One of the few unalloyed advantages the academy had was its series of large, underground training rooms. They were incredibly durable, designed for personal training, sparring, and experimenting with potentially city-block-leveling abilities without worrying too much about collateral damage or vaporizing innocent bystanders. They were generally monitored for safety, but the monitoring could be turned off manually from inside the room as easily as the lights—a feature I'm sure had absolutely never been abused for illicit power experimentation. Ever.

  I was down there, experimenting with my new abilities post-my-near-death-whatever-the-hell-that-was. The new energy flow patterns were… interesting. I wouldn’t say I was amazed—amazement is for suckers and people who haven’t had their inheritance stolen by a glass-themed ex—but I was certainly pleased in a grim, ‘this-might-keep-me-alive’ sort of way.

  Direct momentum manipulation had increased to almost seven inches. After careful study—which mostly involved me staring at a spinning quarter until I got a headache—I’d decided that ‘Momentum’ was the best description of my power’s shape, my so-called Dao. The Dao of Momentum. It sounded cool as hell, like a rejected Jet Li movie title, and it fit all the clues. My blueprinting was sort of like a metaphysical photographic memory, where I could take a snapshot of all the current locations and movements of an object’s particles, including my own, for later reconstruction. I could now trace or replicate a blueprint out to nearly ten feet. I still couldn’t replicate a car, for example, but it was a hell of a lot better than only being able to handle a couple of feet at a time. Now I could lose a motorcycle instead of just a bicycle. Progress!

  My energy expenditures were also a hell of a lot better. My patented ‘disassembly teleportation’ was considerably faster, although some of the old transport limitations based on density still applied. But while disassembled, I could now move at nearly fifty miles an hour instead of the fast sprint I was limited to before. Right now, I could disassemble and then reassemble at least six times before I was nearly completely drained from a full tank, which was sweet. Still not a great combat maneuver, since while I could break my body down quickly, it still took at least a minute of solid, uninterrupted concentration to restore my full blueprint—a minute in which any passing villain could kick my scattered atoms into a dustpan.

  By the same token, if I had to do a full restore on someone else, it would probably be a lot cheaper, too. More importantly, if someone I had already blueprinted needed a full restore, I could do it all at once as long as they were close to normal-sized, rather than slowly resetting a section at a time. Of course, if I had to use it, they’d probably lose just about everything, including memories, since I’d be rebuilding them from a snapshot, not a live backup. It was the ultimate factory reset, with a 100% chance of erasing your browser history. Permanently.

  I was starting to get a feel for the spirit-particle shapes of other people, the way their energy moved inside them. Obviously, I couldn’t manipulate them directly—something about their soul seemed to have a pretty good firewall—but it was fascinating conjecture. My Wu breathing was working much better as well, much faster. It would still take me most of a day to completely refill in a spirit-rich area, but now that I could tell the different spirit shapes apart, I was able to sort of block out the ‘noise’ and only suck in the good stuff. It was like finally learning how to use the coffee filter instead of just eating the grounds.

  Other Alpha’s energy flows were weird. Some of them seemed to instinctively rotate their energy, just like I had learned to do consciously, and it reached out through their bodies. Brick-types especially seemed to just naturally run their energy through their body as it slowly moved, a constant, passive reinforcement. I had to wonder if that was why they had such extreme durability. I, on the other hand, still had a lot of internal blockages preventing me from running energy through my body the same way. My spiritual plumbing was a mess of calcified cynicism and metabolic debt.

  Most alphas had a sort of wellspring in their core, a direct line to the Q-Rift that I conspicuously lacked. Pure, unformed spirit energy just seemed to flow into their core constantly. The faster their spirit rotated, the more rapidly the energy mutated into whatever shape they needed. It was like a metaphysical assembly line I’d been locked out of. I was stuck dumpster-diving for energy behind the cosmic strip mall.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  And then I discovered my new favorite material.

  Carbon.

  Oh, carbon. I wanted to write a sonnet to carbon, a love letter to its atomic number. It was incredible stuff. Forget diamonds; diamonds were seriously overrated, the tacky baubles of mobsters and failed engagements. But carbon… carbon was the quiet, unassuming nerd who secretly ran the universe. It was what made iron into steel. And as per Graviton’s suggestions, I tried making fullerenes and nanotubes.

