Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 32: Worse Than the Nail Shrimps (Patreon)

The fleet wasn't only taking portal technicians. They were scooping up technicians of every kind, to the point that the head of the Hall of Technology had to go head-to-head with pushy recruiters who'd just been handed the broadest authority yet. This wasn't your classic poaching of staff anymore, this was a real mobilisation.

Humanity's forward outpost of defence now sat right beneath the wormhole leading into demon space. The fleet ran it, so the fleet was skimming the richest cream off every school and institute. At least, it was trying to. Students of the most influential masters were left alone.

I fell into that category, along with my friends. We all carried enough weight, but Rene, they'd let slip out of their grasping claws almost by a miracle. He'd had to pull every string he had and prove he'd be more useful here, just to avoid getting shipped off to some space base.

The trouble was, Rene specialised in training first-years, and first-year training was about to be moved to Earth.

Black Lotus was starting to run a quiet fever from all the changes.

Somewhere in all this, almost unnoticed, Aoran vanished. He'd left for the Ka Federation for a consultation, whatever that meant.

He'd promised to come back, but Novak got back first. He held a handful of meetings at the school, then portalled straight off to the Yellow Pine.

I didn't bother him. The week I'd taken to make up my mind about joining the school's permanent staff hadn't run out yet. And the longer I dragged it out, the more information my master would have on hand. By the time the deadline arrived, something would already have leaked into the public sphere, and he'd be able to speak more freely.

Broadly speaking, a place on the staff of a school or some other organisation on Verdis used to be the ultimate goal for plenty of cultivators, but with demons on our doorstep, that goal had shifted toward simple survival. And something told me that after the invasion, there'd be a lot more open positions going around.

Aoran got back from the Federation before Novak had finished his tour of Verdis. He arrived in the company of two other aliens: an urdan I already knew, and a saarei I didn't. They didn't have much contact with the school's staff, but that big purple head with the glossy black eyes set off a wave of rumours and spawned a few fresh conspiracy theories.

One claimed the saarei was an Eight, secretly here to fight for us. That theory got debunked the moment the saarei and the urdan headed back to the Federation after their talk with Novak.

Once I'd confirmed my master had stopped portal-hopping between meetings and had decided to stay put at home for a while, I finally invited myself over for tea.

By that point, only two days remained before I had to give my answer, and it was starting to fray my nerves. I laid out my reason for the visit plainly, and Novak confirmed it. A meeting, not a decision.

I turned up on his doorstep at the arranged time. My master didn't bother greeting me, just called for me to come in. He himself stood by the panoramic window, lost in thought, looking down at the evening lights of the campus.

"Sit," he said, turning away from the view and getting straight down to business. "What's this about you and Delgado?"

Only one cup of tea sat on the table, in front of the chair facing away from the window. Novak had evidently already gone well over his usual tea quota in his last few meetings.

I sat down, picked up the cup, took a sip, and laid out the short version of Delgado's manipulation attempt.

"And which way are you leaning?" Novak asked once I'd finished.

"My take," I said, choosing my words slowly, "is that new duties would tie my hands right at the moment everything goes to hell. When the invasion starts, I don't want to find myself dependent on bureaucracy."

Novak nodded, almost immediately, without a moment's pause to think it over.

"You've just answered your own question, Jake. It will be hell. The demons know how to clear a minefield better than we expected," he said. "Nuclear warheads turned out not to be as reliable a weapon as we'd hoped, and the demons turned out smarter than we'd hoped.

"We expected them to jump a gateship straight into the trap. Instead, they built a gate on their side."

"But a nuclear warhead is a mass detonation. Isn't that the whole point of a minefield in front of a wormhole? One goes off, they all go off, and the wave of plasma and electromagnetic radiation goes straight through the window to the other side, wrecking everything over there."

"It should have," Novak said. "But on their end, the demons set up a focusing array that intercepts the detonation's energy right as it passes through the window, and redirects it into a narrow, focused stream. It's still a destructive stream a few kilometres across, but it doesn't touch the megagates, and they come out completely unscathed. And any ships waiting on that side just need to stay out of its path."

I turned the cup over in my hands in silence, mulling that over.

"We won't have time to lay a new minefield before they jump to this side. Say it's sub-light speeds, they can't warp through a wormhole..." I trailed off, then reconsidered. "Can they? That's two separate warps of space, which should destabilise the wormhole."

But a wormhole was a window, not a tunnel; theoretically it was possible, though as far as the data available to me showed, no one had actually pulled it off yet.

"As far as we know, no," Novak said, and some of the tension went out of me.

"That'd be bad," I said.

"Trust me, it's a lot worse than you think," Novak assured me. "Fleet analysts believe that right after the detonation, while our side is still blinded by the flash, that's the perfect moment for a small group of demons to break through.

"They don't need to push anything the size of a Challenger through, so their speeds can be enormous, kilometres a second instead of metres. And they can enter the window at a sharp angle, so the radiation wave won't touch them.

