Chapter 512: Planting the Great Knowledge Seed in Lucianne
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 512: Planting the Great Knowledge Seed in Lucianne
"This... is the so-called Knowledge Seed?"
By now, I had brought Lucianne to the upper deck of the yacht. The vessel had already pulled away from the marina, and the sea breeze whipped around us, tossing our long hair. As I watched the island recede into the distance, I turned to Lucianne to answer her question.
"Of course. You have the chance to back out anytime before it takes root in your Sea of Consciousness. Even after it grows, you can still choose to destroy it. As far as I can tell, the risks are entirely controllable," I explained with a smile.
I held out my palm, where a brand-new Great Knowledge Seed floated, and moved it toward her. Currently, "cultivating" these seeds required a significant amount of time and nutrients. Without a massive source of nourishment, the cultivation speed couldn't be forced; even technical breakthroughs couldn't compensate for a lack of raw materials.
I had already decided that once the first batch of information, redundant memories, and nearly useless data transmitted back by the Trees of Knowledge were converted into nutrients, I would use them to cultivate more Great Knowledge Seeds.
Lucianne instinctively reached out to take it, but her hand passed right through.
"The Knowledge Seed has no physical form. Essentially, you have to take it using mental power," I reminded her.
"I see..." Lucianne wasn't too surprised. She was no stranger to such things; for instance, one needed similar methods to manifest or store a spellbook within the body. She was quite familiar with the process. "And then? I just... put it into my forehead?"
"How else would you do it? Then, you must sink your awareness into your Sea of Consciousness to proceed to the next step."
Following my instructions, Lucianne pressed the Knowledge Seed against her forehead. She closed her eyes, appearing as though she were trying to follow the seed into her Sea of Consciousness.
After a moment, she opened them again.
"Did it work?" I raised an eyebrow, slightly surprised. Why didn't I feel anything?
"How do I get my awareness into the Sea of Consciousness?"
"Huh?"
At her question, I stared at her, feeling as if my brain had momentarily stalled. I was genuinely flabbergasted.
"You've been in contact with the Transcendent for half a year now. You don't know how to enter your Sea of Consciousness with your mind?" As soon as the words left my mouth, the realization hit me.
I thought back to the first time I entered my own Sea of Consciousness. No, it wasn't even about entering it—I had been able to perceive it back when I first derived the Tree of Knowledge. Later, after an accident involving [Transcendent Knowledge], I had relied on the power of Body Cultivation to thoroughly master the means of entering the deeper levels of my own Sea of Consciousness...
Suddenly, I realized the problem. The concept of a "Sea of Consciousness" seemed to be something that had to be manually opened. Because it was an abstract concept, the human brain couldn't possibly contain such a physically existing "space." Perhaps something existed there, but it shouldn't be called that, nor used that way. Only after a person subjectively began to construct the framework of the concept could the Sea of Consciousness be abstractly "perceived," opened by the subjective consciousness, discovered, and finally utilized.
It required an external stimulus to serve as an anchor. It was like a blind person being unable to comprehend the concept of color; neither verbal descriptions nor mental communication could help them imagine the brilliance of a rainbow. But a blind person still had eyes. If those eyes were repaired by an external force, allowing them to see light, then a door to a new world would be opened for them.
That was Lucianne's current situation. She had never understood the Sea of Consciousness, never encountered anything like it, and lacked any form of enlightenment on the subject.
In my case, my enlightenment probably came from something like the Memory Bookshelf. While the space opened by the Memory Bookshelf wasn't the Sea of Consciousness itself, it had paved the way for me to autonomously realize that mental state.
"Sorry, I was being presumptuous. The Sea of Consciousness is a subjectively constructed abstract concept..." I massaged my temples, feeling a bit helpless, but I had to explain it.
Lucianne felt even more helpless. To her, my previous "matter-of-fact" tone felt like I was marveling at her incompetence. This sense of powerlessness left her unable to even offer a rebuttal, because the gap between us was real and tangible.
