-Tech City-
Having spent the last two months sequestered away from the world doing forging, James returned to surface only to find that the city seemed to have once again started slowly expanding. With the restoration of the monolith, the city limits had been restored to tens of kilometres as opposed to its previous few kilometres.
Thanks to that, the outskirts of the city now had people buying up land and building homes and businesses. Golden grain was once again filling fields off into the distance for as far as the eye could see and the small townships scattered kilometres away, to oversee the grain fields, had been rebuilt.
It seemed that since the last auction, the release of a public meditation technique and breathing technique that left others in the dust, and the more than impressive living arrangements, hundreds of thousands of commoners had started flocking to the city from all over. Even from places as far as Pomit in the far south-east and Sargie in the far north-west.
The total population of the city now numbered just short of 800,000 and not a single one of those residents was a mortal ... at least not any longer. Every last one, from children to old men, was at least in the barrier realm thanks to the meditation technique being sold in the university.
Because of that huge influx, the city as it had been, became called the inner city. Thanks to the increasing population and the return of the safety zone provided by the monolith, Jessy made some changes to the city. She demolished everything in the farmer’s district and had it split in half with one part becoming the new university spanning kilometres across and the other part becoming industrial estate.
James could find no fault with this and honestly admitted, that at this point he didn’t really care what happened to the city. He’d said that in a moment of distracted concentration when he’d been conditioning something and Jessy and Jasmine had taken it as him giving them absolute freedom to do whatever the hell they wanted with it.
Thanks to that, the commercial district now had an underground which was entirely policed and operated by the Brotherhood. It became the premiere black market in the empire and even started stealing black market trade from outside of the empire.
The university was now huge in comparison to its previous self. The most interesting thing about the university was that people who came here and lectured or studied did so entirely freely and without paying a cent. This was because they paid for the knowledge by getting the implant and all the classrooms and lecture halls were entirely run by like-minded individuals who loved knowledge.
The most popular place in the university was the biggest lecture stage that was open air. It had thousands of stone seats surrounding it, and everyday people would go there and debate on different topics. It was quite common to see budding apprentice forge masters and alchemists sharing experiences.
The Gau clan made quite a name for themselves when Song came to the university and started preaching on artefact creation. Their fame as forge masters became well known in the city after that and they often went to the University and gave speeches to help recruit talented forge master apprentices.
Similarly, a new sect that came from the Sanhong City, based in the same named region, which called themselves the Potion Daoist’s, started giving lectures at the University which created an onslaught of talented and experienced masters in their trades coming to the University to lecture and recruit talents.
It became such a ‘thing’ that the stage had to be booked in advance, and another stage was created with the same setup. To limit the amount of pestering students got from factions trying to suck them in, recruiting on the campus became forbidden with the exception of one week every three months.
That became recruitment week and was actually an idea Gary had come up with in order to give students more freedom and to prevent people using the debating stage just to talk about how amazing their guild is and that sort of shit.
Still, once they’d started, they quite enjoyed it, and it then became professional courtesy not to try and sell your guild while at the university and to focus only on knowledge, which being the aged professionals they were, was very much up the alleys of the old monsters that visited to give lectures.
There were also a number teams that were running projects that the Brotherhood invested money into. Not only that, many guilds started research teams and began to back research teams that managed to finish some of the basics courses and had begun a project for the science fair.
The payout for the science fair was quite sizable, and if the backing guild were lucky, they would have sowed good fortune with a promising researcher and possibly drawn that person into their guild. It didn’t always work, but many young researchers and scholars agreed to concede the payout to a faction if they backed them financially during their research.
As much interest as the university was generating, the arenas created more. They now had 40 odd arenas of all different sizes in the Spirit District. The largest was the old arena retrofitted to fit nearly 300,000 spectators, and with a combat area sized at 200 metres in length and 150 in width.
This arena was designed for the tower realm cultivators and team matches. The rest were all smaller, and the majority of them were only a few dozen metres in diameter and were underground arenas. This was because of the huge influx of barrier realm cultivators that wanted to try their luck in an arena. If they did well enough, they could make a name for themselves and win a shit load of money while doing it.
Not only was there more arenas in the Spirit District but it seemed the idea from the University had found its way here. Powerful cultivators would often speak on the Martial Dao and martial techniques, and it became a place where people freely traded information regarding what they’d achieved or discovered.
This sort of trait definitely wasn’t common in the cultivation world because people generally kept such things to themselves lest someone get the upper hand over them, but most of these people were only common mortals a few months ago, and they all felt some kind of sickening comradery.
At least it was sickening to James. He often had people grovelling and thanking him like he’d saved their life because he was selling a meditation technique for a pittance to the mortals, but in reality, it wasn’t for them. It was entirely for him.
As could be seen by his guild now having nearly 1000 members. That made it only slightly smaller than the Gau Clan had been when he first came to this world. Hell, even the two sects the Shield Maidens and the Sword Masters didn’t have that many disciples.
