Emerson Fortier
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Chapter 45 - In the Firefly Sect
🕑 Added 2022-10-29 20:15:48 +0000 UTCKalemal landed the shuttle, unaided by automatic systems or the tech spirits, on a ragged outcropping of the planetary fragment labeled Number Six. Number Six, was, in reality, a vast network of planetary fragments at this point in its destruction, a cloud of stones tethered together by long networks of concourse tubes and cabling that allowed constructs and laborers to continue the work of chopping the once massive world into cubes of semi-processed stone and metals for shipment to the denizens of Massu millions of miles from the shattered planet.
Six smelled different from Three. If anything, it smelled even more powerfully of piss, mingled with an undercurrent of acid strong enough to make Yi Cao’s nose run until he got used to it.
Zihan told the girls to remain with the shuttle before he and Yi Cao dropped from the ceiling port onto a landing pad, just as they had when they’d first arrived at the station weeks before. The memory might have made Yi Cao nostalgic, if he hadn’t felt his eyes buzzing to keep the floor in focus reminding him of all he’d lost since they’d arrived.
For all that the stink of piss was stronger, the concourses of Six seemed empty after the bustling crowds of Three. Zihan led him through vast empty corridor after vast empty corridor to some address known only to himself where he put his hand to one wall and exerted a bit of Ki to unlock a hidden door.
The door closed automatically behind them as they entered, and a guard in traditional cultivators robes, crimson crossed by a yellow sash to match his sect’s colors, met them before a second door at the end of a short hallways. Huge golden sigils painted onto the door haloed the man that stood before it.
“The Firefly Sect”.
The guard did a double take when he saw them and dropped his spear crossways to block their path. “Halt.” He said in thickly accented imperial. “Be ye friend or foe to the Sect?”
Zihan stepped up to the man put one finger to his forehead with a smile. “That, my friend, will be for your betters to decide.”
The doors to the sect opened with a crash. The guard’s spear clattered across the tiled floor of the decorative hall beyond while his body slid to the opposite side of the room and thumped against the wall.
Six pairs of eyes turned, as one, to regard the Young Master standing in the door.
Zihan lounged against the doorpost. “I heard,” He said, “that this is the only place with decent Ki dampener around.” He looked around the tiled hall, then frowned when he saw a woman lounging on cushions in chamber off one corner, then at the woman who sat behind a low glass counter near the front of the hall. “Perhaps I was mistaken.”
The guard roared from the floor on the opposite side of the room. The air shimmered around one of his hands and a beam of light leapt from his palm towards the Young Master.
The aim was bad, unless the guard had been aiming for Zihan’s hip. Zihan didn’t even bother dodging. He backhanded the beam and the entire length of the technique billowed into flame. The guard howled and snatched his spear then lunged to his feet.
“Do ye want to die ye impudent pup?” The guard took a stance menacing them with the spiked weapon. “Ye court death!”
Zihan pursed his lips and gave him a once over. He fished in his robes and flipped out his sub-space wallet. “Do I?” He asked. He dialed up a pack of the nastier tobacco sticks he’d started smoking and popped one into his mouth. “Yeah, I don’t think I do.”
He blew smoke out the side of his mouth then tossed the pack toward the young man who dodged it as though it were a snake.
Zihan looked around. “Anyone with any real authority around here?” He asked past hi tobacco.
The guard growled and moved forward, brandishing his spear, but the woman at the counter moved quickly between them. “Elder Zhur-ge is not far away.” She bowed, then glanced at the guard behind her. “If the Young Master would like to wait in one of the training halls, I’m sure that he would like to meet you. As he does all new guests and prospective disciples.” She gave the guard another pointed look and he set the but of his spear on the ground, growling something under his breath.
She turned a sunny smile on Zihan. “If the Young Master would like to hear our rates and fill out the necessary forms?”
Zihan eyed the guard over the diminutive woman with a smirk. “We need a sealed room for practicing highly destructive techniques.” He said. He sucked on his tobacco stick and blew the smoke towards the guard, then waved to Yi Cao. “Yi Cao will fill out the paperwork.”
