I felt sorry for the troops. I really did.

There were only a few orcs, and they were not wildlings from Korse. They were not weak, but clearly they, like the human troopers, had been bred in a one-gee field. Someplace likely cool, since the minute the drop-ships landed and the hatches popped, they started sweating, and stinking.

Dienne’s ship was packed with Golems, which he started to deploy immediately among the rough sandstone outcroppings around our landing site. Contrary to his reassuring words, after we dropped off the command team outside the rift, I’d had to remote both dropships through a harrowing canyon to get to the first point. Unfortunately, without cross-discipline sorcery, the tech 6 pods would have become inactive chunks of metal, and once I managed to land them both, when we deployed and I dropped remote, that’s what they would temporarily become.

And no, drop-ships were not easy to remote in an atmosphere. Remoting drones in a vacuum was relatively easy since there was no gravity or atmosphere to deal with, but remoting two drop-ships was terrifying since a single wrong instruction could send one of them into a rock wall at deadly speed.

On the plus side, my wristband reported that I had gained a rank in technology for it, bringing my affinity to adept+. Apparently, inside a rift, all gains were much faster, and although my current band was not configured to display everything a true node could, I bet I gained other attributes as well. Something about facing danger inside of a rift, with an atmosphere of advancement essence, tended to accelerate all advancement, one of the many reasons people were willing to delve.

I had the heavy drones building an earthworks between the heavy outcroppings. Golems tended to be particularly specialized, and Dienne’s golems were outfitted and crafted for combat, not construction. On the plus side, with their limited sentience, they were extremely good at combat and incredibly durable and easy to control.

His golems were already mashing the first wave of attackers, weird centauroid scorpions with armored humanoid torsos and huge double pincers on both their insectoid bodies and their humanoid arms. They were incredibly ugly, and like all chaos spawn, suicidally violent, but his big nickel-iron giants were smashing their carapaces easily and ignoring the venom from their double-stinging tails.

Because of the tech cap, the troopers were mostly in heavy armor, like medieval knights from the old Earth era, and they didn’t have any environmental controls on their armor. Clearly, they were able to tough out the heat, but it couldn’t have been comfortable.

At least Tech 3 didn’t prevent them from wearing decent lightweight alloys and modern materials. If it had been tech 2, where the restriction would have made them wear heavy bronze, they’d have been a lot more miserable. As for myself, I was dressed in a brand new set of light armor with a minimum of technological adaptation. New, because I had recently outgrown my initial combat armor, in a number of disturbing directions.

My armor was wired, of course, I could activate it if I needed to, but I didn’t right now… the heat was comfortable for me, having been raised on Korse, and trying to keep all the systems active would have just been one more distraction. Several of the warriors had enchanted armors, and the rest were hoping to get some as rift rewards.

My trace to the command pod outside, where Taera, Sergeant Murphy, and Kushiel… rather, Warrant Officer David Wasserman waited was active, which was a big improvement on the empathic link that Dienne maintained. The empathy link was only able to transmit emotion and was useful for bailing our raid out if a true emergency happened, but with the actual trace, we could receive orders and advice in real-time.

David was very pleased when he heard of the wasteland of cracked mud. Apparently, this rift had a number of different landscapes, and the sandy desert would have been the worst. There were several tunneling species, but sandworms, which were one of the possibilities, wouldn’t appear in the wasteland… They were huge and could rise and swallow an entire unit if they weren’t on their guard.

The earthworks were nearly complete, and I was carefully maneuvering from unit to unit, keeping my eyes open. One of the orcs had a nasty gash on the outside of his leg, right behind his armor, from a flailing scorpitaur’s dying frenzy, and I triaged it and quickly repaired the muscle and skin. I could do it remotely, but it was much easier to touch my target directly and used far less energy.

And then I felt my entire body shudder as the advancement filled my channels with energy. I sat down suddenly on the baked dirt that my drone had been pushing into a wall.

Corporal Casparov flipped up the visor on her suit as she turned and saw me sitting in the dirt. “Are you okay?” she asked.

I nodded to her, “Yeah. I suddenly got hit with copper.” She grinned. “Good. Go ahead and power stuff down. Right now we got it. We got lucky, The scorpitaurs are actually the toughest wave, we skipped the other two coming in at waypoint one. This wave is almost finished, and the other two should be a lot easier.”

“Taera said when you hit copper, you needed to take a break at one of the nodes. I’ll let the teams know you are out of action for a while, and without sandworms, we should have no real problems.”

I noticed Dirk had heard the announcement, and he grinned, turning towards one of the other troopers, Lydia Stormwind. After a moment, Lydia scowled, “I told you no, not even to celebrate. Keep that shit up, trooper, and you’ll find yourself hot racking with Braxis. Maybe he’ll let you do butt stuff.”

I tried to pretend not to have heard, as I headed back into the pod through the access hatch. The minor nodes onboard boats were nowhere near powerful enough for node transit or quest rewards, that required a fully powered ley crossing, but a copper node was more than powerful enough to bounce signals, including class adoptions. Bronze classes would require the more powerful node on the Crow, but orichalcum or higher would require a full station or maybe even a planetary node in a powerful enough system.

