Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 2: Home Again (Patreon)

Thirteen sixth-stage cultivators in just three years. Once, I couldn't even have imagined a number like that among humanity. Even so, the demons had eleven eighth-stage cultivators. In a direct confrontation, we wouldn't stand a chance. They could wipe us out with ease.

Fortunately, the Clan Union was deeply fragmented, and the forces they usually sent against Earth were raid groups led by a seventh-stage cultivator.

We had a very real chance of repelling the next attack. What came afterwards...

First, we had to live long enough to find out.

I spent several hours at Novak's. Between us, we finished off a bottle of his premium cultivator's alcohol, and my head was pleasantly fuzzy in a way it hadn't been for a very long time.

I went down to the underground, settled into the corner of a carriage, looked at my reflection in the dark window opposite, and tried to savour the moment — the sort of thing a slightly tipsy man in a good mood ought to do.

Demons, battles, emotions, the pile of emails that had suddenly landed in my inbox... I decided to leave all that until tomorrow. If anything had been truly urgent, someone would have called me.

Unhurried and quietly content, I made my way back to the room I hadn't seen in three years.

Nothing had changed. The same scent of metal and sterilised air lingered in the room. The only thing missing was Chen's sword, which needed to be hung back on the wall. Ever since the old man died, I'd carried it with me like a dependable good-luck charm.

I switched on the window and selected a sunset over a mountain.

Anita had an atmosphere, so my room at Black Hole College had featured a real window. The view, however, had been nowhere near as majestic, and it certainly couldn't be changed.

I kicked off my shoes and collapsed onto the bed without even getting changed. Sleep claimed me before I had time to think about it.

Morning, on the other hand, arrived entirely without warning. It felt as though there had been no transition at all between the moment my eyes closed and the moment they opened again.

I wasn't ready to face the morning and didn't realise at first that it had already come. The sun beyond the distant mountain in the artificial window had long since set, and now the nearer slope was bathed in a soft golden light.

My head wasn't pounding nearly as much as I'd expected after Novak's bourbon. It had been the first time I'd actually got drunk in a very long while, but late third-stage cultivators recovered quickly. Even so, the faint tension in my temples was a reminder that the previous evening had been a lively one.

To clear my head and shake off the morning haze, I put the kettle on while catching up on everything I'd put off until today.

First came the forty-three unread emails and the hundreds of chat messages.

I boldly marked the chats as read and skipped straight to the latest messages. Then I sorted through my inbox, starting with the newest: invitations to raids and auctions, automated notifications that items I'd been interested in before leaving were back in stock...

Nothing important or urgent.

But amid all that noise, there was one batch of messages that I read with genuine pleasure.

Denis, Marlon, and Nur had all written to thank me for the internal cultivation techniques I'd sent them before leaving for the Federation. At the time, those techniques hadn't yet become publicly available, but the first steps towards synchronisation had already been made. Thanks to that, my old friends were among the first to gain the ability to cultivate even in Earth's low qi environment.

As it turned out, I wasn't the only one who'd had the idea. Bao had also sent the techniques to Denis and Marlon, while Zola had sent them to Nur, so the three of them ended up with more than enough.

Bao had even sent Denis a crystal and the necessary materials, which eventually allowed him to break through to the second stage while still on Earth.

Marlon broke through as well, though much later, since he'd had to buy his own crystals and materials with his hard-earned money.

Nur never did break through. She had more or less given up on cultivation altogether, got married, and had a son she named Benson.

Nur had recorded an entire video message about how she'd found happiness without cultivation. She told me not to worry about her and said that if I was ever on Earth, I should drop by and visit.

Reading those messages left me with a bittersweet wave of nostalgia for the old days.

Completely ridiculous.

Back then, I'd been living in constant fear for my life, risking it almost every day. But memory is a strange thing. It works selectively and often remembers only the good. Those three had been good people.

Another good person, though one with a scarred mind and soul, had invited me out for a cup of tea. Somehow, Zola had already found out I'd returned.

Well, that wasn't exactly surprising. Her master was one of my master's disciples and still belonged to his unofficial faction.

I glanced at the freshly brewed cup of tea, then called Zola.

"Morning, my friend," I greeted her. "If you haven't had breakfast yet, we could meet for a morning coffee at a cafe."

"Unlike certain people," she replied cheerfully, "I actually have a job and responsibilities, so I get up early and can't wander around whenever I feel like it. You'll have to wait until lunch."

"My, haven't you become an important person," I replied drily.

"Oh, you'll be surprised," she said. "One o'clock at Marco's. You're paying."

"Marco's it is," I agreed. "You're paying. I came back broke, and you're the important one with a job and responsibilities, so your salary ought to be respectable."

"My friends are all penniless!" she sighed dramatically. "Honestly, why do I even keep your company?"

"Mandarin?" I suggested. "Everyone pays for themselves."

"Marco's! Relax, you pauper. I'll pay this time, and you can pay once you've sold the mountain of loot that's bursting out of your spatial pocket."

"Ha!" was all I managed.

"What? Don't tell me you didn't bring anything back to sell?"

"Just a few souvenirs for friends. Though I could always sell yours instead..." I lied.