The woman bowed again. “To use one of our scripted rooms is charged by the hour in station credits.” She said. “With a minimum deposit up front in case of damage to the scripts.”
“Fine, fine.” Zihan replied. He scowled at her. “Price is no concern.” He flipped his card over his shoulder for Yi Cao and Yi Cao nearly fumbled it as he attempted to catch it with his new hands. Only the spirit running the augments gave him the reflexes to snatch it in time. “Charge us whatever you want.”
The woman bowed for a third time, then hurried to lead Yi Cao to the glass cabinet that served as a counter near the entrance. “I’ll just get the forms.” She said.
They had three forms, in three different languages, each from the homeworld, one of which matched, or nearly matched, the imperial language Yi Cao had learned to read and write in the sect. While he filled out the easier bits and puzzled over questions like “Home address”, and “Political Affiliation”, the woman ran through a list of other services offered by the sect for visiting cultivators.
“Our sources are among the best on the station. Some of them were even stolen from the governor’s own vault of impounded material from the old world, making it the best you will find anywhere beyond Elleppu. We have very reasonable rates.”
“No. Thank you.”
“If you are practicing new techniques or working to develop your own, we have theoretical manuals and secret techniques that may shed light on your path, some of them developed by Elder Zhur-ge himself.”
Yi Cao shook his head. As he did for recovery pills, advancement resources, personal instruction, and some kind of membership program like the one he’d gotten for the shooting range at the weapon dealer’s store and never used.
“No. Thank you.”
He filled out “affiliations” as “none”, and the woman put a hand on his metal wrist, drawing his glass eyes up to hers. “We have other manuals in our library as well.” She said. “Manuals for mixing your,” she waved her fingers at his eyes, “augments, with your path.”
He returned her look of pity with a deep scowl. “They want to know your rank.” He said over his shoulder to Zihan. “What do you want me to put down?”
“Who cares what these peons think?” Zihan replied. “Put down whatever you want.”
Yi Cao looked at the line for rank next to Zihan’s name on the paperwork.
“Why do you even need this information anyways?” He asked the woman behind the counter.
She hesitated, but her smile barely faltered. “Normally only sect members are permitted to rent the scripted rooms.” She said. “This is information we ask from all of our members.”
Yi Cao pursed his lips. “I see.” He set the pen on the paper and pushed the half completed forms across the glass to her. “I don’t think you’ll be needing more then.”
She nodded quickly, then accepted the card he offered her and touched it to a construct along the wall behind her. Numbers dialed downwards, and she offered it back to him with a smile that didn’t touch her eyes. “Thank you for visiting the Firefly Sect.” She said with a short bow. “I’m sure the master will be ready for you when you depart. Yi can take you to one of our open halls.”
The spear wielding guard glowered at them as the woman gestured to him, then nodded, and turned to lead them down a narrow corridor off the back of the main hall. “This way.”
Zihan paced the script room they were brought to. The room itself was long and narrow, perhaps twenty paces across and twice that in length, more of a hall or a corridor. Painted scripts ran the length of the wall, and even threaded under the lacquer on the floor. Yi Cao recognized them as some sort of Ki script, but they meant nothing to him otherwise. Zihan scanned them by the light of the technomancer’s star suspended from the ceiling, as though reading a book, then followed their course across the ceiling back to the door.
He nodded. “This will do.”
“You’ll be charged by the hour.” The guard told him. “Anything you haven’t paid for will be required when you leave.”
“Just leave us be.” Zihan told him. He shooed him away and shut the door, then turned to face Yi Cao. He sucked his teeth for a moment then nodded and paced the length of the wall again, knocking on individual sigils in the scripts as though ticking them off of a mental list.
