The Stargazer's War - Chapter 24

Chapter 24: The New Routine

I skipped out on weight training the following morning for just a fifteen mile run, my own futile attempt at giving my sore and bruised muscles a chance to recover from the prior day’s abuses.

Listen to me. Just a fifteen mile run. Less than a year ago I could’ve maybe managed three before collapsing to the dirt rasping for air like I was dying of the fucking consumption. It amazed me how quickly I’d acclimated to this all, how readily I’d accepted that my mortal limits no longer applied.

I’d gone from spending most of my time in zero g to running two-hour half marathons in a matter of months. Even as I cooled down and plodded back through the hall to join Xavier for breakfast, I marveled at the insanity of it all.

I knew it wasn’t enough. I knew I had months of hard training ahead if I wanted to catch up to Instructor Long in time. Threads, I’d already decided to push up the opening of my muscle meridian to try and buy myself more time to make copper after I formed my core.

But at the very least I could appreciate how far I’d come, even if my thoughts of pride came to a screeching halt as I reached the breakfast table.

“No Nick this morning?” Xavier asked through a mouthful of bacon.

“I haven’t seen him,” I replied as I set down my plate, a comically large dish for the single bran muffin it bore. “He seemed… out of it last night. I don’t know. I’m going to spend the afternoon helping him with his apple project.”

“Good,” Xavier said. “That’s good.”

I glanced down at my muffin but couldn’t muster the will to pick it up. “It’s good he has something to focus on. Back when I was his age, pushing for my vac-welding cert got me through a lot of stuff.”

“Don’t give up your entire afternoons. We’ll need time to train.”

“I know, I know. And I need to spend more time with the electroshock machine if I want to open my muscle meridian before dueling day. And I need time to meditate on what qi techniques I want to develop.”

“And you need to eat your breakfast,” Xavier added.

I snatched the pastry off my plate and took a bite, chewing the admittedly-tasty muffin as spitefully as I could.

Xavier smiled. “I’ll talk to Charlotte about borrowing the machine again.”

I swallowed. “Thanks.”

Oh, right, I should explain the electroshock machine. There aren’t really herbs—or at least not easily accessible ones—that can simulate the effects of opening the muscle meridian. Instead, pretty much all cultivators use a fairly simple device that basically electrocutes your muscles into seizing in a similar way. Most sect members have scheduled time with it baked into their cycling class, but since that doesn’t come until cycling three and I wanted to advance now, I had to get one through other means.

Fortunately, one of the cycling three instructors owed Charlotte a favor. Or a few favors. Or maybe some blackmail was involved. The story seemed to change each time she brought it up. Anyway, as long as it wasn’t during class time, I could borrow a machine whenever I needed. Tonight, and for the next few days if I wanted to make this work, I needed.

The conversation lulled as I worked through the rest of my muffin and Xavier wolfed down his regular morning feast, us both caught up in our private thoughts as the cafeteria buzzed around us.

He still had half a plate of scrambled eggs in front of him by the time I finished and finally stood. I patted him on the shoulder as I left, only a little envious that he could take his time while I had to hurry off to class.

Truth be told the structure was nice, especially seeing how aimlessly the fully-fledged sect members milled about housing D. Still, I yearned for more time in the day, an advantage I wouldn’t achieve until I escaped the metal stages altogether and a jade core reduced my body’s need for sleep.

But that was for the future. Now, my main worry was getting to my new medication class. Other than her assistant’s message scheduling a meeting several days out, I hadn’t heard a peep from Elder Lopez about Long’s behavior or Park and Stevens’ accusations of cheating. However that latter got resolved—presumably through focus hour bribery—I had no intention of returning to meditation one.

I strolled into a classroom well over twice the size of my previous one. As the door shut behind me, a group some hundred strong of kids ranging from twelve to seventeen turned to gawk at my presence. Of them, I spotted one familiar face.

“Caliban!” Nick’s sister wove through the mass of students to approach me. “What are you doing here?”

“Learning, presumably.” I smiled at her, fighting with an iron will to keep my eyes from glancing down at her missing hand. The bandages were gone, leaving a red and angry stump where the regrowth treatment had begun its work. “It’s good to see you, Martha.”

“Yeah-uh, you too. Nick didn’t tell me you were joining this class.”

