“Can you hear that?” Deacon said quietly, as I was practicing a straight-line kata in the limited space, trying to collect a bit more energy. The port, especially with a guest, had taken a lot more out of me than I had hoped. If I wanted to be able to fight, or even to port and run, I needed at least a couple of solid hours of energy gain.
“No. Hear what?”
She lifted her eyebrow, “That roar. That sounds like Baelfire’s flying, and it’s getting closer.”
“How close? Did she follow us? How did she follow us?”
She thought about it for a few minutes, “She’s probably hunting us. She must have some method of finding us and she’s probably flying over the city to look for you.”
“Wait, she can just fly over? Won’t the heroes respond?”
She nodded, “They should, but when she’s flying she is very fast. It will take at least a few minutes to mobilize them. This isn’t the academy… Also, if she’s not doing anything actively destructive, they probably won’t do more than harass her to find out who and why she’s here. I am trying to figure out how… wait… the suit!”
“The suit?” I asked stupidly.
She nodded, looking at the generic-looking hero suit that they had stuck me in after kidnapping me naked from my bedroom. “Yes, she put the suit on you. It probably has a built-in Infrared reflection that’s as noticeable as a mirror… she can detect IR reflections right through solid walls, it’s part of her heat control. You can alter structures, right?”
I sighed. “Yes and no. I could alter a small part of the suit, and then, given the time and energy, I could replicate it through the whole thing, but if it’s got some kind of weird infrared thing going on, I would have to change and then blueprint the whole thing… That could take hours, not to mention being an enormous energy sink.” I sighed and started stripping it off. “Crap. I don’t even have a backup. You wouldn’t happen to be carrying an extra set of boxer shorts around would you?”
She shook her head, and I could tell she was blushing. “No, I wear my Kereval suit bare like most people, that way there aren’t any air pockets to mess up the stressor fluid’s impact protection. Umm… I don’t know what to suggest.”
I sighed, “You’re just looking for an excuse to see me naked.” I grumped, stripping the rest of the suit off and dumping it into the same sink I’d ditched my armor a few weeks ago. “You said she recognizes IR signatures. Does that mean she can recognize my body through walls too? Or yours?”
She shook her head, “Not mine. I have enough body tempering that while she might be able to recognize me if I got close enough due to not having a signature, her regular senses don’t work well. Your body?” she was looking away, “Well, it’s different enough that I doubt she would even recognize you unless she saw you up close. I mean, you physically look the same as when we loaded you, but your entire system is different, not as… artificial.”
I sighed. “See, this is why old wrecked industrial parks have a limited lifespan. If this damned place hadn’t been abandoned almost since the FAAFO, there might be some kind of coveralls or some dude’s dirty sweatshirt or something.” I looked around. Wrecked aluminum shelving, some old cardboard boxes, a broken mop bucket, half a decayed mop handle, and some beat-up and rotting old car magazines.
I shook my head and started decaying the super suit. “Nothing I can use in a hurry. Give me a day, and I could make a suit of aluminum scrap armor, but right now I am tapped. Heck, without my helmet I can’t even tell you how tapped I am, I just know I am low in juice.”
She nodded, “Your chi storage is low. Is that what you were doing?”
I nodded and started doing katas again. Yes, it was no fun with your bits flopping out in the breeze, but it helped to get the cycle started again. “Yeah. I can’t do that sitting cross-legged and falling into my bellybutton thing. I found a way of regaining energy, but it involves exercise and motion.”
She sighed and slipped her mask off. Well, honestly, if I hadn’t been surrounded by top-shelf girls at all times during the last few weeks, I would probably consider her a ten, although I was not too fond of the Eastern European look. I liked them short, curvy, and redhead with glasses or freckles. The kind that looked like they just stepped off a red carpet with a permanent tan and umm… I was not too sure of the term, the fish-lip look. I think they call it kissable or bee-stung lips or something like that. Very popular on television since it combined Russian and Indian good looks, but Alpha girls were always amazingly good-looking, and the over-the-top attractiveness just fed my paranoia and distrust.
