Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 11: Accessing the Changes (Patreon)

I waited for the news to stir something inside me. I listened to myself, almost with curiosity, and found nothing in particular. No chill under the ribs, no racing heartbeat, none of that familiar state where the body readies itself to fight or flee.

Perhaps it was simply that this sword had been hanging over me ever since I'd ended up in this world at all. Along with thousands of others, I'd been prepared, trained, honed specifically for war with the demons. And, unlike the others, I'd actually fought them, even if not in original bodies.

But the last three years had been relatively calm. The thought that one day the demons would come had turned from a Sword of Damocles into a sword merely hanging from the ceiling. Not so much a threat as a rather peculiar piece of decor.

Now the sword had swayed. But swayed — not fallen. And the part of me that should have been panicking, or frantically preparing, instead calmly registered the fact and filed it away somewhere under ‘matters I can't do anything about for now.’

What I could do something about was mastering the changes Stage Four had granted me.

The physical changes had settled in fairly smoothly. This time there'd been no sensory overload, and my body had adapted to the new strength automatically, but that only applied to everyday life. I could feel, I knew, that I'd grown stronger across the board.

That needed to be tested and mastered.

I went to train.

I chose the same hall where Kate had run me ragged more than once, sand and metal, but this time I started not with techniques, but with plain movement.

Squats, lunges, a series of strikes into empty air, nothing but muscle and tendon, not a drop of qi. I wanted to feel the body I'd become without any boost from techniques, to feel my native speed and strength.

Well, strength would need the gym, but my speed had grown. I couldn't say by how much, that would've required precise measurements, I could only feel my usual sequences lagging, like desynchronised metronomes. Speed had increased, the execution technique had stayed the same.

Enough warming up.

I moved on to the Mad Monkey of the East.

A jump with no run-up, and the ground fell away beneath my feet with that same familiar sensation of a springy blast under my soles. Only this time the blast was stronger. It sent me flying towards the ceiling, some twenty metres above the sand.

I should've trained under the dome!

I threw my arms up and, through sheer force, stopped myself from kissing a steel beam.

I fell back down grabbing at short-lived air platforms with my hands.

There was a tonne of work ahead. But it was best not to attempt God's Stroll or any serious Space stunts right now, even though the Anchor Point was meant to give me extra stability.

The second Monkey jump came out more precise, I'd already accounted for the new blast strength. The third was nearly perfect. By the fifth, I was already driving myself along a rough, jagged trajectory through the air, changing direction every two or three steps, as the technique demanded.

I never touched the ground, I even ran across the ceiling a few times, which wasn't easy at all, I had to hold myself up with my hands while my feet pushed off the ceiling.

But this wasn't a test of strength. It was a test of control and the synchronisation of body, mind and techniques.

The synchronisation lagged, but not critically, so, without landing, I moved on to Chainsaw Punch, mindlessly scattering blade projections.

I wasn't aiming, but even so, just functioning became difficult.

Still, not critically.

I activated Thousand Sparks of Awareness and Mind Parallelisation.

That lifted every limitation. My attention split into separate, distinct streams of information, each of which I could keep in focus without losing a single one.

Four at once, though I was still using the old technique for the third stage.

This was unmistakably the effect of the Clear Thoughts Pill.

I pulled the first disc out of my spatial pocket and flung it, activating the Double Cycle. It flew out in a wide loop around me, obediently holding its trajectory.

Second. Third. Fourth.

I had to cut off Chainsaw Punch so as not to knock down my own discs.

Four discs at once had been my stable maximum back at the third stage, when I could still pull off stable acrobatics in the air.

But back then I hadn't practised running along ceilings, which demanded synchronous activity from four limbs. Even in the air, I'd still been standing on my feet.

I launched a fifth.

It slotted into the loop, joining the others without any effort on my part. As if I'd simply added one more ball to a juggling act that had already found its balance.

A sixth… It joined the others just as smoothly, but with that one I felt the limit.

I forced them to desynchronise, break the perfect loop and scatter, each along its own trajectory.

As a result, my head flooded with the leaden weight of overload, my vision darkened, and I had to drop to the ground abruptly, freeing up yet another stream of consciousness for the separate control of my hands, which formed air steps to brake my fall.

My vision cleared and I touched the sand more or less properly, but out of four discs, two streams, I lost the lot.

So it worked out to two discs per stream, plus one stream for movement, and that was only possible thanks to the breakthrough material that had granted me one extra stream.

After the Parallelisation upgrade, another stream should be added, which in theory should allow for two more discs. Thousand Sparks for the fourth stage should spare my head that leaden heaviness and the darkening vision, and the Double Cycle should add control and increase the number of discs. But that would mean a heavy skew towards Blade, and discs specifically.

