Over the next week I made three batches of pills per day, slept in the afternoon if I needed it, and fought crime at night. I only needed a few hours of sleep every few nights, as I could deal with most of the need for sleep by cultivating for a few hours per day instead of sleeping. If I wasn’t doing one of those four things, I was practicing my sword chi. I would need to use it if I was to pretend to be a member of Soul Blade.

I had made a relic that would allow another cultivator to fake the power of Sword chi, but it wasn’t sufficient. The relic took the form of a bracelet which, when one put neutral chi into it, would coat the hand in sword chi which could then be shaped by the will of the user. While I asked Bruce to use it for testing, he was barely able to damage anything with it, only scratching the wall of the cave. Even I was only able to leave a few millimeter deep, few centimeter long cut in the rock with it, while I could make one three times as big without using it.

I was certain that the weakness wasn’t the base materials. I had imported many types of jade from China and, after selecting one that naturally contained a large amount of metal and earth chi, I carved symbols into it and prepared it in such a way that it should convert the chi it was given to a fairly pure sword chi. My methods were severely lacking, however, as my lack of study in forging caught up to me. In my home realm I never would have needed to learn it, but here I would need to be a ‘jack of all trades’.

As I was better with the creation of talismans, I created several of those, teaching Bruce how to use them. With them he was able to do almost as well as I could do with the bracelet, and I could do almost as well as I did without the bracelet. Now I just needed to figure out how to get the relic up to the quality of the talisman. While I would like it to be better than that, if I pretended that I was only in the middle collection phase they would probably accept that as my best effort.

All of us went to the ‘baby shower’ that Saturday, including the boys. Tim seemed to enjoy being there, and spent time with his ‘sister in law’. Damian seemed much less happy and spent most of his time sulking in the corner until he could feast at the meat-heavy banquet after the ‘shower’ was complete. His mother had left him here, seeing that he was progressing in cultivation, and the boys had even taken another round of pills last Wednesday. Only the medium and a few late level toxins had left them this time. After a few more sessions they should be able to break through to the Collection phase, though they would need to spend more time meditating to do that successfully, as it required a certain degree of skill with chi manipulation.

Dick’s wife was apparently an alien from the world of Tamaran named Koriand’r. To me, though, she just looked like a slightly atypical body cultivator. From the files I had read about her on Bruce’s computer yesterday I assumed that she would be at a much higher level, as even when they were in the Titans together she was mid to late Collection phase in her physical abilities, and was much stronger now. I was surprised to see that her actual chi level was only in the middle collection phase. Apparently, her people were just naturally physically superior to humans, not that she wouldn’t have been considered human in my world. Here, however, they divide the different races of humans into different types of beings, despite the obvious fact that they are close enough to reproduce with, and therefore the same species.

While the others brought things like clothes, diapers, a baby bed, or in Bruce’s case a gift card, as he didn’t know what to get, I brought two types of alchemical powders. One was a special type of powder which was traditionally used by even civilian women after childbirth to overcome the damage and exhaustion of childbirth so that they can recover quickly. They thought it was an unusual gift, but thanked me. The other was meant for the child. I explained that it was a gentler, longer lasting form of the cleansing pills I gave Dick. Essentially, if you dipped your finger into it and put it in your child’s mouth once a week the child would grow up with no toxins in their system, making them healthier and allowing them to develop faster. Furthermore, the child would essentially be at the end of the cleansing phase and would be full of chi, without having to do anything. This meant that when the child had learned to manipulate chi sufficiently they could directly break through to the Collection phase. Many women of my sect used it with their children so that they could cultivate to the Foundation stage and therefore enter the inner sect before they reached thirteen, therefore avoiding the need to work a job to pay for their basic expenses within the sect town.

As that didn’t make sense to them, I explained that everyone was given food, housing, and basic needs, but had to pay the sect back for those things once a month. The outer sect members had to work at least one hundred hours per month to pay for it, maybe less if they had a difficult or more skilled job, but the inner sect members had the option of paying with contribution points. That was why I had so much knowledge about my world, because I had worked in the library for four years, with my last two spent as an alchemist.

While they weren’t sure if their child would want to cultivate, they thanked me anyway and said that they would try it. After all, there wasn’t really a downside to using it and the child would be healthier than normal. I offered to give them enough cleansing pills for Koriand’r to use them too, though I warned her not to use them until she had recovered from childbirth, as they put great strain on the body.