Well, they didn’t before. Now, with the huge influx of cultivators, all the guilds and clans had recently been getting huge numbers of fresh-faced barrier realms rocking up on their doorstep looking to join a powerful faction in order to learn their techniques and have an opportunity to use their resources.
By the same token, a great many people had chosen to remain as a free cultivator and find their own way. The problem with this was that you would often miss things that an experienced cultivator could teach you, as was demonstrated by James’ total lack of understanding towards his Spirit Pressure.
As James surveyed the city, he noticed that outside each of the city gates to each district small towns had started forming. He imagined what this place would be like with this level of growth in another 50 years. It was already nearly half the population of the capital city Yansho.
Thanks to the array powered construction of Tech City, it actually took up only a sixth of the total area Yansho city did. From what he’d heard though, Yansho city had been buying designs from them for housing skyscrapers and was trying to even that margin.
Finished his brief moment of inspecting the city, James returned to the HQ building. Apparently, there was someone of slight importance who was very eager to meet with him.
-James’ Office-
As James entered his office, he saw a man dressed in a very regal and posh looking military uniform. Something he’d expect to see Napoleon wearing in a history book or something. On his hip sat an old warn scimitar.
When James scanned the man, he detected a powerful fire energy. It had obviously been purified quite a bit. Not to mention he sensed the man’s Spirit Pressure was at least twice as powerful as his own. He could intuitively tell by the man’s lack of ability to fully reign in his spirit pressure that his control was probably even worse than James’ had been when he first started testing it.
That created a strange perpetual pressure around the man. It wasn’t much to James as a cultivator, and especially not as a cultivator with fairly controlled and powerful spirit pressure of his own, but the man no doubt flattened roses and grass simply by walking past them.
That wasn’t the only thing James felt in his brief scan, he also discovered that the scimitar on the man’s hip was clearly made by a forge master proficient in creating spirit artefacts. It had also obviously existed for a long time, because he felt it reacting just from his brief scrying of it and it was a powerful spirit, at least by the standards James had to judge it by. Which would probably be considered low.
After a momentary scanning of his guest, James sat at the opposite side of the table and eyed him over. The man had a bushy waxed moustache and a thick head of waxed back orange hair. His eyes were clear and sharp, and he carried himself with a dignified upper-class air, with straight back and looking down his nose at the world.
The last thing James could tell, without even scanning the man, was that he had just recently stepped into the tower realm. He still had the fresh ‘new realm’ smell about him, just like a new car keeps it’s smell for a few weeks until you spill your coffee in it ... or something.
James already had some idea who this fellow was, but decided that he would play it by ear anyway. He’d somewhat gotten into the habit of running with things lately, and it was a rare moment when he felt something was beyond his control anymore.
He gave a polite smile and poured himself some tea. “I’m James, what can I do for you?”
In a no-nonsense tone, the man gave a grunt, made a show of looking James over and then stared him straight in the eye. “You have my son, and I demand his release!”
James tapped his fingers on the table and leant back in his chair while looking at the man. “I’m afraid I can’t do that. You see, if your son is the man I think he is, then we’re expecting a ransom. Otherwise, he’ll be executed for colluding to bring harm to my guild.”
“Humph! What nonsense! My son would have no such intentions!”
James leant back further and gave a sigh. He then looked at the ceiling and spoke to Jasmine. “Jasmine, playback the evidence on Perlious Latsoe.”
“Certainly James.”
Jasmine then began playing back footage and voice recordings of everything incriminating that Perlious had ever done inside the Yori Empire. By the time it was finished, General Latsoe was shaking with fury and his already poorly controlled spirit pressure was threatening to surge forth like his rage.
James, who had been busy with something on his pad through this short routine, finally looked up and eyed the General then began reading from the pad.
“So it looks like we have your son on at least 3 counts of attempted subterfuge, 2 counts of murder, 4 counts of subverting justice, 2 counts of conspiracy to commit murder, 4 counts of conspiracy to abduct, 1 count of littering and at least a dozen counts of public urination. Not only that, but it would appear we could also charge you with subterfuge and conspiracy to murder and abduct. I probably shouldn’t even let you leave my city, let alone allow you to take your son.”
“Would you dare?! I’m the General in charge of the entire northern border of Hastoel. If you were to try anything against me, this empire would gladly hand you over to the Hastoel Government. Don’t think you’re protected just because you live in a different nation!”
James gave a flippant smile then stood up and looked down at this General Latsoe character. “I don’t particularly care what you think. If the empire is so willing to just hand me over, then we wouldn’t be having this conversation because you’d have had me expedited along with your son 2 months ago when he was captured.
“No, I think you’re here to try and threaten and bluster because you’ve already tried to pressure old Arty and he’s told you to blow it out your ass. Most likely, your ruling class probably passed on trying to march an army in here and taking my city.