I needed to leave something for combat techniques. With an upgrade, it's not just power that grows, but complexity of execution too. Especially where Space techniques are concerned, where a single mistake can be fatal.

The session in the hall turned out to be informative. Short, but tense, I could still feel that tension in my temples. So I caught the two discs still in the air, gathered up the ones that had fallen, and left the hall, mentally weighing my options for rest.

This time I didn't even need a shower. I hadn't sweated, and the sand…

I jumped into the air with the Monkey, stripped my clothes off into my spatial pocket, and part of the sand fell away on its own, and what didn't, I shook off by wrapping my whole body in a minimally charged Fist projection and detonating it on the spot.

I landed already dressed.

Still, I wasn't allowed to enjoy the moment of my own coolness for long.

The message caught up with me in the corridor, right as I was choosing between the greenhouse and a fizzy drink from the machine, and a couple of cutlets with a shot of gin at home in front of the interactive window with the mountain view.

It was an official summons, not from a person, but from the system, which had received data that a new, healthy, fourth-stage cultivator with rare qualifications and no assignment had appeared.

The system couldn't allow such a cultivator to wander about unoccupied.

I was summoned to the Portal Division of the Hall of Technology. Logical, if I'm honest. I'd have been surprised myself if they'd left me alone.

"…ordered to report to the Portal Division of the Hall of Technology within twenty-four hours of receiving this message, for a qualification interview and subsequent assignment to educational-practical duties in accordance with existing portal technician certification."

Sheer quintessence of bureaucracy.

Not even Novak could save me from that.

Or could he?

I rang my master, he told me to go. He also explained, incidentally, what the Portal Division actually was. It was what remained of the Portal Project once it had lost its uniqueness and gone into mass production.

The certification and standardisation centre had been moved off somewhere into a ministry on Earth. The single development centre had vanished after we got hold of praxi technology, and whatever was left had simply been dumped onto the Hall of Technology.

Twenty-four hours…

No point dragging it out. I didn't want that fizzy drink, or the alcohol, which affected me even less now than before, all that badly anyway.

The division had inherited at least part of the Project's premises.

At its peak, this had been an entire small underground town, dealing not just with small portals, but with space rings and the wormhole too. Additional divisions for orbital construction and deep-space construction. Additional security divisions, fleet cultivators in uniform blue armour with crossed maces on their shoulders, sickeningly strict, who'd nitpicked even at me, despite my then extremely high clearance level. Checkpoints round every corner, every step of the way.

Now the security had been cleared out.

At the central entrance stood one lazy fourth-stage cultivator in a black jumpsuit, no armour.

He didn't even bother scanning me. He heard the purpose of my visit and waved me through.

Inside, thanks to the scale of the earlier construction, it turned out to be quite spacious, even empty. I had to poke my head through the first doors I came across just to find any living people and announce the reason for my visit.

Not long ago I'd have had my head handed to me for that, but the fours on my collar significantly softened the reactions of everyone I met. Especially given that most of them were threes.

Eventually, I was sent to the head of the division, told which laboratory he was currently in. But I noticed how my potential colleagues hid their smiles as they told me.

That could mean anything, but I decided not to relax.

I found the right laboratory, opened the door, and walked in on three praxi at a table, holding raw steaks in their hands, tearing at them with sharp teeth.

"What the..!" the surprise had me summoning my armour and raising my hands.

The praxi reacted too, jumping up, kicking their chairs back, pulling on their own armour. Two of them drew spatial swords. Only one snapped irritably.

"Not this again, you bastards!? How many bloody times! Who sent you here?"

"Um… Administration," I said, remembering that the praxi now held some status between prisoners and hired workers. "I got a message to come in for a qualification interview."

"No, I mean who sent you here, which bastard, right in the middle of my lawful lunch break?

"I'll tear the little sod apart!" he said.

"Ah, right…" now I understood that technician's smile. "I honestly didn't catch his name."

"Seriously?" the prax asked angrily. "Then piss off. You've failed the interview."

"Were you supposed to be conducting it?" I asked.

The other two praxi relaxed, sheathed their swords, dismissed their armour and started picking their chairs back up.

"Yeah. I'm the head of this madhouse. Piss off!"

I dismissed my armour too.

"I have a portal technician's diploma from Black Hole. Ka Federation."

"A federate?" he asked, surprised.

"Local. Exchange student."

"Shako," his colleague said quietly. "Look at the surname. It's him."

"Excuse me?" I asked.

"You're Sullivan, Novak's disciple," said the one who'd first checked my interface.

The head glanced too, and his gaze grew harder, filling with even more malice.