Chapter 57 – Wheels inside wheels (the GTAs are back)

So Toy Pu-Che fled the valley to hide out for the time being and plot and scheme for a comeback, but his disciple Mi Quo was not so lucky.

After all, someone had to be the fall guy, and Pu-Che thought he was as good as anyone. So he left Mi Quo there with only the clothes on his back.

Adam was jubilant; everything had gone not just to plan but far, far better. I was now leaving him metaphorically scratching his head as to what should be his next moves. Should he return to Earth? Go join up with Sam? He had left a cryptic message though it was just to let her know he was okay.

The children would now have significantly increased security with a PD to escape, but Libby had yet to figure out how they could all go into it without leaving someone with the key outside. So it was, as yet, not a foolproof escape. He rubbed his chin, still sitting in the forest as wisps of dark energy still rose like smoke from the ashen ground.

Maybe he could use this disaster to his advantage, at least temporarily. Destruction of such a scale coursed by dark energy was indeed something any rational person would keep away from. But then he remembered the factions were, in his opinion, mostly crazy. They would just see this as a potential quest and throw people into the area, searching for the cause.

He figured it was time to confide in the village elder, Bai Bo-Xue. Also, he knew the man was very nosey, understandably, and he could not hide things from him forever. Better to get him onside now and strike another deal than sell them out for a handful of coins. Adam didn’t doubt that he would, although he had been decent enough not to yet.

So direction decided, Adam got up, stretched, and started shadow-jumping back to the village. Besides, he had loads of SP now, and it was a lot more fun than running a couple of hundred miles.

Mi Quo had gone in search of the Lich King in the hope that he would take him as a disciple or at least allow him to live in this wretched hell hole. Only to see the Lich vanish before his very eyes. He probably didn’t even notice him, he thought sorrowfully.

Bai Bo-Xue got all he could out of Thawain, which was not a lot, and none helped make sense of anything. If anything, it only complicated matters and made his story even less believable. So how did a level 13 beat level 60+ beasts? So easy; he just got spirit beasts to do his bidding and defeat them. So simple. As simple as the village idiot he would become if that story got out.

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Adam must be able to hide his actual level, but then to tell people that he had defeated high-level beasts just wiped out that cover story in an instant. Again it made no sense; nothing about the guy seemed to make sense. The most infuriating thing of all was that Gongnui seemed to know far more than him or at least eluded to it—the old bastard.

Echo has made lots of improvements. Lots. He had more SP to play with than he had ever dreamed of having. So he sorts to fulfill his prime directive as well as he could. First, they would protect Adam’s physical body as best they could. Then, with the help of Echo’s GTAs, or was it Echo now?, they set up a relay of miniature teleports throughout his body so that GTAs could travel where needed instantaneously. Thus overcoming the restrictions of physical time and space did not have as much of an impact on his spirit sea, as things were thousands of times quicker to complete there.

He also decided to go the whole hog and set up fairly small PDs at these teleport points, containing any resources that might possibly be needed for repairing damage to Adam’s body. Oh, and by the way, he also made a construct holding data on Adam’s current physical body so that repairs could be made, returning Adam’s body back to mint condition.

And as the PD could house GTAs, and indeed did, this meant Adam’s physical body could be completely destroyed/vapourised/polluted/irradiated or poisoned, and Echo could simply rebuild it in less than a second. Of course, this god-like ability would come at a god-like cost normally. But miniaturization had something to be said for it. His GTAs worked almost as well in the physical world as the spirit one; this meant they could work as efficiently as the AI mind could make them, surpassing simple evolutionary steps with ease. In short, he was a genius and had far surpassed Dr. Miles, Bones, and anyone else you could think of, probably.

As a result, Adam could be blown up a hundred times without them exhausting their current SP supply. This would however not remain the case if he continued to enhance and temper his body. As it was it was just a mortals body, a carbon based life form and as such didn’t require many rescources to repair.

Meca and Trey had worked particularly hard to try and redeem themselves from their previous failure. And despite Libby and Hubba notifiying them that all had worked out for the best and that their Frankestein’s monster, the new Echo, had saved all their minascule asses.

The Shame weighed heavey on their shoulders and they had worked every nano second trying to come up with a worthy contribution to the team. They had then handed over their blueprints to Echo and his GTAs to implement.

They had created a new outer defense for Adam’s most vunerable part, his head. Meca and Trey had managed to work on a genetic plan that would incorporate the subtances with the highest tensile strengths into his bone. It was a bit like woven Kevlar, incorporated into his bone tissue, leaving its original functionality and blood supply intact.

But that was not the end of their blueprint.