The possibility of a random fall into an unseen gorge was significantly less concerning when you knew you wouldn’t really be injured by a fall. Even less so when you could actually fly. Thus it was that with only a small group, John found it much easier to travel through the Breathless Plains. If they came to a gorge blocking their path, it was often possible to leap over it- and if they couldn’t, John could carry a handful of people with him while Lir and Ayhan were able to carry themselves and one or two others comfortably, depending on the distance.

  That left the local beasts as the greatest hazards, and they could be quite annoying. The local avians always found the most inconvenient timing to attack people, either when they were flying or split or having just settled down. Worse than that, fighting them was almost pointless.

  Real combat experience was important, of course, but fighting the same sorts of beasts over and over wasn’t helpful. Once you knew their attack patterns, they were fairly easily dealt with. After a certain point killing them became routine and lost all its value. It wasn’t like the world was a game where they could get experience and levels- even if that was the case, it would be a trivial amount. Nor were the bodies worth much, and nobody wanted to carry a pile of rotting birds.

  Obviously they had storage bags, but those only worked to a certain point. Their main value was providing more space- any preservative abilities were mainly coincidental. They didn’t magically stop time or anything, they just provided a potentially sterile environment with consistent temperatures insulated from outside effects. It was already impressive enough to manipulate space on a relatively permanent basis.

  John had just recently seen Presha of the Silver Breeze Gorge, but he still made sure to stop by the sect. At least it felt recent, but it had been more than half a year since the trip to the Molten Sea. Then again, considering the distance between where they lived it wouldn’t have been weird to interact even less frequently. Even on Earth, John wouldn’t go visit a neighboring country yearly. Then again, if he had the money he might have.

  Travel here was not as fast as planes, but cultivation allowed even those on foot to keep a significant pace.if they were powerful enough. At least over short distances, John could outpace any car but keeping that up for a long journey was pretty much impossible, even at the Ascending Soul Phase.

  -----

  No matter how much he trained, John would always need the guidance of others. If he thought he knew everything about every element… he would only be fooling himself. He needed the specialists, and even if his cultivation was strictly higher than Lir and Ayhan, the two of them likely had some insights he’d never come to understand. Of course, actually figuring out what they knew that he didn’t would be rather difficult.

  Thus he still sought to train with people like Presha. She had a greater understanding of specific aspects of air that he might not reach in a lifetime, including the manipulation of vacuum. She didn’t use that as her sole technique with rapid shifting in methods actually being her selling point.

  Her techniques with her sling almost made John swap weapons and styles. He could add slings techniques to what he did with his off hand- unwrapping a sling from around his forearm wouldn’t be that difficult even in the midst of combat- but she gained the most of using it as her primary method of attack. Sling bullets could be carried along by an augmenting force of air element, or they could fly through a vacuum. The sling itself could be used to strike with great force, or the string could cut apart the air itself.

  The rapid shifting was what John thought he could best incorporate into his own techniques. Throwing off his enemies was part of his core style, and tricking people by not hiding the element he was using could be a great boon. That was what he tried to learn… and starting with what he could see working wasn’t a bad point.

  Even when he got close to Presha, he wouldn’t be able to injure her with vacuum- not without overwhelming her defenses, at least. Obviously he wouldn’t defeat her that way, but he wasn’t trying to win but to learn.

  John augmented the movement of his sword, keeping it in continuous motion as he relentlessly attacked Presha. For her part, she humored his desire to engage in melee instead of retreating, twisting out of the way or knocking aside his sword with her sling, dispersing his own air element while using the mass contained in the pouch of her sling to great effect. It required precise control, but clearly she had the experience.

  John appeared to repeat the same series of moves over and over. Presha continued to humor him for training purposes, but his actual intention was to see if he could slip something past her notice. Little by little, John replaced the composition of the air around her, disguising his motions as part of his attacks. If a blade of any spiritual element failed to intersect with someone they would generally think themselves safe, not necessarily realizing the attack wasn’t meant to land.

  Though if he could land a direct hit, John wouldn’t mind. That made it more difficult to read into his movements as a form of feint, because they were meant to go along a particular path that Presha inhabited when he began his motions. If the path or her position changed, he simply accepted it and released the energy to do the other thing he intended.

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  Exactly once did John manage to bring Presha to the point where she staggered, her breathing labored as her body tried to figure out why it was lacking oxygen despite taking breaths. Presha’s instincts were to create a great bubble of wind that pushed herself and John apart. Then she got a few clear breaths and readied herself once more.