"If I don't have a Sea of Consciousness, is there any other way?" Lucianne didn't want to give up on this Knowledge Seed. Its effects were simply too heaven-defying. If she were disqualified just because of a basic entry requirement, she would probably wake up regretting it every single day for the rest of her life!
She had heard of similar things, like spellbooks. Not every spellbook circulating in the Witch Academy could be used the moment it was picked up; some had thresholds that were nearly impossible to reach. This was likely a similar case.
"If you don't have one, you open one. It's a simple logic. Now that you understand the concept, haven't you thought about overcoming the obstacle?"
"Overcoming it..." Lucianne was stunned by my words. This was a clash of mindsets. When she encountered a difficulty, she thought of finding a different way to solve it, whereas I thought of overcoming it directly.
"Yes. The Sea of Consciousness is a very abstract concept. If you can become aware of its existence, you can do many things. In fact, meditation is a form of enlightenment meant to inspire the Sea of Consciousness, but we don't need to use such a slow method right now. We'll use the most direct way." I reached out and directly retrieved the seed Lucianne had just tucked into her body, leaving her dazed.
It was... out already?
She had just put it into her forehead, and then it had vanished from her perception before she knew it.
"Now, focus your mental power on this seed. I will guide you, using this Knowledge Seed as an anchor to construct your Sea of Consciousness."
As I spoke, I couldn't help but sigh inwardly. Promoting the Knowledge Seed seemed to be more difficult than I had anticipated. It wasn't like a Leaf of Knowledge; the leaf didn't belong to the person carrying it. Its ownership remained entirely with me, and the carrier or the Fool's Dream only had temporary usage rights.
The Knowledge Seed, however, established a deep connection with the person. One could even say it became a part of them. Even I, the caster, could not interfere with it; I could only "observe." Although I personally felt this connection was more than just observation, I would need a deeper understanding to figure out what other capabilities it possessed.
Lucianne obediently released the mental power threads condensed through her Witch Meditation Method, firmly locking onto the Knowledge Seed.
She had tried to do this earlier, but she hadn't been fully prepared, and the seed had reached a domain she couldn't touch in a way she couldn't understand.
I didn't say anything more. Looking at Lucianne's somewhat "feeble" mental power, I still felt uneasy, so I wrapped my own mental power around hers.
As the Knowledge Seed slowly sank into her forehead, I kept my movements very slow this time. The goal was to let her adapt to the entire process of peering into the unknown. The Sea of Consciousness wasn't actually that mysterious; it was only the "unknown" that made its construction seem difficult. It was just like the first time one encountered a Witch Meditation Method—it looked hard, but the only real difficulty was the initial threshold of getting started.
Under my meticulous guidance, Lucianne's spirit and awareness suddenly seemed to open a brand-new perspective. It was a place of conscious chaos. Only when the subjective awareness noticed this place did the Sea of Consciousness gain order. And there, through this strange perspective, she finally saw the existence of the seed.
"This! This is the Sea of Consciousness!"
Lucianne was more surprised than she had ever been, like a child who had just received a new toy. I could see she was trying to remain composed in front of me, but the small, excited movements she couldn't hide betrayed her inner turmoil.
"Yes, it's that simple. Don't overthink it. This has no direct connection to your so-called talent; it's just that your cognition hadn't expanded to this point yet. Once you understood the concept of the Sea of Consciousness, you probably could have taught yourself and mastered it quickly even without me," I comforted her.
"Is that so? I understand." Lucianne accepted my explanation, but she felt even more dissatisfied with herself. She needed to work harder!
Once she had this photographic memory, freeing her time from those boring textbooks, she would have more time to learn more things and expand the upper limits of her cognition. This initial qualification threshold had been enough to teach her a lesson.
"Now, use mana to nourish it. Let it take root and sprout in your Sea of Consciousness, growing into a Tree of Knowledge. That will complete the preliminary steps of mastering it. After that, its growth will depend on you."
"Use mana?" Lucianne blinked, instinctively preparing to do so. But no matter how hard she tried, the seed wouldn't absorb mana the way a spellbook did.
