“Can you hear that?” Deacon said quietly, her voice cutting through the rhythmic swish of my arms as I practiced a straight-line kata in our glorified janitorial coffin. I was trying to coax a few more dribbles of energy into my utterly bankrupt system. The port, especially with a stowaway, had taken a lot more out of me than I’d hoped.

  If I wanted to be able to fight, or even to port and run—my two primary survival strategies, which amounted to ‘bluff’ and ‘blunder’—I needed at least a couple of solid hours of energy gain. My spiritual gas tank was running on fumes and wishful thinking.

  “No. Hear what?” I grunted, pivoting on one foot. My new, less-enhanced body complained with a symphony of pops and creaks. Progress, they call it. I call it a demotion.

  She lifted an eyebrow, a gesture that managed to be both elegant and deeply concerning. “That roar. That sounds like Baelfire’s flying, and it’s getting closer.”

  A cold knot of dread, familiar as an old friend, tightened in my gut. “How close? Did she follow us? How did she follow us?” Paranoia, my oldest and most reliable companion, whispered that no escape could ever be that clean. The universe always sends a bill, and it’s usually delivered by a pyrokinetic maniac.

  She thought about it for a few minutes, her expression one of intense concentration. “She’s probably hunting us. She must have some method of finding us and she’s probably flying over the city to look for you.”

  “Wait, she can just fly over? Won’t the heroes respond?” I asked, the part of my brain that still believed in a functioning society briefly overriding the cynic. This wasn’t a villain gig with pre-arranged permits; this was a bona fide hostile incursion.

  She nodded, a gesture that was far too calm for the content of her words. “They should, but when she’s flying she is very fast. It will take at least a few minutes to mobilize them. This isn’t the academy… Also, if she’s not doing anything actively destructive, they probably won’t do more than harass her to find out who and why she’s here. I am trying to figure out how… wait… the suit!”

  “The suit?” I asked stupidly, my mind still cycling through images of a fire-wreathed angel of death scorching the city skyline looking for little old me. My life had truly jumped the shark.

  She nodded, her gaze zeroing in on the generic-looking hero suit they had stuck me in after kidnapping me naked from my bedroom. A fitting metaphor for my life: stripped of everything, then dressed in someone else’s idea of what I should be. “Yes, she put the suit on you. It probably has a built-in Infrared reflection that’s as noticeable as a mirror… she can detect IR reflections right through solid walls, it’s part of her heat control. You can alter structures, right?”

  I sighed, the sound weary enough to qualify for its own pension. “Yes and no. I could alter a small part of the suit, and then, given the time and energy, I could replicate it through the whole thing, but if it’s got some kind of weird infrared thing going on, I would have to change and then blueprint the whole thing… That could take hours, not to mention being an enormous energy sink.”

  I was already moving, my fingers fumbling with the seam at the neck. “Crap. I don’t even have a backup. You wouldn’t happen to be carrying an extra set of boxer shorts around would you? Preferably something in a non-flammable, non-traceable fabric.”

  She shook her head, and I could tell she was blushing, a faint pink hue rising on her cheeks. It was almost charming, a hint of normalcy in our utterly absurd situation. “No, I wear my Kereval suit bare like most people, that way there aren’t any air pockets to mess up the stressor fluid’s impact protection. Umm… I don’t know what to suggest.”

  I sighed, deciding to lean into the humiliation. If you can’t beat it, mock it. “You’re just looking for an excuse to see me naked.” I grumped, stripping the rest of the suit off and dumping it into the same sink I’d ditched my armor a few weeks ago. The porcelain was starting to feel like a trusted confidant. “You said she recognizes IR signatures. Does that mean she can recognize my body through walls too? Or yours?”

  She shook her head, her eyes politely averted, granting me a sliver of dignity. “Not mine. I have enough body tempering that while she might be able to recognize me if I got close enough due to not having a signature, her regular senses don’t work well. Your body?”

  She was looking resolutely at a fascinating patch of rust on the wall, “Well, it’s different enough that I doubt she would even recognize you unless she saw you up close. I mean, you physically look the same as when we loaded you, but your entire system is different, not as… artificial.”

  I sighed. “See, this is why old wrecked industrial parks have a limited lifespan. If this damned place hadn’t been abandoned almost since the FAAFO, there might be some kind of coveralls or some dude’s dirty sweatshirt or something.”

