The Stargazer's War - Chapter 3.9

(A quick note that chapter titles are exclusively to help me keep track of what happens where in my internal files. Please refrain from groaning.)

Chapter 3.9: My Sect’s Life

“Cal…”

I mumbled incoherently and rolled closer to the source of warmth a few feet to my left.

“Cal,” my tormenter persisted.  “You’re going to be late for work.”

My eyes snapped open, panic the reigning response until I recognized both the speaker and the source of warmth.

“Lucy!” I hissed under my breath, cheeks reddening as I stared at Micaiah’s forehead mere inches from my face.

Putting the stealth skills I’d spent over a year now honing to good use, I extricated myself from the bed, only stopping to pull the blanket up and over Micaiah’s bare chest on some impulse to preserve her dignity that didn’t stand up to the slightest rational thought.  I dressed myself in near perfect silence, stopping only once I’d gathered everything I’d needed to confirm Micaiah hadn’t woken.

She’d drooled a bit on the pillow.  It was cute.

“Should I…?” I breathed.

“Let her sleep,” Lucy whispered in my ear.  “I’ll let her know you had to go.”

With a nod I swallowed back a small knot in my throat, smiled to myself, and stepped out into the hallway.

“It seems the date went well,” Lucy remarked as I made my way to the kitchen.

“Did you have to—”  I sighed.  “Of course you did.  I can’t be late on my third day.  Thank you.”  Intellectually, I knew Lucy couldn’t care less what us humans did with our fleshy bits, but I couldn’t help dredge up old fears of my mother discovering me with my teenage sweetheart back in my school days.

I winced, both at the traumatic memory and in silent apology to Lucy.  I didn’t care how many war crimes Lucy had committed before Cedric taught her better, nobody, and I mean nobody, deserved getting compared to my mother.

“You’re welcome,” she warmly replied.

I humored Lucy’s curiosity as I grabbed the breakfast wrap from the counter and moved to depart.  “Dinner was perfect.  The restaurant was beautiful and the food was delicious and it was neither extremely snooty nor outrageously expensive.  I’ll have to thank Ursula for the recommendation.  Seriously, I didn’t think baba ghanoush could taste that good.”

“I’m happy for you.  You seemed nervous while you were getting ready.”

“I don’t know why,” I said.  “We had breakfast together just the two of us practically every day on the way here.  This just felt… I don’t know, more real.  More intentional.”

“The outcome would certainly imply it was.”

I cycled my heart meridian to stop myself from blushing, knowing full well it was cheating.  My relationship with Lucy and talking about this stuff still felt incompatible in my mind, warranted or otherwise.  Thankfully, I didn’t have to suffer it long.

“See you tonight,” I bid her as I stepped out onto the gangway.  “And-uh… make sure Micaiah knows I really didn’t want to leave like this.”

“I’ll take care of her,” Lucy replied.

“Thanks, Lucy,” I said, then, as much to myself as to her, “I know you will.”

My coworkers offered me a round a weird looks as I arrived in a private transport for the second day in a row rather than the levibus they all took.  None of them asked me about it, thankfully, as I didn’t want to explain that my head valet kept ordering them.  Already they’d begun to suspect I was independently wealthy, which, funnily enough, couldn’t have been further from the truth.

But if the sect wanted to spend their money on private transports to and from their guest hangars, I wasn’t going to stop them.

That said, I really didn’t want to explain to my mortal coworkers why the sect would spend their money on me, so in preparation for the inevitable questions I came up with some lie about running errands for some secty before work.  I hadn’t the faintest idea how believable it was with the dynamic between cultivators and mortals, but with any luck nobody here would have enough experience with the sect members to doubt it.

But that was later me’s problem.  Today me’s problem was Ursula and Bill grinning at me like the threads damned cheshire cat as I stepped into the staging area to suit up.

“So?” Ursula prompted.  “How’d it go?”

“Zuria’s was fantastic,” I told her.  “Thanks for the rec.”

“I take it from that grin on your face you closed the deal?” Bill asked.  When I didn’t deny it, he slapped me on the back.  “Attaboy.”

I suppressed the slight chuckle by feigning a sigh.

Ursula rolled her eyes at Bill’s antics.  “Glad I could help.  Let me know if you want any more recommendations.  Forty years I’ve lived here, more than enough time to find the best spots to eat.”

