422. T.I, 6

(Rose)

I felt the bite of the cold even more now that I was injured, bruised and scratched all over. It was painful to move.

I wrapped myself in a different blanket and began leaving this place as fast as my legs allowed me. Only a slow limping, trying to escape before the night would catch me and freeze me to death.

On an impromptu path around the northern side of that mountainous chain, I began to get closer to the lusher lands I could see below from up there.

At least, the cuts from where I bled weren’t deep since all that thing did was punch and kick. I didn’t lose too much blood. But the bruises that constellate me still hurt a lot, and on a different level as well.

It was as if all my air had been extracted from my lungs. A terrible sensation hard to describe. I feel hollow.

I saw myself as being mostly human overall, with the ability to tap into the ambient T.I. when I needed to. It seems I was partially wrong.

I had a lot of T.I. stored inside of me.

I realise it now that I feel it’s missing. All gone. I feel hollow, dehydrated from that magic flow. I’m out of breath and my body feels heavier.

I slide down along a dusty path. I see a trail between the rifts that stretch further north. I’ll follow that direction.

I feel nauseous from the lack of T.I. inside of me. It feels like there’s more pressure from the air around and over me. It’s painful in a different way.

Whatever that thing was, it feeds on T.I., on magical energy, nothing else. I had more of it to offer than the ambient air. A lot more. It ripped it all away from me.

This feeling, I think it will pass. This aspect of me will recover over time like healing another wound.

It should have been obvious to me that there’s a lot of T.I. inside of me. Still, I didn’t realise it until now that it’s missing.

Well, I did know I am technically more of a daiûa than anything. But I didn’t realise how much T.I. was naturally stored inside of me.

I thought I had the ability to tap into the ambient air flows of T.I, and didn’t store any of that energy inside of me, remaining essentially human therefore. That was inaccurate.

Living tissues can store a lot more than I thought, in an inert form I think.

The twirling effect I felt when I activated magic probably was real, but it doesn’t change that fact. My flesh had a lot of potential energy in form of T.I.

Now it’s gone. But since I mostly exist on our material plane, I’m still alive nonetheless. I will mend.

I don’t know what level of T.I. I had inside of me, since I don’t have any way to quantify it. But it will probably reaccumulate from the air until it reaches an equilibrium of some sort.

Not that I would know what to do with that hidden potential energy inside my cells.

~

I made fire the old way. With a flint and alcohol.

I reached shrubs and scarce woodlands shrouded in fogs. I made camp along a building halfway collapsed into the nearby rift.

As I warm myself up, I realise one thing about this T.I. stored in living cells. That’s the energy living beings now use to evolve so fast. It’s likely to be the cellular energy beings-like-her use to transform their body in the blink of an eye.

It’s a dormant and all powerful metabolic tool, that just waits for a superior order to activate and give aim.

That’s how Bleue got her wings. Well, it’s a part of an explanation. I still don’t know how you could make human genetics transform in order to grow wings. That doesn’t sound possible.

Yet, it happened. Everything happened.

I still have yet to understand how and why. I still have a lot to learn.

I ain’t dead yet. So I will.

~

I tried all night to use magic, without any result. No gate opened, no tapping into the ambient T.I. I’m currently cut from it entirely, as far as I can tell.

But I think it will return gradually.

As some of my wounds have already healed a little too fast from what I would have called normal and expected.

I’m mostly bruised and grazed all over. I chipped a tooth, a few fingernails, but no bone broken and no deep wound. I’ll be fine. The pain prevents me to sleep though.

So as much as I can focus my thoughts, I think about T.I. I try to find a theory to link all the facts I’ve witnessed. It’s hard. I have too much left to understand before I can really get it all. Quantum chromodynamics being a part of it I know too little of yet.

Until I understand that mathematics at least a little, there’s no way the effects of T.I. will appear as anything but magical forces to me.

And according to my friend focused on studying it, even with a good background in elementary physics, it still was hard to grasp. He needed to study and relearn radioactivity under that new scope. What he had time to teach me of it is still shallow. It helps though. At least I understand that atoms can decay in various ways, even if I don’t remember everything he taught me.

Seeing T.I. as a form of radioactivity explains some phenomena, not limited to Licht’s light. The way it spreads, invisible but lingering. The way it can be accumulated into radiating artefacts and released into another form.

As a powerful energy stored inside matter, and that can be released under specific in vast amounts, it works as nuclear power.

I’m not sure T.I. energy law is directly correlated to mass or celerity. But I’m sure it’s related to energy in its broader form. T.I. makes nothing more stable, as far as I know. If anything, it’s a second aspect of entropy altogether, a paradox for it.

Because it certainly accelerates chaos and decay on a broad scale. Or is that just my intuition speaking?

But it also allows new forms and structures to rise. It fastens metabolic rates, meaning it impacts positively chemical reactions rates rather than slowing them down like entropy. I’m getting confused.

It’s the source of energy for these lifeforms that now grow all over the world like flowers at spring.

Beings with endless vitality and will to live on, to evolve. Well, for some of them.

The links between T.I. and life itself, old and new, are a deep ocean to explore and one of the biggest mysteries about it. Where does chemistry ends and life begins? It’s a gap like the link between life like me and bacteria.

The flora inside of me is another world of mystery to me.

The flora outside of me is even more mysterious.

The more I think, the less I know.

What matters today is that I will heal. And tomorrow, I will follow the trail of that clue regarding T.I.’s origin on Earth.

Oceanic. Volcanic. Spatial. Shamanic? Or just a twist in quantum chromodynamics. Or godly. Real god-made.

I doubt I will be meeting God up there. A new god, self-proclaimed god however, there’s a fair chance that I will meet more over time.

No matter what my nightmarish friend believes, I doubt it has been left empty and uninhabited.

I’m ready to bet some sort of daiûa or scientist lives in that place, whether it is a ruin or not.

Whatever it is and whatever that place is, it will be an opportunity to learn more.

I’m on my way. We shall see.

~