Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 35: Backup Plans (Patreon)

I'd expected a simple procedure: foam, antiseptic, a gel cap over the finger, maybe a week of short daily visits for regenerative sessions, and mild discomfort until the nail and the flesh around it grew back. At Stage Four, the body regenerated well enough that I could have skipped the procedures entirely, but then it would have definitely dragged on.

Instead, after examining the wound, the medic suggested something else. He was a Three, which was probably why he was being so terribly polite.

"We can regenerate it by around lunchtime," he said, running the scanner over the foam-covered wound.

I arched an eyebrow. Not bad at all, on a par with the Federation. Looked like there'd been some kind of technology exchange here too.

"I'll need to stay overnight and miss the next day of work?"

"It speeds up regeneration several times over," the medic said, taking my question for reluctance.

Ha, if it meant not having to look at Jonson's face tomorrow...

"Does this injury actually qualify for medical leave?"

"The regenerator's a stationary unit, you won't be able to take it to work with you."

The medic's whole manner suggested it had been a joke. He'd clearly had plenty of experience with grumpy senior cultivators before.

"Okay," I said. "Just make sure the Hall of Technology gets a notice about me being unavailable."

"As soon as we've hooked you up."

The regenerator was a ‘tube’, almost identical to the one that had held my leg after training with Kate. This one was clearly built for a whole arm, not just one finger.

Hopefully Jonson wouldn't come visit this time. Hopefully Zola wouldn't find out either; I didn't need her acid commentary. Though I strongly suspected she had an AI agent set up to cross-reference her contacts against the incoming patient list.

The medic fixed my arm inside the tube, hooked up the system, and my finger plunged sharply into fire, which quickly settled into a muted tingling right on the edge of noticeable.

"The unpleasant sensation will last a few hours," the medic said. "Do you need a painkiller?"

"No."

"Sleeping aid?"

"No." Who'd broken this lad, and when? I wasn't used to medics this polite. I wasn't used to polite medics at all, unless they wanted something from me. Did he want something? "Thanks, I'll call if I need anything."

He walked out practically bowing and left me alone.

The discomfort wasn't sharp enough to be a real bother. Nowhere near the level that called for medication, but there were still a few hours left until my usual bedtime. Just lying there staring at the ceiling wasn't the best way to spend the time. My head, in a state like that, always found something to worry about.

I reached for the interface with my free hand and, lacking any better idea, opened up the school archive.

Now, with a terrifying eighth-stage demon somewhere out there behind the wormhole, and his plans for a breakthrough to the ninth, it seemed like a good time to refresh my knowledge of invasion history.

The original records turned out to be patchy and incomplete, so I turned to later popular-science works that tried to bring some order to the subject. But even there, there were constant mentions of how a large chunk of the archives had perished along with the very civilisations they described. The earliest mentions went back millennia, and even a quick skim confirmed what I'd already heard in passing from Old Chen: humanity lost entire eras of progress every single time the demons came to pillage.

The most common, and most clearly described, were the qi-extraction rituals. After them, entire cities turned into open graveyards. People died, animals died, plants died, insects died, and theoretically even bacteria, since the trees withered instantly, while the bodies left behind didn't decompose for a very long time. Not until the survivors, the lucky ones who'd been outside the city, buried them, or flies carried ‘life’ in from the untouched territories.

I honestly couldn't picture the scale a ritual would need to be to cover an entire planet. And I couldn't tell whether it would kill the planet outright or not. How deep would a ritual like that reach underground? Underwater? If life died off on the surface, would it survive underwater? Would the atmosphere itself be affected, or would it just seal itself off, frozen in place, with no shifting percentages of oxygen and carbon dioxide...

Then again, with that much dry timber lying around, wildfires would be inevitable sooner or later, and that meant less oxygen, with nothing left to replace it.

I wasn't an ecologist, and I had a lot more questions than answers.

Pointless, unnecessary questions, because my job was portals and survival. That, I understood. That, I could do.

And that's exactly what I dreamed about all night. All night I fought demons and fled through portals from a terrifying Eight. His horns were so huge they wouldn't fit through the portal. Not a dream, an exhausting horror show!

I breathed out easier when I woke up. Though I still had half a day left hooked up to the tube.

Regeneration, though locally contained, still demanded fuel, and I woke up hungry.

Breakfast was the first thing offered to me by the same medic who'd hooked me up to the tube. I didn't turn it down, even though it was some kind of fat-and-vitamin puree, and eating in a half-reclined position wasn't exactly comfortable.

I didn't go back to reading the chronicles after breakfast. Instead, I moved on to the question of survival, which, right now, specifically boiled down to a backup set of armour.

I called Alan, an armourer I hadn't spoken to in about four years. We agreed I'd stop by his place as soon as they disconnected me from the regenerator.

