Day five. Mindy and I had taken our tests for Doctor Menendez’ remedial appearance class. Mainly the course was about not looking incredibly stupid and ignorant when in costume, and some of the reading assignments were truly useful, like how to talk in an interview to sound relevant while not actually giving away higher-clearance information.
Some of the bad examples were utterly hilarious, like one particularly stupid brick back in the 80s that carefully explained that he was happy to stop an alpha assassin naked because he’d noticed the woman’s heat signature while he was busily boning the governor’s trophy wife and his mistress, the state assemblywoman, at the same time.
The Secret Service actually had to shut him up when he started repeating the stories the mistress told him about exactly what kinds of toys the governor enjoyed, and where he preferred for her to put them. Needless to say, that conservative incumbent wasn’t even able to get on the ballot for re-election by his own house subcommittee.
However, I did find out that the 80’s team anchor, Ogre, claimed that he liked to make sure that his boudoir was ‘painted like the inside of a goddamned cement truck.’
The Doc was happy with our answers. Apparently, it didn’t matter that much whether our answers were good or bad, intelligent analysis or yammering about rumors, he just cared that we seemed to have taken the information seriously enough to have an opinion on them.
Remedial Criminology was an audit, as was advanced anatomy, although Doctor Lindsay MacKillain, the Anatomy teacher, seemed delighted that I already had a firm grounding… I sort of had to, and said she looked forward to seeing me attending specialty anatomy next semester, she was writing me in as qualified for the course based on my earlier education and a set of online tests I could take at my leisure.
Remedial teamwork was an eye-opening experience as a ‘costume’ class. The class was fairly full with semester students, nearly every first year on campus, and I didn’t impress Powercry in the slightest.
Each class varied between information management techniques and equipment, and actual class exercises in the Gym. She informed me gravely that she WOULD be seeing me for remedial teamwork next semester, right along with Mindy and a new batch of first-years, but that didn’t surprise me… I’d always worked alone, and I still didn’t really feel like labeling me as a class 6 power had been a smart choice. The class, as it sounded, focused on teamwork, although advanced versions tended to focus more on direct action or support, depending on the individual’s abilities. Remedial teamwork was a combination, but later classes were more specialized.
And then there were Eastern studies for the third time. Honestly, this was probably the hardest class I’d ever taken, not because of the volume of information, but because of the sheer unfamiliarity I had with both the subject and the exercises.
Last class he’d had to correct my breathing exercises a little, which made it even MORE uncomfortable and alien, but this time, when he had me run the breathing exercise, he seemed surprisingly pleased. “So how much energy are you at?”
I shrugged, “I’ve been completely full for a couple of days. I tried to overload like you said, but when I try, I just breathe out all of the excess instead of storing it inside.”
He nodded, “Not entirely unexpected. Technically Tu Na, or Wu breathing is the simplest and most basic form of cultivation. It works for all three types, and it’s so basic that even normies with no potential can do it. So, have you figured out the hidden secret of cultivation yet?”
“Does it have to do with normies?”
He smiled slightly. “Yes and no.”
“The basic secret of cultivation is that, if you can teach a normie how and figure out the appropriate method, and most importantly find a way to get rid of all the useless shapes cluttering up their energy channels, they can awaken the same potential that an alpha does. In fact, alphas ARE exactly the same as a normies, we just had a lucky break and survived the trauma that opened up our pathways enough to start accumulating and using essence, basically getting flooded with exactly the shape of spirit energy that we needed to absorb to get us over the first roadblock.”
“How does that apply to single-power users?”
I shrugged, “I guess that means that if we can find the right shape, we can potentially unlock our OTHER major branch as well, without risking our lives on guesswork?”
He nodded, “That’s basically it. Supposedly, people used to know how to determine your perfect shape, but whatever it was is lost. I have been doing some of my own research, but the only thing we have that comes close is a library that we captured from the Serenoid Empire when they tried to invade back in ‘97. The problem is, the diagrams are made for people with six arms, and we have only managed to translate a tiny bit of it.”
“Is there any chance that I could look at it?”
He raised an eyebrow, “You think you can translate it when our best minds have failed?”
I grinned, “Nope, but I have a unique perspective on energy and matter based on my abilities. If there are any…” I checked my notes. “Cultivation methods that resonate with me, knowing how they work SHOULD give the big brains at least a primer into the language, right? By comparing what I experience to whatever instructions are written for a particular diagram?”
