I would like to say that my new spiritual re-awakening led to a sea of endless power, a cosmic wellspring from which I could draw godlike might to smite my enemies and finally get my security deposit back from my last landlord. I would like to, but I would be lying through my teeth, which were currently grinding against the chalky, vaguely beef-flavored sawdust of a forty-year-old MRE.

  The reality was less "ascendant demigod" and more "spiritually enlightened hobo." I was still a little weaker than I had been when I’d been sporting my own personal, self-installed physical modifications.

  That had felt like wearing someone else's enhanced power armor—impressive, but fundamentally disconnected. This new state felt more… whole. Like the power was actually mine, not just a widget I’d hot-wired into my soul. A novel feeling, and one I immediately distrusted. If my life had taught me anything, it's that anything that feels right usually comes with a hidden invoice.

  The hardest part was keeping the energy slowly flowing. Supposedly, it would soon become an instinct, a background process like breathing or suppressing the urge to scream in a crowded room. But for right now, it was a near constant, if minor, effort—like trying to remember to hold in your stomach all day.

  Speeding it up took much more effort, but when I did… well… let’s just say it was a hell of a drug. My power absorption skyrocketed, and I got a temporary boost to strength and speed that would make a low-rent speedster jealous. The side effects, however, were a real buzzkill: crippling exhaustion and a hunger so profound I was half-considering eating the MRE’s plastic spoon.

  Too bad I didn’t have an emergency shirt, and never really had enough savings to put any kind of money supply into my hiding places. My contingency planning had always focused more on "escape from supervillain lair" and less on "impromptu diner breakfast." So instead of a stack of pancakes, I was basically cleaning out the hideout’s sad, post-apocalyptic food supply.

  Deacon was carefully packing up the now freshly cleaned needles into a piece of boiled canvas, her movements precise and reverent. Each needle was a tiny monument to my recent agony. I tore into another ancient MRE that had probably been expired since before I was born. It tasted like crap now, but it had probably tasted just as bad fresh off the assembly line. The U.S. Army: consistently disappointing across decades.

  “So what do we do from here?” she asked, her voice pulling me from my culinary misery.

  I chuckled, a dry, raspy sound. “I honestly have no clue. My five-year plan ended at ‘don’t get dissected.’ I figured I’d head back to the academy. They are bound to have noticed I was missing for...about a day?” I’d been kidnapped, spiritually rebooted, and acupuncture-tortured. It had been a full schedule.

  She nodded, “That, and a lot of people were asleep. I’d guess almost a day by this point. The surveillance was deactivated, and the maintenance tunnels were active, but it took almost half an hour for you to wake up and for us to get past the border.”

  “I will probably have to go on foot. I seem to have more energy potential than before, but I don’t really have a way of measuring it until I can get back to the academy’s overpriced gadgetry.” I gestured to my bare chest and lack of footwear. “If I had money, I’d probably grab some clothes and more food from an all-night store, but I seem to have accidentally left my wallet behind in the clutches of my kidnappers. Rude of them not to let me grab it on the way out.”

  “I would help with that, but the only funds I have are Farmer’s marks, and in a city, almost no one will accept them except importers. The moment an importer noticed I had them, they would try to find out why, and likely reveal who I am.”

  “So how are you going to survive?” I asked. Not that I should care that much. We were even. She’d stuck needles in me, I’d saved her from a brain-bomb. The ledger was balanced. My conscience, that traitorous organ I thought I’d had surgically removed, was apparently still on the payroll.

  “That’s why I asked what we should do from here. I am not really sure. I was raised in the sect, and then we immigrated, and the survivors wound up getting bound by the various farmer factions. I haven’t really ever been anywhere where I wasn’t ordered by someone.”

  “You have never been free? In your whole life?” The concept was as foreign to her as a working public transit system was to a Farmer Family heir.

  She shook her head, “No, my spirit root was discovered when I was a small child, and I was taken in by the sect. Since then, I have just served.”

  “How old are you?” I asked. Yes, technically rude, but when you’ve shared a teleportational soul-space and a needle-based ordeal, formalities tend to go out the window.

  She looked thoughtful, “Umm… wait, let me translate. The world I came from was very different from here. Most mortals would live around twenty-five years before age claimed them. Our years were set up differently. There was a wet season, a growing season, a harvest season, a fallow or dry season, a second wet season, a growing season, a harvest season, and then a cold season. Each of those cycles took about… three years? So I would be, locally, between eighteen and twenty-one years old.”

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  I sighed, “Alright, I thought, at least according to the books I read, that you could be like, hundreds of years old.” My brief fantasy of being mentored by a wise, ancient crone evaporated.

