Even while surrounded by her peers, Amanda felt lonely. Where once before she felt camaraderie, kinship, and rapport, she now felt like a stranger. The other students looked like sheep, bleating and chattering without a care in the world, oblivious to the danger lurking just around the corner.
They were the same. She was one of them before the break. It was she who had changed. Was it what growth felt like? Because if it was, it sucked big time. With a sigh, she admitted to herself. She changed. The question then became, what triggered the change. The answer was obvious but she refused to admit it.
The deviant squid and that vacuum realm. Though she left the encounters without any wounds, that was only true to her body. She could see it now. In the shadow of the dissociation, she felt when among her peers, there it lurked. The mental scars left by these incidents. She felt damaged, and inadequate.
Amanda wanted to scream at them and wake them up to the horrors, to the invaders and conquerors that thought them nothing more than ants to be crushed at their feet.
The anguish rose in her heart like an adagio that blended into a fuga del Diavolo. She wanted to cry, to run, to scream until the shadows she could now see vanished. Until she had run so far her own weakness was left behind.
Weak. That's what she was, in a single word. From her weak will to her shattered hubris to her production talent. Amanda made the choice to trust her father's plan and became a farmer. She was not the successor to Titania Samson, she was a farmhand with delusions of grandeur.
She even had her seed pouch with her. One thousand plant species are held in stasis. Amanda could go to a barren world and turn it into a verdant paradise in just a couple of years. But she couldn't protect herself from the monsters; real, imaginary, or wearing a human smile.
She needed protection. Amanda's thoughts drifted to the conversation she had with her father the day she escaped the deviant squid.
*
*
"Our deal is over," he shouted.
She had never seen Jeremiah that angry. She loved her father but she was scared of the man before her. She knew he wouldn't harm her but his anger was almost tangible and made her irrational side believe he would kill her.
"It was not my fault!" Amanda whined. "The game wardens were the ones who failed to keep the evolved mollusks away from the hunting area!"
"Regardless. Granny said so. Unless you want to go there and change her mind, our hands are tied. You need bodyguards. I will assign Tyrone from the security forces, and a squad–"
"Don't, please don't!" She begged. "It will cripple my ascension! Tyrone won't let me collect enough aura. Reaching one hundred percent on my first star will take years, not to mention the estimated amount to get a good evolution! I'll be middle-aged by then."
"We don't have anyone qualified to protect you with only one star."
That was because the Prime Vestiges given to the recruits to the Samson security forces were below-average combat ones. The good stuff was reserved for an undeserving elite. In very few cases, the appraisal and evaluation of the Prime's worth was off and a really good one with cryptic descriptions slipped past.
"I know!" Amanda brightened up. "The guy who killed the deviant squid! Robert. He's strong, for sure. And I am sure he is unaffiliated."
"I don't know, this is a huge risk," Jeremiah said.
"Even if he is not as strong as it seems and he defeated an already weakened squid, it's still better than Tyrone. I am sure he is a newly-ascended Arch. We can invest in his growth."
"Granny–"
"--will agree to give it a try or I will stop talking to her. Dad, all I ask is to give Robert a chance. Call him for an interview. Test his limits. Bribe him to display what he can do."
"Okay. I will get his information from the Mollusk Realm passage, and get his background checked."
Amanda sighed in relief. She hoped not only for a bodyguard but for a friend.
*
*
Back in the present, Amanda felt a little guilty. Robert was aware of how they manipulated him. She tried to stay above-board but it was hard. She felt an urge to make him want nothing by giving it to him before he even noticed he needed it.
The young woman, still a teenager, still a child in the eyes of everyone, bit her lower lip. Robert's demands to get her Father's approval and signature on all gifts was a clear signal that she crossed a boundary she shouldn't have.
But he kept his cards so close to his chest, his emotions in check, she found it hard to read his intentions. What was he thinking about her? Did he hate her? She surely thought so during that tram ride.
She had to stop worrying, a part of her said. Robert will do his job and help you grow, it continued. But she couldn't trust the voice. People were fickle and their priorities changed all the time.
That's why she bought Robert the one and a half million dollars dog. Guys love dogs, right? (not all of them) Robert would accept Freddy as part of his family, and the dog would always remind him of her (not necessarily, but Amanda was in her own fantasy world). It was like… they had a child together. (Not at all). Except for the yucky parts of actually having a child.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Should she… hell, no. That was a can of worms she was sure would ruin everything. And her Granny would kill Robert on the spot.
What she needed to do was use this week apart to sort her thoughts, get in the mindset to study…
Would Robert take her to that liminal void of his and stay there just the two of them, studying but forced to keep physical contact at all times…
Begone, impure thoughts. Amanda slapped her cheeks.
The loneliness she now felt was so familiar. It's been there with her as long as she could remember. Inside the steel and concrete cage of the arcology, she was untouchable. People around her always tried their best not to draw Titania's wrath. She once thought that at least here, at the Imperial Academy, she could forge real connections with her peers. Yet, this was a place for the scions of the world's elite. They only showed their public personas. A group of girls she was friends with waved at her. Amanda searched her heart and found she didn't really know them, the feeling of detachment returning with a vengeance. She waved back. Perhaps she should invest time and emotion to really know them.