“You can tell?”
“What shapes resonate? Yeah. I mean, it’s not so much being able to sense it, but I am getting better and better at monitoring my own energy state. I haven’t EXACTLY been able to name my own dao shape, but I have managed to exclude a ton of possibilities, and I have a list of what I feel are fairly common possibilities.”
“Do tell!”
I nodded and pulled out another list of notes. “Bear in mind, a lot of this is just stuff I managed to pick up from reading some of the older, translated stories. I can’t read ancient Chinese, so some of the terminology might be two different words for the same thing, or possibly even be totally wrong, but a lot of these stories have been cross-referenced and translated so I am fairly confident.”
“To be honest, if I had to pick a single one, it would be motion or acceleration. I had a bunch of other possibilities like air, height, sunlight, pollution, and the stars, but a swift storm yesterday wound up blocking out a lot of possibilities, so I tested it on the trams and during the storm. I am almost Ninety-Five percent certain that my ideal shape is some kind of motion. Or maybe something close to that. Considering certain power’s effectiveness in comparison to other near-misses, I feel good about it. If I can find some… methods to choose from? I should be able to interpret stuff pretty well by feeling my way through it.”
“From what I can tell, I get the strongest effects from the strongest fields, and obviously the most effective transition of motion is an orbit. I get much stronger effects from altitude than I do from wind speed, which I guess is because of a slightly increased orbital speed from Earth, and stronger energy from a large moving mass of wind than from a transit tube.”
“So if I were to determine a method, I’d be specifically looking for one that embraces motion, particularly one that fights for acceleration. It helps that every single one of my powers can be defined as acceleration in some form or other. That might also be why I spend energy in deceleration because my power treats deceleration like acceleration in the opposite direction rather than adhering to a universal motion standard.”
“Damn, you DID do your homework. I am pretty confident too, confident enough to think that if your Dao embraces a different concept, it’s one close enough to motion or acceleration to count.”
I chuckled, “Yes I did. Now, it’s possible that I am ever so slightly off. It might be acceleration, it might be motion, it might be action, or it might be some weird mystical concept that embraces them all, like lightspeed or circularity, but we are working on feels here, and this feels right.”
He nodded, “I will do what I can. I can’t guarantee the documents themselves, but I will try to get the diagrams, at least, as long as you are willing to document whatever you find out. I get it, but damn BSA and their over-the-top secrecy. It’s like half the time the only ones that seem to know anything are the ones that are actively attacking it. So what else did you find out?”
I took out my other set of notes again, “Well, As far as I can tell, we need the right cultivation method, apart from just Wu breathing or whatever it is. Something that’s capable of pulling energy more efficiently to start stretching my Dantian, which as far as I can tell is my soul storage. Is that what you did?”
He shook his head, “I was mostly focused on the physical, but my abilities are almost entirely linked to my body, so I was able to start circulating my energy directly through my body and use it like a sort of battery for energy compression. Some… stuff happened, and the power of gravity contains a powerful concept of compression as part of its very idea. My soul expansion was more like… putting a balloon on a soda bottle and shaking it up, which kind of felt backward.”
I nodded and continued. “That’s the next part. Once I figure out a way to start cleaning up all of the extra bits of shape I can’t use, I should be able to start running my energy through my body directly, and as you said, that’s called circulation. I’ve tried doing it myself, but I immediately start running into walls of crap I can’t budge until I have a LOT more energy available.”
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I flipped to the next page. “Okay, meditation. Sitting in one place and diving into my belly button has never worked. On the other hand, doing a workout routine or katas and movement frameworks seems to help me perceive and manipulate my energy better. Doing it without actually using power is there, but as I said, I keep hitting roadblocks I don’t know how to clear or break yet.”
“As far as I can tell, despite my various power sub-abilities, which are called techniques, by the way, the real kicker seems to be the blocks. My cultivation is like a small aircraft, I can get it going really fast and powerful, but there are chocks in front of the tires that keep it from even getting started. From what I have read, there are supposedly medical treatments or umm… medicines? That can help fix that, but my own powers are kind of useless to get past them, unlike yours.”
“What do you mean?”
“The entire way that my abilities work involves speeding past stuff and taking snapshots of the before and after. I can make a LOT of mistakes, and then just go back to the prior save point in my body and start over. I have been able to push those chocks a little, but it hurts and seriously fucks me up since I don’t know what I am doing, and when I restore, it is like getting teleported back to the beginning of the maze again, with all my chalk marks disappeared and a brand new floorplan.”
