36 Chapter 36

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The four of us were in the throne room, kneeling before Fire Lord Ozai. Besides us and the Fire Lord, there was no one else in the room! Just me, Azula, Ty Lee, Mai, and Ozai. We all felt the warmth emanating from the wall of fire and saw the shadow of the firebender standing before us.

"I'm glad that your health has been restored, Azula, and that you can walk again. Garro, is everything alright?" Ozai asked, turning his head toward me, standing to the left of Azula.

"Yes, my Lord, health is fully restored, the legs have finished growing and are completely healthy, now only the physical strength of the legs needs to be regained, but that requires exercises and constant training."

"Wonderful! I am very glad that Azula has someone like you. As for training... she will regain their strength on the way."

"On the way, father?" Azula lifted her head and looked at her father.

"Yes. You are heading to the walls of Ba Sing Se, where preparations are underway to breach the wall. You'll learn the details later. I want you, Azula, to be there and take command of the city until my resident arrives. Is that clear?" Ozai asked Azula.

"Yes, father, I will not let you down!" Azula lowered her head again, expressing a bow.

"And you... I want you to accompany my daughter and take an active part and assist in overcoming the walls and capturing the main city-fortress of the Earth Kingdom," Ozai said, looking at us. "And you, Garro... I ask you to take care of my daughter's health."

I also bowed my head in respect and said nothing.

Four hours later, we were already on a ship ready to depart. I stood at the edge of the ship, holding onto the railing. Here, in the bay, not a volcano, so a pleasant breeze was blowing around me, and I watched the people running back and forth in the city-port, which, moreover, serves as the main industrial and production center, from which tanks, weapons, and so forth are dispatched.

"Did you like it at my home?" Azula asked, approaching and stopping next to me, looking in the same direction as I was.

"Yes. I must admit, I definitely liked it here very much. And by the way, Azula, I have news for you."

"What is it?" Azula turned to me with interest.

Raising my left hand with fingers spread, I focused.

"Look..." I said after twenty seconds of concentration, and small electric discharges began to fly from one finger to another with very low power. "I've finally managed to generate lightning!"

Azula looked at my hand, her face screaming astonishment, and then she turned her gaze to me, smiling.

"But why..." not knowing which word to choose better, she paused in her speech.

"Why so little? Not a full-fledged lightning, but only small electric discharges? Simply, I used very little of my chi, literally a drop, and did all that you said. And it's not enough for more." The discharges in my hand stopped running back and forth, and I lowered it. "There, the power I used up is gone. I think I can create a powerful lightning, there's no difference, as far as I understand, only the energy expended varies. So now I'll be expecting further training from you!"

Azula and I talked for another fifteen minutes when the ship began to sail. Once we left the bay, the ship picked up much greater speed, and then the wind became inconvenient, whistling over our words, and we headed to our cabins.

The journey was going to take us about two weeks at standard speed, and then an extra day or so to get to Ba Sing Se. However, the duration would increase by at least six hours, as the ship needed to refuel with coal, replenish food and water supplies... in short, all standard procedures. And this didn't even account for the possibility of encountering a storm or another problem. This could further delay our arrival.

Naturally, the four of us were terribly bored, and we all entertained ourselves as best we could. I spent most of my free time training with the lightning element.

I managed to create lightning very recently, just ten hours before departing from the port. And you know what? It's like riding a bicycle - if you manage to do it once, it gets much easier afterward! With lightning, it doesn't work exactly the same way, but if you manage to create it once, you can easily do it again and again. And absolutely everything else was a matter of energy control. Interestingly, lightning was controlled precisely through energy! Not like fire or any other element, but rather as one of the forms of pure mana that acquires all the properties of lightning but remains mana!

If compared to fire, there mana is completely transformed into fire, and that's it. In creating lightning from an explosive reaction, we get a new form of mana. It's mana, not lightning, but mana that has partly become fire and partly remained mana. As if the elemental particles of mana, if such a thing exists, haven't yet decided whether to be fire element or remain as mana. And this uncertainty is taken for lightning. But it's NOT LIGHTNING. It's mana that has all the properties of lightning but is not lightning itself!

However, this has its advantages! Although for other benders, it's rather a minus. Such a form of bending, although it appears as an element, is not, and therefore standard, conventional techniques of mastering the element don't apply here!

Therefore, controlling lightning is extremely difficult!

For others!

However, because it's still mana and not a new element, controlling this "lightning" was much easier for ME! Essentially, I was controlling the same mana... just in a kind of its quantum uncertainty. Gosh, it sounds overly complex, but I express it as I understand it.

