“Disciple, I do believe you have some explaining to do,” Nadia said with a frown.

She next to James on the edge of his isolated space, the waters from her crafted core pushing against the walls. The lotus petals of buildings floated around the edges in a probing manner.

“Trying something different,” James answered.

“Disciple, a cultivator doesn’t just try something different,” Nadia said disparagingly. “I’m not even sure what you did.”

“You wanted me to take control of the core, overpower it with my will, right? When I did that, I broke parts of the core. Parts of you.” James looked at his master with a steady gaze. “I wasn’t going to let that happen. Then I remembered my partition, isolation room, whatever you might call it, and thought, ‘well, if it worked for that demonic cultivator why wouldn’t it work for a core?’”

“Foolish,” Nadia said, emotion leaking from her. “Disciple, you will not last in the Immortal’s graveyard without the powers a core grants you. I said as much. And yet you’ve ruined your chances for what? To preserve me? I’m at most a ghost, and at little a collection of memories! You will die if you don’t take control of my core!”

“And you’ll die if I do!” James shouted. “I’m not doing that! It doesn’t matter if you’re a ghost, or a memory, I’m not destroying what you are to gain power!”

He slumped, leaning against the walls of the isolation room.

“I can’t,” he said quietly.

“Please, James,” Nadia said. “I could not live with myself if you died for my mistakes. If I were alive, we would have left the graveyards quickly using my clearance. I am not, however, meaning you will need power to protect yourself until another train comes.”

“Couldn’t I still use your passcode?” James asked. “Hunter B-something whatever?”

“No, it is coded to my voice,” Nadia said. “And there are a number of other safeguards in place to prevent its misuse.”

She looked at her disciple, begging. “Please, James. Take control of my core.”

“No,” James argued. “No. Everyone says I’m special, unique. Myself, I don’t really believe it. But I know you do, I know Tsukiko does. Scrap, even Osman knows it! So I chose to believe the words you told me.”

He took a breath. “I remember what you said, that a cultivator learns integrate with the natural world. But with a core, the goal is to overpower it, to control it. Why? Why is that different than interacting with the natural world? I thought about it and decided that if a core is a world of its own, why don’t I learn to integrate with it as well?”

Nadia looked on questioningly. “I don’t understand.”

James moved toward the lotus suspended in the core. “I don’t have a perfect explanation, but I want to try learning how to enter the Metastate here. If the state merges my conscious and unconscious and lets me connect with the world, then I can learn to do that here.”

He stepped through the suspended water, Nadia following behind. “Instead of brute forcing a connection, I learn to work together with the core.”

“You cannot enter the Metastate while here,” Nadia said. “Only your mind exists in this state. You cannot merge mind and body if there is no body to merge with.”

He arrived at the center of the lotus, Nadia’s soft blue core hanging in the center. Water swirled around it in hypnotic patterns, captivating James.

“I have another theory about that,” James said as he walked forward. “I told you I’ve always had excellent body perception, correct?”

“You have,” Nadia answered, wondering where he was going with this.

“I know my body,” James said as he stood next to the orb. It pulsed with that same soft pressure as before, Nadia’s conviction condensed and merged with the inevitable tide of water. “I know exactly how far I can reach, exactly how much I have to bend to touch my toes. It’s always been instinctive, but when I entered the Metastate I learned so much more about myself.”

He reached out for the orb. “And then there’s what you said, about how my imagination, my willpower, is what matters here. What I think, as long as I believe hard enough, becomes truth.”

He smiled at his master. “I’m wondering what happens if I imagine a new body here, one that’s an exact copy.”

James breathed in. He thought of himself, of his body and how it connected to his mind in inseparable ways. He pulled on those thoughts, bringing the connection to the forefront and using it. His mind and body were one, millions of unconscious thoughts built to control millions upon millions of actions.

James slowly built his body in this world, delving through his mind to find each individual connection. What was before a concept of James—one could even say his soul—slowly built itself into a merging of mind and body, because in truth there was no difference.

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The brain came first, expanding outward into a nervous system that matched his body outside. Blood and bone came next, then muscle and organs as James built each connection. He added fat and layers of skin. Cartilage, keratin, and anything else his body used to function, even the various synthetic nanites and metals born with everyone.

At the end, James stood, hand still over the orb that was Nadia’s core. He stretched, feeling the muscles in his body move. Then, he looked at the core and entered the Metastate.

He felt it immediately. Unlike his attempt before, where the connection felt distant and limited, it now felt like his first time. Lines of swirling energy exited the soft blue core, the center of the world hovering around him.

With his mind and body now merged, James placed his hand on the core. It reacted, instinctively lashing out to eject the interloper. But now that he was in the state, James could see more.

The rules in this world were different. Water was the base for everything here. James’s body was different, something not of this world. And so the core reacted like a body reacts to a virus.