“That I’ll definitely take you up on,” I replied as I slipped into my vac suit.  “Though to be honest I wouldn’t be upset just going back to Zuria’s.  That baba ghanoush was something special.”

“No, no, you have to take her to Pevik.  They do this soup with gene-modded habaneros that…”  Ursula went on about her favorite restaurants as we kitted up, climbed into a no-at, and pulled into the airlock.  The grav thrusters on the finicky machine—little more than four chairs, a steering yoke, and a frame—carried us at speed to the first fix site several miles from our staging area.  Bill, as was apparently most of his job, kept the thing stationary and running while Ursula and I, magnetic step by magnetic step, climbed over to the fist-sized hole in the hull.

We patched it up.  We got back in the no-at.  We rinsed and repeated.

The rhythm of working alongside others made for a welcome change of pace from the solo welding I’d done on my first day and back on Fyrion as we alternated between amicable chatting and periods of silence.  It wasn’t quite as meditative as I’d grown used to, but it was more normal.  I appreciated the company, and being around people who treated me like just another vac welder was oddly comforting.

I found a vantage from which to stargaze a bit while the others broke for lunch.  After I’d turned down their offers of a few bites yesterday and returned today without a meal of my own, Bill and Ursula got the hint that the morning’s labor hadn’t left me hungry.  Ursula had expressed disbelief at the idea, which I explained away with large breakfasts and dinners and the desire to avoid after-lunch sluggishness.

They’d looked at me like I was crazy, but hadn’t pressed the issue further.

The afternoon went much the same as the morning, and soon enough I found myself hanging up my suit and climbing into the transport to head home.  I chatted with Lucy over a dinner shared with a ravenous void beast, showered, and settled in to read the first of the books Harold had sent me.

Introduction to Macroenchanting made for a mouthful of a title, but I found the text itself remarkably easy to follow as it took me through the basics of celestial-scale qi movements.  I fell down a number of rabbit holes stopping and looking up unfamiliar terms, but little left me entirely uncomprehending.

All in all, it made for a pleasant way to spend the evening: a cozy couch, a crackling fire, Ariel slumbering at my side, and a mental task to contrast the fairly mindless physical labor of vac welding.

So, the next night I did it again.  Then again.

The passage of time hastened as patterns turned into habits turned into routine, and the beginnings of, if not necessarily the life I wanted, something comfortable began to take shape.  At the end of the first week, Xavier and Micaiah came over to discuss the sect side of things.

The final death toll of the murder at the reception totaled seven.  A dozen others had been maimed or otherwise wounded in the series of honor duels the assassination had sparked, remarkably few of them among House Velereau.  Xavier and Micaiah had thankfully avoided the any fallout, while Charlotte remained holed up in her family estate, a state of affairs that left Xavier visibly worried.

Whatever Jean Jack Velereau or anyone else’s grand plans were, no further conflict had yet materialized.  The daughter of a botanist under House Morris took the fall for the original murder under the pretense of revenge for Austin spurning her advances.  Whatever the girl or her family had done to earn the ire of the three houses, this would put an end to any face they had within the sect.  She was scheduled to be executed in two days.

That story alone reinforced my decision to keep as distanced from the sect as possible, a sentiment only compounded upon as Xavier cheerfully described fighting duel after duel while Micaiah recounted hiding out in her suite to avoid those same challenges.  

“I will say,” she admitted, “the focus rooms might be worth it.  My cultivation has improved more in the last week then the entire year before that.”

Xavier echoed the sentiment.

That was the power of the sects, ultimately.  However dangerous their squabbling, however infuriating their arrogance, they held the keys to power and distributed them remarkably effectively.  People would put up with all sorts of bullshit if it meant growing stronger.

Xavier departed our little gathering to return to the arena, while Micaiah lingered to join me for dinner at another of Ursula’s recs.  I made sure to thank my coworker the next morning.

The time drifted on.  I took my days off in sets of two, using the time to have Lucy fly into orbit so Ariel could stretch their wings and I could get some cultivating done a bit away from the sect’s prying eyes.  As usual, my bottleneck wasn’t qi, but the actual act of advancement.  Ascending from iron to titanium required reforging the mind in the same way the jump to iron had reforged the body.  My discussions with Lucy had yielded a few promising ideas, and I really would’ve liked a better way to stay focused while channeling my brain meridian, but sourcing an appropriate crucible would take some time.

