Six Hundred Energy. I thought about that. Six times what I had started with, and to be fair, even with only a fraction of the energy that a true class three had, I had gotten efficient enough at using, and recovering, that energy that I almost felt like I could justify calling myself that. I mean, I wouldn’t, of course, no matter what the power assessment had said, but as an emergency fill-in, I would be good for at least a few minutes.

I’d gotten in plenty of personal training time and had a reasonably good idea of my own new potential. I’d probably make a damned good fight for a publicity-hunting hero now, and if I went back to that line of work, I’d definitely raise my rates. Being able to ‘ghost’ more quickly and efficiently meant I could use it in actual combat more than once, which meant it was a lot more than an emergency escape now.

I still wasn’t able to pull all of the junk out of my energy channels, or meridians, or whatever they were called, and it was hard getting a decent picture of what they were and how they worked because almost every ‘cultivation’ book had different definitions of how to get them cleared out, from acupuncture to deep-tissue massages, from some kind of mental construct of a black hole for my energy pool to forcing my way through them.

The worst part was trying to figure out exactly how they worked and what path they took, and they got all tangled up with Indian spirit medicine chakras and acupuncture points, at this point I was almost ready to give up except for one little fact.

While, obviously, the whole black hole conceptualization wouldn’t work for me, That was more Bob’s specialization than mine, as I dived more into the concept of momentum, I was able to start tweaking them a little. I added and subtracted momentum from objects, and in the end, the blockages were very much objects… the only thing that had kept me from progressing so far was that I was worried about ‘vibrating’ the blockages loose and hurting myself in the process. How much would it suck to be trying to play with metaphysical concepts only to discover I’d been ripping holes in my physical body instead?

But, I had an idea… one that would take absolute privacy and probably cause a good deal of pain, but one that I would try when I had a chance to get away from the School and any sort of audience.

My last weekend before the official start of classes. Much as I hate to admit it, I think the constant training I got working at the clinic has helped me enormously in almost every way. After careful measurements, my deep probes were able to penetrate, and repair, almost nine inches deep now. That wasn’t terribly exciting for the most part, except that, unlike most medical procedures, I didn’t appear to have to penetrate their natural defenses to be able to alter their matter.

I couldn’t monkey with their energy, but unlike a lot of people, their personal energy shape was not a hard stop to my abilities. My range absolutely was, which meant that if I wanted to mess with someone all they had to do was keep me at range until my energy was gone. On the plus side, if someone’s powers started going haywire they wouldn’t point fingers at me.

I hadn’t had much chance to experiment with special effects, but think about it… a nine-inch ball of plasma hurled at something close to a hundred miles an hour. It still wasn’t as dangerous as, say, an anti-material rifle or honest hand grenade, but it certainly was a huge improvement, and between ghost step and the ability to create kinetically neutral air platforms that were actually big enough for me to balance on them, I had damned good battlefield mobility.

The cool part is that unlike back when I was playing the bad guy, I could do a lot more with neutral kinetic platforms now… back then I could float ominously and deliver a decent monologue, but balance was impossible. Now, though, I could actually hold myself to a platform so a stray bullet or overbalance didn’t instantly send me falling, which was awesomeness in itself.

Did I still have things I could do that would freak out the BSA and get me locked into a room instantly? Absolutely, if I didn’t mind the fact that forcing a fission reaction would blow me up at the same time. As far as I could tell, they still thought that my absolute limits were assembling molecules, and no one needed to know that I had figured out how to manhandle particulate light… Ironically enough, photons were turning out to be a LOT easier to manipulate than electron transfers.

I also discovered something very fun… but don’t tell anyone about it.

Larger elements, you know, the ones with lots of protons and neutrons? Well, a lot of them aren’t particularly stable. I know, I know you learned about radioactive decay back in grade school, but it’s actually simpler than that.

I discovered that I can suck up radiation like a sponge. Okay, not like a sponge so much as like a filter in a water-purifying plant. And it’s not as simple as just ‘radiation’, since two-state wave particles are what I can draw into my energy core and purify. The atoms that are erroneously called radiation, basically alpha or helium zero, are just particles with the electron shells stripped off of them… I can manipulate them, clean them up, lock them together, add electrons to make them stable, whatever. Not particularly useful unless you want to blow off the energy to add electrons to them.

Other types of radiation, in the end, were just high-speed subatomic particles. Protons, neutrons, positrons, electrons… in the end, at least in my experience, their energy definitions were more dependent upon their actual momentum rather than their signature, and to me? That momentum was exactly what I needed most.

