Chapter 3: Cultivating Complications

My pokedex buzzed. With a glance, I found a message from Johnny saying he wouldn’t be back until late. That was fine by me. I needed to get some work done anyway.

I glanced around my room, but still couldn’t find my pillow. It had disappeared a couple days ago. At first I thought Joy had taken it to wash, but she claimed otherwise. With a deep sigh, I plopped down on the bare ground—my butt was going to be sore—and began the habitual practice of aura cultivation.

Meditation wasn’t something I did in my previous life, so I couldn’t attest to how similar the process was, but I think it began the same way. With a deep breath, I began by clearing my mind and focusing inwards. When I first started cultivating on a hunch, as a hyperactive five year old, this had been the most difficult part. It didn’t matter that I had the memories of an adult, my hormones demanded I move constantly. Now, after many years, I could manage it with just a few rhythmic exhales.

Once reality faded away to a hazy background murmur, my perception blurred and I sunk into the void. It was a vast, empty expanse without any standard sensory stimulus. Even after all this time, it was disturbing, reminding me of things best left forgotten. I pushed my fears away and focused deeper. There, in the very middle, floated eighteen balls of ethereal energy. They weren’t visible or tangible, but I could see them all the same. This was my crowning achievement, a testament to my hard work these last ten years.

When I had first accessed my cultivation core, it had been filled with a wispy mist of aura particles, swirling about on nonexistent wind. It had taken me months just to be able to interact with the otherworldly clouds; the laws of physics were more of a suggestion here, not to mention that my body didn’t come along with my consciousness. Hard to hold and grab things without hands.

Eventually, I discovered that emotion was the key. Memories, especially those that I had strong feelings about, were powerful forces here. When I concentrated on one, I practically relived it. It was fairly disturbing at first, but I eventually adapted.

Sadly, it couldn’t be used as a memory aid. The actual information didn’t become any clearer, but I could feel the emotions I had experienced perfectly. Doing so caused wild turmoil throughout the aura clouds in my core.

With practice, I found I could harness this, and by focusing on particular experiences that elicited extreme feelings—both good and bad—my will was projected into this place. Thus, I learned to manipulate the vapor. Only a little at first, but—as I practiced—my control grew, until one day, I condensed all of it down to a single solid marble of power, just to see what would happen. The next day, I was shocked to discover my inner space had refilled. The marble was still there, floating in the middle with a zone of emptiness around it. Condensed aura seemed to repulse the gaseous variety, making it look like a giant hurricane with an eye of calm centered around the little dot.

Thus began many days of condensing my aura, again, and again, and again. I got a few weird looks from Joy and the other orphans for how much time I spent alone in my room, but I brushed off their concern. My sweet caretaker had been far too busy looking after an entire center full of kids, to give my oddity too much consideration.

It gradually became more and more difficult as the marble grew, but I soldiered on for a simple reason; I got a superpower. It hadn’t been obvious at first, just a warm feeling in my gut and a slight tingle of my skin. Nothing notable. Until, one day, I took a bad fall on a bike; stupid lack of muscle memory. A really bad fall. However, instead of broken bones and a terrible case of road rash, I was fine. There wasn’t a scratch on me, yet my clothes were torn to shreds.

This had prompted some testing. In time, after highly inadvisable experimentation—as the scars could testify—I discovered that the tingling I felt was a barrier woven through my skin, and the warm feeling at my core was the power source that fueled it. The amount of punishment it could take was surprising, though a sharp enough object could still pierce through with enough force.

My secret cultivation continued for a full year, and I gained the reputation of a reclusive loner, but I didn’t care. The marble of power grew, and the zone of repulsion expanded with it, causing the “stormy” part of the hurricane to dissipate as the eye of calm dilated.

Ultimately, I was left with a large ball of energy, and a vast expanse of nothing. Beyond the edges of this space, I could vaguely sense more of the moats of aura drifting about, but no matter how I pushed and pulled with memories and emotions, the swirling clouds refused to respond. I was stuck, and it was incredibly frustrating. I’d reached the maximum standard capacity.

To add insult to injury, shortly after this, aura cultivation was taught to us in school…

Before that moment, I had been incredibly arrogant, believing I was the first to discover my inner space and the ability to manipulate the aura it contained. Imagine my shock when everything I had learned, from two years of experimentation, was taught to elementary schoolers in only a few weeks.

All of my sneaking about, and self imposed isolation, had been for nothing. Well almost nothing. It still took the other kids many, many years of cultivation to reach the MSC like me. Some still hadn’t.

Regardless, it was an eye opener. I realized I hadn’t been treating this world as a real place, and the people around me as actual individuals. Suddenly, I was awoken to the incredibly complicated society I now inhabited. This wasn’t a children's cartoon with simple moral lessons and side characters that only existed to further the plot. There were politics, religion, culture, and economics—just as intricate and complicated as back on earth. I was fascinated and horrified at the same time.

