The Gotham City Morgue was quiet. It was eleven PM and the last employee had left three hours ago. A grid of shelves covered two walls, refrigeration units meant for storing bodies, which were only really needed when there were super villain attacks, like a year ago when the Joker detonated a bomb in the local stadium. The light on the camera blinked red, indicating that the security system was active and hadn’t detected anything.
The light changed to green, a sign that the security system was off, and one of the doors opened. Eight men in black pants and black dress shirts entered and lined up on rows on either side of the door, all carrying a sword and a pistol, and followed by an attractive middle eastern woman. She motioned towards a computer and one of the men went over and started typing on it. Thirty seconds later he called her over and showed her something on the screen. While the cameras didn’t record sound, it did show her motion towards the coolers and say something. Many of the coolers were opened and the trays slid out to reveal thirteen bodies, all of them from the other realm.
The woman pulled a needle out of her jacket and walked over to one of the slabs. There she stuck the needle into the neck of one of the corpses and injected something. A few seconds later the wounds on the corpse closed and thirty seconds after being injected the man sat up and screamed, grabbing where his wound used to be. The man collapsed and the woman waved at the other slabs. Presumably she told them to grab the bodies, because someone grabbed a stack of body bags from a cabinet and handed them out. They all bagged up the corpses and moved them out of the room. The man who worked on the computer threw the revived man over his shoulder and carried him outside and when they were done they closed up everything and left.
–
Batman stared at the screen, looking for as many details as he could. “And you say you bought this from a source? Are you sure it’s authentic?”
“He doesn’t like Mrs. Al Ghul, but I doubt he has resources to fake this, not that I know much about manufacturing video files. I can barely use the laptop I bought to watch internet videos.”
Bruce nodded and rewound the video, then zoomed in on the needle. “Is that something from your world?”
Lo shook his head. “I’ve never heard of an elixir that can revive someone that’s been dead that long. The man was killed around seven oh five, and this is four hours later. If it was from my world, it would be an Immortal level elixir, though.”
“Immortal, huh?” he sighed. “I’ve never heard of it being used like that, but I suppose its possible.”
Lo realized what he was talking about. “The Lazarus Pit? You think she is using its power to bring back the dead?” he thought for a few seconds. “Actually, if it is an Immortal level ingredient, a proper alchemist could probably make such an elixir from it, though I’m not sure how. I’d have to have a sample of the water from it to be sure.”
Bruce looked over the rest of the information my source provided, though it was mostly random shots of her buying coffee or business records of her purchases in the city.
I went to my niche and started meditating. While all chi inside of you in the Cleansing stage was neutral chi, the fact that it regenerated meant that I could practice making purer forms of the other types of chi. The boys joined me at one point, and Dick even swung by for a few minutes and practiced with us. Any time they took a break I had them suppress their chi so that the first layer of their dantian would expand.
Damian improved faster than Tim, as he had more potential, but focused on body cultivation, focusing on improving his lower dantian, while Tim focused on magic cultivation, centered in his middle dantian, and Tim and Alfred focused on the spirit cultivation in the upper dantian. Bruce and I took the hardest path, trying to focus on all three. This would result in our physical, magical, and spiritual multipliers being increased, instead of just one for the others, but the progress would be slower. Normally a person wouldn’t attempt such a thing until they had already cultivated to their potential at least once already, as it wasn’t needed until you tried to break through a bottleneck and would greatly slow your progress, but he was determined to do it.
With the materials Yu had brought I was able to make several pills and elixirs to help us out, improving our cultivation speed. One of those was a Foundation stage anti-aging pill, which I gifted to Alfred. While I never tested his potential, he was making great progress in the techniques I was teaching him to counteract the effects of aging. After a few days his arthritis started to clear up and the liver spots on his skin started to disappear. The pill I gave him amplified that effect, filling him with energy and making some of his hair start to grow out brown instead of white.
I went out with Yu every night that week, carrying the bracelets I made for sword chi in case I had to use them, and introduced him to all of my employees. I also gave these employees new seeds, some of which had to be grown near special relics that absorbed ambient chi and converted it into a specific type of chi before releasing it back into the environment. I would make more of those objects later, but for now they would only be able to grow a small amount of each herb and the quality would be limited by the quality of the relic and the amount of chi that could be converted.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
At the end of the week I had a gift for Yu. I handed over the sixty thousand that I had left from kidnapping Damian and the best Sword Chi bracelet and had him play the role of Soul Blade after drinking an Elixir of Memories which contained all of my experiences as that villain. As it would take him a few days to fully assimilate the new memories, I continued to follow him as Fist.
He used some of the money to set up a base in one of the warehouses in his territory, and it became his main base. The government had a program for aliens to get valid green cards to function in the United States, so I helped him get a proper ID. Once he had enough money he would purchase this warehouse so that he couldn’t be challenged as a squatter.
We worked out a deal where he would provide me with alchemical ingredients and I would return them as pills or elixirs which he would sell or use himself, either paying me for the alchemical work or half the profits if they were sold. We were careful to only sell things that wouldn’t hurt others, like cleansing pills, anti-aging pills, healing elixirs and pills, and some minor enhancements. As he had a contact within Metabrawl, he was able to sell them large amounts of the last two. Bruce wasn’t the happiest with this, but as long as they stuck to using them in the illegal fight club he wouldn’t stop us from selling them. It allowed Yu to earn enough money to buy the warehouse, and in a few more weeks I would have enough to purchase the auditorium where I first came to this world so that Yu and I could start work on the return formation.