*
*
Back home from his shopping trip, Robert placed the enchanted tub in the middle of the shower stall, admiring how big it was. The bathroom had a bathtub but the circular wooden tub wouldn't fit inside. And it made filling the tub with hot water easier.
While the tub filled, he took the booklet and read it in the liminal void. His time in real life was too precious to waste on things he could do in the void. Which included personal hygiene but he was afraid of what would happen if he used the tempering bath there. Would it become unbalanced? He had no idea and wasn't comfortable sharing that detail with Diana.
The booklet offered two methods for the first batch of alchemical reagents. He could use one packet per day with a healer overseeing the process, which he counted as, split the daily portion in four, stretching the first batch across two months. The end results were comparatively the same, with the stretched method losing by a little but the risks were way smaller.
Two months. To Robert, that meant sixteen years and eight months just to use the first batch with the slow method.
Fuck it. Time to use the turbo-void method.
He went back to the district twenty-three mall. Back before the rift cataclysm, humanity had a means of instant communication across the entire world. That was lost, along with most of the technology involving electricity or explosions. Some of it was replicated using ether crystal and runic enchantments, like vehicles, but others were lost forever.
Diana said that he could split the portions in ten parts at most but he still needed twenty-four hours between applications. The efficiency of the baths would decrease by thirty percent, though. She sold him a scale that could weigh not only mass but also the etheric content of substances, so he could portion the baths accordingly. Robert placed a request for half as many baths as the first order for six hundred thousand dollars. That should cover for the lost efficiency. But he needed it soon.
*
*
Robert waited for the right time to use the baths. He needed the exact amount of time in the liminal void to do his tempering, and then return as fast as possible. If some accident happened, he would be back soon to seek medical aid. He couldn't trust his healing magic would help him.
His backpack of holding had two and a half cubic meters of hot water and another cubic meter in his ring. All his valuables were in the liminal void version of his apartment.
With this much water, he could take twenty-four baths, which meant spending that many days in the liminal void, including the wait to take the next bath. In real life time, five hours and three-quarters. Using his timepiece, he waited that long and carried everything to the liminal void.
The bath was easy enough to use. Fill the tub with warm water, pour the exact amount of powdered whatever – Robert had no idea what was in that powder. It could be the dried blood of vestal virgins for all he knew. Diana wasn't sharing her recipes, that was for sure. And stir with a silver spoon. More like a shovel but Robert didn't judge.
Then he slowly immersed himself. The water level in the cramped tub rose until only his head was outside. It would remain outside for the first baths as tempering the head with Void energy was a one-way ticket to brain damage land.
He felt the effects of the Void tempering right away. It felt like small fish nibbling at his flesh if fish could nibble your flesh from the inside. The Void was disintegrating small bits of his body, which he then restored with his healing magic. The new tissue would trap some Void ether and become infused with it, developing a resistance to the Void. The pricks and stings kept going on and on, demanding an ever-growing concentration effort to keep healing it.
And this was the bath at ten percent potency. Using the full packet was suicide if he didn't have a dedicated healer next to him. The million and a half he spent on the bath reagents would be cheap if compared to the costs of keeping a healer on retainer for that long.
The bath lasted for an hour. Fortunately for him, the adaptive healing spell started to heal wounds caused by the void for less essence. The reduction was minimal but it would compound over the whole treatment like a loan shark's interest.
The timepiece displayed one hour since he entered. The rate at which the Void ether in the bath struck him had lessened considerably. Robert used a moment to appreciate how useful it was to have accurate time tracking in the liminal void. He marked the time and climbed out of the tub.
Only then he considered what he would do with three and a half cubic meters of water lying around in the liminal void. Without flowing once it got away from him. Anyway, he went to the bathroom and poured the tub into the bathtub. It wouldn't go down the drain and he thought he didn't even want it to go there. He would scoop those still water art installations later and take them over to reality later.
He read some books, and took some notes, until the next bath. And the next, twenty-four times.
After the last bath of this batch, Robert took his empty backpack of holding and ring. He used them to scoop the water in the bathroom. Problem solved.
With this method, he used ten days' worth of tempering alchemical reagents in a single day.
*
*
Robert sat in the park, surrounded by a sea of vibrant emerald. The grass was thrumming with lifeforce, as healthy as grass can be. Freddy was roaming around, taking in the sights and smells.
The park was as big as the one in the twenty-third district. Residents of this floor had many amenities such as unlimited access to a modern gym for Archs and better eating options, all for basically free.
The latter was especially important now that he started to use the biomass absorption tempering technique. The extra biomass needed to come from somewhere, and while converting Essence into physical matter was possible, it was never permanent.
His breakfast was worth six thousand calories. As he ate, essence infused into the food inside him, compressing it beyond what would normally be possible in his intestines, before letting it pass into his bloodstream to be stored in his cells. Normally, only the adipose cells stored excess nutrients but the technique made sure that each cell of his body had extra biomass and energy to use. His toughness and density would increase sharply in the next few weeks.
The worst part of the technique was what it called "sublime bowel control". Robert had to absorb all of the food he ate, leaving nothing behind for his, erm, behind. Even the fibers and other byproducts were metabolized, infused with his essence, and absorbed into the body. He swore to void-punch the first person who said he was full of shit.
His time in the void was more of the usual. Sleep, study, transcribe information from the library books, sword training, and getting up to speed with the academy curriculum. He dreaded exposing Amanda to ridicule.