Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 6: The Deliberate Step (Patreon)

I spent all three days of waiting caught up in thought and infuriating attempts at self-knowledge.

I decided not to fixate on personality traits and instead work from the roots I cultivated. From the feelings each of them gave me. The hardness of Fist, the sharpness of Blade, the sensation of flight from Air, and the boundlessness of Space.

Keep it simple. I wasn't that complicated a person. Besides, four traits meant four chances. Surely I'd get at least one right. And from whichever guess landed, I'd carry on when it came time to shape the real aura.

I even managed to rest and clear my head, staring blankly at the plants in the greenhouse and the stars under the domes where the lights switched off in the evening.

If you stare at something static for long enough, lazily enough, you calm down whether you want to or not. It's boring as hell, but if you accept the boredom instead of fighting it, it works like meditation.

At least, it's the only form of meditation I ever managed.

So, two days of digging through myself, a day of boredom, and I was more or less ready. Just a faint trembling of impatience underneath it all.

I went back to the Meditation Hall, to the breakthrough wing. Three years hadn't touched the tiles or the smell of mountain mint mixed with coffee, but the reception desk looked wrong before I even worked out why.

There was no thinhorn behind it.

Both previous times, a thinhorn had been standing there, a catalogue name and an indifferent cloned face. Today, instead, there was a girl.

I. I. Bitter — twos on the collar, dark hair pulled back tightly, and only her face carrying that same indifference.

Could it be…

I opened the interface and saw the very same body-change notation on her.

So the thinhorn was still here.

None of my business, and not exactly news, but why had all of them chosen girls?

Or maybe they hadn't been given a choice.

"Sullivan, Jake," I said. "Booked for today, three o'clock, breakthrough chamber for the fourth stage."

The former thinhorn nodded with indifferent professionalism.

"Long-stay chamber.

"Please deposit all your belongings for storage and prepare your breakthrough materials separately."

Well, ‘all my belongings’ amounted to little, since I'd already left my main five-hundred-litre pocket with Novak, and brought along only a small fifty-litre ring.

As a Fist cultivator, I couldn't wear rings without risking damage to them mid-fight, but this was a Federation model I'd brought along to resell. All sorts of Point, Mace, and Air cultivators would probably be interested.

For now, I'd simply loaded it with everything I needed for this breakthrough.

This time I wasn't worried about sabotage, so I ran my hand over the table, laying out the boxes of materials and preparations, then set the ring down next to them.

The girl's gaze lingered for a moment on the boxes' unusual shape, unusual for us, standard for the Federation, and then she looked at me a little more closely. Though not closely enough to distract her from her work.

We quickly went over the order in which the staff would bring things to me and what I needed to take with me. Then she handed me a standard package, a grey kimono with the school's black emblem, slippers, and a belt with a mechanical noose, before politely gesturing towards the changing room.

"Please," she said, and even gave a slight bow.

The medic appeared before I'd even managed to tie the belt, and without wasting words began fixing thin transparent sensors to my neck, chest, stomach, until I was covered in them almost everywhere.

For some reason it felt like there were more of them this time.

I suspected the school collected data and analysed every breakthrough, to build the most efficient possible breakthrough pipeline.

This time my chamber was right at the end of the hall, on the second floor, tucked almost into a corner. The actual corner one, and the one after mine, were occupied, and their walls were opaque. Mine stayed transparent right up until I stepped inside, and the tech made them matte white, cutting me off from every distraction of the outside world.

This time I didn't even bother clearing away the meditation mat to swap it for a bed.

The Federation had taught me to sit in the lotus position for cultivation after all, but task number one wasn't switching on the Flow, it was drinking the tea that slowed down dispersion. I'd brought it from the Federation, so no one here knew the brewing method, and it needed specific tools besides, delicate filters the tea had to be strained through before drinking. I'd brought the brewing set with me right from the start, and the tea, portioned out, along with the filters, was to be delivered to me on a schedule through a sealed hatch in the wall.

After the tea came the internal cultivation set, running qi through my body. Then rest, and the first Flow session.

Three days in here looked nothing like three days of waiting outside. Out there, it had been boredom, which I'd already learned to accept. In here, it was more of a routine: a short Flow session, rest, tea that tasted surprisingly decent, a short internal cultivation session, rest, tea.

Tea became my only source of calories.

The method I'd chosen involved mild fasting.

Three days was no longer any great strain on me.

I didn't spend the time between sessions on empty plant-watching. I'd had my fill of the greenhouse. Instead, I cycled through the sensations each type of qi gave me, one after another, without actually using them.

The hardness of Fist, the firmness of projections and shields. The circulation of Blade's cutting force. Flight, that moment when the ground's already behind you and you're still rising, carried by the strength of the Mad Monkey of the East. And then the boundlessness of Space.

Technically, all of it came down to limits, the limits of qi usage, the technical boundaries of a spatial pocket, but that was completely different from the sensations themselves.

Space Qi was vast, heavy to understand and heavy to grasp.

Forty-seven hours in, and my cultivation level had climbed to 12,491 out of the required 12,430. I even started thinking that with a bit more effort, I could break through using the smaller of my two crystals, that's how easy and confident I felt.

My body hummed with excess energy.

Still, I decided not to risk it, and sent the staff the signal to bring the crystals in. Both of them, smaller and larger, exactly as planned.

I opened the box with the larger one and began slowly drawing its energy into myself. I kept at it without rest or sleep, save for tea breaks, for the next twenty-two hours, restraining myself now and then from the greedy urge to speed things up and just drain the crystal dry in one go.

