Candace was looking at us both in curiosity. I had to admit, she looked good, and this was going to be unusually sensual, but hopefully, we’d be able to push past this. Of course, it didn’t help that she had taken my advice to heart, and was wearing a little red swimsuit that might get her put into jail for indecent exposure. “So… this is going to make my power drop?”
I nodded, “Sort of? However, according to Abbey, she’s already past the power level she was at before. She’s capable of making more comprehensive minor changes, and she said that her range for information manipulation has nearly doubled for jumping gaps. In your case, you already reinforced your body quite a bit, which means that with the new power density, you might be more powerful than you were before.”
Sabrina nodded, “Yes, plus I made some crystalline aspect body purification pills. I strongly suspect that they will actually improve your body reinforcement. Your air manipulation probably won’t grow, and you will need to be more careful with how you spend your energy since you won’t be flooded at all times like before, but you should have an awful lot of power before you are tapped, and with an affinity like wind, heading to the top of the student hall and meditating to gain it back should happen very quickly.”
She nodded, “So I will be stronger and tougher than before, and possibly stronger wind powers, but with less endurance for using them. I can probably deal with that.” she sat down on the mats. This room was starting to get some real use. “So how is this going to work?”
I glanced at Sabrina, and she smiled a little, “Well, we take the pills.” she held out a small box and opened it, which had three translucent-looking oval pills nested inside on a bed of some kind of grass. “And then we hold hands, although we might need to get closer than that, maybe even hugging, to get the cycle going. Jake will transfer the energy to me, and then I will send it to you.
“The really hard part is going to be when you send it to him. You will feel it like you are filled up with uhh…”
I chuckled, “It should probably feel good, but you might feel overstretched. Not physically, but like you just had a really great workout and then lots of mind-blowing sex. Once you feel like that, I will try to link to you, and you can pass it to me when you feel me tugging.
“Apparently, there are lots more things we have to do to keep boosting our powers once we have capped and compressed our energy, but the exact details… let’s just say that if this works as well as I expect, I’ll be trying to use it as a bribe to get our delightful Akyo to cut loose some information we need on it.”
“Akyo knows more?”
I nodded, “Yes, but she’s not being terrifically forthcoming. She has her own plans, and I think I am going to have to bribe her.”
Candace snorted, “Bribery? Do you think that will work? She’s not exactly poor. Her family could afford three of Tokyo’s class sevens to escort her here.”
I grinned and flopped down next to her, and waved at Sabrina to join us. “Yes, I think I might have a bribe she wants.” I took Candace’s hand, and she looked almost surprised as I wrapped my own around hers, after a moment, I realized I was almost as strong as she was. Apparently, I had been getting as much out of these sessions as the people I’d cultivated with.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked both of them.
Sabrina curled up and scooted close to me that her knees touched mine. “You know I do. I mean, I’d want to anyway, but this sort of chance, for an alchemist? It never happens. We even have a word for it, it’s called a Terepekai, a windfall of genius. To be honest, I wish I still had my yin to offer you, to try and repay you for it.”
I smiled at Sabrina, “Thank you for trusting me. And I know that the Maxwells still have your family. We will find some way to get them back. Candace?”
She laughed, “Have you ever seen me back down from a challenge? Hell, I can’t wait until you are year two and we start getting REAL fights. If this has a chance of getting me past class four, I wouldn’t miss it for the world.” she scooted closer until all of our knees were touching, and then smirked a little, “Too bad this isn’t an orgy, though, I would rock your world like you wouldn’t believe.”
I grinned, “On the contrary, I would totally believe it. Alright, I need you both to start breathing like this…” and I started with the tuna breathing Bob had taught me first in the very beginning. I actually chuckled a little, I know it wasn’t actually pronounced tuna, but Tu Na breathing brought back memories of the fish metaphor, and we were about to learn how to breathe air. We took the pills, and I could feel the burning, cleansing effect running through my energy channels.
