Hours turned to days and the two human guests on board the submerged Lurill’shan reef ship quickly fell into a routine. A week passed quickly.

Xith’le’so informed them of the planned visit with the followers of the Disciples in a few weeks, giving them a deadline and a sense of urgency. They needed to make the most of their time on the reef – cultivating, practicing techniques, upgrading their equipment, and making friends and future allies.

If all went well when they met with the Disciples, then they could potentially be heading back to Earth shortly after. Hudson hoped that Vince, Clara, and the other participants from the trial were doing okay.

He hadn’t seen his cat, Max, in months. He grimly hoped that someone – his mom, his landlord, a neighbor – had taken care of him.

Hudson and Cor woke with the dawn – even though they couldn’t see it – to practice and perfect their modified version of the First Form with Xith’le’so before the start of the first duty watch. Xith’le’so continued to praise Cor to the heavens, even bringing other body cultivators to their practice sessions to view and comment. Cor did his best impression of a peacock, shamelessly taking credit for the deep insights and direction Ix secretly continued to provide him.

There wasn’t a day that went by when Xith’le’so didn’t subtly – or overtly – bring up the topic of the rifts, wanting to know more. Pouncing on his status as a cultivation genius, Cor admitted to being able to make them himself. Her awkward segues and seemingly innocuous questions, while simultaneously warning against using the ability, were becoming suspicious.

Obviously, it wasn’t Cor who could make the rifts, but they couldn’t let Xith’le’so know that. Cor could have kept his explanations simple…. and should have kept them simple. The simplest lies are the easiest to keep.

Obviously, Cor didn’t do that.

“...and was this before or after the terrorist incident you defused?” Xith’le’so asked Cor, at the end of a particularly long, convoluted, and completely fictional retelling of Cor’s past and how he came to learn how to open rifts in spacetime – before even becoming a cultivator.

“Oh after, well after,” Cor said. “I was a young whippersnapper in the army at the time. The old man who taught me what little I do know about opening rifts, I met him years later, after I left the army and when I was running my own independent operation.

“It sounds like you received a powerful inheritance from a true master of the dao,” Xith’le’so said with a sigh. “And where is your master now? Is he back on Earth?” Xith’le’so asked.

“No, he’s uh, passed on, if you catch my drift,” Cor replied. “Shame really. Was running an op and ran into an old friend of his. Former apprentice, actually. They got to arguing about their hokey space religion, and it didn’t end well. And what a piece of work that guy was. He had to wear this special armor that kept him alive – after being cut in half after the first argument he’d had with the old man – but he could stop bullets with his bare hands. Let me tell you about that time when…”

Hudson lost it when Cor described kissing the space princess that rescued him, and he burst out laughing. Hopefully Xith’le’so interpreted his reaction as disrespect towards Cor, and not evidence that Cor was spinning the biggest, most convoluted yarn out of the best parts of old Earth movies.

“You only get one chance to make an impression,” Cor had told Hudson dismissively, when they were alone later.

Hudson was starting to get the feeling he knew why the ex-wives were exes.

Aside from practicing the First Form, Hudson spent a considerable amount of time perfecting his Mind Gate technique until it became almost second nature. He was also inspired by the peeks into others’ mindscapes to clean up and work on his own mindscape.

He had two key insights from his interactions with Xith’le’so and the other body cultivator who had attacked him. The first was the wall of water that provided both a defense and means of attack. That soldier had said she had used her “essence” to attack him – did she mean jing? qi? shen? Something else or all three together?

He needed some kind of always-on protection for his mindscape, beyond perfecting the Mind Gate technique.

The second insight came from Cor. His mindscape had been small and incomplete – but it had the potential to grow larger. And it did grow larger, bit by bit, and changed in form, as he continued to cultivate.

For one, the streams of water strangling the silicate slugs infecting his mind grew larger and increased in number. Cor couldn’t tell him how, only that he was absolutely focused on fighting back against the silicates.

In the past, much of Hudson’s mindscape had grown without any conscious direction, but he could change that. It was his mindscape, and he could influence the direction of its growth directly.

Over the course of many short sessions that stretched over days, Hudson exerted conscious control and direction over his mindscape. It would be a long process, but he had a start.

He cleaned up all of the detritus and damage strung around his yard, assembling the pieces of the outbuilding back into a semblance of their former shape. He wasn’t sure at first how to repair it completely – but he found that sessions of practicing the modified First Form helped. The martial forms helped the oak tree grow more branches, grow taller, and the grass in his yard to turn greener and healthier, as well as slowly transforming the structures in his mindscape back to “normal.”

