Without warning, the room began to drink. Noem raised his hand in interest as his skills were gripped in an attempt to wrench them away, and he canceled his skills with a single thought. His Qi snapped back into the peerless fortress that was his body, and the room’s effects battered against it fruitlessly and insistently.
“Ever had a room try to eat your Qi, little miss meteor?” Noem mused. Little miss meteor jabbed one of her edges into his back, which he decided to take as ‘yes’ for some reason. “Well, then that makes two of us. Think we’re trapped in here for good, or is this some kind of airlock for Qi? A… Qi-lock?”
Noem tapped his knuckles against the wall once again. A ghost of a sensation brushed up against his skin, lapping at the thin layer of Qi he always had around him. That too was stolen away. As if the room’s aura could only cull skills, but the wall could siphon away absolutely any Qi that it touched. Leaving Noem very few avenues to potentially explore.
The stone was cool to the touch once it chewed through Noem’s thin layer of natural Qi. It was a natural, relaxing cool like the stone under a shaded outcropping, not the unnatural or extreme cold produced by Qi or tech alike. It gently worked its way through his fingertips, following the lines of his fingerprint and continuing downward wherever it could work.
Wherever it traveled, cool relief followed. Small ripples spread out from his fingertips and into the wall, carrying the Qi it leached out to the furthest reaches of the small stone box. Something told Noem to let go. Something louder told him to hold on. Little miss meteor shoved herself into his side.
He patted his pack with one hand as the cool relief spread. “Thanks for your concern, but I’m doing fine. This is some sort of advanced Qi construct, and it looks like I’m activating it. Or I’m letting it take all of my Qi from me for no reason, and it’s going to kill me when it's done with me.”
Noem chuckled and pressed his other hand to the wall. It nipped at his Qi all the same, and began to ripple out into the stone just as his other hand had. He briefly wondered if removing his shoes would help whatever process was working, but then the cool sensation hit his elbows. And sunk deep into his bones, spreading and multiplying along every nerve and muscle fiber. It felt like his arms were immersed in soothing med-gel, but the relief didn’t just stop at his body. Foreign Qi so powerful and immaterial mingled and entwined with his own, fighting every step of the way for purchase.
A hard flex of his muscles and a horrific burst of his own Qi stunned the foreign substance into stillness. “Stop that. The apex of plagues couldn’t sicken my Qi, so you definitely won’t be able to.”
“The apex of plagues?”
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Noem looked over his shoulder at a holographic projection of the outline of something close to a person. Except it was so tall it had to bend over, with its back scraping the top of the room. He glanced up to find a head staring down at him, bereft of any features and dripping the same cold, comforting Qi that the room had forced into him.
“Yeah. One of my old classmates bonded with it, and they tried to kill me a whole bunch. Really helped build up my control over my Qi, and pretty much guaranteed nothing will be able to take it from me.” Noem explained casually, even as he panicked inside. Whatever the hologram was, it felt like it could draw from far more than just the room.
The Qi hologram lowered itself ever so slightly. Noem smiled nervously and glanced down at its feet, expecting to see toes bound together into something like a foot, but instead saw a normal foot. He scrunched his face in confusion–if this wasn’t the thing depicted by that ruined statue, then what was?
“You seem confused by your own explanation.” The hologram noted with a tone of amusement, though its blank face gave nothing away. It leaned ever so closer, and Noem felt the Qi in his arms begin to travel upward once more. Except this time, it was a true mixture of his and this strange entity’s. “I just checked, and the apex of plagues was responsible for a few horrific accidents more than four years ago. Until it was dealt with by someone that ‘chose’ not to be interviewed, and the university swept it aside like it was… how do I say this sarcastically enough… ‘nothing at all’?”
Noem snorted at the hologram’s attempt at sarcasm, if it could even be called that. “If you’re insinuating that I killed the apex of plagues, then you’d be wrong. She might’ve tried to poison me a bunch, but I asked for at least half of them. It’s the university themselves that locked her away and put her on a work-release making antidotes and medicine.”
The strange mixture of Qi rose over Noem’s shoulders and began spreading up his neck and down towards his heart. He grunted in discomfort as it touched his brain, then wiped away the tendrils that did anything but work through his Qi.
“If you’re doing that, could you stop trying to take control of me? It’s getting pretty annoying.”
The hologram giggled and waggled a finger at Noem. “Nope. That’s the biggest part of the test, and depending on how far it goes, you get a better grade. If you manage to mingle it with your entire arm without losing control, I’ll give you a prize!”
“Just my arm?” Noem rapped his knuckles on the side of his head. “You’re already in my head, and I’m still here talking to you. What do I get for that?”
“I have no idea.” The hologram said excitedly. “You’re the first person to come down here with a key, and the first beyond that who didn’t get killed by the little smoke serpent that I hired to guard me.”
“You mean the apex? The one that made all the smoke? That one?” Noem repeated for clarification.
The hologram hummed confirmation. “He wasn’t much of an apex when he came to me, saying he’d lost some important battle, so I gave him enough power to shroud the quarry in smoke. And now your little sister took him away before he could finish paying me back.”
The room rippled fiercely as the hologram crossed its arms and… pouted? Noem couldn’t make sense of its emotions as it displayed them, since he could only really tell from the arm movements and the sound of its voice, but it seemed to go from excited to have a visitor to being annoyed that the apex left it. Which, when he thought about it, were actually pretty closely connected.
“Well, I’m here now.” He offered. “And I don’t have much of anything to do for the next couple of decades.”
“Oh, you have things to do. You just haven’t found them yet.” The hologram said ominously as the last of the cooling Qi settled in Noem’s toes. “Wow. You actually withstood complete saturation. And that might even be an understatement. Let me get these walls down and I’ll show you around the place.”