“Nick’s been… wrapped up in his work.” I kept my answer diplomatic. “Some seed he’s been fiddling with. I’m supposed to help him with it tonight, actually.”

“That sounds like him. How’s he been? I haven’t heard from him in…” She scowled. “It feels like months.”

“He’s seen better days—you know his situation probably better than I do—but he’s got friends. We’re looking after him.”

“Good. That’s… good.” She paused, visibly failing to find words. “Well, um, welcome to meditation two.”

“Glad to be here.” I smiled again and gave her a nod as a dark-skinned woman with bags under her eyes and a cadet’s uniform—a copper going off the insignia on her chest—approached me.

“Cadet Rex, I take it? I’m Senior Cadet Buundi. I understand there are some qualms about your placement in this class.”

“I did too well on my exam to test out of meditation one. The issue should resolve soon. I promise you, I do deserve to be here.”

“I’ll be the judge of that. This way.” She directed me away from the entrance and around the various circles of chatting teenagers to an open spot by the left wall. “Meditation two works a bit differently than you other classes. Rather than working on maintaining focus in spite of external distractions, our goal here is to get you to the point where you can keep control of your internal qi while still interacting with the world at large. You’ll only be done once you can fight at full capacity while manipulating your qi.”

“Sounds simple enough.” I’d already managed basic actions while cycling. Threads, Vihaan never would’ve survived the void horde attack if I hadn’t been able to walk and cycle at the same time. There was probably a reason they insisted on mastering shutting out distractions before starting on multitasking, but I’d yet to stumble into it.

“You may’ve noticed the age range we accommodate here. That’s because there is no meditation three. Once we’re done with you, you’re done. I understand Elder Lopez has given you until the end of the year. It’ll be hard, but if you apply yourself—and if you are as ready for this as you say—I think you can do it. We’ll be here to support you.”

My eyes followed her nod to take in the twelve other Senior Cadets that already begun to organize the class into sections. It seemed the large class size and wide spectrum of skill levels necessitated more instructors than any other class. “I appreciate that. I won’t let you down.”

“No,” Buundi said, her voice suddenly sharp. “You won’t.” She gestured down at the empty stretch of floor along the wall. “We’ll start with simply walking for today. I want you to cycle your bone, stomach, and skin meridians while you pace across the room, touch your hand to that wall, then return. Got it?”

I swallowed back the knot in my throat. “Seems easy enough,” I lied. I couldn’t cycle my skin, not without the whole class seeing me go pale as a corpse. I settled on my kidney instead, hoping to reach the same challenge level without revealing my qi’s unsettling effects. Since she couldn’t sense my qi, she’d have no way of detecting the change unless she prodded me with a stick or something. I inconspicuously looked Instructor Buundi up and down to confirm she did not, in fact, have a stick on her.

Shoving out the noise and motion of the class around me proved of little difficulty, leaving me the simple task of something I’d been doing for months. Once I’d made it across the classroom and back without dropping my focus, I faced Buundi with a smile. “How’s that?”

“Good. Now do it again.”

Thus began one of the more boring class periods of my time on Fyrion. At least in meditation one my mind had been free to wander. Here I had keep rapt attention to my cycling as I paced back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.

I made it almost an hour before slipping up, losing track of my position in the space walking headlong into the wall. I sighed.

“Fifty-four minutes,” Buundi read off her holopad. “Again.”

I realized then the difficulty lay not in walking and cycling at the same time, but in the mental endurance to keep such ironclad focus for hours on end. I barely made twenty minutes on my second attempt.

By the end of the three-hour class period, my original fifty-four minute streak remained my longest, an unsurprising result according to Buundi. I found the practice to be an entirely new kind of exhausting, one that left me drained long before the my instructor was done with me.

I posted up in the corner for lunch, content to avoid intruding on the class’s complex teenage social web up until Martha sat down to join me.

I tried and failed to mask my fascination as she expertly went about unpacking her meal with one hand, her right arm handling limply at her side as she avoided making contact with its tender end. From what I’d heard, the cell treatment to regrow a limb—especially one as complicated as a hand—took years of near constant pain. I couldn’t imagine going through that at her age, especially in such a toxic environment.

She noticed my staring as she lifted her sandwich to her mouth.

I blinked and averted my eyes.

“It’s alright,” she said, waving her stump through the air. “You get used to the looks.”

