Fia adjusted the fit of her Travel Suit and began tuning the vitality regulator. She had been beyond the edge of her known world for a week now, there were still signs of civilization along the road she was following but everything had been abandoned in the latest round of collapses. For all Fia knew, she was living in the apocalypse and was one of the few holding on until the final end came.
Once She had broken camp Fia set off down the nameless road toward another unknown destination. Her only real hope was that if she kept walking she would find a haven, as it was her supplies were dangerously low.
As she was beginning to look for a place to make camp for the night Fia noticed something strange, a stray patch of green in the otherwise lifeless landscape. Mystified Fia began walking toward it. Thankfully the patch happened to lay in a shallow depression that was a perfect place to camp.
In the center of the patch of green, green grass out in the deadlands, was a man dressed in an unfamiliar style for all the world like he was out on a stroll through a wealthy settlement. He was both alive, and breathing.
Fia pulled out her Vitality gauge. Judging from the needle Fia was sure that she wouldn’t be able to stay for long, but she could dig a hole and plant some spring weed. Fia would effectively lose the seeds, not being able to stay long enough to gather more, but she would be able to refill her waterskins.
Committing to the action Fia pulled a shovel out of her gear as well as a formation compass, and began digging a perfectly circular hole where she planted a single spring weed seed. By morning the seed would have grown and the hole would be filled with water produced by the spring weed.
Once the spring pond was planted, Fia carefully went through the process of setting up her shelter, checking it for damage and signs of wear. Once she was ready to enter for the night she dragged the man inside and sealed the door behind them and turned on the shelter’s vitality regulator and watched her vitality gauge.
Once the vitality was at a safe level, Fia removed her Travel Suit and began tuning the regulator down to a state of equilibrium. While Fia tended to food and hygiene she didn’t realize quite how low she had turned the dial on the shelter’s regulator.
In retrospect, she later considered, it should have been obvious that the man had passed his Font level, the point in cultivation where a soul’s output of vitality exceeds what the body needs to maintain itself. He clearly was still growing his Spiritual Skin, A skill which shared the effect of the anti-wasting coating on her shelter and Travel Suit and would allow anyone who had reached their Font level to walk through the deadlands without a protective suit.
Fia had a fairly well developed soul for her age, so she didn’t need a particularly high density of Vitality to survive. Still, factoring the man into the calculus of her survival left Fia disappointed. Together her supply of Vitality crystals would last them about four months. When rationed for two people, her food would only last them four weeks. If Fia was willing to risk her stash of seeds, the greater part of her wealth, she doubted they could establish a refuge level settlement, one that produces just enough vitality for every plant, animal and person living there.
***
When Ian woke up it took him a moment to remember what had happened to him. He had managed to fall asleep on his lawn while sunbathing after a long night of surfing the internet. When he woke up he found himself in a sort of tepid desert, neither cool nor warm, simply dead and lifeless. Something about the place left him short of breath.
Ian had stood up and walked around looking for anything. The further he walked from his little circle of grass that had apparently been ripped away with him, the more short of breath he felt. Eventually, seeing nothing save his circle of grass, Ian returned there and slipped back into unconsciousness.
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Now he was in a sort of tent that had been erected around a large cart. Now, instead of feeling short of breath, Ian was positively giddy. Across the tent from his was a disheveled looking woman, roughly groomed hair, slightly underweight, and dressed just enough to preserve her modesty. She had entirely neglected some of the more modern notions of personal care Ian sort of expected from women, shaved arms and legs, plucked eyebrows, and a few things Ian couldn’t really put to words.
The giddiness that Ian was feeling reminded him of the one time he had tried one of those multi-hour energy shots. He had ended up leaving his shift early that day because the only reason he wasn’t literally bouncing off the walls was because he had enough self control to remember that would be not just weird, but dumb.
Ian forced himself to control the jitters and began to breath in and out, imagining the extra energy burning away. At first this eased the jitters, but then, almost as if he were catching fire himself, the jitters returned. Doubling down on his focus Ian went deeper into a meditative state which again eased the jitters for a moment. The second time they returned Ian gave up and began to mentaly shove the excess energy out of his body with each breath until with a sort of mental snap, the image became self sustaining and Ian felt like he could breathe comfortably again.
Ian opened his eyes as he began to slump from the entirely mental effort. The woman was awake and staring at him.
***
Fia only vaguely realized she was staring at the man. What he had just done wasn’t really all that impressive. Few children needed any instruction to ‘open the tap’ and set out on the path of soul cultivation. The impressive thing about the man was that his natural Vitality generation was enough to reach his Font Level.
Fia would need to monitor her Vitality gauge for a while to be sure, but she was sure that he had pushed his excess generation just above what they as a pair needed to meet their personal vitality needs. Again, this wasn’t exactly impressive as Fia was close, in absolute terms, to her Font Level. Fia was sure that given a little cultivation instruction, the man could help her establish a new settlement.
Eventually Fia introduced herself and the man, Ian as he called himself, gave his name in return. Fia decided that Ian was strangely naive. He claimed to know nothing about Vitality or its importance to living things, and to Fia he seemed completely genuine in his ignorance. As they spoke, he occasionally made a nonsensical comment before immediately correcting himself to something completely different, as a confused look bloomed on his face.
Neither Ian nor Fia was sure what to make of the other, the circumstance was beyond what either of them knew as normal so the conversation was awkward as each tried to reach a comfortable common ground with the other.
Thankfully, having been so familiar with some of the stranger portions of the internet, Ian wasn’t completely out of his depth. While he was embarrassed with how long the realization was coming to him, he did decide he had somehow slipped into some sort of post-post-apocalyptic cultivation sort of fantasy world.
The cultivation technique that Fia tried to teach to him was relatively basic, as far as he could tell, though she showed no real comprehension of how cultivation worked even though she knew how to do it.
In essence, Cultivation was the art of using a powerful mental image to strengthen the soul so that it could produce more vitality. The image Fia had learned was that of plants growing in a field, taking vitality from the air and turning it into something solid.
When Ian tried using the same image he could feel the jitters returning. After interrogating Fia, Ian decided that not only was he feeling an excess of vitality, but that despite Fia’s assurances, that excess was probably a bad thing.
By Fia’s limited knowledge only the most talented people ever felt side effects from too much Vitality, and only when they suddenly came to a point of rapidly diminishing returns in their efforts. To Ian it felt and sounded like the body adapting to a toxic level of some substance.
Ian went with an image of a gas burning power plant. ‘Soot’ from the ‘fire’ collecting on a growing chunk of coal that constantly gave off more gas that could be burnt though he only collected a small portion to burn in the powerplant.. Once he came up with that image he had to focus for a while until the image became self perpetuating.