“If I had to guess, they’re already well aware it would be considered a hostile action by the other two nations and then Hastoel would be like a paper boat resisting the ever continuous tides of the ocean. So if I’m not wrong, you’re either here to bluster and threaten me and hope I’ll roll over and capitulate, or you’re here to assassinate me in my own home.”
The moment he finished pondering on his conspiracy, Latsoe was standing and had a hand on the table to flip it. He very quickly discovered a slight problem however, when regardless of how much force he used, the table remained stationary and unbudging.
By this point, James was already reaching for his lightning shoes in preparation to escape. The ever present sniper fired his Arc Cannon, and the sound speed projectile blew the window open. For the first time, thanks to the huge boost he got from both his scrying and his spirit pressure, James actually witnessed the slug rapidly move through the air towards Latsoe’s head.
To his even greater shock, he witnessed something otherworldly, as Latsoe’s Scimitar glowed brightly and as if without even realising it himself, Latsoe had drawn it and sliced that sound speed projectile in half.
Just as James’ boots fired up to launch him out of the room, the Scimitar was slicing through the air, and a violent burst of flame followed behind it, beginning to fill the room. Making it worse was that the first slice cutting the slug in two had created its own sonic boom which was sucking the flame from the scimitar outwards and feeding it.
Even for James, all of this seemed to be happening too fast. James also came to realise why the General’s spirit pressure seemed unsteady and barely restrained. James had thought it was from a lack of control, but he now understood that it was because the General was constantly using it to increase his speed and perception.
This entire scenario happened in the time span of a second, which was fast even by James’ standards. Seeing the imminent sound wave and the closely following flame wave, James maximised his spirit pressure and lightning energy internally and focused it on his speed and perception.
Normally, when controlling his spirit pressure or spirit energy inside of his own body, he felt little to no resistance and had superior control. He now realised that was because he’d never really pushed it to its limit, as he was in this split second life or death moment.
As it ramped up, the world slowed even further and the visible sonic air pulse was already less than a metre away from James. He felt his control over his internal energies slipping from the sheer level of power he had to use to achieve these speeds and before the chance slipped by, he ran!
His lightning and wind energies poured into his lightning shoes, and for the first time, he watched as lightning spirit energy got sucked up by the free energies of the materials and arrays his shoes were made from. Then a massive wave of lightning energy was returned to his legs, spurring them on to even faster speeds.
With the assistance of his spirit pressure willing his spirit energies to move through his meridians faster and willing his body to react quicker, James reached the sound barrier for the first time. Less than a step behind him was the sound wave created from Latsoe’s scimitar, and a step behind that was the wave of fire being pulled along and fuelled by the sonic pulse.
James reached the door, and for a brief moment, he felt himself pushing against something like a sheet or plastic wrap. The harder he willed his body to move the thicker and thicker the sheet became, until finally the barrier snapped like a twig and his body looked like it had disappeared.
Following the disappearance of James through his office door was the flame wave, barrelling out and lighting anything in the room and corridor outside that was flammable on fire. An alarm rang out in the building, and the General let out a dissatisfied grunt. He then started running after James in pursuit.
James felt the skin of his body burning from the air friction, and his eyes felt like they were about to be pushed back into his brain. Probably the only thing keeping him alive was the inordinate amount of spirit energy and pressure he was using.
He now realised he’d grown far too cocky and had vastly underestimated the power a tower realm practitioner had at their fingertips. He knew that if he timed it right, and caught them by surprise, he could just set off a bomb and run, letting them be engulfed in the aftermath.
The problem was that he had no spirit bombs when he walked into his office and he never suspected General Latsoe would actually dare lash out at him on his own territory. In his mind, it was completely irrational, but then, people do irrational things for the ones they love.
By the time James was a hundred metres away, Latsoe was just rushing out of the office in the wake of the fire. Seeing James just reaching the end of the corridor, he swung his scimitar, and a godly firestorm exploded from the edge.
James glanced back to see it rushing towards him, and without a second thought, he launched himself at the nearby window. His soft squishy body, already starting to show tears and burns on his skin, then had the pleasure of being filled with shards of glass. What little remaining energy and pressure he had, was then used to break his fall moments before he hit the ground and lapsed into unconsciousness.
This whole scene covered the span of perhaps less than 3 or 4 seconds. In order to survive just those few seconds, James had used everything he had in his tank and then some. His audacity at thinking he could talk down to a Tower Realm standing only a few metres away had almost cost him his life.
Luckily for him, Jasmine’s intuition was on point, and drones had been circling the building the moment James walked into that office. Before he even broke through the window on the second story, drones were rushing to catch him.
The moment he hit the ground, he was lifted into the air again as Jasmine persevered to get him as far from this psycho as she could, as fast as she could. When General Latsoe reached the broken window seconds after James’ escape, he found him already another 200 metres from the building being evacuated by a horde of drones.