In the interim, I meditated.

I contemplated the revelations I’d made so far and the mysteries I’d yet to solve.  I contemplated my Vac Suit, the only technique I’d managed with dark qi, and ways to potentially derive new abilities from it.  Most of all I contemplated Death, its nature and its manifestation.

There seemed to me a conflict inherent in my Way.  Death, as a symbol, represented change more than anything, a near diametric opposite to the stagnant stillness of the void.  I realized, of course, that the nothingness I cultivated did not constitute the entirety of my being, but it certainly made up a substantial enough portion to call my connection with Death into question.

I spent hours on that particular subject.  I spent hours more deconstructing bits and pieces of the qi-weave that’d made up Death’s appearance back on Ilirian.  I only remembered a fraction of a fraction, and I comprehended even less, but the minuscule portion I’d chosen to decipher was slowly, inexorably, beginning to make sense.

Harold’s books had provided a surprising amount of insight into the topic, in particular their instructions on mitigating the subtle effects of moving qi that grew amplified to significance when implemented at a planetary scale.  Carlos had described Death as a phenomenon, an imprint on the galaxy itself shaped by countless peoples’ beliefs and experiences.  It was, in a way, a subtle effect of qi amplified to significance by its galactic scale.

I spent the remainder of my off time in training.  I’d never be as devout about it as Xavier, but I’d exerted a great deal of effort learning to use a sword, and I’d be damned if I let that go to waste by falling out of practice.  I practiced—and lost—against Xavier during his occasional visits, but predominantly I trained against Lucy’s projections.  Some day, I told myself, I would defeat her simulation of Cedric.  I’d long surpassed his cultivation at the time of his death, but Lucy sped up her holo enough to compensate, leaving me repeatedly losing in the face of his superior skill.

Stealth gave me a harder time.  While I could practice moving silently to my heart’s content, a distinct lack of anyone to actually sneak up on limited my progress.  Even Xavier—whose record of never once being surprised by my antics I now understood—would’ve made a welcome training partner compared to those I had available.  Ariel, both bound to my very spirit and able to sense dark qi, I’d never be able to sneak up on, especially since they spent most of the day perched on my shoulder.  Lucy, similarly, simply couldn’t lose track of me while I was aboard.

Nevertheless, I practiced as I could.  The wilds of Ilirian hadn’t made for particularly fertile ground for such skills, but here on the Right Eye, with its busy streets and maintenance passages and hidden nooks, made for the perfect environment for stealth tactics.  My skillset so far practically forced them.  Being invisible to spiritual sense was too useful to ignore.

Sight and hearing I could similarly dodge with good old practice and liberal application of my Vac Suit camouflaging me into the shadows, but I’d still have to come up with some sort of answer to the more esoteric senses.  Meditations on nothingness seemed like a good place to start.

At no point in the two months following Austin Urlitch’s death did I set eyes on Charlotte.  Her frequent messages reassured me that she was alright, through from her tone I got the distinct impression she suffered a lot of anxiety over what we were getting up to.  My complete lack of interaction with the sect, up to and including outright ignoring the numerous messages that poured in, seemed to assuage some of that.

Xavier informed me she was in much more frequent contact with him, both for the obvious personal reasons and to both leave instructions and gather intel on the general state of things beyond the walls of the Velereau estate.  Mostly she had him challenge—and defeat—various people in duels and request some prize or other for his victory.  The underlying purpose of the tasks eluded him as well as me.  He too had not seen Charlotte in person.

So time passed, and so I grew accustomed to life on the Dragon’s Right Eye.  I woke up.  I went to work.  Some days I went out for drinks with my coworkers, others I went home and studied.  On weekends I trained and let Ariel fly free long as they could.  Best of all, I avoided stumbling into any cultivator bullshit entirely, a feat which, after all of Charlotte’s warnings, I remained immensely proud.

That of course made it all the more frustrating when, for as spectacular of a job as I’d done keeping clear of the sect and all it entailed, cultivator bullshit, like a particularly belligerent drunk on his way home at two in the afternoon, stumbled into me.

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