Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 41: Cucumber Wine (Patreon)

The room I was assigned on Beta-Beta-Pi was about the same size as the nook I'd got in my second year, except without a personal shower. The shower here was communal, at the end of the corridor. Still, the shower wasn't what bothered me most. I hadn't lived long in my new flat on Verdis, but losing a real window and going back to a fake one hit my mood harder than I'd expected.

Some consolation came from the fact that the base was deep underground, and nobody here had a real window, not even Novak. And besides, I didn't spend much time in the room. The week had gone by in a mode of constructive work, sixteen to eighteen hours a day.

I suspected the local cafeteria was generously dosing the food with stimulants. There wasn't actually that much variety: three kinds of porridge, three kinds of meat. On a diet like that, covering the body's full range of vitamins and micronutrients without supplement dosing was unrealistic.

To compensate for the monotony of the food, though, there was a superb selection of tea and light alcohol, which barely registered on a fourth-stage cultivator, like trying to knock over an elephant with a pebble. Pascal and I had taken a liking to cucumber wine. I never doubted people's ability to brew alcohol out of anything, but the existence of this drink still surprised me. Once the surprise wore off, we often discussed the technical details over a cup. We'd even brought a few bottles into the lab.

The cannon, at least at the stage Pascal and I had reached, wasn't giving us any trouble.

The scheme we'd sketched back on Verdis remained essentially the same: rechargeable rings like blanks in the magazine, instead of a solid frame. Ten seconds of activity, no problem. We'd crammed the cannon's housing full of generators and batteries good for five minutes of continuous activity. Plus twenty spare rings. The incoming portal, in theory, had the capacity for half an hour of continuous operation, except we had nowhere on Beta-Beta-Pi to test it, on no one and with nothing.

No one on the base was below the fourth stage. Everyone here was a respectable cultivator doing important work, putting in no less than we were, and we couldn't pull them away on a whim. We needed second- and third-stage cultivators, on whom the whole idea was supposed to rest. But even that wasn't so simple.

The base was staffed exclusively by people from Black Lotus and Yellow Pine. Our schools favoured individualism, honing uniqueness to a razor's edge. Group techniques were the domain of the fleet, the army, and the Spirit Temple, where people were drilled from the start to act in formations. Sure, I fired off a few discs through the portal, a couple of colleagues launched some spikes, but it made for a rather half-hearted test.

Pascal and I each had a cup of wine, assembled a prototype incoming portal and two cannons, and dumped the problem on Artem as our boss. Let his head ache over it.

We took up another task, one that wasn't coming so easily, and on which we had some fairly serious disagreements. Wine wasn't helping us resolve them.

Evacuation portals. Pascal's original target had been ninety seconds. We hadn't come close. Now he was willing to settle for a minute, treating active duration as the single most important factor.

Artem had told us to focus on stability and finishing the project quickly, and I agreed. Still, after I'd fixed everything out of the portal that had made it so unstable, the load on the system had risen, knocking us back down to forty-nine seconds. And Pascal was very unhappy with that downgrade. If not for it, we'd already be able to hand in the project.

"That's a fairly solid time," I insisted.

"A minute, minimum!" he insisted. "Nobody knows what forty-nine or even fifty-three seconds feels like. We're trained from childhood to count: one second, three, thirty, a minute, five… Those timings are wired into our subconscious."

"Well, we've got thirty seconds guaranteed, with another nineteen as a buffer," I said.

"We need a minute." Pascal wouldn't budge. "We've still got a week."

"Right, and in that week we're supposed to manage what we haven't managed in several months?" I asked.

"We'll try," he insisted stubbornly. "Maybe if you recalculate the trimmed feed to Vacuum and Gravity again…"

The image immediately flashed before my eyes, the same one that had landed me in prison: Johnson sliced open, his heart rolling across the floor, jumping with each contraction.

Of course, without Johnson's modifications and my attempt to hold the membrane, the danger wouldn't be nearly as serious; the portal would malfunction, but I still shook my head.

"No! We're not risking a ten per cent failure rate across every portal for the sake of ten measly seconds!"

"You just don't want to work anymore," Pascal accused me.

"I've hit a conceptual dead end," I said. "I don't see a way to solve the problem."

"Then go do something else. Give me a few more days to work on it alone."

"Artem will have both our bollocks if I sit around doing nothing," I pointed out.

"Find yourself something to do."

Something like what?!

Except I already knew what. The thought had been circling in my head more than once already, right alongside the image of Johnson's death. The portal membrane was simply the perfect combat disc. All I needed was to figure out how to generate it in the field.

"Fine," I agreed, sitting down at my holographic workbench.

I didn't need a full-sized portal. The smaller the better, though not so tiny that the disc couldn't do any damage. Something finger ring-sized would do. What would the generator need to look like if I stripped him of everything except the batteries for Gravity and Vacuum…

In theory, I could drop those too, if I grew the roots with essence.

