You have suborned Sweater Weather to Storm Globe as a subskill.
Congratulations, you have forged your twenty-second Qi Skill, The Space Within!
“You’re glowing,” Bryan told me.
“Oh, stop,” I said. “You’re going to make me blush.”
We were crouched in the shadow of a building not far from the beam he’d successfully knocked me out of a second time. Bryan made a face as if to call me an idiot, then waved a hand at my sweater, which now glowed a gentle neon blue, courtesy of hooking it up to my Storm Globe skill and transforming it into yet another energy-storage device.
“Can you summon more clothing skills?” he asked.
My brows raised. “I do not know. Hang on.” A quick rifle through my skills told me that no, I couldn’t. I idly wondered why the rest of my clothing kit hadn’t transformed into some sort of Qi skill upon entering a beam with me. “Maybe it’s because they were a gift from the System.”
“The system? Oh, your other clothes? No. They were a gift from… him, right?”
“That’s right.” I nodded once.
“Well, maybe. I suppose. Or it could just be because it doesn’t work every time, it doesn’t make skills every time. It’s not a science, you know; it’s magic. As you keep calling it.”
“Space magic,” I corrected.
“Right.” He spun in a slow circle, taking in our surroundings. “There. That’ll do. Hold on, Quart.”
“Hey!” I whisper-shouted at his departing figure, but he was gone, darting off to get some other oddity, doubtless something to throw me into the beam with. Though I really wasn’t sure what he could possibly find out here; we were in a, ah, well. Less-than-nice part of town.
While I waited I read the details from my most recent notifications.
You have suborned Sweater Weather to Storm Globe as a subskill.
Sweater Weather, subskill:
Conjure a Qi-enhanced garment in the form of a sweater for the storing of energy. Sweater can be donned, removed, and manipulated at will.
Current Sweater Storage: Spirit: 200/200
Congratulations, you have forged your twenty-second Qi Skill, The Space Within!
Skill: The Space Within!
You have absorbed a Base Building Node: Level 3! You have founded a Qi-enhanced inner space. You are able to retreat within this space and utilize it as a safe zone. No one else is able to detect this space. Only one living being may be inside the space at a time. +10% HP, SP, and StP regen rates inside. Items may be stored inside at a residual cost of Raw Cosmic Qi or Spirit relational to their quantity and quality.
Can be upgraded to inner realm and inner world with significant amounts of Qi infusion.
Level: Inner Space
Limitations: 300,000 cubic feet space; one person inside at a time; storage requires residual energy expenditure; normal flow of time.
Raw Cosmic Qi or Spirit required to upgrade: 2,000
I stood with my jaw on the proverbial floor for a long moment. “Holy fucking shit,” I finally mumbled. Was there a single game-breaking cheat I wasn’t going to get my hands on for this build? I was having trouble keeping track and the apocalypse had just started.
I perused the details a moment more.
Honestly? Even if I hadn’t had a single other weird thing happen so far, this skill alone would be a total game-breaker. 300,000 cubic feet was plenty for me, but a cost of only 2,000 spirit or Qi to upgrade, and only two tiers of upgrades available? I could connect the dots. The present limitations of only one person inside at a time and normal time flow implied that upgrading would probably allow me to invite more folks inside, and possibly—I held my breath and dared to hope—the holy grail of game-breaking OP cheats, time dilation. A time dilation space where I could train and cultivate? Yeah. Game over for pretty much everyone else.
“Alright,” I muttered to myself. “How do we do this?” I imagined a portal rising from the earth. Nothing happened. “Ok, not like Asano for once, then. Maybe it’s more of a Ruwen thing. Let’s see…” With a thought I activated the skill, and found the space was already active, just waiting for me.
And I was in it.
Just like that, no shit; one moment I wasn’t, and the next I was.
It was a bit dark. I wished for light, and there was light. A hum of electric power buzzed overhead as long, fluorescent fixtures appeared. I felt a miniscule trickle of Spirit eke out of me at the effort, but not enough to be concerned with. So that’s how it worked, eh? I just pictured what I wanted, and I spent Spirit to conjure it?
Not bad.
The space was not unlike the place I’d been summoned to when I’d met my mysterious alien benefactor, the one who I assumed had been providing code overrides to keep course-correcting my broken build. I was in a long, tall, warehouse-like structure. The space was empty aside from me and the lights. Nothing interesting in and of itself, aside from the nearly endless potential of what could be done with it. I sighed, contended, and willed myself back out of the space and into the “real” world.