Too bad my body disagreed with my assessment, though, or maybe it was prancing around trying to do katas and concentrate while I was undressed in front of a young lady. Then again, according to the fiction I had read, cultivators had very flexible ages… She could be my grandmother’s age.
Fortunately, imagining my grandmother standing there trying not to look as I exercised naked did exactly what intellectual distrust couldn’t. It helped me get my body back under control.
“So, basically we are stuck here?”
I shrugged, “What’s this WE, white girl? I am stuck here. You can leave any time you like. I thought I made that pretty clear. You could even flag down the psycho and let her know I am here if you want… I probably have enough juice to get back under cover, although I can’t take you with me, and if you showed up at the academy with me, someone might try to shoot you.”
She nodded, “So you are here instead of there to protect me.”
I chuckled, “I guess you would put it that way, of course, there’s also the fact that you three waltzed in and snatched me from the school almost effortlessly. Anonymity, for the moment, seemed a lot safer than going back and hiding in a safe that was already broken open.”
She shook her head, “It was far from effortless. We had to burn a lot of intelligence to get you. If you went back, the Maxwell group would probably have to write you off or try alternative methods. Can you talk while you are meditating?”
I nodded, “Yeah. Do you still hear her? I don’t understand how you could, I can’t hear crap.”
She shrugged, “You are here because of me, so for now, I am here because of you. She doesn’t seem to be headed directly towards us, but pretty soon the locals will get involved. If she tries something after she has their attention, well, she’s pretty powerful, but not that powerful. She will probably leave.”
“So what are YOU planning on doing here, just watching me exercise naked?”
She shook her head, “No. I want to know what method you are practicing. You aren’t a chaos or demonic cultivator, which means you are… unusual.”
“Would you care to define those for me?” I asked, switching forms. I still didn’t have enough energy to start working on my channels, but if she had information to expand what I had gleaned from the Serenoid diagrams, I would happily take it apart and see if it could apply.
She nodded, “A demonic cultivator… well, that’s a little hard to explain. The term is very loaded, like calling a soldier a baby killer. I guess I should start by defining cultivation?”
I shook my head, “I have a pretty good idea of what that is already. They draw in energy from the environment to stretch out and eventually compress inside their soul-box.”
She nodded, “The first step isn’t even drawing in energy, that’s the second step. The first step is to use the energy your body naturally produces to clean your system and improve it to be an appropriate vessel for essence. That’s what is referred to as body refinement. You seem to have sort of skipped that stage… before, you were like a box full of random puzzle pieces that had been shaken up and dumped on a table, and you saw the pattern of some of the pieces and used some sort of biology hack to douse them all in glue so it would hold together even if it didn’t create any sort of picture.”
“Whatever you did when we were transiting cleaned off the glue holding the pieces together, so it’s back to being a jumbled mess. But this is not a bad thing! Usually, a bad start like that could permanently destroy your potential or would require powerful alchemical compounds to… dissolve the glue, and if you had already started assembling the puzzle, it would have had to destroy your cultivation base and shake the box back up.”
I grinned, “At least you aren’t talking about fish.”
“Fish?”
I nodded, “Yeah, a metaphor a teacher was teaching me. Essence is all around everyone, but people are like fish living in water, they can’t recognize it because it’s all their environment is.”
She nodded, “Not a bad metaphor for an essence-rich death world like this, if simplistic. Anyway, basic body tempering is like putting the puzzle’s outer edge together. Body refinement is like filling the puzzle in afterward. The Metaphor kind of breaks down after that. The difference between righteous and demonic cultivators is that righteous cultivators refuse to use any essence except that gathered from the atmosphere. Demonic cultivators can also use the essence gathered by creatures as well, which saves them a lot of time.”
She smiled slightly, “It’s sort of ironic, though, since righteous cultivators will happily kill spirit beasts and eat them, which is just another way of absorbing their chi rather than just directly absorbing it.”
