The Stargazer's War - Chapter 3.17

Chapter 3.17: Paid Medical Leave

“I still vote six-eighteen.”

“Cal, we’ve been over this.”  Charlotte swiped through the holo display we’d projected over our side of the dining room table to bring up the description for cognitohazard six-eighteen.  Her finger gestured to a figure just below the id.

Survival Rate: 83%

“Yes, I know it’s below the survival rate we agreed on, but it’s perfect.  I need something that’ll help me stay motivated and be more adaptable while I’m cycling my brain meridian, and you could use something for mental resilience and recovery to match your iron body’s.  It’s exactly what we’re looking for.”

“It’s too risky,” Charlotte argued.  “We agreed on a ninety percent survival floor for a reason.  I know a few percentage points don’t feel like much, but if you take this kind of risk every time you advance, sooner or later the dice are going to roll a one.  You only need to mess up once.”

“We’re advancing, not rolling dice.  It’s not riskier.  It’s more difficult.  Just because fewer people on average survive six-eighteen doesn’t mean we won’t.  Neither of us is exactly the average cultivator.”

“No, we’re worse,” Charlotte countered.  “Both of us are rushing.  We have a very good reason to, sure, but you can’t deny we’re advancing faster than should even be possible in a gravity well this small, let alone advisable.  Only taking a year from iron to titanium is insane.  The average Right Eye cultivator never even makes titanium.  Those that do take a decade to gather up the qi, and they have all that time to meditate and practice mental discipline and prepare revelations.  We are exactly the kind of cultivators who make up that seventeen percent death rate.”

Much as I wanted to disagree with her, Charlotte was right.  I liked to think my repeated exposure to the infinite sea had left my mind hardier than most, but I knew well enough how vulnerable I was to apathy and depression.  That’s why I was so eager to advance to titanium and reforge my mind in the first place.

I sighed.  “Let me see two-thirty-seven again.”  Back to the drawing board we went.

Cognitohazards were a fascinating phenomenon that I unfortunately couldn’t research in particular depth because apparently thinking too hard about them could drive you insane.  I supposed that meant the inner workings of cognitohazards were a cognitohazard themselves.

The common definition was that a cognitohazard was a piece of enchanted information, much in the same way that an item or structure could be enchanted to automate some qi-powered effect.

The common definition was also wrong.  More accurately, a cognitohazard, when thought about, caused the neurons in your brain to fire in a particular sequence that formed something akin to a technique at a molecular level.  Technically, the information itself wasn’t enchanted so much as it enchanted your brain.  Presumably they could do all sorts of things, but most just killed you.

Details like how they were discovered or made or recorded or actually worked were all too dangerous to look into, so we hadn’t.

There were, of course, all sorts of other crucibles one could use to reforge their mind, but none of those would be quite so easy for me to obtain.  Unlike an alchemical compound or a natural treasure, looking at an image file didn’t use it up.

They also came with a secondary benefit of serving as a sort of passive defense against people rooting through your memories.  Such techniques generally weren’t feasible until well into the gem stages, by which point most cultivators would come away injured rather than killed from cognitohazard exposure, but even at high levels mental injuries weren’t so easy to recover from.

Considering the weight of the secrets we carried, I’d welcome every bit of deterrent I could get.

That, of course, left me wondering if my knowledge of the infinite sea could achieve something similar.  I knew Elder Lopez had seen it, and she certainly hadn’t come away with her sanity fully intact.  Nick had taken it worse.

On second thought, maybe I didn’t want to use the infinite sea as a mental defense.  Higher stage cultivators were known to be more susceptible to void-induced psychosis, and if someone was close enough and powerful enough to try and read my thoughts, they were close enough and powerful enough to kill me if they went VIP.

I’d worry about that later.  We had a decision to make.

I scanned through the document Charlotte pulled up, one of hundreds House Velereau had access to.

Cognitohazard 237

Survival Rate: 94%

Successful users report better direct control over biological functions at the molecular level, improved attention to detail, and superior coprocessing skills.

For Charlotte, two-thirty-seven seemed perfect.  It hardly stretched belief to imagine ‘direct control over biological functions’ would apply to her nanites.  She’d have to come up with a different reason when explaining her choice to her father, but coming up with a convincing lie fell firmly within Charlotte’s wheelhouse.

I wasn’t entirely sold.  I was pretty much exclusively interested in the coprocessing, something I could hopefully focus on when I performed the actual advancement.  The attention to detail, however, worried me.  Too much attention to detail was half of the problem I was trying to solve.  My brain meridian made it a struggle to value one piece of information over another, so the last thing I needed was more information.

We continued our search.

The whole time we worked, I kept my Vac Suit running at as high a capacity as my meridians could manage.  To Charlotte, I must’ve looked like little more than an amorphous silhouette as my extremely overcharged technique deflected any light from refracting off me.  The act simultaneously made for good practice and served to saturate Lucy’s dining room with more qi than a focus room.  Considering Charlotte could spend more than two hours a week here, her progress towards titanium had skyrocketed.