When I first gained awareness, I had felt like an anime main character, destined for amazing things. Why else would god, Arceus, or whoever, put me here? Now, I wasn’t so sure. Turns out my special protagonist powers were taught to every child, and most of my foreknowledge from the show and games was proven useless. Every day I discovered more and more differences between this reality and the one they had portrayed.

Maybe I wasn’t destined to be here, and it was actually just a cosmic mistake. I could be some sort of godly clerical error, a soul lost in the mountains of paperwork it undoubtedly took to manage all of reality.

It was a wake-up call I desperately needed. This was my life now, not a game, and I needed to treat it as such. So I gave up my lone wolf ways, and—with a lot of help from Johnny and Daisy—actually became a part of the world I was now in.

I shook away my wandering thoughts, and refocused on the eighteen balls. I was immensely proud of their creation. The MSC had been my nemesis for years, the repulsive force of the single condensed ball preventing any new energy from entering my core. There was no solution to this taught in school, or any other publicly available source, besides bonding with a pokemon, that is. No doubt, the big clans had methods, but they wouldn’t be handing out their secrets to a no-name orphan. So, I had to discover my own way.

All the classic cultivation tropes—-compressing, spinning, filtering, igniting, freezing, and so on—failed. I even tried building it into structures or creatures. That was beyond my ability. Finally, after diffusing and compressing the ball over and over again, I had a realization. Parts of the cloud responded faster to certain emotions than others.

Lots of experimentation was done to try and separate out these different energies. I tried pulling on individual particles, but my control wasn’t precise enough. Making a giant centrifuge of emotion, to try and create a density gradient, was also beyond my ability. Only after years of trying and failing every possible idea I could think of, did I finally come across a method. In my defense, it only took so long because the solution was completely ridiculous.

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I had to split my consciousness in two.

Desperation and boredom, from years without progress, had made me crazy enough to try any harebrained scheme at that point. Weeks of meditation passed, resulting in a constant headache from trying to focus on two things at once, but at least there was some feedback. That was more than any other experiment had resulted in, so I soldiered on.

Somehow, with the magical fuckery of aura, I managed it. Its applications were limited, and was only possible inside my cultivation core, but that was all I needed. Another month of training and I got the result I wanted.

One part of me focused on the happiest memory I had. The other concentrated on… the opposite.

My two parts pushed in opposing directions, in as equal of strengths as I could manage. It had taken lots of trial and error, but eventually the single ball had filtered out into a gradient of eighteen distinct groups, depending on how strongly they reacted to the different memories. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what these groups represented.

From there, it had been child's play to condense them down into individual cores that began to orbit around each other without any input from me. At first, I feared that this work would be undone by the time I next cultivated; having half my being relive the worst experience of my existence for hours was, in a word, hellish. However, my worries were unfounded. Turns out these new filtered and concentrated balls were incredibly resilient, and actually repelled one another now.

They were all different sizes. Most were on the smaller side, with a handful in the medium range, but two were massive. More than half of the original mass of my core was in those two balls alone. I was happy to say that the big boys were the ones most strongly affected by positive emotions, but which energy type they were, I wasn’t sure. How do you quantify whether an element was positive or negative? Is a fire happy or sad? Does a rock feel joyful or depressed? I had no idea.

Much time had been spent trying to get a feeling for what each of them represented. When I focused on one of them, I'd be flooded with flashes of memory and emotions, but the impressions they gave were indescribable and constantly shifting. One moment, a sensation I’d best describe as the taste of a half melted snickers would be emitted, then Yakety Sax would play through my being. What was that supposed to mean?

Next, I tried testing them against each other. I had taken two of the smaller balls and pushed them together with my split being. Overcoming their repelling forces had taken significant willpower, but when I did they simply knocked together benignly. Undeterred, I tried again with a different set. I had a suspicion that they would interact differently depending on their type effectiveness, and I was right… too right.

The next pair had exploded against each other in a blast so strong, my consciousness was ejected from the inner world. Migraine didn’t feel like a strong enough word to describe the agony my brain was in afterwards, and it lasted for days; Joy had been quite concerned.

When I finally recovered enough to try cultivating again, I had found my core back at square one, distributed out in a cloud. It’s overall density had even dropped some, relegating me to simple condensing, something I hadn’t had to do in many years. When I was back at full capacity, I then had to go through the torturous process of separating out the types again. Interestingly, they had resulted in the same sized balls. Or at least I think they were the same size. It made sense though; I was pretty sure these spheres represented my aura affinity, which never changed.