“Right now, I am technically at the beginning of the refinement stage, or the condensation stage. There were a lot of other names for the first stage before you build your dantian, but some of them, like mortal or powerless, are a little on the dodgy side. I also kind of like the forging realms, like the body forging realm for pre-dantian. I got a lot of notes from something called the Chinese Journal of Golden Medicine, but I think I know why you were able to move forward… and I don’t think I am until I can figure out a way.”
“Elucidate.”
“Your concept is mass and weight. You naturally create pressure on your energy, which is exactly what it needs. Eventually, the pressure causes it to clump together, and form a liquid stage, and then eventually even more weight and pressure, like a diamond, causes it to form a solid mass kind of at the bottom of your soul container called your foundation. Each time you compress, it tugs and yanks at all of the impurities, the inappropriate shapes, where the sheer weight of your concepts liquefies and forces them into new shapes.”
“So your concept just naturally refines most of the spirit essence you get and forces it into exactly what you need. That probably won’t work for later stages, but uhh… mind if I use a badly thought-out metaphor?”
“Sure, I do that all the time,” he chuckled.
“Before we were awakened, we were like kids stuffing toys and shit up our noses. Anything that didn’t work, up our noses it went. Your concept, though, was like suddenly standing in a ten Gee field, it pulled all of that crap right out and let you use your energy channels. Mine is more like a whirlwind. I keep pushing and pushing, and all it does is add more crap up there.”
He laughed, “I am starting to love your metaphors. At least it wasn’t fish.”
“Well, The fish one was damned good. Basically, for me, the next stage is to do what your concept does naturally, but to do that, I need to be able to breathe through my nose. In your case, if what I was studying in the old tales has any validity whatsoever, what YOU have to do to get to the next stage is exactly the opposite. You need to start inducing motion and friction in that solid mass of power at the bottom of your soul and grind it into a fine powder so that you can fill your soul with as much power as possible without breaking it. Once you stuff it so full it’s almost going to crack, it should all merge together and create something called a magical or golden core, sort of like heat and pressure turning coal into a diamond.”
“So I got it easy in the beginning, but now I get to the hard part?”
I nodded, “Yeah, but I get to the hard part right at the beginning because of my concept, and once I get past it, it gets easier… for a little while anyway. The next part is a bitch, but according to the documents it could take anywhere from a moment to hundreds or even thousands of years.”
“I am not sure about this Chinese stuff, they seem to be fond of throwing thousands of year terms around, like plants that supposedly only have a fruit that grows every thousand years and stuff, or flowers that just sit there and absorb energy for fifteen thousand years. The ultimate goal seems to be living forever. I also couldn’t decipher their stages very well. EVERYTHING I have read says they gain significantly more power each time they cross a threshold or a level or rank or something, and that there are little ranks and big stages.”
He nodded, “Unlike you though, I don’t have that much of a clue to my own energy. But yeah, I am… formidable, I guess. Still can’t kill a giant Kaiju, but who can?”
“Did you have any tribulations?”
“What do you mean?” Bob asked.
“Well, from what I can tell, you must have passed at least one or two thresholds. Everything I read implied there would be challenges or tribulations. Lightning, getting attacked by your own insecurities, monstrous beasts getting attracted to you, breaking through your weaknesses, it’s always something, but the common theme seems to be that it’s painful, dangerous, and requires enormous willpower.”
He laughed, “Well, when I hit the points that you mentioned, I was kinda on active duty. I am basically immune to lightning because of my power interaction, fighting powerful beasts was my full-time job and one more wouldn’t even be noticed, and…” he leaned forward conspiratorially, “I don’t have any insecurities.”
“How about psychological flaws?”
He shrugged, “Well, I am arrogant to the extreme, but as far as I know from my own reading that’s pretty much a defining feature for cultivators. So no, I didn’t notice anything unusual. However, that leads to homework.”
I raised an eyebrow, “More than I am working on already? I am going to wear out my laptop.”
He shook his head, “No, I meant that ‘I’ have homework. You have already shot past what I intended for this class, and feel free to keep checking in occasionally during downtimes, but not here. Especially if you get more information.”
“Is that normal for a class like this?”
He nodded, “Yeah, technically you are not my student so much as a research assistant, because you picked up the basics amazingly quickly, and while I might be the only one who knows about this stuff, my level of knowledge isn’t much higher than yours. Both of us are still punching in the dark.”