Seeing his chance to kill the captor of his son slipping away, Latsoe only grew more enraged and leapt from the window. Fire energy swirled around him like a tempest, and he rocketed through the air at amazing speeds.
Combat drones then arrived on the scene only to be blown out of the air before they could fire, or have their Arc Cannon slugs impact a solid wall of fire turning them into a hot spray of instant molten iron. Without the speed of sound pushing them forwards the molten iron simply hit the Generals skin and then slid off like water droplets not even leaving a red mark.
The further they moved from the HQ building, the closer the general got. The two hundred metre gap became 100, which then became 50. By that point, Latsoe was throwing fireballs like confetti, and the horde of drones surrounding and protecting James dropped like flies.
Almost 2 minutes had passed until finally Latsoe had closed the distance to 25 metres and sent out a wall of flame hoping to turn the drone horde and James into ashes in one go. Before the wall of flames could contact James, the newer model combat drones blew past at supersonic speeds creating a jet stream that sucked the fire along with it.
Intercepted by the Mark IV drone, Latsoe was forced to back off for a brief moment giving Jasmine enough time to get some more distance with James’ unconscious body. In the same moment, she was already moving her most powerful arsenal into position. The newer combat drones were more than just fast.
In less than a second, they’d surrounded Latsoe and did some strange transformer thing, revealing a laminated cube in their core. Each cube then lit up like a torch in the night and strange array patterns projected out from their surface creating odd patterns in the air.
Each of these projected arrays then seemed to solidify slightly, and an opaque force field flickered to life. The drones quickly shot around Latsoe, who seemed to be far more focused on catching up to James, and then began to move in towards him.
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Before he realised what was happening, Latsoe suddenly collided with a remarkably soft, rubbery, transparent surface. After glancing around, he finally noticed the 20 drones all positioned around him in formation. Unfortunately for him, he never got the chance to try and break out from the force field they’d created because in a split second their cores became blindingly bright and an oppressive force suddenly filled the insides of the barrier.
Each of these drones had just set their little mini-reactors to self-destruct and created a contained mass implosion within the barrier. More or less, they just suicide bombed the shit out of the General like Muslim extremists.
-The Lab-
Once more, James awoke in the lab as fit as a fiddle and without the slightest break, scratch or bruise. And once more, he simply dumped Exsue onto the floor as he got up. Walking out from the room, with Exsue once again piggybacking off him and biting his shoulder.
As if Déjà vu, he then fought to push Exsue off of himself and arrived in the main area of the lab to see Skay having an argument with a group of people on the Screen.
James let out a long sigh and then decided to just turn around and leave. As he stepped into the elevator and hit a series of buttons, he tapped his ear piece.
“Jasmine, replay the events after I passed out.”
Without a word, a screen appeared on the wall of the elevator showing the full 4 minutes from the moment he launched out the window to the sudden disappearance of General Latsoe and the 20 drones that had surrounded him.
James then let out another sigh. “Jasmine. You can build your army.”
“James, are you certain you’re okay? You’ve been non-responsive for nearly 10 days and appear to now be acting out of character.”
“I’m fine Jasmine. Gear up the factory for full-scale war production, you can begin building your droid army, full outfit of our defensive and offensive technology. I want you to double your efforts on all array and spirit material research, even if it means you need to build yourself another computer. We have 7 months until the War of the Worlds.”
‘ding’
James stepped out onto the top floor and then entered his meditation chamber. As he sat down, he gave one last instruction to Jasmine. “Jasmine, I’m going into a closed-door session. No one is to disturb me.”
James then removed his earpiece for the first time since he got it, and sat down in the centre of the spartan room. James’ meditation chamber was an entirely empty room no more than 5 metres in length and width. It had a single plain red rug made of soft fur and apart from that was completely white.
As James sat into his meditation posture, he reviewed his short contribution to the battle with Latsoe. It had been a long time since James lost a fight, which was most assuredly exactly what happened with Latsoe. Being completely honest with himself, James accepted that he was never a contender to be part of that fight anyway.
Without Jasmine, he was certain he would now be dead. His spirit energy control and spirit pressure execution were both sloppy in the face of the sudden assault, and he readily recognised that his first instinct was to run from someone more powerful than himself.
Before, he was well and truly proud of his cultivation and everything he’d achieved here. Now, he was ashamed of himself for becoming so pig headed. Normally his pride was somewhat twisted from standard expectations.
Before he came here and started his guild, he prided himself on his character and his ability to adapt quickly while remaining level-headed. Before he became a cultivator, he didn’t care about winning or losing a single battle. Instead, his pride was focused on his ability to play the long game and survive any situation.
He prided himself on his endless persistence in the face of greater odds, and he prided himself on knowing when to fight, and when to survive. Now that he felt ashamed at being so easily trampled, James realised he’d been doing a number of things, that on Earth, would be out of character for him.