That’s why I was at my best when I wasn’t shielded by a mile of dirt underground… all those cosmic rays from the sun, photons, ions, and even molecular movement. I would breathe it in, and that was charging me faster and faster, and spinning my core more and more quickly as I stripped off the useless particles and simply kept their momentum energy for myself.

Of course, I wasn’t an idiot, I wasn’t walking around leaving a trail of poisonous dielectric elements trailing behind me, but whenever I could get those masses freed from my energy pathways… let’s just say that I wanted privacy to protect any bystanders from the results of cleaning those out as I was wanting to keep it a secret.

Of course, some of the stuff I had already managed to strip out of my pathways had proven enormously useful… Let’s just say that some of what I considered contaminants In my own personal energy framework turned out to be important building blocks when I was making my microchip. Even if I couldn’t pull the junk out of my nose easily, if I kept trying I should be able to slowly work the impurities out instead of simply yanking or blowing them out.

Xianxia stories never mention it, but that crap that gets purified out by the young genius? If it was me, that black goop would wind up being composed of stuff that would poison people if they so much as touched it or even inhaled the fumes it would give off. You wouldn’t want to handle it unless you were wearing a hazard suit, although I promise it wouldn’t be radioactive.

Heck, I bet that if I had some decent weapons-grade uranium, I could probably force my advancement and spirit energy compression incredibly quickly, and the more of those stories I read, the more I realized just how much the ‘chi’ energy resembled a hefty dose of not just magic, but radiation as well.

I mean, think about it… they have to occasionally purge impurities? High-spirit locations, plants, and pills can kill normal people. Does Spirit energy provoke mutations? It just shocked me that no one had really connected the two together. Cultivators would probably consider places like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island a cultivation paradise, and the Kaiju almost always buried the needle on Geiger counters.

A ginseng root that managed to survive being buried deeply into a high-radiation field for ten thousand years would HAVE to be pretty damned special and has some pretty awesome life-affinity spiritual shapes. The ties to what modern science considers ‘radiation’ and what the ancient Chinese scholars referred to as essence or spiritual energy ironically encouraged my research into it. After all, if I could use it freely, with my crap connection to the ether, then anyone probably could.

I’d worked with several others to make sure that my first-semester schedule worked for me. Senpai Bob made sure I was taking a regular Tai-Chi physical training period twice a week, power training with the kinetics, and, once the clinic realized that while I wasn’t ready to work part-time without far more comprehensive anatomy and human biology classes, but I was more than happy to be on-call for emergencies, all discussions about extracurricular activities to pay for the ‘privilege’ of attending the academy miraculously disappeared.

No, I wasn’t that sheltered. I knew full well that over the last week, certain rumors had probably gone out, and I expected that in the coming semester a few… difficult cases might show up at the clinic that weren’t students but could earn the Kellar academy a hefty sum.

But I made no bones about my limitations. Fresh trauma I could deal with. Old trauma? Well, I could rebuild damaged stuff from default human blueprints, but I wasn’t some kind of genius who could read and rebuild your DNA. If someone had brain damage, I could probably restore their brain to a ‘normal human shape’ using their own replicated cells, but that wouldn’t suddenly return the damaged memories or personality of someone who had serious brain damage.

Basically, if you have a severe stroke, I could fix what went wrong, but I couldn’t stop it from happening again, and the mental changes from that stroke? I couldn’t restore someone’s mind to what it was ‘before’ they ever had the stroke. Just like while I could clean out poisons and infections easily enough, I couldn’t fix viruses or diseases unless I knew EXACTLY what I was looking for.

Could I fix something like a damaged thyroid? Sure, but I had no idea what your own body would do with that once I’d fixed it, and stuff like age? Well, age was the direct result of your own body slowing and shutting down. As I said, I didn’t have any ability to magically read genes and fix them, and even if the whole telomere length related to aging thing hadn’t turned out to be a total fraud, aging, like the creation of life, was as much a mystery to me as it was to anyone else.

Although looking at alphas from the outside, the more powerful they were, the better their energy flowed through their bodies, and the fewer the blockages in their energy streams, the longer they seemed to live.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Bob had definitely been right about one thing. Volunteering time at the clinic gave me lots of chances to get close, hands-on experience with a lot of different alphas, and seeing the way their energy streams worked, and flowed through their bodies, gave me some excellent ideas for both my own energy patterns and the way they worked in others.

