Looking up at the pale white star in the sky, I sat on top of a mountain taking a break, enjoying some reconstituted paste and water. I had lost track of how long I had been traveling on foot, it had been years by now. The Calm Ocean had been difficult to cross on the raft, but it was something I had managed to accomplish. With my sword and what little energy I had, it was easy to cut and hollow a large chunk of stone. The currents then carried me across and none of the large water beasts had bothered me. It was surprisingly anti-climactic. After that came some tundra, or stunted grasslands with small shrubs. The white light in the sky had been less at the horizon and moving directly above me in very small increments as I traveled. Eyeballing the white light in the sky, I estimated that it had shifted from around 10 degrees to around 12 degrees. If it was directly over the center of this place, that meant I had a long way to go. I had kept my mind trying to work out the math as I traveled. But it wasn’t as simple as each degree being a percentage. As I traveled the angle would change more rapidly. Since I wasn’t traveling along a circle, but a straight line I had to start digging out my math skills I hadn’t used in a very long time. Who would have thought that geometry could be interesting, but there was nothing else to do while traveling. There were only small bugs and worms as land creatures. Nothing in small bodies of water either. I had been expecting a larger food chain, but the outer portions of this place appeared to be devoid in life. The further I went towards the center of this bubble, the more life seemed to thrive. My guess it had something to do with the atmosphere. While I still needed to breathe, I could survive fairly harsh conditions. I had no expertise in working out the exact composition of air that I was breathing. I had lived far too long in the Forever City and traveling, that it was hard to remember what regular air was like. As long as I wasn’t choking to death that I hadn’t really paid attention. I didn’t want toxic yellow clouds ever again. Yang Heng might have loved the Forever City, but he grew up in a literal gilded tower. I had seen the outskirts of that massive place, and it was hell. My current goal was trying to figure out how long the trip would take to keep my mind occupied, while trying to conserve what little energy I was able to draw in. I was traveling along a chord, which was a geometrical term for a straight line between two points of a circle that did not pass through the center. The total length of the chord could be worked out with the Pythagorean Theorem, ‘a’ squared plus ‘b’ squared, equals ‘c’ squared. I needed half the chord length, so I didn’t multiply things by two. The length needed to reach the center was the square root of the distance from my starting location to the white star minus the distance from directly beneath it to the white star. Unfortunately, I had no good way to guess at these measurements. Anything I came up with could be wildly off. That was the problem with such guesstimates. That left trying to work out the distance based on the angle. I had to really dig into my memories to remember this, which was radius times the sine of half the angle. The sine was opposite, divided by the hypotenuse. Unlike the other problems I had faced, I had no idea what to do now. Waiting wasn’t palatable, but I would also quickly lose any sense of direction. I also had no idea how long the storm would last. It could be days, months, years even. I doubted it would go on for that long, but I hadn’t run into a storm since I had started traveling. I picked the direction I had been traveling before and set off across the top of the snow. I would travel until I got tired again. It was what I had been doing and it seemed to work well enough. I went up the mountain and then heading down was a lot of fun. I didn’t leap like before, I just pulled out two pieces of wood to use as skis and slid down the mountain, building up quite a bit of speed. I was able to get quite a distance across a flatter section before coming to a stop. The blizzard finally stopped a couple days after it started. Everything was white, but it was simple enough for me to run across the top of the snow. I left huge billows of snow and depressions in my wake, but I didn’t sink if I moved fast enough. While I could run on water for a short distance, it was too dangerous if I got tired and didn’t have a place to rest. The super storm was just another minor event on my journey to the center of this place. With how much travel time it was taking, it was a joke in my mind, that it would be faster to start up a civilization to reach the center of this place, rather than trying to travel on my own. Perhaps this place was a prison, and there was a super being trapped here. Perhaps we would be able to make a trade. Maybe other cultivators got stuck here in the past and started up some sort of civilization somewhere near the center of this place. It would be hard for regular people to survive and there was no energy, but I was hopeful there would be something. If I was truly trapped here, then my only hope was to try and return to the hover craft and use Yang Heng as an energy