“However, you still have nine hours a week to kill. I’d love to let you have it off for your training and research, and I want you to keep working on your breathing and trying to break those barriers with different methodologies if you can, but I am going to move you over to the Quigong and Tai Chi class.”
“What? Why?”
“Not much more I can tell you unless I can get diagrams from BSA that we mentioned before, and my experiences don’t fold over because of our different concepts. However, as someone who can somehow detect your own energy levels, I was hoping you could actually evaluate it, and who knows? Maybe it can help your plugged-up circulatory problems.”
I laughed, “You sound like a vascular doctor.”
He nodded, moving his great head slowly, “That’s the first time in my life I have ever been confused with an intellectual. Still, I am at a bit of a standstill, so your next two weeks are kind of open. Hopefully, your mind will be, too. I agree with you about some of the ridiculous superstitions that exist in the kung-fu circuit, but some of it might offer insights you could use since Martial arts and power cultivation have apparently gone hand-in-hand for a very long time… may be long enough.”
“Long enough?”
He nodded, “Yep, everything I have heard implies that energy expansion and learning to fight more effectively are like peanut butter and chocolate, two great tastes that taste great together. I never learned to fight until after I got my powers, learned to focus them without killing myself, and played supervillain for a while, so I have always had that option. You learned to fight long before you tried to use your ability, and your ability, by default, isn’t really tied into combat like kinetic or body enhancers are.”
He sighed, “At some point, even if this cultivation stuff is more mythology than history, SOMEONE had to take the first steps in cultivation to figure it out. I am hoping that even if we can’t find anything to help you jump over it, at least you will have the basis to repeat those first steps yourself and share them with the rest of us.”
I facepalmed.
“What’s wrong?”
“Well, I have been running through the online fiction depositories because the actual translated versions of stuff about internal alchemy are limited. There is so much fiction about cultivation that it’s not even funny. It’s like asking a fantasy reader ‘What is magic?’ fifty different people have fifty different ideas, and every single one seems valid.”
“There seems to be a few common points of reference, but even those seem… flexible. It’s enough to make me even doubt the way my own power works.”
“How do you figure?”
I shrugged, “The second thing I could do when my power awoke, was figure out how many grains of dust were in a pile of dust. Manipulating them came quickly, but it makes me wonder if what I do qualifies as telekinesis at all, since it’s not so much moving them as figuring out what they are, and how to alter their maneuvering vectors. What if what I do isn’t moving them so much as simply a weird enhanced detection ability? That certainly explains why my first assessment came back as a class two.”
He shrugged, “If that’s the case, then figuring out how to manipulate your own energy should be easy.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you can detect the bits of your own power, right?”
I nodded, “More or less, but mostly I can just detect their potential movement effects, as particles.”
"Wait, what about electricity? Heat?"
I shrugged, "Electricity is electron transfer. Motion. And temperatures are molecular motion. If an energy can be expressed as a particle, I can touch it and manipulate it, but if it's a pure wave, like magnetism or gravity, I can't touch it."
"So wait... does that mean you can handle light?"
I laughed, "Technically, yes. under certain circumstances. It really depends on how it's behaving at the moment."
"God, you are so overpowered," he laughed.
I shook my head, "See, that's where we have to disagree. You control gravity. It's the most prevalent force in the universe. Me, I can nudge a few particles around. Sure, that means I have a lot of potential flexibility, but it's still just tiny things. The really important stuff is way out of my league. A real class three light controller would probably tear me apart easily, and a brick? even though being able to stop kinetic motion is pretty cool, their sheer energy would mean I could barely stop them for a few seconds before they pounded me into a hamburger. Heck, I can't even deal with the wrong spirit shapes because they are just... stuck.
He grinned, “So, figure out how to get them moving without hurting yourself. You said Orbits seem important, so start with that. If the unfit shapes have different movement characteristics, well, stop trying to beat on them like some sort of micro-hulk, and instead do as I do, use the movement to pull them out of your nose.”
“Think of it like a whirlpool. I mean, sure, a whirlpool tends to toss things about, but in the middle there’s suction. If you can use that to suction out the impure bits of energy, then find a way to get rid of them, that should have a similar effect to my gravity compression.”
I nodded slowly. I guess that was a possibility. Still, the idea of accidentally turning my own organs into particle-beam weapons was not particularly appealing.