My heart pounded furiously, as if trying to escape my ribcage. Then, my breath caught as if someone had flipped a switch, leaving me desperate for air. Each inhale became sharper than the last, and an intense pressure built in the center of my chest. The discomfort became unbearable. It felt as though my heart was being pierced repeatedly by thousands of tiny needles, and a bout of dizziness assaulted me, sending the world into a fuzzy spin. To make matters worse, a creeping sense of nausea steadily built up in my gut beneath the growing pain in my chest.
“Ugh, not again…” I groaned, clutching my stomach with one hand and bending over to steady myself against the spinning.
“Your blood-toxicity levels are rising; you must begin cultivating immediately,” Ada said.
“What are you doing?!” The woman’s frantic shout reached my ears.
“I don’t know what to do!” I screamed back in frustration. Why was I in so much pain? What in the world had she made me drink?!
“I will assist,” Ada said.
“I told you to—Gods damn it all!” I heard a rapid staccato of footfalls, followed by the sound of one of those creatures angrily screeching.
A hand like an iron vise clamped around the back of my neck and slammed me to the floor on my stomach. With one cheek pressed to the deck, slippery and moist with a thin layer of blood and seawater, the air whooshed out of my lungs, finally giving me the chance I needed to gulp and gasp like a fish out of water. The wooden planks strained beneath me.
The flintlock roared over my head, the sound reverberating through the confined space and mixing with the woman’s voice.
“Cultivate! Now!” The fingers on my neck relaxed, only to latch onto the hair on the back of my head and sharply crack my face against the deck. Once. Twice.
I vaguely heard Ada’s voice saying something else when a bolt of white-hot lightning shot through my nose and bloomed into a stunning, warm agony that spread behind my eyes and mouth. I screamed loudly and incoherently, hot blood pouring down my nose as pain absorbed every one of my thoughts. And as I lay there, my face and nose throbbing with pain against the slick deck, the woman's command echoed in my head. But I had no idea how! What was I supposed to do?! Desperation clawed at me, the fear mingling with confusion and pain. Trying to obey either of them and think clearly through the haze of pain was near impossible. I squeezed my eyes shut tightly, trying to focus past the pain. Think. What did I know about cultivation?
“It is the channeling of the universe’s energy, focusing on breath, and guiding it through the body's pathways. And so much more,” Ada supplied.
I mentally agreed, but that was just an esoteric explanation—nothing practical that I knew how to apply. But despite my ignorance, I attempted to calm my racing heart and control my erratic and shallow breathing, made all the harder with blood running down half of my face and getting into my eye.
I imagined drawing in energy with each shaky breath, picturing it as a visible force filling me, cleansing the pain from my body. Nothing.
I envisioned the energy as a glowing light, starting at the center of my chest where the pain was most intense, then slowly spreading outwards. Nothing.
I visualized it flowing down to my stomach, up through my throat, and splitting towards my limbs. Nothing.
The roar of the flintlock broke my fragile concentration.
I gritted my aching teeth and tried harder. I had to. I kept recycling the same series of mental images, drawing in energy with every breath and letting it sweep through and saturate my blood, bones, and organs with warm, healing energy. The mental images were surprisingly vivid, and also nothing more than the hopes of a desperate man rather than an informed technique.
“Detecting anomalous energy signatures converging across multiple acupoints in your upper torso,” Ada said.
I sent Ada the mental image equivalent of the middle finger before hunkering down and trying so hard I probably looked like a constipated psychotic murderer. The grimly amusing thought came unbidden and so naturally that it caught me off-guard and again broke my concentration.
I shouted against the deck in pain and frustration, bucking futilely against the woman’s hold on me. She easily re-adjusted her grip on my hair and pressed my face harder into the deck.
“Threshold reached!”
For a moment, nothing happened, and my doubt grew. But then, almost imperceptibly, a warmth began to build in the center of my chest—not the searing pain from before, but something steadier and more soothing. It spread along the paths I had imagined, the warmth growing, though it was tinged with a faint tingling sensation like pins and needles. The pain behind my eyes began to dull, the heat easing the throbbing in my nose. I froze. Then I redoubled my focus, clinging to the sensation with a mental death-grip as I willed the warmth to expand and push the pain further away. I must have been making noise.
