To flail against infinit.., p.27
To Flail Against Infinity, page 27
part #1 of The Stargazer's War Series
The staff member nodded towards it. “I’ll be in there, ready to administer medical aid should it be warranted. Since you’ve chosen to forego both qi and vital monitoring, I’ll only intervene should you call for it. Do you understand?”
“Yep.” That sounded perfect to me. The last thing I wanted was him running in to administer CPR the moment I started cycling my lungs or heart. Threads willing I wouldn’t need to cycle either of those, but you never know.
“Very well. There’s a locker there if you wish to stow your uniform, as well as a robe you can wear to the showers. Good luck.”
I bid him thanks as he adjourned to the observation room, leaving me alone in what felt a little too much like a padded cell. With a sigh I stripped down to my undergarments, tossing my clothes haphazardly into the locker before taking a seat on the floor, my back to the window. “Alright,” I muttered to myself. “Let’s do this.”
I visualized my center easily enough, finding my pool of qi exactly where I’d left it. Without further ado, I formed the familiar needle-and-thread shape, directed it to the meridian entrance at the base of my spine, and got to work.
The pain exploded through my entire body at once rather than the slow build of Nick’s various herbs, a difference I’d expected yet that startled me all the same. My focus flickered as my breath hitched, but I recovered quickly.
The sensation was different, coming in fits and starts as it chaotically leapt from the now familiar full-body agony to complete numbness and back again. I tuned it out, focusing exclusively on my breathing and the forceful flow of qi through the clogged passage. It was almost easy. Weeks of practice didn’t count for nothing.
It ended as quickly as it began, abrupt and anticlimactic. For all the build-up, all the training, I’d almost expected something to go horribly wrong.
I guessed sometimes, the system worked. Of course, I still had two meridians left to potentially kill myself trying to open. I may have come a long way from nearly asphyxiating in Lucy’s core room, but I still had plenty of peril waiting on the path ahead.
For now, though, I reveled in my success and experienced for the first time the sensation of cycling my spine meridian. It felt… odd.
From my reading I knew it governed pain, sensitivity to temperature, and reflexes, the latter of which I’d have a hard time testing on my own. I dug my fingernails into the palm of my right hand to test the former.
It felt… cold, like four icicles pressing into my skin, distinctly noticeable yet entirely unlike anything I’d expected. It wasn’t entirely pleasant, but it also wasn’t the screaming distraction it’d otherwise been.
In contrast, the air around me stifled like a swamp, oppressively hot and humid against my skin as every bit of heat and moisture amplified in my mind.
I cut off the flow of qi.
The world returned to normal. I sighed. It seemed the more meridians I opened, the further I distanced myself from other cultivators. I’d never heard of such oversensitivity to temperature or humidity. I prayed I’d get used to it.
The beep of my holopad tore me from my trance and into the fetid stench of the focus room. The full hour hadn’t yet passed, but they’d need extra time to clean up the mess of toxins I’d expunged. Crinkling my nose against the smell, I flashed the staff member a thumbs up and pushed myself to my feet. He smiled back through the window.
At his instruction I left my clothes where they lay and wrapped myself in the startlingly soft gray bathrobe hanging in the locker above them. Clad only in it and its pair of matching slippers, I adjourned to the showers, my spirit afloat with the glow of victory.
For all the weirdness, the unanswered questions, the unpredictable behavior of my qi as it interacted with my body, I’d taken one more crucial step on the inexorable march of progress, one critical milestone towards forming my core.
As the hot water of the shower washed over me, a single thought echoed over and over in my head, crescendoing until it manifested as a set jaw and the kind of slyly confident grin best grinned in private.
Ten down, two to go.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I RETURNED TWICE to the focus rooms over the following five weeks, each time equipped with a different specialty herb Nick had tailored for my specific purpose. The process proved remarkably simple: I chewed on a few leaves to reintroduce impurities into my system, then cycled my blood meridian to force them back out through the appropriate avenue.
