“So wait, I am confused. You are saying that Quiet Code is possessing your armor?” Akyo asked shyly. “That sounds dangerous. I have heard stories about possessed arms and armor, and they generally end badly.”
“No, I am not possessing your armor, not really, or if I am, it’s more like I have...temporarily taken up residence, like a spirit of metal or something, to improve what you have already created.”
“Improved?” I asked Quiet Code.
“Yes. Not your armor design, I can’t enchant it or anything, you are going to need to do that yourself when you learn how, but figuring out what you want and making sure the UI can handle it is what I have been working on for a while. You keep asking if I am an AI, but I’m really not, just a copy of Pixie’s consciousness… and she’s going to LOVE that name when I get back. If I were an AI I would be working a LOT faster, but since I am a sort of psychic clone, I can only think as fast as she does, and you have a metric ton of room in here… it’s like every moment I discover a new set of rooms, with a new set of tools.”
“I am just glad you didn’t include offensive systems at first other than theft protection. If you’d included a fraction as many weapon systems other than your ‘general plug-in controls’ for adding new modular components, I’d probably still be trying to figure out how to access your helmet speakers to talk to you.”
“I’m not exactly a weapons designer. Wrong framework. I mean, I might be able to improve existing systems or make them smaller, but I don’t really need them… anything small enough to fit inconspicuously in the suit I can do better just using my abilities. Except maybe a melee weapon, but I don’t have the training to be good with those yet.”
I glanced back at Akyo. She was an absolute stunner, and I had to admit she hit me right in my protective instincts, even though she could probably squash me like a grape. She was dressed up in sort of a casual Cheongsam shirt, completely ignoring the fact that it was a Chinese style since it looked amazing on her, and a pair of fluffy wide-leg black pants of a style that I didn’t recall the name of. Red silk on most girls makes them look slutty, but on her, it looked refined, especially with her hair up in chopsticks for class.
Currently, after yesterday’s excitement, I was officially restricted to campus. Which was fine for me, since I had several things I needed to do, including recovering my energy from yesterday’s fight. I wasn’t exactly being punished, but apparently, students getting involved with fighting greater Kaiju without any real combat training other than teamwork courses was frowned upon.
“She says she’s more like a metal spirit or something like that. She’s using my armor as a prototype for a system UI while she develops what she calls a semi-AI to handle all of its sensor packages. Once she’s done and boots it up, she goes back to Princess Pixel, like an astral projection thing, I think.”
“Are you in contact with her right now?”
I nodded and tapped my redesigned earbud. “Yep. I have a direct link to my helmet, and from there you already know that I have a spectrum of connections to your own armors and earbuds, like a switching station. Quiet Code also has a direct connection to Princess Pixel through that, and if I need either of them, it just takes a second to connect.”
“If Quiet Code is Princess Pixel’s astral spirit, can’t she just connect to it that way?”
“Not exactly. We send impressions and feelings and can communicate that way, but we are like two different sides of the same brain. We each think… sort of differently, and can’t really discuss things with each other until we are both the same person. Then again, I am her data interpreter, so when I am here working with you, her ability to use computers well is impaired. We have two gifts, data spirit and light illusions, and I am the part that is data spirit, she has the part that is light illusions. Right now, she’s using my absence as an excuse to improve her physical and light-based training, and wants me to let you know that she’s ahh… not wearing any clothes while she works out and gets all sweaty.”
I groaned, “You too?”
“Me too? Oh no, she’s got the body and the sex drive, I am still fascinated by your armor. But I also have a lot of her umm… inhibitions, and you happen to be the most accessible male at the moment, despite not being in proximity. Don’t be surprised if she acts a little fixated at the moment, since you are practically holding half of her soul right now.”
“Me too?” asked Akyo.
I shook my head, “No, not you. I meant Pixie. Apparently, when she’s separated from Quiet Code, she loses some of her logic and inhibitions, and Quiet Code is letting me know that it’s reflecting on me.”
Akyo nodded solemnly, “That makes sense. I mean, you aren’t ugly and you reflect both the good guy and the bad guy vibe. Is it really a surprise that in the close-knit world of alphas, where there is a definite scarcity working in your favor, you get a lot of attention?”
