Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 16: Upgrading (Patreon)

The following weeks gradually settled into routine.

Napo and Daubo, naturally, hadn't become my friends, but the hostility had gradually faded, leaving behind something like professional indifference. We checked portals, compared readings, wrote reports. Sometimes one of them made a mistake, sometimes I did, and not a single incident escalated into a show of weapons or threats any more. Concealed ones included.

But that only applied to the praxi. Jonson, clearly hoping for a fresh conflict, judging by how often he dropped into the laboratory without any real reason, just to look. He never got his wish. It didn't please him in the slightest. And our conversations had degenerated into a steady stream of veiled threats.

The Shako affair, meanwhile, had stretched itself into a viscous bureaucratic mass. At the very least, there was the question of jurisdiction and our right to try him. But patting him on the head and letting him go wasn't an option either. As I'd predicted, he did end up with his two-by-two cell. Whether they fed him steak or protein paste in there, I couldn't say. I'd lost interest in the affair long before it concluded. I found out about the cell from my subordinates, as an already accomplished fact.

The technical work carried on as ever: faults, inspections, and the occasional genuinely interesting case, like the portal Shako had nearly killed me with, though far less dangerous. I'd have to dig deeper than standard diagnostics to find the cause of a fault, taking a portal apart screw by screw, microchip by microchip.

People had even started recognising me in the corridors of the division and asking for advice.

The profits trickled in too, and I made an effort to keep everything in points. Money wasn't a problem any more, not like it had been a month ago. I'd settled all my debts, even with Bergqvist. I'd had to bow to him in front of Aoran. Novak's ‘little box’ had done its job — three red materials for the breakthrough, worth some thirty million altogether. The master, damn him, had really opened his purse, which meant I owed him again. And he hadn't taken money for it, even though I could easily have afforded to pay.

I suspected he'd done it in advance, so I wouldn't open my mouth the next time he needed me to walk into hell for him.

The Hall of Meditation had finally delivered its decision to upgrade the shielding in all Stage Four breakthrough chambers. A couple of people had already tried to repeat what I'd done. No one had yet managed to achieve full synergy at the proto-aura stage, but people kept trying, so the next failure would fall on the Hall for not taking measures, not on the cultivator.

The fourth stage, and a position, even a minor one, overseeing two subordinates, had opened access to housing of another level. My subordinates, after all, were aliens and valued specialists. So the move went through without any excessive bureaucratic hassle — a single request through the interface was enough, and I was even allowed to choose from a dozen available options. Not in person, just from photos on the network, but they were all three-room flats, half of them with real windows.

Real windows on Verdis were reserved for outer walls and elite establishments.

There was a practical side to it too — the atmosphere beyond the glass was thin, and first- to third-stage cultivators didn't cope terribly well with oxygen deprivation. Third stages, of course, coped far better than first stages, but they still had to live in rooms designed for a cadet, who had nothing to bring in there besides himself. With an interactive window so the cadet wouldn't lose his mind.

There were slightly bigger boxes for married couples, like Adam and Lina, but even they had moved into better chambers after their breakthroughs.

My new flat wasn't a penthouse, of course. Compared to Novak's apartments, with their view over the school and the parks below, mine was as far off as I was from the seventh stage. My window didn't look out onto a panorama, but onto the neighbouring residential building. Between us, though, was a small park, green by day and blooming with lights in the evening.

The view was less breathtaking than a sunset over a mountain, but it was real. Well, the view from an interactive window had been real too, at the moment it was recorded. The view from certain cities on Earth was transmitted in real time, adjusted for the delay needed for the signal to reach Verdis. But that beauty was unreachable.

A modest park, on the other hand, was literally right outside the window.

A small thing, one might think. An unremarkable view — nothing to boast about. And yet I'd already started thinking about how best to arrange a tea table and position the chairs.

It seemed Novak had done a bit of damage to my psyche with his tea hierarchy.

I set my table right up against the glass, with only three chairs around it. The best view of the park opened up from the two set sideways by the glass.

Bao and Zola dropped by that very evening. Bao spent the whole time grilling meat, while Zola grilled my choice of interior and the curved sword on the wall.

"You're not even a swordsman!" she said.

"It's a keepsake and a good-luck charm."

"You need more luck?" she snorted. "You're the luckiest person I know!"

"Which you never fail to remind me of regularly," I said.

"His luck's a bit broken," Bao remarked. "It kicks him in the balls every time right before it's about to pay out."

"Not always," I said. "Sometimes the payout comes before the kick."

For some reason, I found myself remembering the thirty million Novak had spent on materials for Bergqvist again.

Well, perhaps he'd spent less, but I should probably start wearing metaphysical protection for my genitals right about now.