The technique she used for spellbooks was completely useless here. "I... I can't mobilize the mana..."
"Oh!"
I realized the problem again. She was still a freshman!
She didn't have the qualification to use mental power to interfere with mana yet. Meanwhile, I had already completed a qualitative transformation of my mental power through various accidents...
"Sorry... I'm still a bit rusty at this. I forgot the most basic things." I pressed my hand to my forehead, feeling a bit embarrassed. It was mainly because the only other test subject, Sister Bai, was so powerful that both she and I had overlooked certain "common sense" details we hadn't bothered to value.
Now that I was trying to promote it, a whole host of problems had suddenly cropped up.
"Well, do you have any other energy? Any power your mental power can command will do—elements, spirits, anything."
"Is Witch Power okay?" Lucianne's lips trembled slightly as she asked.
"Witch Power? I haven't tried that. We can give it a shot. Don't worry, if it breaks, I'll give you another one." Hearing her suggestion, my interest was piqued. I had only experimented with elements and other common Transcendent powers I could access; I hadn't tried anything else. I hadn't expected her to be able to command Witch Power, though it wasn't hard to understand.
"Okay..." Lucianne struggled for only a moment before nodding. She hadn't forgotten her role as the "guinea pig" cooperating with the experiment.
Lucianne rummaged through her storage equipment for a long time before pulling out a refined, crystal-like Wizard Tool. This was one of the foundations for wizard apprentices to command Witch Power.
After all, wizards were fundamentally human; they didn't have things like Transcendent bloodlines to serve as support.
Of course, this excluded those lunatics who fused the bloodlines of other races into themselves—though bloodline fusion wasn't exactly rare in Wizard Academies.
But Lucianne clearly hadn't undergone such a modification.
As the Witch Power poured in, the Knowledge Seed began to react. In my observation, the growth process was many times slower than Sister Bai's, likely due to the energy's power level...
But the seed in Lucianne's Sea of Consciousness was indeed "growing."
It was a long process, but Lucianne was the first person I was promoting this to besides Sister Bai, so I had plenty of patience to stay with her through the initial steps. Moreover, this was a precious opportunity to collect experimental data!
Although this attempt had met with many setbacks, it served as a major wake-up call. If I wanted to teach someone, it wasn't about what I thought, but what they thought. I should never assume that explaining common sense was unnecessary, because that was the guarantee of teaching quality.
In that moment, as a teaching assistant, I found myself slipping into the mindset of a teacher nurturing a student. Furthermore, teaching others was the fastest way to learn oneself.
I wasn't afraid of mistakes or accidents, because those mistakes represented problems, and solving problems represented personal progress!
Lucianne had entered a wondrous state. She felt her Sea of Consciousness passively expanding as the seed grew, extending the order of her subjective awareness outward. To put it simply, her Sea of Consciousness was gradually enlarging with the help of the Knowledge Seed. As the Sea of Consciousness was constructed, her understanding of mental power also deepened, as if even her meditation had gained a sense of sudden enlightenment...
"Eh? It stopped growing?"
Lucianne instinctively provided more Witch Power, but once the Knowledge Seed reached a certain point, it could no longer grow.
When Lucianne opened her eyes, she found me sitting on a nearby lounge chair, holding a glass of juice that had appeared from somewhere.
"You ran into a problem, right? The Tree of Knowledge won't grow anymore?"
"Yes," Lucianne said with a nod.
"Congratulations. You've completed the introductory phase of cultivating the Tree of Knowledge. That's about as much as I can teach you. From here on, the tree's growth will require you to use your own memories or acquired information as nutrients," I said with a smile. I stood up and took a sip of juice before continuing my explanation.
"It's a long process. If you run into anything you don't understand, you can try asking the Knowledge Shadow. Remember, the Knowledge Shadow is the 'me' in your subconscious. It's not that the real me has a bad attitude toward you; it's that you feel I should have a bad attitude toward you. Perhaps you should change your view of me slightly, otherwise your own preconceptions will become your greatest obstacle in the future."