Chapter 71 – Master Class

Adam was about finish off the old guys and leave the joint when there could be heard someone talking with a booming voice from outside. Should he stay or just go?

Thoughts stirred in his mind, hazy alarm bells ringing from the distant confines of his cerebral cortex – gate-ing was a bad idea. Some people had a skill that could be used to track people who gate-ed. Then why had he done it before? He hadn’t when being chased by those faction guys.

He realized he was feeling very spaced out as he tried to concentrate on this and other things.

He went to the entrance of the order’s temple or whatever it was and found there was a guy hanging about sixty feet up in the air on a sword – so unfair.

That was what Adam wanted to be like, all cool – zipping around on a sword confident, and knowing what the hell he was doing. Could he nick the guy’s sword? No. Would he be totally outmatched again? Yes.

Well, at least he’d seen a guy on a sword now – he gave a big sigh, his shoulders slumping in defeat. Maybe the guy would just kidnap him? Nope, he had seen the guy’s expression, and it wasn’t pretty.

If some faction members had kicked his arse, then this guy was just going to smoosh him under his foot or fart him into non-existence.

***

Echo was puzzled; his consciousness was different from the others – as a hive mind. And he had felt certain spiritual pressures on him since entering this strange building but had put it down to just that – strangeness.

But now this – the teleport had failed. Were the guy’s mental defenses or otherwise too strong to implant an AI existence into his spiritual sea? That was quite plausible if it weren’t for the fact that the teleportation had happened, but the AI – Echo2, as he had named it – had reached the physical coordinates, but there was nothing there - No boundary, No shell, nothing – Puzzling and just plain annoying.

He then spoke to Libby and the others about this, and one thing led to another as they generally do – as Libby checked, out of sixth senses, the stuff she had transferred to her new PD – had it transferred correctly – nope there was nothing, no books, no nothing - nada. What exactly was going on?

They had the SP and weren’t doing anything differently from usual. So again, it came back to the fact that there must be some kind of protection – that made sense, they didn’t want everything being pinched, and they were, no doubt, high-level practitioners. So she tried pinching something else as a test – a bit of brickwork, no. That would be protected, right? They wouldn’t want someone pinching the whole building.

Curious, she tried it anyway – having checked the integrity of the material now residing in her PD workspace, she found it had worked. That was unexpected, and what was more so was that the wall she had taken a small amount of material from remained unchanged. Oh Shit!

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They had been duped, and worryingly, not just Adam had been affected by this high level of mumbo-jumbo mentalism. Suggesting that it was high-level off-the-charts stuff – and implying that they needed to get the hell out of there, now.

Adam was just relieved there was a chance that the guy still hovering above him, on his majestic, floating sword, was a figment of his or, rather, some master arsehole’s imagination.

This whole messing with his head made Adam want to scream, though – how many times was he going to be foolish enough to underestimate others before he realized he was still at the bottom of a very tall tower of bones – the peak of cultivation?

Now how was he going to find where this master was? See the unseen, my arse. He could do one better than that, or at least Libby could. This place may be an illusion, but clearly, the walls weren’t – that led Adam to a simple conclusion.

The conclusion Adam had reached was based on the fact that whomever they were at was a major league dick, and he presumed, judging by everything around here – the order’s building, the underground city, and the biblical vortex taking up most of the sky – this was very much old school, probably a few thousand years, old school.

Adam headed back into the building, towards the open-air courtyard with the fountain. As he got closer to the chamber, however – he was suddenly teleported to somewhere else.

Yeah, right, like I’m going to fall for any more of your stupid malarkey today - It was yet another illusion.

In such a delightful, bamboo-ed glade as this, it would be a shame not to practice some of his kata moves – he could pretend he was in a martial arts movie. Adam kicked and spun, taking down imaginary enemies all the time, listening to Libby’s commentary – the old bastard could pull all the illusions he wanted out of his kazoo, but Libby’s Sat Navi would still remain one hundred percent accurate.

As Adam got closer to where the fountain should be located, an illusionary wall appeared, and then more shit – more flying cultivators blasting him with some shit, some ninja-like people running at him, decapitating him, and so on. Towards the end, the illusion flickered into life so quickly, it was like moving through a thick fog – and of course, Adam got killed numerous times or would have without Echo’s interventions.

Relentlessly, Adam moved forward until his foot satisfyingly connected with what felt like a shit ton of masonry – which he began to pound with front kicks and then spinning kicks.

He knew his theory had been correct when he heard a screaming that made his ears literally bleed – again, Echo saved the day, and Libby prompted him to keep at it.

Then all the illusions fell away, and he was left panting, standing in front of a mostly dismantled statue of the previous owner of this place – the master, who had duped him up till then.

Predictable dick thought; Adam put his statue on show, like in the underground city – pride coming before a fall, as he kicked it some more just for the hell of it.

Some crap fell to the ground – there was loot within the statue. He found a pouch and some rings that came off the statue’s fingers. Was it a statue or a mummified corpse? He wasn’t quite sure now.

Anyway, time to sit down and take a breather when he’d rested a while – laying on his back where the fountain should have been, Libby poked at him to have a look around to see what was actually here, which turned out to be a dusty old place where every book or stick of furniture just crumbled at his touch. He thought maybe some of the pill bottles and things like that might still be of use even if they were powder – Trey could probably extract stuff out of it. So they took all that stuff.

But there wasn’t really much they could take. Until that is, he got to the garden – it was overgrown. Overgrown with thousand-year-old plants! Carefully Libby transferred the lot to a specially prepared PD space – where time was actually going slower, as she didn’t want any chance of them being damaged.

Then he gated back to the underground city.