While I waited to see how that would come back to bite me, Bao went into seclusion for his breakthrough to the fourth stage. He was betting on a very long stay and preparation in the chamber. Rene was also about to break through and had no time for me, so I was left without meat or company, only Zola's barbed comments.

On the other hand, I got to know Diana properly.

Diana looked divine. Pale, glossy skin, long black hair, long fluffy lashes, full lips, full breasts, and curves like a violin.

Zola looked like a black tumbleweed next to her, which I told her right away. Diana, on top of it all, had manners and carried herself with the grace of a princess!

For some reason, the overwhelming majority of thinhorns had chosen the female sex when changing bodies. I'd been too afraid to ask for a long time, but I finally put the question to Diana.

It turned out to be simple. Not just Zola, all thinhorns carried within them a hidden craving for human approval. And there was no easier way to earn it than an attractive appearance.

Male cultivators could be attractive too, but it came more naturally to women, and they were easier to shape at the genetic-design stage. A woman's outer form changed less under the influence of cultivation. Few of them turned into broad-shouldered mutants like Bao.

I wouldn't have minded that kind of solid physique myself, but apparently not everyone finds it appealing.

Full integration with humanity, though, had never quite happened. That traitorous body-change mark on the interface got in the way. So the former thinhorns had remained a separate group, and most of them turned to same-sex relationships.

There were even rumours of orgies, but I didn't dare ask about that.

There were more important matters than chasing rumours about other people's love lives. I'd have liked to sort out my own, but techniques came first.

Once the routine had settled a bit, I started working through my technique upgrades and finally managed to figure out exactly what I'd turned into over those weeks.

I still hadn't touched Space techniques, though I'd begun performing simple tricks. My six Earth techniques had settled onto the new foundation unevenly — perfectly in some places, while elsewhere I'd had to more or less relearn how to move my physical body, and carve new channels for qi in the subtle one.

I practised each technique separately, not yet daring to bring everything together into a functioning combat scheme. I didn't need to perform every technique perfectly, but I did need to be confident in the mental techniques that formed the backbone of my combat scheme.

Mental techniques and the Double Cycle. It had become one of my main damage dealers and, at the same time, my chief means of annoying and distracting an opponent. A pile of discs carving circles around the arena ought to be plenty distracting.

I'd held three streams of consciousness even before the breakthrough; the breakthrough material had given me a fourth, and the Parallelisation upgrade had unlocked a fifth. On top of that, the Thousand Sparks had given the streams greater clarity. Even so, I didn't risk loading them until Bao's second week in seclusion had begun.

I started slowly, adding one disc at a time, standing firmly on both feet.

I needed to carefully learn my limits and choose the best plan of action for combat, because right now I was no fighter at all. The fourth stage might impress cultivators of lower stages, but I myself felt as though I'd do more damage to myself in a fight than to an opponent. A decent late-stage third would wipe the floor with me.

I felt less confident than when I'd tested my abilities right after the breakthrough that unlocked the upgrade. From that training session, I'd worked out that I could hold roughly two discs per stream. But now, standing firmly on my feet, making no unnecessary movements, I ran straight into the limits of the technique itself — eight discs made my channels burn.

That was more than I'd managed to launch before the upgrade, and considerably more than the technique was capable of by default without the mental techniques.

So: eight discs, and I still had one stream left for the Monkey.

But that ruled out any possibility of using other techniques at the same time. I'd have to settle for six.

That decision might be worth revisiting once I'd polished the upgrade to perfection, but I doubted anything would change. I could already feel the limits.

The Chain Punch and the Hook went through the upgrade almost unnoticed — they'd been with me from the very beginning, so I simply felt both of them grow organically faster and heavier, with no need to retrain my body at all. The Cutting Hook, on the other hand, unexpectedly gave me trouble, breaking out of the balanced blade projection and flickering between Blade and Projection. The issue lay in changes to the channels that I didn't yet understand and hadn't refined.

A similar problem cropped up with the Chainsaw. And I'd still been planning to add Space to it.

Perhaps a third component would fix and stabilise everything, but Space injuries were extremely painful and slow to heal. So the Chainsaw got shelved for a long time, along with the other Space techniques and the Scythe.

Novak had promised to get hold of it, but for now that remained nothing more than a promise.

Separately, I worked on the Monkey's upgrade. It had turned genuinely wild. Wild enough that I even wondered whether I still needed the God's Stroll. Still, the Mad Monkey of the East was designed for use in atmosphere. The Stroll worked outside it too, and even underwater.

Training the Monkey in the sand hall became torment, given how hard and how far it hurled me forward.

The sand hall, which had seemed gigantic back in my first year, now turned out to be tiny. Even so, it taught me to rein in the Monkey's power. To let it out fully, I simply flew out to the fields beyond the school, where the beetles grazed.

I even got a scolding from the herders a couple of times for spooking the meat. Apparently, it loses flavour that way.