To fake opening my skin meridian, that meant an hour spent sweating black gunk. For my stomach meridian, it took a different route. At Nick’s recommendation, I fasted a few days before that one to clear the way.
Simulating the pain of meridian opening turned out even easier. I just had to expand my spiritual senses beyond myself to glimpse the qi around me.
Oh boy did that suck.
I felt as if I’d fallen into a star, submerged in blinding light and scorching heat and ear-shattering noise.
I withdrew within the second, a migraine already taking root in my mind. Unbidden I let out a grunt of pain, one I’m certain helped sell the illusion of actually using all that qi to advance my cultivation.
Over each of the two hours I spent there lying to the sect about my progress, only a handful of times did I reach for that deafening inferno. Accustomed as I might’ve grown to Fyrion’s ambient qi, the planet-wide enchantment only left some ten percent of the world’s qi production spread about its entire surface. The other ninety percent it divided evenly between the seventy-seven focus rooms.
A rough, rough estimate accommodating for the difference in surface area between the focus room and the entire planet, put the qi inside at about a hundred and forty million times as dense as that outside. And Fyrion was just a dwarf planet. I couldn’t imagine the intensity of the focus rooms orbiting the stars themselves.
Actually, fuck imagining. I was pretty damn proud I managed to stay conscious, migraine or otherwise. The thought of trying to acclimate myself to that much qi didn’t even cross my mind. It wasn’t like I’d ever have to fight someone inside a focus room, right?
Anyway, by the time my official sect record considered my bone, skin, and stomach meridians open, I understood why everyone valued focus room hours so highly. Threads, divided evenly between the four people taking up mine—Nick, Charlotte, Xavier, and, sporadically, Elder Lopez—the extra hour meant an entire twenty-five percent more qi than they’d otherwise get.
No wonder Xavier and Charlotte were shooting up the ranks.
More importantly, I had my own advancement to attend to. Ranking be damned. Just over three months into my time with the Dragon’s Right Eye, I’d finally steeled my focus, honed my combat prowess, and “opened” enough meridians to move on from my introductory classes into the intermediate ones.
I just had to prove it.
* * *
Exam day morning, my holopad chimed as I navigated the crowd of sweaty cultivators from the morning workout to the cafeteria for breakfast. I answered.
“Mindy! We all set for today?”
“You’re set,” the reply came muffled, followed immediately by a distinct smacking sound.
I scowled, not that she could see it over the comm line. “Are you eating?”
She took another bite. “New sushi place just opened down on Hatcher’s Row. I’m making sure it stands up to Elder Langham’s exacting standards.”
“You’re eating sushi? It’s eight AM.”
“It is? Huh. No wonder they were closed.”
My stomach churned at the sound of her swallowing and shoving something else into her mouth before she kept speaking.
“Anyway, I’m calling to let you know your spread’s good to go. Crew’ll be there come noon.”
I blinked. “Crew? I just wanted a—”
“Excuse me? Yes, the pH on this is off by point—”
She hung up.
I exhaled, scooping a smattering of berries into my half-serving of oatmeal before making for our usual table. Absent Charlotte, who usually didn’t bother making the trip back to housing D for breakfast, Xavier and Nick had already dug in, ravenously making headway into their large and massive portions, respectively. Even now my heart skipped a beat seeing Nick wolf down so much food, but I’d long learned to deal with that particular panic response.
I wasn’t in deep space anymore.
“Just got off a call from Mindy,” I greeted them. “Looks like lunch is going to be a bigger affair than I expected.”
“Oh no.” Sarcasm dripped from Nick’s voice. “Not more food. Anything but that.”
Xavier glared down at my meager breakfast. “You do realize you actually need to eat, right?”
“I am eating,” I said, forcing down a spoonful of oatmeal.
Xavier scowled. “Cal, you have fewer calories there than you burned on the track today. How can you expect your muscles to grow if you don’t feed them?”
“I am eating,” I repeated myself, my tone sharpening.