It wasn’t exactly an anticlimax, but it was a HELL of a lot easier than it had been before, mostly because Sabrina easily caught my energy strand like she’d been practicing for it her whole life… and considering she knew how to draw energy from things as an alchemist, it was probably true. She seemed to be enjoying herself but was much more controlled and was able to start spinning her core on her own without any help from me.
I had to be careful since her actual energy core was much smaller than mine, but it slowly started stretching as it filled, and I could feel how easy it would be just to… snap it, and draw all the energy into myself as her energy thickened. She had some clogging in her energy network, but probably because she had been practicing and taking purification pills her whole life, it was swept away rather easily. If anything, the substances she had created to increase her own power had been the source of her impurities, because they merged into her purifying stream almost as if they were glad to finally be released from her energy corridors.
When she was finally gasping and stretched out as much as she could, she started feeding energy to Candace, and it started… not well.
Candace had huge blockages everywhere, and the energy stream that Sabrina fed into her was not the powerful but slow and inexorable movement of liquefied energy I had used on her and Abbey. It was more like a wind tunnel, the energy thready and trying to tear apart her energy network.
Candace was squirming in pain, but I was already past Sabrina’s auric barrier, and I did the only thing I could think of. I fed my own energy directly through Sabrina, forcing her energy back into her own network where it could stabilize, and running mine through the bond she had made with Candace. Candace looked absolutely shocked, but then closed her eyes tightly and just kept spinning her core as I ran my energy around the outside of it, like a race car trying to take the outside loop. I could see that the pressure was hurting her a little, but her spinning core was just trying to keep up with the passive bleed-off effect of my own.
After a few moments, Candace started relaxing just a little, steadying her breathing as my energy curled through her passageways, slowly wearing away the blockages and gently flushing them like milk through a stack of crackers. Dammit, I should have had Sabrina do the same acupuncture thing to her as she did to me, but I persevered until Candace started moaning, in pleasure, I hoped.
Candace had a very deep energy well, deeper than mine, actually, and her energy was already partly congealed, once I started gently nudging her core to start spinning, I could see her pick it up and quickly start spinning it herself. After a moment, I did the same trick as I had done with Abbey, tugging her body to my chest and gently starting to draw the energy out until she recognized what I was doing and fed it to me because I knew if I didn’t start regaining some of the energy she could drain me dry.
It felt like hours later… and probably was, the circle finally started cleanly passing energy through all three of us, and I could withdraw my direct control from the energy strands threading their way through Sabrina into Candace. Finally, we were able to move backward from the close proximity, hands still linked together, as the tide rose in all three of us from our sharing. And yes, it felt incredible… the problem was, my energy was thickening again, drawing in all the extra liquified energy that they were producing… it was almost like my pool was empty, and my core was grinding to a halt.
No, it wasn’t stopping, it was simply passing on the energy without the motion itself, like an electrical charge down all of my channels and back into me, and even the overabundance the girls were producing still just kept getting drawn in and cemented into the bottom of my basin. Eventually, it seemed we were filled, all three of us, even though Sabrina and Candace were still liquid, mine seemed to have solidified into crystal in my veins, the electrical discharges of energy movement without the actual essence flow ricocheting through my body.
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Sabrina had the presence of mine to drop the connection, shaking off my hand and slapping Candace’s hand away from mine as well, as I started feeling nothing but incredibly painful shockwaves passing through my body. I fell backward, and it felt like I had stuck my fingers into an electrical outlet as Sabrina yelled, “Stop! He’s breaking through! That’s a tribulation! We need to get him his suit!”
My body was starting to… dissolve, for want of a better term, under the force of the shockwaves, and I was struggling to rebuild it as quickly as possible. The new energy was almost the opposite of chaos energy, not bound to the law of motion, but almost completely formless… My body sponged it up so quickly, and I had no idea whatsoever where it was coming from.
