"Apart from the obvious embarrassment, this is amazing," said Bertho as he sprang up from the puddle, looking like a wet dog that had just been thrown into a river. "Think about the things we could do if we were able to control mana better. Just this sprinting speed alone would be amazing for us." His eyes practically had stars in them as he stared at Arin, already imagining all the possibilities.
"Oh, and how exactly do you see that being useful?" asked Bill, who was now standing on the ground and plucking leaves out of his hair. Several small branches had become tangled in his cloak during his unfortunate landing, and he was pulling them free one by one. He still looked somewhat ridiculous, but at least he was no longer hanging upside down from a tree. Bertho turned toward him with the expression of someone who had already thought of several answers.
"Simple," Bertho replied. "We could use this to relocate incredibly quickly whenever we are spotted." He gestured toward the forest around them as he continued explaining his idea. "The biggest problem with our camouflage is that people generally figure out where we are if we shoot five of their friends dead from the exact same location. No matter how good our camouflage is, staying in one place after that would be asking to get surrounded."
Arin nodded slowly because Bertho had a point. Their camouflage and concealment techniques were extremely effective, but they were not magical. Once an enemy understood that arrows were repeatedly coming from a specific location, they would naturally begin searching that area. Even if they could not immediately find the Sonnenberg archers, the enemy could narrow down their search and begin attacking the surrounding area. Being able to move hundreds of meters in a few seconds could completely change that situation.
"That is good," said Tom, who was still trying to forget the irritating sensation left behind by his encounter with the nettles. "But this could also have the potential to solve our close-combat situation." His body was strong enough that the nettles had caused very little actual pain, making him somewhat like a boar in that regard. However, he could still feel a slight humming and irritation across his skin, and that sensation was bothering him immensely.
"Think about it," Tom continued as his expression became increasingly excited. "What if we were able to shoot while moving that fast?" He raised his bow and began demonstrating what he meant. "We could flee rapidly if enemies got too close while still firing at them at the same time. Even if we could not kill them immediately, we could keep them at a distance and prevent them from catching us."
"That could actually work," Arin admitted.
Tom apparently took that as permission to demonstrate further.
"Like this!"
He attempted to shoot himself backward using the same basic principle that Arin had used. For approximately three seconds, everything seemed to be going perfectly. Tom moved backward at a speed that would have been impressive even without the added fact that he was attempting to maintain control of his body while using a bow. Then his momentum began to disappear, and his feet failed to keep up with the movement.
Tom stumbled.
He stumbled again.
Then he completely lost his balance and went down.
Tom landed sprawled across the grassland, with so much dirt and grass covering his clothes that there was barely any visible skin. His bow had somehow survived the entire experiment, which was probably the most impressive part of the demonstration. Arin stared at him for several seconds before finally managing to speak.
"I see what you mean," Arin said, desperately trying to hold back his laughter. "That would be amazing."
"Hey, we can all laugh," Tom said from the ground, his voice slightly muffled by the grass. "But it does make sense, and you know those cultivation novels. They always go on and on about momentum techniques and movement techniques." He pushed himself up and brushed grass from his face. "With this, we could create actual movement techniques."
"That does sound good," said Bill, and his earlier irritation had already disappeared beneath his excitement. "We could develop different ways of moving depending on what we are trying to accomplish. Fast movement for escaping, sudden changes in direction for combat, and perhaps something for closing the distance when we want to attack."
Arin listened to them while imagining the amount of work that would be required. The idea itself was excellent, but the process of discovering how to use it safely was another matter entirely. Their current understanding of mana control was still extremely limited, and they had already demonstrated how easy it was to turn a simple experiment into an accident. Arin was not particularly enthusiastic about learning through repeated collisions with trees, puddles, and other inconvenient objects.
"That does sound good," Arin admitted, "but it also means that we are going to suffer an enormous amount of abuse while figuring everything out." He looked toward the tree he had nearly crashed into earlier. "I really do not like the idea of constantly crashing into trees and rivers while we learn how this works."
"That is true," Bertho replied, although he clearly did not sound particularly concerned about it. "But do you have a better idea?"
Bertho was far too deep into the excitement of developing new movement techniques to care about the potential injuries involved. His eyes were practically shining as he imagined everything they might be able to accomplish once they understood how to control the movement properly. To him, crashing into a few trees seemed like a small price to pay for discovering something that could potentially transform the way the family fought.
Arin thought about it for a moment before an idea came to him.
"I say we let the whole family participate," Arin said with a delighted smile.
His expression made the other three immediately suspicious.