Afternoon had long given way to evening by the time we’d fully combed through the Velereau database.  We argued a handful of possibilities to death and back, especially six-eighteen, but I eventually ceded to Charlotte’s risk aversion.  I didn’t want to push her into an advancement she considered too dangerous, however perfect a crucible it would’ve been for me.

We tentatively settled on two-thirty-seven, pending seeking out someone who’d actually used it and asking for what little of their experience they could safely share with us.  It was admittedly a compromise, but as in all things, perfect was the enemy of good.

The ideal crucible that would solve all my problems with a one hundred percent survival rate almost certainly existed—the galaxy was a big place—but we only had so much time until ISH came looking for Lucy or someone caught wind of Xavier’s talents or one of those divinatory mechanisms I’d heard so little about realized who the Stargazer was.

Threads, we’d already dismissed the vast majority of potential crucibles when we’d decided to go with a cognitohazard.

In the end, the best crucible was the one that saw you safely to the next stage, and the first step of that was actually getting your hands on the damn thing.  Cognitohazard two-thirty-seven more than satisfied my requirements.

Charlotte stuck around through dinner.

After she left, I took Ariel up to the cultivation room on Lucy’s upper deck to practice with my newest technique.  I’d thus far discovered a fair amount about warping space, first and foremost that it didn’t work below deck.

Lucy’s soulspace was a part of her, and even with her permission I lacked the spiritual significance to mess with it.  Funnily enough, I felt a similar resistance even when I Warped outside, though I found little difficulty in slipping through it.  I wondered why that was.

In practice, this all meant I couldn’t train in the open space of Lucy’s gym, and instead remained confined to the rooms constrained by her physical dimensions.  I could cross her cultivation room in five steps with no techniques necessary.  Learning to Warp there was an exercise in precision.

The good news was that Warping in enclosed rooms was actually remarkably safe.  The technique didn’t accelerate me at all, so if I overshot the end result was that instead of a footstep away, the wall was mere inches from my face.  I picked up a lot of experience walking directly into walls, but even my worst blunders didn’t amount to so much as a bloody nose.

The qi expenditure scaled with both distance traveled and, fascinatingly enough, cross-sectional area.  Neither mass nor spiritual significance seemed to affect what I could or couldn’t transport, which made certain implications as to the technique’s inner workings.

It seemed like Warp did something akin to burrowing a tunnel between two places, and the length and width of the tunnel determined the qi cost, not what passed through it.  Because the technique wasn’t working on me but on space itself, nothing stopped me from bringing items or people with me.

In my handful of hours learning the technique, I’d yet to figure out a way to anchor the Warp anywhere but directly in front of me, so for the time being I couldn’t use it to make other people walk into walls, but I considered that avenue of discovery a top priority.  The prank potential was limitless.

That said, pranks seemed to be the only real directly offensive use for the technique.  I could make things closer together, but I couldn’t make them collide.  I messed around for a bit trying to generate some kind of sheer by bending space within an object, but while visually it looked like parts of the object compressed, in actuality it came out completely unharmed.

It made a certain amount of sense.  The shape of space affected specifically the paths of things traveling through it.  Light and sound bent along with it, but my arm, for example, was attached to my body, and while Warp could make it look like it bent in all sorts of unnatural ways, from its perspective it remained whole and attached and in its regular shape while the rest of the world bent around it in exotic ways.

It was all rather unsettling to watch and difficult to fully wrap my mind around.

In combat its primary use would be mobility, though Xavier’s idea of Warping Shiver to strike from range held promise.  I’d yet to get around to trying it out—for a handful of reasons including not wanting to damage my sword by accidentally slamming it into Lucy’s walls—but its potential as a surprise attack excited me.

As Micaiah had pointed out, cultivators broadly accepted space to be inviolable.  All sorts of ranged techniques existed, but something got from you—be it a technique or a projectile or something more exotic—the easier it was for its target to usurp your influence and neutralize the attack.  That was the whole point of carrying a sword in the first place.  Ranged attacks were fundamentally easier to stop than melee ones.

With Warp I could strike with Shiver from a distance.  The bent space worked both ways, of course, so I’d be opening myself up to melee counterattacks, and a sword thrust from a hundred feet away could be parried just like any other, but without prior knowledge, no cultivator would expect such a strike, leaving me with an extremely effective way to end fights before they even began, as long as I could keep my ability under wraps.

Of course, even at short ranges Warp ate up so much qi that I could only use it a handful of times in a day before my meridians throbbed with an icy ache, so getting in enough practice to actually incorporate it into my fighting style would take months. 

Worse yet, it released a non insignificant amount of light qi every time I used it.  Lucy more than readily gobbled up any spill off before it could escape her walls and alert the sect to something strange going on, but if I ever used the technique outside, it would be noticed.

That was a problem I’d need to solve sooner rather than later.  More and more my Way seemed suited for stealth, but I could hardly remain undetected with my techniques generating light qi for all to see.  Since I couldn’t use the stuff myself, enchanted objects were the obvious solution.  I already had the odor-masking ring I’d found in Leslie’s stash as well as the prosthetic core Jeremiah had made for me, but the two together barely even accounted for the output of my Vac Suit at low power.  If I wanted to funnel more qi into my defense or use Warp, I’d need something else.

