Six hundred units of energy. I rolled the number around in my head like a fine wine that had probably been used to clean a carburetor. Six times my original, pathetic capacity. To be fair, even with only a fraction of the raw output a true, ether-sucking Class Three could muster, I’d gotten so efficient at using and recovering it that I almost felt like a fraud for not calling myself one. Almost. My self-esteem isn’t that easily bought. It requires a down payment of cold, hard cash and several signed non-disclosure agreements.
But the math was comforting. In a pinch, I could now be a competent emergency fill-in for a few glorious minutes before my metabolism staged a hostile takeover and demanded a tribute of twelve cheeseburgers. I’d put in the sweat-equity, logged the personal training time, and had a reasonably good idea of my new, terrifying potential. If I ever went back to the rent-a-villain gig, my rates would absolutely be going up. Ghost Step was no longer a single-use emergency ejector seat; it was a legitimate combat trick I could pull more than once. Which, in the business of not dying, is generally considered a positive.
The main event, the grand project of my existence, was still the metaphysical plumbing nightmare that were my energy channels. Or meridians. Or soul-sewers. The nomenclature was a mess, a clear sign that the entire field of cultivation was built by people who’d never had to file a building permit. Every text, every scroll, every poorly translated web novel had a different, mutually exclusive method for clearing the gunk out: acupuncture, deep-tissue massage, visualizing a cosmic black hole in your gut, or just screaming and forcing your way through. It was less a science and more a buffet of desperation.
The worst part was mapping the damn things. They were a tangled spaghetti junction of Indian chakras, Chinese acupuncture points, and what I strongly suspected were doodles some bored monk added because the page looked empty. I was this close to giving up and just accepting a life of energetic constipation, except for one glaring, inconvenient fact: it was starting to work.
The whole ‘black hole’ visualization was a non-starter—that was more Bob’s area of cosmic expertise. But momentum? Momentum I understood. I could add it, subtract it, and in the end, these metaphysical blockages were just stubborn objects refusing to budge. The only thing holding me back was a healthy, well-founded fear of “vibrating” one loose and discovering I’d accidentally given myself a spiritual aneurysm. The line between “enlightenment” and “internal hemorrhaging” was frustratingly blurry.
But I had a new idea. A stupid, painful, potentially catastrophic idea that required absolute privacy and a significant distance from any innocent bystanders who might object to being sprayed with metaphysical shrapnel. I just needed a window to try it.
This was my last weekend before classes officially started, a final gasp of freedom before being plunged back into the academic meat grinder. And as much as it pained my cynical soul to admit it, my time working at the clinic had been… beneficial. It turns out that constant, hands-on practice is useful. Who knew?
My measurements were precise. My deep-probe range—the distance I could reach inside something and fiddle with its molecular makeup—was now a solid nine inches. Not exactly world-altering, until you consider the implications: I didn’t have to penetrate a body’s natural energetic defenses to do my work. Their personal energy signature, that hard stop for most powers, was just a polite suggestion to me. My range was still my Achilles' heel—keep me at a distance and I’m a sitting duck—but on the plus side, if someone’s powers suddenly backfired, no one would ever look at the low-tier support guy and think I did it.
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I hadn’t had much time for flashy special effects, but the possibilities were tantalizing. A nine-inch ball of plasma hurled at a hundred miles an hour may not be an anti-material rifle, but it’s a hell of a way to say “get off my lawn.” And between Ghost Step and my newly improved kinetically neutral air platforms—now actually large and stable enough to stand on without the constant fear of plummeting to my death—my battlefield mobility was approaching “respectably annoying.”
Did I still have tricks that would make the BSA lock me in a box and throw away the key? Absolutely. Forcing a fission reaction was still on the table, provided I didn’t mind the accompanying feature of my own spontaneous disassembly. As far as anyone knew, my limits were assembling molecules. No one needed to know I’d figured out how to manhandle particulate light. The universe’s irony wasn’t lost on me; photons were turning out to be far more compliant than simple electron transfers.
I’d also discovered something fun. A party trick, really. You know how larger elements, the ones with all the protons and neutrons, tend to be a bit… unstable? Radioactive decay and all that? Well, I discovered I can suck up radiation like a sponge. Or, more accurately, like a filter in a water purification plant for the apocalypse.
It’s not just “radiation.” Alpha particles are just helium nuclei stripped of their electrons—I can tidy those up, lock them together, make them stable. The other types—beta particles, gamma rays—are just high-speed subatomic particles. And to me, their energy signature is defined less by what they are and more by their momentum. And momentum? Momentum is my favorite currency.
That’s why I charged best under an open sky, not buried under a mile of earth. All those cosmic rays from the sun, the photons, the ions, even the frantic jiggling of molecules in the air—I could breathe it in. My core would spin faster and faster as I stripped away the useless particles and kept their precious momentum for myself. I was a cosmic scavenger, living off the universe’ table scraps.
Of course, I wasn’t an idiot. I wasn’t walking around leaving a trail of toxic, dielectric elements in my wake. But when I finally managed to purge the real nasty blockages from my pathways… let’s just say my desire for privacy was as much about protecting bystanders as it was about keeping secrets. Xianxia stories never mention the hazardous waste disposal problem. That black goop the young master purges? In my case, it would probably require a HAZMAT team and a five-mile exclusion zone. It wouldn’t be radioactive, just… profoundly, chemically nasty.
The thought occurred to me: if I ever got my hands on some weapons-grade uranium, I could probably force my advancement at a truly terrifying rate. The more I read, the more the parallels between “spirit energy” and “radiation” became impossible to ignore. They both require purging impurities. High-spirit locations can kill normal people. Spirit energy provokes mutations. It was all starting to sound like the symptoms of a particularly aggressive radiation poisoning. I bet cultivators would consider Chernobyl a five-star spiritual resort. And it explained why Kaiju always made Geiger counters lose their damn minds.
A ginseng root that spent ten thousand years soaking in a high-radiation field would indeed be pretty “special,” in the same way a three-headed frog is “special.” It was a terrifying, yet oddly encouraging, line of research. If I could use this energy with my broken connection to the ether, then maybe the ancients were on to something, albeit with a lot more poetic license and a lot fewer lead aprons.
