Kyle flew upwards again and stopped near the World Ceiling.
'The wind here is pretty strong,' he thought as his hair kept slapping his face. 'Just what I want.'
The next moment, he summoned a green ball of Wind Ether in his hand and watched it.
He could control the ball so that it wouldn't disperse into the surroundings, but he actively deactivated that ability and watched as the Wind Ether slowly vanished.
The surrounding wind was absorbing part of the Wind Ether and became stronger.
One small gust of wind became bigger, which pushed on another gust of wind, which pushed on another gust of wind, and so on.
Since there was nothing but air and wind around Kyle, he could see how his little bit of Wind Ether had a huge impact on the wind in the distance.
'Wasn't there some kind of proverb about a butterfly's wings and a tornado? Or was that just about that time travel butterfly effect thing?'
He watched the movement of the wind with his Ether Sense and saw that his own Wind Ether had a ten-times amplifying effect on the wind in the distance.
'Ten times is pretty crazy,' he thought, 'but it is also not very focused in its effect.'
'Sure enough, this feels just like the Fragment of Metal Expansion.'
'Except that the effect is much more pronounced.'
'In fact, the effect probably gets even stronger further away. I just can't look that far into the distance.'
Kyle was right.
Several hundred kilometers away, the Skysand above the southern continent was being pushed around, hitting the areas protected by the Ether Springs.
Luckily, the Ether Springs were powerful enough that they could block the Skysand without many issues.
The Skysand moved erratically from time to time, and this wasn't anything unusual.
The only people who noticed were the ones traveling past one of these streams.
"The Skysand is wild today," one of them said.
"Yeah, that happens," another guy answered.
Kyle continued watching his Wind Ether dispersing into the wind and took a deep breath.
'This is so fucking complicated!'
'Yep, that confirms it,' he thought. 'This is the hard one to learn. What did the Duchess of Twilight call it? A Base Fragment. Right, a Pure Level One Law is made of one Base Fragment and three Auxiliary Fragments. I already know the three Auxiliary Fragments, leaving me with the Base Fragment.'
Wind's composition wasn't very complex. It was just about making the air move. Wind's focus also wasn't that complicated since it just involved a bit of pressure.
Wind's movement was just about how the wind moved.
Yet, the true power of wind was how it affected the air and other streams of wind.
Just a little bit of wind could have devastating consequences if launched at the right moment and at the right time.
Wind was like an engine, and by adding just a bit of wind, a tremendous effect could be achieved.
Just a bit of extra wind could turn otherwise peaceful winds above the Atlantic Ocean into a hurricane.
In the initial phases of a hurricane, there were just a couple of individual downdrafts and updrafts. The speeds of these drafts were not very strong. A normal human would consider them drafts, but those were not extreme speeds.
Yet, the wind and some other things would just keep feeding the storm, making it more and more powerful.
Just a tiny bit of extra wind could turn a failed hurricane into an actual hurricane.
Kyle remembered a video from Earth where a guy pushed over a small domino stone, which hit a slightly bigger one, which hit a slightly bigger one, and so on until a huge domino was pushed over.
One small push could cause a catastrophe.
Kyle experimented with his Wind Ether for several hours, watching how it strengthened the wind in the distance.
Eventually, he got distracted by something and looked up.
The sun was passing right above him.
'Huh, it really is just some kind of spotlight,' he thought as he flew over.
The sun was traveling across the World Ceiling at a couple of hundred kilometers per hour, which wasn't very fast to Kyle.
A moment later, he touched the brightly colored spot on the World Ceiling that was the sun.
'It's warm,' he thought. 'At most a couple of hundred degrees.'
It was so weird to literally touch the sun.
Well, it was even weirder that the sun was just a moving white spot on the silver ceiling.
'I can actually feel a bit of Light and Fire Ether coming from it, but it's not that much. Weird.'
He watched the sun for a bit before he returned to looking at his Wind Ether.
Some days passed in which he experimented more with the wind, and he was slowly learning how the wind affected other kinds of wind.
'At least I'm starting to see what's actually happening, somewhat. It's crazy how complicated the Ether's transformation is in this case. The volume and speed of wind create completely different movements of Ether. It's similar to the levels of speed of Wind Movement.'
'This is most likely similar to the different Metal Composition Fragments. Actually, now that I think about it, are they actually individual Fragments? I mean, we create frameworks for the different levels to master them, but there is no real natural distinction between the Metal Composition Fragments.'
'We just decided that they are Fragments. I guess they are just individual checkpoints.'
'In the same way, the Fragment of Wind Expansion also probably has individual checkpoints, which I could call Fragments.'
Kyle shook his head. 'But I don't need those. I'm in this for the long haul, and my comprehension speed isn't as slow as it used to be.'
'In fact,' he thought as the ball of Wind Ether in his hand expanded a bit. 'Here you go! I already got the lowest level.'
'It's just that the lowest level is less than 1% of the entire thing, and it doesn't even really increase my power.'
'Well, I already expected that this would take forever.'
'Just gotta keep at it.'
tg://resolv?domain=StrongestHammerGod
The author's patreon. If he gets more than 1000€ per month, he will increase the number of words in the chapter.