Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 7: Not So Self-Aware (Patreon)

All the new energy already churning through my body suddenly froze, as though time itself had stopped.

There was no core freezing-and-thawing this time, no burst of panic.

The changes unfolded cleanly, in an orderly fashion.

The space inside my core expanded again, but without the sensation of being stretched myself, or, the opposite, of falling into it. And it wasn't as intense as last time.

The Anchor Point didn't let me fall into it, but at the same time it gave a foundation to every other change happening around it, and to my consciousness, which no longer got lost inside the core but calmly watched it grow outward from that very point.

The new changes weren't so much about size and space as they were about quality.

The qi inside my core thickened, as though my reactor had suddenly started producing a qualitatively new, far more energy-dense output.

And my breathing… Every breath now carried something denser, slower than plain air, as if I wasn't breathing with my lungs any more but with my whole body at once, every cell suddenly learning to take part in the process instead of simply waiting for the result.

I could no longer hear just my heartbeat, but the synchronised vibration of my entire body and the world beyond it.

Every pulse changed me, body and soul, fusing them into a single whole.

Intuitively, I started to understand why transferring consciousness into another body doesn't work at the Stage Four.

My subtle body was now bound fast to the physical one, and the physical body itself had begun turning into energy.

Energy, qi, had become physical.

Every pulse of that vibration reshaping my body simultaneously pushed excess qi out of me, multiplying the chamber's already-high background level several times over.

It felt like I could sense those waves, see them, touch them. And I didn't need to close my eyes or concentrate to do it.

I simply could.

Kate always said the breakthrough exhausted her, but for me it did the opposite, it charged me up. Even now, electrified ants were crawling under my skin, and I had to consciously rein in my muscles and channels to keep from bursting into some technique or other.

At least I could stand up and walk around while I ran a bit of self-diagnostics.

The floor held me just as steadily as ever, the walls weren't swimming, and there were no side effects from the breakthrough whatsoever.

This time everything had gone as smoothly as it possibly could have.

That was both surprising and unsettling at once.

Both previous times, my body had met the change like a blow, like something to be fought against, at least for the first few minutes. This time it simply accepted its new shape, as though it had been waiting an eternity for this very change.

I subconsciously braced for the blow to come, but it never did, and the breakthrough energy was slowly leaving my body. Energy I was supposed to direct towards shaping the proto-aura.

I couldn't let that energy just dissipate for nothing.

Still pacing the room, I tried to gather together everything I'd been mulling over for the last three days, so I could release it all outward in one motion.

The hardness of Fist, the sharpness of Blade, the flight of Air, and the boundlessness of Space.

For a fifth-stage cultivator, the aura is part of their very being. They have to hold it back. But I had no such luxury, I had nothing to hold back, I had to shape this sensation from scratch and set it against the world. I forced it out of my body, using that same vibration that had replaced the feeling of my own heartbeat.

The room around me swelled. I could still see the walls, but it felt as though they were three, five times further away than they actually were. The space around me expanded, and there was nothing in it to hold on to. Even the ceiling and floor drew back.

And yet I stood firm, as though the air itself were holding me up. As though the temporary support the Mad Monkey of the East created had permanently solidified beneath my feet.

But the aura, though it was me, wasn't for me. It was an expression, a manifestation of my self, for others.

I could stand, while everyone else could fall into the pit beneath me, because they held no power here.

I could keep my balance in this warped world, because it had been born out of me. No one else had that luxury.

Space and Air merged into one.

At least half the mosaic fell into place on its own, easily, almost without effort, but I got Fist and Blade wrong.

Strange.

Those were the two I should have understood best. Fist, at least, had been my first choice, my natural talent, and it had never once let me down.

Hardness. I called up the image I'd lived with for years, tried to fit it in with the rest… and realised hardness had no place in boundlessness.

Though why not?

The Anchor Point was still the hard heart of my core; I could feel it.

Apparently, hardness simply had no place in this particular boundleness. The two just weren't made for each other.

That disappointed and unsettled me a little, because it meant I wasn't quite the hard man I thought I was. And not quite as sharp, either, since sharpness didn't fit here either.

Two of the four elements had failed, and I felt a bit deflated, though I didn't panic. I was more upset about how poorly I understood myself than about the failure itself. Half the aura, assuming I hadn't got it wrong again, had been guessed correctly on the first try, and that was a success. A light attempt, meant only to give a sense of direction, had given exactly that.

Still, there was plenty of energy left, both in the room and in my body.

Not as much as before my first attempt at generating the proto-aura; it had eaten into both my reserve and the surrounding background, and even into that fresh-from-the-breakthrough feeling.

Normally after a breakthrough, I'd head to the training hall and burn off the excess energy with destructive techniques. If shaping an aura was just as draining, why bother going anywhere?

Novak and Aoran had said it was safe, that nothing threatened me, so I could well afford a few more attempts before I ran completely dry.