The small silvery pyramid installed in the pilot compartment lit as I sat down on the seat and grasped it. In a moment, a sourceless hologram appeared over my hand, one of the many unfathomable magical technologies of the system.

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Welcome to System 7.0!

Advancement to adulthood is complete!

Wood stage cultivation root is complete!

Meridian activation is complete!

Tin stage dantian formation is complete!

Basic cultivation technique- Maenad basic manual installed!

Basic circulation- Maenad basic manual installed!

Welcome to the copper stage! Currently, you require four steps to complete the copper stage and advance to the bronze (foundation) stage:

1. Expand your advancement pool (x5) to increase the energy density of your dantian.

2. Purify your meridians in order to fully circulate each density level of your dantian.

3. Advance your basic circulation by choosing a class or developing/discovering a new technique.

4. Choose your bonded or unbonded status.

Congratulations! With your advancement to (copper) stage, you have gained eligibility for one of the following classes:

I felt an incredible power rush through my body as the node helped me visualize my Dantian, the pool of life energy at the core of my being that every essence-using creature possessed.

There were some groups that refused to use nodes or classes, claiming that they stunted human potential. You could still cultivate to fairly high stages without it, using nothing but ancient scrolls and handed-down knowledge, but there were also groups that refused to use technology or medicine, or genemodding to reduce reinforced recessives that could cause children to be born with birth defects.

To me, the node system was a tool, an ancient tool created by a group of humans millions of years ago, that was akin to a customized library of human potential. No one had any idea of how many classes existed, or if the system itself created new ones as people with unusual potential worked to realize that potential.

There were, however, paths that people knew about, sets of special knowledge and studies that always led to a guaranteed class. Before I was taken, I’d been studying to someday become a Dimensional Warden, to unlock common Pilot at copper, uncommon spacial Navigator at bronze, uncommon Hyperspace Hunter at orichalcum, uncommon Drone Plotter at Iron, uncommon Drone Warden at steel, and finally the rare Dimensional Warden at silver.

It was a well-known path. One I had been excited about even though it entirely ignored my forces affinity. One that demanded respect from Korse and the Unified Fleet alike. Respect and power that I’d hoped to use to deal with the EMP pulser in the Korse system that continually knocked my world back into the dark ages.

Then again, that choice had been made back when I expected to take at least a decade running through tin, living a peaceful existence, and potentially bonding with a charlotte or city-bred baseline. Attaching myself to a copper-level raid in order to more-or-less sponge advancement, getting captured, getting trained in a challenging droner school, and even trying to build around Kushiel’s caliban had offered me experiences and path possibilities beyond my dreams.

Even learning entirely unexpected traits such as Triage or experiencing the environment of a combat ship had opened surprising or even entirely unknown paths, as did having goals like mine… I wasn’t sure anymore if Hyperspace Warden was really the path I should choose.

Finally settling down the roiling energy in my core, I began looking through the class possibilities. It was no surprise that I already had uncommon choices even at Copper.

Classes were tiered by rarity. It wasn’t really a measure of power, it was more a measure of how specialized the traits you receive from that class are. The traits from more common classes could also unlock the potential for higher-tier classes. People COULD choose basic or common classes before they even learned to cultivate, right after they completed their child class, which is how people with a minor spiritual root, incapable of cultivation, still advanced.

Most of our troopers had a single bodily affinity, such as physical or ranged. During your child class, traits were much easier to train, but the system didn’t track education… even if you were a brilliant programmer, unless you had a tech affinity, you couldn’t just patch into a software framework with your mind, you used a keyboard or vocoder like most people did.

But if you had the appropriate affinity, that training could become a trait. Learning how to lift appropriately, training yourself to carry heavy burdens, pack a balanced load, and the like would probably train your body attribute and allow you to lug up to your body maximum with ease, but unless you had a physical affinity, it would never become the ‘loading’ trait, allowing you to carry vastly more, by an order of magnitude, than training alone.

But when people reached tin, they could still choose a basic class even if they had no affinities at all. Basic classes allowed you to gain basic traits such as ‘loading’ or ‘brawling’ as generic traits, even if you didn’t have any affinity to attach them to. Common classes could be taken at copper the same way, allowing even people without affinities to gain enhanced traits, extend their lifespans, and possess near-magical abilities even without the spiritual root for cultivation.

Cultivators, on the other hand, almost never chose a basic class at Tin. We already had affinities and a root and preferred to look for more unique traits that linked to our affinities instead of being restricted by a class. In my case, I had gained both triage and enchantment, uncommon traits usually linked to specific classes, while I was tin stage and unrestricted by a base class. Yes, I lost out on things like loading from the Porter basic, enhanced growth from the farmer basic, or a number of other potential traits, but if I needed them, I had the affinities to support many of them, and could still learn them if I needed to.