It looked like I really was on track to be the ultimate OP’d MC.
Bryan returned momentarily.
“Yep, we’re in luck,” he said. “Store’s just around the corner.”
“What store?” I asked with some trepidation.
“Does that really matter?” he asked, his voice pitching just a bit high. “Come on.”
Now.
Have you ever been to a K-Mart?
If you’re of a certain age, then probably, sure. Maybe you even remember it as a perfectly fine shopping experience, the supermarket department store that somehow left a spiritual legacy in both Wal-Mart and Target without having direct ties to either. They were trucking along, just dealing with the rise of e-commerce like everyone else, when JCPenney acquired them back in the… what was it, late nineties? Early aughts? I don’t remember. But then they went and made Martha Stewart their spokesperson—not the “I’ve bounced back and I hang out with Snoop Dogg” Martha Stewart, mind you, but the pre-jail version—just before the ugly scandal hit her square in the blanket-folder. She went down hard for a few years there, believe me. And K-Mart was the ship she steered to the bottom.
Anyway, the store Bryan had led me to, his great plan, was a darkened, locked up, defunct, dirty old K-Mart. So, yeah. On par for how things had been going so far.
“Fuck me,” I mumbled. “Is it open?”
We jogged low to the ground, keeping an eye out for threats as we crept across the abandoned parking lot out front. I mean, it was the apocalypse; every place that wasn’t currently a battlefield or slaughterhouse felt like an abandoned location. But this spot especially fit the bill. It was the two- and three-foot sprouted grass reaching up through long-ignored cracks in the ancient blacktop that really sold the vibe, you know?
“Not even a little bit,” he said. “Gonna try our luck though. We need inventory, Quart. And if there’s one thing the Mighty Mart should have…” He trailed off as we approached the front windows.
Grime coated the outside and they looked to boarded up with sheets of plywood on the inside. We stalked down the front of the store a moment, heading toward the telltale sign of broken glass.
“That’s assuming it hasn’t all already been lifted,” I grunted. We arrived to find one of the floor-to-ceiling glass panels had been shattered, clearly an entry point, and it didn’t look new. A breeze kicked up and blew past us into the store, whistling quietly as it did.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
Bryan shrugged. “We’re not here for iPads or whatever the hell the local kids took when they ransacked the place. I guarantee we’ll find something useful. Come on.”
It was dark inside, and smelled of mold, and the only sound was a slow drip from someplace overhead where the roof was losing the slow battle to the elements. It was eerily silent apart from that, like the soundscape of dropping into a snow fort as a child. Everything felt muffled.
“Hang on,” I said.
You have activated skill: Ballers Be Balling!
The now-familiar pair of glowing orbs materialized in the air around me. I sent a mental command to make them orbit us just overhead. They cast their baby-blue neon light into the space as they did so, and between them and the gentle glow of my similarly imbued sweater, we were able to make out the scene before us.
It was a dirty shambles, a right mess of overturned kiosks and dirt-congealed merchandise littering the cracked tiles that made up the floor, but it was, indeed, a K-Mart. And despite the filth and air of utter abandonment, there was, I noted with surprise, still a significant amount of inventory to be spotted.
I nodded and took stock of my Qi skills, reminded that I had been wanting to try more of them out.
“Not a cart in sight,” Bryan said, shaking his head. “Who would’ve thought that was the thing they’d have run out of? Maybe Aldi has the right idea after all. That’s the place with the quarters, right?”
“Oh don’t worry about that. Hold my beer.”
You have activated Qi Skill: Cart Collection!
Just as the last time, a row of red plastic shopping carts materialized, shooting out of me like a long, segmented, oddly prehensile tentacle, until it separated from my body and the gentle blue glow of Cosmic Qi dispersed, leaving only what appeared to be mundane carts.
“Hey,” I said, my breath catching as I surveyed the carts. All of the power-chaining I’d been doing with Qi and Spirit through Storm Globe… just how far could I take that? “I’ve got a really freaky idea.”
Bryan quirked an eyebrow. “This does something for you, then? Bit of a shopping kart fetish?”
“Stop that. No, I’ve decided to quit fucking around and get serious. The universe wants to incept my dreams and grant me the ultimate carte-blance magical power set? Fine. I’m gonna dump out all the crayons and see what kind of colors I can make.”
