With no answers, Lind focused instead on the world he was in. His body was quickly acclimating to his control, even if it felt weird when he focused on it.
He learned that in the normal world, or maybe the cultivation world as he should call it, he would have been a cohesive energy form. He may have retained the image of his body but he would have had little to no corporeal effect for a few centuries.
The loss of the body was not small to an Immortal. They could still invoke and absorb Qi but they could not progress. They would be stuck at maybe half the power they once wielded.
He was still a Radiant Tier in one sense but he might only be able to use Sliver Tier power.
Yet, in the spirit world, he was at his peak! He had full access to all his Laws and Qi like before. The old woman explained it as he existed as a compatible life form in his current state.
He also confird his recovery was unusual. His mastery of Celestial Qi had suddenly beco a boon he had never expected! He had wanted to understand the elents and pushed his boundaries thanks to his harmony, but the benefit in the spirit world was beyond any benefit he ever dread of.
The world, such as that word could be applied, never stayed still. Even the composition of the elents never settled but it was not without patterns.
He noticed that while there were no seasons, there were shifts in existence that were parallel to it.
The formations of mountains or other rocky terrain corresponded to winter, forests and grassy fields were sumr. Storms of rain and tornadoes were spring. Icy squalls were the fall.
He had almost assigned it winter but saw the transition from forest to stone in those storms.
Spring and fall were periods of transition while sumr and winter were more the balance of the scales.
There was, however, no damned pattern to where things appeared. He could be walking through a desert and then find himself in an ice storm with a single step!
He also found the golden sky was not as empty as he had expected. Eddies of elents were always moving and colliding just outside his normal eyesight.
His Talents were the most shocking thing to keep working. If he focused, his Law Eyes and Law Touch worked just fine!
He was left to his own devices and the first thing he had to master was flying.
With his body, he had both a cultivation thod and his draconic instincts but now that he was a soul, it seed he had to start again. Walking ca to him instinctively but flying did not.
There was no longer a body to act as a dium for what he wanted to do and he had to grasp the concepts directly. It was an enlightening experience!
He had taken flight for granted most of his life. He got to fly in the World Realm due to being a dragon soul. It was a liberating experience but he had not fully grasped it. He simply let his body do what it did best.
Later, when he beca a Heaven Realm and Immortal Realm, flight beca an option of a thod. Manipulating air, gravity, or any manner of phenona was an option at that point. It was all about efficiency.
Now, he had no restriction but his imagination and he had to simply apply in the chaotic world he was in.
There was no gravity, strictly speaking, to overco but there were various forces shifting at all tis. Strong current, shift in gravity direction, and the occasional natural disaster just showing up out of the blue were normal there.
He found the Celestial Qi was essential to his grasping the spirit world. It also gave him clues.
The spirits did not avoid him exactly but his impression was one of trepidation and worry where it concerned his presence. They were vastly more powerful than him but they still seed afraid for so reason.
He could not get answers from his guide. Sothing about personal rules they had regarding any visitors but her face had revealed enough.
One of the living souls that ca to the spirit world had done sothing grave.
He pushed it aside as he tried to grasp the imdiate vicinity around him.
An oddity he had noticed was wherever he moved, the world stabilized. It was like his very existence forced it to conform to his will. He had awakened on a pure white stone slab but now he was on a moderate white platform.
The color was not a concern more than the material. He could not rate it! It was not a question of new senses as a soul but the fact the quality was not steady at any ti at all!
One mont, it was Law Grade, the next it was grade 2 at best!
He tried to understand his impact on the world but it only made his head hurt. He still did not understand how that worked!
It might be a phantom pain like when soone was missing a limb but still felt sensations.
He pushed it all aside as he observed the world. Ti was not a concept there as there were no day and night cycles. There were no steady transformations to show the passage of ti either.
It was all relative and thus he slowly explored the world and flight at the sa ti.
The rules had to exist because the spirits said they lived under them so he could damn well fly!
If the rules were the sa then he could damn well fly!
Natural and demonic Qi no longer held the answer for him. It was Celestial Qi or nothing.
He had been studying it and using it in his weaving for millenia now but he still did not truly grasp the nuance of it outside of that. Elixirs and his other creations were all instinct with trial and error mixed in.
He now truly began to grasp how damned profound Celestial Qi was. Its operating principles had not changed but the environnt had.
He had to manipulate a chaotically shifting landscape to incorporate its power into his own.
It was a fascinating and painful experience. His senses were not ant to deal with the ever changing chaos of the spirit world.
Still, he found it very useful to comprehend Celestial Qi. It confird for him that Celestial Qi was the source Qi. It clearly was the foundation for all that made up the many worlds and transford with interactions of matter and energy.
Assuming there was not simply a void since even Arts and conjurings still obeyed the basic principle of matter and energy cannot be destroyed or created, only converted, then it was the original interaction of Celestial Qi with the world that made the myriad realms!
It was a fantastic theory but had many holes still.
The thing he was trying to grasp was the current world around him.
"You are strange." A voice suddenly broke his contemplation as he looked up to find a small child looking at him from above. She was not a fixed age but definitely stayed in a range of childlike growth. No more than a pre-teen and no smaller than a toddler.
Her hair was red, green, and all colors without pause or purity. Her face, however, was relatively stable. Was she a young spirit? Was she even a she?
There were no sexes exactly although so spirits showed preferences. It was only in voice and attitude from what he could tell.
So did this spirit embody the pure curiosity of a child?
"Why am I strange?" Greetings were aningless to the spirits as they could read him like a book, literally. So he skipped past it and reacted to her question.
"You don't try to bend the world to you like the others. You don't try to wring out secrets from us. Others did. The bad one did." Lind was tempted to ask but refrained.
"I like to think individuals vary. No one is completely innocent and no one is completely guilty but sowhere in between. I have made plenty of mistakes that led to regrets." The liquid eyes shifted from dark to pale as she got closer to him.
Her robes were hard to grasp as they nearly blended in perfectly to the golden and silver sky.
"I know! You were so an to my little girl!" Shock flooded him at those words. Surely–Surely not, right? A smile crossed her face suddenly and her resemblance to Annabelle shook him!
"Don't confuse him. He is riddled with that guilt enough." The old woman suddenly appeared again. He whipped his head around with a question plain as day on his face.
The wrinkled face smiled wide at him.
"What is their race called, Lind Frey?" His eyes widened in shock!
"Wait, does that an the manifested beasts–?" The spirits both nodded.
"They co from here, but while the beasts could be said to be summoned by their conditions, the aether children are purely from us and the Qi. Do not let the guilt weigh you down boy. You realized your mistake and were willing to accept the consequences. That is enough for us." Lind swallowed nervously.
Annabelle's parents! An entire world of parents!
A cold sweat spread as he recalled the other aether children he had not had such great interactions with. Did that not an an entire race was his in-laws?!!!
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