The initial attacks against him weren’t attempts to take over his body, as Nadia had thought, they were only attempts to flush the wrongness from James. His body was not compatible with the world around him, and so the world took it upon itself to forcibly remove the offending pieces. A cultivator attempting to control the core would do the same, replacing pieces of the world and forcing it to work together.

It was like trying to open a file with the wrong computer program. Some programs might open the files, but it couldn’t access all the information without completely converting the file. Computers knew how to do it through clever programming. Cultivators and cores, however, had none of that knowledge. All they could do was try to force a change.

But now that James had a body in this world, he could do something about it. He studied the incoming attack from the core, looking through the eyes of the Metastate to find the solution.

Air would have to go, there was none of it in Nadia’s core. James looked through his mind, finding the connections that required him to breathe air. He changed it, using instinct and the knowledge Nadia gave him to convert his lungs to breathe water in this world.

Other things changed as well. The core had no basis for many ideas and concepts that James knew of in the world outside. He changed small parts of himself, pieces of the body that used these concepts in their making and fixed them squarely in the concepts the core understood.

It was tricky at first, James didn’t have all the knowledge to perfectly fix something. But the more he tried, the more his instinct seemed to take over. The nanites in his body went to work, supplementing his thoughts and accessing old connections that had long fell out of use in the world outside.

The more he changed, the less the core tried to reject him. What began as tidal waves became soft eddies against the shore, until finally the core had nothing left to reject.

James breathed out, expelling water from his lungs as he stood. He turned to Nadia, smiling. “I knew it would work.”

She could only nod, speechless.

James made a gesture, mimicking his master’s movements when she conjured water. A small wave formed. It waved at Nadia, moving past her and breaking against the ground in the distance.

“It’s nowhere close to what you can do,” James said. “Yet at least. But I think I have the idea now.”

“Disciple, this is incredible,” Nadia said.

“That isn’t even half of it,” James said. “I think I can do this in the outer world as well if I use my mind as a bridge.”

James moved again, performing the motions his master used previously to create a small current around him. The water spun, much slower than Nadia’s, but it held enough force to knock a person back. He stopped it, walking over to Nadia with a smile.

She wrapped him in a hug. “I never should have doubted you.”

“You didn’t,” James said, reciprocating the hug. “Now, time to figure out what’s waiting for me outside.”

He turned back to the door that led outside his isolation chamber. Nadia let him out of the hug, a proud smile on her face.

“I’ll come visit,” James said as he made to the door.

“You’d better,” Nadia said. “And disciple? Stay safe.”

“I promise, master,” James said.

He opened the door to his mind, reaching out to link himself with his outside body. The movement came easily to him now, perhaps because he finally understood the connection between himself.

He’d always thought his mind and body were separate in some capacity. That whatever made up himself was linked to his body in some small way, like how a single cord connects a viewscreen to the wall. But that wasn’t the case. His mind and body were one and the same.

James stepped through the door leading to Nadia’s core and back out into his mind. The world around him had changed. Pieces of his experiences now dotted his mind. He saw the hydroponics towers of Tower Ten, the grand skyscraper of Blue Mountain Sect, and the vast plains of the wilds in the lower floors of Cyber Crane. He saw Tsukiko’s room, Nadia’s training floor, and Garret’s strange hideaway.

“Time to wake up,” James said.

He opened his eyes to a blur of trees and the sounds of wing pounding against his ears. A dull pain throbbed from his left hand. James looked down to see it burned black from Robert’s attack. Nadia’s body still slumped against him.

With reverence, James laid his master’s body down, crossing her arms over each other.

“Thank you, master,” James said quietly.

He stood, looking in the train’s direction. A gloomy city moved toward him, the outside skyscrapers covered in vines and other greenery. Gray walls and windows peeked out from under the greenery, the bones of a city long past its prime. No neon signs hung advertising the stores below them, no viewscreens hovered with the latest news. The city before James was dead.

He took a breath, centering himself and linking with the world now sitting inside him. He entered the Metastate, feeling his lower back heat slightly. An image of crashing waves appeared in his mind as James moved both his bodies as one.

A gout of water shot from James’s hands and out one of the broken windows. He smiled, the gloomy city ahead unable to mute his emotions.

As the train moved toward its destination, James spent his time bandaging his hand and protecting his master’s body. While she still lived on inside him, James still wanted to give the body a burial.

He knew as the train pulled in that things weren’t over. He still needed to get back to Cyber Crane Megacity and let Tsukiko know he was alive. There was also the matter of Robert and Osman. James wasn’t going to let their vile actions stand. He would find some way to bring them to justice.

It would take a lot of work, but James knew he could do it. He had his master with him, along with all the other friends he’d made in Cyber Crane.

The train slowed, coming into the station of the Immortal’s Graveyard. James stepped off, his heart resolved.