Afterward I learned more about the Earth’s meat preparation methods than I wanted to, drank some sort of alcoholic beverage named ‘beer’ and discovered that I liked potato salad.

They had invited all of their comrades from when they were part of a sect, or I guess an organization, called the Teen Titans. There was a large dark skinned man whose body was mostly metal named ‘Cyborg’, a smaller green skinned man who kept turning into animals and insisted he wanted to be called Beast ‘Man’, and a late Nascent stage female cultivator named Raven. They also invited several members of other similar organizations or who no longer did typical work for superhumans, like a man with gills who used to be called “Aqualad” or a woman named “Tara” who had a late foundation level of highly pure Earth chi in her body, though I doubt she ever cultivated.

She had apparently retired shortly after leaving their team and was now going to college for a degree in ‘geology’, and worked at a jewelry store where she impressed everyone with her ability to quickly and accurately tell if gemstones were fake. She liked telling everyone about herself, which Dick said was because she was a ‘social butterfly’. I didn’t see any wings though, insect or not, so she much have reached a high level of cultivation to be able to take on such a perfect human form.

I ended up spending most of the time speaking with the female cultivator. She was five years older than me, so I was certain she wouldn’t be interested, but she did tell me her story. She was from a Realm called Azarath and, though she had strong natural demonic talent thanks to her father being an immortal demon king, she chose to follow her mother’s cultivation path as a priestess. At some point after entering the Nascent stage she opened a portal to this realm in order to hide from her father and has been living here ever since. Her father did find her about two years later, but thanks to her friends, including Kori and Dick, he was prevented from coming through to this world.

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

I told her my story as well, how I had been recruited at the age of nine by the sect, how I studied there, about how I was attacked by demon cultivators before getting there, and how their attack less than a month ago had lead to me coming to this realm. I even told her how impressive her team’s defeat of Trigon was, as even in my home realm we had heard of him. Three hundred years ago the Jade Dragon sect joined several others to defeat a group of demon cultivators that followed an immortal demon by the name of Trigon, and the demon cultivators were completely wiped out.

When it was time to leave we exchanged phone numbers, Alfred having given me one a week ago when I was hired as Bruce’s body guard, and said goodbye.

That night Bruce got a call from an old friend in the police department and suited up to go meet him. I was at home instructing the boys in how to better manipulate their chi when the door bell rang. I went to answer it and found a plump, short, dark skinned woman in her fifties standing there. “I need to speak with Bruce.” she said.

“I’m sorry Mrs. Waller, he is indisposed at the moment.”

“Then get on the bat cell phone or whatever you call it and tell him I need to talk to him.” I looked over at Alfred and he nodded, then left to do that.

“Very well, please come inside. Would you like some tea while you wait?” I lead her to the living room, the boys having left as soon as they heard her, and went to make tea. I briefly considered putting something in her tea, but at the moment the only things I had available was a minor poison I had made to deal with the rats in the wine cellar and cleansing pills. The first would be overkill and I didn’t want to have to clean up after the second, so I just brought here normal tea.

Fifteen minutes later, Bruce walked into the room. “I’m sorry, I was taking a shower.”

“Of course you were.” she said as I offered Bruce a cup of tea as well. “So I take it you were actually meeting with a certain police commissioner?”

Bruce nodded. “Your intel is as good as ever, I see.”

“I’m assuming he told you about the missing children case.”

“Three children between the age of eight and twelve have disappeared in Gotham in the last week.” This got my attention.

“What he didn’t tell you is that this is happening in every major city. The Flash stopped a child kidnapping about an hour ago in Central and even your friend in blue dealt with one last night. And from what I can tell, they aren’t just taking them from the US. Some of our agents have reported disappearances in Canada, Mexico, Europe and the Middle East. I can only assume that this is a global phenomenon.”

“And you want the League to do something about it.”

“I would send my people, but they aren’t as discrete as yours. We don’t just need to stop this, we need to know who’s doing it, why, and stop them for good. So of course I thought of the World’s Greatest Detective.”

“Excuse me.” I said, curious about how familiar this situation was sounding. “Have any of the children practiced any form of martial arts or do they practice any eastern religion?”

“I’m sure some of them do.”, the plump woman said. “What are you getting at?”

