Chapter [B5] 25 — Spirit Batteries

Chapter [B5] 25 — Spirit Batteries

I looked at the tiny mound of leaves on my table, humming under my breath. Even though I’d only taken a tiny part of the sphere, they’d still amounted to this much.

I grasped one of the leaves, staring at it intently. The surface felt cool and slightly textured, the veins raised just enough to catch on my skin when I shifted my grip. It was lighter than it looked, but there was a firmness to the midrib that promised it wouldn’t tear unless I forced it.

The faint scent coming off it was green and clean, the same smell that clung around the Divine Tree—which, duh. Up close, the veins formed a consistent pattern—primary lines branching into secondary and tertiary lines in a way that matched flow diagrams I’d drawn for formation plates.

I rolled the stem between finger and thumb, listening with my senses rather than my ears. There was a residual hum in the leaf, a quiet persistence that didn’t leak away like ordinary plant Qi.

I had sorted them by grade earlier, chalking the brighter piles A and S because the purity was high and the grit was low. These were almost ten times stronger than the leaves we’d extracted last time. That was… insanity.

How do I make this leaf into an energy source? I wondered, staring at it with narrowed eyes.

Storing energy in a thing was simple. Converting stored potential into stable, directed flow without warping the carrier was the hard part. We had done it with crystals, with copper coils, with spirit glass, with laser capacitors. Yin and the researchers had done it with the arrays in the city that pulsed rather than streamed, because pulsing put less load on the plates at scale.

But a leaf offered channels already aligned by nature, and the alignment matched the divine tree’s larger order. If I could access that order, the leaf could do more than hold a charge; it could carry one, shape one, feed one.

Back in the ward tents I’d guided thin lines of Chi through the humans whose channels were irritated by the air and the miasma in it. The trick had been to guide, threading a trickle through a pipe rather than pushing it in indiscriminately. That had worked. This needed the same principle, but from a source outside the body rather than within it.

As I looked at the leaf, I felt its faint connection to the tree that still existed. The divine tree had accepted me taking these leaves earlier, just like it had the first time I’d approached the Divine Tree. The leaves I held now had been given, not stolen, and I suspected that mattered. They had a line home, a line I could follow without carving a new path, one that connected me to this leaf through the Divine Tree. If I could keep that line intact and set the leaf to act as a conduit, I wouldn’t be forcing the leaf to become something it wasn’t; I’d be asking it to do more of what it already did.

I wondered if that would work.

Reaching out, I followed that connection from the leaf to the divine tree and willed the leaf to provide a conduit. I didn’t push Chi into it. I didn’t flood it with a charge and expect it to hold. I acknowledged the pattern inside the leaf, acknowledged the larger pattern inside the tree, and set the two in alignment as if I were tuning two instruments until their tones matched.

The leaf responded. A warmth came up through my fingertips, and a small point of light kindled at the center where the primary veins met. It spread along the veins in even lines, steady rather than flaring, and the whole leaf began lighting up—soft but unmistakable.

Just this amount of Chi flowing through this leaf right now would be enough to push a first-realm cultivator into the second, as long as their foundation was stable.

The leaf continued to glow, the flow remaining steady. I adjusted the rate slightly downward to see how the channels behaved under lower pressure. The light dimmed a fraction, but the Chi flow didn’t suffer. Good. The contact point to the tree stayed open without additional reinforcement from me.

The divine tree’s presence settled around the connection like a hand keeping a door from swinging shut. That tracked with the idea I’d landed upon—that these leaves could be used as conduits, not just as purified fuel. If they could purify miasma as alchemical material, they could carry cleaner flow for healing and strengthening.

But how would I create meridians, for the cultivators?

The leaf could source and carry, but a mortal’s body needed channels to receive and distribute. Cultivators developed meridians over time through training, pills, and guided circulation. A mortal’s—or a broken cultivator’s—body had physical vessels and nerves but no reinforced Chi channels.

I could think of three ways to build meridians. First: brute-force carving using controlled Chi like a blade—fast, dangerous, sometimes effective with sturdy constitutions, too high-risk for broad use. Too much involvement from me, too, which would mean too much time taken. Second: gradual conditioning with low-dose Chi and herbs, allowing the leaf to form quasi meridians—safe, slow, not suited to wartime. Third: introduce a guiding intelligence that could enter the body and shape growth from inside—something like what I had done for Zhang.

If a leaf could be a conduit, then a leaf could be the seed of a construct with a task. It would need will, not awareness. It would need enough structure to hold instructions and enough flexibility to adapt to different bodies.

