Sunwhisper (Mechanoborg Ne Plus Ultra)

Strength: *3

Dexterity: *6

Constitution: **1

IQ: *9

EQ: **5

Ego: **9

Dao Rating: 9037 (31 Unspent Ranks)

Cultivation Techniques — Path of the Honing Edge

Eight Mines Clutch of Lead *5

Eight Mines Honing Edge *2

Grandfather’s Cutting Elbow *1

Impurities Rejection *8

Impurities Attraction *5

Lead Grasshopper Stance *5

Copper Mantis Stance *1

Cultivation Techniques — Path of the Kingdom of Wild Hearts

Aura of the Bleeding Heart *3

Hand of the Gentle Sage *6

River of Agony *2

Even accounting for his investment into EQ and Ego, Sunwhisper had amassed an ungainly hoard of floating ranks. This was a situation made possible only by a set of extreme circumstances, his reliance on Starscream for combat ability in the beginning, and now the sudden influx of spirit energy from twice daily elixirs. Whereas Janna had been learning a host of new techniques and developing them to the best of her ability as well as training her body, Sunwhisper had been largely ignoring his techniques, and he’d shown only modest improvement in his martial arts skills.

In a one-on-one fight, Janna would have beaten him. For the duration of Yuyu’s tutelage, Sunwhisper had been completely focused on developing his core.

Sunwhisper knew that he was close to being able to beat the wards, the requirement was obvious, he needed a three star Ego. If it had been a quantity issue, he would have had to raise his Constitution as well, but it didn’t seem like it mattered how much mana he was actually channeling, just the strength of will behind his intent.

He hadn’t done it yet because the option had just become available that morning when his Dao Rating went over nine thousand, and he’d discovered the price was exorbitant. Raising a statistic that was still in the first class only took one rank, the second class took two, breaking into the third class doubled the cost of each rating again. Fortunately, he’d been saving since he hit the maximum rating as a two star. He had more than enough to experiment. He pushed his Ego into the third class, and then added one more for good measure. It cost him almost a third his unspent ranks, but it did the job.

Raising his mental statistics didn’t usually have any obvious aftereffects, not since the one major jump in EQ he had undertaken after his duel with the border guardian, but he had started to notice a tingling in his brain and at the base of his skull whenever he increased his Ego. It only took a moment, so he shut off his status screen as soon as he’d made the adjustment and turned the scripted cabochon over in his hand.

"What have you done?" Yuyu asked, a look of genuine curiosity momentarily replacing her usual staid expression. Janna’s face pinched in annoyance, but Sunwhisper didn’t have the processing power to spare thinking about what that meant. He immediately fell back into his meditation, once again summoning a flood of mana and focusing it into his palm.

The same resistance, the same result. But this time, as he felt the enchantment being bent by his intent, reaching his previous limit, he discovered a new reserve of strength. The seconds stretched on, and Yuyu made a dismissive sound, reaching for the orb again.

It was Ise Ebi who stopped her, snapping his claws suddenly, the sharp sound startling everyone but Sunwhisper, who was too absorbed with his task to notice.

"He has it," the lobster pronounced.

Sunwhisper would not relent, and the binding scripts gave way before he did. A bead of golden light came into being at the center of the oversized crystal, rotating slowly.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

"There it is," Ise Ebi said.

"So I see." Yuyu frowned, taking the cabochon and replacing it in its box. "What did you do?”

"Demonic magic," Sunwhisper said, "gave me a slight edge."

"Is the effect temporary?"

"No." Sunwhisper assumed that claiming a temporary boost would nullify the test. If he wasn’t strong enough to exert the control over his mana that he needed to for the ritual process all the time, then he wasn’t strong enough. "That was something I was holding in reserve, because it is costly, but now that I have made the choice, the change is permanent. We can repeat the test as many times as you would like to be certain."

"That won’t be necessary," Yuyu said. "I don’t need to know everything you are capable of, as long as you are capable of doing what I want. We can begin the ritual immediately."

"Immediately?" It wasn’t what he had expected, but he was hardly in a position to refuse.

"What about me?" Janna asked.

"You may watch." Yuyu stepped to an unremarkable section of wall and depressed a single brick. A section of stone slid aside, revealing a small fortune in elixirs. There were three silver racks of glass vials with exotic looking labels. "Nine Dances Kokiabi" was a purplish fluid that contained dull flashes of color, while "Liquor of the Seven Dreaming Immortals" was yellow with brown specks. "Tell your spider to stay back," she instructed, "and place yourself in the harness."