I shook my head, “Not sure about the attractiveness thing, but yeah… it does get a little uncomfortable. I mean, I am a guy, we are used to taking the initiative, even if we get shot down a lot. It’s a lot easier to deal with now that I realize that that’s just Candace’s way… I saw her flirting with Magnum from the Flare yesterday, and she’s even more blunt than she is with me, and that helps to keep her in the ‘sexual tension but a buddy’ category, but it all feels like a bit much at times.”
Akyo nodded, “Well, as long as you realize that buddy or not, she’d still jump you if she had the chance, I guess that works,” she was blushing a little, which was kind of an appealing look. I might have to see if I could embarrass her a little more often without making her angry. It was a tough challenge, but it might be a fun one.
Sabrina was definitely in the ‘ally of convenience’ category, Mindy was the ‘beautiful but boss’, and Candace was an ‘irrepressible flirty buddy’ which made it easier to keep my cool. Akyo and Abigail were the ones I was having trouble categorizing, exactly, which made me nervous. Honestly, I had zero interest in having a harem, but if I did, those two would have been at the top of the list. Akyo appealed to my inner weeb, and Abigail just had to put on her glasses and put her hair down to make me want to do unspeakable things to her, a fact which I half-suspected she already knew… plus I still owed her a date.
And technically, I owed Pixie a kiss. Which didn’t help much, since, in her own way, she and Abbey had a lot in common and pretty much attracted me for similar reasons. I guess, in the end, I just had a thing for short, helpless-looking smart girls. Librarian kink? maybe.
“To change the subject, would you happen to know anything about Chi, or ki, or whatever that is?”
She nodded, “I assume you mean the real thing that alphas manipulate to express their abilities, rather than the metaphysical energy that martial artists use to focus and break boards?”
“There’s a difference?”
She nodded, “Absolutely. A huge difference. While they are typically the same energy, it is used differently. A martial artist will focus on improving their chi flow through their body, using it to increase their body’s refinement and capabilities rather than focusing on external techniques. It’s called body cultivation.”
“On the other hand, spiritual cultivators use it to charge their dantians and build up their internal treasures so that they can project that energy. Alphas do that naturally, although mostly they don’t train it on a spiritual level. Instead, they focus on increasing their speed with using it and the direct amount they can channel, which is a limited path… it’s like learning how to draw a gun really fast without bothering to improve your aim or buy a better gun.”
“Do you train it?”
She nodded, “Yes, although since I am still trapped by a reliance on external energy, I have been mostly trying to improve my efficiency, because overdrawing energy is harmful to the environment. I was hoping you could help with that because of uhh… what you did with Frost Phoenix.”
I chuckled, “You know I am not convinced that it will work with someone that doesn’t have nearly identical pow…” I thought about that for a second. My power WASN’T momentum, that was my focus or my Dao, my actual power was observation. “I take that back, it might work, but are you sure you want to try that? It comes with big downsides.”
She nodded, “I am well aware. You never really asked me about what you did, but I have a very deep power well so that I have to use minimal external energy when balancing my earth control, and my body refinement is good enough that I can play tank even without a secondary physical affinity.”
I nodded, “Do you know the differences between what your true affinity and your dao are? Sabrina was telling me about that, and it made me come to some conclusions about that.”
She smiled, “Jake, I was steeped in that sort of thing for half my life. If you are asking about it, I will show you, if you will show me yours.”
I looked at her closely. She kind of had that ‘mysterious’ thing going on, so I wasn’t sure if she was flirting or not… she had a serious expression on her face, though, so I was inclined to believe she was just using the terminology expressively, since it was her second language, rather than trying to tease.
I slowly nodded, “Okay, after much introspection, I realized that my power is NOT momentum. That is my dao, but my actual affinity is introspection. That’s why I can memorize stupidly huge amounts of data to blueprint things, and keep focus on trillions of molecules at a time. That introspection allows me to focus on individual units of energy, quantum energy, chi, or whatever, and my dao helps me decide where each particle is located, its velocity and direction, which is where my superpowers come from.”
She smiled, “That is excellent! But umm… you said that Sabrina taught you this?”
I nodded, “She seemed to understand a lot about it.”
