The Stargazer's War - Chapter 3.10

Chapter 3.10: Cultivator Bullshit

“…then Sun Buns turns to me and says—and I shit you not—‘the stench of sewage is back.  I think there might be a second source.”

I slammed my fist into the table as laughter took me.  “Right in front of him?  Oh, that’s devastating.  I’ve gotta steal that.”

Sun Buns—or Sun Byun to those of us who weren’t married to him—grinned at me.  “The next time a plumber tries to up-charge you for parts he didn’t use, you’re welcome to.”

Ursula put an affectionate hand on her husband’s arm.  “I’m just glad your cousin told us what to expect.  If I didn’t know what a trex-calibration fitting was I’d never have known they sure as hell don’t belong in a toilet.”

There were five of us in total crowded into our usual booth at Hijinks, more than most nights but not an unusual crowd by any stretch.  Ursula and Sun sat to my left, while Bill and his wife Tanya had taken the bench opposite us.

I’d taken a liking to what had become our default bar.  Hijinks sat just at the edge of sect territory, close enough to work to be reasonably accessible, yet far enough—and dingy enough—that the secties wouldn’t stoop to set foot in the place.  Bill had informed me that getting a table could be a feat and a half on a Friday night, but on the Wednesdays we usually went out for drinks we could just walk right in.

As mortal bars went, it was just dive-y enough with its worn down furniture and tabletops riddled with carvings from more vandalous guests without being dive-y enough to be unpleasant, a qualifier with exactly two requirements: the bathrooms were clean and the floors weren’t sticky.

The conversation lulled as the waitress arrived with our dinner, and the act of shoveling food down our faces took precedence over more social uses for said faces.

I froze with a mouthful of burger the moment I noticed the cultivators walk in.

There were four of them in total, each on the high end of copper to my spiritual sense.  I glanced up as inconspicuously as I could, looking across the bar to get their measure.  They were in street clothes rather than sect uniforms, and they seemed to be in good moods, smiling and laughing to each other.

I swallowed, resolving to let them be and avoid making a scene.  Prideful and domineering as cultivators could be, I knew as well as anyone they were perfectly capable of enjoying a nice evening out with their friends.  Threads knew I’d done it often enough.

I followed Charlotte’s advice and kept my head down as they walked past, only half paying attention to Bill’s story about the night he told his parents about Tanya.  I wanted to laugh at his father’s antics.  I wanted to eat my burger.

I wanted a lot of things.

“Move.  We would sit here.”

He wasn’t talking to us.  He wasn’t looking at us.  It would cost me nothing to keep my mouth shut and let them bully a few mortals into changing tables.  I fully intended to do exactly that.

“Why are they always pricks?” I muttered to myself as I leaned in to take another bite of my burger.

“Excuse you?”

I cringed.  That had not been loud enough for a copper to pick up on naturally.  One of the must’ve been cycling his sense meridian in a crowded bar for some threads-forsaken reason.

I looked up to find four angry cultivators looming over our booth.  I glanced across the table.  Bill stared at me with wide eyes and almost as pale as mine.  I understood why.  From his perspective, there was a very real chance I was about to die.

I finished chewing and swallowed before I replied.  “Come on, guys.  There’s an open table right over there.  Why do you gotta make those people move?”

“Because we would prefer a booth,” the sole woman of the group explained as if I were a simpleton for not understanding, “and it is our right as disciples of the great master Nguyen to sit where we please.”

“Of course, honored cultivator,” Ursula tried, already gathering up her things.  “You can have our table.”

I didn’t move from my aisle seat, leaving Ursula stuck in the booth unless she wanted to climb over me.  “Which house is master Nguyen under?” I asked.

One of the men—I mentally dubbed him ‘Buzz’ after his haircut—looked at me like I’d turned green.  “Which house?”

“You know, in the sect.  If they’re such a great master surely they hold a place of esteem in one of the great houses, right?  So which one?”

Buzz faltered, his hesitance both confirming their lack of sect connections and displaying a modicum of actual intelligence as he realized that these were not the kinds of questions mortals asked.