I ran through what I’d done with Zhang in my mind, then looked back at the leaf. Could I create a spirit from it? The leaf’s channels were already ordered; the divine tree’s pattern was already present. If I impressed a task onto that order, could I give it a simple will?

I… think I could. It would need a clean task: trace the body’s potential channels, open the gentlest paths first, reinforce walls, and prepare for larger flow. If it encountered damage, it would repair where possible before advancing. If it encountered resistance beyond safe thresholds, it would retreat and rest rather than tear through. If it found internal contamination, it would route to exit points the way I had routed miasma for patients earlier. Basic rules, with universal solutions. The model was clear enough in my head to test. ȑâɴ𝖔𝖇Ε𝓢

Focusing intently, I thought of everything I’d done—making that clone of me, everything I’d learned about the world and its laws—and the fourth law of cultivation seemed to click in, my domain willing the spirit’s creation. I kept my breathing even, holding the leaf in my left hand as I cupped my right over it to contain the working. The glow gathered into the center and began to thicken. The veins pulled their light inward like threads being drawn into a knot, and where the lines met, a small shape formed.

The leaf transformed in my hand, softly, gently, before it formed a tiny flower spirit that looked up at me and chimed. The sound was clear but not loud, like a bell struck with a fingertip. The spirit’s body was simple—five petals, a tiny calyx, a stem that tapered to a point of light instead of a root. The glow was contained inside it, no longer peripheral in the leaf. The scent was the same as before, green and clean, but brighter.

I kept my hands steady, even as I gasped gently. I examined the spirit with rapt attention. It was stable. The edges did not fray. The light did not leak. When I set a tiny test current through it, the spirit responded by brightening and then settling back, as if acknowledging instruction. I tried a different instruction: seek damaged channel; do not enter; map from outside. It moved, hovering over my wrist, and traced my body before shaking and hovering back in front of me. It couldn’t find any damaged channels, and so it had stopped.

My instincts burnt alive as I felt it, confidence and surety. With this flower spirit, I could heal people. I could give them cultivation. Just this flower spirit entering their bodies would be enough, because it knew what to do; it had a will, a will that was simple and directed.

But I kept testing. I needed to confirm my instincts were not misguided arrogance. The first test was temperature response. Bodies vary. The spirit needed to hold cohesion at high and low. I walked a thin current through it that mimicked fever, then another that mimicked a chill. The glow held steady.

The second test was interference. I introduced a tiny pulse like the static hum of miasma in the air. The spirit dimmed for a breath, then adapted and brightened again, ignoring the interference rather than fighting it. That matched what the leaves did as material in purifying taint; they did not crush contamination; they allowed clean flow to route around it while drawing the stain toward exit paths. The spirit carried the same behavior pattern in miniature, just like I’d wanted.

Third test: obedience. I told it to stop. It stopped. I told it to sleep. It dimmed until it looked like a small, dull bead. I told it to wake. It brightened on command. Good.

Fourth test: recharge. I cut the link to the tree and watched the glow. It faded slowly but did not collapse. I then re-opened the conduit by setting the spirit against the leaf stump I still held. The spirit brightened quickly. That was crucial. It meant we could recharge them in batches without returning to the trunk each time as long as we had leaves set aside as staging points and the tree’s permission to keep those conduits open.

Fifth test: compatibility. I pricked the pad of my finger with a sterilized needle and let a single drop of blood bead up. I held the spirit near it without contact. The glow did not flare or recoil. I let the spirit touch the drop. It absorbed the fluid, brightened, and then returned to baseline. That told me it could tolerate internal fluids without swelling or binding to them. The spirit would probably take minimal nutrients from the host if needed without overdraw. I gave it a stop-call again and it stopped, obedient as before.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

I looked at the leaves and grinned like a man possessed. I’d done it; I’d successfully created the cultivation batteries. But then I smoothened out my grin. I needed to focus on the task at hand. I needed to make a lot more of these.

It would genuinely raise our chances of winning this war—more cultivators, more people to throw bombs, more people to make sure the demon god and its endless demon lackeys could be exterminated once the war started.

—

When Qiao Ying entered the room, he let out a soft gasp. His lord was surrounded by spirits—golden, soft, tiny spirits filling the room, chiming as they danced around Lu Jie’s head—and more and more were being added to their number. It felt like he’d stepped into a scene from heaven.

A faint glow came from the spirits themselves, bright enough that the Chi lamp on the corner table had been turned down to its lowest notch. The walls were chalked with notes, lines and numbers stacked in tidy columns. A board stood to the right with half-erased diagrams of channels and flow rates, alongside scrawled reminders. Someone had drawn three small boxes next to a heading and filled each with a checkmark.

