the air pushed at the plane of stretched bubble solution, shimmering with the faint cloudy opalescence of the mica. It held for about five feet before she curled her arm too sharply and the shape distended into a giant floating orb that drifted on the breeze. Walls thick enough that even when she brushed her hand against it, the structure just *bounced*.
"Hm. It’s hard to control."
She nudged the bubble sideways with only a flex of her essence field’s control and it sluggishly responded. The glycerin and fatty oils were working exactly as described, creating a structural resilience that common soap could never achieve. But it meant that the Water content was set in an ’almost’ crystalline lattice pattern with *impurities* she had no direct control of in between...
Luckily she’d had some experience with briny sea water starting years ago, after Elua’s wedding. The dedicated cultivator still practiced with adding various salts and other things into suspension and that had somewhat prepared her for situations like this, where other substances were emulsified along with her Element.
A child could chase these in wonder, she realized. A crowd of refugees could watch them drift through a ruined town square in the aftermath of the Descent, among the other things the Clearer Skies intended to bring to them, and for just a few minutes think about something other than what they’d lost. The tool was meant to allow her to split her attention between the Guild roles of performer and healer, Nohre easily assumed.
"It’s like trying to move tea instead of water."
"You’re still moving your tea wrong, then. You should be pulling as pure water as you can to the edges before letting the fluid flow against your containment."
"Okay, I do that already. It was just a bad analogy, okay?"
"You said okay twice. Am I making you nervous?"
She produced three more of the larger bubbles instead of answering the tease, mostly achieving better and bigger results while trying to figure out all the little tricks to sustaining the shape in motion. Careful pulses of her Element helped make up for a slight lack in physical technique alone. Of course, she also practiced sending a stream from the jade container in order to load the cultivator tool without using her hands.
Watching the disciple experiment was a small joy of its own to El. It wasn’t that the others she taught currently had no mind to do so, but this once young girl - and now young woman - had more of a bolstering elasticity to her spirit that actually reminded her quite a bit of the soap she played with. Synergy as an Astralism was a lot like Mend in some ways, despite it not being about healing the spirit.
Rather, it bolstered the effect of an allied cultivator’s own unique ability and made her very in tune to the people she connected with because of it. Not to the level of an Empath who almost learned the inner emotions of those nearby for ’free’. Or a Telepath who opened a bridge between the two.
But certainly enough that the reincarnator had caught little tugs here and there from the antler wearing healer, sneaking ’peeks’ at the validation or disapproval which the Goltbred wouldn’t voice out loud to her practice... and would have hidden immediately behind layers of barriers, diversions, and psychic traps if those looks were done with any ’malice’ or trickery.
Instead of just the sixth sense’s equivalent of looking back for desired guidance.
"You should use that blue gel on the next one, little water deer."
"I’m taller than you. I doubt you’re going to grow anymore, either, so I’m always going to be taller."
"I speak of little in terms of experience and achievement, not stature. You should know this by now."
"I do. But seeing the look on your face when I brought up your height was worth it."
For a small moment, El regretted giving any gift to the little upstart! But then... she remembered that she was perfect as she was! This body she’d grown into was exactly the one the restrained young Qat had ’picked’... minus the hair length, which she’d yet to cut all the way back to her shoulders again.
She also remembered something else that evened out her mood incredibly as she readied herself to bite back like the ’little snake’ some thought she could be.
"You know, I seem to remember a time when you asked me if men liked women that were shorter than them. You sincerely tried lowering your center of gravity whenever you were next to Fusand for a whole week after that conversation - and he asked me on the very first day what sort of strange training I was putting you through."
"...He did?"
"He did. You want to know what I told him? It was a spiritual training to not trust me if I seem to be giving you an answer you already held in your assumption. He nodded and walked away, never telling you to stop."
"M-Master!"
Seeing that her green eyed friend could still blush and stomp her foot into the ground even after five years had gone by, the mischievous eldest daughter cackled loudly. In a style that wasn’t cute at all, she felt... but knew her beloved Qatrand would find a way to be endeared, regardless.
