To Improve Oneself [Solo]

A strained groan broke the silence of the otherwise empty warehouse. The figure of a young woman in light, white workout clothes strolled across the open floor, her arms outstretched above her head until she'd felt a satisfying pop in her shoulders and back. The last remnants of breakfast still tantalized her taste buds, as she stooped to ensure her laces hadn't come untied during the walk over from her room.

Sylvia glanced around the vast space with wide, alert eyes. Noone was around, just as she'd hoped, and there was nothing to damage but some crates and discarded furniture she'd brought in the day before. It was good, she thought. What she'd planned might have been dangerous, so it was better not to have anyone watch.

What was she doing here in the late morning? Practice, of course. She'd had a couple of ideas for ways to improve her techniques, and with the ease of access to reishi in the City of Light, now was as good a time as any to work on them.

She held her gloved hand aloft in the air, and opened her senses to the spiritual energy all around her. Like everywhere in the city, the atmospheric reishi was dense and plentiful, and it didn't take long at all for her to draw in what she'd needed. With a small amount of focus, thin strings sprouted from her fingertips and attached themselves to the supporting beams above, which groaned in defiance as she pulled the energy taut.

More strings sprouted from her shoulders, then from across her body as she was lifted up off the ground. She grinned with a small amount of glee as she flexed her power, and was soon catapulted across the room. Strings gave away and regrew as she willed it, catching her body before it could hit the ground again, and she was thrown back the way she had come. For the first couple of minutes, this was all she'd done, to warm up and prepare herself, like one would stretch a muscle.

When she was done, Sylvia felt her feet gently touch the floor again, and she ran her fingers through her hair while the last of her giggling died. Maybe danger wasn't the only reason she preferred to train alone...

”Enough of that.” She spoke aloud to noone in her native tongue. With her left hand raised, she used the strings again to connect herself to one of the empty crates at the far side of the room, and slowly pulled it a few feet with a twitch of her fingers. With a flick of her wrist, it flew across the floor and damaged itself upon landing against the opposite wall.

”Oops.” She gathered up as much as she could of the damaged wood, and drug it to within a few feet of where she stood. It was still difficult to control her power at times, but that was why she was here, in the first place.

With no time to waste, she began in earnest. New strings sprouted from her fingertips and anchored themselves to the nearby floor and wall. Her gaze settled on where she knew the strings to be, and her will drew ever more reishi to the nearly imperceptible structures. In just a couple of seconds, she could see the light blue of-

The strings had snapped under their own weight.

Again, Sylvia strung her hand up by the wall and floor, and again, she drew reishi towards the strings to bolster their durability. And yet again, just as they had begun to become visible, they snapped under the strain. So, she repeated ad nauseam, over and over again until her fingertips began to ache. Each time, she gathered her reishi a little more slowly. She tried to spot the exact moment when the strings were fat with energy, yet before they broke.

It was not something so easy to do.

In due time, however, she had succeeded in one way: the strings had been thickened to the point of visibility, and they did not snap under their own weight. A small grin crossed her cheeks as she thought how to continue with her experiment.

It didn't take long to decide on how to move forward, and with her new goal in mind, she set about to making the strings smaller again. Slowly, she willed the same amount of reishi into the form she had grown accustomed to. Rather than simply filling a space with as little as she could get away with, she went the opposite route and made her construct more dense. She forced the material together, more and more-

It snapped again.

A small sigh escaped her, and she started over from scratch. From strings that were thick and visible, she forced the reishi together, but more slowly. Her green eyes stared intently, helping to focus her supernatural senses on the small area which was the target of her attention. If she could just see-

Snap!

Stubbornness was both the woman's blessing and curse, as she repeatedly tried and failed to accomplish her self-given task. Her frustration came and went, like the tides of the ocean while she worked. Countless attempts all ended in failure, though some less than others. Over time, she had continued to make progress, but she never could get the strings quite as small as she'd liked.