  I looked around. My kingdom: wrecked aluminum shelving, some old cardboard boxes that had probably once held something exciting like industrial-grade lubricant, a broken mop bucket, half a decayed mop handle, and some beat-up and rotting old car magazines featuring models who were now probably grandmothers. A treasure trove for the discerning hobo, but useless for me.

  I shook my head, and started decaying the super suit, reducing it to its component molecules with a thought. It was easier than making it. “Nothing I can use in a hurry. Give me a day, and I could make a suit of aluminum scrap armor, but right now I am tapped. Heck, without my helmet I can’t even tell you how tapped I am, I just know I am low in juice.” It was like trying to check your bank balance on a dead phone. You just know it’s bad.

  She nodded, her cultivation-sense evidently more precise than my own internal barometer. “Your chi storage is low. Is that what you were doing?”

  I nodded, and without any better option, started doing katas again. Yes, it was no fun with your bits flopping out in the breeze of a dusty janitor’s closet, but it helped to get the cycle started again. Motion. Momentum. My Dao was a harsh mistress. “Yeah. I can’t do that sitting cross-legged and falling into my bellybutton thing. I found a way of regaining energy, but it involves exercise and motion. I’m basically a self-powered hamster wheel.”

  She sighed, and slipped her mask off. Well, honestly, if I hadn’t been surrounded by top-shelf, world-altering girls at all times during the last few weeks, I would probably consider her a ten. She had that whole elegant, doll-like features thing going on.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

  Not really my type, though. I’d always had a thing for the girl-next-door types. Short, curvy, maybe a redhead with glasses or freckles. The kind that looked like they just stepped off a red carpet with a permanent tan and umm… I was not too sure of the term, the fish-lip look?

  I think they call it kissable or bee-stung lips or something like that. Very popular on television since it combined Russian and Indian good looks, but Alpha girls were always amazingly good looking, and the over-the-top attractiveness just fed my paranoia and distrust. It was like nature’s warning label: ‘Caution: This individual can likely bench-press a car and/or ruin your life.’

  Too bad my body disagreed with my assessment, though, or maybe it was prancing around trying to do katas and concentrate while I was undressed in front of a young lady. My autonomic nervous system has never been a great team player. Then again, according to the fiction I had read, cultivators had very flexible ages… She could be my grandmother’s age. That was a profoundly unsettling thought.

  Fortunately, imagining my grandmother standing there trying not to look as I exercised naked did exactly what intellectual distrust couldn’t. It was the ultimate cold shower. It helped me get my body back under control. Thanks, Grandma.

  “So, basically we are stuck here?”

  I shrugged, the motion feeling oddly unencumbered without clothing. “What’s this WE, white girl? I am stuck here. You can leave any time you like. I thought I made that pretty clear. You could even flag down the psycho and let her know I am here, if you want… I probably have enough juice to get back under cover, although I can’t take you with me, and if you showed up at the academy with me, someone might try to shoot you.” I wasn’t exactly on the ‘welcome home’ committee list.

  She nodded, her expression turning thoughtful. “So you are here instead of there to protect me.”

  I chuckled, a dry, raspy sound. “I guess you would put it that way. Of course, there’s also the fact that you three waltzed in and snatched me from the school almost effortlessly. Anonymity, for the moment, seemed a lot safer than going back and hiding in a safe that was already broken open.” My life was a series of choosing the least-worst option.

  She shook her head, a flicker of professional pride showing. “It was far from effortless. We had to burn a lot of intelligence to get you. If you went back, the Maxwell group would probably have to write you off or try alternative methods. Can you talk while you are meditating?”

  I nodded, flowing into a new stance. “Yeah. Do you still hear her? I don’t understand how you could, I can’t hear crap.” My super-hearing was apparently on the fritz, another feature lost in the factory reset.

  She shrugged, her attention turning inward again. “You are here because of me, so for now, I am here because of you. She doesn’t seem to be headed directly towards us, but pretty soon the locals will get involved. If she tries something after she has their attention, well, she’s pretty powerful, but not that powerful. She will probably leave.”

  “So what are YOU planning on doing here, just watching me exercise naked? There’s a fee for that, you know. My agent will be in touch.” I quipped, trying to mask the sheer weirdness of the situation with bravado. It was my default setting.

  She shook her head, a faint smile playing on her lips. “No. I want to know what method you are practicing. You aren’a chaos or demonic cultivator, which means you are… unusual.”