On the crime fighting front nothing major happened. Yu had decided to recultivate as well, this time using Sword Chi, as it fit his persona. Because of this he wasn’t picking fights and was mostly limiting the crime in his territory to simple drug sells and prostitution, stopping any theft, robbery, or assault to keep the people there safe. As Jade Dragon I had respected this by avoiding dealing with his drug dealers and pimps and letting the brothel keep operating in the Asian district. As long as he continued the way things were going, I wouldn’t officially stop him, focusing instead on major crimes that were occurring in the Asian district but outside of his territory.
Batman wasn’t able to do much more about the League of Assassins, as they had avoided Gotham since the kidnapping event, and Talia hadn’t even come by for a visit. Because of this he was also forced to only handle minor crimes outside to one attempt by Mr. Freeze to boost some sports cars. His funding had mostly dried up, and he was in the middle of some sort of medical cryogenics research, so he was desperate.
In our personal lives I had went on a second date with Raven. As I had started to plateau at around thirty points of chi in my first level, I had broken through to the Gathering phase and Raven and I were able to go flying together. Her technique was quite interesting, but as I was not yet at the Nascent stage I couldn’t manipulate my soul in such a manner so I had to stick to using a sword.
Around three weeks after the kidnapping incident I was leading the men through meditation. Bruce and Damian had reached the three percent level with all six types of chi, so I was teaching them to breakthrough to the next level by building shells around their three dantians. I was gathering and purifying the chi for myself, and was at about seventy percent full of 5-6% elemental chis in my second level, attempting to fill it up so that I could start expanding it. Dick and Tim weren’t quite there yet, as their purity was too low, so in between gathering different elements of chi I was giving them pointers on how to further purify their chi.
Then Alfred came running down the steps. “Master Dick, I hate to interrupt, but we just received a call from lady Koriand’r. She just went into labor, and needs you to come to the Watchtower immediately.” As she was a member of the League, the Watchtower’s medical facilities were open to her. They weren’t certain what would happen during the birth of a Human-Tamaranian hybrid child, so they had opted for that rather than a normal hospital. Also, the Watchtower knew their secret identities already, making the birth certificate process much easier.
We all jumped up and left for the cave’s teleporter. Normally, only Bruce would be able to use it, as it was a security risk for both the tower and the Batcave, but he allowed us to use it this time. I made sure the extra pills and elixirs I had made were in my ring, and ran to the transporter, ignoring the stand I bumped into and the potential measuring stone that I knocked off of it. I could pick it up when I got back. Alfred stayed behind to watch the house, and we all disappeared, soon arriving on the space station.
We were quickly lead to a waiting room where the doctors told us to wait. I would have offered the doctors medicines from my ring, but the Watchtower had already bought large amounts of my medicine directly from me, and at most would only need the rarer medicines.
Soon the rest of Dick and Kori’s former team showed up to wait with us, and we sat there as Dick stayed with his wife. Raven just stared at the room until I came over to talk to her. It took me several minutes to breach the subject, but when I did I found out that she was thinking about her own birth and what her mother had went through when she was born. The fact that she was half demon meant that she had severely injured her mother during birth, and that several other Azarathians had to work together to suppress the demonic side of her so that her true nature wouldn’t result in the deaths of the people around her. She didn’t want to risk that happening to her, which is why she had been avoiding relationships. I assured her that I had dealt with many demons before and that, if we did happen to grow that close, I would be there for her and my child, and would protect both of them. This seemed to comfort her a bit.
–
In the cave Alfred started to clean up. Thankfully no one was leaking any of that weird black material during meditation any more, but there was still a lot of sweat on everything. Noticing the object that had been knocked from the podium he picked up the stone. It glowed with a bright white light and he lifted it into the air to use it as a flashlight to find the cloth that was normally wrapped around it. The stone sphere had rolled by over twenty feet when it was knocked down, leaving the rag about halfway to its location from where it hit the ground. Alfred wrapped the stone, cutting off its glow when he stopped touching it, and placed it on the stand. His cleaning work now finished, he went back upstairs to start some supper. He wasn’t sure when the others would be back, but when they were he wanted them to have a proper meal waiting for them.
–
Around three hours after we arrived we heard the sound of a baby crying and a few minutes later we were allowed in to see it. Upon seeing the baby, however, Raven squeezed my hand. She remembered what I had said, and it helped her deal with her trauma enough to ask to hold the baby, which Kori allowed. Most people wouldn’t assume so, but she definitely had a strong motherly instinct from the way she held the newborn child carefully and gently rocked it back and forth. When the baby started crying, everyone but Dick and Raven were kicked out, presumably because the baby was hungry. Before leaving, however, I handed Dick a bottle of pills. “These are a specialized form of healing medicine that my people use to recover after childbirth.” I said. “Just one of them should fix most of her issues, but she can take one per day until she is fully recovered.” The bottle only had six pills in it, but that should be enough for full recovery in all but the worst cases. And judging by the fact that she was awake and didn’t appear to be in serious pain, one or two would probably be enough.
An hour later we return to the cave, promising to help out if they needed any help. Raven and I scheduled another date for tomorrow, as apparently a movie from her favorite series was going to be first released in Tokyo around noon local time, and she had reserved two tickets for it, unsure if she was going to invite me or someone else. I didn’t speak Japanese, but she said that if I would bring and Elixir of Memories with me she would share her memories of the language with me.