  To cohen a phrase, Oi, Vey!

  Building the first nanotubes was a bit of a nightmare, a fractal headache of mental strain. But honestly, once I had figured out how to construct both single and double-walled tubes, it got a lot easier. The trick was the valence electrons, which almost lent themselves to carbon co-links better than any other material I had ever tried to work with. It wanted to form these structures. It was practically begging for it.

  Fullerenes were awesome, but compared to the strength, utility, and sheer versatility, multi-walled graphene nanotubes were just sheer awesomesauce. Stronger than diamond, potentially flexible in ‘giant’ sheets—which I was quickly blueprinting—when twisted one way, it was incredibly conductive, but when twisted the other, it was a near-complete insulator. Its thermal characteristics were also extremely mutable. This stuff was the Swiss Army knife of materials science.

  The biggest problem with nanotubes has always been creating them long enough, but I didn’t have that problem. Normally, they were measured in nanometers, but I could measure them in millimeters before their complexity got out of hand. Just for shits and giggles, I even managed to create a simple transistor contained within the structure of a C-70 fullerene, the classic soccer-ball type. I was literally computing on a molecular level. Take that, Moore’s Law.

  A few hours—or was it days?—later, I was gleefully blueprinting the stuff I had made, cackling to myself in a way that would have concerned any passing psychologists, when the door alarm chirped, slicing through my carbon-fueled mania.

  “Is he cackling?” a familiar, suspiciously melodic voice asked from the other side of the door. Abigail.

  “I think so,” another, more exasperated voice replied. Mindy. “Can you grab some of those hard-boiled eggs and a bottle of water? He missed all of his classes yesterday and I don’t think he’s slept since Monday night.”

  Wait what? The thought cut through the euphoria like a knife. What day is it?

  The door slid open. Mindy looked at me closely, concern written on her features like a tragic play. “It’s Thursday morning. What were you doing?”

  I giggled again, a high-pitched, slightly unhinged sound I barely recognized as my own, and then the tidal wave of exhaustion hit me. I’d missed two days of sleep! If I wanted to be ready to keep an eye on the teamwork exercise tonight, I’d HAVE to grab some sleep and miss today’s classes. The joy of auditing remedial courses was that missing a couple of days was meaningless. They probably wouldn’t even notice I was gone.

  “These!” I said, holding up the bags of my creations triumphantly. I was no genius—my gifts had done all the heavy lifting—but I was still stupidly proud, riding a wave of sleep-deprived accomplishment.

  “I found him the training rooms. I don’t think he ate or drank or used the bathroom for almost two days. You stink, buster,” Mindy remarked, glaring at me, her nose wrinkled. “As your sponsor, I am officially complaining.”

  “Does that mean no sex and I sleep on the couch?” I asked drunkenly, the filter between my brain and my mouth having completely short-circuited from fatigue. I didn’t even realize what I’d said until I saw her face turn a very interesting shade of red. “Oooh, pink!” I added, thoughtfully pointing out her blush as if I’d just discovered a new element.

  “You can sleep in your bed, AFTER you have a shower!” she snapped, her voice tight with a mixture of anger and profound embarrassment.

  “What has you so excited?” Abbey asked, her voice a calm, curious hum in the midst of the chaos. Her eyes were taking in everything, filing it all away. Always assessing.

  I put the bags on the table, quickly swallowing two eggs whole and draining the entire water bottle in one go. “Those!” I remarked triumphantly, a piece of eggshell stuck to my chin. “Mindy is a supergenius, and so are you. I want to have your babies!” And then I laughed as both of them started turning varying shades of pink and crimson, a beautiful spectrum of flustered fury, before turning around and stomping toward the shower.

  I barely managed to stay standing long enough to soak myself, my clothes, and the entire floor, before stripping and just sitting on the shower floor, letting the hot water beat down on me as it swirled toward the drain. After a few minutes, I managed to stumble back to my feet, turn off the shower, and drip my way back to my room, completely ignoring the fact that a bunch of other students in the hall were staring at the naked, dripping-wet guy mumbling about carbon allotropes.

  Oh right. I forgot clothes.

  By the time I realized that, I had already flopped wetly into my bed, barely pulling the covers over me before I was zonked out. I don’t think I even remembered to close the door. My last conscious thought was a vague hope that my new carbon nanofiber samples were safe.