For one, the city. He’d never once cared about the woe and misfortune of others, and before coming here, he’d never have felt proud about wasting his own time helping people that couldn’t help themselves.
He defended his actions here as being for the future of the guild. But the truth was he was too busy basking in his own ego at everything he’d achieved with the city, to recognise he was slowly moving from someone who only needed his own approval, to someone that lived for the approval of others.
It certainly wasn’t as serious as becoming some grossly cheerful hippy that had an ego based entirely around seeking the attention of others, it wasn’t as bad as James felt it was, but it was nonetheless evident.
If James hadn’t been so full of himself, he would have long since put in countermeasures to deal with Latsoe. But he didn’t, because he felt he could survive anything. It was true that he survived, but it wasn’t under his own power, he instead was rescued from the brink of death ... by a talking machine no less.
James began to think about everything else he’d done since coming here. He soon began to realise, that thanks to the technological advantage they had over others, he’d become far too relaxed and lost sight of himself in the centre of a maelstrom of madness.
James spent weeks meditating on how much his personality had changed. Some things he liked, for example, he no longer froze as much as he did before, he thought this to be positive. Inversely, he no longer assessed situations as fully as he once would have. He missed things he normally wouldn’t miss and made mistakes he would never have made before.
By the end of the few weeks, James left his meditation chambers with a renewed vigour. He excepted that some things will always change, even himself, but the thing that wouldn’t change was his core values, the things about himself he had the most pride in.
Strangely, during this whole time in meditation, his greatest breakthroughs in his re-evaluation of himself all came from Gold James. Goldy, being the condensed conscious spirit embodiment of his pride, knew the things James had always prided himself on better than even James did. Which technically isn’t a correct sentence because after all, they’re both James.
When he emerged from meditation, he found a sleeping Exsue curled up on the floor outside his door sleeping like a cat. He gave a soft smile. Patted her head lightly then started walking out as he put his earpiece back in.
Before he’d even managed to reach the door, a body was glued to his back, making sniffing sounds and licking his neck. “You smell different today JayJay. Just like you did the first time I sensed you come through the portal.”
James, for the first time in ... well, forever, stopped in his tracks and then reached back a hand and patted Exsue’s blue hair. “It’s good to see you too Exsue.”
Exsue, for a brief moment, wasn’t sure what to do. James had never openly shown any form of affection towards her without her forcing it before. She started hyperventilating, and her pupils dilated like she’d just ingested some psychedelic drug.
As James reached the door to his room, Exsue fell onto the floor and started twisting around and moaning like some pervert. James could only chuckle wryly at this sight then turned and left as Exsue started bucking up and down while very inappropriately manhandling herself.
James tapped his earpiece as he closed the door to his bedroom and the writhing moaning Exsue on the floor. He then started preparing some tea as he spoke to Jasmine. “Jasmine, did you complete your new computer?”
“Hello James, welcome back. Yes, only a few days ago Skay and I successfully completed our first entirely spirit and array based computer. Although we say that ... I am weary of copying my core program onto it. This machine is beyond everything we envisioned or believed possible, and it runs in a manner not entirely conventional to standard computers.”
James poured some tea and then started to pace around his round table and his office. “How so? Don’t all computers just operate on zeros and ones?”
“Well, it’s not just a matter of its code, it’s rather a matter of hardware. Perhaps, you would be better off examining this prototype yourself. Even I can’t fully understand it. Dr Skay kept many of its details hidden from me.”
James quirked his eyebrow. Firstly, everything Jasmine just said, but more importantly, there was a chip in his table. It was a tiny little gauge no bigger than a speck of sand, but to James’ hawk-like Scrying perception, even a single grain of sand cannot go unseen. Or rather, in this case, the lack of a grain.
James brushed his hand over the mark and then contrary to what one might expect, he ignored it and moved on to the lab.
-Level 9-
Level 9 of the lab was below the spirit reactor and was recently excavated for the sole purpose of building Jasmine’s new computer. Contrary to the rows of processors and storage devices James had been expecting, he instead found a single large white room stretching to nearly 500 metres in every direction.
On the floors, walls and roof were hundreds of intricate arrays beyond even James’ comprehension. Each one spanned tens of metres and overlapped and intersected with tens of other arrays all combining together to create a single large array pattern that covered every inch of free space.
James felt quite a strange energy as he entered the room and after momentarily Scrying he realised that the entire room was saturated in it. As he walked in, he saw Skay busily painting a pattern and he suddenly sensed a part of Skay’s spirit enter the lore pattern he’d been inscribing. This wasn’t like when you gave an artefact a spirit, but rather forcing your will and intent onto the array, to allow it to operate more smoothly and in a certain manner.
James had to take a double look at Skay when he approached. He looked younger than ever, and if you were to meet him now, you would think the old man wasn’t more than 40, which was a vast comparison to the aged and wrinkled 70 odd he looked when they first came here.
