Aimless Ascension

Gale caught the glass before it could drop and sent it back to where he summoned it from.

"How?"

Xiaolin had an incredulous fascination on her face the whole time. She crept closer to the burn marks left behind by the runic scripts on the floor. She could only detect the residual Qi flow there and nothing else.

Obviously, she wasn't even anywhere near detecting any of this. Many higher-ranked practitioners were hopeless about this as well, so she didn't take it too hard.

"What do you think?" Gale asked.

"That seemed a little too simple," Xiaolin said truthfully. "You simply drew that, barely using any Qi. The little wisp of energy wouldn't be enough to even make another person itch. Yet the script sent the glass flying."

"Be careful with your assumptions, dear Disciple," Gale said with a thin smile. "I can kill a person and still be left with energy with the amount I used in the script."

Xiaolin was sceptical hearing that out, and that was probably the first time. Gale had a prominent place in Xiaolin's heart, and she believed him completely on most occasions, but that wasn't the case with the trick just now.

Simply because she had a close intimacy with energy. She could tell how much energy was used at a close inspection. The amount used in the script was really minuscule, about a twentieth of what Gale used to flick the glass in his direction.

"How will you do it?" she couldn't help but ask.

"You want to hear about how your master kills people?" Gale widened his eyes. "That's very deplorable of you, Disciple."

"Master," Xiaolin brooded, knowing her master was joking. She learned two things after her injury about her master. He couldn't endure tears. And the second was cuteness. He couldn't hold himself before something cute.

​ Her master had shown her pictures of Vale when he was only like a kitten, Vale in different cute costumes and poses yesterday. Sometimes with a sword clutched in his mouth, sometimes in a traditional robe, in every one of them, Vale was the cutest thing the world has sent his way. There were pictures of Rong'er riding Vale as well.

With how her master talked about all this, it wasn't difficult for her to figure out he figure out Gale adored cute things.

Well, Xiaolin was cute too. She had been hearing that her whole life; before she cared nothing about that, her focus was absolutely on practising spirit arts, however, that changed after her injury.

Xiaolin found it was easier to get what she wanted from her master by acting cute. It was a terrible weapon against such a brutish man. She had to use it sparingly, in case he grew an immunity to her cuteness.

Gale laughed and gestured to her to pay close attention again. "See this," he said and pointed his finger towards the ironwood wall.

Xiaolin didn't know if she blinked or totally missed it, but a moment later she found a finger-deep hole in the ironwood. She drew closer to the wall and examined it closely. She did find the residual burning smell of Qi there as well.

Her master acted too quickly for her even to see, much less detect. However, she hadn't noticed any high movement of energy.

"You probably won't be able to detect how much Qi I used unlike the other time, but I assure you it's just about the same as the script," Gale informed her.

"Is it really this easy to make a hole in ironwood?" Xiaolin asked.

After laying reinforcement scripts, ironwood was just as tough as iron. Although the house was standing on the land for over fifteen years and much of the scripts faded, the wood was still tough, far tougher than a normal human.

"They are more complicated than they look," Gale said. "Especially the little script. It is way harder than the Qi bullet."

"But they look so easy and effortless for you, master." Xiaolin was yet again in awe. There was still too much for her to learn.

"Effortless is slapping someone to death," Gale snorted. "This takes mental fortitude. And of course, practice. Anyway, should we go back to the script?"

Xiaolin nodded and got back to her seat while Gale drew the same pattern in mid-air. It was almost invisible, and although Xiaolin could smell it, she could barely see it, until Gale diluted it with the blue energy from his third fate lock to make it visible.

"This is a 2^3 Reverse Gravity script," Gale said. "It isn't something an aspiring scriber learns on their first, second or even third steps. I chose this merely because it looks cool on demonstrations. Anyway, disciple, you said this is simple, right?"

Xiaolin nodded and waited to be refuted.

Gale flicked his finger as the blue light in the script spread before her, widening to contain her full sight. Gale literally magnified the script, providing more Qi into them.

"This is the exact 2^3 script just in a magnifying form," Gale said. "Does this look easy to you?"

Xiaolin was awed at the display. From outside what looked like just one strand of Qi before, now appears as 8 as they interlocked together in smaller forms of the same pattern to form a complicated cycling pattern, moving in uniform order in an equilibrium.

"Master, that smaller one had an eight-line structure like this too?"

"Obviously. This is called a 2^3 structure. I'll explain them later," Gale said. He left the bigger version on the air for her study. "This one is almost useless, even though I spent a hundred times more energy on this."

"Why?" Xiaolin perked her brows, eyes still on the revolving energy pattern. Unwittingly, she brought her palm towards it to feel it. But on that very contact with her skin, the script popped like a balloon, except there was no popping sound, just thin blue light flickering like a miniature firework.

She turned to find her master smiling at her, almost smugly. "You said both of their scripts were identical. Then why?"

"Another fact to learn about runes is equilibrium," Gale said, and drew two similar scripts again in the air. One smaller identical to the one he drew on the floor, and another gigantic. "From the outside eye, both of them seemed to be in equilibrium. However, that isn't the case."

Without her notice, the glass was in Gale's palm yet again as he positioned the gigantic script before him and then the smaller one in a straight line.

"This bigger one is too big to be in equilibrium with just 2^3 scripts or just an eight-line structured script," Gale said, and threw the glass at it.

The glass broke through the big script as blue energy dissipated, however, when the glass made contact with the smaller script, a force thrust exactly the direction the glass came from and reverted it back to gale's direction.

"Hence this happens," Gale said, catching the glass back.

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Thanks for reading me making magic out of nothing. Another chapter on explaining runes.

Thank you Reawakening for the high praise in the review.

We prolly won't make it to the 1000 unlock this month. Next month then . . .