I just needed to make some changes, swap out hardness and sharpness.

My number two option for Blade was cold. It showed up in the auras of plenty of Blade cultivators, and it had been in Novak's, despite the fact that he wasn't a Blade cultivator at all.

So, cold, then. Bone-deep cold.

It should fit into that expanded space my proto-aura was already shaping.

Next I had to replace hardness, but I decided to work again not from the plain qualities of the qi types, but from the feeling of the master's aura itself, from the mortal fear it had given me the first time we met.

Death and Fist.

How were they connected?

Well, Fist could certainly kill, but so could any other type of qi. And yet no other aura had ever made me tremble like that, made me feel so utterly insignificant before a force so much greater than myself.

Force…

Not a simple strength. Strength, determination, and self-awareness.

Self-awareness didn't come from Fist Qi. It was part of his character, and together they formed Force, tiger's eyes that looked straight into your soul.

Could I try it… Wasn't that too much for me? I wasn't Novak, after all. I'm not so self-aware.

But I sure as hell wouldn't say no to becoming like him!

I gathered every image together, merged them, and forced them onto the space around me.

What happened over the next second had nothing in common with what I'd been shaping a minute before.

The space didn't expand — it vanished.

The walls, which had just drawn back several metres, no longer meant anything at all, no distance existed at all any more. There was no more ‘far’ or ‘near’. I found myself over an abyss that had no edge, and no bottom.

The sensation of support beneath me shifted into a sensation of controlled flight, as the space around me tore itself into a merciless storm. Inside the sealed chamber, the air howled like a mountain summit, biting with cold.

I'd got the cold right.

And Force, too.

I felt something rather dangerous inside me rise to its full height and turn a predator's eyes on the world. Maybe not a tiger's eyes, but no less frightening.

Was that really me?

Doubt tore the spine straight out of the storm I'd raised, and it collapsed, dropping me back onto the floor of a room shrunk back down to its normal size.

Whoa!

My legs buckled and I dropped to my knees.

Whatever had spilled out of me had struck back at me just as hard.

My breathing went ragged, and my core-reactor, which a moment ago had been humming with a surplus of power, was now so hollowed out it caused actual physical pain.

I was forced to brace myself on trembling hands. Three days of fasting and nothing but tea had chosen that exact moment to remind me of themselves with weakness and a savage, animal hunger.

A single violent surge of will had burned through the last of my strength completely, and had drained the room of everything left in the air from three days of cultivation. Everything I'd expelled from my body after the breakthrough, that whole background field that had built up drop by drop, vanished in a single second.

I laughed, stunned.

I never thought showing off an aura would cost fourth-stagers anything at all.

Turns out it chewed through reserves quite ruthlessly.

I gathered myself and got back on my feet. Just a second before the door to my chamber burst open. Two on-duty medics in white coats rushed in as though they were racing to save someone who'd already stopped breathing.

"What the…" the first one started.

The second one put a hand on his shoulder.

"Alive?" he asked me.

I nodded.

The second one spun sharply towards the exit, dragging his colleague along with him. The colleague hesitated for a second, then bolted after him.

Something was going on outside.

I followed slowly, as fast as the weakness in my body allowed.

The corridor greeted me with a chaos that had nothing in common with the quiet, near-empty wing I remembered from three years running.

The doors of two neighbouring chambers stood flung wide open. From the corner one, another pair of medics was pulling a cadet out on a stretcher. The boy's face was grey as his kimono, blood pouring from his nose across his lips.

From the other side, through an open door, came the voices of the same medics who'd just rushed into my room. A rather irritated female voice was answering them.

There were some displeased voices coming from below, too. Right beneath us…

My chamber turned out to be smack in the centre of all this…

Shit! Had I really done all this to them?

And how many breakthroughs had I ruined? How many enemies had I earned myself, for absolutely nothing?

One of the medics glanced outside, spotted me, and came over.

"You felt it too?" he asked, tearing the sensor patch off my neck without ceremony. "You looked like you were right at the epicentre. We thought you were dead," he said, scanning the sensor with his handheld reader. "Sensors are definitely dead," he added, holding the scanner up to my chest.

"Yeah, about that…" I decided not to hide the truth. It would come out sooner or later anyway. "Looks like I formed an aura."

The medic looked at me, then at my chest, where he was still holding the scanner, then moved it up towards my head.

"You were breaking through to the Stage Four," he reminded me delicately.

"I know. Master Aoran suggested I try to form a proto-aura from the leftover energy. But I think I overdid it a bit.

"I've got the feeling I completed it. Entirely."

"If that's true…" the doc said, "you'd be the first Earthling to ever manage that.

"And in the process, you nearly finished off your neighbours. At least one breakthrough was completely wrecked, and it's still unclear whether the poor bastard's going to pull through or not."

"Could he die?"

"Worse. His cultivation might be totally crippled."