Chương 19: The Plan

After a week of sitting down and learning to speak and understand the language with an actual teacher, Blick was becoming confident in his understanding. After two weeks he was growing bored. Learning was great but he had gone from a very active life of hunting and preparing for the next hurdle to sitting and being fed. Complaining to Terran one day led to him being given an evening training session with master Collin, the capital guard trainer. When the stocky man entered the training room he paused to stare.

"When they told me I would have to keep quiet about this task, I had no idea they meant it was because you're not human. Holy shit. You're not human. What's your cultivation stage?"

"Blick at mist. Self taught. What next?" Blick was happy to be able to understand and respond but still disappointed in his lack of knowledge that everyone here seemed to hold. Master Collin raised his eyebrows and clapped his hands together one time with excitement.

"You absorbed enough to accidentally create your core, not unusual but that means you don't know how to open your meridians right?" Blick blinked a couple of times, processing the fast speech, before explaining.

"Blick doesn't know accidentally, meridians are opening in hands and feet? How open what's already open?"

"Oh you haven't even tried! This is actually way better than I thought. If you have no idea that means you have no bad habits or biased against certain techniques. What's your pain tolerance? The more you can handle, the faster this will go." Blick was already getting lost. Why do people here talk so fast. He just shook his head at Terran who had sat down near the side of the room. Terran stood and walked closer to abbreviate the word salad into digestible chunks.

"He knows nothing on the subject and he has a relatively high pain tolerance. I watched him grab a hot pan a few times with less than a wince when I would have screamed. I'm nothing special so he may not be unique in his strength, but his skin is more dense and his muscles more compact. He's stronger than the average male even while he's smaller. He has grown an inch or more in the last 2 months. So we believe he's not yet an adult. Best answer…

we don't know, but as long as I'm around he seems to trust those who I tell him to." Collin was growing more fascinated by the minute.

"Alright then, my new favorite student. We can start today with basics on cultivation, and over the next week progress into actually opening meridians and some weapons skills. Preferred weapon?" This question stumped everyone. With a shrug Terran looked at Blick and pointed to a weapon rack in the corner. Walking over Blick found an assortment of weapons. He did not like these things that slashed. Preferring to follow his father's path with a big stick he found the only non bladed weapon on the rack.

"Ah a quarter staff, good solid reliable weapon. Downside is facing true armored individuals. Makes up for damage with utility and speed. If he's as strong as you claim I will have one of the heavier versions brought up for training. Most new recruits cannot handle anything heavier than this to learn with. We can make this work. When you go to bed each day I need you to help him focus on cultivating. He needs to start condensing his mist as much as he can while he is here.

Improving is exponential so the more he does before he's an adult, the further he will progress before he reaches old age. As we don't know his life expectancy we just have to guess it's close to our own." Turning to Blick with a smile he offers a handshake and finishes with, "welcome to the academy Blick, I look forward to training you." Blick smiled at the wince his new trainer gave when he shook hands. With an apologetic shoulder pat he stepped to the side and started swinging the staff around.

And Collin quickly started correcting his abysmal form with a lot of "what the fuck are you doing" "no stop that" "oh lord please don't…" Terran chuckled not knowing the first thing about teaching fighting styles, but knowing this would be the most entertaining part of his days.

"Lord Hesties, we have an idea of where this Blick came from." Bowing at the waist, a fist over his heart, the scout captain reported his best guess. Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

"Go on, what do you think." Trying to hide his own excitement after over a month of waiting patiently.

"We believe there is to be a singular tree, within a mile of the Zipan, on our side, with a gate."

"What do you mean a tree with a gate?"

"According to Blick there is a magical gate, not his words but it's the only thing that makes sense. He described runes forming an arch and a void between them. We have similar run craft but nobody ever considered making a gate in a tree, let alone our gate can only travel around a mile. Not very useful for the amount of effort our specialized crafters have to dedicate to a project like it."

"You don't think this gate connects on our world do you."

