Chapter 111: The Responsible Thing
Late Topaz didn't feel much different from Paike. Sure, he was a touch stronger, he felt quicker, and his senses had improved, but there was no major sea change.
What it did give him was an idea of what was next.
In Ruby, reaching the peak came after the dantian was stretched to the extent needed to trigger the change to Topaz. Paike even understood now how to calculate exactly how much was needed to have enough density and pressure to force the change. Where Liming had been struggling with some idea of herself didn't really make sense in that context, but he just took that as some hidden variable he might be able to uncover later.
If the key to Ruby was amount, in Topaz it was density. Not of the qi, but of the walls of his dantian. They were getting stronger; likely, it just needed to be strong enough for him to generate enough force to compact it into Emerald.
The whole process was remarkably similar to Ruby, which made a lot of sense, as in the end it was just about combining more qi particles to form the next stable configuration. Apparently, the real personal revelations were needed when trying to move past Emerald.
Paike considered what Peak Topaz would look like. For Ruby, it was just having it stretched to the max size and filled. So he would need to go one more round of strengthening?
That didn't sound quite right, but he couldn't find the flaw in the logic either.
If he needed the strength to force the qi together, he didn't need stronger dantian walls, though. He could just apply more force in various ways. Moving the qi into a collision or reinforcing the dantina with ambient qi. Or even something like his latch system on his dantian.
But that wasn't supposed to work. Was it?