Isaac never considered that opening the meridian within his right eyeball would only be the second-worst pain in his life.

After the conclusion of their conversation, Isaac helped Reed back down from the roof to the apartment walkway. In much better spirits, she waved goodbye and returned home, so Isaac did the same. Once inside, feeling satisfied after his conversations with Babs and Reed that day, he decided to keep working on his cultivation. Having dug a channel to the meridian all the way in his right palm already, this new channel to his eye went much faster. He sat cross-legged in his room, feeling the cool of the floor beneath him, as he steadily inhaled and exhaled.

Having been regularly cultivating for some time now, Isaac hadn’t even realized the world had drifted away from his notice until he hacked up a bunch of black gunk and bad juju as he cleared the channel through his neck. Compared to the torso and arm, the neck was a sensitive area, thin and filled with tubes. Some of his day classes involved medical procedures - from there, Isaac learned blood, oxygen, the nervous system, and food and water all went up and down the neck along their own paths (well, food and water seemed rather obvious. But Isaac had no idea he had the equivalent of a telegram line called the nervous system within him). Even for a cultivator, once those tubes get severed, it’s game over - just ask Panama and Kieran.

The memory of his comrade’s burial spurred Isaac to keep channeling all night. After careful metaphysical digging up through the neck, Isaac took a breather. Messing with the brain was serious business - Isaac hadn’t taken a class about that part of the body yet, but he knew digging through the brain probably wasn’t the best idea. And yet - though he didn’t have names for the body parts, though he couldn’t point them out to another person, all the cultivation had given Isaac an instinctive knowledge of where to go within his own body.

There was no need to enter the brain directly. Instead, Isaac just followed his spinal cord until it connected with the brain. There, he took a turn, following along his right optical nerve. And then he arrived. From his class sessions, he gleaned that this was going to hurt, so he took a deep breath and then stuck a rag in his mouth. With a slow count up to three, he readied himself, keeping his body loose, his mind strong, and then-

A muffled scream echoed through the room. Isaac’s vision went black as his head spun and sharp punctures of pain rattled through his whole body. The rag slipped from his mouth as he fell on his back with a thud. His vision shifted from black to gray; everything seemed much too bright, and a stinging sensation cascaded out from his eye until it percolated around his whole head. He stood back up, still blind, and instinctively made his way to his table where he fumbled around with his canteen until it finally opened. He emptied it entirely on his face, the room-temperature water providing relief from the much, much hotter burning sensation across his face.

Isaac wiped his face with his shirt and his breathing steadied. His vision returned; he blinked the fog away until he could finally see his room again. His metal canteen displayed his reflection; outside of an angry red splotch around his eye, nothing seemed different, and the splotch was already disappearing. But then he squinted his eyes - all the scratches and wear-and-tear on the side of the canteen were much more apparent to him now.

He wasn’t sure if he could see better, or if he just noticed the fine details better. Either way, he found the coldest spot in his room - the wooden floor - and laid the right side of his face against it until he drifted off to sleep.

A sleep, mind you, that only lasted twenty minutes. And as for the worst pain in his life - that came an hour later, during his inaugural outing onto open water.

Today’s training involved manning a small patrol boat as it conducted its usual business around Narragansett’s harbor. To further promote cooperation between the squadrons, Isaac would be joining Dan and Demetrius of Squad 1 for today’s outing. For someone who lived on land his whole life and enjoyed the view of the ocean, going out in a boat for the first time should have been fun.

It was not. Isaac had seen ocean waves before, but never considered that they would rock the boat while it traveled. After five minutes onboard, Isaac spent the first portion of their journey resting his head over the railing, his face utterly green. Six men manned the boat - the captain, two shipmates, and the three cultivators. The three regular sailors kept busy with their work of navigation and record-keeping while Dan and Demetrius offered inspirational words and slapped Isaac on the back for support, respectively.

Dan also pointed out landmarks, most of which barely registered with Isaac. A lighthouse, an outcropping of rocks, the network of buoys. A large shadow suddenly overtook the boat - the shadow provided some relief to Isaac, who was finally getting used to the motion of the ocean. A destroyer rumbled past, its gray frame briefly blocking out the sun entirely. Tens of thousands of pounds of weight, metal, machinery, and men all went into the operation of a single destroyer, creating its own little ecosystem aboard the ship. And to think - that destroyer was just one of dozens more, and was just a mere ant compared to the mountains known as the modern battleship and aircraft carrier.

Isaac, of course, felt that he was something of a brain expert, and all that philosophical waxing combined with the time at sea finally settled his stomach. He wiped his face and finally freed himself from the railing, giving his comrades a cocksure smile to indicate it would take more than seasickness to kill him.

“First time at sea?” Dan asked, the wind pushing his mop of black hair off his face. His wooden staff hung across his back. When Isaac nodded, he chuckled. “That’s alright. I doubt most of the recruits here have ever been to sea before, especially those from the western provinces.”

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Isaac had never really gotten to know Dan or Demetrius yet. “Where are you guys from?” he asked them.

Dan answered first. “Quinsigamond. Central Arcadia. We got a river running through our city that I used to work as a longshoreman for. The Navy actually recruited me right off the docks.”

“You weren’t conscripted?”