“Yeah,” I muttered, glancing out to catch several of the other students gawking at me, “I know the feeling. They get bored of it eventually.”

“Or they find something new to stare at.” Martha let out a laugh. “I guess I should thank you for that.”

I mock bowed. “Always happy to provide spectacle. Making a scene is something of a specialty of mine.”

“I know. I saw what you did last dueling day.”

I grimaced. “That was… a necessary evil. I’m hoping I don’t have to repeat it next week.”

“Oh, you mean you don’t want to get beat up again?”

“Something like that.”

Silence reigned for a few moments as we chewed our respective lunches, only for Martha to swallow and blindside me with an abrupt change of subject. “Tell me about the void incursion.”

I blinked, my eyes unintentionally darting to her missing hand and back. “What-um… what do you want to know?”

“You saved a kid’s life, right? Tell me about it.”

I exhaled. “Okay, well, I was walking with the class from cycling to combat…”

She nodded. “Yeah. So was I.”

Shit. That’s right. She would’ve been right down the hall from me when she lost her hand. “Right, so… you know what it was like. Alarms blaring, lights flashing, void beasts crashing through the windows…”

Martha didn’t interrupt me further as I retold the tale, leaving out the details of how I evaded the void beasts’ notice. Everybody already knew my qi was undetectable—officially because of some technique I’d learned—so that cover story bought me some leeway.

“…and then, you should’ve seen the look on her face when I rounded the corner with that freezer cart. This one cadet, guarding a hallway entirely on her own, faced with me trailing blood along the floor as I ran at her yelling for a medic.” I let out a gentle laugh as I relayed the moment, a brief glimpse of levity in an otherwise desperate story. “From there I made it to—” My holopad buzzed. “Damn, time for class. We have to finish this up tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” Martha said, her eyes soft and out of focus. “We do.”

“Well, it was nice chatting with you,” I said as I packed up the remnants of my lunch and pushed myself to my feet. “I’ll tell Nick you said hi, okay?”

“Yes!” Martha seemed to collect herself. “Tell him I miss him.”

I smiled at her. “That I can do. See ya tomorrow.”

“Bye, Cal!”

I waved goodbye as I left the classroom to embark upon the incredibly brief walk to cycling two across the hall. My heart sank as I stepped inside to find a table set out with well-measured portions of an uncomfortably familiar herb.

“You must be Caliban,” the lone instructor greeted me, a man who’s hair had somehow gone gray despite the youth in his face. He seemed late twenties to my inexperienced eye, putting him right at the end of his time in the cadet program.

That’s all I remember about him. Sorry. You’re going to have to make do without his name.

“That’d be me.”

“Glad to have you join us,” Instructor what’s-his-face said. “We’re just beginning the section on opening the spine meridian.”

“Great,” I lied, nervously eyeing the table of herbs. “Is that what the leaves are for?”

“It is. I’ve got an extra dose for you all lined up.”

I bit back my sigh. I’d known this was going to happen eventually. As I climbed the levels of cycling class, the instruction fundamentally had to shift from the basics of cycling to specialized prep for opening specific meridians. It was just my luck that I’d joined in time for the pain training.

I chewed the leaf as was expected of me and settled in to sit crosslegged on the padded floor as my classmates did. For perhaps the first time since I’d come to Fyrion, the others suffered more than I did.

Before the pain could even take hold I started running qi through my spine meridian, neutralizing the herb’s effect entirely. While my teenage classmates grit their teeth and struggled to keep their focus against the simulated nerve damage, I spent a quiet class period fortifying and widening my various meridians ever so slightly, taking in qi from the infinite sea as needed.

The instructor flashed me a curious look as the class came to its end, but I didn’t bother addressing it. Whether he thought me suspiciously talented or a somehow a cheater didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. I’d sit in class and follow along and “open my meridians” on a schedule the sect would believe until I finally graduated. Unlike combat class, the requirements to pass out of cycling were clear.

Either you’d opened the necessary meridians, or you hadn’t.

Rather than continuing on to my third class of the day, I headed straight for the transport platform to return to housing D. I stopped by the empty cafeteria to bus my lunchbox before moving on to the gym. I found Xavier waiting for me, a new bruise across his left cheek.

“Did you win?”

“Not this time,” he replied, not questioning how I’d known he’d fought a duel. He did that every day. “But my prowess grows greater with every loss, my thirst for victory more indomitable with every defeat.”

