Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 60: Burning Sky (Patreon)

Once Aoran was sure the accusation hung in the air and no one intended to voice it, he reminded us, “The Federation’s doors are still open to anyone who wishes to leave Earth.”

Uniformly sullen looks were his only answer.

“That’s bullshit!” Lina couldn’t hold back. “With all due respect. We have to stay and fight!”

“Perhaps,” said Aoran. “Battles make up at least half of a cultivator’s life. But your mortal relatives, if you still have any, if you care about them, need not go through what you go through. At the very least, they have less strength to fight with.”

Novak and Kaluya kept their sullen expressions, but the Great One’s disciples began exchanging glances.

“As the Federation’s ambassador, I can arrange the evacuation of your relatives, should you wish it.” He turned to me, pointed at my chest, and changed the subject. “That won’t be enough. One session is too little for a full cleansing. So I’ve set the process in motion. It will finish everything on its own. A week, perhaps a little less.”

The xeltar pointed at my pendant, which was still lying on the table beside a coffee cup.

“Don’t wear it this week. Stay away from active portals and any Space techniques. They could undo the cleansing process.”

I looked at the pendant. Everything I owned was in there: the spare Generators, Zola’s injectors…

“I’ve got medicine in there,” I said.

Aoran stepped back to the other end of the table and passed his hand over it. Five bottles of ‘pineapple fizz’ appeared on the table, and I didn’t sense the slightest distortion of space or release of Space Qi that usually accompanied handling a spatial pocket.

“One bottle a day,” said Aoran. “That will be enough to sustain the process. It won’t be pleasant, but I advise you not to stop.”

Aoran swept his gaze round the table once more, with all three eyes at once, lingering on Cheruiyot, whose scar was now barely visible, then on me.

“I’ve handed over the intelligence package and said everything I could say at this table,” he said to Novak. “Now I would like to speak with my disciple in private.”

Novak rose, clearly intending to leave with Aoran, but I put my two pennies’ worth in again.

“Can I assemble portals?” I asked. “Hardware work: casings, projectors…”

His ordinary eyes looked straight at me, while the third slid from my head to my feet, then back.

“Is there a particular reason?”

“Survival!” I snorted.

“Let someone else handle the batteries,” he said. “Your survival depends on following these simple rules no less, perhaps even more…”

I nodded, then stood and bowed more visibly.

“Thank you, Master.”

“Survive,” he said. “That will be enough.” His three eyes slid over those present. “Survive, all of you!” It sounded like an order, and all of Novak’s disciples rose as one and bowed.

Aoran gave us a parting look, bowed half as low as we had, and left the room together with Novak. Their conversation was short, two minutes, no more. Then he departed for the space base.

They gave me a room in the same wing where they’d put Bao. It had no fancy view, not even fake one. The cubbyhole, with a narrow bed, a tiny desk and a bedside cabinet, was carved deeper into the mountain. Its only virtue was privacy. The crowds of the last few hours had been grating on my nerves, so I set the bottles of healing drink out on the desk, put the pendant in the top drawer, flopped back onto the bed and fell asleep instantly.

I woke with a jolt, ready for a fight, and immediately reached for my armour in a spatial pocket I didn’t have on me. I’d long since stopped noticing the pendant on my chest, but its absence frightened me. Knowing my armour no longer lay just beyond that thin, invisible boundary was unsettling.

I’d felt these before. Once again I felt naked and unprotected. Still, I trusted Aoran. Even if he was carrying out the Federation’s political will, there was no point in deceiving me specifically.

On the second day, a deep itch began beneath my skin. I got diarrhoea, something unheard of for a Stage Four cultivator. And it hit me as hard as the purge after my first minor breakthrough. I felt just as weak and worthless, but, as Aoran had advised, I kept drinking the pineapple brew, which was clearly the cause of my condition.

Because of my state, they excused me from official meetings and operational planning, but after Johansson turned up, they brought Bao into them. He, Johansson and Cheruiyot left for somewhere on the third day.

On the fourth day, the diarrhoea gave way to sweating and thirst. I smelled as if I’d spent the night in a chemical warehouse. The same acrid smell as at the rehabilitation centre, only stronger. There couldn’t have been that many deformed particles in me. It felt as though my body was getting rid of absolutely everything that bothered it even slightly.

That same evening, the bulk of the debris left over from the space battle finally reached Earth. The sky blossomed with fire.

The fleet had done a good job of breaking up the debris before it arrived, so only relatively small pieces entered the atmosphere. But they were mostly metal and alloys, and though small, they still reached the surface, causing mass fires in fields, forests, and cities. It disrupted air traffic, and half the debris was radioactive. Hundreds of thousands of mortals in protective suits were sent out to collect it.

On the fifth day, the itching subsided, but the sky kept burning even in daytime. I felt fresh enough to start building a new pair of Trouble Generators, but the workshop at the mountain facility, Novak’s personal base, didn’t have everything I needed.

