Back in his room, a rather bored Arc was thinking about what he should do.
Despite the wealth this place had displayed there were no toys for him to play with unless you counted a blanket as a toy, in which case there was one toy for him to play with.
Just as Arc was thinking about how this might be a form of torture in and of itself, he remembered what he was told to do by Bell.
'How could I forget?'
He quickly began to absorb and condense the Xan that surrounded him. Initially he found it the same as before, but after a few minutes of soaking he found that his core balance point was absorbing more Xan than before.
He couldn't determine if this was a good thing or not. Bell hadn't said anything about balancing how much the points take in, only how much was spreading through his body and balancing the flow. He decided to stick to caution, trying to absorb less Xan forcefully.
Instead he found himself woefully unprepared. He understood the basic concept of how he could stem the flow to a portion of his body, but he had no idea how to put it into practice. Feeling worried and a little bit defeated, he instead opted to try to look at what was causing the disturbance.
Recent experiments of his, including the one where he figured out that his blood vessels carried Xan, proved to him that he could focus a bit of Xan on an area inside of his body and 'see' a general shape of what it was. For example he 'saw' his blood vessels much the same way as Bell introduced him to them. He could also use Xan in a similar manner to detect the level of Xan in an area, that was a basic technique Bell had taught him so he could make sure the Xan inside his body really was steady.
Combining these two, Arc decided he would find the source of his worries. As long as he found it he would certainly find a solution.
Or so he hoped. He might have screwed up already.
He shook off those thoughts of doubt. He was positive he had done everything in accordance to what Bell had taught him. Without further deliberation, he sent a ball of Xan into his stomach region.
Finding the source was more difficult than he thought it would be. His troubles stemmed from his low level of control over his Xan, leading his blobs of Xan to dissipate before he could find clues. It was exhausting work, and Arc was starting to regret his decision when finally he picked up on what it might be.
It was an ovular object, thinner on one end and smaller than a tooth. It was located in his intestines, relatively close to his balance point. Other than that and the slight fluctuations of Xan it was giving off, Arc was unable to discern anything more from it. He couldn't tell the color or hardness, nor could he taste or weigh it.
However there were only a select few objects that could have possibly entered his stomach unless this had been fed to him while asleep.
The first possibility is that it was always there and he had only just noticed it. He disregarded that as a possibility as he had been sure he couldn't feel those fluctuations before.
The second is that this was a condensation of Xan, much like that formed around his neidan, that formed as a result of his saturation. He couldn't rule it out but given Xan's nature to repel itself, he didn't think it likely.
The final possibility is that it was something he had ingested. Thinking harder about it as this was clearly the most likely, he remembered what he had eaten. Last night, or was it noon, he had eaten that bowl of stew. He didn't remember, but it was entirely possible that he had eaten a piece that he didn't properly chew that held this thing inside. It still wouldn't explain why he hadn't felt the fluctuations before he went to sleep. The other possibility was that it was in the food he had more recently eaten, but he hadn't seen anything to suggest fruit was cut open to place it inside.
He was thoroughly stumped for a long while, but after some thinking and a bit of a comparison of this thing to what little he knew of the world, he think he came up with an answer.
'Is this a seed?'