The Bingen family was another really interesting case. Their breathing method had developed along a similar line to the Roth family's method, largely because they had struggled to figure out how to turn their actual profession into something useful for cultivation. The problem was that the Bingen family used their patients as part of their profession, and there was no immediately obvious way to turn healing someone into a cultivation method. Unlike forging, where the connection between mana and the finished product was relatively straightforward, healing did not provide an obvious object through which mana could be refined.
So they had eventually moved toward the next obvious solution.
Medicine.
More specifically, they had based their breathing method around the process of refining medicine. The idea itself was relatively simple, but the result was something Gaia found genuinely amazing. The Bingen family had somehow stumbled into the correct answer for preparing medicine without even realizing what they had actually discovered. They had no idea how important their method could become, because the arrival of mana had completely changed what medicine meant.
Before mana arrived, medicine had primarily been about treating illness, repairing injuries, or managing conditions that could not otherwise be cured. After mana arrived, medicine had taken on another enormous purpose. Pills and other medicines were being developed to improve cultivation speed, strengthen the body, increase mana absorption, and help people progress through the System. That meant the amount of medicine humanity consumed had increased enormously.
Unfortunately, there was a rather nasty problem hidden inside all of that medicine.
In the gentlest terms possible, humans were slowly poisoning themselves.
Every medicine or pill created by humans contained something that Gaia understood as free will. The free will of another person could become mixed into the medicine during its creation, and although the amount was usually tiny, that did not mean it was harmless. The human body would slowly push that foreign free will out, but doing so required time. The body needed opportunities to recover between doses, otherwise the foreign free will could begin accumulating.
And if enough of it accumulated, something much worse could happen.
The free will could clump together and eventually form cultural energy.
That was something humanity currently had no reliable way to remove.
Even Gaia herself did not know of anything currently existing on Earth that could simply eliminate cultural energy once it had formed inside a person's body. She knew many things about the nature of cultural energy, but knowing how something worked did not automatically mean that she possessed a method for safely removing it. The distinction was important, especially when dealing with something as fundamental as the energy created through the free will of living beings.
Well, perhaps I should not be so hasty, Gaia thought.
Her knowledge did give her some insight into a few natural treasures that might eventually be capable of dealing with the problem. The universe had provided a number of templates for each planet connected to the System, and those templates included natural treasures with properties that could become extremely useful. The problem was that Earth was not currently strong enough to nurture many of those treasures into existence.
That meant cultural energy could become a serious problem in the future.
Gaia was already aware that quite a few humans were heading in that direction. Some were consuming enormous amounts of medicine in an attempt to accelerate their cultivation, apparently without considering whether their bodies could handle the accumulated consequences. Not that Gaia particularly felt responsible for stopping them. Their bodies would warn them when the cultural energy began forming.
And the warning would not be subtle.
It would be incredibly painful.
In fact, Gaia knew that the process could become so painful that it would feel like torture. The human body would be sending an extremely obvious message that something was seriously wrong. Anyone experiencing that kind of pain should, under normal circumstances, immediately realize that continuing the same behavior was a terrible idea.
Unfortunately, Gaia also knew humanity.
She had enough experience with humans to know that obvious warnings did not always stop them from doing stupid things.
That was why she found the Bingen family's discovery so amusing.
They had accidentally found a way to make their medicine considerably less toxic.
Their new breathing method refined the mana contained within medicine while the Bingen family was preparing it. During the refining process, a large amount of the mana inside the medicine was drawn out and absorbed by the person preparing it. More importantly, much of the free will mixed into the medicine was pulled out alongside that mana.
By the time the medicine was finished, very little foreign free will remained inside it.
That was an enormous improvement.
The process was not simply removing mana from the medicine, however. There was a complicated relationship between mana and free will that made the entire process possible. Mana inside medicine needed something to anchor it, otherwise it would not remain stable. Mana did not naturally enjoy staying in one place without something holding it there.
That something was free will when made by humans.
The free will acted as an anchor for the mana contained inside the medicine, while the mana itself protected that free will from being stripped away by outside mana. Without that protection, mana that was outside the medium that was protecting the free will particle would eventually interfere with the free will, loosen it from its anchor, and eventually convert it into cultural energy.
It was a complicated relationship.
Free will held the mana in place, while the mana protected the free will from being stripped loose.