  “Would you care to define those for me?” I asked, switching forms. I still didn’t have enough energy to start working on my channels, but if she had information to expand what I had gleaned from the Serenoid diagrams, I would happily take it apart and see if it could apply. Knowledge was power, and right now, I was desperately short on both.

  She nodded, settling into a lecturer’s pose despite her combat gear. “A demonic cultivator… well, that’s a little hard to explain. The term is very loaded, like calling a soldier a baby-killer. I guess I should start by defining cultivation?”

  I shook my head, not wanting a remedial lesson. “I have a pretty good idea of what that is already. They draw in energy from the environment to stretch out and eventually compress inside their soul-box.” Graviton’s lessons were burned into my brain, right next to the memory of Crystal’s smile. Both were painful in their own way.

  She smiled a little, apparently amused or impressed. “The first step isn’t even drawing in energy; that’s the second step. The first step is to use the energy your body naturally produces to clean your system and improve it to be an appropriate vessel for essence. That’s what is referred to as body refinement. You seem to have sort of skipped that stage… before, you were like a box full of random puzzle pieces that had been shaken up and dumped on a table, and you saw the pattern of some of the pieces and used some sort of biology hack to douse them all in glue so it would hold together even if it didn’t create any sort of picture.”

  I winced. That was a painfully accurate description of my former state. “Whatever you did when we were transiting cleaned off the glue holding the pieces together, so it’s back to being a jumbled mess.”

  “But this is not a bad thing!” she insisted, her eyes alight. “Usually a bad start like that could permanently destroy your potential, or would require powerful alchemical compounds to… dissolve the glue, and if you had already started assembling the puzzle, it would have had to destroy your cultivation base and shaken the box back up.”

  I grinned, despite myself. “At least you aren’t talking about fish.”

  “Fish?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, a metaphor a teacher was teaching me. Apparently essence is all around everyone, but people are like fish living in water, they can’t recognize it because it’s all their environment is.”

  She nodded, a scholarly light in her eyes. “Not a bad metaphor for an essence-rich death world like this, if simplistic. Anyway, basic body tempering is like putting the puzzle’s outer edge together. Body refinement is like filling the puzzle in afterwards. The Metaphor kind of breaks down after that. The difference between righteous and demonic cultivators is that righteous cultivators refuse to use any essence except that gathered from the atmosphere. Demonic cultivators can also use the essence gathered by creatures as well, which saves them a lot of time.”

  She smiled slightly, a cynical twist to her mouth that I deeply appreciated. “It’s sort of ironic, though, since righteous cultivators will happily kill spirit beasts and eat them, which is just another way of absorbing their chi rather than just directly absorbing it.”

  I nodded, the hypocrisy sounding entirely familiar. “But demonic cultivators also drain it from people, right?”

  She shrugged, a gesture that encompassed millennia of philosophical debate. “Broad brush. Most of them don’t. But the righteous ones, on the world I come from, call all of us evil because we prefer not to suck places dry of natural energies to cultivate. It’s kind of like experience points in a role playing game. You can sit in one place and contemplate the universe for the next thousand years and hope one day to advance, or you can go out and kill monsters instead.”

  A laugh barked out of me. “So, most demonic cultivators are basically adventurers, but a few of them are Murder Hobos?”

  She nodded, her smile widening. “Exactly right! Also, some of the more obscene cultivation methods used by the evil and unethical focus specifically on drawing essence from sapient creatures, lower-ranked human cultivators, or dual-cultivation with an essence vessel. My own cultivation method involves drawing essence from materials, whether spirit-enhanced herbs, spirit animals and chaos beasts, spirit ore, or basically anything that sheds energy. I refine it, merge it into special potions or pills, and then let other people use it or use it myself.”

  “I noticed that you were taking in all kinds of energy and refining it incredibly quickly,” I recalled the sensation during our teleport, the way she’d acted as a filter for the chaotic energies.

  She nodded. “That’s the alchemist gift. We can change most kinds of essence to increase its purity, but our method is super specialized for creating other substances. Change is not something that lends itself to power growth, so we grow our abilities through crafting items and then consuming them, instead. But because I can absorb essence from living things as easily as dead things, the righteous cultivators label me as demonic, just like the psychos that dual-cultivate with a vessel.”

  “You know you are creating more questions than you are answering, right?” I chuckled, my mind reeling with the implications. It was a whole new layer of metaphysics to be paranoid about. Wonderful.