Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 59: Briefing (Patreon)

Cheruiyot let Bao go as soon as we left the portal hall, nodding towards a side door. “The guest rooms are through there. Make yourself at home. Johansson will find you himself.” Bao glanced at me; I waved a hand. I wasn’t deciding anything right now anyway.

Cheruiyot led me down a short corridor with bare stone walls to a massive, unadorned wooden door. He didn’t knock. He pushed it open and let me go first.

First, I sniffed the air. A habit developed over years of tea with Novak: guessing from the doorway, by smell, how serious the conversation would be. Caramel and charred wood meant bourbon and something unpleasant. Citrus and honey meant tea and something complicated, though in recent years we’d moved away from Pure Thoughts. And this time the place smelled of coffee, strong and bitter. Cultivators rarely drank coffee, so I suspected these were some rare, qi-active beans.

Suppose the smell was even coming from coffee. Cultivators grew a lot of weird shit.

The room itself surprised me too. Instead of a cosy sitting room with a small tea table, it was a long hall with a wide dark stone table in the middle. Much longer than a tea table, it could have fit a dozen people around it without trouble. Still, right now it was only half occupied: Novak, General Kaluya, and three of my senior fellow disciples, Adam, Lina, and Bat-Endere… I mean Bat-Erdene. I always mixed up his surname. At least I knew him better than Cheruiyot.

Above the table hung a hologram of the Solar System with markers scattered across it, and beside it an enlarged diagram of Verdis’s orbit, supplemented by some tables. On the table were not only cups and glasses but also plates of half-eaten sandwiches. By all appearances, the meeting had been going on for a while.

Of course, this room had a panoramic window overlooking a nearby mountainside, but for some reason Novak sat with his back to it. He raised his eyes to me, gave a short nod and turned back to the hologram.

Kaluya looked at me as if he were reassessing me from scratch.

Adam nodded too and raised a hand in a brief greeting. Lina, on the other hand, broke into such a wide smile that I immediately regretted coming.

“Our hero has returned!” she sang out to the whole hall.

“Jealous?” Bat asked her.

“Aren’t you? He took down a cultivator a stage above him! That’s like me kicking your arse.”

I glanced at Bat. He’d moved up and was now a Five, too.

“I had help,” I said.

“Yeah, a couple of half-dead Threes!” Lina waved it away. “Modesty doesn’t suit you. Whatever happened to that young cadet who proudly declared his love of lesbian porn to the world?”

Silence fell over the room. The others’ eyes darted between Lina and me.

“Seriously, now?” I asked.

“Humour is an essential element in stressful situations,” Lina declared seriously. “It promotes mental health.”

“Yours goes way beyond any healthy limits!” I shook my head.

“Amen!” said Bat.

“That concludes the psychological decompression,” said Novak. “Back to work. Sit down.” Novak pointed at the chairs, then ordered, “Lina, make the boys some coffee and sandwiches.”

Lina didn’t argue.

The sandwiches Lina served us were completely ordinary. The meat might have been bug, but it definitely wasn’t qi-active, so I had my doubts. Bread, a slice of cheese, ham, a lettuce leaf. And coffee. Ordinary too. That is, delicious and so strong that a mortal would have bounced about like a wind-up toy until morning and certainly wouldn’t have slept. Clearly elite coffee, but as for special effects, it only wet my throat and pushed the dry sandwich further down my gullet.

Since I’d already had a snack bar at my previous stop, I wasn’t really hungry so that I could focus on the conversation between Novak and Kaluya. They discussed the hunt for demons beneath Verdis's surface, where they tried to burrow at the first opportunity. Our Earth cultivators seemed better than theirs, at least at sensing through the ground, but the sheer area and the enemy’s constant movement kept us from getting a grip. Systematic sweeps didn’t work because the demons moved chaotically and often returned to already-checked zones, which quickly wore down our forces. The old masters couldn’t see a way around this limitation.

Novak’s disciples listened but didn’t intervene, since nobody had any concrete proposals. Still, it seemed to me we were waiting for something.

Not something. Someone.

Two sandwiches later, the massive door opened again, and Aoran walked in. As far as I remembered, the xeltar was supposed to be at our base beneath the wormhole leading into Ka Federation territory.

The xeltar wore a yellow, almost golden robe with silver embroidery. The colour suited his yellow, mottled skin, though the robe hung off him like a coat hanger.

“Greetings, friends,” he said with a light bow, and blinked all three eyes.

“Master,” Novak nodded in reply, half rising from his chair.

“Mr Ambassador,” Kaluya echoed Novak, and the rest of us, raggedly and reluctantly, peeled our backsides off our chairs, stood up fully, and showed more respect.

“No need,” the xeltar waved it away with a thin hand, its fingers twice as long as a human’s, and looked over those present.

His third eye moved out of sync with the other two. It settled on Cheruiyot. Aoran went to him first.

“Close your eyes,” he ordered.

Cheruiyot obeyed, and Aoran stretched his right hand toward him, his fingers rippling like Zola’s “piano playing”. All the while, his third eye stayed on Cheruiyot’s face, while the main pair slid sideways toward Novak.

“I don’t have much time, so we’ll combine things,” the xeltar said, and his palm began to glow gold.