Eventually, she supposed the strings were about as thin and dense as they could be, with the amount of reishi she had used, in the end. They were just thick enough for the light coming in from the windows to glint off their surface, but the real test was still to come...

With the ends of her new strings still anchored to the wall and floor, Sylvia pulled them as taut as she was able without straining her hand. With the other, she snatched up a broken piece of wood with less refined reishi, and flung the object directly into the path of her progress.

Though the piece of debris broke against the veritable fence, she frowned at the result. Her strings were released to rejoin the airborne power in its natural form, and she nursed her sore hand for a moment.

Maybe she was going about this the wrong way, then?

After a brief pause to recover and attend to other matters, the Quincy woman promptly returned to her private practice with a refreshed mind. If she couldn't brute force the strings into a stronger form that performed to her liking, then maybe a different shape was in order?

Like so many times before, she anchored her hand to the near wall with thin strings of reishi. Slowly, she built up their thickness with ever more material, and stopped just shy of the breaking point. Then, she split each string into several, all much thinner and weaker than the original. With a careful, unwavering focus, she wrapped a couple of strings around one another, making what she'd hoped would be a stronger chord.

In truth, it was quite a bit smaller than the structure she'd wound up with before. With a hopeful grin, she picked up another piece of broken wood with her free hand, and flung it towards the new strings. Just as before, it broke, but not in the same way. Upon further inspection, several thin, shallow grooves adorned the side of the board, near where a stress fracture had formed.

She was getting closer!

With the broken wood set aside, she started over from scratch once more. This time, she neglected to anchor herself to the wall or floor. This time, she had her sight set on the empty air. Beginning just outside the reach of her fingertips, she drew in reishi and made a small, vertical platform to use as her base. From there, she focused on attaching herself to it via the strings.

It wasn't as simple as she'd thought, to divide her attention between two different reishi constructs with varying structures. However, neither was it the most difficult things she'd done so far. Before long, she had anchored her regular strings to the unseen wall, and so began in earnest to reconstruct the cutting chords.

Once that was done, and the concept proven, she dismissed all of it to start anew. This technique would be all but useless if it needed to remain stationary, after all. So, she worked to form each string independent of any base at all. Her fingertips ached more with every minute, and the strain was causing droplets of sweat to drip down her nose and chin, but slowly, ever so gradually, she was finding a way to accomplish what she'd wanted.

In the end, she succeeded, in a way. What had begun as platforms similar to that which she stood upon with hirenkyaku had become more akin to anchors themselves, like little, grain-sized weights to which she attached each string. From there, she could move them about much more easily due to their size, and while her normal strings were much too fragile, the new chords seemed sturdy enough to endure the abrupt motion.

All that was left was to test it, and see if she had finally created something of use.

Turning her attention to the pile of discarded trash some forty feet away, she pivoted on her heel and motioned as though to throw a ball. With a strained cry of effort from the woman, the near-unseen strings sprouting from her fingertips soared through the air, and into the dilapidated dresser... then through it. In fact, once the debris had settled, several marks could be seen in the floor, all leading back to the Quincy.

It had been a week since she'd last practiced here. Since then, a lot had happened: she had learned the true identify of the woman named Ulv, and been made to question her pride as a Quincy. Her heart and mind had been in such disarray that she hadn't thought to train, even.

Now, however, Sylvia had returned to the empty warehouse with determination in her heart. Dressed in her light clothes again, she closed the door behind her to ensure privacy. The broken, dilapidated furniture from her previous sessions had already been moved out of the building -to be disposed of, she supposed.

That was okay, though. It wasn't necessary for what she had in mind today.

Wasting no time, the young woman set the book on sewing and basket she'd carried in her arms on the floor, and began to draw in reishi from the room. It didn't take much at all until she was satisfied with the amount, and a thin sheet of white cloth appeared in her outstretched hands. Such was the Himmlischer Anzug, the technique she sought to improve.

She tore the cloth in two, practically without effort.