source. It would be incredibly hard to advance my cultivation and survive, but it was the only option I could think of. When I reached the next large body of water, I paused to consider my options. I hadn’t bothered fighting the large sea creatures under the surface. I hadn’t sensed any energy from them, but it was tempting to see if they had anything valuable. But it was too big a risk. I got out my rock boat. It was basically a rowboat, made out of rock. I had to be careful with it, since it couldn’t withstand my full strength. The important part was that it floated. I tossed it in the water and got out my stone oar and began rowing across the body of water. It was salty, so an ocean. Over the years I had considered trying to make an actual glider and flying long distances. The problem would be speed. I would have to lose altitude to gain speed and even then, it would be about as fast as my running. I only went slower to move around the occasional large obstacle and travel across water. There was no faster way for me to travel. Even my knowledge of arrays and formations was only enough to troubleshoot them and do basic tasks. In this no energy environment, that knowledge was even more useless. The hovercraft was the most efficient flying vehicle possible in terms of energy usage. The Forever City had a fully built out cultivation tech tree. If the hovercraft didn’t work, anything with energy had no chance. Creating anything from technology wasn’t going to happen. I couldn’t even remember sine functions that well. The possibility of me building up any kind of infrastructure or technology using raw materials was less than nothing. The necessary material science and other knowledge that wasn’t tied in to cultivation and energy just wasn’t there. Yang Heng had been no help in that regard either. He looked down on technology, since it was limited in what it could accomplish. Having some basic knowledge of fundamental physical principles was limited in use. The ability to take various ores out of the ground and actually make something useful out of it was beyond me entirely. Energy was too much of a massive cheat. Like having the cheat codes for the universe itself. The power to use one’s mind to alter reality. That was why I had been focusing on keeping every scrap of energy I could get within me and using every bit of energy as efficiently as possible. I had done so before, but now, with no energy in the air and my very life related to the amount of energy I had, it was more important than ever before. It was also tempting to try and measure energy in discrete amounts, but Yang Heng had warned against such a practice. It led to inflexibility and would contaminate one’s techniques with things not related to the technique itself. I recalled his words on this matter. “Measuring every last bit of energy is something to be avoided. Such a thing seems counterintuitive, but it places barriers on future techniques you might develop and refining them further. Going down the path of numbers leads to more rigid thinking, like a calculator or an array. While you might gain greater understanding of how much energy you have, you do not gain a better understanding of utilization.” “That seems like an arbitrary distinction. Using numbers helps quantify an issue.” “For anything other than energy that is the case. Imagine a cultivator is a river. The water flowing through is the energy you use. Using numbers, is like making a dam. Even if that is not your intent, you will never break boundaries to grow further once you are an immortal.” “So it is a future problem then?” “All problems are future problems. But if you go down the path of measuring every last drop of energy, you will go down a path that is limiting. This is the experience that we have gathered over the ages. Hone yourself and not your perceptions. Ultimately it is your choice, but focusing on progress and numbers will distract from actually making progress.” I hadn’t been entirely sure about this line of thinking. But Yang Heng had been forthcoming in all other aspects about cultivation and reality itself. That was why I focused on improving my control and use of energy, and didn’t quantify every last portion of it. It was frustrating to do so. I liked the hard reality of numbers, but that hard reality would be a shackle imposed upon me. Still, I was improving. I knew that much. What had taken a larger portion of my energy before, now took less. It was about focus and visualization. Just like I had improved my cultivation, using what energy, I had involved such a technique. A perfect example of this was using energy to boost my body, beyond the base level of my cultivation. Focusing on the energy inside of me, willing it to better assist me in specific ways became easier with time. The same was true when using my sword as well. The improvements were small, but they were there. Each incrementing on the previous. This allowed me to focus on other aspects of energy use. If I had spent my time working on math and quantifying everything, then it would be harder to improve. I had asked Yang Heng what the smallest bit of energy was and he had told me that, this kind of question showed I still had a long way to go to achieve understanding of