“That’s good.” I brushed right past Xavier’s overdramatic phrasing. “Any word on Charlotte?”

“She’s getting you that machine. She said something about a tracking down a replenishment pill?” He shook his head. “I’m not sure what one has to do with the other, but I know Charlotte’s core doesn’t need replenishment.”

“Huh. So we’ve jumped from extortion to bribery then. I… guess that’s preferable?” I gestured over to the nearest empty sparring ring. “Shall we?”

Xavier took on a somewhat more instructive role than he had in the past, coaching me on imperfections in my technique and other such adjustments in much the same way an authorized combat instructor might’ve. Even if he himself still had a long way to go, I knew of nobody who dedicated so much of their daily life to mastering the Dragon’s Fang, and Xavier had more than enough of a head start to be leaps and bounds better at it than I.

That didn’t stop him from absolutely wiping the floor with me each bout, but those periods between fights where he actually instructed me added a new sense of progress to our regular practice.

I left after only two hours, tire and sore as ever yet far from finished for the day. A wonderful hot shower and a clean uniform later I found myself standing in Nick’s doorway looking in to what might’ve been the most crowded room on Fyrion.

Every surface other than a foot wide path across the dorm and the bed itself bore a stonework pot from which sprouted something green. He’d hung blankets over the two windows to regulate the illumination level, leaving a mismatched collection of programable grow lights the only way to see.

Upon his desk sat a scope of some sort, a machine I didn’t recognize, and a stack of dirty dishes so precarious that I hesitated to so much as look them.

The room was dark and clustered and messy and stank of soil and fertilizer and sweat and old food, but I waded through it to join Nick behind his desk, leaning with my hands against the back of his chair to look over his shoulder as he explained the project in front of him.

“This is the seed in question.” He gestured to a white tray with its own attached light and magnifying lens. I squinted through it.

“Looks like any other apple seed.”

“That’s because it is. A salazar’s snap to be specific. It’s a popular varietal among botanists because it takes splices well and has a qi matrix that both stable and scalable. It doesn’t do anything special, but it’s one of very few plants that can thrive in low qi environments and contain high quantities of qi if given the opportunity. Supposedly, there’s a two-thousand year old salazar’s snap tree in the imperial gardens at Taz-9, planted by the first Augur of Pulma during the…”

I let him talk. It was more words than I’d gotten out of Nick in the past week, and he seemed genuinely enthused to share. Truth be told I couldn’t care less about the long and storied history of his preferred breed of apple—threads, I didn’t even recognize half the names he rattled off. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t learning anything or that we weren’t getting any work done.

Whatever I’d said, I hadn’t really come here to work.

Some twenty minutes of in depth explanation on the finer details of intercellular qi transference later, Nick picked up a second seed with a pair of tweezers and set it beside the first. “And here’s the problem.”

I blinked at it. “It’s identical to the first one.”

“You would think that,” Nick said, raising his hand to reach for a switch on the side of the mounted magnifying lens. “Until you look inside.” He flicked the switch, and the first seed came alight, a warm, steady glow emanating from its center. The second seed remained unchanged.

“This one,” Nick gestured with his tweezers for the glowing seed, “is alive. It’s dormant, but it still has germ qi it inherited from its tree.” He pointed to the other. “This one is dead. It’s gone through the exact same treatment as the living seed, except I’ve drained it of its qi in roughly the same way we’d have to to replace it with yours.”

I nodded along, understanding so far. “And you can’t re-add qi to a dead seed?”

“Exactly. If you try…” He dropped his tweezers and shuffled around through a pile of disorganized tools to grab what looked like little more than metal stylus. He touched its tip to the second seed, and a bright flow of qi materialized beneath the enchanted lens.

The seed exploded.

Well, maybe exploded is too intense a word for something so small. It made a nice popping sound that brought a smile to my face.

My grin didn’t last as I realized exactly what I’d just watched. “That looks… a lot like what happens when you try and absorb someone else’s qi.”

“Wait, you mean like—” Nick shuddered. “No, no, no. It’s nothing like that.” He waved the stylus in my face. “The injector cleanses the qi that runs through it. That’s not the issue.” He blinked. “Okay, well, that’s not the only issue. I just realized if we want to use your qi, we need an injector that can depersonalize it. Have we looked into how your qi interacts with enchantments?”

