Time slipped slowly past, and before anyone noticed, fifty days had gone by.
Once he'd shed his initial shock and dread, Danny took to dropping by between his own training to chat with this "fellow countrywoman." Daisy kept her eyes shut and ignored him, so he just rambled on by himself.
He talked to the great tree. He talked to the rocks.
By chance, Daisy learned that this kid could use chi too—and had been practicing for two years already.
Unfortunately, forget projecting it outward or reinforcing his own body; Danny could barely manage a single complete circulation inside himself, and he gave Daisy nothing much in the way of practical advice.
In a place like K'un-Lun, with no one to talk to, he'd been bottling it up something fierce. The moment he saw she was interested, Danny spilled everything in one go, holding nothing back.
When he finished, Daisy let out a soft sigh. Danny had found his own chi in one year and nine months—a result second to none among his peers. Plenty of others trained ten years and still felt no chi-sense at all.
Danny was the textbook Westerner: rack up a little achievement and he loved to brag, with no notion whatsoever of modesty. Daisy got annoyed enough to chase him off.
She sat beneath the tree puzzling it over for three more days—from the Way of Heaven that takes from the excess to supply the lacking, all the way to the principle that where the leaves dance, fire will burn. She thought through the whole of it and finally discovered she truly had no gift for insight.
Switching to her human state made her foundation and constitution sufficient, but it did nothing for her aptitude.
Not only was her aptitude low, her mind was cluttered. She couldn't even manage to enter stillness.
She could only take the unorthodox road: enter the Way through martial force, through motion, through killing.
For a whole week she took part in K'un-Lun's campaigns to exterminate the H'ylthri legions. It was a routine activity for training the disciples to begin with, and once she joined, they swept through the enemy with overwhelming ease.
When there was no enemy left to kill, she burned the plants, burned the wood, and carefully savored that faint lingering trace of matter being broken down by flame.
On her sixtieth day in K'un-Lun, Daisy smashed through the H'ylthri's lair, slaughtering them until she was drenched head to toe in green plant sap. And that was with her holding back—otherwise the H'ylthri, who'd been neighbors to K'un-Lun for thousands of years, would have ceased to exist.
Her right hand seized a hulking H'ylthri. This one was the leader: it spat corrosive venom of considerable potency, stood tall and massive, vines covering its whole body, and most crucially, it possessed a measure of intelligence.
In her human state Daisy could barely keep it pinned down. She fought for the better part of a day before finally beating the enemy down.
"Die, you piece of trash!" The killing intent radiating off Daisy now was immense. Apart from that one point of clarity in her heart, she'd thrown her mental guard wide open. To her, the Phoenix Force and the dragon's power alike were outside forces, with no distinction of righteous or evil—so long as they could be controlled, there was nothing she couldn't accept.
Through ceaseless slaughter, she and the Phoenix Force grew ever more attuned. She hadn't switched to her Inhuman state, but she could tell the resonance frequency between the two was undergoing minute adjustments.
Her nails shot out, and amid its wailing shrieks the H'ylthri leader was sliced clean in two.
Mental power and stamina both bottomed out. Even if the prey were weaklings, killing nonstop for seven days would wear anyone down, and she had no strength left to fight on.
Daisy sat on the ground. As if struck by sudden inspiration, she looked toward the horizon. The glow of the setting sun met her eyes; the sun had dyed everything around her gold. There in the splendor of autumn and the golden silence, Daisy suddenly understood her own path.
Fire destroys the old to bring forth the new. Honestly, that realm was too lofty—not suited to her at all.
Rather than chase some vague, intangible rebirth, she'd do better to focus on what was in front of her. Simple, direct destruction was what suited her style. Destruction was the beginning of rebirth; it wasn't evil, but a necessary process.
Her already-drained stamina began a slow recovery, and her mental power was nourished as well, slowly catalyzing along some unseen path. A newborn power sprouted within Daisy's heart—chi that belonged to her alone.
This newborn chi was faint and frail, but it carried a thread of the Phoenix's nature, which made the chi extraordinarily tough.
More than that, the scattered Phoenix Force she'd been tainted with long ago during her talk with the darkened Jean Grey seemed to find an outlet at last. Bit by bit it was absorbed into the newborn chi, beginning to convert, drop by drop becoming part of herself.
Daisy hurried back to K'un-Lun and sat beneath her tree. The sun had already dropped more than halfway below the horizon. She attempted no new insight, but closed her eyes and circulated her chi, squeezing those uncontrolled traces of Phoenix Force inside her, running them along the channels of her chi, and at last converting them into power she could wield at will.
The autumn wind drifted by, brushing the treetops, and the leaves gave off a soft rustle.
All around lay silence. Sun, moon, and stars shifted in their courses, and K'un-Lun's night soon arrived. The corner where Daisy sat felt more like a patch carved whole out of space itself—no one came to disturb her.
The Phoenix Force scattered without order inside her was drawn out thread by thread, dispersed and assimilated, gathering from a trickle into a long, winding stream.
Unlike the powers stored in her cells, chi was a genuinely existing energy—without substance, yet with form. As a beginner, Daisy shouldn't have been able to circulate it through her whole body at all; like Danny Rand, running it through every limb and bone was painstaking, grinding work.
But the Phoenix Force was the ultimate cheat. Even though what she'd picked up was only a dust-mote's worth, a single faint sliver, it was enough to work wonders.
After three days of unbroken conversion, the Phoenix Force that had once overflowed and influenced her every moment was now essentially gathered up in the manner of chi. The phoenix tattoo on her back could be withdrawn or revealed at will.
The one regret was that, as she mobilized the Phoenix Force throughout her body, her hair had now turned completely red.
Chi could act directly throughout her body. Like Madame Gao or Lei Kung, she could now use chi to reinforce herself, raising her attributes across the board.
It was just that her total reserve of chi wasn't large, and the conversion process had consumed a good deal of it. Exactly how many years of cultivation it amounted to would need some reference point to measure.
But unlike the passive triggering of before, she could now use this fire ability freely.
Daisy stood, gave her right hand a light shake, and a ball of golden-yellow flame appeared in her palm. The flame lasted thirty seconds before going out, consuming roughly a tenth of her chi.
In other words, she could hold the chi-reinforced state for five minutes of combat at most. If she threw in a few outward flame attacks during the fight, that duration would shrink further.
Normal chi was centered and harmonious, without any attribute. It could reinforce the body, strengthen the mind, resist mental intrusion, and—used cleverly—even heal wounds.
But this thing of Daisy's, more like a fire-aspected battle aura, lacked many of those properties. If she channeled it into her head, it would simply fry her brain. Healing was the same—she could sterilize a wound and seal it shut, if that even counted as healing.
The flame carried few extra properties; it merely amplified her attack power. Even without becoming the Iron Fist yet, her strikes had taken on a touch of the irresistible, the all-conquering.