“If we’d been in a sect when you completed your first circle this is the kind of place they’d have given you for your breakthrough. Scripts,” he knocked twice on a sigil and glanced at Yi Cao, “to keep your manifestation from blowing down the whole sect, and,” he traced a line painted up one wall to a locked panel in the wall. “ to channel the excess into storage rings so you can use it for later. I suspect they’ll be keeping that though.” He ran a finger across the panel, then turned to face Yi Cao from the other end of the room. He looked at Yi Cao, then looked away and tapped a finger to his lips.
“You wouldn’t have fallen through, if you’d been in here.” He said at last. He looked back up at Yi Cao. “These scripts mean we can practice, without fear of you falling back into the void.”
Yi Cao shuffled nervously in place, his metal foot scraped the lacquer protecting the painted scripts.
Zihan gestured towards him. “Go on then.” He said. “Hit me with something.”
Yi Cao stared at him. “Hit you?” He asked.
“Of course.” Zihan grinned and took an easy stance, hands behind his back, chest thrust forward, eyes sparkling with Ki. “This room is meant for sparring. Show me what your aspect can do.”
Yi Cao opened and closed his mouth once. He looked at a metal hand, and tried to imagine summoning a ball of… what? He flexed the fingers, or rather, ordered the AI now synched up to his nervous system to flex them, then curled the hand into a fist.
“Come on.” Zihan said. “You aren’t scared are you?”
Yi Cao glared at him, or tried to while his glass eyes struggled to focus on him at the center of the swirling scripts. “I’m not scared.” He snapped. He looked back at his fist, a fist empty of the channels he’d once carved into them, when they’d been flesh. “What am I supposed to hit you with?” He asked.
Flames shot past Yi Cao’s face, close enough to scorch, and Yi Cao staggered backwards.
The flames cut off and Zihan smirked at him while the scripts rippled with firelight as they channeled the burst of Ki back to the panel behind the Zihan. The Young Master lifted the finger he’d used to launch the technique. A thin taper of white fire still clung to it and he blew it out before he tucked the hand behind his back and waited. When Yi Cao glowered at him the Young Master just raised his eyebrow. “Your turn.” He said.
Yi Cao pulled at the Ki inside his channels. He’d mostly repaired the damage since his accident and surgery, but those repairs had only been able to go so far before he’d run out of flesh. The Ki spun in his chest but nothing happened.
He tried to contort the Ki into some kind of technique for several seconds, then gave up with a snarl. “This isn’t working.” He said. “I’ve never done this before!”
“Nonsense.” Zihan replied. “What do you think your manifestation was?”
“Ki.” Yi Cao snapped. “Wild, uncontrolled…” he thought about it. “Ki?”
He remembered the way the Ki had responded to his desire to see the thing chewing into his leg by growing lenses across the sphere it manifested at the start of the whole experience.
Zihan shook his head. “A manifestation is never wild. Uncontrolled… maybe, but Ki, in its natural state, never manifests the sort of effects you get during a break through, or in a technique. You don’t see fire aspects, for example, spitting beams of fire.” He lit the palm of his hand on fire, then juggled the flame like a ball. “Or a water aspect forming water constructs. They just summon water, like that dirty source you used to cut your key scripture.”
“Your problem,” Zihan went on, “Is that you’re trying to rely on your own channels while you’re still in the first circle, instead of pulling on your source.”
“I didn’t have the source… out in the void.” Yi Cao said.
Zihan smiled and tossed the ball of fire at one wall. It bounced, then bounced again where it hit the floor, sending ripples of light through the scripts each time it hit, then disintegrating into dozens of coals that scattered as they bounced across the room before splitting into sparks and going out.
“That was part of your break through.” Zihan told him. “It happens when you pass the first circle and close off your body with your Ki. The result is a brief, very brief, surge in Ki capacity, to the point that, for about twenty seconds, you could have matched a cultivator with a single Node in terms of sheer Ki Capacity.” Zihan looked at his hand and the white flames crawling there, then gave his hand a shake, which only set the flames to dancing brighter while he frowned at them.