Regardless, that experience had thoroughly killed any enthusiasm I had for experimentation. Perhaps—if there was no other option—I would have continued trying to discover what energy type each ball represented, but the starter selection ceremony would show my affinities anyway. Why go through needless pain and suffering? Especially since I had only figured out the aura filtering trick a few months ago. Patience was a virtue… and migraines suck.

Instead, I focused on the new abilities that had been unlocked. With a bit of focus, I could actively control the aura in my body. The automatic shielding had been cool enough, now I had the full superhero package: strength, speed, vision, hearing, and mental processing speed. All were enhanceable with a subtle redirection of aura flow.

I was ecstatic to finally be seeing tangible results for all my effort, but I had learned my lesson in humility. There was very little chance that I was the first to discover this ability, and it only took a week of careful observation for this to be confirmed.

While studying for the LATTs with Gary at his grandfather's lab/ranch/mansion hybrid, I saw one of the professor's assistants try to lift a heavy piece of equipment. He had strained and grunted for a moment, without making any progress. Then, with a deep breath, he lifted and repositioned the machine with ease. Before unlocking my own abilities, I would have waved the moment off, but now I knew that breath was him focusing his internal aura to strengthen his muscles.

I had desperately wanted to go up to the man and ask how he had achieved it. Maybe compare notes, and see if our process was the same. Sadly, he wouldn’t have taken that well. There were few things more frowned upon than asking for training secrets from someone.

Kanto had a strong tradition involving the passing of knowledge between master and apprentice. The lab assistants were all Samuel Oak’s, so asking one to reveal the famous professor's secret techniques, when I wasn’t an apprentice too, would be taken incredibly poorly. Not welcome at the lab anymore, level of poorly. Sadly, I was too old now for bad etiquette to be waved off as childish ignorance. One of the few perks of adolescence I had actually enjoyed.

No. I would just have to make do on my own. Maybe I'd be able to prove myself to the enigmatic ruler of Pallet Town, and be let in on his secrets sometime in the future, but poor was probably a generous estimate of those odds.

For now, I focused on my own cultivating method, and it was time to get to work.

It still took a very long time to split my consciousness. The mental gymnastics required to pull it off was an unrefined process, I hoped to improve on. Currently, I focused intently on two distinct things, while vaguely holding the image of my being splitting down the middle. There was a disconcerting pulling sensation across my spirit, like stretching out a sore muscle, but I pushed through the discomfort.

With a sudden jolt, I managed my cognitive halving. The disorientation of perceiving and doing two things simultaneously was hard to overcome. The first time I'd managed this step, I'd become incredibly nauseous. Luckily, it wasn’t possible for a spirit to vomit.

Regardless, I was getting better at adapting to the extreme vertigo. Next, one part of me focused and pushed one of the eighteen balls to the border of my internal space, while the other half simultaneously shoving the remaining seventeen as hard as I could in the opposite direction.

It was incredibly difficult. As much as the eighteen cores didn’t want to be pressed together, they resisted full separation nearly as strongly. It was a strange dichotomy that I didn’t fully understand. I was just thankful I didn’t need to use my worst memory as one of the controlling emotions anymore.

At last, I got into position, with one of the big cores pressed to the very edge of my being, while the other eighteen were held as far in the opposite direction as I could muster. Now, all I had to do was wait. Each of the balls repelled all energy from the other types, but actually attracted the same typing. When all the energies had been mixed together in a single core, everything was repelled. However, now—divided into individual groups—it was possible to isolate an individual core and use it as a magnet to attract more energy, once it was out of the influence of its repelling siblings.

It was a very slow process, with only one eighteenth of the natural energy of the environment being attracted, but it was something. In addition, despite it being a passive process, it was not at all easy. The longer I held my cores apart, the stronger their pseudo attraction to each other became, or maybe it was my mental control weakening? I wasn’t sure. Either way, it was an intense mental workout.

I fought against it as long as possible, as my isolated ball slowly absorbed aura from the surrounding environment. Eventually, it became too much and my control broke, causing the balls to snap back to their orbiting cluster in the center of my being. I could try and struggle to push them back into position, but I had learned it was a losing battle; already I could feel the building headache from having my consciousness split for so long.

Instead, I awoke back into my body, and slumped back as the weight of my efforts hit me. It wasn’t physical exhaustion, or even mental, though there was a minor headache. It was more of an emotional depletion. The strain of embodying and controlling powerful memories always left me in a state of ennui for a while. It wasn’t pleasant, but I had learned the most effective remedy already.

With a groan, I gathered the will to push up from the floor, stupid missing pillow, and stumbled over to my bed. I had just enough energy to glance at my clock before sleep took me. I had been cultivating for thirty minutes; a new record. A fact, that even in my emotional fugue, brought a small smile to my face.