It was coming from someplace outside of me, it had to be… My suit… My suit? Right! My suit had dampeners. They were meant for traditional energies, but maybe it could help. I was losing control trying to blueprint my body as quickly as it was being damaged, so I did the only thing I could think of… I heard a loud popping noise as everything around me save the girls themselves, the tatami mats beneath me, the wooden floor and concrete beneath that, the air itself, was quickly sucked in to blueprint my suit around me.
I didn’t care that I was burning off incredible amounts of energy to form the suit from the wrong materials, I was desperately trying to get RID of the destructive surplus that was tearing me apart. The suit that I knew best, at this point, was my mark four, the one that Princess Pixel had used her Quiet Code persona to inhabit for weeks.
It seemed to help, either burning off the excess, or the dampeners, heat sinks, EMP wells, and breakers… I was absolutely and utterly drained, physically and mentally, but the long, drawn-out burning, pulling my body into the shocks and destroying my flesh seemed to be easing off, finally.
The last thing I heard, was an odd-sounding female voice in my ears, one that I didn’t recognize that sounded slightly like Quiet Code’s synthesized voice with a measure of surprising warmth and amusement, saying, “Well, isn’t THIS interesting. Oops. Hold on.” before I passed out. Again.
***
“Is he going to be okay? Candace asked again, as Sabrina fed him what she called a centering pill. Fortunately, whatever he had done to utterly wreck the practice room hadn’t harmed either of them and his new suit, however it had magically appeared, hadn’t had his helmet sealed.
Sabrina nodded, in concern, “Yes, I believe so. His spirit and qi are strong, but his willpower is almost totally tapped. He’s probably going to sleep for two days solid. His healing kept up with it for a little while, but when the tribulations started, I thought we would lose him.
“The Chaos essence is strong enough that when it started converting to divine essence when the punishments of the heavens started punishing him for defying their will, it was… stronger than any I have ever seen, even stronger than a golden core’s tribulations. But his will was strong enough to survive it, I have no idea why.”
“Is there any way we can help?”
She nodded, “Yes, but there’s something more important you have to do.”
Candace looked at Sabrina askance, “More important? I know he said we might lose power, but I didn’t… I can feel my strength like never before, and the wind practically begs me to control it. Which means he is phenomenally important! What could b e more important than helping him?”
Sabrina sighed deeply. “He will be okay. He didn’t burn out, he didn’t die, and he broke through… time, and sleep, will do more for him than we can. I don’t know if he will need food when he wakes up, but he might. He just went through all of the tribulations that should have occurred to reinforce his body at the same time. The tribulations for breaking through from mortal to body refiner, body refiner to qi condensation, and condensation to a foundation, all at once, he was not ready for it, which was why he...sort of died, a lot.
“But you will be going through the same thing. Not soon, but eventually. Don’t waste what he’s done by pushing too quickly like he did. You are already damned close to ready, but take your time, and refine your body until it’s ready, so that you only have one tribulation when you finally break through. Take a few years. Fight, grow stronger, but please don’t push too hard to go to the next level. Heavens know I won’t, I have plenty of time, and so do you.”
Candace looked at her oddly, “What do you mean, plenty of time?”
Sabrina chuckled, “Ever notice how powerful alphas don’t seem to age? Well, each time you go through a tier, your lifespan extends. By forcing us to hop to the last stages of qi condensation, our lifespans will be in the hundreds of years. So will Abbey’s, and Frost Phoenix's too. During that time, we can and will be absorbing the chaos energy.” she sniffed, “In fact, on this island, right at this moment? His breakthrough dropped the chaos essence enormously, I bet old-fashioned radios would work fine for at least a few months until the ambient essence reestablishes itself.
“I suspect that Kaiju will even avoid this coast for a while… to their chaos senses, this place probably smells like desolation after his breakthrough soaked up so much chaos essence. So what you can do is take your time. Every time you spin up your core and absorb the essence, you will be helping to break down the concentration. If enough people can start doing that, we could set back the clock on this world’s dissolution into a chaotic realm.”
“So he has to do that again?”
