Suzume raised her eyebrow at Hudson’s reckless remarks.

“Can you clarify what you mean?”

“The people like you from S.E.C.T.,” Hudson struggled for a second recalling the word that Clara had used, “The young masters of your clans. You treat this” – he gestured with his hands – “like it’s a game. A game with winners and losers that have already been decided.

“I’m not going to go along with that game. And you should know from the last time we were in this ravine that I don’t know how to hold back.”

“An angry threat, is it?” Suzume asked rhetorically. She turned and pointed down the ravine. “Qian and Clara are returning, so you might want to put that wonderful rage back in its cage. I quite like it. It’s very endearing…but Qian can be, well, reactive.”

Hudson turned and saw Qian and Clara walking down the path. They had small rips in their pants and minor wounds. Qian had also ripped the sleeves off his tunic, but that was clearly a stylistic choice and did not reveal a need for make-shift tourniquets.

Suzume gave Qian a small hug. “The wandering heroes return,” she commented drily.

Clara had something in her hand. She came up to Hudson and presented him with two more silverine claws.

“These were the best ones. In case you need some new ones,” she said.

Hudson hadn’t expected to receive souvenirs. “Uh… thanks.” He tucked them into his tunic with the other one, even though they were still dripping a little bit of blue blood and guts out of the ends.

“What’s the plan?” Qian asked brusquely.

“We were still discussing that,” Suzume replied smoothly. “Perfect timing.”

Hudson wasn’t a fool. He and Suzume had both laid their cards out on the table, and while their priorities conflicted slightly, they both had a mutual enemy. There was a way to meet in the middle.

It was not lost on Hudson either that Suzume and Qian had already made a decision by not returning through the portal and allowing him to block others from coming through. George would know that they had betrayed him.

He could play hardball and be unreasonable, demanding things go his way, but Suzume had given him a hint that Qian wouldn’t respond well to that.

“If I may?” Hudson asked Suzume. She nodded in acquiescence.

“I have two primary goals: the safety of me and my friends, and the deconstruction of this trial.” He held up a finger at Qian’s immediate frown and flex. “Let me finish my thoughts.

“You two, and Clara, I might add,” nodding in her direction, “want to grow stronger. But you don’t want to do it at the expense of either your lives or to purely service someone else’s strength.”

“I’m not giving another single trial merit to that piece of trash George Adams,” Qian growled through his teeth.

Hudson blinked in surprise. That was new information. He didn’t know that trial merits could be transferred… and he obviously hadn’t known that George had been collecting them from his people, in addition to the ones he had earned himself. He could use this.

“You won’t have to give up any more of your trial merits, Qian, I can promise you that.”

He took a deep breath. “If I’m being honest with myself, I don’t want to give up on my own cultivation. For better or worse, I am on a cultivator’s path now,” Hudson continued. “And that will continue after this trial.”

He didn’t say that after he broke this trial, his next target was S.E.C.T. itself.

“So here is what I propose we do…”

…..

MEANWHILE…. ON EARTH: BRITAIN, THE UNITED KINGDOM

….

George Adams Sr. set the tablet down on the chaise longue beside him and drew his fingers through his hair. The report was thorough, as expected from his people.

Investigative Subject: Hudson Appleseed (male, 22, current whereabouts: S.E.C.T. First Trial)

Family Background: Only child of John (father, deceased) and Mary (mother, 61). Older brother Jacob (24, not in employment, education, or training). No significant other. Pet: cat (female, 3 yrs old, named Max), currently missing, possibly deceased

…..

Academic Background: university business school graduate, 3.7 GPA, magna cum laude, major in Marketing

…..

Work Experience: 6 months at regional wholesale goods distributor. Strong performer in analytical problem solving, poor in communication. Known to work extra hours, contributed to major successes for which his supervisors received monetary bonuses and for which his efforts were unattributed. Unclear the degree to which the subject understood the merit of his work product. No strong professional relationships or established network

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

…..

Cultivation Experience: No official records within S.E.C.T. Records of therapy sessions indicate significant time spent in meditation. Confirmed by co-workers and fellow karate dojo attendees. Residence (single-efficiency apartment) completely destroyed by electrical fire 3 days after start of First Trial; no evidence of foul play found. Trace ichor remnants found in local sewage pipes

…..

Preliminary Conclusion: Subject was high-pot target for cultivating meditatively focused techniques, or techniques dependent on high mind-body synchrony. After being taught a technique, they lost control of it, and were forced to join the trial to escape S.E.C.T. discovery

George appreciated the physical touch; the knowledge that only hands-on experience could provide. Many others in S.E.C.T. relied too much on the passive observation and reports of Ux, the global AI. Would Ux sample the local sewers for substances known to be excreted only when cultivating in the Qi Gathering stage? Could they even do that?