My new nail was thin as paper, pink as a baby's arse, and soft as marshmallow. Not that I was supposed to know that, since I'd been forbidden from touching it. Even outside the tube, it still itched unpleasantly. Especially at the touch. But it was there, I was free, so I could head off to Alan's. With a calorie pit stop at Tangerine on the way.

Alan's workshop greeted me with the same controlled chaos I remembered from my very first order: a cramped, dimly lit room, cluttered with components, thick with the smell of hot metal and burnt rubber. Armour plates hung along the walls, along with helmet samples, tangles of wire, and scanners like the ones used in medicine.

Alan stood at a holographic controller, directing laser manipulators as they engraved a formation onto a chest plate. An incense stick, clamped between his teeth, smoked faintly, and a thin stream of smoke rose straight up to his nose, drawn in through his nostrils.

"You wait," he ordered, still focused on his work.

About five minutes passed before Alan switched off the manipulators, inspected the work, nodded to himself, shifted the stick to the other corner of his mouth, and finally turned to face me. I'd had time to notice the change by then. Alan had grown into a Five.

"How many years has it been?" he asked.

"Memory problems?" I joked.

Alan didn't appreciate the joke.

"I remember every client, however much of a shit they were. What brings you back? Weren't you in the Federation? Didn't bring a fancy armour back from there? I don't fix bioarmour."

"Almost nobody here does, which is why I need a set of good old-fashioned iron."

"So I take it you've already trashed the fancy one?"

"Oh, no, the fancy one's perfectly intact. But the nearest decent smith able to fix it is in a whole other system. Whereas your work can be patched up on the spot with duct tape."

"A few more insults like that and I'm doubling my prices."

"What insults?! I'm saying your armour's the most reliable there is!"

"It definitely can't be fixed with duct tape. Maybe re-sealed, temporarily. But foam's better for that... Anyway, what exactly do you need?"

"Let's sit down and figure it out. I'll tell you what I can do, you tell me what's best to build for it."

So that's what we did. I talked, and Alan smoked his incense stick. Generally speaking, laying all your cards out for another cultivator was considered bad form, but it was necessary if I wanted maximum synergy with the armour. Even my Federation set, for all its bells and whistles, was still a fairly standard model.

Alan specialised in custom work. But after we'd talked it through, he said he needed to think it over. All this Space stuff was new territory for him, he might have to buy a few blueprints for new formations.

"Actually, that's where I can help you out. I'm no great engraver, but up here," I tapped my temple, "I've got plenty of new material on the subject, straight from the Federation."

"Then I'll need a list," he said.

"It'll be a very long list," I said.

"So start writing!" he said, pulling the nearly-burnt-out stick out of his mouth.

"Yes, sir," I gave in.

Still, the list wasn't the first thing I got to work on. I had some free time off, so I needed to sort out the Jonson situation without him breathing down my neck. I needed covert surveillance equipment.

But first, I messaged Delgado. Straight and honest: "Can I use spy drones to keep an eye on Jonson?"

"Yes." She replied.

"He doesn't have access to security or surveillance systems anymore, right?"

"No. And he's not stupid enough to do anything while he knows he's being watched."

"You didn't authorise him to use spy drones to watch me, did you?" I asked, because she absolutely could have.

"No. After the incident, he's banned from playing with toys like that entirely. Did you fake an injury just so you could go handle your own business?"

"No, that's just a coincidence."

"A little too convenient a coincidence. If coincidences like that keep happening, I'll be inclined to keep Jonson on the project."

"And I'll be inclined to leave it. You're the one who told me to catch him red-handed."

"Not at the expense of actual work!"

She was starting to get on my nerves.

"I've got a doctor's note excusing me for the rest of the working day! Take it up with the Hall of Medicine."

I waited a few more minutes, in case she had anything else to say.

She didn't, so I tried arranging a meeting with Kate. Usually that was easy enough, so I was surprised to find out she wasn't even on Verdis. Which meant going straight to Artem, hat in hand.

Artem headed up one of the many research divisions within the Hall of Technology. Technically it was two separate divisions merged into one purely for the sake of his genius: the Synthetic Intelligence division and the Biotechnical Systems division, AI and biodrones. Which, technically, made it a Delgado-level post, so I couldn't just yank him around whenever I felt like it, but I had one advantage: he was my senior fellow disciple under Novak. And seniors were supposed to help and mentor the juniors.

Which I shamelessly took full advantage of.

"Spare me a few minutes of your time," I asked, during the call. "I've run into a problem that needs your genius to solve."

I caught myself being every bit as polite as that medic from earlier.

"Sure, I could use your input on something too. Got an idea."

"What kind of idea?"

"Come by, we'll talk it over."