Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 26: Old Blood (Patreon)

Among Earthlings, I was probably one of the people best acquainted with Space and portals, but the noise and bustle of the Beijing portal hub caught me off guard.

The constant announcements, the sound of heels tapping on fake marble, the hiss of wheels on the cargo platforms and the electric motors, thousands of people hurrying in all directions at the same time, as if an anthill had been poked with a stick, and the whole scene was illuminated by the red glow of the setting sun, its rays bouncing off the marble and the polished metal through the tall panoramic windows.

The hall was enormous, divided into blocks enclosed by armoured glass and deflectors meant to protect people in the case of a portal malfunction.

The Space background was fairly uneven, but well above standard, higher than at any portal station I'd visited before. With careful cultivation, techniques here could easily raise one's Space root. Careless cultivation could result in injury. Ordinary people passing through, however, were in no danger.

For most, it had become pure routine; they walked out of the portals and went straight for the exit or moved on to another portal.

I stood out from the general flow. I kept having to check the map and my interface, and my clothing wasn't any help either.

The civilian suit which Novak had given me before I left didn't fit like a standard jumpsuit. Too much fabric across the shoulders, the sides and the hips. The trouser legs were far too wide. All of it restricted movement to some degree, and it would get in the way if I ever needed to put armour on.

The place I was going to visit next was Urumqi.

In theory, I could use the Black Lotus portal to jump anywhere I wanted, but doing so would have disrupted the established schedule and the entire settled communications system. If an activation took place outside of the timetable, it would have caused a state of chaos in the system and attracted the notice of the relevant authorities.

And despite having gained a little political weight, I still couldn't afford something like that.

There was still twenty minutes before the Urumqi portal was due to be activated. I bought my ticket and then took one of the free seats in the waiting area, watching the continuous flow of people.

Twenty minutes was not enough to allow one to go anywhere and yet was a long time for nothing more than staring into space.

Thoughts kept creeping in.

I was on Earth. Almost everyone around me was an ordinary mortal without an interface. I couldn't see names hovering over their heads; I saw images on their phones and tablets instead. It was actually there, on screens, not in the interfaces inside other people's heads.

I have nearly forgotten what it was like to carry a mobile device with me after all these years.

So that was what all those deep pockets in my civilian suit were for.

The sight of social-media photos on the phone of a woman sitting near me reminded me of the pictures on the memory card that belonged to this body's original owner. His late parents and friends. Two teenage boys: one tall and lanky, with a smug smile and tousled hair; the other broader in the shoulders and more serious.

An image that I last saw during my first year, even though I still had the memory card somewhere.

By now, that pair would have grown into young men, and might even have families of their own.

In my first year, I'd still felt some hesitation about this body's past. Now I felt nothing. No warmth, no guilt, no urge to track down anyone from those photographs.

The real Jake Sullivan…

Now I was the real Jake.

The old Jake Sullivan had been dead a long time. Seven or eight years now. They had their own lives, their own drama, none of which had anything to do with me any more. And ahead of me lay Patriarch Bao.

I hadn't still decided how I was going to spend this week on Earth, but if I was to visit anyone it would be the three friends from the academy, not people I had never known.

About five minutes before the scheduled time, the hub staff politely asked us to take our places.

It was something new. Apparently this was how planetary stations handled overcrowding. Coloured patches of light showed up on the marble; these were the "places". The passengers just had to move along with the light. The patches moved steadily toward the portal and, since people were focused on the light moving across the floor, they weren't frightened and didn't hesitate when facing the portal's black membrane. The effect was a smooth, almost conveyor-belt-like flow — one person every three seconds. If a malfunction was detected, the strip of patches simply stopped in place.

I got a red patch. Blue and green ahead and behind me. The twenty-three passengers going to Urumqi all went through the portal in less than one and a half minutes, showing not the slightest sign of hurry. Almost all of them were ordinary mortals, which only proved once again that the activation time that Pascal had wanted for the evacuation portal was too long.

Urumqi was not noisy at all. Although the style of the building was the same, it was smaller and contained much fewer people. The light filtering through the panoramic windows was not so red. Here the sun was higher.

Someone was already waiting for me at the exit of the block.

Two nearly identical girls stood there, with different hairstyles and the colours of their expensive-looking trouser suits: yellow and green. The one in the yellow suit had her hair pinned up in a bun at the back of her head using two long hairpins and held a small holoprojector with which she projected a greeting into the air for me.

Welcome, Jake Sullivan, to Urumqi!

I went over to the girls, and they bowed in exactly unison, greeting 'Master' Sullivan in exactly the same way.

"Hello, hello," I replied, returning the nod. "And you must be..." My interface gave me no information regarding them.

"Bao Liu," the one in green with the braid introduced herself.

The one in yellow said "Bao Song".

“Could you happen to be one of Bao Feng's sisters?”

"Yes, Bao Feng is our respected elder brother," Liu replied on behalf of both of them.