It was clear this boy had been cultivating, and was then thrown into the trial. The chances of him spontaneously inventing a cultivation technique were lower than him spontaneously bursting into flame. There was no evidence of Elenor Chiang’s direct involvement, but her fingerprints were all over this boy. It stank of her meddling.

But why? George stood up and poured himself two fingers of brandy. Why would she risk one of the most fundamental rules of S.E.C.T. – non-proliferation of techniques – for this child?

He picked his tablet back up and thumbed through to the next entry.

Investigative Subject: Corvinus Landry (male, 46, current whereabouts: S.E.C.T. First Trial)

…..

…..

MEANWHILE… ON EARTH: SHIKOKU, JAPAN

…..

“When was the distress call received?” Elenor Chiang asked the commander on duty.

“43 minutes ago, Elder.”

“Ugh,” Elenor grunted in displeasure. Whatever was happening at their rift mine, it wasn’t good.

S.E.C.T. had the rights (and duty) to mine and maintain the safety of a handful of locations entrusted to them by the Disciples. They were a major source of income, and thus power, within S.E.C.T., and thus generally controlled by one of the founding clans. This one, on a dim rock of a planet with the descriptive name XLSR44, was managed by the Yasunori clan.

She had received a communication from Ux precisely 2 minutes ago, and immediately authorized an emergency in-world teleport to this staging area in rural Shikoku, Japan.

“Why wasn’t I contacted sooner?” she began to ask. “Nevermind, I’ll bring that up in the after action review. Who do we have?”

The commander visibly gulped. She didn’t know this officer personally, and she knew all of the senior officers in S.E.C.T. personally. On a more detailed inspection, he looked awfully young. And junior in rank.

“The commander took the majority of the garrison with him, when he went through to address the, uh, first distress beacon.”

“What?? When?”

The commander checked his watch. “24 minutes ago,” he replied, wincing.

Elenor cursed the junior commander, his almost certainly deceased senior commander, and the stupidity of politics that had once again gotten in the way of S.E.C.T.’s mission – their true mission.

“Any details come through?”

The young commander shook his head. “Completely scrambled.”

That was an answer, in and of itself. The worst answer. There was only one thing in the big, dark, abyss of space that would do that.

The galaxy was at war, and they were losing. The Disciple powerhouses were holding the front lines without significant change. The strategic assets – the Nascent Soul cultivators and above – were all fixed in a stalemate, one that would only change with the addition of new strategic assets.

The smaller war; the war of attrition, the war in the trenches, the war that she had been fighting for a hundred years and saw her people die in, year after year… They were losing that war. S.E.C.T. had responsibility for a few handful of planets, and the decrepit Elders in charge only saw them as resources to be exploited and rifts to mine. They didn’t understand that each rift world they lost wasn’t just a dip in their maseki income; it was a loss in a war that they could never regain.

Elenor pulled herself together, and executed a familiar series of qigong techniques. The qi surged out of her dantian, fortifying her body. It encircled her mind, increasing its processing speed and resiliency. Lastly, a final pulse encircled her body, tight against her skin, and with an effort of will, disappeared beneath her skin entirely.

If what she feared had truly happened, then the concealment technique hiding all of the qi in her body and dantian would be critical.

“Principal Ux,” she said into the air, knowing that the global AI could hear her. “Prep a one-way transport pulse to XLSR44, t-minus 60 seconds. Myself and Bravo team. We’ll take it from the launch pad. Inform the S.E.C.T. Elders of possible silicate incursion. Full quarantine protocol requested.”

“Acknowledged,” a silky female voice whispered in her ear.

“On me,” she said to half of her personal vanguard behind her. She had two small teams, although technically she was only permitted to have a single team of ten cultivators personally loyal to her.

That’s why her second team, Bravo team, weren’t cultivators. They were the best of Earth’s soldiers, hand-picked by her, intensely loyal, and trained specifically in anti-silicate tactics.

“The boss is going to regret missing this one,” a grizzled man growled out from behind a hideous grin. They hustled down the metal stairs from the control room with the commander to a ten-by-ten foot square on the floor of the large, open hangar deep underground. Formation arrays, powered by enchantments and processed maseki, surrounded the launch pad in dense geometric patterns.

Ux would create the portal, but one of this size and scope would create a distinct energy signature. The formations were designed to hide that energy signature from their enemy.

“I don’t think he will,” Elenor replied absent-mindedly. Her thoughts were already on the other side of this portal. On the corpses she expected to find; of the empty world, completely drained of life and qi. Of another world harvested by their bitter enemy, the silicates.

“Captain Landry has gotta be bored in that trial, babysitting all of those spoiled kids.”

Elenor smiled briefly at the thought, but her response was cut off by the portal activating, its ink-black coldness sending them hurtling through a rip in space-time.