Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 31: Bad Mood (Patreon)

The first thing I did after I got back was head to the hall. I just grabbed the nearest free one, sand and steel, and started with the simplest stuff, without boosting my mind with mentals beforehand. I didn't want to think at all. I just flooded the space with Chain Punches, spitting out bursts of silver projections.

The steady pop of detonations brought me no satisfaction. I wanted something more powerful, so I switched to Hooks, which pop harder. But it was still an empty sound. I'd have preferred to hear the crunch of bone and the wet smack of flesh in it, the way I had when I shattered Jonson's jaw.

Sometimes you just get a bad, destructive mood for no reason at all. This looked like exactly that kind of situation.

The projection flew in an arc, detonated with its characteristic dull thump of air, and it wasn't enough. I leapt into the air with Monkey and brought a rain of blows down on the sand. The impact became more tangible, gaining some depth, though it came with a hiss of sand as a sandstorm swallowed the whole hall. Tiny shards of quartz tore at my civilian clothes, worked their way underneath, and scratched my skin like microshrapnel, but it was a surprisingly pleasant pain. I wouldn't even have bothered raising a shield if it weren't for my eyes.

Sand in the eyes isn't much fun.

Deciding I'd stirred up enough chaos in the air, I dropped back to the ground, threw Scythe down at my feet, and carried on with Cutting Hooks mixed with an unstable Chainsaw.

The projections flickered, spitting out a stream of poorly formed qi right on the edge of falling apart: one moment an under-formed blade, the next an elongated projection, as if the technique couldn't decide what it wanted to be. I felt the familiar resistance in my channels but kept striking anyway, risking a fresh injury, chasing the irrational goal of digging down to bare metal under the layer of sand.

I reached it sooner than I'd expected, and that annoyed me, so I pulled a pair of discs out of my spatial pocket, intending to cut straight through the floor.

Double Cycle on the first pair, Thousand Sparks, and Parallelisation to boost the count and the control, since flying through the sand wasn't exactly smooth.

Stop!

I froze, another pair of discs in my hands.

Ha! The pain was gone, even in the regenerated foot itself. Just a clean, even feeling, as if Space Qi had finally decided I wasn't its enemy.

My time on Earth had actually done me some good, after all.

Realising that brought a sense of progress. My brain, sped up by mental techniques, quickly sketched out a plan for getting back into training, and that inexplicable fit of anger at the whole world finally let go, as if everything had clicked back into place.

Maybe I'd lost my right to reincarnation, but I was still alive and still developing. Maybe Nur was wrong, and it wasn't about power here and now. Maybe the ultimate achievement was immortality?

Even Eights weren't immortal.

But the system itself said there were ten stages. Granted, we'd only ever heard about the last two in legends, but who knew?

I tucked the discs back into my pocket, dropped the shield, and waited for the sand to settle.

Performing Misty Step while it was still airborne would have been very dangerous. I could have caught a grain of sand with my brain. I didn't know how fatal that would be, and I didn't want to find out. Though that was exactly what should have been my goal. If I learned to reassemble my body out of interdimensional mist into a solid object in the middle of a sandstorm, injuries like that would stop scaring me.

Right now, I definitely wasn't ready for that.

For now, I just needed to repeat what I already knew how to do. I jumped into the air with Monkey and dissolved between dimensions, savouring the sensation, hunting for any inconsistency.

There wasn't one. Space was obeying me again.

I pulled my body back together, Monkeyed my way a bit higher, stripped my clothes off into the spatial pocket, and coated my body in a thin layer of projection to detonate and blast away the sand stuck to my skin, then put the clothes back on.

It wasn't as simple as with the jumpsuit, which was one single piece, but I managed.

Now I needed to rest, get some sleep.

At the Stage Four, I could go without sleep for quite a long time. I might even have managed a whole month if I'd needed to, but that got dangerous for everyone around me. After two weeks, hallucinations and paranoia start setting in. I hadn't spent anywhere near that long on Earth, but jumping across different time zones had messed with my sleep schedule and my head a bit. Maybe the bad mood had something to do with that too.

I wanted my old schedule and a clear head back. I still had a few days off left and wasn't obliged to go back to work. I decided to give those days over to training, but I couldn't fall asleep for ages and slept straight through the morning, waking up closer to noon. So I had plenty of time for a late breakfast, and I decided to talk to Zola, to ask her about the changes the latest news on demon activity had brought.

Zola was busy, so we pushed the meeting to the evening. It turned out the new attack had sped up certain plans. In particular, the Praxi Plan had got a kick up to speed things along.

Semen, egg cells, and saliva from the most important candidates had already been collected, and now the Hall of Medicine was working on scaling things up. Voluntary sample donation had been announced, but with women, they took blood instead of eggs and saliva.

While a few millilitres could hold up to 500 million sperm cells, eggs were a far rarer, and collecting them was a pain.

For the plan to work, they needed something closer to an assembly line, so they took blood from women instead. The plan was this: isolate white blood cells, convert them into stem cells, multiply them, and grow ovaries from them, then put those in test tubes and bombard them with hormonal compounds to make them spit out an egg every few days. They couldn't push it any faster, since egg quality dropped sharply.