Because of that relationship, completely removing all free will from medicine was actually impossible if the mana inside the medicine was supposed to remain stable. There needed to be at least a tiny amount left behind. In fact, Gaia realized that an elixir could be considered essentially flawless as long as only a single speck of free will remained within it.
Once the medicine was sealed, that tiny amount of free will could maintain the stability of the mana.
Then, when someone eventually broke the seal and swallowed the elixir, the situation became much more favorable.
The person would be left with medicine and pure mana that contained almost none of the harmful foreign free will that normally accompanied human-made medicine. The mana could then be absorbed without creating the same level of danger, making the Bingen family's method incredibly valuable for anyone who regularly relied on medicines to improve their cultivation.
And there was another advantage.
The mana refined through the Bingen method was also better suited to the person who consumed it. It was similar in principle to what the Roth family had achieved with their weapons. When a person used an object or consumed something that had been refined to match their own mana signature, their body could interact with it more easily.
That made the resulting medicine more effective for the person who had prepared it.
The same basic principle explained why weapons created using the Roth family's breathing method were better weapons. The mana inside those weapons could more easily take on the mana signature of the person using them. That made the weapon easier to control and allowed the user to channel their own mana through it more naturally.
Gaia could not help but shake her head when she thought about it.
Honestly, why has nobody tried refining their weapons yet?
The answer seemed obvious to her.
If someone could refine a weapon so that it better matched their mana signature, then the weapon should become easier for that person to use and potentially stronger in their hands. The principle was already visible in what the Roth family was doing, even if they had not necessarily understood every part of the process.
But Gaia could only shrug.
She could get angry about these things until the Earth itself turned blue, but she was not going to drop hints for humanity. These discoveries were supposed to be made by humanity itself. The entire point of allowing these different breathing methods to develop naturally was to let people explore the possibilities of mana without Gaia constantly reaching down and giving them the answers.
The same principle applied to the cultural poisoning problem.
Gaia was not going to announce that taking too much medicine could eventually cause cultural energy to form inside someone's body. She knew that doing so would probably not produce the result she wanted anyway. Humans had already demonstrated that they could interpret even useful warnings in the most ridiculous ways imaginable.
There had been plenty of idiots before the System arrived.
Gaia had no reason to believe the System had magically removed that particular part of human nature.
If she warned them that excessive medicine could kill them, some people would immediately assume she was hiding a secret method of achieving rapid cultivation. They would ignore the warning, consume even more medicine, and eventually become heavily poisoned.
Then, when they were suffering from the consequences, they would probably accuse Gaia of lying.
Or they would claim that she had not warned them clearly enough.
Or they would insist that she should have done more.
Gaia had absolutely no intention of getting involved in that mess.
So she simply did nothing.
She let those idiots walk toward the consequences of their own decisions, just as humanity had always done. Gaia was even benevolent enough not to personally smite people who insulted a god and their planet. She did not punish them by destroying their lives outright.
Her response was considerably more measured.
She would make them infertile. She would rob them of their luck.
And she would ensure that they would not become corrupted humans.
That last part was particularly important.
Gaia knew that heavily poisoned humans would be extremely vulnerable if the Void ever offered them a way to survive their condition. Someone suffering from cultural-energy poisoning might eventually be willing to side with the Void simply because it promised relief or survival.
Gaia was not going to allow that.
Not because she intended to save every idiot from the consequences of their choices, but because allowing the Void to gain new followers through a problem humanity had created for itself would be unacceptable.
The number of subconscious protocols Gaia had already installed to monitor these possibilities was frankly ridiculous.
She had protocols checking for signs of cultural-energy accumulation, protocols watching for unusual changes in humans, protocols monitoring possible corruption, and additional protocols watching for activity that might indicate the Void was attempting to exploit the situation. Her subconscious mind was practically drowning in warning systems.
And Gaia knew that it was going to drive her crazy eventually.
There would be false alarms.
There would be harmless abnormalities that triggered warnings.
There would probably be humans doing something completely stupid that caused three different systems to panic simultaneously.
But Gaia was not going to reduce the number of alarms.
Those warning stations were too important.
The Void remained a threat, and she needed to know if it began moving against humanity in ways she had not anticipated. If maintaining an absurd number of subconscious monitoring protocols meant occasionally dealing with false alarms, then so be it.
Gaia would rather be annoyed by a thousand false warnings than miss the one warning that actually mattered.