I nodded, “But demonic cultivators also drain it from people, right?”
She shrugged, “Broad brush. Most of them don’t. But the righteous ones, in the world I come from, call all of us evil because we prefer not to suck places dry of natural energies to cultivate. It’s kind of like experience points in a role-playing game. You can sit in one place and contemplate the universe for the next thousand years and hope one day to advance, or you can go out and kill monsters instead.”
“So, most demonic cultivators are basically adventurers, but a few of them are Murder Hobos?”
She nodded, “Exactly right! Also, some of the more obscene cultivation methods used by the evil and unethical focus specifically on drawing essence from sapient creatures, lower-ranked human cultivators, or dual cultivation with an essence vessel. My cultivation method involves drawing essence from materials, whether spirit-enhanced herbs, spirit animals and chaos beasts, spirit ore, or anything that sheds energy. I refine it, merge it into special potions or pills, and then let other people use it or use it myself.”
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“I noticed that you were taking in all kinds of energy and refining it incredibly quickly.”
She nodded, “That’s the alchemist's gift. We can change most kinds of essence to increase its purity, but our method is super specialized for creating other substances. Change is not something that lends itself to power growth, so we grow our abilities through crafting items and then consuming them, instead. But because I can absorb essence from living things as easily as dead things, the righteous cultivators label me as demonic, just like the psychos that dual-cultivate with a vessel.”
“You know you are creating more questions than you are answering, right?” I chuckled.
She nodded, “Okay, to simplify things, chaos cultivators are able to directly tap into the chaos realms. You call them alphas. Their cultivation happens on instinct, although over time it can slowly naturally increase, and their gifts, the way they use it, are innate. Basically, they gain essence exactly the same way that monsters do.”
“Like Kaiju do?”
She nodded, “Exactly. There are three types of energy-using beasts. What you call Kaiju, which are basically chaos beasts, spirit beasts which absorb energy through the environment and eat other spirit beasts, and magical monsters who gain energy through instinctive demonic cultivation.”
“The problem is, in this world, the chaos essence is so strong, that some people become chaos cultivators, or alphas. Every time they grow in strength or use their powers, they slightly increase the ambient raw energy. It’s not pure, it’s chaotic. Usually, chaos energy winds up becoming defined as soon as it enters an ordered structure, but on this world, it isn’t happening… every single alpha that uses superpowers is increasing the ambient chaos.”
She sighed, “That’s why this is a death world. Even the most heroic alpha is adding to the energy problem, and sooner or later one of the monsters on the other side is going to notice that on this world, they can comfortably exist in their natural form instead of being forced into an ordered form. That normally only happens when a world has been overtaken by chaos monsters and destroyed.”
“The Q-Bombs.”
She nodded, “I think so. A few insane cultivators have tried using an infusion of raw chaos as a weapon, but here, the humans have learned how to create chaos engines for mass destruction. It has ripped weak spots to a number of different Earths, and tends to attract power-hungry monsters, failed gods, immigrants from chaos-infested worlds, and the occasional sect trying to figure out what’s going on and how to stop it, like the Serenoids. They come here and promptly get their asses kicked, usually because chaos cultivators are insanely strong compared to the other sorts.”
“My people were being murdered wholesale by righteous sects, and we found a portal. We had no idea where it led, except that it was to a world that wasn’t dominated by those who suck dry all the atmospheric essence and hoard all the resources for themselves. When we got here, a few bad apples made sure our immigration was called an invasion, and now there are few of us left.”
She sighed, “Unfortunately, weak chaos cultivators are VERY good food for strong and unethical demonic cultivators. Some idiot drains a few class two or three alphas and all of a sudden your entire clan is declared monsters, and everyone is happy to label outsiders as monsters. That’s why I have an important question for you.”
“What’s that?” I asked, curiously. I was working on a half-learned stance that meshed well but required a lot more strength to accomplish. Before I cleaned out my enhancements it was easy, but right now, balancing on your hands is a lot more challenging.