Then all that would remain would be the functional ring itself, plate-sized and two fingers thick. A stationary device would naturally need to be bigger…

But why would I need a stationary device, if I wasn't planning to use it as an actual portal? Two rings, two generators linked into a network. Essentially I'd have two mobile micro-portals on the battlefield. If I managed to punch through an enemy's armour and push one of them inside without losing control, I could drop a surprise into the enemy through the other opening.

That's bloody genius!

But the portal's small diameter would only let me push thin things through. Point or Finger cultivators would love that. What I needed was something bigger than a fist, which would significantly increase the device's size.

On top of that, I needed to work out how to keep the device from breaking down after the membrane gets torn out of it…

I felt an unhealthy surge of enthusiasm, thought once again that they must be dosing the food with something here, then waved the thought off and got down to calculations. By evening, I had holographic prototypes ready: two rings, tray-sized and a finger-and-a-half-thick. Here I'd managed to save on size, and at the same time I'd shifted the membrane's generation point, not through the centre of the ring but a few millimetres above it. The membrane was extremely unstable and couldn't withstand any scrutiny, but I didn't need stability. On the contrary, the fact that the membrane flickered without losing its connection only made it more dangerous.

Though the connection had its own problems too.

More importantly, working on these discs had given me an idea. With the evacuation portals, I'd been locked into a vertical layout. What if I set the ring horizontally instead? The incoming portal would have to hang from the ceiling, so that gravity would pull in the same direction on both the entrance and exit. It wouldn't add any active duration, but it would cut down the time needed to use the portal, since there'd be no need to step through or jump through it, no need to shove a wounded person through. You could drop them like a sack into a hole in the floor.

I presented the idea to Pascal, and its simplicity struck him.

Feeling as though my mission for the day was complete, I decided to wrap up work in the lab and went two floors down to see Alan. A few ideas had occurred to me about how to combine the new, half-finished device with the armour, which was still stuck at the development stage.

Alan wasn't happy to see me. His department clearly had its own workload too, but for a change he wasn't engraving formations; he was going through reports. He wasn't even smoking an incense stick, which, as far as I could recall, was a first.

"I hate you," he said to me instead of hello.

I glanced over my shoulder to check whether that was addressed to me.

"For what? I haven't even had time to say anything yet."

"You inherited this from your master. He dumped this work on me, but hating him is dangerous, so I'll hate you instead."

He said it so seriously that I couldn't tell how much truth was in it. I wanted to believe he was joking. In a certain sense, an armourer was like a doctor. You don't want your proctologist hating you. He can turn your life into hell.

"Deal," I agreed cautiously. "As long as it doesn't get in the way of you working on my armour. And please, remember that Novak values his disciples. Especially me. Anyway, you said you had a few options for the final version of my armour. I need to decide while there are still a couple of weeks left, not just a day."

Alan nodded, set his tablet aside, walked over to the holographic workbench, and pulled up the working version of the armour, highlighting the large formations on the chest and back.

"I won't have time to rework the mechanics anymore. The coating can be swapped, but it's already a top-tier alloy. That leaves the formations.

"Chest: standard variant against swordsmen. I hear the elite among our opponents are specifically sworders, so nothing special here, just a well-developed defence against cuts and thrusts, the same stacks of individual shields angled against the blow that you're already familiar with, but these will be fifth-stage formations.

"Back: reinforcement of the Fist shield. Gauntlets: a raw bonus to Fist attacks, or Fist plus Blade. Though I'd stick with Fist; Blade drags the overall output down; it’s better on the weapon. Boots: Air, to suit your Monkey. The armour has extra oxygen tanks, but doesn't need them to survive. I'll fit it with the Federation's oxygen recirculation system.

"What do you think?"

"That you've completely forgotten about Space," I said

"Not my area. I didn't understand much from your materials."

"Instead of a shield, there'll be a Space Stabilisation Formation," I said. "And on the gauntlets, you need to hang an Air control amplifier."

"Air?" Alan asked, surprised. "Have you been hiding something from me?"

"Thanks to Air, I can reactivate spent discs before they hit the ground."

"That'll only work in an atmosphere," Alan pointed out.

"Yeah…" I agreed reluctantly.

Giving up Fist was painful. It had been my foundation since my first days in this world! Without it, I felt incomplete.

Alan seemed to sense my hesitation. "I can make two pairs: one for Fist, another for Space. Could you swap them through your spatial pocket?"

"Most likely, yes!" I said, cheering up. "Then maybe you could throw in a Space control option too?"

"Aren't you asking for a lot?"

"I'll pay for it."

"The issue isn't payment; it's time. Prioritise the order of work."

"Air, Fist, Space."

"Excellent, then I'll need those Space formations from you," he said. "I'm not choosing them myself."