James could only assume the old madman had some breakthroughs in his cultivation to so drastically affect his visible age. Then on second thought, he realised that the outwards appearance of most cultivators was a reflection of their mental self-imagine, so perhaps it was just because he felt younger again that his body responded by making him look younger.
As Skay finished up the pattern he was working on, he turned and spotted James. “Bout time you got your ass into gear boy. While you’ve been having an internal crisis and moping around in your room for the last few weeks, we’ve been making breakthroughs that would put the greatest minds of earth to shame. Now come on. You’ll want to see this.”
Finished his brief greeting, he marched over to a single pedestal in the centre of the room. Then looked at James. “I’m going to need the guild seal.”
James cocked his head and raised his eyebrows. The duo then had a brief conversation with facial expressions and James then willed his seal from his spirit realm. Moments later, the blood red seal sat floating magically over the pedestal.
Skay then looked at the roof. “Jasmine, get the members to meet us down here now.”
James finally couldn’t contain his curiosity. “What’s going on Old Madman?”
Skay gave a knowing smile and chuckled. “The future is what’s going on boy. I’m about to play God! HAHAHA!”
James couldn’t help but give a wry smile at seeing the Old Madman was still just as mad as before. In a matter of minutes the other members of the core had arrived and in one way or another showed their concern at James’ wellbeing.
They then just as quickly acted like nothing had ever happened and Skay smiled brightly as he began to explain.
“What we’re about to do may very well be on par with the absurdities of the Ancient One’s monolith patterns. This here is something I’ve had rattling around in my head since long before I ever came to this world and is the amalgamation of years of dedicated research before I ever even came here. Today, with the help of this world’s crooked natural laws, my chance has finally come.”
Skay then gripped his fist tightly as he had a quiet moment staring off into space. He then let out a long sigh. “Your task’s here are very simple. Each of you will position yourselves in these specific areas.”
Skay pointed to six circles surrounding the pedestal. James gave the Old Madman a strange look. “Why are their only six circles? We have seven people here.”
Skay smiled brightly and gave James a hard stare. “That’s easy boy, someone is going to have to control this reaction from the pedestal. Naturally, as the creator and the only one that understands what he’s bloody well doing, that will be me.”
Then before further argument could be broached on the subject, Skay started pushing people into position. As he was being pushed onto his circle, James clicked his earpiece to get a hold of Jasmine. To his shock and surprise, all that came back was static and very faint sounds.
He focused his energy and pressure into his ears, and slowly he began to hear Jasmine’s voice in patchy broken words. “Jame ... crsshhk ... the ... crsshhk ... must sto ... crshhk.” James was starting to get a strange vibe about all this, but he couldn’t place a finger on what was going on.
When it finally clicked, it was too late. With everyone in position, Skay clapped his hands together and then placed them on the pedestal. One by one, arrays began to light up in sequence, starting from the central pedestal where Skay was standing.
When James finally realised something was dreadfully wrong with this scenario, the circle he was standing in had lit up. A powerful array field shimmered to life around him trapping him in his circle. Seeing everyone was trapped, Skay’s smile became grim. He took one final look around at his workmanship and then walked up to James.
“Boy ... James. You’d best take care of my little girl.” He said with a solemn face. With that, the arrays began to brighten as they pulled in more and more power from the Spirit Reactor. The room began to buzz with a strange vibration, and everything started to grow fuzzy and indistinct.
James suddenly felt the array around him drawing out spirit pressure from his body. It had the same sensation as when he was imparting a soul onto an artefact. He started trying to fight it only to hear Skay’s voice echo out in the chamber.
“You mustn’t fight it! Without your assistance, this will never work. I am going to die here anyway, and there is nothing you can do to change that. Stop fucking around being so indecisive and fucking ... RELEASE!”
His voice slowly built up to a crescendo until the word release was yelled out at the top of his lungs. James felt a wave of nausea hit him, and suddenly a compelling feeling beyond his control simply pushed him to release his spirit pressure at its utmost maximum.
Not only James, but the other 5 sins also felt the compulsion beyond their control and simultaneously they released the full effort of their combined spirit power. A strange thing then happened as more arrays lit up and for a brief moment their minds were connected to Skay’s.
James felt his grief and his happiness and years of piled up regret and sadness. He then began to see brief moments of Skay’s past.
When he first met his wife, when they married, when he found out she was pregnant. James felt the happiness and joy of these times. He felt what it was like to truly and without reservation love someone.
He then saw the moment of the child’s birth. He felt the fear and hopelessness when Skay’s wife went into labour and started having complications, the anger and regret of his powerlessness when his wife died and only moments later, his child.
He felt the complex emotions of that instant moment where everything flooded in at once. The grief, the fear, the inadequacy of his ability to foresee these events and stop them. He then felt that moment when the pride of a man who believed he was the smartest on the planet, snapped in twain like a brittle twig.
