Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 30 Earth Reflection (Patreon)

"Should I come back?" I asked outright.

"Nothing's going to change any time soon," Novak said. "We've got a mountain of data to go through. Same goes for the demons. They'll need to sit down and analyse how the result matches their original plan before making another move. That'll take time. At least as long as after the probe. Then there'll probably be another test attack. Beyond that I won't even try to guess."

I said nothing, turning over what I'd heard.

"You've got a window," Novak said. "One last chance to spend some time on the planet before everything goes back to being about survival. Use it."

"Is that an order?" I asked, sarcastic.

This whole sudden ‘holiday’ reeked of one last attempt to tie me to Earth, to show me it mattered, before another global shitstorm began.

"I'm ordering you to stay out of trouble and far away from old men at the edge of their death," Novak replied. "Verdis isn't going anywhere. Problems are guaranteed. Right, I've got to run."

The line cut off before I could answer. Not that I had much to say. My master's actions usually had more than one layer to them, so figuring out the real intent behind his orders was never easy.

Strangely enough, I felt more confident when he was shoving me straight into the hell.

But for now I'd been ordered to relax, so I headed back to the table, where the Bao family was reminiscing about some funny story from childhood. Bao Liu was the butt of it, blushing furiously, while Bao Feng and Bao Song laughed almost to tears. The ice between the brother and his sisters seemed to have thawed completely.

The mood was ruined by dear old Dad Hai, who called to ask where the hell the girls had gotten to.

With obvious reluctance, the girls confessed, after which Bao Hai called Bao Feng directly.

My friend's jaw muscles stood out so sharply his face went almost square.

"Father," he greeted, and then we all heard his half of the conversation, which clarified nothing except that Bao Hai was somehow trying to use his son. "Yeah… Yeah… No!.. Agreed."

Bao Feng didn't bother saying goodbye, but I definitely saw him hit the button to end the call.

"Well?" I said, voicing the question that was clearly gnawing at everyone at the table.

"Great-grandfather's being buried tomorrow. I'll be there, in exchange for father not punishing the girls."

The sisters let out nearly imperceptible, well synchronised breath of relief.

"So what now?" I asked him.

"We're flying to Mother's," Bao Feng decided. "Are you heading back?"

"No, I'll wander around Earth a bit more."

"You could come with us, though I'm not sure Mum will have room if we all show up…"

"I'll manage," I said. Bao's mum and dad had their own drama going, and I'd already had more than enough of that for one day. A little more and it'd be a lethal dose. "I'll get a hotel. Tomorrow I'll go see Nur, or Denis and Marlon."

"Nur," Bao decided for me. "Don't you dare see Denis and Marlon without me."

"Deal."

We parted ways, and I called Nur again. Not much time had passed, so I figured she probably wasn't asleep yet.

"How did you manage that so fast?" she asked, indignant.

"Manage what?"

"Getting into new trouble."

"I haven't gotten into anything. I've got a free day tomorrow, I wanted to meet up."

"Really? Lunch together, then?"

"Around noon, your time?"

"One o'clock's better."

"Pick a spot, send me the location."

The place Nur sent turned out to be a small cafe near a park: simple, family-oriented, with a playground right outside the window. I wouldn't have recognised Nur if she hadn't waved at me. And it wasn't because she'd put on a few kilos.

The sleeve of tattoos that used to run all the way down to her wrist was gone. The dragon had also vanished from her neck and there was no ink on the bare parts of her legs.

I doubted myself right up until the last moment, until I got confirmation through the interface.

"What the hell happened to your tattoos?!" I asked.

"Had them removed," Nur answered, smiling. "They never brought me any luck."

"They saved my life!" I said, indignant.

"And I'm glad they did, but it also meant a demon caught in my head because of them," she tapped her temple with a finger, shaking her head in a clear ‘never again’ gesture.

"Then you should've kept going all the way to Stage Four," I said, hinting that Four closed off the possibility of body-swapping.

"You know," she said. "There's a theory that high-ranked cultivators lose their chance at reincarnation. As if they're trading all their many future lives for power, here and now."

"Interesting theory," I said. "Might even be true." Though that would mean I'd never be reborn again, either.

Whatever it meant, I wasn't stopping. I needed this power, here and now.

We ordered, and talked about pleasanter things. She started asking about Bao and Zola. I asked about her son, her husband, her parents.

Her son was staying with her parents just then, and her husband was at work. He was a police officer, also from the culls, though not from Black Lotus, but from the Spirit Temple: Water and Earth. Unlike Nur, he hadn't given up cultivation and was still trying to push through to the third stage. Losing his shot at reincarnation didn't scare him.

After seeing Nur, I headed to New Valla. It was quite a bit further north, and half a day earlier, right on the coast of a cold sea. I'd promised Bao I wouldn't meet Denis without him, though, so I ended up wandering around venues until evening, when a thoroughly worn-out Bao Feng finally turned up.