“Since,” he went on as he swatted at the flames, “you have no nodes, that Ki had nowhere to go, so you get what we call the first break through. Your first taste of real Ki control and techniques.” He finally blew out the last of the flames and turned his attention back to Yi Cao. “You’ll still need the two remaining circles of your foundation if you want to form nodes, but as long as you have a strong enough source, you’ll be able to manifest your Ki now, and start experimenting with techniques.”
Yi Cao touched a metal hand to the metal sphere hanging from his neck. The touch lacked the tactile comfort he’d once drawn from feeling it beneath his fingers. He dropped his hand to glare at the floor.
“Try pulling on it with your spirit.” Zihan told him.
“I know how to pull on the source.” Yi Cao snapped. He glared at Zihan, then looked away. He studied the scripts. “You’re… sure… I’m not going to get sucked out into the void again if I succeed?” He asked.
Zihan stomped on the scripted floor. “That’s what the scripts are for.” He said.
Yi Cao looked at them skeptically. “Shouldn’t we test it?” He asked.
Zihan rolled his eyes. “Heavens above.” He snapped around and raised one palm towards the wall opposite Yi Cao.
Flames roared from his hand. The roar was deafening. The light from the sea of flames was enough that Yi Cao’s eyes dialed something back until the Young Master appeared as little more than a silhouette at the front of a wall of dark fire. The heat hit Yi Cao like a physical thing, and he staggered back involuntarily before the flames cut off as suddenly as they’d begun.
Zihan flicked his hand to rid it of sparks while fiery light moved in waves across the script chiming each time a ripple hit a script in the ceiling shaped like a coiling snake. The Young master turned, smirking, to Yi Cao. “If you think you can match that kind of Ki output, then maybe these scripts can fail you.” He gestured around at the whirling light gradually dissipating as the ripples were sucked into the panel at the end of the room. “Otherwise, you’re safe. You aren’t going anywhere.” He put his hand behind his back and looked serious for the first time since they’d arrived at the sect. “If you do, I’ll catch you.”
Yi Cao studied that expression, and Zihan gestured towards him in the silence.
“If we were back at the sect this would be a time of exploration for you. You’d get access to a whole host of dirty sources so you could start experimenting to see which types of Ki you have the best affinities for, but we’re not at the sect, and until you form your core, you aren’t going to find a better source than the one you’re currently wearing. I’ve had to wait weeks for you to get to this point so we could test it, now draw on it, and let’s see what this aspect the whole world was battling over can do.”
Yi Cao stepped slowly back into his starting position at one end of the room. He used a metal hand to push the source to the center of the key scripture he’d cut into his chest and felt when it connected, felt the Ki bubbling in his chest, just as he had when he’d been sucked into the void. He quickly shifted it away again.
He took a deep breath. His chest trembled, and not only because of the augment hidden away beneath the scar tissue and the bolts holding his ribcage together.
“They have other sources here.” He looked up at Zihan. “They rent them out.”
Zihan scowled. “I killed almost a dozen cultivators to get you that source.” He said. “I’m not paying for you to practice with some triple aspected second tier source.” He flicked a finger at Yi Cao and Yi felt heat wash over him. “Now pull.”
Yi Cao took a deep breath, wished again that he could close his eyes, then did as he was told.
Ki bubbled inside of him. The bubbles popped and formed, and popped again, like a low level anxiety attack that he couldn’t escape while his eyes were stuck open thanks to the augments. He thought for a moment that nothing was going to happen, but when he pulled on the Ki, this time, the world warped around him.
Light pulsed from the scripts around him, a pale blue, like his source, in contrast to Zihan’s blazing white/red fire. Yi Cao laughed and heard his own voice reflected back at him from the warp effect, repeated behind, above, around. His electric eyes went haywire as he laughed and he heard Bo Bo ping in his ear and ask if they were back in the void again. The question just made Yi Cao’s laughter redouble and the Ki seemed to respond. It swelled, and danced. It rippled, pulsed in and out while the light washing from the scripts beneath him silhouetted the Young Master’s figure which wavered like the sympathy flames he’d once seen manifest themselves above a cheering crowd while he explained their prospects as junior outer disciples to his cousin.