Yes, I also control my mana not exactly excellently, far from perfectly, but precisely mana control is important in mastering new elements, because without it, you can't synchronize your energy with the element! So in a way, I do have control over my energy, and therefore... "lightning" was relatively easy for me to control.

But I will definitely try to resolve this bending uncertainty to a definite outcome and create real lightning someday! For now, the full-fledged and, in my opinion, no less effective substitute is enough for mastery.

For more than two weeks, I spent most of the day meditating. There was no land nearby, so I tried to perceive vibrations through the metal of the ship. And I must say it wasn't much different. Yes, initially, it was challenging because I was perceiving vibrations and amplifying them for myself using earthbending, you could say, I was retransmitting them, but with metal, it was both simpler and more complicated at the same time. It was harder because the retransmission using earthbending in the case of metal showed very low efficiency. However, it was simpler because metal, in general, spreads vibrations faster, better, and further.

Still, most of my training was devoted to developing "lightning." Azula also practiced this with me. But unlike me, she was always moving, performing pirouettes, it seemed to me that she was showing off in front of me. I, on the other hand, sat and meditated or, when using lightning, concentrated.

"I can't understand how... why you can create lightning without moving at all?" she asked when another lightning bolt, accumulated by me for a few seconds, was launched at the jagged shore of one of the islands a couple of hundred meters from the ship, and a bunch of rocks in response collapsed and fell into the water, creating a lot of splashes.

"Because... how to tell you... we have completely different approaches to bending. Everyone uses a method similar to yours, linking certain movements to specific elemental actions and subsequently using all of it.

Or they weave elemental effects into entire katas. They produce a psychological attachment to the effect. This is good at least because it allows achieving results much faster than with my method. However, this has been happening over centuries, millennia! It has almost woven into the essence of all benders!

"And you're different? Or is it again because of your lineage?" Azula asked, coming closer.

"Don't think that my lineage is so brilliant and great. All we did was imitate the spirits. And their bending is in no way related to martial arts. I know how to fight in hand-to-hand combat, you know this yourself. But I don't need to move to control fire.

"Then why do you say your method is slow? It's been less than a year since you started learning firebending in the circus with Ty Lee, and now you already surpass me, a master of fire!"

"Have you seen how I meditated?" I asked Azula, relaxing after using lightning. Using a full-fledged version of this technique requires a lot of energy. For example, Azula can strike with maximum power lightning bolts about thirty times, each of which could destroy the ship we're sailing on! Another thing is that accumulating the necessary charge would take her about half a minute, but the tests showed exactly such a result. The speed of accumulation depends on the creator of the lightning's throughput capacity, thanks to which he releases the charge outside and immediately retains it. For example, my throughput capacity is several times higher than Azula's, but here, as I suspect, everything is involved: training and meditation from childhood, internal energy management, development of several elements, constant training, good physical development, very costly development of bloodbending, long (in my opinion, VERY!) stay in the spirit world and consuming these spirits in large quantity and variety, and now also constant maximum loads using lightning. All this combined gives me the ability to pass through myself several times more energy per second than Azula. However, it's funny that in volume I only surpass Azula by no more than four times, as the same tests showed, and only her more powerful, hotter flame allows her to keep up with me in battle given such indicators. It turns out I greatly underestimated the power of her fire because I previously thought that if I surpass Azula in the amount of bending, it's by no more than one and a half to two times. And it turns out like this.

"Of course, I've seen. The entire ship's crew has seen how you do it."

"To achieve what I have achieved in bending and am achieving to this day, I had to meditate like that since I was eleven, and only very recently did I start mastering the fire element. So don't talk about what you don't understand, Azula, or you'll look quite foolish in the eyes of someone who understands the issue."

"I'm sorry, Garro, I didn't mean to offend you."

"It's okay, Azula, I understand, so I'm not offended. As I said, our lineage was quite strange, and we understood this no less than everyone else."

The conversation somehow faded on its own, and each of us thought about our own things. I was devising ways to use lightning and how to further improve my characteristics? How to become even more dangerous? Start paying more attention to the other elements? Earth and air are my least developed elements, especially air, and that should be corrected. However, besides that, it's worth continuing lightning training, as it allows for the fastest development of throughput capacity and reserve, and also trains control over energy, not over elements!

Azula distracted me from my thoughts by touching my hand.

"Garro... my legs hurt, can you help?" she asked.

"Hm? If you want a massage, just say so. Making up reasons here..."

***

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