She nodded slowly, “Sabrina’s concepts were forged around her alchemy. Each of the various specializations would comprehend Dao differently. Martial artists think about things in terms of forms, around which their body cultivations are built. Alchemists think of them as differing Dao, because that is the majority of how they view the world, a necessary view to understand how the various external substances they use will work together. Similarly, Sorcerers, formation masters, and talisman creators all think of them in terms that fit within their own laws.”
“So you are saying she’s wrong?” I asked. I remembered her mentioning things might be different for me than for an alchemist, and I guess this is what she meant.
She shook her head, “No, I am saying she’s specialized. Her outlook is shaped by that specialization. Can I introduce a new term to you?”
“Sure. I promise I’ll remember,” I laughed.
She nodded, seriously. “Superpowers, or affinities, or the basic core of how alphas use their abilities, are techniques. They are natural techniques that people who gain alpha abilities adopt instinctively when their life is threatened. What she refers to as dao, the rest of us, or at least humans that come from Earth before it was sealed, referred to as laws… or more precisely, they are small pieces of laws that improve based on our understanding of the concepts that make up those laws.”
“In your case, that technique is observation of all things. That used to be referred to as spirit sight, soul sight, or endless awareness, but observation certainly matches the description. The thing is, techniques can be LEARNED, but they usually have a minimum power level that they can be learned at. That is probably why, with your understanding of the concepts of the law of motion, your ability to influence momentum was very limited… just the tiniest bit of motion attached to your expansive comprehension of the ultimate essence of so many things allowed you to manipulate things at a tiny scale. Usually, by the time someone is powerful enough to learn a technique like spirit sight, they are already capable of using their internal essence and comprehension of the laws of motion to move mountains.”
Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
“You were… unbalanced, having such a powerful technique innately, but having so little essence available to use it effectively with your understanding of the concept of momentum.”
I nodded, paying closer attention. What she was telling me jibed, on a lot closer level, with what I understood than what Sabrina had been telling me.
“As an alchemist, her innate understanding of concepts would revolve around fire and wood elements. Her techniques, on the other hand, would mostly involve empowering substances through those concepts to unlock and purify their essence… making potions, pills, and Philters.”
She sighed deeply, “That is why so many males, when they unlock their innate abilities, don’t understand how to use them. They would gain a technique, but without a law to govern them, their minds or abilities would destroy them. On the other hand, if they innately understood and could apply a law, techniques, at least minor and inefficient ones, would quickly follow.”
“Females, generally, would unlock a technique AND a law. That’s why I always find the ‘genetics’ theory and the way they apply it to be somewhat amusing. It’s not genetics, it’s a simple understanding, although your genes may have a hand in determining your instinctive concepts and techniques. Women are born surrounded by restrictions, we incorporate them as easily as breathing. Men are urged to explore and to break down restrictions, and their mind naturally adapts to the idea of struggling against any artificial restrictions… but in the end, that’s what a law is, a useful restriction that helps us channel our essence into the world, to create effects that MATCH the world’s restrictions.”
“Heh, I think that idea would drive Senpai Bob nuts.”
She nodded, “It flies in the face of everything he understands, and nobody, especially a man, enjoys change… sometimes, change breaks people.”
“If you want to grow in power, and break through the first tribulation, what you have already done… growing your power, absorbing it, and increasing its density, is the most important part. It also helps to do what you have been doing… adapting your body by sending essence flowing through it like a martial artist, to cause it to change and become a more perfect vessel for your law, the law of motion. To break through, you need to fully conceptualize motion beyond momentum, to understand and apply it more effectively, and to ensure that your power has the kind of density and growth you need to ensure a powerful and stable foundation, which is what it will become after you break through to level one,” she added.
“Level one?”
She nodded, smiling, “Yes. The first pillar of immortality. Or rather, the structure that you create, the foundation upon which your pillars of immortality, your spiritual fortress, and your true core will be built. The landscape in which your nascent soul will live. It’s basically a lot like building a house for your future spiritual being to live in.”
“Huh. So wait… does that mean that even the strongest of alphas, like Graviton, are really just weak newbies?”