His laughter abruptly stopped. A moment later, after trying unsuccessfully to fiddle with the manifested sphere, he stopped pushing the Ki out of his chest and felt the whole sphere collapse around him.
Zihan stood with his arms crossed outside the sphere. A light smile on his face.
“Well.” He said when Yi Cao had nothing to say. “I do believe that worked.” He grinned. “You’d have been invisible if it hadn’t been for the scripts lighting up at the touch of your Ki. Not a bad trick. How did it feel?”
Yi Cao lifted a mechanical hand and looked at the shining brass tendons where they peaked out from polished plating. He closed it into a fist. “It felt powerful.” He said. He turned back to the Young Master, expression grim.
Zihan’s own expression grew contemplative. “Yes.” He said. “Yes. I’m sure it did.”
They practiced.
They practiced more than just the spherical technique.
“You’ll want three different kinds of techniques.” Zihan told him after Yi Cao manifested the bubble a few more times just so he’d be used to the concept of drawing out the spiritual power from the stone.
Ripples of blue light passed across the scripts, silhouetting the Young Master as he paced around his servant and disciple. He ticked them off on his fingers.
“Defensive, offensive, and movement. Some people prefer focusing on what they call specialty, or utility, techniques, but they almost always boil down to pretty much the same three things. Kill your enemy. Keep your enemy from killing you, and fucking off when neither seem like an option. Some aspects are better at one or two than another.”
He stopped in front of Yi Cao and gave him a predatory smile.
“If yours was a dirty source, you’d be limited to techniques that utilized the strengths of each of its aspects. Fire and Ice, for example, if cultivated together, aren’t going to be able to do much except destroy everything they touch, add in a third aspect like smoke, or force, or wind, or, even destruction, or creation, and you’re just going to limit the usefulness of the aspects even further. A fire, ice, and destruction cultivator might have a couple of obscenely powerful techniques, but they’re going to be limited to those techniques, while a someone with a single aspect, such as yourself, is going to be a lot more versatile. You’ll get to choose your techniques as you go, instead of having them dictated by what your aspects are limited to by their interaction.”
He looked at the storage panel and listened to the chiming of the script in the ceiling as the ripples began to fade from the scripts.
“This, invisibility of yours, seems like it could be a pretty decent defensive technique.” He went on. “If it didn’t drop you through the floor each time you used it.” He turned back to Yi Cao and sucked his teeth contemplatively. “The best defensive techniques are passive, low cost, and highly effective, but that’s a hard combination to find. Most of the best ones I’ve seen cost absurd amounts of Ki, which makes them unwieldy and mostly useless until you’ve started opening nodes, but there are work arounds. Typically the best techniques are armor. Wrapping yourself in elements like stone or ice. It’s passive, and it can be adjusted to reduce the cost as needed, but there are other excellent defensive techniques. Phasing into smoke, for example, or hiding behind illusions. There are dozens of ways to defend yourself, but not all of them are good. The very very best work passively all the time, like the stone skin ubiquitous to earth cultivators, or the regenerative abilities of blood and flesh cultivators. The worst, in my opinion, and I’d know, are the ones that require you to act first.”
The Young Master clicked his tongue and crossed his arms behind his back.
“I’m a fire cultivator.” He said. “Fire has almost no defensive properties that don’t involve striking first, striking hard, or incinerating everything thrown at me. It’s absurdly costly to put something up passively around me, and absurdly risky to assume I can react first. You saw that light technique I blocked when I knocked the guard through the door getting in here?”
Yi Cao nodded and Zihan shook his head.
“It probably wouldn’t have hurt me. My cultivation makes me a lot more durable than your average mortal, but it doesn’t make me invulnerable to holes punched through my gut, or your average decapitation. There’s a chance, if I hadn’t caught it in time, that it might have found a weakness if I hadn’t incinerated it before it reached me.”
Yi Cao pursed his lips as Zihan paced back to the other end of the corridor and waited for the last of the rippling Ki to drain into the storage cabinet.