"The old bastard left a will nobody can actually carry out," he said. "Whichever grandchild or great-grandchild reaches Stage Five first gets everything."

"Doesn't that make you candidate number one?" I asked.

"It makes me target number one. I've already signed a renunciation. Father's disowned me a second time, and the whole family's happily gone back to tearing each other's throats out," he sighed. "Well, at least I got to see my sisters and my mother. Though the girls got banned from seeing me again.

"Screw it all! Let's go see an old friend!"

Denis, like Nur's husband, had also almost gone into the police early in his career. It was fairly typical move for someone from the culls who didn't choose the better-paying opposition. In the end, he'd picked something in between: a job with a private security firm, specialising in escorting valuable cargo.

We didn't meet at a cafe or restaurant, but at his place, where he treated us to fresh tuna steaks. Just like in first year, he manned the pan himself, though Bao kept trying to prove his own competence.

Thanks to internal cultivation techniques, Denis had been progressing. He was already late-stage, but a breakthrough was still a long way off. Still, he had a nice flat, bigger than anything either of us could afford on Verdis, a good salary, and no shortage of women interested in him. In fact, he actively avoided them, since most made no secret of wanting to put a ring on him. Denis was fairly glad with his life and his position, though the news about the demons and the probe had clearly unsettled him. The news that had killed the old Bao patriarch hadn't reached the public yet, and we didn't spoil his mood by bringing it up.

We stayed at Denis's place all the way until lunch the next day, and he saw us to the portals himself. But thanks to the time difference, we reached Marlon in the morning. He came to meet us himself.

Marlon hadn't gone into any of the security services. He'd chosen a fairly unpopular but well-paid field: meteorology. Officially, he was a junior specialist in the forecasting division. And one of the people sent out to catch and personally rein in storm fronts unofficially.

"You can actually tame a storm?" I asked him, impressed.

"Of course not. That takes a full group technique. Three Air cultivators, two Water. But a tornado, my partner and I can disperse one of those between the two of us."

That was impressive, the same way any specialist's work tends to be, and Marlon had long since become one.

He'd kept working on himself too. Late Stage Two, a bit behind Denis, since Bao hadn't been quite as generous with him, but without a trace of envy or urgency. Marlon seemed like a genuinely happy man too.

He was reluctant to talk about his personal life, mentioning only briefly a girlfriend he'd been seeing for quite a while now, seriously enough that he promised to invite us to the wedding, then steered the conversation straight back to a cyclone he was looking forward to more eagerly than that same wedding.

Marlon didn't ask about the demons. They didn't interest him in the slightest, as if they simply didn't exist for him. His mind was on jetboard-flying through the heart of a storm front. That, in fact, became the whole point of our visit. We skipped eating, just grabbed a pack of sandwiches and a couple of bottles of water. Marlon took a flyer, jetboards, and insulated suits, and flew us out to the nearest storm to show us what it was like, flying beneath a thunderhead.

Verdis never offered that kind of sensation, thanks to its thin atmosphere and heavy armour, so we had the time of our lives. But by the end of the day, after all these reunions, Earth felt more foreign than ever. I still had time left, and it was pleasant being outdoors without sealed armour, but Bao and I agreed, without much discussion, that it was time to head back.

We said goodbye to Marlon at the regional hub and transferred to the global one, from which the portal to Verdis was due to open.

Bao Feng, like me, stayed quiet for a long while, but eventually decided to share his thoughts.

"It's strange," he said. "There's this gulf between us and them. Like we've gotten so used to something else that we've forgotten what ordinary even looks like."

"I don't think there's a correct version of normal," I said. "Regretting not losing to Denis, back then?"

"Hell, no! I'd have had to come back home, and Father would've eaten me alive over it! It's just strange, seeing what a different life would've looked like. We chose the harder path. I want to believe it wasn't for nothing."

"I wouldn't call it the harder one. Right now Denis is laughing and showing off his flat. Think back to him right after he lost. I reckon it took him a fair bit of effort to put himself back together."

"He did all right for himself," Bao said. "Better than I probably would have."

"And he'd have made a better cultivator too," I agreed.

"Screw you, Jake. You got where you are on nothing but luck."

"Oh!" I said, mock-offended, pressing a hand to my chest.

In truth, this whole visit to the planet had left me with pretty mixed feelings. There was a kind of unease sitting in my chest, as if I sensed some falseness running through all of it. But I couldn't quite work out which side it was coming from. Was it them, my friends? Or me?

Was it Earth?

Or was it the path of cultivation itself, the path from human to immortal, from Earth to the stars?

Maybe Nur was right, and I'd already traded away my right to reincarnation, finally finishing the transformation from a human being into something else.

That unease stayed with me right up until I stepped through the portal's black membrane and saw a technician in a familiar grey jumpsuit.