Sunwhisper sat alone in Makoto’s front room. The guardian had directed him to take a seat on a small stool beside a bare wooden table before going to meet with the village elder. Sunwhisper didn’t know whether this was a show of trust or arrogance, taking a captive into one’s own home and leaving them unsupervised. Makoto knew that he had nowhere to go and no one to turn to for help. He was an alien, a demon. He was alone. He felt that the situation should have meant something more to him than a dry restatement of facts, but it didn’t
Again and again he replayed the last moments of Optus’s life on a screen only he could see. He did not record everything he saw and heard, as doing so required deep concentration, but the last moments he shared with the leader of his people seemed significant enough to preserve for analysis and posterity. Sunwhisper knew that he was different than the other mechanoborgs had been; the presence of a quintessence organ, a core, as Makoto had dubbed it, was evidence enough. Optus’s last words had hinted at something more, but that statement hung frustratingly unfinished.
A heart. Of course he had a heart. Sunwhisper had been designed to be a an artificial human, and the similarities were more than superficial. While he would never die from lack of oxygen, his metabolism did make use of that molecule and he breathed air to obtain it. He had a heart that beat blood that was only distinguishable from its organic analog under a microscope. His organs weren’t in exactly the same locations as they would have been in a true human, making room for his chest compartment and a few other utility features, but he did have organs.
Sunwhisper pulled up his status screen, a heads-up display that overlaid the real world, providing him with information about his own inner workings. He could access a schematic of his own body, accounting firsthand for the lackluster core and skinny meridians Makoto had mentioned. His fathers had all been subject to a Hero System, the legacy of Orobos, whereby they advanced through the accumulation of experience won in battle and from quest rewards. But Sunwhisper didn’t have that. He hadn’t gained a single experience point for killing that fox, and he knew that he was foolish for having hoped that he would.
His status screen didn’t even have a box for experience. Instead, he had a Dao Rating, an opaque metric that remained a reproachful zero. His fathers had designed him based on the information they had received about this world from an advance team whose ansible messages had been cut short, and they had done the best they could for him under the circumstances.
At first glance, his status screen was not so different from a Hero System status screen. He had Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, IQ, and Ego statistics, just like his fathers. He had a mana pool, as they would have. But he also had EQ, emotional intelligence, which was a dump stat if he had ever heard of one. Why even include it in a System?
Makoto had left behind a pile of scrolls for Sunwhisper to study while he was out, and in the absence of any other stimulus, they proved an edifying distraction. There weren’t any maps, but Sunwhisper was able to surmise that he found himself in a place called Fringe Town, on the edge of a region referred to as the Blessed Lands, or less commonly, as Hollow. He took scans of the scrolls so that he could peruse them at his leisure, but paid special attention to an educational text labeled “Child’s Meditation.”
Mana was magic, and the people of the Blessed Lands used a particular kind of magic they called cultivation. This scroll was an instruction, albeit an extremely basic one, on the practice and theory of cultivation. The fact that Makoto had left such precious knowledge with him so casually suggested that it was not actually precious. Was magic so common in this world that every child was expected to know how to use it? Was such knowledge not even considered dangerous?
The compass had clearly brought them to the right place. A world where magic was so plentiful that it was taught to school children like mathematics had once been taught on earth had to be close to the source. If the Quintessence was not in this world, then it was just beyond it. Sunwhisper opened his chest to produce the compass, its ornate, gold case inscribed with sacred code. Beneath its crystal face, an arrow of black metal pointed unerringly toward the source. Sunwhisper’s internal sense of direction told him that this world had a magnetic field uncannily similar to earth’s, as improbable as that was, and the compass was pointing north-east.
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The relic was functioning, and if Sunwhisper chose, he could simply walk in the direction of the source of magic until he found it, but he knew that such a choice would lead to the failure of the quest. The world they had entered was more dangerous than they could have imagined, and he was still much weaker than the mechanoborgs who had all been defeated by a single old man.
He replaced the compass, resolving to keep it hidden until the time when he was strong enough to pursue what it promised. If he was going to survive, let alone complete the sacred mission, he was going to have to become a cultivator, and not merely an average one. He would likely need to become one of the greatest there had ever been. At the moment, his only frame of reference for what that meant was the border guardian. Surely, Makoto represented someone at the heights of cultivator power.
The Child’s Meditation scroll was as simple as it was baffling. It spent several paragraphs explaining how difficult it was for a beginner to enter the trance state required to sense one’s own core and begin drawing on mana from the environment. Sunwhisper found himself rereading the section out of shock. Mana was so abundant in this world that you could draw upon it from the air? Any air? Anywhere?
The breathing exercises were simple enough, though it wasn’t immediately clear whether the initiate was literally trying to breathe in mana or if the exercise was merely a means of centering the mind and relaxing the body. He followed the instructions, but for him, entering a trance state was as easy as accessing his status screen.
He could see his core, or a digital rendering of it, anyway. What was he supposed to do with it now?
“A new initiate must forget himself even while he remembers his core. Mana is all around us, for we of the Blessed Lands live out our lives within the very soul of the world. Channeling is the process of drawing that mana into our own bodies, allowing it to become a part of us as we become a part of the soul of the world.”
Most of the scroll was like this, and Sunwhisper did not find it particularly helpful. How exactly was he supposed to become one with the soul of the world? He continued the breathing exercises, they were what he had to work with and he would do so, and continued on to the visualizations.
“A cultivator is a vessel for the soul of the world, but the soul will not occupy a vessel which is not prepared to accept it. Feel the mana that is already within you, and demand that it move. The energy may be sluggish at first, but with practice, one finds that mana is eager to respond to the intent of a cultivator. The soul demands to be mastered.”
Sunwhisper didn’t need to imagine his meridians, he had a diagram. But they were empty. There was no mana, even of the sluggish variety. The scroll suggested that he imagine points of light moving through his body toward his core, from his extremities to his navel. He did so. Nothing happened.
“As you begin to make progress, consult with your mentor for further instruction.”
Sunwhisper was not making progress. But as Makoto had not returned, and he had nothing else to occupy him, he went over the instructions again and reapplied himself to the exercises.
He had an internal clock, so he was perfectly aware of how much time he was wasting in a fruitless exercise. After a few more minutes, he searched the lower floor for more scrolls, but what he found was even less helpful than what he had already. Every other scroll on cultivation assumed he had mastered the basics already, and was therefore useless to him.
Sunwhisper found the kitchen, and helped himself to the potatoes and raw onions in the cupboards. The nanofactory in his gut could process virtually any biological matter into sustenance for his synthetic body, but human food was still a more efficient source of energy than grass or bark, and more pleasant.
After the snack break, he sat back down in the front room and reapplied himself to the meditation. It was nearly two hours before he had a breakthrough, and when it came, it was small, arguably minute, but unquestionably a positive result.
He had been visualizing points of light for so long that he almost didn’t realize when one of the points wasn’t just a visualization. There it was on the schematic, a single mote of mana entering his fingertips, floating down his meridians and into his core, absorbed from the soul of the world, whatever that was. It was real. It tingled. This was the Cultivation System.
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Sunwhisper (Mechanoborg Ne Plus Ultra)
Strength: *2
Dexterity: *2
Constitution: *2
IQ: *6
EQ: *1
Ego: *3
Dao Rating: 1
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