"Keep quiet and focus!" the woman snapped.
But I barely heard her; the warmth was now enveloping me in what felt like a protective cocoon of energy. I didn't fully understand what I was doing, but something was happening. The feeling reminded me of stretching out a group of muscles that hadn’t been worked in a long time. Now, that same feeling was lodged deep in the middle of my chest and continued to grow the more I pressed at it with my thoughts. As I pressed further, my perception of the outside world withdrew inward, until after a short spell, I was submerged in the sensation as it moved through me. First, it spread to my neck and abdomen, then it branched off into dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of razor-thin streams of sensation that traveled to my upper and lower body, reaching all the way to my individual fingers and toes. There, the sensation was the weakest, and it was strongest in my chest.
My facial expression changed. No, it wasn't strongest in my chest. The warm sensation was strongest in my abdomen, somewhere behind my navel. My brow creased as I focused my thoughts there. Time seemed to slow, and all the noise around me was drowned out by the dense silence in my head. I vaguely made out shouting, perhaps the occasional movement of something tickling my physical senses, but it was all muted, distant, and alien to me now.
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The longer I concentrated on the area behind my navel, the stronger the sensation became, until I was struck with a profound realization. I knew what cultivation was; I had read enough about it in my past life. So, this… This must be my Dantian! The space felt like a reservoir of energy, a wellspring from which warmth emanated and flowed through my body. I instinctively understood that this was the core of my being, the source from which I could draw power and direct it throughout my body. The sensation intensified as I focused, feeling almost like a gentle fire—warm but not burning, comforting in its presence. It pulsed rhythmically, akin to a heartbeat, each throb sending waves of warmth radiating through my limbs. The energy felt alive, a part of me yet distinct, as if it had its own consciousness, responding to my attention by growing stronger, more vibrant. I envisioned this energy as a glowing orb of light, spinning slowly, gathering more strength with each rotation. As it spun, it seemed to pull in more of the ambient energy around it, growing larger and more luminous. I directed my thoughts, pushing the energy along the pathways that now felt as familiar as the veins in my own body. With each cycle, the energy returned to the core behind my navel, each time more potent than the last.
I got lost in the pattern, in the movements, in the rhythm. I watched in my mind’s eye as it traveled upwards toward my chest, filling the space with light and warmth, then down through my legs, making them feel rooted yet light. Then, it reached out to the tips of my fingers and toes, tingling slightly as if electrified, before retreating back to the center. Each return to the core made the area glow brighter, and I felt a surge of vitality with every cycle. My thoughts began to clear, and a profound sense of peace enveloped me. The chaos around me—the sounds of battle, the cries, the crashing of the sea—seemed distant, as if I were in another world entirely.
Just as I was delving deeper into the rhythmic cycle of cultivation, a rough hand abruptly seized my shoulder, snapping me out of my meditative state. The sudden break in concentration was jarring, and the serene world I had been immersed in vanished instantly as my eyes—my physical eyes—flew open.
The red-haired woman, her face a mask of urgency and impatience, stood towering over me. Her grip tightened, almost painfully, as she yanked me to my feet.
"Enough—we have to move!" she barked, her eyes burning with fierce determination and… pain?
My stomach sank as I took in our surroundings and audibly gasped. There were two more [Sea Demon Fledgling] corpses strewn across the deck, their slimy carcasses traced with deep gouges and lacerations. One of them was missing half of its head.
But what made me want to huddle into the fetal position and never move again was the last corpse. The creature’s skin was a mottled blue, still slick with seawater. Its hands were massive webbed paws lined with razor-sharp talons, and its torso and limbs were longer and more muscular than its counterparts. Its eyes were bulbous and dull with death, its mouth slack-jawed against the deck and showing rows of jagged teeth.
Text appeared over the corpse: [Sea Demon Grunt]
I didn’t have time to fully process that when the woman moved away from me, stealing my attention.