Again, she constructed her basic cloth from reishi. This time, however, she didn't simply force reishi into the form and shape that she desired. No, anything worthy of being taken into combat needed to be more than a simple trick. So, visible only to the mind's eye, she formed many strings of reishi in the space between her fingers. Using the knowledge she'd recently learned about sewing, she slowly pieced the strings together; one always being overlapped by the next, then overlapping the one after that.

It was a simple pattern, and very time consuming, but as the minutes passed, the cloth began to take shape again. She smiled some at her creation, only to tug at it again from both ends. The cloth held on for a few seconds, but still, ultimately tore under the light strain.

With the loss of her concentration, the two pieces of cloth rejoined the airborne reishi, and without delay, she started anew. This time, she tried a more complex stitching pattern, though the process didn't go any faster than it had before. Like before, the basic cloth came together in its own time, only to be torn with simplicity and ease.

So, her time in the warehouse continued. Sylvia tried again and again, using different weaves and structures as her thoughts suggested, and pausing to address the book a few times more. Eventually, she did come to a pattern that she felt suited her needs the best.

Breathing deeply for a few seconds, the woman let her eyes close and focused on the cloth draped over her arms. As much as she loathed to compare her technique to anything done by that monster, it was Ulv who had given her the idea, in the first place. She thought back to how reiatsu had been woven into the threads of her previous uniform, and tried to call forth the reiryoku from within her very soul.

She had almost called her bow by reflex in the process.

After a few minutes, she'd realized she had activated her blut by mistake.

With time, the very different feel of directing reiryoku outwards from her body did come to her. It was so much different from reishi that she had mistaken the sensation a few times, and the energy fought back against her much harder than when she called her bow. It resisted even the simplest direction.

Once it was in place, however, it stayed put. Over the threads of reishi within the cloth, she spread her reiryoku in small amounts. The process was even more time consuming than stitching the cloth had been, and in the end, it was far too exhausting, she felt.

“How does anyone fight like this?” She breathed the words heavily, and pushed the few strands of hair from where sweat had plastered them to her brow. After catching her breath, she put her work to the test, and pulled from either end of the cloth. Much to her elated satisfaction, the cloth did not tear as easily, but rather frayed before the strings began breaking under greater strain.

Sylvia collapsed onto her ass on the hard floor, and the cloth fell just out of reach. Over the next couple of seconds, the only thing to show for her work slowly dissolved, but that didn't stop the gleeful giggling coming from the Quincy. As exhausting as it'd been, it was definitely progress.

Following a brief lunch of the contents of the basket, she returned to her practice with haste.

First things first; she needed to make the process much less tiresome. Again, she constructed the basic bones of her cloth from reishi, a process that was growing more quick with repetition, then turned her attention inward. Her reiryoku reserves were much too limited to cover the whole of the cloth, let alone an entire outfit, so she had to be intelligent about this, she thought.

During her break, several ideas had come to her about how to accomplish her goal. She could fill the space between threads with reiryoku, but that might only take longer to construct. She could replace choice reishi threads with reiryoku, but again, that seemed exhausting and time consuming. A third concept proposed a compromise between what she'd tried before and these new methods.

Slowly and carefully, she traced lines strategically across the illusory fabric. Using her finger as a focal point, she directed trace amounts of reiryoku to infuse into specific strands and threads. The lines glowed with a light blue color for several seconds before settling back into the white of the cloth, and by the time she was finished, one couldn't tell the fabric apart from what she'd made before.

However, it most definitely stood her test, as she failed to tear the result with her bare hands.

”One more thing...” Sylvia muttered to herself as she pressed the cloth to her front, and the rest of an outfit stitched itself together. After nearly a full minute, she stood in her new uniform of choice; white and blue in color, made to resemble a cross between a trench coat and a bomber jacket. Then, she turned her attention to the near wall.

The young woman ran at the solid barrier with everything she had, and shouldered the hard building as strongly as she could muster. A low thud was all that rewarded her effort, and she fell to her back with a heavy, “oof!”

Incessant giggling followed shortly thereafter. She had hardly felt a thing.

She only needed to practice until she could stitch an entire uniform quickly.