On a bench under the window, trays of leaf cores lay in a neat grid, each covered with thin cloth to keep dust off. Beside them sat a stack of cups with lids. A cloth-wrapped bundle of tools, clamps and narrow tongs and measuring rods, had been pushed to one side of the worktable to make space for a new set of notes. Those notes had a different hand from the chalk on the wall—tighter, more compressed—his lord’s handwriting when he condensed a plan or forced himself to be direct so others would not have to guess. Qiao Ying’s eyes lingered there, but he brought back his attention to his lord.

Lu Jie sat straight-backed on a simple chair, robes rolled to the elbow and secured with a tie to keep sleeves from brushing the work. He held one hand open at shoulder height. When a new spirit formed, it rose from his palm like a lantern being lifted from a table, light gathering and condensing until it took a shape the size of a small flower. Each spirit chimed once when complete. The spirits drifted outward to join the slow ring around Lu Jie’s head. A few of them held steady at the height of his eyes as if waiting for a command. Some turned gentle circles above his shoulders. The ring was not quite orderly, but it was languid.

Qiao Ying watched the rhythm of it. His mind went back to when his lord had been writing the five books that had qualified him as a Fivefold Sage—he recognized the same focus emanating from him now.

He checked his footing again. The floorboards were solid, so the room did not creak. Qiao Ying nodded to himself. He did not want to interrupt now. He held his breath for a count and then let it out slowly to keep his chest steady.

He took two steps back to close the door quietly. The latch made a soft click that slid under the chime of a spirit and did not break anything. He lowered his gaze and began to turn. His plan was simple: wait in the corridor and return in a little while. Lu Jie deserved an unbroken line when he worked like this.

He had nearly reached the threshold again when Lu Jie’s voice arrived, even and clear. “Qiao Ying, what brings you here?”

Qiao Ying halted at once and bowed, hands at his sides rather than clasped to avoid catching a sleeve on the table. “My Lord, Su Lin and Cao Chen are back, if you’d like to meet them.”

Only then did Lu Jie turn around, eyes widening. “That is wonderful news. Please, take me to them.”

—

I looked at Su Lin and Cao Chen. They’d changed so much within just a few months, and yet not at all. Su Lin had leaned fully back into his almost ratty appearance, scruffy and looking half dead. His hair stuck out at uneven lengths, and there was a nick on his jaw that hadn’t closed cleanly; he’d covered it with a crooked strip of cloth that had already darkened at one edge from an herbal tincture. The collar of his robe was open and misaligned by two ties, exposing skin that had seen too many long days without a proper rest. His eyes widened when he saw me, lines deepening at the corners, and he pulled me into a hug with sudden strength, ribs pressing against ribs.

His breath hit my shoulder in uneven puffs and the words came out rough. “I thought you’d died, brother.”

I patted his back gently and glanced at the others in the courtyard behind my master’s house: my master, Granny Lang, Su Lin, and Cao Chen. The courtyard smelled of steeped leaves and old wood warmed by sun. The flagstones held a faint grit that collected at their seams. Someone had swept earlier; the pile of dust and small chips of bark still sat in the corner near the plum tub. A reed mat had been set out for sitting.

My master stood near the doorway with his hands behind his back, watching.

Granny Lang sat on the bench by the potted herbs, sleeves rolled to the elbow.

Cao Chen, back straight, had shed the last traces of the boy I remembered; his robe sat clean on his shoulders, the belt properly tied, a jade clasp at his collar that he would not have owned months ago. He had filled out, not with ornament but with steadiness. He looked immensely happy to see me alive, lips pressed together in a way that could not hide the tension leaving his stance.

Granny Lang smiled warmly at the scene before Su Lin separated from me.

“You must tell me everything,” Su Lin demanded, planting himself a half-step in front of me as if to bar any escape, though there was no thought of leaving from me. He had always been direct when urgency rode him.

I nodded, and we had a full, lengthy recap, which included the fact that I was going to die. The atmosphere turned dismal again, by the time I stopped speaking. However, to my surprise, Su Lin and Cao Chen did not linger on the fact I was going to die soon. Perhaps they knew I needed normalcy right now. Perhaps they needed it too. They moved the conversation to where hands could rest and tongues could loosen without shaking.

“So much has changed in such a short time,” Su Lin began. He sank onto the reed mat with a soft grunt, palms flat on his knees. He stared across the courtyard toward the old plum tub and then back to me, as if mapping the distance between the world we had lived in and the one we stood in now.

“You’re telling me,” Cao Chen chuckled. He settled beside Granny Lang, forearms on his thighs. “Just a year ago, I thought I’d be stuck in that town. I thought Brother Zhang wouldn’t be healed. But then, everything changed so quickly. And everything went to shit just as quick, with the world literally ending.” His tone felt almost pedestrian, which soothed me, in an odd sort of way.