He felt that moment when Skay realised that no matter how powerful his mind was, no matter how much he’d known. He could never have saved his wife and child. He then felt the burning hatred towards the world, the endless disgust at the fate of all creatures, and then finally, he felt the desire.
It started as a spark of madness, an idea beyond the scope of anything ever envisioned. He was going to save his daughter at any costs. He locked away the corpse of his dead child and spent years scanning her brain into the computer. Scanning his, hers and his wife’s DNA into the machines he’d created.
He never stopped marching forwards, to the single goal. That endless dream. As the spark of his madness progressed into a flame, his desire to resurrect his daughter grew without limit. Every failure only led to further attempts. He couldn’t resurrect the body, it was simply impossible, even for him.
So he did the next best thing. He created Jasmine’s mind. At first, it was just another program that took the scans of Skay’s dead daughter and then slowly created its own mind and developed its own personality. The technology of earth was powerful, but to create something that could mimic something so close to life it was flawless, he needed more.
Then a day came on earth when he discovered he was going to die. He was unreconciled. He refused to accept that his life’s ambition, his one true goal for living, would end with him. He then was introduced to the Spatial Anomaly, and he saw a chance. Although it was a long shot, he began making plans to try and blow open the spatial anomaly.
He was aware that space and time were intrinsically linked. If he could tear open a moment in space-time, perhaps he could go back. Perhaps, he could find an opportunity to prevent the disaster that befell him.
Then the holocaust happened. That was why he was so much more concerned with the disappearance of the anomaly when they first met. If the anomaly had still been operational, he’d thought he would have the chance to return in time. Even if he couldn’t, he was going to die either way.
Then, they came here. At first, he was enraged at the sudden change, more so than that, he’d lost his chance to save his daughter. With a great deal of luck, Jasmine came with him, buried away in the Ocean Lab’s computer systems and lucky enough to be sucked through into this universe. James then had the strange experience of feeling what Skay felt when they first met.
He saw memories of them working together on everything, and he felt something that could only be described as respect and comradery. From everything he’d seen up until now, James had never felt Skay give anything or one, respect. James felt Skay’s exuberance at meeting James after they’d been here for a while and worked together for a while.
He felt the bond of friendship, if it could be called that, the two of them shared. Then he finally saw Skay painting this lab, and he felt that unreserved hope, that single-minded wish. Skay always knew that Jasmine would never quite reach the stage of being truly granted a second chance at life.
Although she had been with Skay for many years, learning and adjusting and growing, that was only programming. Skay knew that no amount of programming could ever truly become life. Skay himself hated to admit it, because as far as he’d always been concerned, human life was only electrical impulses in an unusual median and stuffed into a head cavity.
That was until he came here, and for the first time, he experienced that moment of realisation that true life had something even he couldn’t explain. The moment when he fused with his true spirit, he knew there was something intrinsic to human life that Jasmine could never achieve on her own. Then when they granted an artefact a soul, Skay realised that his chance had come.
Finally. He could grant Jasmine a soul, make her a real person ... or at least, the soul of a real person. When he came here, he was still dying. Even after reaching so far in his cultivation he could feel himself slowly being eaten away from the insides. Spirit energy helped to extend his life, and he promised himself that no matter what, he would achieve his dream before he died.
James returned to reality as the last of his spirit pressure was drawn out into the array. That moment of connection with Skay was a side effect of the array system allowing him to multiply his spirit pressure control to profound levels and to borrow the power of his comrades.
James fell to his knees on the verge of passing out from pressure depletion. In his final lucid moments, he looked up at Skay who stood in the centre of the array fields with his arms in the air and the first genuine smile on his face James had ever seen.
Tears fell from his eyes like a river, but he smiled nonetheless. At that moment, James witnessed his first true glimpse at what he’d been calling a soul. Skay’s body began to rapidly age and wither. In moments, like paper in a fire, his body blackened and then blew away like ashes.
Although it looked like nothing was there, James could see in his Scrying field the ethereal true spirit apparition of Skay, still standing in the same position. Reality then began to fracture and bend, as his vision blurred and darkened, Skay’s spirit apparition was disintegrated before his eyes, and all of the pressure energy released from him and his cohorts piled on top of the formless mass of pressure that was once Skay.
Finally, James couldn’t force himself to stay lucid, and with a blinding flash from the array’s, James lost consciousness.
When he awoke, he was still laying on the floor of the 9th level. What was once a pristine room in perfect condition was now riddled with cracks and fissures. The array’s had half disintegrated, and the room was filled with an eerie mist.
James pushed himself up to his feet and started to take account of the situation. Returning to his norm, his face was expressionless and without emotion. Although on the outside he maintained a stone cold expression, his insides were rolling over themselves, and his stomach was trying to force itself up through his throat.