"I'll have to see it first. We'll find out whether you value me highly enough," she said, a hint of mock menace in her voice.

The other person who'd asked to meet was my senior fellow disciple and former mentor, Kate. She wasn't busy, so we arranged to grab a coffee in an hour.

At Marco's.

On her tab.

Coffee was all well and good, but first I needed a proper breakfast.

My fridge was empty. I had enough money for a decent cafe, but, carried away by nostalgia, I decided to revisit the free first-year canteen instead.

The hall hadn't changed in the slightest: the same roar of two and a half thousand voices, the same tray dispensers and queues, the same complete lack of choice. Every press of the meal button was a lottery.

I'd already changed out of my black jumpsuit into the grey cadet's uniform, but the threes on my collar still drew attention. The first-years waiting in the queue kept giving me suspicious glances. Third-periods rarely showed up at the free canteen, and the fact that I wasn't barging to the front to flaunt my higher status, instead quietly waiting my turn, was unusual in itself.

First year was the worst of the worst, and cadets were treated accordingly.

My tray turned out surprisingly decent: a piece of meat with a crisp crust that tasted of smoke and pepper, a thick soup with something fibrous floating in its translucent broth, and a salad made from blue vegetables. After three years of Federation cuisine and seeing what various alien races ate, any lingering sense that certain foods were somehow ‘wrong’ had completely disappeared.

I didn't bother looking for a better seat and took the nearest empty one. If the first-years had been saving it for a friend, they didn't dare tell me to move.

One of the cadets beside me was holding a spoon over his serving of metallic rice with the expression of someone who'd just been handed a death sentence. Judging by his face, he'd only recently discovered it wasn't rice at all, but termite eggs. The plates around him were already empty, so he was obviously still hungry, yet the ‘rice’ disgusted him.

I'd reacted much the same way myself once, but the dish was actually delicious. Suddenly I remembered how we'd used to swap food — Marlon taking the sweets, me taking the meat...

"Hey," I said, lifting my bowl of soup towards the cadet. "Fancy a trade?"

"Huh?" he said blankly.

"My soup for your meal," I offered.

He hesitated.

"But it's..."

"Delicious as hell," I said. "You haven't seen what the saarei eat yet. Half the time it's still wriggling. And the smell of urdan food... Whew! Federation cafeterias have special ventilation systems just for it."

That settled his hesitation. He held his plate out to me.

"You've been beyond the wormhole, sir?"

"Just got back," I nodded, taking his serving of metallic rice and handing him my soup.

"Thank you, sir!..

"So... what's it like over there?"

"You'll have to be more specific, lad," I said. "Most rocks over there are just like the ones here — no atmosphere. And where there is one, it varies. Anita, where I spent most of my time, has an atmosphere, but it's so monotonous there's hardly anything worth looking at."

The first-years grew bolder and started asking questions.

I answered them in between mouthfuls. The metallic rice practically melted in my mouth.

After leaving the canteen, I took the scenic route through the academy's most picturesque corridors, with miniature gardens behind glass. It was quite a detour, involving several underground stops, before I finally reached Marco's, where Kate was already waiting for me at one of the tables. She waved.

I made my way between the wooden tables and cushioned armchairs to the one beside the panoramic window overlooking the academy grounds, then dropped into the seat with a grin.

"Morning. And congratulations on reaching Stage Four!"

"Thank you! It only happened a month ago.

"And I see you've decided to catch up with me.

"At this rate, Novak won't have any disciples below the fourth stage."

"He still hasn't taken on anyone new?"

"He's already got plenty on his plate with the new master. Besides, his own breakthrough took up a great deal of his time."

"And what about all the intrigue?" I asked in mock horror.

"What would we do without it?" Kate laughed, sliding a latte and a croissant towards me, pointing at each in turn. "No sugar. Raspberry jam."

"You've got a good memory," I said, reaching into my spatial pocket and taking out a small wooden box decorated with intricate carving. "This is for you."

Kate accepted the box with both hands, lifted the lid, and inhaled.

"It smells wonderful," she said, raising an eyebrow.

"Old Well. It's basically Pure Thoughts Plus, designed for third- and fourth-stage cultivators. It has excellent synergy with many internal cultivation techniques."

"Oh! That can't have been cheap."

I nodded without going into details. Kate deserved the gift. Besides, I'd bought an entire crate of it, for myself as well as for friends, so I'd managed to negotiate a modest discount.

Coffee brought with it the usual conversation — who was doing what, where everyone had ended up. Kate briefly told me about her own breakthrough, about Adam and Lina, and about the stir Novak's breakthrough had caused. He had become the first Earthling to reach the sixth stage. It was such a significant event that he had been all over the news.

Almost without noticing, we drifted onto the subject of duels and the arena, and Kate mentioned that they'd installed a new safety system modelled after the Federation's.

My first thought was that it would make fights less intense, taking away some of their edge.

I was wrong.

The system had been configured to allow combatants to wound and even cripple one another, stopping only at the brink of death. There hadn't been a single fatality in the arena over the past year, but the fights had become absolutely brutal. The instructors complained that cadets now went all in from the very start, without thinking even a few moves ahead or keeping a contingency plan in reserve.

"I'll have to watch some of the recent matches," I said.