I knew that glow. I’d seen something similar at the Bao estate, when the medics tried to keep the old patriarch alive with a disc that poured out golden qi, similar to Palm qi but less nauseating. Back then it hadn’t saved anyone.

Cheruiyot clearly wasn’t dying, but the gold pouring into the scar on his face wasn’t pleasant. He clenched his jaw, his cheekbones jutting at sharp angles.

With his left hand, the xeltar worked something in his interface.

“Let’s begin with the clan head,” he said.

The hologram above the table changed. The system map and Verdis disappeared, and a silhouette appeared: tall and broad-shouldered, with massive horns that curled back, then rose aggressively again. Red skin, a rather goat-like face, though without a beard.

“Ghaurzakh Kzarnet. An Eight. Head of the great clan. He led the previous raid on your planet when he was still a Seven. He returned home an Eight, killed his father, subjugated his elder brother and took his place. About a hundred years ago, the brother broke through to the Eighth Stage and tried to win back power, for which he paid with his life.”

The hologram split. Beside the Eight’s silhouette, two smaller ones appeared.

“Trazgul Kzarnet, head’s eldest son, a Seven. Formally, he commands the fleet, but a Four is the real commander. I suspect the Four has already been executed for failing to break through the planet’s defences, so that we won’t dwell on that person, and we have no way of confirming the identity of the new commander.”

Aoran lowered his hand, and Cheruiyot exhaled, raising a hand to the scar, which had noticeably shrunk after just one miraculous treatment.

Aoran caught his hand and shook his head disapprovingly.

Cheruiyot apologised. Aoran let go of his hand, and all three eyes turned to me.

“Vezhkar Kzarnet,” he continued, gesturing for me to turn towards him. “Nephew, the younger son of that same murdered brother. Also a Seven. Commands the vanguard of the invasion. Unlike his cousin, he does so personally, since his loyalty is constantly in question and he can’t shift the blame onto anyone else.”

“That’s the fucker causing us problems on Kairea!” Kaluya swore. “Forgive my outburst, Ambassador.”

“Quite possibly,” Aoran nodded. “Take off your pendant,” he ordered me.

I pulled it out from under my collar, took it off and laid it on the table, and he placed his palm on my chest. He pressed me back against the chair, but despite the firm contact, his fingers kept moving, like worms.

The new skin began to itch — a very unpleasant itch.

Golden qi seeped warmly into my chest, reached my heart, and began to prickle there, as though someone were unpicking a seam thread by thread. The pain dropped lower into my core and spread across the new skin like red-hot metal.

I hissed through my teeth.

“Try to relax,” said Aoran. “It will get worse before it gets better. But it will help clear the deformed particles of flesh from your blood.”

Something in my chest jerked so hard that the world went white and the sound cut out. I gripped the chair with both hands and held on for several minutes, trying not to make myself look weak in front of my master and fellow disciples.

I don’t know if I managed it. When the sound came back, Aoran was still sharing intelligence.

“…also a Seven.” My vision returned, and I saw a hologram of a new demon. “Head of the daughter clan Drkhaal.”

“Drkhaal,” Bat muttered. “We’ve run into them before.”

“Drkhaal is the most influential of the daughter clans, and Mzharot is the strongest of their heads. Ghaurzakh tries to keep him close.”

The hologram changed again. Now a pyramid of numbers hung above the table.

“In total, we have one Eight, three Sevens and twenty Sixes. Five of them are daughter-clan heads or their children. Six are the clan head’s personal guard; the rest are the guards of the daughter-clan heads,” Aoran went on, handing me an intriguing twisted bottle he’d taken from his spatial pocket. “Drink it all,” he ordered. “Next we have two hundred Fives.”

“Four hundred and eighty-nine,” Novak corrected him.

“Impressive!” Aoran nodded. “Then I suspect the number of Fours has also fallen well below four thousand.”

“The question is by how much,” Kaluya said, shaking his head. “I hope a fair number of them were on the ships.”

“I must disappoint you,” said Aoran. “Among the demons, service in the fleet is considered a duty for junior cultivators, who can be sacrificed without regret. Even captains are mostly Threes.”

“And how many Threes do they have?” Novak asked, while I finally plucked up the courage to sip Aoran’s brew.

It tasted like fizzy pineapple juice. But it was more than taste. Freshness spread through my body with every gulp.

“From here on, the data diverge,” said Aoran. “It was a great stroke of luck that we obtained precise lists of the elite. Analysis suggests the demons had between twenty and forty thousand lower-stage demons at the start of the operation. Plus a hundred thousand mortal enslaved people.”

“Two hundred Fives,” Kaluya repeated. “We have more.”

“But most of ours haven’t settled into their new stage yet,” Novak said, glancing briefly at Bat, then shifting his gaze to Cheruiyot. “Fourteen Sixes against twenty, also fresh, and not a single Seven.”

Novak looked at Aoran as if asking something, but the xeltar shook his head.

“I bear responsibility for my people, my dear disciple, just as you bear responsibility for yours.”

“Don’t we have a common enemy? Doesn’t his plan to ascend to the Stage Nine threaten the Federation, if not the whole galaxy?”

Aoran nodded.

“But not everyone believes it’s possible. Many think Ghaurzakh will burn himself out in the process and Kzarnet will fall.”

The fact that billions would die along the way seemed to bother hardly anyone.