Data-Driven Daoist

Fragments flew up from the great lake of blackness and constructed a tunnel. Voices grew louder.

He heard himself. Li Yao. Wu Di. Qiao Jinhai. A kind voice gently calling Huang Niuniu’s name. Her own screams.

「Most dreams are just a bunch of rocks in a muddy pond,」 Fei Rui said. 「Yours is the best dream I’ve been in. It’s so big, and you can make things in it. Are we going into Soft Niuniu’s dreamscape? I bet it’s soft. Why are the voices so loud?」

Her own screams drowned out every other sound.

Yu Han let his mind relax. He didn’t want to visit the dream anymore. Still, he wanted to know what was there.

But he shouldn’t.

The tunnel fell away, and Yu Han felt something drain out of his being, just slightly. He had a hunch that Fei Rui lost more of whatever it was that had to be consumed to visit another dreamscape.

「It’s tiring, isn’t it?」 Fei Rui said. 「Dream Wading takes so much Essence. Yu Han, what’s Essence?」

”I don’t know.”

「Me neither!」”Let’s head back.”

They returned to Yu Han’s dreamscape.

”Can you make more pearls?”

「Six more. I can make around thirty per night, I think. It takes not so much Essence for each, but I don’t have more Essence after thirty pearls. And if I make too much, it hurts the inside of my shell. I think that’s where my brain is.」

Yu Han conjured his dagger. ”Fei Rui, I’m doing some tests. Can you help me?”

Children loved it when adults took them seriously. Fei Rui was probably older than both Yu Han and Johan combined, but with his memory loss and upbeat personality, he had the mental age of a child.

「I can!」 The crab perked up. He raised both claws and spun around. 「I can help a lot!」

”We can transfer memories, or echoes, into the pearls. Is there a way to transfer a pearl into the echo?”

Fei Rui poked a claw into the dagger. Nothing seemed to change for a while. Suddenly, the dagger became more real, the glitchy effects of the mirage fading away. Fei Rui dropped it, and it bounched on the ground with a metallic clank.

「There!」

”How’d you do that?” Yu Han asked, shocked.

「All I had to do was make the bubble pearl inside the sharp pointy thing and it works. The pearl becomes the whole echo, and the echo is the pearl. Like you and me!」 𐍂ＡＮÓВΕ𝐒

The dagger might have been just an echo, but in the dreamscape, objects he was so intimately familiar with appeared solid. Yu Han couldn’t treat them as holograms even if he wanted to.

But even so, slight hints would remain regardless of how real they felt to the touch. Now, there were none.

Yu Han picked up the dagger.

”Heavy...” The weight was nigh identical to reality. He traced the edge with a finger. The dagger hadn’t been sharpened after he took it from Bushy Beard’s corpse. There were a few nicks here and there, and scratches on the blade. Huang Niuniu used it frequently, it seemed.

He cut his finger. “Ouch!”

It bled. The pain was far less muted, the blood dripping like the ghost of the real thing. It splattered on the white dreamscape floor.

「Yu Han. You’re hurt. Did the stick hurt you?」

”I’m fine.” Yu Han tried to echo the wound away, but a mental pressure built up. Slowly at first, then like an avalanche.

A transparent haze covered the wound. An image of a healthy, uncut finger overlapped with the version that was cut open. The healthy image slowly overwrote the wounded one until no cut remained.

But the blood on the floor and the dagger did.

”It’s real,” Yu Han gaped. Until now, the changes he made to other objects were always a reflection of changes that had happened in reality. He couldn’t echo something and modify it on the go. When Jie Tong’s dagger cut into him in the dreamscape, unless it was on the nose, it would not leave a wound.

What would happen if his dreamscape body died? Or got maimed? Was he brave enough to test that out?

A heaviness cloaked his brain. It was the feeling of Qi depletion.

Yu Han echoed a wooden board hanging from a tree, then had Fei Rui turn it more real with a pearl. Then he took the pearl with Li Yao practising his swordsmanship and had Fei Rui project the image right in front of the wooden board.

Swish.

Crash!

Li Yao’s sword cleaved through the wooden board, even though in reality, they had used it as practice for Huang Niuniu’s Martial Art.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

As the board was destroyed. After a while, the echo of the events reached their end. Li Yao disappeared, and in his place, a lime green pearl appeared on the ground.

As for the shattered board on the three, the object echo, they remained. Yu Han had Fei Rui stop the projection.

「This is hard work!」

An unharmed pearl appeared between Fei Rui’s pincers.

“How did you do that?”

「I did thing I do to make the projections, but in the opposite way. Yay!」

Fei Rui looked at the with proud eyestalks. Was the lime green light a bit dimmer now?

“Can you project it again?”

Fei Rui did. The wooden board appeared. Unharmed. They then started and stopped the projections multiple times. Event projections would retreat into the pearls by themselves after the events had fully played out. Object projections needed to be manually stopped. If the object broke while projected, the brightness of the lime green pearl would dim a bit.

Was it something like energy depletion? Could this energy regenerate?

Yu Han shrugged. ”The pearls make the projections of echoes more real. Whether I cast an echo into a pearl or Fei Rui casts a pearl into an echo, it doesn’t matter.” He stabbed out with the dagger. It cut through the wind.

”If I cast a pearl into my body, will what I train here become real? Will it transfer to reality?” Yu Han felt his heartbeat quicken. Until now, practising Martial Arts here didn’t have much effect on his real-life mastery. But practising his Cultivation Art did.

”Is it about mental practices?” If so, Yu Han could grind Thousand Petal Awareness here. ”Fei Rui, can you cast a pearl into me?”

「Uh...」 The crab collapsed sideways. 「I don’t know. When I think about it my head hurts. What a strange idea. Why do you want to do that?」

Yu Han explained his reasoning.