After a week, the outbuilding was mostly repaired, but the roof on his house was still half-broken and smoldering. He needed more time, processing qi into the other key energies, jing and shen.

His Engine Breath technique, by itself, only converted qi to shen, and he had been maximizing his absorption of shen from the first time he had started cultivating. From what Hudson could tell, shen influenced the size and shape of his mindscape, whereas jing improved the quality of it. He asked Xith’le’so more detailed questions, but unfortunately didn’t receive any answers. Apparently specific direction around the applications of jing and shen were supposed to wait until later in his cultivation journey.

Ix wasn’t much help either, not on detailed questions regarding body cultivation. They advised Hudson to meditate on the direction he wished his mindscape to evolve when he was performing the First Form, which seemed to be good guidance.

The bigger question in Hudson’s mind, beyond simply “fixing things,” was deciding what direction he wanted his mindscape to take. Practically speaking, he needed to do something about the smoldering roots grasping at the walls of his house. Every time he activated his sigils, the Rooted Strength and Eternal Flame sigils activated together, were more difficult to deactivate, and consumed more of the essence of his mindscape.

He could try and chop the roots down… but that seemed like a waste, and also a temporary measure. They would just grow back in the same place. While moving through the measured steps of the First Form one morning, he struck upon an inspiration: he didn’t need to get rid of the roots. He just needed the roots to grow in a different direction.

Specifically, if they grew up around the edges of his mindscape, forming a wall, or hedge – wouldn’t they keep things out? Two birds, one stone – or as the Lurill’shan said, two fish with one hook.

The airlock to their room chimed and interrupted Hudson’s musings. Their breakfast had arrived.

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Hudson wasn’t sure if there was a dining hall or where exactly the Lurill’shan ate, but all of their meals were delivered to their room. They consisted exclusively of a weakly flavored algae soup sucked out of a pouch, and tough, fibrous strips of protein. Hudson made the mistake of asking where the strips came from; apparently the food situation was so bad that the people on the reef had to eat the processed remains of the silicate husks.

They were eating the silicates, or rather, the part of the silicate adapted from Lurill’shan ecology. Hudson felt vaguely ill after learning the source of most of his nutrition, but Cor had the opposite reaction.

“I’m telling ya,” Cor bit into a strip enthusiastically, and repeated to Hudson for probably the fifth time, “Get some real seasonings, pop it on the grill and smoke it for sixteen hours… mmmm. Gonna be good. I need to take some of this back with me.”

“Yes, yes, so you’ve told me many times,” Hudson replied glumly, “And no, before you ask again, I’m not gonna help you lug twenty pounds of raw silicate husk back with you to Earth.”

The airlock chimed again, but Hudson and Cor weren’t expecting anyone. The door slid open, revealing a Lurill’shan cultivator – the tassel on her knee joint denoting her body cultivation rank was a dead giveaway. It wasn’t Xith’le’so.

Hudson also recognized the figure. It was the cultivator who had attacked him in his mindscape.

“I was informed correctly,” the woman spoke. “You are indeed staying in the guest room set aside for representatives of the Disciples. My name is Tor’le’su, and I wish to speak with you.”

The cultivator Tor’le’su waited awkwardly on the other side of the airlock, while Hudson tried to think of a polite way to tell her to go away.

“Well, don’t just stand there dripping in the doorway like some wet cat comin’ in out of the rain,” Cor finally said, motioning her in.

“Thank you,” Tor’le’su said, bowing her head stiffly before passing through the airlock. It closed behind her.

There was a period of awkward silence before Tor’le’su spoke again.

“First I must apologize to cultivator Hudson,” she said. “I did not know of your cultivation or your abilities, and my attack was unwarranted.”

“I understand,” Hudson said, slightly mollified. “You were just doing your job.”

She bowed her head again, the gills on her neck rippling up and down in a pattern Hudson hadn’t seen before.

“And I know what I have to ask is… presumptuous,” she continued, struggling with the words. She looked down at her feet, her hands clenching and unclenching. “But one of the soldiers on that platform… she swore that she had been infected by the abominations, but that the maddening voices had gone away on their own. When I inspected her mind, I also thought she was poisoned, but then on a second check, she was not.”

“Was this your doing?”

Hudson glanced at Cor, who shrugged. He didn’t think it was worth keeping it a secret either.

“Yeah, I guess you could say I had a hand in that,” Hudson said.