One Praxi ark could theoretically reproduce Earth's civilisation within a few generations, if an unoccupied planet suitable for colonisation was found.

Which was about as likely as the demons deciding to leave us alone.

The next day I woke up properly; the cycle of getting back to my old schedule turned out to be remarkably short. I had an unhurried breakfast, drank some tea while browsing the forum, and headed to the hall to lock in yesterday's progress.

Literally halfway there, I ran into Delgado.

"Sullivan? Weren't you supposed to be on leave on Earth?"

"Just got back."

"Well, since you're back, I'll expect you at work."

"I've still got a few days left."

"The fleet's pulled some of our specialists, bureaucrats have started jumping back and forth more often because of the latest incident, so the load on the portals has gone up. Your praxi aren't keeping up," she said, without a shred of introductory politeness. "Consider your leave over as of today. I'll expect you at your post tomorrow."

"Yes, ma'am," I answered without much enthusiasm.

"And don't forget about the evac portals. We might need them soon."

Bosses, as always, only cared about the job getting done. Except now I was a boss too. It was worth stopping by to see my toothy ones and hand out some mental kicks for not pulling their job.

Skipping the training I'd spent mostly in a half-dissolved state, the praxi genuinely deserved a dressing-down. Left without leadership, meaning without me, they'd lost direct oversight and started slacking off, feeding their colleagues a line about being desperately busy.

I promised I'd cut off their steak supply, and they pulled themselves together immediately. Not much work landed on me personally, so I was able to spend some attention on the evac portals, though not much, because the latest demon attack had set off far more changes than I'd suspected. Changes that could touch not just the Hall of Medicine and the Praxi Plan, but the whole academy.

There was a proposal to scrap the first year entirely and only admit candidates who'd already fought their way to the second stage on their own.

Theoretically, now that the Ka Federation had shared effective internal cultivation techniques with us, that was realistic. But then they'd have to give up selling the techniques and make them freely available to everyone.

And what about breakthrough materials? I doubted those could ever be made free, even in theory.

In our first year, we'd torn each other to shreds over those materials. We proved to ourselves and to everyone else that we were warriors ready for battle. I'm not romanticising it. I hated my first year. Damn it, it had been awful, with the highest dropout and death rate of any period, but it gave people without a rich daddy a way through. Crude, unbalanced, but a chance.

If everything now hinged exclusively on the second stage, it would end up being nothing but rich kids on their daddies' crystals. Classic Baos, who'd hit a wall at the fourth stage.

Still, that was all just rumour, and no final decision had been made yet.

Newcomers would still need an introduction to qi and guidance on techniques. Sure, there'd be private halls and schools offering those services for a fee, no doubt about that, but the authorities couldn't just let everything run itself. The authorities couldn't let cultivator training slip out of their control. That would simply be dangerous for the authorities themselves.

If some private or family school rose above the rest, that could lead to revolution in the worst case. My opinion was that training still needed to take some kind of organised shape. And trials, together with duels.

If they scrapped duels entirely, plenty of cultivators who'd made it through the meat grinder of the first year would be outraged. Me included.

But those were sweeping changes affecting the whole planet. Besides that, there were also local changes concerning me specifically.

At the end of the working day, Delgado called me in to see her.

"I won't beat about the bush," she began, gesturing for me to sit down across from her. "The division needs permanent staff. Especially now, when the fleet's taking people faster than we can train them.

"I want to move you onto the permanent staff."

"Does Novak know about this offer?" I asked, sitting down.

Delgado paused for a second, as if the question had caught her off guard.

"Should he? You're not some newbie cadet under his direct wing anymore. Although..." she narrowed her eyes, "given how terrified everyone here is of so much as touching a hair on the Great and Scary's head, I wouldn't be surprised if I was meant to ask him first, not you."

That stung more than it should have. Probably because there was a fair bit of truth in it.

Still, I managed to keep a straight face and even smiled back.

"Wow, are you so desperate you're stooping to cheap manipulation?" I asked. "Being a newbie cadet under the Great One's direct wing taught me to spot manipulation pretty well."

I had no intention of living the rest of my life as if every major choice needed Novak's silent approval, but the current situation was definitely not a good time for a rebellion.

"And you don't want to loosen his grip?" Delgado asked, surprised.

"I don't want another boss over my head. Technically, yes, you're my superior, but as long as I'm a cadet, I answer to my master more than to you. Don't try to manipulate me. It won't get you very far."

I'd had a similar conversation with Jonson once. Back then I'd bluntly hinted that manipulators always came to a bad end. This time I decided to go easier, to avoid any future accusations of overly heavy-handed diplomacy.

"Are you turning it down?" she asked, point blank.

"No," I shook my head. "I need some time to think it over."

"To consult Novak?"

"Yes," I said. "Unlike the two of us, he ought to know what's actually going on."

Delgado nodded.

"Forty-eight hours," she said.

"A week," I said, rising from the chair. "That's how long it took last time for the fuss around the news to die down enough for Novak to speak freely."