Starscream understood her perfectly well, and he unhooked himself from Sunwhisper before scuttling out of the script circles to settle beside Janna, deftly winding his long tail beneath him so that it wouldn’t cross any of the etched lines. He couldn’t communicate with Sunwhisper while they were separated, but he approved of the experiment. While he didn’t trust Yuyu, he believed in her sanity to the point where he didn’t expect her to throw away resources without cause. She wanted them to be strong enough to kill her uncle, so until they reached that juncture, the safest option was to play along.

In just a few minutes, he had studied them to the point where he would be able to reproduce them to around an eighty percent degree of accuracy. Not something he would risk his own life on, but something to keep in the back pocket, certainly.

They were a means of retarding the flow of mana as well as limiting its toxicity. Without them, what they were about to attempt would have probably meant the death of the subject. With them, he was still glad Sunwhisper was going first.

Sunwhisper strapped himself into the chain harness at the center of the room. It was not meant to completely hinder his mobility, merely to prevent him from exiting the inner circle of scripts. Why it was necessary, he was not sure, but the situation did not seem to lend itself to a pick and choose attitude.

Yuyu brought the elixirs. "Drink," she commanded, uncorking the Nine Dances Kokiabi, and Sunwhisper complied. The elixir hit him like a bolt of lightning, and he jerked against the chains. Yuyu effortlessly sidestepped his wild gesticulations and paid no heed to the noises he was making. Sunwhisper gagged, his body rebelling against the potion. It wasn’t poison, at least not in the usual sense, as his gut could detoxify almost any biological toxin as soon as it was introduced. Nine Dances Kokiabi was a spiritual elixir, and the effect it had on his body was merely a sympathetic reaction to what it was doing to the flow of mana in his meridians.

The spiritual energy inside of him had gone insane. It was as if a river had decided it was actually several rivers, and they were all flowing in different directions. He bent his will to master the wild inertias of his own energy, and slowly brought it back under control. As soon as he had done so, Yuyu pressed the second vial against his lips, and he drank it without thinking.

Liquor of the Seven Dreaming Immortals didn’t feel like anything. As focused as he was on containing the effects of the first elixir, Sunwhisper hardly noticed that he had taken anything. The taste was slight and sweet, water with a little honey, and there was no change until it reached his core.

When Sunwhisper had traveled across the Tree of Heaven with his fathers, before they had exhausted their munitions, he had borne witness to a number of explosions. There had been great worms dwelling under the bark of the tree, and they had responded to the footsteps of the men of iron upon its surface. Betamax’s quarry gun had been put to use against alien flesh, and the result had been decisive.

He felt like that worm now. Elixirs were, in some respect, simply concentrated mana. As the liquor was processed by his digestive system, the amount of mana that resulted was comparable to the amount of smoke that rises from a burning log. The "smoke" was drawn in by his meridians and funneled into his core. Far more potent than the Seishin potions, a single dose of the Liquor of the Seven Dreaming Immortals would have taken him several days to process on its own. The Kokiabi, however, made these interactions far less predictable. When they blended in his stomach, the liquor’s rate of expansion increased at an exponential rate, far beyond what Sunwhisper’s meridians were capable of handling safely.

He felt the first rupture like a nail being driven through his chest, except instead of being driven in, it originated in his own flesh and erupted out. One of his meridians collapsed, increasing the pressure on those that remained. He gasped, losing his grip on the flow of his mana, and Yuyu retreated out of the script circles.

She took her place in a small square located in the corner of the room and channeled to activate the scripts. The ritual room was abruptly alight with silver fire.

Sunwhisper did not notice. His eyes were closed, and his mental gaze was directed inward, attempting to gain control of the riot of spirit energy that was inside of him. Yuyu had described what he would have to do to complete the transformation, but a verbal description did not do the process justice. The ruptures were a part of the procedure, and he would have to assert his will over the mana even after it left his meridians and was freely contaminating his body.

First though, he had to channel as much as he could into his core. It hurt. What he was experiencing made the pain he had taken from Hago seem like a mild irritant in comparison. That had been the pain of a damaged nerve. This felt like the same kind of agony was afflicting every nerve in his body.

Sunwhisper compartmentalized his experience, putting the pain on one side of his mind and the task at hand on the other. Slowly, he regained control of the wild spurts of mana that were trying to run in every possible direction regardless of the position of his meridians. He drove them into his core like a dog herding sheep into a pen that was too small to contain the flock.

But these sheep were made of magic, and the pen could not hold. The first ruptured meridian had felt like a nail. When his core ruptured, it felt like he imagined the space worm had felt when it was hit with Betamax’s quarry gun.