One absolute conclusion I had reached, though, was I had no idea how they were connected to the ether. It was maddening. I had to scrounge and fight for every little scrap of energy return, but when an alpha used their energy, there seemed to be some kind of wellspring inside of them that just magically refilled their dantian, like a pressurized oil well, and their dantians were just HUGE, because it was always filling rapidly and their dantian’s soul borders would expand until the pressure equalized.

Few of them had their energy compressed, that that’s because the students were young… I bet that as they got older, their cores would naturally expand and then compress all that extra energy. No thought needed, no methods, no weird and uncomfortable breathing exercises, no visualization, just friggin’ magic. Lucky bastards.

Last, but not least, the floors had to be rearranged as the old class left and the new class moved in. I didn’t particularly enjoy the way that the school tried to overemphasize teamwork in your private life, but I understood it. Like a kidney stone, this too shall pass.

Team suites.

Basically, the reason the floors were designed the way they were was to create a series of suites. Ten rooms, all with a common eating area, bathroom, kitchen, and exercise area. One of the rooms had its own miniature restroom with a shower, which, as a male alpha, I was entitled to, mostly because no one wanted me in the communal shower or repeating the ‘tinker walk’, which had entered the rumor mill. It kind of pissed me off, since I preferred to stay under the radar, but what could I do?

As my sponsor, Mindy was in the room right next to mine, obviously, and somehow, Abigail wound up on the other side. The girl just had this weird way of worming herself into everything and made friends like a hyperactive puppy, and while I was screwing around on the roof trying to expand my energy, in the lab trying to finish Mindy’s super-suit, or in the gym trying to exercise, Abigail and Mindy had both managed to set up a list of ‘team potentials’. It felt like tryouts, and I was sitting at the dining table bored out of my mind as Abigail happily chatted with Mindy about the… I guess recruits? But it had to be done.

“These teams, they are just for school, right?”

Mindy shrugged, “According to Mister Dexter, the teams you make in Academy often wind up as the teams you get set up with after school ends. I mean, there are usually some swaparounds, but a lot of cities prefer to hire an entire team ready-made that has been training and working together for four years rather than trying to put one together from a bunch of solos and rebuild them as a unit.”

Abigail nodded, “Exactly right. Plus, I mean, we already have the core of a great team right here! Researcher, that’s me, you are support, and Mindy is our powerhouse. Technically, we could use a good anchor, and a suppressor or manipulator would rock, as would another damager, but any of us can fill in in a pinch.”

Mindy chuckled, “Okay, We can fill in for anything but the anchor.”

Abigail nodded, “That’s why I have been asking the first years about potentially good anchors that would fit our team dynamic. I have some ideas, but I am not sure.”

“What aren’t you sure about?” I asked.

Abigail looked at me nervously, “One of them is from your remedial teamwork class.”

I facepalmed. “Please tell me that they aren’t being dropped back to first year?”

Abbey shook her head, “No, if you are talking about Chinook, absolutely not. She DID want me to talk her up to you, though.”

I raised an eyebrow at Abbey, “Talk her up?”

She nodded, hair bobbing as she pushed her glasses up her nose. “Yep. Wanted me to try to get you to sit with her or pass you her number. I told her I would let you know she is interested, so this is me letting you know.”

I facepalmed. “No. just… no. It’s probably a good idea to put together a decent team, but I am here to learn, finish my civilian education, and build up contacts and a reputation as a competent support. Not to set up a series of… sex whatever. Anyone who’s just looking to score with a competent rookie is off the list right now. Not to mention she’s got a shit attitude.”

Mindy smiled slightly, “We already excluded them.”

Abigail sighed deeply, obviously trying to get my attention. “This one is interesting, but She’s already convinced you are going to say no.”

I raised an eyebrow, “Really?”

She nodded, “Really. Akyo Tokamura. Public Identity, calls herself Terracotta.”

“She’s trying for anchor? I thought she was already a first-year.”

Abbey shook her head, “No, she’s from those islands with all the monsters, Japan. Someplace called Kyoto. She got here last semester, but delayed entry to work on her localization skills. She’s not normally a tanker type, she’s actually a manipulator, earth-type elemental.”

I thought about that. “I thought she was a transformer elemental. That makes a lot more sense. Manipulator and emergency anchor. She needs a hell of a lot of training, but she has potential. Who else?”

