Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 39: Investigation (Patreon)

Fuck!

More constructive thoughts didn't come to me for about two seconds, probably. Only then, through sheer willpower, did I manage to tear my eyes away from what was left of Jonson.

Well, to hell with him! He brought it on himself.

But the bastard had set me up too!

I looked around, searching my surroundings for a clue on what to do next.

At the centre of the scene was the portal, its ring sliced clean through. The cut would have been almost invisible if it hadn't blackened from the internal overheating. If the internals hadn't been completely fried the moment the membrane flew, there had to be answers somewhere in there. Any physical trace of tampering, any proof of my innocence, would be there.

I scanned the room. The security camera in the corner of the lab was pointed straight at the ring. Good, it should have caught everything, including Jonson chasing me through the door with his vine, striking me in the back. But we'd already been through this. The footage could be altered, whatever Delgado said about restricted access.

Which made the frightened technicians in the corner of the room all the more valuable. They'd seen that I hadn't approached or touched the ring.

"You!" I said, pointing at the one holding the tablet. "Call the Order. Now!"

That was slightly redundant, since the interface was already flashing red, but the alert was for first responders.

"You!" I said to the other one. "Don't take your eyes off me! Remember exactly how I'm standing and what I'm doing." It'd come in handy as an alibi. And the more precise that alibi is, the better. I turned back to the first one, who was already dialling someone through his interface. "Once you finish that call, bring more cameras in here. As many as you can find, so no detail is left out of frame."

Right, what else could I do in the few seconds before the angry security lads came storming in?

Probably worth warning my allies. Delgado or Artem?

Well, Delgado could be called my ally only nominally. Though she should back me up, if only because I'd survived and she didn't have any other specialists to spare. But neither of them had any authority over the investigation that was about to start. Technically, Delgado had limited authority as my boss, and Artem could report to Novak, but neither of them was the Order, and without the Order, this story wasn't getting closed.

I could call Bao. That would be the simplest route, he'd pass everything up to Johansson without much fuss, but the situation was serious enough that I decided to do it myself. Lately the fuss over the demons had died down, and I hadn't heard of anything else that could be keeping Johansson busy.

I chose direct contact and dialled him through my interface.

"Jake?" His voice was wary, though not without sarcasm. "If you're calling me directly, this is worse than the thing with Jonson's jaw. Did you kill someone?"

"Jonson," I said. And so he wouldn't think I was messing with him, I had to repeat it clearly and distinctly. "I killed Jonson."

The pause on the other end stretched out. The first technician had already finished his report to the Order, but hadn't run off for cameras like I'd told him to; he just stood there. A roar of jet boards sounded in the corridor.

"I take it that's not a figure of speech," Johansson finally said.

"No, the idiot tried to set me up and…" I sighed, hunting for shorter words, "got blown to pieces. You'd better watch the footage."

The lab door burst open, and a pair of medics rushed in. No boards visible. They looked around, spotted us through the glass, saw Jonson's legs in the doorway to the shielded room, and dashed towards them.

I shook my head involuntarily when they froze upon seeing the full picture.

"That's not something you're going to resuscitate, lads," I said. "Better leave it to the Order."

"What the hell happened here?" one of them couldn't help but blurt, staring at the chunks of the body and the pool of blood.

No one had time to answer before Security burst in. Their route and reaction were identical to the medics', only the question differed: "Who the hell did this?"

"Your colleagues are here," I told Johansson. "See you." I hung up. "Technically, I did it. But he brought it on himself, and you'd better review the recordings. I'm going to stand right here until then, not move, and not touch anything."

I ended up not moving for quite a while. About twenty minutes, probably, until Johansson showed up in person and ordered me taken to an isolation cell. During that time, both Artem and Delgado tried calling me, but I played dead and didn't answer.

They took my pendant with the pocket and fitted me with cuffs that restricted the qi flow in my body. They made my fingers itch, but it was worse when they came off. The sensation was like blood rushing back into numb, cramped limbs — a thousand needles at once. They only removed them once I was in the cell, a small, tidy, windowless room with a bed, a sink, and a toilet. All the amenities, minus a signal.

I hadn't bothered calling anyone while under watch, so as not to make the Order lads nervous, and in the cell I lost that option entirely.

I'd expected to be called in for questioning fairly soon; instead I got dinner, then breakfast. No one was in any hurry to interrogate me, and three full days went by like that. No one visited me, and it was impossible to pry anything out of the jailer during meal deliveries. All I could do was guess, and honestly, I couldn't stop guessing, running through every version of events, wondering what had gone on behind the scenes without me. By the end of those three days, I'd genuinely started doubting my own memory.

And then, as if nothing had happened, a grinning Bao showed up, handed back my pendant-pocket, and let me out of the cage.

"Am I cleared?" I asked.

Bao laughed.