“We’re moving, now,” she said, taking an uneven step and stumbling from foot to foot until she caught herself on the edge of a crate. “Cursed… thing…” she huffed through a curtain of her red hair that had come undone from its braid in the fight. I blinked, taking her in for a second time. My eyes widened.
Blood had soaked through the fabric of her shirt, originating from a deep gash above her hip. The wound was severe, the edges ragged and still oozing blood that stained her side and soaked through the leather of her pant leg.
"You're hurt," I said.
She barely glanced down at the crimson stain spreading across her clothing. "Shut up," she grunted, her voice strained under what must have been considerable pain. And despite the venom in her voice, I could tell that she may have been strong, but she wasn’t invincible. I could see the pallor of her skin and the slight grimace that crossed her face as she struggled to hold even her own weight on her two feet. It was clear that she was more injured than she appeared to be and was pushing herself beyond any sort of reasonable limit, driven by necessity and stubborn will. I don’t know how I knew that. I just knew.
"Let me help," I said, reaching out to support her arm, but she shook off my hand with a fierce look. I had the sudden and intense premonition that I would have lost my hand if she hadn’t been so injured.
"Fool. Touch me again and—"
The ship shuddered violently beneath our feet, each creak and groan of the timbers sounding like the anguished cries of a beast in its death throes.
A barrage of cannon blasts simultaneously reverberated through the hull, the very framework of [The Sea Sovereign] seeming to protest and strain.
The fighting on the upper decks spilled over into chaos, the clashing of steel and the sporadic crackle of small arms fire overlapping with everything else.
Then, the ship pitched unexpectedly.
A deafening roar filled the air, more immediate and terrifying than anything else I had heard up to that point. It was followed by a horrific impact that seemed to come from the very depths of the ocean itself. An enormous force collided with the side of our vessel, sending a shockwave rippling through the structure. The impact was so powerful that it felt as if the entire ship might capsize. We were thrown off our feet, sent sprawling across the slick, blood-stained deck as the world tilted wildly around us. The lights swung overhead, casting erratic shadows that danced across the walls, while all around us, shouts and screams filled the air, mixing with the sound of splintering wood and shearing metal. For a moment, everything was chaos. The ship listed dangerously to one side, throwing everyone aboard and its cargo into a jumbled heap. The impact knocked the breath from my lungs, and I struggled to push myself back to shaky feet amidst the rumbling chaos. Eventually, the ship righted itself with so much inertia that some crates broke against one another. Somehow, I remained mercifully undamaged when everything relatively settled back to normal, and I was left engulfed in an eerie, dark silence.
The overhead lantern must have come unhinged from the beams above in all the chaos and gotten snuffed out. Combined with the humidity and dank air of the deck boards down here, it must have been enough to put a stop to any potential for a fire right out of the gate.
I looked around. I was alone. I tried calling out, only to choke on a bout of wracking coughs. I tried again.
“Hello? Lady?” There was no response, only the eerie groan of the ship as it fought against the sea. I scanned the dimly lit deck, my heart hammering against my ribs.
“Ada?” I whispered to the darkness in front of me.
“Yes, New Soul?”
“Am I dead?”
“…No. You are not dead, New Soul.”
“…Um, Ada?” I breathed heavily.
“Yes?”
“Stop calling me that. Lady!?” I harshly hissed to the darkness, a desperation edging into my voice. Still, there was no answer—no sign of the fiery-haired woman. Panic set in as I carefully made my way forward, navigating through and around debris. Then, in the dark, I saw a figure slumped low and sideways against the wall. My stomach dropped. It was her. And her body was unnaturally still, her vibrant red hair darkened by shadows and what I feared was blood. Approaching cautiously, my worst fears were confirmed. A slowly spreading pool of blood was visible beneath her head, stark against the dark wood of the deck. My hands trembled as I knelt beside her, the cold grip of fear tightening around my heart.
“Hey, hey, hey, are you okay?” I whispered, reaching out tentatively to check for signs of life.
Her chest rose and fell shallowly. Relief washed over me, but it was quickly replaced by a sense of urgency.
I needed to find help—now.