My wishlist already included companion pieces to the ring, more specifically ways to hide from more esoteric senses.  I wasn’t concerned about my body heat—my various meridians stopped me from producing it entirely, letting any lingering heat disperse until I matched the ambient temperature, but the air I displaced, the sound of my footsteps, and the absence of environmental qi in the space I took up could all be detected by a high enough level cultivator.

Nobody I’d have any chance of winning a fight against would feasibly be able to notice any of those, but ostensibly the point of stealth was to hide from the people I couldn’t beat in a straight up fight.

I wished I hadn’t let Alice take the qi battery bracer we’d found in the Ilirian ruins.  A method to store large bursts of light qi to be distributed to various enchanted items over time seemed the only real solution to Warp’s tremendous conversion, but for all the vac welding I’d done in the past year, I wasn’t even close to affording such an expensive piece.

A part of me considered selling onyx or the whetstone, but my more cautious side won out.  If anyone deduced the method by which they’d been enchanted, we’d be in a world of trouble.

On a more promising note, my AI analysis progressed leaps and bounds over the two week paid medical leave my workplace accident earned me.  The software managed to identify a shape in common between my two techniques as the qi intake, as well as the way the sigil changed to accommodate more or less qi.  

The fragment of Death I remembered didn’t include that part, either because it was elsewhere in the incomprehensibly large technique or because its nature as an icon didn’t actually have a qi input.  My AI did manage to match a subsection of it with a particular bend in both of my usable techniques, but it reported just under forty percent confidence in the comparison and didn’t have a strong guess as to its actual purpose.  

I theorized it had something to do with boundary definition—determining where the technique’s effects began and ended—but that was as much guesswork as actual analysis.

Either way, the progress was exciting.  With every passing day, every computation cycle, I inched closer and closer to deciphering the secrets of dark qi.  I was still a long way from making changes to my techniques, let alone developing new ones, but between my studies in marcoenchanting and my AI’s slow but inexorable calculation, I felt I was a few key insights away from cracking dark qi enchantments. 

If I could enchant Lucy with some variant of Warp, she’d be the fastest ship in the galaxy.  It’d take a cultivator capable of walking the Threads—i.e. in the active stages—to keep up with her, and as I understood it there were only a few thousand of those in the entire galaxy.  Better yet, active stage cultivators were extremely vulnerable to VIP.  The Black Maw representatives that visited the Dueling Stars every cycle to witness the intersect tournament and claim a batch of recruits could only stick around a few weeks because the red dwarfs didn’t output enough qi to support them.

We didn’t have that problem.  If I could crack FTL, we could turn interstellar space into the perfect refuge.  Now, we’d all go stir crazy instead of void-crazy, so keeping a low profile using the amulets the Arcadian Gardener had given us remained plan A, but it would be nice to have a back-up for when ISH inevitably came looking for us.  It would also be our only viable method of leaving the Dueling Stars without signing on to join the Black Maw, but that was a problem for the distant future.

I had enough to worry about with this sect—no need to start considering joining another.

In the end, there was only so much I could accomplish in my two weeks off.  I practiced; I studied; I spent time with Micaiah.  Lucy and I took a week straight out in far orbit, meditating in a hard vacuum and letting Ariel fly about to their heart’s content.  Eventually, I got bored enough that I sought out one of Carlos’s shows, more so out of a need for entertainment than real desire to catch up with the roguish musician.  He bought me a drink to congratulate me on ‘sealing the deal’ with Micaiah.  I ensured he actually paid for it rather than skipping out and leaving me with the bill.

By the time my impromptu vacation came to its end, I was chomping at the bit to get back to work.  I could only watch so many movies and train so much before it all grew stale.

It was to some chagrin, then, that on my long anticipated first day back, I couldn’t make straight for Bill and Ursula to suit up and get outside.  Nor, as I’d feared, did Harold call me in for a chastising or a groveling apology.

Instead, for the second time, the moment I stepped off the transport I found myself accosted by one of the non-sect cultivators I’d taught a lesson to that night at Hijinks.  This time, however, they wanted nothing so simple as my tutelage.

“Hidden Master!”  The cultivator I’d dubbed ‘Buzz’ snapped into a salute at my appearance.  “I know this lowly disciple deserves neither your acknowledgment nor your aid, but I knew not where else to turn!”

I sighed.  “Alright.  What do you want?”

“It’s Master Nguyen, Hidden Master.”  Buzz averted his eyes, his voice and body language dripping with both trepidation tempered only by what seemed to be exhaustion from adrenalin-fueled sleep deprivation.  I knew before he even spoke I was about to get dragged into bullshit I wanted absolutely nothing to do with, but Buzz’s pitiable appearance tugged at my heartstrings even as he uttered the series of words I so desperately didn’t want to become my problem.

“He’s gone missing.”

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