“Were your ancestors settlers, aliens, or cultivators from another world?”
I coughed a little, collapsing my balance to my knees. “What? Am I an alien? I have no idea, but I don’t think so… I can trace my ancestors back to the Mayflower.”
She nodded, “But you aren’t a chaos cultivator. And I know you aren’t part of my sect, so it has to be someone else. I mean, it’s possible you are just a natural cultivator, but that’s… insanely rare. I guess it has to happen occasionally since someone had to start the whole cultivation thing in the first place, but I have never heard of anyone that started cultivating without being taught.”
I smiled and stood back up, “So I might be one of the giants that other people stand on the shoulders of? I mean, intellectually that’s cool, but I hate thrashing around in the dark.”
She nodded, “Fair enough. Hopefully, I can help you find a light. So what do you use to gain energy?”
***
“You are kidding.”
She shook her head. “Nope. Tried and true. The more channels you have opened, the stronger your base is. Your spiritual base is extremely powerful, a mythical physique, and probably a bloodline, which would explain why you aren’t dead already. Most people with a special physique wind up dying before they ever reach adulthood, but that would explain why you were able to use your essence gifts without any training.”
“But...ugh, needles?”
She nodded, “Yep. One hundred and forty-three nerve clusters. You have fourteen spiritual roots. I have four. Serenoids have eight. Hell, even dragons only have twelve… I don’t know what your bloodline is, but fourteen roots are insane. It would be a shame to waste it. You won’t get a huge effect right away, but you could have an incredibly strong foundation and I have no idea how high you could soar.”
“But… one hundred and forty-three needles?”
She snickered, “Are you afraid of a little pain? If you hadn’t wrecked my alchemy kit, I could have probably made you an awakening pill instead, but you wanted to lay low for a few days.”
It had been several hours since it was obvious that Baelfire had called the search off, and we had moved to one of my secondary hideouts, thankfully one where I had stashed some emergency pants.
Yes, don’t laugh, emergency pants are a thing when your clothes can be destroyed by some asshole elemental with a grudge. It wasn’t the first time I’d been forced to discard my clothes, and it probably wouldn’t be the last… most denim and cotton were not designed to deal with a class four fireball, and I wouldn’t always have the energy to reset and repair my clothing if there was anything left to reset.
We were in an abandoned high school’s steam tunnels. Yes, I tended to prefer janitor closets, although in this case, it was an entire janitor suite. Someone long ago had set up a cot and mattress, some lockers, and even a bookcase full of old Flint, Vinge, and Heinlein books.
The two of us were enjoying a meal of Minute Rice, Spam, and canned green beans, and there was even an old tube TV and VCR with a box full of old tapes, from turn-of-the-millenium porn to classics like Ghostbusters. I’d never been hard up enough for entertainment to restore the TV and VCR, and the tapes would take a lot of energy to repair.
Not that there was any television reception even if I got it working. Don’t make me laugh.
“So how small do the needles have to be?”
She smiled a little, “If I had my pack, I would have been able to show you. But to break open the channels, they don’t need to be very thick. About two inches long for comfortable handling, but super-thin thirty-two gauge needles at the end should work fine. Mostly I need to be able to handle them. My own were twenty-eight gauge but that’s because they had to be able to stand up even if I had to pierce someone with improved fitness or durability up to class three.”
“Materials?”
She shrugged, “Not copper, it would interfere with your energy channels. Gold is too weak. Silver is weak but still usable. Stainless steel is fine, and so is aluminum. I mean, you wouldn’t want aluminum for a long-term piercing, like jewelry, but for temporary use, it should be fine.”
I nodded, and held up something I had quickly crafted. “four-forty stainless?” I said. There was a lot of steel around, including the old lockers.
She looked at the needle I had made, “Yes. If you could blunt one end, or attach a piece of fabric, that should be perfect. Do you have any alcohol?”