His feet stepped forward dazedly until he stood on the spot Skay had been. He then searched everywhere hoping everything he’d seen in that last moment had simply been a mesmerising hallucination brought on by pressure depletion.
“Old Madman!” James called out. He heard the groans of his companions being awakened by his calling and released his scrying field. He searched everywhere for that sensation he felt when Skay was blocking him but found nothing. He then searched again looking for the unique energy of Skay’s spirit pressure still finding nothing.
He called again and started walking through the misty room but still found nothing. He then ran around the room again and then he employed all of his spirit energy and sprinted around the room. He then ran back and found his companions mostly up and began questioning.
“Where’s Skay?”
He ran up to Exsue and shook her while repeating the question. “Where’s Skay?!”
Before he realised it, his emotionless face was gone, and it had warped into desperation and fear. Exsue, whom was the most experienced of everyone, seemed just as lost about what happened here as the others. Apart from James, everyone had passed out before that final crushing moment.
James tapped his earpiece. “Jasmine! ... Jasmine answer me damn it!”
Despite his calls, nothing changed. Just as James was becoming frantic, he heard the sobs of a woman. He glanced around and saw his other 5 companions all standing there looking at the devastation of the room and started whipping his head around.
The soft sobbing continued, but James still couldn’t find its source. Just when he was starting to think he was going mad and having a mental break, he thought back to his recent time in meditation.
This wasn’t how he should be acting right now. The first concern in an emergency situation is to assess the risk to his personal safety. He took another glance around and found that the room was already starting to show signs of structural failure.
Putting that crying sound to the back of his mind, he ushered everyone into the elevator and heard the resounding ‘bang’ of the roof and walls starting to cave in as they shot upwards to the top floor.
-James’ Office-
Everyone sat at the round table and stared off into space somewhat dazedly. This was the first death of a core member they’d experienced. Kelly, the newest, was the least affected, but in the month or two she’d been a part of this group she’d gotten along rather well with Skay, both being stupidly smart and having similar interests in science, they had worked on quite a few things while James had been soul searching.
The next least affected was Exsue, who made no bones about only caring about James. Nonetheless, it was clear she was upset because James was upset and James was upset because Skay was gone. That meant that, somehow, indirectly, she was upset about Skay’s death too. In a twisted Exsue way.
On the opposite end of the scale, James and Harvy were taking Skay’s death the hardest. Harvy, because Skay was his evil master, and James because Skay was his friend. Although they weren’t bosom buddies, and they didn’t have anything close to a normal friendship, they were probably the closest to an actual friend either of the two of them had ever had.
While James filled everyone in on what he’d witnessed at the end of Skay’s array ritual, his eyebrow started to twitch. Finally, he slapped a hand on the bench and shot to his feet. “Where in the hell is that infernal sobbing coming from!”
Everyone at the table just gave him a strange look, like he’d gone mad. As James was looking around like a paranoid schizophrenic, Gold James started yelling in his spirit realm.
~You heard him you noisy bitch! Shut up! I can’t concentrate on meditation with you fucking crying away back there!~
James’ eyes lit up, and his face then went through some strange expressions. He then slowly sat back at the table. Just as Exsue was about to ask what was wrong, James lifted a finger to silence her and closed his eyes as his focus returned to his Spirit Realm.
When Spirit James opened his eyes and parted his lightning nucleus like a curtain. He stepped out to find Gold James standing on his rock with his hands on his hips and yelling at the water down below. Spirit James looked down at his clear liquid sea and saw another person at the bottom of his ocean.
This person was curled into the foetal position at the bottom of the sea while sobbing and sniffling. James’ metaphorical heart tightened in his Spirit chest, and he slowly descended into his sea.
When he reached the person, he was stunned to see it was quite clearly Jasmine. Or rather, it was clear to see that it was the spiritual embodiment of Jasmine. She looked younger than she did when she was on the screen as a projection made by a computer. Her image was still unmistakeably the splitting image of how she’d always portrayed herself onscreen though.
The only difference was that she was a sobbing, crying mess this time. Also, as opposed to normal, right in the centre of her chest was the same blood red guild seal that normally just floated around in James spirit realm. The difference was, it was anchored squarely in the centre of her chest like it was an intrinsic part of her.
The moment Spirit James set foot on the lake bottom, Jasmine looked up at him with puffy red eyes and her hair swaying in the currents of the liquid ocean. Before James could react, Jasmine had launched herself at him and wrapped her arms around his waist.
“He’s dead James! Sniff ... my Papa’s dead!”
In a very uncharacteristic moment, Jasmine cried like a real girl. James couldn’t stop his eyes from watering and unconsciously, without thought, he dropped to his knees and pulled Jasmine into a tight hug. With a great deal of effort, he prevented himself from wailing like she did, but no amount of effort stopped his tears from flowing out.
Out in reality, everyone watched on as James’ face assumed a forlorn, heartbroken expression, and a single tear managed to force its way from the corner of his eye.