Sabrina nodded, “Yes, and so do we if we can, although we might have to use more traditional dual cultivation methods to do what his law allows him to do just from contact. That, and survive, keep destroying kaiju and chaos spawn, and then someday we can break through and have the same effect.
“I probably won’t be able to help much myself. I could never instigate dual cultivation, because my qi doesn’t work that way, but he ignited my alchemical flame, and there’s other stuff I can do, especially if I ever break through… but I plan on taking my time so I am strong enough not to kill myself if it happens.”
“Your flame what?”
Sabrina held out her hand and a purplish fire appeared in her hand. “Indigo. He ignited my alchemist’s flame as indigo. That’s incredibly pure… and I can use it to create alchemical substances of astonishing purity. I was hoping for yellow, or even green, but indigo? That’s the same purity as dragonfire. The only thing better would be either a legacy or a divine flame.”
Sabrina actually giggled, a sound Cadence hadn’t heard before. “In my world, an indigo flame would put me on the fast track to becoming a grandmaster alchemist. The greatest teachers would be begging me to become their disciple. So I suggest you do what I plan on doing, and not wasting that gift.”
Cadence nodded and sighed, “Does that mean I shouldn’t go out and practice my new power level? I bet I could be reclassified as a class six if I wanted to. I can FEEL the upper atmosphere up there, ready to do whatever I ask.”
Sabrina shook her head, “Not at all. Just remember that your energy pool is finite now, and I guess I don’t have to tell you what will happen if you are doing Mach six in the upper atmosphere and you suddenly run out of power.”
Candace winced and nodded, “Point taken. Who knows? As a class six, I might be able to find some poor, unfortunate male alpha that wants a power boost, and start spreading the infection a little.”
Sabrina laughed, “Maybe, but I wouldn’t try it until you can actually see the qi like he can, and can guide them through the upgrade like Jake did, or you might accidentally rid the world of a male alpha, possibly in a spectacularly messy fashion.”
Candace shivered, “Alright. I will be back.” and she headed out of the studio.
Sabrina remained, meditating on her new flame as she kept careful watch on her savior until the others could arrive and she could explain what happened and what their new roles would be.
***
She thrashed, deep beneath the surface. Her slave had failed, badly. If anything, he had added his essence, HER essence, to that surface creature’s cache when it died like an idiot. She momentarily thought that perhaps she should have allowed her creatures to gain more intelligence, but intelligence leads to rebellion, and she was not one to ever doubt her own foresight.
But now… now, a good section of the holdout legged beasts had gained a reprieve from her slowly encroaching power, and that was INFURIATING. Whatever it had done, had dramatically dropped the level of life energy, the energy she depended and her beasts depended on, in a radius around the chunk of that northern continent’s east coast. This could not happen again.
She couldn’t send her beasts again, not until it stabilized, but that thing had declared war on her, the ultimate foolishness for a god like her. Sooner or later the level would stabiize, and when it did, she would send a horde to destroy it the likes of which the world had never seen.
She still remembered the two-legger that she had consumed. A biophysicist-turned-alpha supervillain who’s brain she had assimilated while she was still just a vaguely intelligent kaiju. He had intended to turn HER ocean into his own personal abomination playground, and his brain, and mind, were part of her now… In a way, she owed him a debt for helping her become the goddess she was today. His memories still floated around in her subconscious and sometimes helped her plan her own monstrosities like the Orca Kaiju.
Of course, while giving something like the old squid killers-turned-slave Kaiju higher intelligence and the ability to challenge her rule would be ridiculous, making some of her smaller minions more intelligent, intelligent enough to destroy the invaders, might be profitable, so she set to work upraising some of her smaller slaves and changing their energy pathways to promote some intellect. They had been successful in the past, which meant that the tactic was likely to be successful in the future, and when the life-energy reset to its naturally rising rate, she would make sure that they were prepared to exploit it and remove the bone from her hide.
A setback was only a setback if you didn’t learn from it, and as a goddess with a brain the size of an old supertanker, learning from both victories and minor setbacks was one of her greatest strengths.