She nodded, “In the grand scale of things, certainly. A cultivator who comprehends multiple laws, has raised his nine pillars of immortality, and has given rise to his nascent soul and fully realized his spiritual fortress is capable of power on a scale that we mere mortals can barely comprehend. Once they hit that level, they can keep progressing, but not here, not on Earth… Earth is a mortal-scale world, and once you have created your golden core, where your nascent soul will be born, any further steps you take will be too powerful for our world to contain. Nascent soul levels BUILD worlds. Most people wouldn’t even try to achieve that before finding a more powerful realm that could resist their energy draw without crumbling, at least, in the stories.”
“So, what is your technique and Law?” I asked.
She smiled evilly, “I don’t HAVE a technique. Or at least I wasn’t born with one. I created them, and everything you have seen me do has been based on minor and terribly inefficient techniques I have created to embrace the concept I instinctively understand… The concept of obdurate stone, a subset of the law of earth.”
“But, like you, I have been circulating essence since I was a child. That’s why I am pretty tough even without my armor and can take hits that would pulverize a human even with my stone casing. Not as well as Candace without my stone body technique, but we train differently.”
She looked at me again with a hard-to-decipher expression, “But with your technique, spirit sensing, you could absolutely use your law to move my power away from the chaos gate that my current understanding natively pulls from. I can’t cultivate normally, because it would be like trying to push water from a pond with your hands into a cup while you are getting pummeled by a fire hose. If we dual cultivated, you could help change the way that hose is facing so I could finally begin gathering that water the natural way, from the natural world, and purifying it for my own use instead of just accepting the water that sprayed onto me and my cup and letting the rest drip off.”
I chuckled, “Metaphors. I love me some metaphors. I get it. Remind me to tell you about the fish sometime.”
“The fish?”
I nodded, “Yeah, Bob told me that power was like water, and humans were like fish. We live in it so we don’t even recognize it, and it takes getting pulled from the lake to finally realize that it’s different from air.”
She thought about that carefully, “Which is what having a threat to your life that your natural technique can help with addresses. I get it. It’s a very good metaphor. I thought you were going to talk about the Koi and the waterfall.”
“The huh?”
She smiled, “It’s a cultivation story. A Koi that swims directly up the waterfall, or a cultivator that embraces all the willpower, bravery, suffering, and strength for the almost impossible journey of becoming an immortal, well, that koi will pass through the dragon gate and become a dragon, or a cultivator that strives in the face of all adversity becomes an immortal.”
“Honestly, that myth is...pretty solid for everything, not just cultivation. Work hard enough and you can become successful. Of course, in the real world, you still need talent, connections, and luck to make it,” I replied.
She smiled, “And in the real world, a koi can’t swim up a waterfall without help or cheating.”
I laughed, “Okay, so what is involved?”
She blushed again, “Well… let’s put it this way. You have created many minor techniques by applying your concept, momentum, in small ways with the technique of spirit sight… because of your understanding of this universe’s laws, you have grasped formation, fire, cold, electricity, and many other techniques easily.”
“Because of Candace’s concept, persistence, she has innately enhanced her body to a great degree. She has applied her technique, wind creation, to form many minor techniques like flight and walls of air.”
“Flight is minor?”
She nodded, “Very minor, although the fact that she has an endlessly wasteful source of power helps. But with Candace, persistence is just another concept of motion rather than resistance. Her understanding of that law is very close to yours, and so simple contact, focus, and intent would be enough to change her power focus the same way you changed Frost Phoenix’s.”
“Mindy, however, has a very different law, temperature, which is a sub-concept of fire and ice. She has two laws, but it would be more difficult to alter them, because the way she understands temperature is different from the way YOU understand temperature, as molecular motion, even if the effect is similar. It would be much more strenuous for her, but possible.”
“Abbey might be even easier because her technique is information, which is a similar, but slightly less encompassing form of spirit sight. That’s why she has to be able to conceptually ‘see’ the information she manipulates. Her understanding of how to manipulate reality is very similar to yours, since change, again, is a form of motion. Barely any focus would be needed, since even when she uses her powers to extremes, they barely use any external energy at all… her ‘firehose’ is more akin to spraying water from a drinking straw, and with enough focus, she might even be able to change her energy accumulation without any help at all.”
I nodded. “And you?”
“Durability, stone, rock, earth. The complete opposite of your basic law. Obdurate resistance. You could help me, but it would take a much more… strenuous form of dual cultivation On the plus side, though, my Yin is intact, which means you would gain a great deal of power from it.”