I nodded, I had a fairly decent medical kit stashed. I didn’t always need a reset, and when I first discovered this place, I might have had to hang out here for a day or two before I even had the energy for a partial reset.
I attached a thin strand of cotton at one end, so it resembled an elongated sewing needle with a flag. “Like this?”
She nodded, “Yes, just one hundred and fifty of them.”
“I thought you said one forty-three.”
She nodded, “Sure, but sometimes they break or are misplaced. If you are standing there with over a hundred needles poking out of your skin, do you really want me scrabbling around looking for missing needles, or asking you to make more on the fly?”
Fortunately, the needles were TINY, and I had manufactured them before she even finished talking. A quick alcohol bath later, and a shower, and I was back in my birthday suit, terrified as she approached my scalp and forehead.
Look, I had been hurt really badly a ton of times. Needles should have been nothing, but humans often had an atavistic fear of needles. I mean, no matter what happened, I had enough energy to reset, but it was still scary as hell to have someone approaching your eyes with needles, even with your eyes closed.
Mostly it didn’t even hurt. I could tell she was hitting nerves, that was the intent, obviously, but I’d never had tattoos or even serious hospital visits. After a while, especially when she moved down from my face, it got a lot easier.
In the end, she only got 137 needles in. The last six were on the bottoms of my feet, and there was simply no way to get to them while I was standing, and I had no way to lie down. I figured I probably looked like a porcupine, but if it helped…
“Okay, now, the second energy structure you showed me from that book. Don’t try to force it down the lines for the extra limbs, that won’t work, but while standing still, start circulating your energy as quickly as possible. I am not sure what this method is, but it doesn’t look particularly hazardous for a beginning technique. Once it’s moving as fast as it can, start extending the channels through your body.”
Pain. Yep, it hurt as badly as the fiction said it would. It was like I had lava pouring through my body… Lava that was moving as fast as a cyclotron. I was nearly completely full, but the damned energy was ripping its way through my body like the Sanford Dam.
I’d felt worse pain… Hot Shot had almost turned me into a charcoal briquette, but this just kept going on and on, and I didn’t dare collapse or lie down, and based on the gasps that Deacon made, it had some physical effects as well… I slightly opened my eyes and could see dozens of tiny electrical discharges working their way down the needles protruding from my body like a bad science fiction’s Jacob’s ladder.
“This is just the base. Your body will not always be as important as you gain power, but for right now it’s the scaffolding and infrastructure for the rest of your growth. A strong foundation means a strong power base and a strong power base means…”
“Do you always talk this much?” I choked out.
She shook her head, “No, but this part tends to be very stressful for the simple farm boys and city girls just starting on their path. Talking them through it tends to help, although this is far more than I am used to. You are a mystery on so many levels… You not only have a Dao, but you even have a concept to match it. I have never seen anyone bounce between levels so much.”
“Momentum?”
She nodded, “Exactly. You seem to apply it to your life as much as to your power, and that kind of focus makes for a powerful and in your case, inexorable path.”
I could feel the energy flooding into my limbs and every part of my body, and I was embarrassed to notice it also caused other reactions, but Deacon seemed willing to ignore it, so I did too. After a bit, the energy rushed back into my soul space, filling it to almost overflowing, and I started to try and force the energy to flow both ways simultaneously, the way that the diagram appeared to describe.
Smooth flow. It’s not a heartbeat, a heartbeat will tear you apart if it has too much energy. I could actually feel the field of energy around me, my aura. Within which I was able to use my abilities… as the flows evened out and the pain started to reduce, I could feel the aura expanding out again until it was over a foot away from my body, and then soon to two or even three feet before retracting.
Even flow. After a while, I could see the way my field pulsed and realized that once the flow smoothed out, I could extend the aura simply by flowing more energy through the area that the aura extended. After the flow stabilized, I realized that I was almost critically low in energy… expanding the energy to my entire body had attenuated it badly, like filling up a stock pot from a drinking glass, only my original soul container was the drinking glass.
I really needed to get back to the tunnel.