“Didn’t you say you have a single aspect?” Yi Cao asked.
“Me?” Zihan turned and raised an eyebrow. “Why?”
“Well,” Yi Cao gestured with one hand. “Didn’t you just say a single aspect can do anything.”
“I said it was versatile.” Zihan grinned, and suddenly held a sword of forged flames that roared between his fingers. He looked at it, flipped it in the air, then let it burst with a low boom. “The problem, when you work with any aspect, is the aspect’s law. Ice freezes. Fire burns. The two are mutually exclusive, which means every time you manifest that Ki it’s going to try and force the world into those two conditions at the same time. This keeps you from exploring the nuances of the aspects individually, for example, ice is also cold, while fire is hot. I can, with my aspect undiluted, manifest only the heat of the fire, because I’m still manifesting the law of the fire in doing so, something I couldn’t if Ice was also in the mix. Fire does not need to burn, it simply does, typically.”
Yi Cao frowned. “Couldn’t you just separate the aspects?” He asked.
Zihan shook his head emphatically. “If you never want to form a core, you can separate your aspects into different nodes, but even then, you’ll have impurities in your channels from each aspect you cultivate, which is going to interfere with each one. Your core, once it’s formed, is going to replace any external source, which means you won’t be able to fill your nodes individually anymore.”
Zihan looked at his hand where a few sparks still lingered from his flaming sword. “If you don’t have a mastery of your law, and of your aspects laws, by then, you aren’t going to survive the core formation process.”
“I know about laws.” Yi Cao replied.
“No.” Zhan replied. He tucked his hand behind his back and looked at Yi Cao. “No you don’t.” Fire Ki sparkled in his eyes. “No one understands how laws work. Not until they’ve had to wrestle with who they are, truly, in the eyes of the heavens.” He blinked, and the fire Ki faded from his eyes. He looked away. Sucked in a breath. “Sources,” he went on, “natural laws, like the laws of aspects?” He looked back at Yi Cao. “Those are nothing compared to the laws you’ll have to overcome if you want to take on a tribulation and survive.”
Yi Cao fiddled with a rough edge of one of his augmented hand. “I heard you only face a tribulation when you form your core.” He said.
“At the first step.” Zihan replied. “And each time you strengthen it until you open your inner world as an immortal.”
The two looked at one another across the training room. “So. You have faced one.” Yi Cao said.
Zihan looked away. “Just, one.” He replied “And it was enough to make me question the value of immortality.”
He brooded in silence for a moment. “I’m told you face them again when you die, as an immortal, if you die, but… that hardly matters.” He added. He snapped his head up to glare at Yi Cao. “That is for your ears only.” He said. “I make it a command, formally, upon your oath.”
Yi Cao felt the oath in his guts curl. “Which part?” He asked.
“About my advancement.” Zihan replied. Eyes cold as ice, despite the fire Ki dancing in their depths.
Yi Cao nodded and felt the weight of the oath recede until he could breath again.
Zihan’s face twisted into something resembling a smile as Yi Cao took a breath. “I cultivate fire.” He said. “As you pointed out, it could be more flexible than I allow it to be. I made some choices, early in my path, some of my teachers called… rash.” His smile twisted into something a little more bitter. “I’ve kept a few of its more flexible attributes, but for the most part, I’ve sacrificed much of that flexibility for just one thing.” He held up a finger and pointed it at Yi Cao. “Care to guess what that might be?”
Yi Cao’s eyes buzzed wildly as he shook his head. “I have no idea.”
Zihan tapped his nose and winked. “Overwhelming power.” He said. “Which happens to be a strength of fire, as an aspect.” His smile twisted again and he looked away. “It likes sacrifices.”
He watched the last of the rippling Ki sucked, by the scripts, into storage by the scripts.
“What fire can do, I can do.” He said. “The better I know its law, and the better it fits my law, the better I can control and direct its power.” He looked at Yi Cao. “You said your law is space. Well. It’s time for you to learn what that means, or begin to.”