"Do you even remember him?" I asked.

The girls exchanged glances before answering.

"Of course we remember our dear brother," Liu replied once more.

"And when did you last speak to him?" I asked.

The girls looked at each other once more, but this time received no reply.

"Never mind," I said, deciding not to press them further. "Where to?"

"The flyer's waiting," Bao Liu answered with visible relief, gesturing the way.

We made our way to the lifts and rode up to the terminal roof, where the landing pads were. Dry mountain air hit me in the face, and the mountains themselves were clearly visible through the flyer's elongated, teardrop-shaped glass canopy. The flyer resembled the one Mendoza's disciple had once flown Novak and me around in, only about twice the size.

That disciple had died at a demon's hands.

Bao Song took the controls of the craft. Bao Liu gestured me into the cabin and settled herself opposite me, hands folded in her lap.

The flyer rose smoothly and silently into the air. Bao Liu sat opposite me, unnaturally upright, as though my gaze made her uncomfortable.

I decided it was no longer necessary to worry her and instead looked out of the window. As we moved along, the view of the city disappeared quickly. Below lay yellow hills and some green patches of forest, which later changed into more rocky ground.

We were flying towards the mountains.

The Bao estate was situated beyond the ridge, past the sharp peaks, through the deep gorges, and over the mist that clung to the slopes.

The estate itself sprawled across a wide plateau, as though someone had carved a slice off the mountain and levelled it especially for building. A complex of structures in the traditional style: curved roofs, dark wood, white walls, split down the slope in terraces, linked by covered walkways and gardens that looked immaculately tended down to the last leaf, even from up here. Somewhere in the centre, something resembling a pond could be seen, ringed by low trees trimmed into shapes that surely carried some symbolic meaning lost on me.

Everything looked old. Deliberately old, with the kind of luxury that boasts not of novelty, but of how many generations have stood on this very spot before you.

Tradition went hand in hand with technology, the plateau having six landing pads, two of which were large enough not only for a flyer but also for Novak's Queen. There were two different kinds of flyer parked directly on the pads, and Bao Song positioned ours between them.

Bao Liu took me through the estate in just as quiet a manner as earlier, using as few words as possible and at the same time making the appropriate polite gestures.

After several covered walkways, we entered a building and, I think, passed straight through it. Unless I was mistaken, we ended up right inside the mountain. The windows disappeared, and all the light became artificial, though the walls were still hung with antique works of art.

Beyond the next door, the qi background rose sharply, and rose again beyond the one after that, as though this were an enormous breakthrough chamber in a Meditation Hall. A chamber of enhanced comfort, in which Bao Zhui was already waiting for us. The old man looked like a wrinkled piece of shit.

He sat in a chair that alone had probably cost more than the flyer that had brought me here. Dark wood, carved with the same plant motifs as the doors outside, and, by the look of it, comfortable to an almost indecent degree. Except that sitting in such a chair evidently wasn't much easier for old Bao than standing would have been.

His body beneath the silk robe seemed almost weightless. The kind of gauntness where the skin simply hangs from the bones because there hasn't been any muscle underneath for a long time. The contrast with Bao Feng, whose body was now thick with dense, powerful muscle, was especially striking. There was no point even comparing the faces. The old man probably no longer resembled his own former self. Instead of a face, there was a web of wrinkles so dense that the eyes were lost somewhere in the folds, as though someone had crumpled a sheet of stiff paper and forgotten to smooth it back out.

His hands lay on the armrests, and I studied them the longest.

They trembled even when they weren't moving. Not violently, not for show — a fine, ceaseless tremor that the old man evidently wasn't even trying to control, because controlling it was no longer within his power. His fingers twitched against the wooden armrest in some sickly rhythm of their own, and the sight left me a little uneasy. It was the same physiological discomfort you feel watching a body that no longer obeys its owner.

No, he was unable to fight any further.

It seemed only a rich qi background was keeping the old man in this world.

Fifth Stage — once the peak of human strength. Now just a worthless old man.

“Didn't expect to see that, did you?” he asked, in a dry and trembling voice.

The question caught me off guard, but I saw no reason to lie.

“I hadn't really got any idea what to expect,” I said.

"All my grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren can hardly wait for me to die."

A faint, barely perceptible pressure struck me in the chest.

Bao Liu swayed.

Was that his aura?

"My apologies," the old man rasped. "I didn't mean to offend you. I'm afraid I don't control it well any more."

"My condolences," I said, rather than pointing out that he'd fallen well short of anything actually offensive.

It wasn't a threat, merely a leak caused by a vessel which no longer maintained the pressure it should have. Although that kind of comparison would have offended the old man himself.

"I don't think Bao Feng is waiting for you to die," I added.

He had long since learned how to live without the support of his family.

"Glad to hear it." He raised a hand and, with a trembling gesture, invited me to sit opposite him. "Tell me about him."