「Let me try!」 Fei Rui clutched Yu Han’s leg with a claw. After a while, he removed it. 「...It won’t work. You are like a bubble pearl. Me too! It’s like casting a bubble pearl onto a bubble pearl. It won’t work. Not for you, and maybe not for me either. Sorry, Yu Han.」

”Don’t apologise. This is how we test. Theorise boldly and experiment to find out what’s true.”

「Theorise boldly!」 Fei Rui danced. 「Theorise boldly! Theorise boldly!」

Yu Han asked him what he meant by them being similar to bubble pearls, but didn’t get a coherent answer.

「We’re memories. Memories can’t have memories of itself. Memories are things that other things have of other things. Maybe.」

Yeah, no idea, bud. Yu Han held out the dagger. ”Can we cast two pearls into one echo?”

They could.

「Wow!」

”Ouch...” The dagger fell from his hand and shattered, fragments of two pearls flying out in all directions before disintegrating.

「Oh no! Yu Han, you’re bleeding from your face holes.」 Fei Rui panicked. 「You broke the pearls!」

”E-Ears. And nose.” Yu Han collapsed. He tried to echo away the headache, but didn’t succeed. ”So we can cast multiple pearls into an echo. But it strains my... whatever it is that gets strained because of the projection. Let’s just call it my mind. If it fails, the pearls break.”

They didn’t break even when the projection of their respective echoes had broken, like the wooden board.

「It strains your mind. We don’t want that.」

”We don’t,” Yu Han agreed. It looks like this was the limit. For now.

Three pearls remaining. Fei Rui made them, then slumped into a corner.

Yu Han echoed a memory of him practising the Ox Tail 72 Sweeping Forms into the pearl. Again, the memory limit was about a hundred seconds. He gave the pearl to Fei Rui, who activated it. A swooshing sound appeared like a halberd cutting through wind, but no image of Yu Han.

「Oops. Sorry, I’m so tired. I forgot to bring out the colourful things.」 The crab fiddled with the pearl again. The halberd appeared, followed by Yu Han’s full body.

”It’s real.” Yu Han gasped. Why? How?

Before, only the parts Yu Han could see would appear. While practising, he couldn’t see his back. But here it appeared, from the sweat stains on the shirt to the folding of the fabric as Yu Han moved.

It didn’t echo only Yu Han’s memory of the events. This particular practice session was before he met Fei Rui, so it wasn’t his memory either.

So whose memory was he echoing?

He echoed the dagger again. His head felt heavy. Any moment now, he would blank out.

He held the pearl. Lime-green, its light a constant intensity. It rolled on his palm like a marble toy. The mirage of the dagger within swirled. It was like an icon for the dagger in an MMO game. If he pressed it, it should appear from his inventory.

But in the dreamscape, it didn’t.

He couldn’t figure it out.

We get access to Qi during Qi Gathering. In Body Tempering, the effects of Qi are passive, limited to within the body. Tempering it according to the Arts practised, treasures consumed, Traits possessed. The only probable way for most to actively use Qi is with Bloodline Arts, courtesy of Traits.

He kept echoing different images into the pearl. From the dagger, to the halberd, to Feral Spot, to Elder Chang, to anything and everything. Finally ending with tonight’s experience of listening in on the trespassers from the Mad Bloodhounds.

His weariness grew. He figured out no way to activate it.

Do I really need Qi? He was just Level 1. It would take months, if not years, to get Qi.

Can I take my memories back?

He tried, using the same intuition as when erasing echoes. But rather than erasing, he tried to take them back into himself.

”....Go to sleep...” Huang Niuniu’s voice sounded. Yu Han was taken back to when he was lying in the medical hall bed. He blinked, and he was back in his dreamscape again.

”What the hell just happened?” He stared at the pearl. The image of that day swirled within. ”Did I just mentally read the pearl?”

He tried again. This time, he saw himself slowly opening his eyes. Then he was back in his dreamscape again.

He changed the echo to one where he was fighting the Filth Eating Ghoul Boss. Concentrating fully, he took back the memory.

”...retreat to the shrine!”

Each memory read would last barely a second before he was booted out.

He tried again and again, and the timespan seemed to lengthen. From a second to two, then three and four. It was as if a sense Yu Han never knew was there slowly activated.

”I’m not taking the memories back. I’m reading them from the pearl without projecting them outside.” Yu Han jotted that down.

The accord really was a gift that kept on giving. Until now, he’d been continuously discovering the new synergies between Echoing Dreamscape and Fei Rui’s pearls.

”Memories can be echoed into the pearls to store them for longer. Fei Rui can project these memories from the pearls. This type of projecting makes them more ’real,’ somehow. Realer than without first echoing them into pearls. I can read memories without projecting them. Maybe he can too? Fei Rui said he can bring pearls out to reality. If so...isn’t that like having my own DVD player?”

Yu Han paused to catch his breath, then continued. “Can I play the projections in real life? Will it retain their ’real’ effects in reality? If I use a pearl to project Li Yao slicing with his sword, can it harm objects in reality and not just in the dreamscape?” So many questions, so few answers. ”I’m too weak to handle multiple pearls projected in the echoes—or the pearls are too weak.”

Yu Han held the final pearl and debated echoing a smartphone into it. How about the unit he had at his death, in the Taiwanese mountain forest? A concept phone, with the latest tech stuffed into it, including satellite calling. A black brick with a tiny touchscreen at the top, for some strange reason modelled like a Casio scientific calculator.

Let’s start less complex.

He echoed his watch, a Seiko with a tourbillon. No electronic parts.

The memory seemed to paste from his mind like sludge leaving a drain. The image of the watch appeared in the pearl.

He tossed it to Fei Rui, who had been waiting with claws clicking. And the watch appeared.