energy. This went against all my sensibilities, but I decided to put my trust in the immortal I had traveled with for a while. He had not betrayed my trust a single time. And while we had gotten off to a rocky start, he had always Enjoy reading on NovelHub - your free online novel platform. While my first master, Yi Rong had a special place in my heart and had helped me. It was nothing compared to Yang Heng. Over the years I had become more and more disillusioned with powerful cultivators. The older and more powerful they were, the more scheming they appeared. I guess it was the lack of perspective and scramble to the top, while Yang Heng already stood very high up. He had never mentioned how high up he actually was and appearances were no confirmation. Also, he was here in the Mechanical Layer where his power was limited, so even with my vision, I didn’t have any good comparison for how powerful he was compared to the other immortals I had met in the Forever City. I would guess more powerful, but it was hard to say how much. Yang Heng would say that rarely were such comparisons that useful. To fight with one’s life online always creates uncertainty. An opponent might have a trump card, or there could be outside interference. The older the cultivator, the more adept they were at survival, creating even more trump cards to ensure their safety. There were hierarchies, but just like how immortal cultivators didn’t apply rigid rules and numbers to the energy they used, they also avoided direct comparisons of power if possible. Sure there were people higher up, and the Heavenly Alliance stood at the top. But it was rare for cultivators to fight each other. The ones who liked to fight, left the Forever City to seek their fortunes. Reality was infinite after all. If one was strong enough, they should be able to create their own Forever City, pushing back other super-organizations. That was how cultivation culture continued. The Firmament, where the Forever City was based, was infinite. There was no need for immortals to fight each other. That was why there were minor skirmishes in the Forever City constantly looking to take more territory or gain some kind of advantage over another faction. The entire culture was unique, and it just rubbed me the wrong way. But that was the past, and this was the future. I needed to focus on continuing to travel as quickly as possible while also honing my ability to retain and use energy. Another thing for me to work on while I traveled to keep my mind occupied from repeating scenery that passed me by. I reached another large body of water and got out my small stone boat and checked the sky. Almost no clouds, just the white star in front of me like usual. I set off on the small boat, using a stone padel to propel myself forward across the water. There were fish and other aquatic creatures in the water of all sizes. I had only spotted the shadow of the larger creatures, but I wasn’t concerned. Having a large body might make a creature hard to kill, but it also made it hard to move around and to avoid being detected. Larger was not always better, but it did provide a bigger target. Once I got to place where I could sense the current was heading in the right direction, I stopped paddling my stone rowboat to rest and enjoy the breeze. Being able to travel without having to exert myself was a rare break I enjoyed when I encountered a body of water. Even after all these years I still had not come across as anything as the Turbulent Ocean and the Super Mountains where I had first crashed into this bubble of reality. Sensing something large to the side, a massive sea snake rose up out of the water. It wasn’t angled at me, it was just breaching the surface. Its dark scales glinted in the white light. It was above the water for a moment before quickly submerging. It didn’t even twitch in my direction, which was why I remained relaxed as my boat continued to go over the water. Perhaps I would need to make a sail of some sort in the future. The boat I was in didn’t have a rudder, I had to use my paddle to direct it. My crafting ability was not high either. In the past I had just purchased everything I had needed. While I could survive with the equipment I had, I would not be able to thrive. Even if there was energy. If this entire place was all water, I might have tried to tame a leviathan to carry me. And while some trips across the water lasted weeks or even a couple of months, they eventually came to an end with more land. Most terrain features were perpendicular to the direction I was traveling. This implied that the entire place was built like a spiral. Perhaps the water was connected at various points, since the creatures seems to be fairly uniform throughout it. I had seen leviathans in other bodies of water I had crossed before. While it had been at a greater distance and less clear, they were there, which implied that the water was connected. Or that could be foolish thinking, since this place was constructed. Perhaps the creatures were seeded across everybody of water, perhaps the water had been higher in the past, perhaps there were underground tunnels. The list of possibilities was endless, since it was very hard to rule anything out when energy was involved.