“Okay, I think I am getting a little lost. You might have to dumb it down for me.”
She turned bright red. “Fine. Blunt. We would have to have sex. That’s what dual cultivation is usually a euphemism for because it’s the most obvious method. You would have to transfer energy to me, I would transfer it back to you, and we would shut off access to the chaos energy because we would be swapping energy instead, and making it more powerful with each revolution. And yin intact means I have never… been with a man before, and when you dual cultivate with someone the first time, that act passes a large amount of Yin energy to you… energy you would usually have a great deal of trouble collecting naturally because you are a man, and men are yang-aligned. Is that blunt enough for you?”
I nodded, “Yeah, that’s pretty much a sledgehammer to the face. Are you asking me if I want to have sex with you?”
She shook her head, “No. I am asking you to think about what it would take. There’s also a very serious risk that one of us might accidentally turn the other into a cultivation vessel because it’s all too easy to switch from giving each other energy to one of us TAKING it from the other and draining them.”
“Yeah, umm… Sabrina was talking about that, and said it’s very common for demonic cultivators to do that intentionally to grow their power.”
She nodded, “It is incredibly easy for a demonic cultivator to grow quickly by destroying others through dual cultivation, and it is a risk because according to the stories it is horribly tempting to take instead of give. I am not asking you to have sex with me, I am just telling you that it might be required for me to… break free of the chaos energy cycle, a DIFFERENT kind of demonic cultivation. What you decide to do with it is your decision.”
I nodded, “Isn’t that your decision too?”
“Huh?”
“I mean, doing that… dual cultivation, sex, that’s as much your decision as mine. I wouldn’t do that without your willingness and uhh… participation, because, as you said, that would be TAKING from you instead of giving.”
She blushed yet again. “No. I mean, yes, but uhh.. yeah. I mean, I already decided that if you wanted to, I wouldn’t object. Oh, that sounds too passive. I mean, I decided to trust you, because you could have done that to Frost Phoenix and you didn’t, and I…”
I held up my hand. “Hold on a moment, slow down. Take your time.”
She nodded and gulped. Well, yeah, I finally figured out how to keep her blushing, it was weirdly fun. To be honest, I was probably blushing a little too, but it was still fun.
“I already decided that I would want to give you my yin if you wanted it, and I trust you.”
“So you already decided that you wanted to sleep with me and you would if I agreed.”
She turned even darker red, and then shot out, “You make me sound like Candace!”
I scratched my head, “Is that supposed to be an insult? I think Candace is a wonderful girl, if a little too aggressive for my tastes. But no, I simply wanted to know that if we did decide to date or something, and do things properly, that it was on the table. Not as a payout, but as a decision that is possible. I thought that your upbringing was really conservative Japanese, and we would have to make pledges, and move to Japan and get married.”
“Oh,” she said. “No… that’s a little too backwoods. I am not exactly cosmopolitan, but… I need to return to Japan after my training is complete.”
I nodded and sighed, “Then my answer would have to be no.”
Akyo looked stricken, and I couldn’t really blame her after her confession. “No?” she asked hopelessly. It probably cost her a lot to make the offer, and here I was turning it away like a doorknob.
“If I sleep with someone, it’s going to be because I care about someone, love them, and not because it’s useful or convenient… and if you have to leave, I am not going to sleep with someone that I have no future with. Not again. I like to think I can learn from my mistakes, and maybe we can find another way.”
She looked at me oddly, but at least she didn’t look heartbroken anymore. “Oh, So how do you want to… uhh… deal?”
I smiled slightly, “I will think about it, and then you think about it and decide what you really want, and what you are willing to do to have it. But as you mentioned, I have a useful technique, and it might give me some insight into how to help you without you giving me your… uhh… Yin. Give it some time, we can both think about it and maybe something will change. We do have time, I hope.”
She nodded and hopped to her feet. “That’s exactly what I am going to do!”
“What, you are leaving right now?”
She nodded and started stalking off purposefully, “Yes. I need to call my mom!”
I glared at the door as she left the room, and then said helplessly, “You need to do WHAT?”
Behind me, in my imagination, stretched a long line of guys who would beat my ass like a drum for turning down freely offered, amazingly attractive, and consequence-free booty that would accomplish a greater good by claiming.
But the question was, would it really have been consequence-free?