With a thought I unsummoned the carts and activated Storm Globe. My Spirit channels were running low since I’d pushed everything I had into the sweater, so I pulled 200 Raw Cosmic Qi from the Globe’s storage and began to cycle it. As before, it purified into Spirit nearly immediately. The thought occurred to me that I probably didn’t need a cultivation teacher after all—that Sam had probably been right that she had more to learn from me, even if it was more a result of my freakish build and less something that I really understood—but those thoughts turned swiftly grim, and I dismissed them. I wasn’t ready to dwell on her loss yet.
“Now,” I muttered, “watch this shit.” I deactivated Sweater Weather to open up a skill slot, then I strained my concentration to chain-activate The Space Within and Cart Collection.
Pain.
That’s right. That old friend. Only this time, instead of Cosmic Qi saturating my body from immersion in an invasion beam, I was channeling Raw Cosmic Qi from Storm Globe, cultivating it into Spirit, and passing that into the two chained skills at an alarming rate.
Beads of sweat rolled down my face and I watched, detached, as they glowed on their way to the grimy floor. The pain suffused every fibre of my being, like being in the beam of weaponized sound. Like being buried alive in liquid concrete.
Magic heard me say I was going to fuck with it, and it decided to have the first dance.
The Storm Globe sphere had become a blue sun in my vision, at first casting eerie shadows all around us but soon swallowing them up and engulfing everything in a brilliant but cold wash of light. My mind’s eye took over, my brain losing some of the chemical battle and forming hallucinations in front of me, another common side-effect of changing up my now firmly cemented med routine. I saw my parents, the joy on my mother’s face over Skype as I opened the box with that damned stockpot in it. Saw my little house, and my bed, then relived the moment I awoke to vast cosmic powers drilling a hole through it with pure energy.
I saw Sam. Alive. Felt a twinge of guilt knowing she had been holding on just to get to her sisters and help them, and that I was the one responsible for the fact she would never get to do that now. If they were alive they were out there probably looking for her, too, but they would never find her. If they were lucky.
I saw Sam. Dead.
By the time it had ended I was convulsing on the floor, seizing and foaming, spittle flecked across my face. I’m sure I would have vomited if I’d been able, but I’d triggered that particular reflex so many times in the past few hours it seemed I was coming up dry just now.
“Quart? Quart!” Bryan was slapping me in the face. Again. “Fuck, Quart, what the bloody hell did you do? You can’t just keep inventing entire new branches of Qi power your first night since getting magic; you’re going to bloody die. Again.”
“Mmmph,” I answered unconvincingly. Bryan sighed and rocked back on his haunches, wiping sweat from his own face as he did so. The guy seemed genuinely worried.
We stayed that way a moment, him panting from relief, I from exhaustion. Finally he broke the silence in a low voice. “I don’t know what he told her… Sam, I mean… I don’t know what it was that made her think this was our last shot. But I believe that she believed it. I don’t know if this gets to happen again. If we muck it up, this might be it.” He snorted softly. “Jesus, listen to me. I sound like a regular dramatist. Look, Quart. I know you don’t have the context that I have for this, for who we are together, but listen to me. I’ve seen you handle tremendous power before. And I’ve seen it destroy you. A couple of times now. Whether we get one more do-over after this or not, I’m here to tell you I have never seen you push the envelope the way you’re doing right now. It scares me, Quart. And I’m not, I imagine, what you might call easily scared. I’ve seen a lot of shit.”
His eyes took on that distant gaze again and I heard the truth in his words.
“I just… I’m just…” I paused. I’m just what? Afraid? Was I ready to admit that yet? I shook my head. “I don’t think any of this is real.”
“Don’t you?” He didn’t sound surprised. Just tired. Maybe a little disappointed. “You told me before—in another life, I mean—that you thought it was all a dream at first. I never pressed you on what it took to break you out of that idea. I assumed you lost people, or maybe just the slow attrition of time broke you down until you were forced to reckon with the grim reality of things. This is the first time I’ve been with you before you’ve admitted the truth to yourself. So I guess you might say this is—” He shrugged, giving a half smile.
“New territory,” I finished, laughing weakly.
“Yeah.”
After a pause, I said, “What truth do I eventually admit to myself?”