"The demons could easily send a group of small ships through to this side, ones whose whole job is to stop us rebuilding our defences."

"We need to hit the gate directly," I said.

"That option's on the table too," he nodded. Then he stood, walked over to the window, and looked back down at the campus lights, as if the answer were hiding somewhere among the lit-up buildings. "Besides that, there's a trap-inside-the-blast option under consideration. A formation, array, or structure solid enough to hold its shape and let demon ships smash straight into it. Their small size won't let them carry formations able to survive that kind of impact."

"But the size of a structure like that..." I said doubtfully. "We'd need to build our own megagate, synchronised with the demons' one, just to get an accurate fix on where the wormhole appears within those cubic kilometres of space they call the 'appearance point'. And it'd get wiped out by the blast anyway. Not to mention the synchronisation problem."

"I never said a decision's been made. It's under consideration. The other option is firing blind straight into the wormhole right after the detonation, while the corridor's still open, and hoping to land a hit. Obviously you'd have to fire from a safe distance, which drops your odds of hitting anything to almost nothing."

I sat with both options for a while, and somewhere at the back of my mind, a raw but stubbornly persistent thought started taking shape.

"Shielded portals!" I said.

"I beg your pardon?" Novak turned away from the window and looked at me again.

"Portals as gun barrels," I said, already feeling the idea building itself as I went, sprouting implementation schemes faster than I could put them into words. "Forget the structure inside the blast. What we need is a small portal ring inside a protective capsule that can survive a nuclear detonation. Not at the epicentre, obviously. If you angle the defensive array sharply enough against the blast, the plasma and radiation just skim off it. Then you drop the array, activate the portal, and it becomes a gun barrel. On the other side of the active membrane, a team of cultivators runs a group technique.

"Though each ring like that would only be usable once. A portal isn't a window like a wormhole, it's got a membrane, and a big enough dose of foreign qi will destabilise it fast."

Novak turned back to face the view again, chewing over what he'd heard.

"That's an extraordinarily sound proposal. Why hasn't any of our technicians suggested something like it?" he asked.

I just shrugged.

"Do the Federates use anything like it?" he pressed.

"Not that I'm aware of," I shook my head. "Then again, Black Hole was a civilian college, not a military academy. I know pocket charges exist, techniques sealed inside spatial pockets, but that's a different principle entirely, and the price is unjustifiably high."

"Sketch me out the idea with the portals, and a theoretical justification," Novak said.

"Sir, it's literally just two linked portals and a shot through the membrane. I've got work waiting..." I put on a pitiful face and drew the edge of my hand across my throat.

Novak wasn't buying it.

"I believe in you."

"Fine, sir," I gave in, standing up. "Should I get started on it?"

Novak gestured for me to sit back down.

"There's one more thing. The cat's getting out of the bag whether we like it or not. Everyone's going to know about it soon enough. Remember that demon who was meant to take over your body?"

"Not as well as Nur does," I joked.

"I mean his name."

"Definitely not. All I remember is that you could break your tongue trying to say it."

"Vrhakzun Drkhaal Kzarneth," Novak said, without a single stumble. "Drkhaal is one of the seven daughter clans within the greater Kzarnet clan. That clan holds the territory on the other side of the wormhole. That clan organises the raids. Last time, the clan head's son led the attack on Earth.

"Federation intelligence says he'll be leading it again. Except now he's not the clan head's son, he's the clan head, and he's at Stage Eight."

"Bloody hell," I swore, and immediately remembered my fresh conspiracy theory. "Could it be that the saarei you met with is our reinforcement?"

"Not much reinforcement in one Six," Novak said. "No, that was a Federation intelligence representative, and he didn't stick around."

"Bloody hell," I said again.

"You said it," Novak agreed. "According to the Federation, he's planning a breakthrough to the ninth."

Nines were a myth. Eights vanished without a trace from time to time, sure, and nobody believed they simply died, but there was no stable, known method for breaking through to the Stage Nine.

That didn't mean nobody had tried.

On top of that, the demons' whole method of breaking through was different from everyone else's to begin with. For them, cultivation wasn't a challenge to yourself or the world, wasn't a search for balance, it was devouring the weak. That included using qi drained from victims during raids for their breakthroughs.

This time, given the scale of the breakthrough, this demon was planning to sacrifice an entire planet.

"Won't he choke on it?" I asked.

"Quite possibly," Novak said. "More than possibly, in fact. That's exactly why none of the other clans are getting in his way or interfering right now, but for us Earthlings, it means extinction either way. The Federation offering us a global evacuation. They don't want to risk a godlike, planet-scale vampires showing up."

"Vampires?" I asked. "There's more than one of them?!"

"If you mean Eights on our enemy's side, no. The Federates believe Kzarnet only has the one Eight left, after the current head got rid of his father and brother. What I mean is, the demons won't stop even at destroying their own planets, if they find out this method actually works. That'll be a plague far worse than the Nail Shrimps."