Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 4: Fancy Footwork (Patreon)

Rene smirked, gesturing with a nod towards the trainer's glass office. Inside, he tinted the windows, put the kettle on, and dropped a plain tea bag into each cup.

"You're the cheapest person I know!" I said, pulling the bags out of the cups and dropping in two fully-soluble tea extract capsules from the Federation instead.

"Well, I didn't study in the Federation," he began, demonstratively counting off on his fingers. "Wasn't on the other side of the wormhole at all, didn't take part in looting the praxi ships…"

"Give it a rest," I waved him off. "You earn well, you're just being stingy!" I told him, pulling a box of tea out of my spatial pocket and quite literally pressing it into his chest.

"And I don't have Earth's first sixth-stage cultivator for a master!" Rene carried on, taking the box. "What's this?"

"Old Well — Clear Thoughts plus. For the third and fourth stages."

"Did you bring breakthrough meds too? So it all goes smoother," Rene asked, interested. "I'd buy some."

"Four items," I said. "Two ampoules of one and two bottles of another."

"Bottles?"

"Little bottles," I showed the size with my fingers, "fifty millilitres each. Different approach to usage. Ampoules — inject. Liquid — drink.

"I'm planning to break through with the ampoules, it's more familiar and faster. If something goes wrong, though, I prefer having a spare on hand.

"Either way, I'm not selling anything before the breakthrough."

"And when are you breaking through?" Rene asked.

"A week or two. Depends on chamber availability in the Meditation Hall."

"Well," Rene said. "I can afford to wait a bit."

"You do realise our Stage Four preparations aren't far behind the Federation's?"

"But they are behind," Rene picked out the key point.

Just then the kettle boiled, and he poured the tea. The capsules dissolved instantly, filling the office with a sharp, tangy aroma.

Rene sniffed, sipped the boiling water, and nodded approvingly.

"Go on then. How's it been out there? Keep it short, though, I've got a rather difficult contingent right now. They need watching."

I gave him the short version: college, diploma, new techniques…

"More detail, please!" he perked up at the mention of techniques.

"Or maybe I'll just show you?" I asked. "You once promised to show me everything you're capable of, once I caught up with you."

"Are you challenging me?!" Rene asked, cheeky.

"Not a fight," I corrected myself. "No attacks at all would be boring, but the main task is who outruns whom. The concrete jungle, where you taught me the Monkey."

"O-o-oh! Your sorry arse will be beaten today!"

We agreed on the evening, once Rene's group sessions in the hall finished and the individual ones began.

Today he cancelled those in favour of bouncing around concrete beams.

The ‘concrete jungle’ had changed little. It was still almost the same skeleton of an unfinished tower and the same heaps of shattered concrete, all beneath the towering dome that kept a breathable atmosphere in here. Yet among the columns and rubble of various heights and shapes, battered and worn as though someone had methodically hammered them with a heavy machine gun, there were new structures scattered about, signs of a recent renovation.

Reinforced concrete is a fairly durable material, but even it doesn't survive destructive techniques for long.

I stopped at the entrance, letting the memories wash over me.

This was where I first understood what it meant to fear falling, not in the abstract, but in a very concrete sense. This was also where I learned not to fear heights and to move with more confidence. With the basic Mad Monkey, it hadn't been so simple. I couldn't grab hold of thin air mid-fall.

Over there, about second-floor height, I'd first split my cheek open on the edge of a slab, with Rene watching me roll down the concrete slope. A little to the left — the same column I'd fallen off seven times in a row, before I learned not just to repeat the route, but to feel it.

My ribs remembered the dull ache after one particularly bad landing on my side. My knee remembered a chunk of concrete that no longer existed.

The sensations back then had been sharp, in every sense of the word. I didn't feel that kind of danger now. Now, armour or no armour, this was nothing more than a stroll.

Speaking of armour. Rene and I had come here in jumpsuits, but for training purposes…

"Armour?" I asked him.

"Of course. Otherwise what's the point?" he answered, and hopped as he pulled on his black-and-blue battle gear.

I used to do it just as clumsily, but not any more. Now my new bionic armour simply flowed over my body.

For the sake of a smooth effect, the soles of my armoured boots hadn't fully materialised yet; they hung in a half-dissolved state and would only manifest into this dimension with my next step. Holding them suspended between the pocket space and the real world cost me no effort now.

"O-o-oh, fancy!" Rene said, meaning either the armour itself or the technique of putting it on.

"There's more to come!" I promised him, turning around and, in the same motion, unobtrusively shifting my weight from foot to foot, which created the necessary gap between the ground and the sole and let the armour fully solidify.