I told here about what happened to me ten years ago and what brought me to this world. If she knew Bruce’s secret, she must already know mine as well, so I wasn’t actually revealing my identity, just confirming it like with Mrs. Al Ghul. “I also met a demon cultivator while under cover, from the sect that did that in my world. I thought his survival might have been a fluke, like we missed someone, but if these children also have a talent for cultivating or are even metahumans...”

Waller nodded. “In that case, it looks like you’ve got a long night ahead of you, rich boy.”

After she left I went down to the bat cave and got dressed. “I’ll be checking in with some of my criminal contacts, seeing if anyone can shed some light on this.” said Bruce while pulling on the cowl. “What about you?”

I pulled on my black trench coat. “I think it’s about time that I go pick up an order from our friend Mr. Clayton. You see, his body guard wasn’t just missed when we were cleaning up the crime scene, he was dead, and someone brought him back to life. That sounds like a cultivator to me. Many immortals learn to resurrect the recently deceased, and while we caught their boss, it’s possible another one made it through that we don’t know about, or came through some other way. Or that someone from earth managed to cultivate to that level, maybe with help from the people of my realm.”

“That’s certainly a possibility.” he said, though from his body language I could tell that he had thought of another one. “I doubt he’s going to just come out and confess.”

“Unless he thinks I can help him. Who better to help cultivators kidnap people than a cultivator mercenary that doesn’t mind breaking the law?”

Bruce nodded. “In that case, I might need to skip patrols tonight.”

That was understandable. If they really were at fault, they wouldn’t be able to do something of this scale without help, so we would need to do some serious training if we were going to fix this situation.

Before I got to where I was going, I focused on blocking of much of the flow of chi into my body. This would lower my natural physical and mental enhancements from the chi, but would cause pressure to start to build up in my soul, as it can no longer release the chi as fast as it brings in more. The increased pressure will cause my dantians to expand so that I can hold more chi, but eventually it will settle at a higher level. This Restrict technique, combined with the Projection technique which used chi to improve that physical and mental enhancement, are taught to all Cleansing phase cultivators in the Jade Dragon sect. I simply hadn’t used them, as I wanted to reach Foundation stage as quickly as possible so that I no longer had to do menial work, and those techniques would slow my advancement.

Once at the butcher’s shop I walked in the back door and directly to the meat locker, taking the stairs down to the office. “Ah, Soul Blade. Welcome back.” Mr. Clayton said, opening a drawer and pulling out a small bag, which he tossed to me. “One hundred Spirit Rice seeds, as requested. I believe you promised me one thousand?” he asked.

I counted out ten one hundred dollar bills and handed them to him. “Thank you for your business,” he said, placing the money in a drawer. “Is there anything else I can help you with?”

I nodded. “Actually, you might be able to. Do you think you could get me alchemical ingredients?” He gave me a questioning look. “I need plant and monster parts that are at least Collection phase, if not higher. So far this spirit rice and the spirit grass those thugs are growing are the only ingredients I can find about the cleansing phase. Apparently, no one on your world raises their plants or animals for that purpose.”

“You might want to try a black market magic dealer. I don’t know much about that.”

That’s when his bodyguard joined in. “Would you be willing to work with human parts?” he asked.

“Depends. Are they ethically sourced? I don’t want to risk having a vengeful spirit after me because I’m using part of their murdered body. But can they really produce high grade materials without being cultivators?”

“We’ve found that many metahumans have large amounts of chi in them even without cultivating, Don’t worry. If you don’t want to risk getting haunted we can always just send you the hair from when we shave their heads. Maybe nail clippings.”

I nodded. “That would be useful.” If it worked the same way monster parts worked, I can easily use them to make pills and elixirs. “Of course, I’m a bit short on funds at the moment, so I don’t know how much I’ll be able to buy.”

He immediately went for the bait. “Actually, there is. Tell me, how do you feel about helping us acquire a few things we need?” I looked at Mr. Clayton and he shook his head. “Not him, but my actual boss. We recently developed a need for certain number of special individuals, and they need to all be young, prepubescent.”

I nodded. “I can do that. Anything in particular you are looking for?”

“Just make sure that they either have metahuman potential or cultivation potential. You get paid more for a bigger meta or cultivation potential. I assume you know at least one way to test for cultivation potential?” I nodded. “Meta potential is even easier. Basically, they’ll have lots of chi, but not be cultivators.”