"Not likely my lord. From the descriptions I seems he comes from a much more hostile world with beasts much more powerful than our own. He found our jungle to be a vacation when he was about knee high." This promoted a concerned look from the lord, and the scout captain returned a nod with a very serious face.

"Do we have a close enough description to get your teams started?"

"Of course sir, he gave us an estimate in how many days travel up river before a huge cliff. We think we found a similar location in the old maps. It's going to be a journey though. Estimated six months travel time with a full company. We couldn't do that long of a scout mission without the backup personnel either. Our scouts can survive alone in the wood for a week or two, but much longer than that and they get lost or sick from only eating meats and not enough sleep."

The lord sat back on his chair and tapped the armrest in consideration. Pausing with thought he asked, "would you be willing to bring the creature along?" Hesitation clear on his face the scout captain responded, "I'm not sure sir. I don't know enough about him personally to make a decision like that. If we do find the gate, what would stop him from just leaving and crossing into it as we try to establish a base of operations?"

"Fair point. I will think on it. In the mean time I need your men to rest up and begin packing. Six months of mission is a lot to plan for so have them take leave and spend a week or two how they see fit. We will reconvene in one month. I should have your mission outlined and budgeted by then. Thank you Captain. You may go."

Learning a new skill had kept Blick quite distracted over the last month or so. Time flies when you're being productive. He had developed his speech to the point he held conversations and didn't need Terran to filter for him. With less and less to do, his best friend in the capital would eventually move out of their shared arrangement and find his own way.

This potential future made Blick happy to see his friend look so positive at his own future, and also sad to know he would soon be moving away from this solid reliable person. His life had been so full of changes and this would be more difficult but still a good thing. Progress meant he didn't need to rely on someone else as much. Terran didn't intend to travel and see new things either. As much as they got along, they didn't share goals in life. That was most prevalent during Blicks physical training sessions.

Blick thrived in the fast pace of combat training. He enjoyed moving around and challenging himself, while Terran preferred to relax. In this life of exploration and wonder… people and places were all temporary. And for Blick, that was an acceptable part of life. With a nod and grunt of acceptance he closed his eyes and focused on the most painful thing he had been doing.

Even during some of those lectures from the annoying older man who taught him words and society standards, Blick would sometimes close his eyes and circulate his mana through his meridian in an effort to force them open. Collin had explained the process and it had taken many days to figure it out. True to the description, the more he pushed, the more painful it would be, but the faster they would open. Only being able to focus on one meridian at a time made the whole thing tedious and slow.

Without enough mana condensed inside his core he couldn't force more than one at a time even if he wanted to. Not enough pressure. According to his instructor, Blick had been lucky to have access to daily mana dense foods in the jungle. Most people in society had normal foods and almost no access to mana resources unless they decided to live way out on their own. The village he had run into had even been more advanced than most with cultivation simply by being closer to mana rich animals and plants.

Something I discovered about the Zipan river cause more mana to soak into the local environment. The area was too far and too harsh to build real cities in. Blick made the connection that it was as much these people's cultural norms as environmental struggles keeping them from the clearly better location. But he knew he was biased because most of the jungle environment didn't bother him.

Dense fur kept him warm, kept some of the pests off him, and his thicker skin kept most of the scrapes and thorns from causing minor wounds needing healing or causing infections. As it turns out, he was just built for that environment. Downsides that he was explained included a desert region to the east of the kingdom. It was hard for Blick to imagine sand at all. Sounded like a lighter color dirt that didn't hold water.

Strange enough but according to the lecture it was hot beyond belief and hardly any plants survived it. Not a place for Blick. And being who he is, Blick was actually happy when they asked him to show them the way to home hole. Even if he didn't know the exact spot they had maps. He had never seen the area from above, but after a week of explaining and retracing his route he could get them close.

This meant his time in the capital was coming to an end, but it also meant he was headed on another adventure, this time with allies and a clear goal. Maybe even the chance to find his people again.