He looked me square in the eye. “You know what, Quart. I’m not going to say it. You have to. It’s got to be your admission, your truth. Otherwise it still won’t feel real enough.”
I sighed.
“So,” he said after a moment, “what screwball power did you create this time?”
“Ah, well,” I pushed myself up on my elbows and willed my notifications into view. “Let’s have a look.”
WARNING! You have channeled a dangerously high amount of Raw Cosmic Qi in a short amount of time. It is recommended you pause channeling and cultivation to avoid risk of channel burnout.
You have suborned The Space Within to Storm Globe as a subskill.
The Space Within, subskill:
You have suborned your Qi-enhanced inner space to an energy storage and manipulation skill. Your inner space can now gather and store ambient Cosmic Qi or refined spirit.
ERROR: Cultivation Channels present. Rerouting energy pathways…
Calculating… Processing…
Processing Override…
New directive applied: The Space Within, subskill:
You have suborned your Qi-enhanced inner space to an energy storage and manipulation skill in alignment with your cultivation channels. Your inner space maps onto your spiritual pathways. It can now gather and store ambient Cosmic Qi or refined spirit in alignment with your cultivation channels.
ERROR: Cultivation Channels insufficient to accommodate energy load.
Processing…
Processing Override…
New directive applied: Progress to Bronze Cultivator Physique: 100%.
New directive applied: Progress to Silver Cultivator Physique: 100%.
New directive applied: Progress to Gold Cultivator Physique: 1%.
Skill subordination: The Space Within: Complete.
Congratulations, you have leveled up the skill: The Space Within from Inner Space to Inner Realm. With this upgrade you may access a space of up to 300 cubic miles, manipulate time to a 2:1 ratio to space outside, and host as many as ten unique beings within your realm. Your realm has been qualitatively altered by subordination to the skill Storm Globe. As a result, Cosmic Qi levels inside your realm will rank “slightly high” compared to the universal standard. Deepen this relationship to increase your realm’s Cosmic Qi levels further.
You have suborned Cart Collection to Storm Globe and The Space Within as a chained subskill.
Your summoned shopping cart constructs may now store and channel energy in the form of Raw Cosmic Qi or Spirit. They may also siphon energy to be stored in either Storm Globe or The Space Within. Objects placed within them may be directly transferred to The Space Within at a one-time percentage-based energy cost.
Title gained: Realm Lord
You have gained a realm! This title marks you as part of the low-tier Nobility.
+5% all base stats. Class altered. +Class trait.
New Status Available. Would you like to view your stat screen?
“Sure?” I said warily.
Combatant Stat Screen
Name: Quart
Level: 11
XP to Level 12: 134
Class: Battlemage Cultivator Lord
Class Traits:
Combat warrior (pugilism; blades);
Cultivator (Cosmic Qi, spirit);
Qi Magician, Journeyman (ambient and cultivated Qi);
Auramancer (projection, control, consumption);
Realmlord (Qi-infused inner realm)
Subclass: Spirit Beastmaster
Subclass Traits: Spirit servant (Sand Witch)
Sprit companion (Tommy)
Physique
Silver, Solidified Pathways. 1%.
Base Stats
Charisma: 11.72
Constitution: 14.96
Intelligence 18.2
Luck: 11.72
Strength: 14.96
Speed: 12.8
Wisdom: 17.12
Pools
Health (HP): 154/180
Spirit (SP): 200/200
Stamina (StP): 40/180
Raw Cosmic Qi: 31,534 (stored)
Titles
First Blood, Regional Award applied.
First Trap, Planet Award applied.
Primary Evolved Award applied.
Triple Threat +3% all base stats, constant.
Wall Climber Award applied.
Realm Lord +5% all base stats, constant.
Equipment
Bag’o’knives
Attire set: combat robes, level 1
“Jesus fuck,” I cursed vehemently, pulling myself to my feet.
“What?” Bryan asked.
“Well, to start with, what’s a Noble?”
“Oh Christ.”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “I, uh… I think I need some new clothes.” I gestured blithely at my level 1 robes. “Can’t very well traipse across the war-torn corpse of my mother-world in this garbage.”
“No.” Bryan smirked as he turned to eye the store’s inventory. “No, you cannot. Quart, my too-quick-for-his-own-good-friend? I do believe it’s time to shop.”
“Yeah.” I grabbed one of my conjured carts by the handle and began strolling down the aisle. “Realmlords be shoppin’.”