Abigail beamed and pulled out a notebook. One thing about her abilities, they worked just as well on printed words as they did on computer data, and she seemed to be overly fond of actual print. It was creepy watching penciled-in notes scroll like text on an old CRT monitor, but a lot of powers were like that… they just completely tea-bagged logic like it was a newbie in a first-person shooter.

“Secondly there is a data controller. She can make minor changes to individual points of information.”

I looked at her oddly, “You can already do that. Why do we need a second one?”

“No, I am not officially on your team. Mindy said that she supported my inclusion as your sponsor, but that eventually the decision was yours. So the second person on the list is me.”

I nodded, “Then yes, it’s fine. I thought it was a done deal already since you and Mindy are already friends.”

She shrugged, “Yes, but you are not like… super friendly toward me, so I was not sure if it would be okay or not.”

I smiled slightly, “I am not super friendly toward anyone. When I first met you, you were too perfect. No offense but I thought you were a plant sent to spy on me or a saboteur.”

She looked thoughtful, “Mindy, can I talk to him in private for a few minutes?”

Mindy glanced at me, and when I nodded to her, she smiled a little at Abbey and rose to her feet. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

After she left to head back into her own new room, Abbey looked at me very closely. “Is it because of the Strategic simulations thing or the power thing?”

“Uhh… how do you…”

She snerked, “Seriously? Information manipulator? Hell, your own background was too weird. At first, I thought you were sent to mess with me too. I mean, both of us are class-a public threats, I am pretty sure they stuffed us into the same class specifically to keep an eye on each other.”

I nodded, “Okay, so how much do you know?”

She took off her glasses and put them on the table. “That’s a tricky question. I know most of your history, although I am more than happy to sever ties between you and SSS if you need it. The Vilnet is garbage. It was actually created by an ex-BSA cyberkinetic as a way to keep things organized.”

I sighed, “Yeah, I kind of already got that.”

She shrugged, “Basically if it’s recorded, written, or stored, I can access it. If it’s in both wetware and storage media, I can affect both, like when I changed your shirt. If it’s solely in wetware, I can’t touch it.”

“What do you mean?”

She smiled slightly, “My secret weakness. I can’t read anyone’s thoughts or memories. If you have a conversation and it’s not recorded, that’s full-on wetware. If you know things, I might not know them, but I can access electronic or written records pretty easily.”

I sighed, “Yeah, can you keep it to yourself?”

She nodded, “Yep, I blurt out my own secrets all the time, mostly because it keeps people from looking deeper. Other people’s secrets are their own problem unless they make it my problem, but like I said, it’s not like I can read minds or anything. I think, however, I might be able to help you with your research.”

I raised an eyebrow and planted both of my hands on the table, “Oh? You know something about nanocircuitry?”

She shook her head and smiled, “No, your OTHER research. That’s why I suggested Akyo Tokamura. I am getting some connections between her and your power research, although I can’t dig them out because you don’t have anything solidified research-wise.”

“What do you mean solidified?”

She smiled a little, “I can tell if there is a solid disparity between the written word and reality, as long as someone has tested the written word’s assumption and has a factual response.”

“If someone has written that the world is flat, I will know it’s false because someone has written down tested commentary that it is true, backed by conviction and evidence. Mostly because the more real a fact is, the more difficult it is to alter. If I try to alter the real information that the world is round, it won’t work because it’s too established and repeatedly tested. It would take more energy to change that bit than I will ever have, and someone would almost immediately break the fiction.”

She smiled, “Some of the stuff you are messing with, well, some of it’s true and tested, some of it’s intentionally false wastes of time, some of it is wishful thinking, some is written as fiction but accidentally touches on reality, some of it is sort of true but needs better testing, and some of it is intentionally designed to help someone like you accidentally kill yourself.”

I looked at her shocked, “I honestly hadn’t even thought about your ability to track down records. Seriously, it’s possible that you could find those documents that Bob was talking about, the ones from the invasion?”

She shook her head, “No. The closest thing that is true is that their manuals work for them. Humans have a different power setup, and trying their methods would kill you or destroy your power somehow. They knew this, so they didn’t fight to get them back when their invasion failed. Their… loot, was either utterly worthless to us or a trap. They consider us hopelessly evil infidels and abominations.”

She looked at me and slid her glasses back on. “So, want another bit of information that will completely blow your mind?”

I laughed, “That category is getting pretty narrow right now. What will blow my mind?”

“Crystal was wrong, but she was also right.”

The edge of the table broke in my hands. “What?”