"The investigation's still ongoing. I'll tell you everything over lunch. You're buying."

"Fine, I'll buy, but don't beat about the bush, start talking now."

Bao didn't beat it out.

So, Pascal had taken the damaged portal apart screw by screw. Under supervision, with a full protocol, sensors and cameras trained on both him and the device.

No technical faults found. None whatsoever.

That was the worst and most dangerous possible outcome, because it confirmed Jonson's theory that my portal was garbage.

"But if it were that simple, they wouldn't have let me out," I said.

"You came this close to being locked up forever," said Bao, holding up a millimetre-wide gap between his thumb and index finger. "This close to becoming an eternal qi battery."

Not the best fate.

Delgado had assembled an alternative team, which built several portals to my blueprints, and across a series of tests, more than forty of them, the portal failed four times. The failures were of the same type, but the membrane fell apart within a fraction of a second, which led the researchers to their first theory: that I'd been the one keeping it from falling apart.

Nobody could say for certain whether I'd done it on purpose, but nobody expected a straight answer either, so nobody bothered asking.

Pascal had suggested the destructive modification was somewhere in the projector the membrane had cut through, which had burned out completely, but nothing could be proven.

The compressor station above the dormitory had turned up empty, and the search of the canyon had found nothing. However, they'd found a pocket on Jonson's body, one he'd worn on a chain around his neck, just as I did. The portal membrane had cut through the chain but hadn't destroyed the pendant. Inside it, among other things, was a portal. A far cruder, much less energy-efficient version of the one we'd been developing.

At first glance it looked like a lone prototype, but Johansson had asked Pascal to take a look, and Pascal insisted it was part of a working network. Still, connecting to it wasn't simply a matter of trying, Jonson had taken security seriously. So Johansson turned to Novak, and Novak turned to Aoran. The third eye of a seventh-stage xeltar found traces of Earth Qi use in the canyon.

The Order's cultivators had to dig through a kilometre of rock before reaching another portal, fitted with formations that liquefied stone. Just as I'd suspected, Jonson had used it, then sunk it into the rock.

With two portals in hand, Pascal got them working. Of course, the real prize was the third portal, located in an actual evil genius' hideout, buried under tonnes of rock out in the wastelands. Equipment, food and water stores, an autonomous life-support system rated for one person. A shielded bunker where you could survive an invasion. It didn't just shield signals; it could, in theory, hold up against demonic qi-gathering formations. The only way in was the portal.

There, among the equipment, they found modified projectors that, if installed on my portal, would produce exactly the kind of destructive membrane that had killed him.

"So why is the investigation still ongoing?" I asked.

By then, we were already waiting for steaks at one of the higher-end establishments, and I was more than happy to foot the bill.

"Because they're checking how much Delgado and Mykula knew, how far they were involved. They helped you. It's not clear whether anyone helped Jonson. With the portals, with building the hideout, or whether he's connected to the anonymous tip against Pascal. Awfully convenient timing, getting him pulled out of the lab. And the attitude towards Pascal himself is still mixed. Every word and judgment of his gets double-checked. On top of that, your portals really are garbage. You know, if you hadn't killed him, he'd have covered his tracks. Your portals would've been tested without you and found to be glitchy, and the blame would've landed squarely on you."

"Well, looks like I got lucky," I said, watching as two steaks with proper potatoes and a bottle of plum wine made their way towards our table. We fell silent for a moment while the waiter set down the plates and the small ceramic Eastern-style cups for the wine.

I poured for us both.

"To your luck," said Bao.

We drank.

"Even though the investigation isn't finished," I said. "They're not going to lock me up now, are they? Or could something still turn up that flips the whole picture?"

Bao tilted his head. "Not unless you want to get properly paranoid about it," he said.

"Excellent. Finally I can get on with properly preparing for this bloody invasion!"

I dug into the meat with real appetite. My gaze, glad to see something other than the monotonous walls of the isolation cell, wandered around the room and the other patrons. At the next table, a man cut off mid-sentence. The woman across from him asked, confused, what was wrong, and he waved a finger at her, telling her not to interrupt, then stared off into empty space.

A few seconds later, the same thing happened at another table. A cadet's gaze went glassy, the way people's eyes do when they fall completely into their interface.

I stopped chewing abruptly. Two was a coincidence, three was a pattern. I scanned the room anxiously, looking for a third.

"Please, no!" I pleaded.

"What?" Bao asked, and followed my gaze.

I'd just spotted the third glassy-eyed cadet with a worried expression.

"Fuck!" I swore, and dove into my own interface.

It took a second to find the right thread on the forum. Same as always in these cases, it was shooting straight past everything else in views and comments, the numbers under the title climbing right before my eyes, updating faster than I could blink.

The demons had broken through the defences beneath the wormhole.

When?

How, exactly?

I needed details.