  Once again John began to build up what he thought was a pretty good zone of depleted air, but Presha didn’t slow down. He had just about exhausted his air element when he sensed the minor workings of her own air element inside her lungs.

  “So you figured it out,” John said. “When?”

  “The moment I disengaged and cleared my head,” Presha said. “That’s a good technique. I like it.”

  “I thought about using vacuum to draw air from someone’s lungs and realized that would never be effective. But the idea stuck.”

  He could still incorporate vacuum directly as an attack, though. Against opponents who weren’t prepared, they wouldn’t expect a sudden lack of spiritual energy to be any sort of threat, but it could be an already moving vacuum of air. It could be surprisingly sharp, or somewhat explosive in its collapse.

  -----

  Over the course of his weeks in the Breathless Plains John gained no stunning insights into the nature of air. No magical enlightenment. But he was a little bit better with his energy control, and he had ideas for how to further develop. That was about what he hoped for, and even if he’d made no gains at all it was only a short period of time.

  Cultivation was a task spanning decades that could stretch into a few centuries, and the best thing that rushing would get him was another near-death experience. If he was lucky enough to survive, obviously.

  Next on the list was the Encapsulated Flow. Having only passed through the area on the way to the Burning Delta, John had little in the way of preconceived ideas of what he would achieve or where he would train. He figured he would ask his disciples what they thought was good and they’d test out various ideas.

  Rather than simply bypassing the rivers, they focused on them. John wondered if they should have lingered more the first time, as he found something quite intriguing about the rivers. They didn’t look much different from what he expected, but he knew they were quite potent- the fact that they didn’t immediately evaporate upon collision with the Molten Sea indicated as much. But he wasn’t interested in the interplay between water and fire at this exact moment. Just the water.

  His first attempts to walk on water had been pathetic, back in the past. He hadn’t really had control over the water element, instead just using spiritual energy like a raft. It had been a clumsy attempt. Now, he could walk across a lake by temporarily solidifying a wide area beneath him- but a lake was still. Even an ocean tended to be relatively consistent, where all he had to do was adapt to an approaching wave.

  Doing the same thing atop a flowing river was difficult, but not impossible. A river was still fairly consistent, not randomly changing paths. In some ways, more consistent than the motion except that the way water flowed around and over rocks varied more widely in curvature than a simple rising wave.

  But those variations were also consistent. Water consistently flowed the same path around a rock or over a ledge. Even where separate flows crossed each other, the vortices they created sometimes followed a repeated pattern. Others were fully chaotic. John first considered how he might adjust some patterns to better fit him. However, he quickly abandoned that idea.

  That might work for a tame river where he needed little energy to control it, but in such a case even if he was slightly off and his platform was less stable than intended it wouldn’t be much. Probably less disruptive than focusing his energy on taming chaos. Instead, recognizing what areas were naturally stable and relying on them would be a more valuable use of his effort. It might limit his movements, but that was true with any terrain. John wasn’t intending to have a great number of battles while standing atop a river. In fact, if it ever became a serious issue he could simply fly.

  But when seeking understanding practicality wasn’t always the most important. He might try to tame chaotic flows later, but not until he had pursued the path that seemed most fruitful. The first time he tried to move along a sharply angled section, he got a surprise, dunking him in the water as the platform shifted.

  He hadn’t expected that, because his spiritual energy had followed the flow of the water. Even trying to figure it out, he didn’t think he’d ever stopped that. So then why had it shifted?

  The answer was simpler than it had any right to be. He’d solidified the surface of the water like a sheet of ice, which then changed the flow. When he began to unbalance, the flow of water was disrupted even more and his energy went wild.

  That had never happened before, but in combat he was usually… less focused. His intense scrutiny of what he was doing had probably gone overboard. Normally, he was more concerned with getting it generally right, which would mean less adjustment and thus overadjustment.

  His failure caused John to reconsider his methods entirely. He hadn’t exactly done a great amount of standing on water, except for fun. Was it wrong to solidify the surface? He was already extending his energy to achieve proper buoyancy, so perhaps he was doing more than he needed. He could create buoyancy that fit with the flow of the river, pressing against a wide area of water without actually needing a platform.

  Or if the river was narrow John could hold himself up with a thin bridge of earth element from the shore, but that was cheating. Like flying.

  At least, during training. In a practical situation, he’d need a good reason not to fly… or let himself simply be caught up in the river, because being underwater would hinder most opponents more than it would him.

  But standing on water was good training, probably. And it was also fun. Personally, John thought it was a hundred times cooler than being a supernatural swimmer.