Arin was determined to let the entire family suffer through the same embarrassment he had just experienced. He knew that people had seen him crash into the nettles, and there was no reason for him to be the only one carrying that humiliation. If everyone participated in the experiments, then nobody could laugh at anyone else without remembering that they had probably experienced something equally embarrassing.
"That sounds wonderful," Tom said, and there was a dangerous glint in his eyes. "Many hands make light work, after all." He paused for a moment before adding, "Although I do think we should pick the right environment for everyone to perform their first experiments."
"That sounds like a good idea," Bill said.
Bill had clearly caught on to their plans.
The three exchanged looks before breaking into laughter. Their original plan had simply been to find Arin and bring him to the communal dining room so that he would not miss dinner. Instead, they had ended up discovering an entirely new field of experimentation. They had become dirty, wet, covered in leaves, and in Tom's case almost completely covered in grass, but none of them seemed particularly bothered by it anymore.
They eventually left toward the communal dining room while laughing about their failures. It had taken considerably longer than expected to retrieve Arin, and they were all significantly dirtier than they had intended to become. Still, in their minds, the detour had been worth it. The idea of developing movement techniques had captured their attention, and they were already thinking about what else might be possible.
After all, those cultivation novels were filled with exciting techniques.
The stories were always full of incredible sword movements, strange footwork, powerful charges, and techniques that allowed warriors to move in ways that should have been impossible. If mana really could be controlled in this relatively free-form manner, then there was no reason that the Sonnenbergs could not create their own techniques. They did not use swords as their primary weapons, but that did not mean they could not develop something equally interesting for bows and arrows.
They could potentially create techniques specifically designed around archery.
The thought alone was enough to keep them excited as they walked toward dinner. They had only just begun learning how to control mana, yet even this crude experiment had already shown them that their possibilities were far greater than they had initially realized. The biggest limitation was no longer whether mana could be used, but whether they could learn how to control it properly.
And they were not the only people who had discovered the wonder of this newfound ability.
Across humanity, more and more people were becoming adults in the eyes of the System. Until recently, only a relatively small number of people had managed to reach this point because breaking through into Stage One while becoming an adult was extremely difficult. A person needed both talent and a suitable cultivation environment, although potions and pills could also be used to increase cultivation speed. None of those requirements made the process easy, but it did make the breakthrough possible.
Humanity was not the most numerous race in the universe, but there were still roughly 12 billion humans on Earth.
That number was also approximately two billion higher than it had been before the system arrived, as the baby boom is still very real. The changes to the world had also caused many women's reproductive systems to begin functioning again, leading to a considerable number of children being born during the previous three years. Those babies were obviously far too young to begin cultivating, so they were not immediately relevant to the development of cultivation techniques. Nevertheless, the sheer number of humans meant that there were already millions of people who possessed the potential to eventually break through into Stage One in the coming month alone.
That meant humanity already had plenty of people capable of experimenting.
As a result, various techniques were beginning to appear in development all over the world. Governments in particular were investing heavily in the process, with many of them essentially sighing before turning toward their treasuries and asking for more money from the System. The development of cultivation techniques was no longer viewed as an interesting hobby or something that belonged exclusively to individual cultivators. Governments understood that these techniques were going to become crucial for the future.
Every breakthrough created new possibilities.
Every new adult demonstrated another way that the human body could interact with mana. Every experiment created more information that could potentially be studied, copied, improved, or combined with other techniques. Even failed experiments had value because they demonstrated what should not be done. Humanity had entered a period where countless people were simultaneously experimenting with the same fundamental force.
As for Gaia, she was enjoying the increase in cultural energy that was beginning to come her way from the people who were officially adults in the eyes of the System. As humanity grew stronger and gained greater control over its own abilities, people gained more freedom in what they could do. That increased freedom allowed them to create more cultural energy, which Gaia could then use to strengthen herself and the planet.
Humanity becoming stronger therefore benefited Gaia as well.
Meanwhile, inside a top-secret laboratory somewhere in Europe, researchers had already made considerable progress with the use of runes. Their work had expanded beyond simple experimentation, and they were beginning to understand just how complicated the subject truly was. The conclusion had already been reached that runes were going to become an entire course of study and eventually a profession of their own.
There was simply too much information for runes to remain a small subject within another discipline.
The more the researchers studied them, the more complicated the field became. What had initially appeared to be a relatively simple method of manipulating mana was proving to contain enough depth to support entire branches of specialized knowledge. For the researchers inside the laboratory, that realization was both exciting and intimidating, because it meant humanity had only just begun to understand what runes could eventually accomplish.