Xavier exhaled and dropped the issue. “You ready for today?”
“As ready as I’m gonna get,” I answered. “Meditation will be a cake walk if I cycle my spine, cycling’s just a matter of showing Chrissy that my sect file shows I have the right meridians open, and the AI puts me at eighty-four percent accuracy with the Dragon’s Fang movements. I only need seventy-five to move onto combat two.”
Nick looked up from his second omelet. “Excited?”
“Extremely. I’m gonna miss the kiddos, but progress is progress. I’ll tell you, I’m not gonna miss my combat instructors. Senior Cadet Long has hated me from day one.”
Xavier nodded. “You do have a talent for aggravating people.”
“Only assholes,” I countered. “It’s not my fault they’re so fun to mess with.”
Xavier sighed.
Nick set down his fork onto a cleared plate and pushed himself to his feet. “Alright, I’m back to work. I’m close to a breakthrough on this apple variant; I’m sure of it. Good luck today.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Good luck with your seeds.”
Xavier waited until Nick was out of earshot before speaking again. “I’m worried about him.”
“Really? He seems fine to me.”
“He spends all day cooped up in his room working with those seeds of his. He doesn’t come out. He doesn’t talk to people. He doesn’t work to improve himself.”
I shrugged. “Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean he isn’t improving himself. There’s more to life than fighting. If he wants to focus on his craft, that’s perfectly reasonable.”
Xavier shook his head. “He’s not well, Cal. He’s skilled at hiding it, but he’s not well.”
I paused a moment to stare at Xavier. To this day I hadn’t a clue how he knew the things he did. He seemed to alternate between complete obliviousness and deep insight, missing obvious social cues—cough cough, Charlotte hitting on him—only to suddenly know for certain the emotional state of a random passerby. Of the entire sect, he was the only one who could gauge my cultivation level, and he did so at little more than a glance.
I think that might’ve been why he was so incessantly honest. What he did or didn’t know about a person was so divorced from what they wanted him to, he’d never learned what thoughts he was supposed to hide.
“Okay. I trust you. What should we do?”
“What else can we do? He’s already seeing a doctor about it. Best I can think of is to be there for him. He needs friends more than anything.”
“Yeah,” I muttered. “I’ll find some time for that after my nine hours of classes, two of working out, combat practice, cycling practice, and preparation to open the two deadliest meridians.” I sighed and glanced down at my holopad. Time to go. “Speaking of…” I stood. “Dinner at C-block tonight?”
Xavier nodded. “Good luck.”
My mind reran the conversation in loops as I bussed my tray and made for the transport platform. Much as I worried for Nick, I fundamentally lacked the time to spend with him. Charlotte and Xavier didn’t have to plan around a busy class schedule, but with Charlotte already gone to housing C and Xavier pushing dangerously close to a promotion himself, they’d have a harder time fitting Nick in around their own training. At least I lived next door to the kid, for all that meant when he rarely left his room.
Painfully appropriately, I found my attention yanked back to my own world as I stepped for the last time into the beginner classroom. Senior Cadet Park was off talking with a parent, so I made straight for her counterpart.
I found him tapping away at his holopad. He didn’t look up. “What do you want, cadet?”
I saluted. “Senior Cadet Stevens, sir, I’d like to test out of this class.”
He snorted. “If you say so, but I’ll have to caution you against it. Your numbers just aren’t there.”
I blinked. “My… numbers?”
He swiped at his holopad. “You average an impulse rating of forty-seven before your focus breaks. The minimum threshold for meditation two is sixty.”
“You guys are measuring this? Why is this the first I’m hearing about it?”
Stevens raised an eyebrow at me. “Did you think we were just hitting you with sticks at random? The Dragon’s Right Eye does have standards, you know. Standards you don’t meet.”
I sighed. I’d been hoping this wouldn’t look too suspicious. “I’d like to try anyway if that’s alright.”