Luckily, he was there himself, so he ordered Lina to bring me everything required. While she was off portalling for supplies, we drank tea and discussed the future in private, as the old tradition dictated.

Novak brewed the tea himself, this time in another study, at a small tea table. I recognised the smell immediately. Old Well – the same tea I’d brought back from the Federation by the boxful and handed out to everyone in sight in my very first week. I couldn't get any boost from it now, but it shouldn’t do any harm.

A panoramic window sat here, but the chairs were arranged so we both looked out at the mountains below and the peaks above. The sky above the peaks was still burning; needles of fire trailed threads of smoke, one after another, somewhere beyond the peaks.

He poured, raised his cup, sipped and was silent for a long time. I was silent too. Over years of tea sessions I’d learned not to rush my questions.

“Aoran is right,” he said at last. “The Federation’s doors are open. And not only for relatives.”

I tilted my head.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Earth owes you nothing, Jake, and you’ve already done more for it than you needed to.”

I couldn’t tell what manipulation lay behind those words.

“That’s strange to hear from you,” I said.

“You defeated a Five,” Novak went on. “A feat worthy of a web novel hero, but you won’t handle a Six, not with a team, not without one. And soon there will be several Sevens here, and an Eight. With your luck, you may well run into them.”

“You won’t handle the Eight either,” I said.

“I won’t,” Novak agreed grimly.

“Do I hear defeatism from the Great One himself?” I needled him.

“This isn’t your league any more,” Novak said, sipped his tea, and stunned me with a confession. “I’ve sent the closest relatives of my other disciples to the other side. I’ve sent my descendants there…”

It was the first time I’d heard of Novak having living descendants. He’d evidently been guarding that secret, so I didn’t press for details, especially since he kept going with his argument.

“Aoran will secure you a place at any college in the Federation. You know how people live there. You know there’s a future there.”

I did know how people lived there. Three years at Black Hole. The quiet, well-fed, safe Federation, where fast breakthroughs were considered bad taste, and almost every danger was measured, safe and regulated. Far from needles in the heart, far from radioactive iron falling from the sky, and far from an Eight who meant to drain the qi from an entire planet to become, if not a god, then certainly a demigod.

It was strange that Novak was letting me go.

Perhaps it was another manipulation whose nature I couldn't understand.

Still, however subtle his manipulations were, Novak kept his word. And if he said he was letting me go, then that was how it was. Perhaps he wanted to raise a cultivator with a grudge against the demons, ready for revenge?

Quite possibly, but I remembered Lina’s emotional reaction to Aoran’s words. “We have to stay and fight!”

That was definitely some kind of bullshit!

Bao… That little shit Bao would stay. And that made him a far better person than me. I couldn’t allow that!

And Zola.

Technically, the only thing tying Zola to Earth was years of slavery. She had more reason to run than any of us.

“Can you send Zola there?” I asked.

Novak glanced at me.

“Bulsara offered her that. She refused.”

“What a bitch!” I said.

Novak raised an eyebrow.

“Looks like we’ll have to kill that Eight!” I explained, without going into detail. I barely understood the storm of emotions churning in my chest myself. Or perhaps it was just Aoran’s ‘pineapple water’ talking.

“That’s somewhat delusional, but I like the spirit,” he said and moved his hand away from me, carefully took a metal badge from his spatial pocket and handed it to me.

The badge showed an owl holding a sword in its talons. And my interface lit up with: J. M. Sullivan, Bureau of Counterintelligence, Junior Agent.

“Only junior, after everything I’ve been through?”

“There’s a time-in-service requirement for promotion,” Novak explained.

We didn’t return to that conversation. I put the badge in the drawer with the pendant and got to work on the Generators, wondering how to rework them so they could kill an Eight.

Nothing came to mind. Even a Five had easily fended off my discs with a spear, though the spear hadn’t survived.

I assembled one Generator by the evening of the fifth day and three more on the sixth, but I couldn’t test them, since the batteries were still empty.

I finished the last bottle of pineapple fizz on the fifth day. On the morning of the sixth, I woke up feeling lighter than I could remember before the fight with the Five, as if my body had finally shed everything superfluous, along with things I hadn’t even noticed. Even so, I waited another day before putting on the pocket pendant.

Only on the seventh day did I carefully touch Space, and beyond the thin boundary, everything of mine was there again: my armour, the spare Generators and Zola’s now-unnecessary injectors, my lucky-charm sword. Space obeyed. No pain, no resistance.

That same day I charged the new Trouble Generators. All four worked and were responsive, even more responsive than before. I was ready to fight again.

Just in time, because the evening brought very bad news.

The prisoner facility, where I myself had sent the living and the dead demons, had been taken from within. A pair of prisoners, half-dead Fours, turned out to be barely scratched Sixes who had only been pretending to be at death’s door. Somehow they’d fooled the filtration unit's scanners and got inside. The facility’s portals were cut off from the network within an hour, but the facility itself could no longer be saved.