Granny Lang laughed. “At least you boys are young. My old bones—and his,” she said, pointing at my master, who lifted his hands and shrugged, “are not supposed to be undergoing such intense changes. This is supposed to be our retirement time.” Her finger lingered a heartbeat longer on my master than the joke required, acknowledgment layered under the line. He glanced at her and made a small face that was communicated mostly through their eyes.

I chuckled at their words. It did not roll far, but it came easier than I had expected.

Su Lin sighed, nostalgic. “Just a year ago, I’d only been smuggling your pills and trying to heal Brother Zhang some other way.” He rubbed at his jaw where the crooked strip lay. His eyes shifted toward the alley beyond the gate, as if a younger version of himself could round the corner at any moment with a pouch hidden under his coat. “But now Brother Lu Jie is the Emperor,” he said, with an emphasis that made me chuckle despite myself, “and the legendary Shen Yuan is back, wreaking havoc.” He corrected himself at once when he saw my master’s lips tilt just the slightest bit downward. “No, based on what you told me, Brother, the Demon God bastard is out there, the one that’s the source of all this trouble.”

It wasn’t the smoothest attempt at shifting blame, but an attempt was an attempt.

Cao Chen nodded. “Who would have expected things to change so much?” He met my eyes briefly, a soft smile still lingering on his face.

“I don’t think I regret it,” Su Lin said. He rolled his shoulders. “No matter the ups and downs, I appreciate that I met you, Lu Jie. No, I’m glad I met you. I’m glad I went on this journey. I’ve grown a bit, I’ve regressed a bit, and now I’ve stagnated a bit, but… I’ve experienced things I wouldn’t have imagined in my wildest dreams. Though I’m still me under all of it, aren’t I?”

I smiled. That was true, wasn’t it? Underneath it all, we were still just us, despite everything we’d gone through. Su Lin’s posture had not changed much since the first time I saw him lurk in the Sect, cleaning. Cao Chen still took a half-breath before answering anything at all. Granny Lang still called us brats, every now and then. The old man still did his best to help all of us.

“Master,” I said. Since we were gathered, I might as well give him a spirit first.

I flicked a finger and a small golden spirit drifted from my arm toward my master. It reached his chest and paused at the skin as if asking permission, then slipped through without sensation. “This should give you the cultivation base of someone in the first realm—perhaps even the second.” I kept my voice even. “You’ll have to cultivate from there yourself, but at least you should be able to live longer, stronger, healthier.”

The old man’s eyes widened as the spirit entered him. For a second, nothing happened. Then a warm light enveloped him, a steady glow that filled the space he occupied and then sank inward, making him close his eyes until it faded.

The wrinkles on his skin and his hunched back both seemed to soften, until he looked significantly younger yet oh so old. Yet he was clearly far healthier and freer in his bearing. His shoulders eased down and back, his breath deepening. When he opened his eyes, the whites looked clearer. He flexed his fingers once and then set them flat on his knees.

But my master’s face didn’t light with excitement. He only gave me a subdued smile. “Thank you, Lu Jie,” he said.

I could already guess at the thoughts going through his head. He would not celebrate a gift given in the context of what was going to happen with bright noise. Perhaps I shouldn’t have told him everything, I pondered, but only for a beat. Keeping it from him would have hurt him more. But it was hard to rationalize, seeing him hurt so much. The heart was a selfish thing that wanted comfort even when the mind knows better.

“I’ll go give a spirit to Matriarch Shie too.” I stood, looking over the faces once more. “And continue making more for the rest of our soldiers. With these spirits, by converting any remaining mortals into cultivators for the battle…”

“Our odds should be much higher,” Su Lin finished, completing the thought for me.

“Exactly.”

Su Lin stood up to give me another hug. The boy’s arms went around me with more control this time, not the initial crash of relief, and he thumped my back once in a way that pretended to be casual. His cheek scraped my shoulder where his stubble had grown uneven. He did not hold on long; he let go at the right moment, before the shape of the embrace turned into something it could not carry.

Cao Chen offered me a firm handshake; his palm was dry and warm. He squeezed once, released, then squeezed again as if words had layered behind that second press.

I nodded to Granny Lang—who promptly pulled me into a hug too. Her grip was strong too. She did not pat, did not rock. She simply held and then stepped back, her eyes steady. My master gave me a short but tight hug as well. His hands settled between my shoulder blades and pressed, the pressure even across both palms. He stepped away with a small exhale.

The next time we met would probably be during the eve of the battle, and all of us knew that.