The Stargazer's War - Chapter 3.20

Chapter 3.20: Titanium

“Congratulations,” Lucy’s voice greeted me as I pulled the headphones from my ear with a slight pop.  “How are you feeling?”

I stared, my thoughts effortlessly processing and categorizing the immense array of information my active sense meridian provided me.  I spent a few moments reorganizing them, compartmentalizing the overwhelming input in the same way I compartmentalized my new, more active control over my body’s base functions.  I took in the trivial, the unimportant, the way the ceiling light reflected off the matted floor or the near imperceptible hum of the electronics in the walls, and I quietly catalogued it without distracting my primary train of thought.

That heard Lucy’s words and responded.  “It worked.”  The words came out quiet, the thin air in my lungs scarcely enough to form the vocalization.  “I’m less… distractible.”

“And the apathy?”

“Still there,” I told her.  “I can devote more focus to managing it, though, remind myself that I should care.”

“Good.  That’s good.  I’m proud of you.”

Her words meant little to me.

No, a portion of my mind barked.  That’s not right.  You’re supposed to—

I cut off the flow of qi through my meridians.  Immediately a sense of warmth spread through me.  “Thanks.  I’m not sure I could’ve done it without you.  The headphones didn’t work before whatever it was you did.”

“I was afraid that might happen.  It doesn’t matter if a cognitohazard reorders your neurons into an enchantment if there isn’t any qi to activate it.”

I blinked.  “Wait… does that mean I’m immune to cognitohazards?”

“It means in this particular low-qi environment this particular cognitohazard failed to take effect.  Please don’t try to test others.”

“You don’t have to tell me twice.”  I sprung to my feet, popping up onto the balls of my feet and giving my arms a few swings to get a feel for any changes.  I felt stronger and more agile, sure, but the improvement was incremental, especially compared to the iron advancement that’d reforged my body.  My sense of control showed more starkly, a notable boost to proprioception as my brain catalogued and processed the exact state of my every muscle in real time.  “Hmm,” I muttered.  “This’ll take some getting used to.”

“How’s your core?”

I shrugged.  “About as you’d expect, I guess.  Still dark and cold and stationary, about a third the size it was an hour ago, marginally higher capacity.  I imagine it won’t take too long to start growing it again.”

Before Lucy could reply, the door slid open and Charlotte stepped through.  “You did it?”

“I’m alive,” I confirmed.  “It didn’t go quite the way I—”

“Don’t tell me,” Charlotte cut me off.  “I’ll need to figure out how to work through it on my own.”

“You’re ready, then?”

“For the qi,” Lucy asserted.  “We’re going to take this slow, give her core a chance to settle.  What you two did to get her to iron in those Sil ruins very nearly got the both of you killed.  I won’t have you repeating it with nobody’s life in the balance.”

“Right, right.  That’s why I went for titanium first.  If getting Charlotte to iron while I was freshly bronze myself strained my meridians but didn’t break them, bringing her up to my level shouldn’t pose a problem.”

“Should we go below deck?” Charlotte asked, visibly trying not seem overly eager.

That thought gave me pause.  Since when could I read Charlotte that well?

“I can assure you,” Lucy replied, “no technique or technology the sect possesses can pierce these walls, however much qi you generate.”

I agreed.  “Better to stay up here.  It’s easier to reach the infinite sea if I’m in the same dimension as it.”

“Alright.”  Charlotte dropped into a crosslegged sit.  “Let’s do this.”

I shut my eyes and envisioned the familiar sigil for my Vac Suit, pulling qi from my charcoal black core to feed it.  The room around me darkened, a shadow falling over me as if the light of Lucy’s fusion core somehow refused to fall upon me in particular.  The blinding light and the deafening noise I’d grown so accustomed to tolerating faded away as my technique protected me.

I channeled more.

My visage darkened, the shadows across me deepening until my deathly pale flesh seemed more a dusky gray.  Most of my expenditure dissipated back into the environment, rejoined the infinite sea from whence it came, but a portion, a small percent, bloomed in my senses, forever lost to me as its nature inverted.

I channeled more.

I reached out to the infinite sea to replenish my slowly depleting reserves.  A piece of me submerged completely, lost in its endless depths as I drank of its bounty.  I partitioned that part off, allowing the overwhelming apathy in the face of eternity to only drown one of many ongoing trains of thought.  The rest of me, diminished, surely, for the division, remained lucid, remained focused, remained here.

I channeled more.

The qi I lost to inversion eclipsed the spill-off from Lucy’s core.  The barrier around me could no longer be described as a mere shadow, grown well beyond to a void that devoured all light and sound and heat that dared approach it.  I felt I could block a shot from Micaiah’s pulse rifle had I the need.

I channeled more.

The infinite sea fed me power faster than I could spend it.  My core swelled.  The room around me blazed with qi, a hurricane of fire and me its dark and silent eye.  My Vac Suit cut me off, kept me safe and distant and separate from the world around me, a layer of nothing between me and the rest of existence.

I channeled mo—

A hand touched my shoulder.  I looked up.  Charlotte spoke, but no sound could pierce my defenses to reach my ears.

I canceled the technique.

“—at’s enough!”  Charlotte was shouting.

I blinked.  “You’re full?”

