11 Walking on water isn't easy

'Breath in, take control of not just water but everything liquid in your surroundings, pull all water, all life, and bend it to your will '

'Breath out, exert your will on everything in your gasp, push past their will, and force your will onto them'

Under the clear light of a full moon, a young boy sat, and with each breath, his surrounding changed. Every time he took a breath in, the air became dryer as the water was forced out of it, and the snow and ice changed and rotated around the boy in a dome. Though they make no sound, or rather couldn't, in front of the boy were white mice whose entire bodies stiffened as the boy held his breath and bask in the control it gave him.

Then he breathed out, and the dome of water was pushed outward and dissolved into either snow or the air. The mice who couldn't move before were now forced into the ground and up again in a repeated action of an odd kneel. The boy breathed in, and the same thing as before happened again. The boy breathed out, and unlike before the dome turned to crystal clear ice, and the mice went back and forth in an attempt to dance. Such actions continued throughout the night, all the way till the moon had resided, and the sun began to rise in the east.

---

This was the 3rd full moon since I began my training, my 3rd month of doing almost nothing but training. While I cannot argue with the result, I'm forced to admit, it is beginning to take a toll on me mentally. The other day, and caught myself talking to the polar bear dog statue, and while I can excuse talking to animals or even fish to starve off my boredom, I cut the line at talking to inanimate objects. Because of this, I have decided to begin heading toward the mountains, even if I don't have human contact, I at the very least need a change in scenery.

My training has had a lot of progress as well, the speed at which I turn water into ice or even gas is almost nonexistent, though turning it to gas still has a heavy toll on my chi reserve. My aiming has become a lot better as well, moving targets is no longer an issue as long as I'm standing still, still need some work especially if I'm running with all my might. I've become quite fast these past months, with running being the majority of my physical training.

Blood bending has been... less successful. Controlling others is immensely more mentally draining than just making fragile body parts like eyes explode. Even that is much harder the more intelligent the animal is, tried it on a caught polar bear dog, and even during a full moon, making it do anything which it doesn't want to do, is an uphill battle. During the daytime, I couldn't do anything to the bear and began understanding why it was thought to be impossible any other time than the full moon.

Besides that, nothing else exciting has happened, though I think I hunted the local population of Turtle seals to extinction since I haven't seen a single one in almost a month. The rest of the day is spent relaxing and preparing for exploring the mountain range, at this point crossing the giant lake that separates us will be a brief, even with a big block of ice.

After a long night's rest, I now stand before the lake double checking my preparations. Though crude, I've managed to make something that at least resembles clothes from the skin of some of the animals I've hunted. They're very uncomfortable, but I need a spare set since the one I started with is in a bad shape, not to mention I'm beginning to slowly but surely outgrow them.

With my makeshift skin bags and giant ice cube, I walk on the water, something that is a lot harder than it seems. It isn't very difficult to propel yourself in a single direction, but if you want a free range of motion on water, it's going to take some training. It was the second thing I focused on after improving my aim, at this point I can make gravity-defying maneuvers as long as I'm on a water-based surface.

During the first hour, nothing exciting happens, while training I had to fend off quite a few aquatic predators, so at least those closer to land have learned not to attack me. Though as I predicted, and one of the reasons I wanted a lot of mobility on water, once I reached the deeper areas of the lake it wasn't long before I was attacked.

To be honest, with all this water around and my absurd chi reserves, I'm certain you would at least need to be a master bender, or a legendary monster like the one near Kyoshi to make me break a sweat.

As if to challenge my thoughts, my senses began to pick up on a large creature approaching. Its body resembled a sting ray, only much larger approximately 20 meters across, with an even longer tail with ominous spikes. It was quite slow and seemed to observe for now, but I don't intend to get caught off guard by it. Rather than wait for it to attack me, I chose to attack first. Sure it might be some spiritual guardian or something, but if it were so it should have hurried and introduced itself, I'm way too paranoid to let it simply observe me.

Due to the distance between us, I couldn't do more than sense it. I doubt it would sit still if I just fired ice projectiles at it, and I'm not confident enough in my underwater movement to fight that deep underwater. Instead, I rose myself up and began to truly pull on my chi reserves for the first time as I began slowly but surely rotating the water into a giant whirlpool.

As I began using more and more power, making the whirlpool stronger and more violent, I sensed the sting ray beginning to be affected. It wasn't thrilled with my action as it began following the current upward with its tail rotating and leaking some purple liquid from it.

As I had no intention of letting this monstrosity within its striking range of me, I began forming multiple big icicle spears aiming towards the center while waiting for the sting ray to be within a distance I could manipulate.

When the distance between us was around 50 meters I sensed a change in its movements, in what I assume is in preparation for an attack. Instead of giving it time to use any tricks I made some big motions with my hand as I pulled all the water around the sting ray and it into the center. I have never actually bended with this much force before, so I wasn't prepared for the massive headache and burning sensation through my arms, but I didn't let it distract me.

Before it could free itself from the water slamming into it from all sides, I let a rain of ice spear fall upon it. I didn't wait to see any results, and instead just kept forming spears and accelerating them faster and faster upon the beast. Even without looking, I could feel that my ice had drawn blood, what felt impossible to manipulate before, now felt slightly less impossible but still impossible.

In a desperate attempt before its final breath, it shot its tail toward me at a speed impossible to see, and judging from the booming sound following it, broke the sound barrier. I'm very happy that the tail isn't elastic because I honestly have very few ways of responding to such a threat, even my water senses were too late to pick up on it, luckily it was too short to reach me.

I let a smug smile show as I confirmed that it was truly dead from a distance, before bending its body towards me. No way I wasn't going to taste it, after of course feeding it to some other animals first to check for poison.

The rest of the trip to the other shore was uneventful, apparently, the corpse of a giant sting ray works as a good deterrent. Once I arrived I decided to stop for the night, though it only took a couple of hours to cross the lake, that fight took more out of me than I would like to admit. Ignoring the headache and numbing sensation in my chi veins, which have begun to lessen and presumably recover, bending that much water drained 3/4 of my chi reserve.

I'm not sure if my efficiency is garbage, or if it simply takes that much chi to manipulate massive quantities of any element, but I'm not comfortable traveling further before I've completely recovered.

It took a bit of searching, but I eventually found a wolf pack. I kidnapped one of them and force feed it with some sting ray, and to my disappointment, it didn't take long afterward for it to whimper and die. I'm sure there's some way to prepare it without the poisonous aspect, but I'm not patient or skilled enough to try it out, so I just gave up on eating it.

After quickly making an igloo, and eating a lot of fish to recover as fast as possible, I went to bed early. The first day of traveling toward the mountains and I already had a lot of excitement While falling asleep I imagine whatever other monsters I'm going to fight, and discoveries I'm going to make in the coming days, and sleep with a smile on my face.