I snorted. “We aren’t even entirely sure how it interacts with me. Enchantments are somewhere on the list between external techniques and how it interacts with normal qi.”

Nick sighed. “It’ll have to wait until you have a core, either way. So much to do, so much to learn.”

“Alright. How can I help?”

“Outside of forming your core? You can teach me to sense your qi.”

I raised an eyebrow at him. “Anything feasible?”

“Yeah, you can read up on the theory. Arlo’s Principles of Qi Inheritance would be a good place to start.”

“Great,” I said, typing the name of the text into my holopad. “I’ll come back tomorrow to get started on that. In the meantime…” I grabbed his arm. “It’s time for dinner. Charlotte and Xavier are waiting.”

“Alright. I need to clean up here a bit. Why don’t you go down and tell them I’m on my way.”

I looked at him askance. “You sure?”

“Yeah. I’ll be right down.”

“I’m gonna hold you to that,” I said, reaching past him to grab an armful of plates from the stack dishes he’d amassed.

“I won’t be long.” He turned back to his desk as I waded through his jungle of potted plants for the door, only to stop as Nick spoke once more. “And Cal? Thanks.”

I looked back, flashed him a smile and a nod, and stepped out into the hallway. As I made my way downstairs and into the cafeteria to first bus the plates then join the others for dinner, I got the distinct impression Nick had been thanking me for more than my meager contribution to his project, for more than agreeing to read up on the topic, and certainly for more than carrying out a few dirty dishes.

——

It took two hours between our group dinner and an especially long evening call with Lucy to fill her in on all the details of my new classes before I could settle in with the absolute mess of cables and electrodes that was the electroshock machine. Just putting the damn thing on proved a task unto itself as I provided it access to every relevant muscle in my body.

It bears clarifying that, just like all the other meridians, the name “muscle meridian” isn’t entirely accurate. That’s what happens when you let a bunch of spiritual scholars that’ve been dead since before mankind discovered basic anatomy name shit.

Several muscles actually fell under the purview of other meridians, most obviously the heart, which had its own, but also the diaphragm, various intestinal muscles, and a whole slew of others. It might’ve been more true to call it the skeletal muscle meridian, but that would’ve gotten in the way of the whole one-word-name thing we had going on.

Anyway, all that to say I wasn’t about to run a bunch of volts through my heart. I’d already opened that one.

Having been at this since I’d opened my spine meridian weeks ago, I required no assistance nor supervision as I sat on the floor and got to work.

While I’d cycled my lungs to keep my breathing even through other meridian openings, the muscle meridian mandated an ironclad focus on the tendons and bones. The latter because, as it turns out, mortal muscles are perfectly capable of snapping unreinforced bones. It’s the brain that stops them. I’d have to keep qi running through my bone meridian to keep that from happening once the cleansing process sent all my muscles haywire.

The tendon meridian was even more important. It’d both prevent the seizures from rupturing all my connective tissue, and, if I didn’t fuck it up, would help restrain my seizing muscles.

The training was about as unpleasant as you’d expect repeated electrocution to be, with the upside that it simulated the spasms and pain of opening the meridian at the same time. Outside of that, it mostly entailed cycling my bones and tendons while simultaneously running through the same set of qi manipulation exercises I’d used to practice for my spine.

It made for a long and grueling process of constant failure and tiny, incremental improvements, the exact kind of deeply repetitive task I promised I wouldn’t bore you with.

So I won’t.

I finished my practice for that night, spent a half hour meditating to decompress, went to sleep, and did it all again the next day. Workout, breakfast, class, lunch with Martha, class again, combat training with Xavier and Charlotte, an hour with Nick, dinner, a call with Lucy, and back to the electroshock machine.

I didn’t play games. I didn’t watch holos. I didn’t read books. I found no time for leisure in the depths of my fervor.

I improved.

I made it to ninety minutes walking back and forth across the meditation classroom. I took great strides towards incorporating Cedric’s moves into my fighting style. I learned more about the cellular biology of apple seeds than I’d ever wanted to.

But most importantly, on the fifth night of my new routine, one day before my scheduled meeting with Elder Lopez, I made it through the barrage of electricity with my focus intact. I completed the exercises; I cycled my meridians; I didn’t budge.

I was ready.

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