Dan shook his head. “My Foundational Technique involves mobility. Agility, nimbleness, endurance, you name it. Holding my staff only enhances all that.” He gave a sheepish smile and rubbed the back of his neck. “I stole things as a longshoreman. Everybody does, of course, but I was pretty darn good at it thanks to cultivation. The Navy found me and said I ought to be using my talents for something better.”

Ah, so he got squeezed. Probably faced jail time unless he joined.

“And by something better,” Dan continued. “I mean the theater.”

…oh.

Dan majestically bowed his head, outstretched an arm, and pronounced that word like thee-at-ter. He was already talking again before Isaac could ask any questions. “You saw me in the orientation film, remember? My love of the stage brought me there. Reed has her movies, but with movies, there are do-overs. The thee-at-ter does not allow for second tries. That’s what makes it exciting. Anything I stole from the docks and sold to a fence - I used that money to buy materials for plays. Costumes, wigs, even pencil and paper to write my scripts on.”

If someone said something like that in Patuxet, they would’ve been stuffed in a locker. But this was the capital, a more cosmopolitan area, and perhaps the nation needed playwrights just as much as it needed miners. Isaac nodded in encouragement, then glanced over at his other companion. “What about you?”

Demetrius was placed in charge of the rear machine gun. He kept his fingers loose on it as the boat hit a wave, sending a spray of foam against the side of the ship, just narrowly missing the cultivator trio. “I’m from the Narragansett slums,” he proudly exclaimed. “My parents migrated here during the civil war in Atalanta when I was just a wee babe. Since I could walk, I boxed. I won children’s matches, teenage matches, coed matches, animal matches, you name it. Perhaps I unlocked cultivation as an extension of my own desire for competition and conquest. When I was conscripted, I decided to meet the challenge head on. Though nautical warfare is not my area of expertise, I shall deliver excellence in this field nonetheless.”

“What a succinct summary,” Dan said with a grin, another spray of foam splashing out of the sea behind him.

“An Atalantan,” Isaac repeated quietly. On the other side of the ocean, Atalanta’s war against Rusalka was not going well - the casualty figures in the Sunday morning papers weren’t exactly promising of victory.

Demetrius looked out into the ocean with narrowed eyes. “One day, I’ll free my homeland. I’ll bring peace to the nations of the world. I can think of no better challenge. But until then, I will, as they say, kick it with you guys.”

The three men laughed, but then Isaac felt his reality lurch for a moment. It felt like his life had been filled with so much drama recently - the deaths of comrades, fighting and violence, the desperate need to improve - that the relatively relaxing days of just training with his friends and watching kung fu movies in the downtown cinema seemed like forever ago. Once everything was all said and done, Isaac looked forward to the day he could just kick it with his friends forever.

But real life had an amazing ability to get into the way. Skyscrapers and tall buildings loomed over the patrol boat as the captain brought it close to the docks. Tugboats and freighters moved to and fro, with hundreds of longshoremen hard at work loading and unloading crates and containers. Despite all the activity, dozens of berths remained empty - trade slowed down ever since the depression and foreign war broke out. The papers said thousands of longshoremen used to work there, and from the grim looks on the face of the boat’s captain, Isaac believed it.

The chill in the air remained as they surged past the docks. The boat swerved around a rocky outcropping stretching into the sea, and upon arriving on the other side, Isaac scrunched his nose. Dozens of factories lined this past of the coast, belching black smoke into the air, waste water streaming out of huge pipes directly into the sea. Isaac did not expect to see where all of Arcadia’s toilet waste ended up, but here they were. And much to his chagrin, the captain pulled the boat closer to the murky waters. The pipes constantly poured water into the ocean, the closest thing Isaac had ever seen to a waterfall. The sound constantly rushed and rumbled - this was the waterfall’s violent, stinkier cousin. And right near where sewer water met ocean, something bobbed along the surface.

The boat pulled up closer, and Isaac felt his stomach drop. The waves sent the object up and down, up and down, so it took a while before Isaac could see her face. He tugged at his collar - there was a corpse in the water.

One of the crew members produced a net and fished the woman out of the water, gently depositing her in the stern of the ship. Isaac wiped his face at the sight of the woman sprawled out before him. Soiled, ragged clothes covered her body, and her long black hair looked equally in poor condition. Describing her as thin and frail didn’t do her appearance justice - it looked as though her spirit had been drained out of her entirely. Empty eyes stared back at Isaac.

Demetrius sank to one knee and examined her. He shook his head. “Judging by her appearance…this woman is one of my own. An Atalantan.”

“A refugee…” Isaac realized. Dan and Demetrius looked crestfallen - they had been the ones to discover the shipping container filled with dead Atalantan refugees while Isaac and Squad 3 raided the Melusine. Apparently, even if the refugees managed to survive the journey across the sea, they faced no guarantee of survival once on Arcadian shores.

The captain scanned the muddy water for anything - or anyone - else. Isaac looked up at the sewer pipes, which continued their downpour relentlessly.

“We got a body,” the captain said grimly into his radio.

The radio crackled with static for a moment before a voice answered him. Last night, Isaac thought opening the meridian in his eyeball would be the worst pain of his life, only to encounter seasickness the next morning. Similarly, Isaac thought the discovery of the dead Atalantan would be the most shocking moment of the day, only for the radio’s answer to send his blood running cold.

“Return at once. Eight-Steps Killer Sam was found dead in his cell.”