Arthur awoke to two things. The first being INCREDIBLE pain. Seriously, it was like every cell was getting stepped on by an elephant wearing napalm golf cleats. It wasn’t the worst pain he’d ever felt, but goddamn was it close.
The second thing was that he was surrounded by medical professionals losing their minds.
“We need more plasma in here!!! And for the love of god, get me another health potion,” one of the doctor looking types shouted.
A nurse rebutted. “He’s already had two, it’s a miracle the toxicity hasn’t killed him already.”
“GODDAMNIT,” Doctor dude screamed. “If he doesn’t get another potion then he’s not making it till we get a healer in here.”
Well that sounded bad.
With a supreme effort of will, Arthur shut out all of his senses and sank into himself to check the damage. And swore so hard it shook his soul. His body was absolutely wrecked. Apparently whatever poison that pointy eared prick hit him with hadn’t been finished off when Arthur used the Qi in that medicine to fight it off, and had burned through him like a forest fire. Every Meridian and Qi channel was caked with toxic muck that was slowly killing him. If he ever got his hands on that grass skirt wearing sunovabitch again, his people would tell the tale of what Arthur did to him to scare their children into behaving.
Tearing his thoughts off of vengeance and on to the more practical matter of, you know, not dying, Arthur did the only thing he could do in this situation. He started cultivating. Qi flowed into his core in fits and starts, and it hurt like he was bathing in lava. But pain is secondary to survival, and Arthur was damned if he was going to let someone who didn’t know what pants were be the death of him.
Using Qi like a sand blaster, he started slowly cleaning the corruption from where it was worst. The Qi channel leading to his heart Meridian. This quickly proved to be a Sisyphean task, as Arthur figured out that the corruption was killing him faster than he could clear it. He briefly considered burning more of his life force like when he cleared his meridians the first time but immediately chucked the idea. His life was already hanging on by a thread, trying to use his life force now would just kill him faster. No, the only thing he could do was keep on keeping on and hope that the people trying to fix him on the outside had some way to help.
Arthur had no way to tell how much time was passing in the world outside his inner self. Sometimes what felt like minutes could be a week, or what felt like days was barely a blink, but it sure felt like it had been a minute when help finally arrived.
Qi he didn’t quite understand flowed into his core from an outside source, warm and pure as the dawn’s light peeking over the horizon. Arthur would’ve called it heavenly if his experience with the power of the heavens wasn’t limited purely to its’ tribulations. Whatever the hell it was didn’t matter. What mattered was that he could use it.
The energy was tentative and cautious. As if it wasn’t quite sure what it was doing. That wasn’t going to work for him. He needed help and he needed it right damn now, so Arthur didn’t bother trying to coax it where he needed it to go. No, he grabbed this power with every ounce of his will and he dragged it kicking and screaming to where he needed it.
The weird Qi did the trick, the corruption caking his Qi channels and Meridians burnt off like he shot it with a flamethrower and then somehow healed the underlying damage. In short order he reached his heart meridian and scoured it clean. By that time, Arthur could feel that the weird Qi he’d manhandled start to falter and he felt a flash of regret. Whoever was trying to help him had to be feeling a hell of a lot of backlash from how he just yanked their power from them. Under any other circumstances, Arthur would’ve at least hesitated. The one saving grace was that he was pretty sure he hadn’t done any permanent damage.
Unfortunately, Arthur knew that he’d gotten as much use out of the weird Qi as he was going to get, so he gently let it go, watching it pull itself out of his body as fast as it could. Turning back to the absolute state his body was in, Arthur could only sigh. Cleaning out his heart meridian had saved his life in the short term, but he was still dying, just now by inches instead of miles. Nothing he could do right now would fix this fast, if at all. Even assuming he could fully devote himself to cultivation for the foreseeable future, Arthur only had a slim chance of survival. All he could really do was hope that the people who picked him up would be magnanimous enough to help him fix the rest of the damage. Or at least stay the hell out of his way as he tried to do it himself. At least their current efforts trying to keep Arthur kicking gave him good odds on that front. With nothing left to really do and feeling like death warmed over, he left his inner world and let unconsciousness claim him. Hoping that this time wouldn’t come with any more trips down memory lane.
Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.
Thankfully, the heavens decided to grant him some mercy, because the next thing he knew, Arthur was opening his eyes in another heavens damned hospital room feeling like he’d just been ran through a rice thresher. At least this one had power, judging by the fluorescent light buzzing away on the ceiling and the steady beeping of the heartbeat monitor Arthur saw he was hooked to.
Looking around, Arthur saw that his hospital room didn’t have any windows, and the only door in or out was made of steel with a plexiglass viewport too narrow to stick an arm through. “Is this a hospital room or a prison cell?” That was when he noticed a hospital call button was laid next to one of his hands with a sticky note reading, “push me”, on it. “Okay, this is just getting weird.” With screw all better to do, Arthur pushed the button in the hopes it would summon somebody he could grill for answers. The only indication it was even working was a little red light blinking on when he pushed it.
Naturally, this made Arthur push it repeatedly to the tune of, “Mambo No. 5” in an effort to amuse himself until whoever was manning the desk sent somebody to make him stop. And apparently it worked, because about five minutes later, someone whose eyes told Arthur they were very irate appeared and he heard an intercom crackle to life.
“We get it, you’re awake,” a tired voice buzzed through the speaker. Well this is a fantastic start.
“Greetings earthling, have you come to take me to your leader,” Arthur said in a raspy voice. The guy on the other side of the glass raised an eyebrow.
“I advise you dispense with the jokes. The Commander is on his way down, and he’s not known for his sense of humor.” Arthur just stared at him.
“Is that supposed to explain anything,” he asked with as much indignity in his voice as he could muster. “Because if it is, you need to go back to goon school for remedial exposition lessons.” Apparently, said goon did not appreciate Arthur’s perfectly sound career advice, because all he did was narrow his eyes and walk off. “Nice to see people still don’t listen to good advice,” Arthur said to the empty room.
With screw all better to do than wait for whoever the hell “The Commander” was, Arthur decided that the best course of action was sit back and cultivate. Both to pass the time, and to get started on repairing all the damage to his jacked up body. The sooner he cleaned all that crap out, the better.
Except he couldn’t cultivate. It started out fine, with Arthur absorbing Qi and storing it in his Dantian, but then he hit a wall. No matter how hard he pulled, he couldn’t pull in anymore Qi. At first, Arthur thought there was something wrong with his body that was stopping him, but a thorough check over told him that wasn’t his problem. No, the problem was that he’d absorbed all of the Qi around him. Which didn’t make any sense.
Qi was EVERYWHERE. Sure, it would be present in various concentrations, purities, and elements. But it was never not there. Not unless it was purposefully being blocked out.
That realization caused Arthur to snap out of his cultivation and examine the room with a lot more thoroughness. Sending tendril made up the meager amount of Qi he was able to absorb from the room towards the nearest wall, he wasn’t all that surprised to find a barrier he couldn’t push through. Repeating that little experiment on the other walls, ceiling, and floor, he found the same force blocking him on all sides. Arthur wasn’t just in a hospital room with a sturdy door, he was in a prison cell designed to hold cultivators. On Earth. “What the fuck is going on?”