“Any more and I might rupture.  Threads, is this what it’s like for you?  There’s so much.”

“That was a hundredth.  Most went back to the infinite sea.”

Charlotte cursed.

“It’s not the same, though,” I reassured her.  “I think my qi is safer, or at least the dangers are different.  It wants to be still, inactive, so unless I do something with it it just sits there.  I don’t have to wrangle it or fight to keep it under control.”

“That… can’t be right.”

I shrugged.  “I don’t know what to say.  I have as much as I have.”

“No, I know, but it’s—”  She took a breath.  “Core capacity through the tiers follows a fairly well-recorded exponential curve.  There’s a lot of variance, sure, and that variance can compound over several advancements, but to casually throw around a hundred times the qi needed to reach you’re current stage…”

“Is it that big a deal?  I get I can practically generate qi for other people from nothing and that’s a big deal for all sorts of reasons, but my qi, the qi I have so much of, doesn’t do much.  I have two techniques, one of which is extremely passive and behaves weirdly, and the other eats so much qi that it wouldn’t even be usable without my absurd capacity.”

Charlotte grew quiet.  “The curve is exponential, Cal.  It compounds.”

“So?  I already have access to effectively infinite qi.  From everything I can tell, it’s ability to actually do things isn’t one-to-one, so what does it matter that my theoretical capacity is orders of magnitude above normal cultivators at the same stage?”

“Maybe it doesn’t.  Maybe it does.  I have to wonder if it’s a property of dark qi that allows you to take in so much more or a function of how much you have access to.  I’m sure experiments have been run with overloading a cultivator with qi before each advancement to increase the capacity gain, but I’m left wondering if there’s a limit.  Obviously with qi as an extremely valuable and limited resources no sect in its right mind would employ such a method at scale, but with an infinite supply…”

I scowled at her.  “Isn’t advancing dangerous enough without running experiments?”

“Cal, I think there’s a significant chance your capacity is so high because you’ve been stuffing your core with way more qi than it can hold for every advancement since you started cultivating.  Even if we only started now, if you can facilitate something similar for the rest of us, in a few tiers we might be some of the most powerful gem stage cultivators in the galaxy.”

“It’s a risk,” I countered.  “You’re the one who said the best advancement is the one you survive.  Could you even keep that much light qi under control?  It’ll burn out your meridians if you can’t, right?”

“It’s worth considering.  Between Xavier’s ability, my nanites, and your qi, a lot of people have very good reasons to want us dead or enslaved.  If we can’t use our unique assets to their fullest, they’re just going to get us killed.”

“Better they kill you outright, then?”

“We don’t have to decide this now,” Lucy spoke up for the first time in a while.  “Charlotte, I can feel all that new qi roiling inside you.  You need time to properly consolidate and let it settle.  Cal, why don’t you call Micaiah and tell her the good news?  I’m sure she’s worried about you.”

“That’s a fair point,” I acknowledged.  “We can resolve this later.  Micaiah and Xavier at least deserve a chance to weigh in.”  I pulled up my holopad as I turned to go, already opening my contacts to dial Micaiah as I spotted Charlotte sitting back down to cultivate in the corner of my eye.  By the time I made it out the door, I’d already begun to resign my contribution to Charlotte’s qi and the argument it’d sparked to an afterthought, its significance lost in the glow of my own advancement.

——

Soulship designation LC-81535—‘Lucy’ to her passengers and friends—fought to reign in the wild qi raging around her core.

She’d heard the tale of Charlotte’s iron advancement beneath the jungles of Ilirian, and she’d witnessed for herself the near constant trickle of qi Caliban gave off while he draped himself in shadows, but neither could compare to what she’d just witnessed.

Her gravitational arrays disagreed, her radiation detectors showed no emittance, and her own continued survival confirmed the reality of it, but for a few moments there, her soul, her very essence, could’ve sworn she’d played host to a micro singularity.

Within her walls, LC-81535 reigned supreme.  It would take a cultivator of Alabastra’s caliber, near the absolute peak of what was possible this side of the frayed veil, to usurp her dominion over her very self.  It was part of the reason she affected such an unthreatening manner—humans loathed to find themselves  so completely at another’s mercy, however tight their mutual bonds might’ve been.

Caliban had done the unthinkable.  For approximately eight point seven one seconds, he had fully cleared LC-81535’s qi, her presence, from a human-sized volume of her own interior.

And he’d done so while generating as much qi as a mid-sized asteroid.

It frightened her.

Few humans could truly comprehend LC-81535’s life span, could grasp what it meant to experience a thousand years of cultivation and conflict.  In all that time, nothing, no creature living or dead, no exotic matter nor esoteric technique, had come close to even resembling Caliban Rex.

It fascinated her.

He remained practically a babe, weak and vulnerable and desperately in need of her protection, yet simultaneously he played with powers so far beyond either of them that it called into question LC-81535’s entire model of the universe.

It excited her.

If space could be bent, if trees could bear fruit with no life, if qi could be created from nothing, perhaps the fundamental laws of reality weren’t quite so inviolable.  Perhaps, in the not too distant future, as his power grew and the singularity that was not a singularity came into its own, Caliban Rex could generate qi in the right place at the right concentration, that LC-81535 too, could do the unthinkable.

Some day, she could advance.

Some day, she could finally be free.