Chapter 0:
In 2025, when I was six years old, a science lab in Seoul announced that they had detected a new type of energy in the atmosphere. While it was only available in trace amounts, roughly one watt per cubic meter, they were able to find a way to capture it. When they injected it into lab rats to test the safety of having it around humans, they found something interesting. No matter how much they injected, the rats weren’t harmed by it. In fact, the more of it they injected, the healthier the rats seemed to be. They ranked the rats by the amount of the energy they had in their body and their performance in various tests and, with little variation, those with more of the energy were stronger, healthier, smarter, and had better reaction times and stamina.
The density of the energy was slowly increasing at a rate of approximately 1% per day, so, seeing a business opportunity, one of the scientists decided to secretly inject the energy into themselves in order to rush human trials. The effect was even more pronounced than in the rats. With every injection his gray hair started to disappear, his few wrinkles went away, his muscles grew more toned, the slight bulge around his middle started to disappear, and all of his minor aches and pains started to go away. At work he seemed to think just a little more clearly, to make leaps in logic and discoveries faster. Once he accidentally knocked a vial off of a desk and, faster than he thought he could respond, he found that he had knelt down and caught it.
With all of the changes that were occurring in him he found it difficult to keep the secret of his own injections, and told his boss and coworkers. After verifying the results, they were able to convince their bosses that they were ready for human trials, and hired one hundred people to test it on. Without fail, all of them gained some benefits, roughly proportional to the levels of the energy in their bodies. Those with worse health saw more benefits than their healthier colleagues, with one man who had lung cancer going into remission.
The lab developed multiple versions of the solution it was using to give the energy to the rats, from simple saline and sucrose mixtures to algae based health foods, as the plants seemed to love the energy as well and store it upon saturating their growth medium. After the announcement to the public, they sold these “bio-active radiation” formulas to medical and health food companies to secure funding for further research and the world was introduced to an almost miraculous panacea.
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Of course, as a six year old I didn’t know anything about this. I heard my parents mentioning purchasing some of the algae when I was seven, and shortly afterwords had to drink a glass of nasty green water that smelled like a pond every day. My parents seemed to have plenty of energy after that, and mother no longer complained about headaches almost every day, so when I learned about the story in middle school years later I realized that they must have had everyone in the family drink the algae.
When I was eight I started seeing commercials on TV and the internet about a wrist band called the “Sansoong Qi”. I would learn later that the lab that made the discovery had found a way to gather the energy using inanimate objects and have it inject the energy into the wearer, essentially turning the fluids in your body into the carrier fluid. They had sold this idea to a major electronics manufacturer and a new age of health began on Earth, as one no longer needed to even take a pill or drink algae every day to receive the health benefits of Bioactive radiation.
After that the world started using regional words for mythical energy instead of calling it ‘bioactive radiation’. In the Eastern world it was called qi, chi, ki, or prana, while in Western world it was often called Mana. The Western world had mostly focused on the energy aspect of it, wanting to use it to build devices which gathered their own power or use it as an alternative power source. The Eastern world focused on the health and bio-compatibility of the energy, trying to develop ways to manipulate it once it was inside a person. And in 2028 the Chinese government announced that, with the help of psychologists and monks, they had developed a way to move it inside the body to direct it to enhance the body in different ways. Not to be outdone, two weeks later a company in the United States announced that they would start selling a generator capable of producing 1.5 kilowatts of electricity from the energy in the air.
This triggered a new space race, only instead of the US and Soviet Union competing to do more in space, the western world, lead by the US and eastern world, lead by China were competing to do more with the new energy source. Many new technologies and ways of using the energy were discovered and soon there were three main ways to use it. Techniques were things a person could do to create an effect. Formations were ways of manipulating the world to cause an effect. Talismans were a kind of middle ground in which human intent and symbology was incorporated into an item which could then be activated to produce an effect.
When I turned eleven my father bought me something special for my birthday, a Sansoong Qi 2. While it was a new bracelet it was an older model, the Qi 3 having come out several months earlier. The recent increase in research into qi had resulted in electronics research taking a back seat to formation research, and resulted in hundreds of new qi based devices being available, drastically driving down the price, but a Qi 3 was still a bit more expensive than you would want a birthday present to an eleven year old to be. I showed it to my new friends in middle school, having started a few months earlier, which resulted in the teacher giving us an improvised lesson into the history of qi.