“How?” Tor’le’su asked, raising her eyes to gaze at Hudson intensely.

“Well, how do I say this… it wasn’t on purpose, exactly,” Hudson temporized. “The silicate mind slugs, or whatever you call them–”

“The mind poison of the abominations?”

“Yeah, they look like slugs to me. Anyways, they crawled out of her mindscape and into mine,” he said. “It was… very gross.”

“And you… let them do this?” she continued, slightly horrified.

“Not really so much ‘let’ as it just happened. And it wasn’t a big deal – I can easily get rid of those things in my mind.”

Tor’le’su was quiet for a moment, absorbing what Hudson had said.

“Can I ask you a question?” Hudson said, and Tor’le’su nodded. “What happens to soldiers whose minds are poisoned?”

“They… are cleansed,” Tor’le’su said. “We learned – the hard way – that we cannot let the mind poison fester. Every soldier and civilian on this reef, and any other reef on our planet, knows the horrors that can come. That can spread, from loved one to loved one.”

“It’s a tough choice, but I’ve seen what can happen as well,” Cor interjected.

“And do they survive this ‘cleansing’?” Hudson asked, having experienced full well how much force the ‘cleansing’ could exert.

“Sometimes,” Tor’le’su said softly.

“Isn’t there a better way?” Hudson said.

“There are no cultivators on this reef who will allow what you have described. They judge the risk to be too great to themselves.”

That gave Hudson pause – was he different from other cultivators? Or was he playing with fire, and just hadn’t been burned yet? He did have the “annex” in his mind that the slugs seemed preternaturally drawn to, and the protection of the lotus root he’d gained from the trial. Maybe they had less of an impact on his mindscape because they were not directly attacking the main part of it?

“I have… a favor to ask,” Tor’le’su said. “As I said, there are no cultivators on our reef who will open their minds in an attempt to draw out the poison. I know because I have asked them all.”

“I’m assuming this favor is drawing the poison out of someone’s mind?” Hudson asked.

“Yes, that is correct,” Tor’le’su replied.

“Shouldn’t their minds have been cleansed?” Hudson asked. Something wasn’t quite adding up.

“His mind has been cleansed…as best we can,” Tor’le’su said quietly, “but he is a qi cultivator, and a powerful one. Parts of his mind… we are unable to reach.”

“What level of cultivation is he?” Hudson asked warily.

“Early Core Formation,” Tor’le’su replied hesitantly.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Cor said. “Core Formation? I hate to say this, but that’s a ticking time bomb. What if he ignited his core? Or attacked us?”

“He is fully restrained and not a danger to the reef.”

“I’m not sure I buy that, but even if that is the case,” Cor said, “why bear the risk of a rogue Core Formation cultivator? I’m not gonna lie, this whole thing smells like week-old bait left to rot in the sun.”

Tor’le’su grimaced and bowed low before the two of them. “I know what I am asking is presumptuous, but if you had only the barest hint of hope, would you not seek to grasp it? Everyone else has given up. The elders have given up. His students, his friends… his family, all but me, have scraped their gills clean of helping him.”

“The Disciples haven’t offered to help you at all?” Hudson asked.

“Their help comes with a price. A ruinous price that our leaders refuse to pay,” Tor’le’su said. “Rightly so, I might add.”

“What price?” Hudson pressed.

“I shouldn’t tell you, but…” she replied. “After examining him, they said they could cure him if we gave them control of the reef.”

A Core Formation cultivator was strong. Maybe as strong as some of the body cultivators they’d seen in action recently – Hudson wasn’t sure – but in Cor’s words, a cultivator who had a core of solid qi was the military equivalent of a tactical nuke.

Viewed from a purely tactical or military perspective, Hudson could possibly see restoring a Core Formation cultivator to fighting strength as equivalent to the firepower of the reef. Maybe. This place wasn’t just a weapon, but also the home to a large number of people.

“So let me get this straight,” Hudson said. “You want me to risk my life in an attempt to save a cultivator far more powerful than myself… for what? Goodwill?”

“If you are successful, you could ask almost anything of the reef, and the elders would give it to you. Mopul’rii’sfun’ge was an elder of the reef before he… before he became the way he is. A powerful elder.”

Hudson and Cor exchanged a glance.

“I’m inclined to say ‘no,’” Hudson said, “But can you give me some time to think about it?”

Tor’le’su bowed low once more. “Of course. Thank you for even considering my request.”

She turned and left through the airlock.