His friend—I went with ‘Braid’ to keep on theme—apparently lacked even that much.  “You speak of matters so far above you they may as well be clouds.  You should remember your place, mortal.”

I made a point of looking down at the table.  “Let’s see… my friends are here.  My beer is here.  My burger is here.”  I looked back up at them.  “I’m pretty sure this is my place.”

“Your place is on your knees, begging for our mercy!” The third and final of the bad haircut trio, Balding, clenched his fist.  “If you kiss my shoe perhaps I won’t cut out your tongue for your disrespect.”

“No need to get all kinky about it.  Can’t you just let people enjoy their evening in peace?  There’s plenty of tables for everyone.”

A look of concern had darkened the woman’s face, as she too picked up on the hints that perhaps not everything here was as it seemed.  “Baldric, perhaps we should reconsider—”

I laughed.  I couldn’t help myself.  It came out bright and sharp and in a great burst that I wished with every ounce of my being I’d been able to suppress.  For fuck’s sake I’d come up with a joke about his receding hairline and made it halfway to his actual name.

Somebody slapped the burger out of my hands.  “You’ll die for this disrespect, trash!”  Baldy’s hand shot for my throat.

Threads he was slow.  Was I this slow back at copper?  I wasn’t even cycling any meridians, and it felt like I had an eon to intercept his strike.  I snatched his hand in the air, my thumb pressing into his palm.

It should’ve ended there.  The girl—I went with Blondie for consistency’s sake, even though her hair was closer to red—had already expressed suspicion.  A rational mind should’ve seen my display of prowess and backed off.

I heard the telltale shing of a weapon being drawn.

Immediately I blasted qi through all twelve meridians, assigning myself a simple task to keep myself focused: disarm and disable.

With a twist of my hand, I snapped Baldy’s wrist.  Before the scream could escape his lips, I yanked on his arm, simultaneously bringing him to double over the table and to my feet to address the other threats.

“He’s a cultivator!” Buzz exclaimed the obvious.

My right hand snaked around Baldy to reach for the sword on his hip.  I drew it and tossed it aside in a single motion, my qi-empowered brain finding no difficulty in plotting and executing a trajectory that wouldn’t hit anybody.  The steel blade had yet to clatter to the floor by the time I’d taken a step towards Braid, whose sword was already up.

I batted the flat of the blade aside with my palm, expecting to disrupt his block bypass his guard.  Instead, the weapon wrenched from his grip.  I continued with my followup anyway, my body already committed to the motion.  I grabbed his forearm with one hand and pulled left, forcibly turning him before I placed another hand on his back and tugged.  The telltale pop of a dislocated shoulder resonated through his body.  I shoved him forward to make space.

I heard Buzz drawing his twin daggers before I spun to face him.  He moved as if in slow motion, his swing so telegraphed it was trivial to sidestep and bash the blade from his grasp.  He didn’t have time to react to his disarming before my hands darted forth to encase his off hand.  With a simple twist I tore his other weapon free, snapping a few fingers in the process.

Instead of breaking free, I pulled in towards me, slamming my shoulder into his chest gently enough to hopefully avoid breaking anything but with enough force to send him stumbling back.

Disarm and disable.

I spun once more to face their final member only to find Blondie already on her knees.

“Forgive us, hidden master!”  She kowtowed.  “We knew not the depths into which we stared!”

I halted the flow of qi to my brain meridian now that its task was finished.  Why was she… oh.  She thinks I’m Black Maw.  It made a sort of sense.  Her spiritual sense couldn’t place my core, and I certainly didn’t look or act like a Right Eye member.  It would follow that I was a high level visitor from the only other source of strong cultivators she knew.

“Get up,” I told her, my voice soft and raspy as my lung meridian hoarded its air stingily.  If they wanted me to be a hidden master I’d play the role of a hidden master, but impersonating a Black Maw agent would be trouble.  “Only a weak will demands obeisance from those beneath them.”  I glared at her companions.  “And only one weaker still would trample the powerless.”

There, that’d definitely stop them from making the wrong assumption.  Openly disparaging Black Maw practices was probably an equally bad idea, but I plead not guilty on the premise that said practices are stupid.