  She laughed, “No, we were a small sect. Your lifespan does dramatically increase with each stage you accomplish, but I wasn’t very accomplished in the third-stage body refinement. Once you complete a stage, your lifespan doubles, more or less. Wealthy families and powerful sects pack their children full of ascension resources at an early age, to get them through body refinement early, and then after puberty, they race through body tempering. If you aren’t at the first condensation stage by the time you hit your fifth birthday, you are never allowed to join most sects or are… removed if you are in one.”

  “But body refinement three is super low?”

  She nodded, “Alchemists are a different breed. Our education is far more important than racing through stages, especially since we can create pills and elixirs to extend lifespans, ease stage transitions, and boost cultivation. That’s why the age that we learn the fastest is crammed with education and training for alchemy instead of trying to cultivate as quickly as possible.”

  “So you can, and do, take your time?”

  She nodded, “That’s why the Maxwell group will probably be hunting me for the rest of my life, as will any other Farming Family that finds out I have escaped. A decent Alchemist can create formulas that can even enhance chaotic cultivators. Baelfire was a… I guess you’d call it a class two? Her gift is fire creation and immunity, but she was just a trickster before she took improved awakening pills and enhanced cultivation philters. I think right now she’s rank five, and Magazine is technically rank six, but he’s powerful enough now that my skill isn’t high enough to create a philter strong enough to have a real effect on him.”

  “Other Wings of Jade Sect members have escaped before. I am sure that there are sect resources and safehouses somewhere, I just… don’t know where they are, or how to contact them. I also don’t know if there are any in Empire City.”

  “What do you use to make your pills and potions?”

  She shrugged, “The bodies of monsters, spirit beasts, or kaiju. Spirit herbs, which can be gathered far outside the cities where monsters tend to gather, absorb the energy. Special ores that have been steeped in energy, and some basic materials for keeping everything together, like purified water, distilled alcohol from essence-enriched fruits and grains, just the normal stuff for any alchemist.

  “Do you have powers? I mean, other than potion-making.”

  She nodded, “Yes, I can detect essence fluctuations and biological integrity, like how many spirit roots you have and where your nerve meridians should flow, that’s a basic alchemist gift, called spirit sensing. I can also produce and control fire and heat on a small scale, which is called alchemist’s fire.”

  “Small scale?”

  She nodded, “Short range, I can heat a small cauldron up to pretty high temperatures, or start a campfire. When I progress to later stages, alchemist’s fire can get pretty powerful or even be used as a weapon, since nothing can put it out, but that’s a long way away. I am also pretty good with a staff and usually have an array of potions and poisons I can use in an emergency.”

  Ugh, sometimes I hate my own head. I was feeling… guilty. There it was. The dreaded G-word. It was that specific brand of guilt you feel when you find a stray puppy that turns out to be a genetically engineered super-soldier from another dimension, and you know leaving it to its own devices will inevitably end with it becoming some other super-villain’s problem or a kaiju’s chew toy.

  I was contemplating leaving this naive little dumpling to her own devices. Crap. She was broke, never lived in a city… and her powers were even worse than mine when it came to needing preparation time.

  If she needed resources that come from the deep wilds, sending her out alone would be a death sentence. I’d give her about a week before she turned into some street gang’s bitch or a corp’s lab slave, maybe both. If she left the city, I’d give her less than a day before she became something’s light snack.

  If she got really lucky, she might just get killed by a random thug or picked up by the Maxwells or another Farmer family, since they made it a practice to infiltrate the cities and try to poach any alphas that fell under the BSA’s radar.

  I was neither the first nor the last low-power alpha to get smuggled out of the city by a Family acquisition team. You were either too weak to be useful or too strong and public to be bothered. If you were strong, they were almost guaranteed to start making attractive offers, but if you were too weak and not protected by the BSA or a corporate group, you would probably wind up in a hover truck with a bag over your head like yours truly.

  Ironically, she would probably make a damned good support… The kind of support that could keep me from collapsing into a coma after a big fight. The kind that could maybe, just maybe, help me unlock the rest of this mythical physique without it feeling like my soul was being fed through a wood chipper.

  I sighed deeply. Why should I feel guilty? She was literally the most important member of a black-bag team that tried to kidnap me. I should be sending her on her way with a smile and be happy she was out of my hair and would be getting what she deserved.

  Then again, making the ‘hard choices’ was one of the reasons I never wanted to be an active, and preferred the idea of being support. Heroes were the ones who decided if a villain could be rehabilitated or if they were simply too damned dangerous and had to be eliminated, not me.

  Her beauty had nothing to do with my decision. It shouldn’t anyway. If she were an ugly man in this situation, what would I do? Dammit, I’d do the exact same thing, because a useful asset is a useful asset, regardless of packaging. I wasn’t being manipulated; I was being pragmatic. Plus, she still had a lot of information and skills I could use, and otherwise, I’d probably lose them forever. It was just good business sense.

  “I think I know where… We can go.”