This version, too, bore a black lotus on a yellow breastplate, but now it wasn't just plain plates of yellow and black. The whole thing was covered in golden scrollwork on a black background. And the helmet was more aggressive, sharper-edged. The armour was rigid and elastic at once, and it was also fitted with solid protective formations and an air-recycling system. So I no longer depended on oxygen tanks.

It broke my usual habits of movement in space a little, but hey, I hadn't studied at Black Hole for nothing. Instead of air, I could now push off from space itself, which is exactly what I intended to show Rene.

This technique, incidentally, had a far grander name than Mad Monkey of the East, it was called the God's Stroll! It looked just as grand and confident as it sounded, but it was a little short on speed, so I often mixed it in with Mad Monkey.

"Shall we start?" Rene suggested.

"You first," I told him.

Rene didn't waste time talking. He pushed off the ground and lightly leapt onto a concrete beam some ten metres away, then turned into a mad pinball. Weaving, pushing off the beam with his hand, off the edge of a slab with his knees, off thin air with his heel wherever there was no support at all. No logic, no visible pattern, only pure, raw speed that should have looked clumsy but instead looked almost hypnotic.

Within a few seconds he was already standing atop the central structure, looking down at me the same cheeky way I remembered from our first training sessions.

Instead of loud words, he stretched out a hand and beckoned me with a middle finger.

I took a step.

Slow, almost lazy. So lazy that I never move that slowly in real life, but I raised my foot at the edge of the training arena and set it down on empty air some twenty metres from the starting position, five to seven metres above the ground.

Every step took a fraction of a second longer than it should have, yet covered a distance that ought to have required several jumps. I also moved in a perfectly straight line, projecting an aura of strength and authority.

It took me five steps to stop a metre away from Rene.

Rene slowly clapped his hands.

"Fancy!" he repeated. "But that took you twice as long as it took me.

"I wouldn't bet on that technique in a fight," he shook his head.

"It has its downsides," I admitted.

"Speed and manoeuvrability?" Rene guessed, walking towards the edge of the platform. "Well then, try and catch up with me," he said, falling off the platform backwards. Not in a panic, but with the confident calm of someone who'd fallen like that a thousand times already.

And who said I'd be chasing him with the God's Stroll?

No, my first step off the platform was with that very technique. It let me look around and see where my opponent was, where he was heading.

Rene, predictably, quickly identified the technique's main weakness, open space, and dived deeper into the concrete jungle, trying to put as many obstacles between us as possible.

I took the next step, which carried me over the spot where he was weaving through, and then pushed myself downward, shoving off thin air with the Monkey.

"So the Monkey's better after all?" he asked cheerfully.

"Suits the terrain better," I answered, slipping through a gap between beams that my body barely fit through.

I'd never abandoned the Monkey or its training.

Rene felt the gap between us closing and started weaving faster, ducking behind beams, building his route so that there was always some concrete outcrop or column directly between us.

Three years ago, that would have worked.

I caught him as he was rounding the columns, with barely fifteen centimetres of space between them. He turned to go around them, thinking it would give him cover; I jumped straight through instead, adding Misty Step to the Monkey. It was a refined version of that trick I'd first stumbled onto intuitively back on the kalamari planet.

For a moment, my body and armour stopped being a solid object. There was only the thought that held the mist of consciousness together.

I passed through the gap between the two columns the way water passes through a crack in a wall.

Rene, confident he'd bought himself another second of distance, didn't manage to react in time, and my hand, already fully material again, closed around his left ankle.

Rene reacted instantly. Before the surprise even had a chance to take hold, the sole of his right foot slammed into my helmet and shoved off with a powerful qi blast.

He tore free, and I was thrown back against one of the columns I'd shot past.

Rene carried on his way, and I bounded up onto the top of a column in two jumps.

"Come back," I shouted to him.

"You didn't hold on to me!" he answered.

"I tore your leg off," I answered.

Rene saw that I wasn't chasing him and hopped onto a column about ten metres from me as well.

"What's that supposed to mean?" he asked, intrigued.

I jumped down from the column, catching the top with my left hand and bracing my feet against the pillar. Then, so Rene could see, I dug my hand into the concrete and pulled out a chunk. Threw it aside and pulled out another, until I reached the steel reinforcement and yanked out a piece of that too.

"You're a bloody monster!" Rene said, impressed. "But now I really don't understand," he shook his head, settling more comfortably on the column. "Three years ago, with a trick like that, you'd already be off signing up for a tournament. And now you're telling me the arena isn't part of your plans. What the hell, Jake?"

I hopped up onto the column too and sat down properly.

"I'm not saying the arena isn't part of my plans any more.

"I'm saying it isn't part of my plans right now. So I'd ask you to keep quiet about what you saw. This trick scales easily to the next cultivation stages and doesn't need a technique upgrade. But if cultivators find out about it, not a chance in hell anyone will let me within arm's reach of them."