“Thank you, hidden master, for your magnanimity.  I swear upon my cultivation and the foundation upon which it is built that none of us will reveal your presence here, lest your seclusion be broken.”

She’d lost me.  I’d just been eating dinner with four other people.  Did that look secluded to her?  I had half a mind to ask what in the hells she was talking about, but opted instead to keep playing the part.  “It is no great secret.  The local powers are aware of my presence.”  I took a breath and addressed the quartet as a whole.  “You will leave this place and not return.  I propose in the future you treat those beneath you with respect.  Your fortunes and your Ways may make you stronger, but they do not make you superior.”

“Of course, hidden master.  Thank you, for your gift of wisdom.”  Blondie looked to her friends.  “Let’s go.”

Baldy cradled his wrist, ketchup staining his shirt where he’d collided with my dinner.  “He broke my—”

“Let’s go,” Blondie repeated.

Finally seeing sense, the cultivators took their leave, though not without glaring a mix of fear and anger at me in their passing.

I let out a breath, mind racing through what had just happened and the probably consequences, when my qi-empowered hearing caught a whispered word from across the bar.

“Stargazer…”

Shit.  How many thread-sensitives were on this godsforsaken station?  I should never have cycled my sense meridian.  The starry eyes were too much of an identifier.  Immediately I cut the flow of qi, feeling color return to the world warmth to my skin.

“We should go,” I said, pulling up my holopad to pay for the meal.

My friends all gaped at me.  Bill looked like he was going to be sick.  

I sighed.  “Stay if you want, but questions are about to start flying, and I wouldn’t put it past those idiots to come back with this Master Nguyen in tow.  We should go.”

It took Tanya’s hand on his shoulder to urge Bill into motion, but eventually they all stood and followed me from the bar.  Thankfully, they waited until we made it out onto the street before starting their interrogation.

Ursula started off with an easy one.  “You’re a cultivator?”

“Yep.”

“What are you doing vac welding?” she followed up.  “Is it some kind of special training?  I know cultivators hate a hard vac.”

I shrugged.  “Same thing you are.  I have the certs and need the paycheck.  Turns out being able to fight only really makes money by taking it from people.”

“Are you in a sect?” Sun asked.

I took note of the phrasing ‘a sect’ rather than ‘the sect.’  My answer remained the same.  “No.  I have friends who are, but they need it more than I do.  It’s not really my scene anyway.  Most cultivators are assholes.”

“I’d toast to that,” Ursula agreed.

They continued making light conversation and peppering me with questions as we made our way to the nearest transport terminal.  I answered some and waved off others, only half paying attention as I thought through the encounter at the bar and its possible consequences.

With any luck Blondie’s promise would keep them from telling their master about me.  I hadn’t had the best experiences with taking people on their word, but she’d seemed earnest.  The way she’d phrased it certainly made it sound like a big deal.

I didn’t think there was too much trouble the bad haircut crew could cause me.  As far as I knew there weren’t any cultivators above bronze outside the sect, and it wasn’t as if they could catch me by surprise with my spiritual sense as sensitive as it was.  Should I start carrying Shiver to work?  My cover as a mortal was already blown.  

Really, I was mostly worried about the witnesses.  I had a good thing going here, and I really didn’t want my new friends treating me differently because I could beat up a few coppers.  The onlooker who’d named me Stargazer too… that concerned me.  Who knew where he’d repeat that name?  At least he was mortal.  Thank the threads most cultivators didn’t care what mortals had to say.  It’d insulate me from anyone important hearing about tonight.

I bid the others goodnight as we boarded our separate transports, once more apologizing for my big mouth ruining an otherwise pleasant evening.  They equivocated and denied wrongdoing and otherwise stopped short of accepting my apology.  I let them.

Like it or not, our dynamic had changed.  I wasn’t mortal.  I hadn’t been for years.  Tonight’s display had served to remind me how far up the mountain I’d climbed, and how distant were the meadows I’d once called home.

The Way only went up.  I could only hope that at the peak, the valleys from whence I’d come would remain in sight.

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