He shrugged. “Your bruises. The test is simple enough: make it through the class period without losing focus. We’ll be hitting you harder than you’re used to. That okay?”
I nodded. “Let’s get this over with.”
Most of the kiddos had already taken their seats by the time Instructor Park called for the class to begin. I caught Stevens whispering something to her as I sat cross-legged on the padded floor, her eyes flashing to meet mine for a moment’s surprise.
Fighting back the sinking feeling Elder Lopez would hear about my sudden burst of progress, I evened out my breathing and descended into my center. Without any real idea what units they used to measure the force of their blows—not that that info would’ve meant anything to me either way—I worried that the numbing effects of my cycling wouldn’t counteract the increase in intensity. I’d tested them before, of course—to great success even—but if the instructors were going to be hitting me that much harder… I just didn’t know.
I supposed I could, if I’d wanted to, hide in the infinite sea for the duration of the test. My focus would’ve survived outright torture so sheltered in those dark waters of uncaring. I chose not to. If I lacked the focus to test out the right way, I clearly still had more to learn from meditation one, Charlotte’s schedule be damned.
Lacking the capacity to cycle more than a few meridians at a time, I opted for my blood, senses, and, of course, my spine. I’d have loved to harden my skin against their blows or reinforce my lungs to help maintain my breathing, but they’d notice if my breath slowed or skin turned corpse-colored. I got away with empowering my senses to drown out the distractions in the deluge of information because the instructors couldn’t see my eyes go all starry night with their lids shut.
I needn’t have worried.
I didn’t even notice the first strike, the icy sensation of spine-muted pain vanishing behind the overwhelming flow of data from my nose and ears. The second caught my attention with the same intensity as Nicki’s heartbeat two spots to my left.
Minute by minute the hours ticked by, the morning class as boring as ever as I distracted myself tracking the senior cadets’ movements by sound alone. Each breath, each step, each thwack of their cane I noted, the pair not even attempting to maintain their surprise against a sense meridian they’d never guessed I’d opened.
When at last the period ended, my eyes flicked open to find looks not of shock or congratulations, but of scorn.
“Cadet Rex,” Stevens spoke with venom on his tongue, “I’m issuing you a request for your current blood chemistry data. You will accept it.”
My holopad popped open with a biometric data request. I squinted at it. “You think I cheated?”
“You took strikes rated at more than double your previous threshold without even flinching,” Park snapped. “Of course you cheated.”
Shit.
“Well, I didn’t,” I replied, sending over the relevant data. I rubbed at my bruised midsection. “Why’d you go so high above the requirement to advance?”
“You’re hardly the first cultivator to cut corners,” Stevens snarled.
Of course I’m not, you ass. Who in their right mind would want to stick around while you beat them with a stick?
I didn’t say that, however much I might’ve wanted to. Instead I simply shrugged. “I didn’t take anything, if that’s what you’re asking. I improved. I made progress. Isn’t that the point?”
Stevens looked up from his holopad over to Park. “His blood’s clean. Should we check his urine? He’s got his kidney meridian open.”
Park shook her head. “That’s not how he did it, then. No way someone at his level could’ve completely eliminated all traces of narcotics from his blood in three hours, and the effects would’ve worn off halfway through either way.”
“So what now? We let him get away with it?”
“Threads no,” Park said. “Report it to Elder Lopez. Let it be her problem.”
I bit back my sigh of relief at that. I knew exactly what Elder Lopez would do about it, and it had little to do with investigating me for cheating. I made a mental note to tell Charlotte she wouldn’t be getting an extra focus room hour this week.
A look of annoyance flashed across my face as I stood and addressed my soon-to-be former instructors. “Is that all?”
“Pending our meeting with Elder Lopez, that’s all,” Senior Cadet Stevens said. “You’re dismissed, Cadet Rex.”
Despite his words, it was the two of them that left the classroom, no doubt headed directly for the Elder’s office. I waited until they were gone before I too made for the door, albeit for a much more delicious purpose.