I reached a safe 13,306. The crystal still held some twenty units of qi, so I sucked those down too.

Seemed pointless to economise, given the scale of everything else I was spending.

Once I had 13,329 qi of 12,096, I finally gave the order to bring in the actual breakthrough materials and the preparation meant to trigger it. I was comfortably above the safe threshold and felt genuinely good.

Damn it, I was buzzing with power!

A few minutes later, on the other side, they started loading boxes into the receiving hatch, which, once sealed on that side, would open on mine.

That was done to avoid lowering the overall high qi background field by opening actual doors.

The boxes were large, so I had to open the hatch several times.

The smallest item was a syringe, pre-loaded with the breakthrough preparation.

I'd left it on the counter in ampoule form, and the change in shape triggered a flicker of paranoia, but I pushed it down and brought the syringe to my neck, pressing the release.

Instead of the icy flood that usually numbed my neck and the eye on the side of injection, a soft warmth spread through my body. My core didn't clench in panic or ice over, but, remembering how treacherous some preparations could be, I hurried to lie down on the bed.

I waited a second, then another, braced for anything.

Nothing happened.

Maybe it was because this wasn't my body's first breakthrough, or even its second; it already knew the path and didn't register it as a threat.

Or maybe the Federation's preparations were simply better made.

I set the surprise aside for later and reached for the largest box.

The Anchor Point turned out to be neither a stone nor a crystal, but something like a heavy droplet of mercury, still moving, still flowing within the bounds of its faceted shape. The box holding it carried a powerful force field, keeping the faceted droplet contained inside.

The droplet had formed within a cosmic anomaly, and it hadn't cost me my entire fortune only because even in the Federation, there weren't all that many genuine Space cultivators.

Too risky a path.

But it was precisely to make that path less risky that I needed this droplet. In theory, it had the ability to stabilise Space Qi around my physical body.

The item couldn't really be classified at all, so it carried no colour tag. And at this stage, it was my most important, and my riskiest, material.

If everything worked, I'd be able to do things no other cultivator of my stage could. Or else…

A lot could go wrong, which was exactly why I started with this one.

I removed the opaque top cover and lowered the walls, took off the glass cap, and pressed the physical switch to disable the force field.

The droplet dropped onto the thick base, where the hidden generator sat beneath it, splattered and spread like something far thinner than mercury, and instantly gathered itself back into that same faceted shape.

I felt space itself shift, reacting to the wild Space Qi.

I picked the droplet up very carefully.

To the touch it was cold and hard as granite. For the first half-second, at least, and then, as though adjusting to the temperature and shape of my fingers, it warmed and began to flow, merging into my hand.

I wasn't drawing its qi out; it drew itself into me. It seemed to have no physical component at all, despite its physical form.

A flicker of fear-memory stabbed at me, the Displaced Sand, four years ago. Back then, Space Qi had thrown itself at me like a predator. My core had swelled to unimaginable size, and I'd found myself inside it like a grain, at the centre of a blazing, furious energy. I'd lost my footing that time, lost all sense of orientation in space.

This time it wasn't the complete opposite, but it was fairly unlike it.

The droplet moved on its own, as though it already knew its place was inside my core. It didn't try to swallow me whole, or expand my core outward. It pulled itself towards the very centre of the energy vortex, forming a solid, motionless support point in the middle of it. Shaping something the rest of my world could revolve around.

I'd taken a risk with this material, and the risk had paid off.

So much so that I started wondering whether the Thread of Vitality was unnecessary, same as the Clear Mind Pill.

I'd chosen both materials to stabilise and neutralise any mental or physical damage the Anchor Point might inflict on me.

Well, it was too late to change course now. Besides, vitality and a clear mind were never wasted. Especially since these were red-classified materials by Earth's system.

The Thread was a large ball of nearly weightless organic fibres, packed with raw qi, same as the crystals. There was a trick to it, a synchronisation, simply drawing the qi out wasn't enough; you had to inflict damage on yourself and direct the fresh energy towards regeneration.

I rolled up the left sleeve of the kimono and swept my right hand over my left forearm, tearing it open with a tiny blade projection. Something like the fingerbolt every one of Novak's students used, but my own, sharpened variant.

The blade sliced through flesh, and a small detonation split the wound open, sending blood spraying across the kimono and the floor.

I picked up the ball, dipped it into the wound, and it seemed to come alive, latching onto it with a death grip.

Nobody had warned me about that!

Nor had anyone warned me how much it would hurt!

It felt like liquid fire being poured into the wound.

I concentrated and brought it under control, spreading it evenly through my whole body. I even stood up and ran through a few brisk movements, tensing every muscle, driving the blood around my body.

By the time I was done, the ball on my arm had turned grey and crumbled into ash, leaving behind dirty blood but no trace of the wound at all.

I was already a little wary of taking the Clear Mind Pill.

A migraine right before a breakthrough was the last thing I needed, but beyond stability, it was meant to help my mental techniques, more streams, faster acceleration.

The pill was small, white, almost pharmacy-plain in appearance. Unlike the Nine Poisons Pill, I didn't even have to swallow it. It dissolved on my tongue in a cold, almost minty freshness that rose upward at once.

I immediately felt as though someone had cleared the excess echo and qi pressure out of the room. Every thought became separate and remarkably sharp.

Usually something triggered my breakthroughs, pain, like last time. Now, though, I realised I could break through with a simple mental effort.

So why wait?

I concentrated, and stepped past the boundary.