“General.” the Colonel said, saluting with one hand while holding a tablet in the other.

  “At ease,” said Adams, walking into his office and sitting down in the large office chair to relax. There was dried blood on the shoulder of his shirt, and he would let out a nasty cough every few seconds, but sitting down seemed to relax him.

  The Colonel followed him into the office and closed the door, then waited for the General to acknowledge his presence. Fifteen seconds later, the General coughed violently for ten seconds straight, then gasped for air, breathing in as deeply as he could before coughing again. A bit of black and purple blood came out when he did so.

  “Should I get a doctor?” asked the Colonel.

  “No, I’ll be fine. Damned Azure Clouds tried to portal behind our lines and the women they sent got me with some sort of airborne neurotoxin. Hurts like a bitch and burned my lungs fiercely, but I managed to drive her off. Even put my hand through her chest. She had gold blood for some reason, so I sent my gloves to the lab for testing. And before you ask, I had the doctor stitch up where she stabbed me and give me some kind of local broad spectrum anti-toxin, so I just need to work it out of my system. I’ll use a healing technique to fix all of this once you give me whatever report it is you think is so important that it can’t wait. Who knows, maybe I can toughen up my body from all of this. What do the locals call it? Body tempering?”

  “Yes sir.” said the Colonel. “She probably had a rare physique that altered her blood chemistry, or might have cultivated it. Maybe even a Demon. Unfortunately we don’t have a corpse to check for a demon core. I can come back later if you want me to.”

  Adams coughed again. “No, it’s fine. You’re already here, so I might as well listen to you.”

  The Colonel nodded. “In that case, I’ve got the statistics of the battle. Seventeen casualties among the soldiers, plus thirty nine locals, mostly from the cleanup crew. All the rest should make a full recovery. We only managed to clear 80% of enemy equipment from the field before they returned. Took us twenty nine and a half hours and over eight hundred of their people to drive them away, and it only took them three hours to regroup.”

  Adams coughed lightly. “They are tenacious little bastards, I’ll give them that. God knows I wouldn’t stay around a battlefield with such lopsided casualties. Mostly because I’m not an idiot.” He coughed again. “So, any report on the Alchemical ingredients? That seems to be our major supply shortage at the moment, since Earth isn’t producing them fast enough.”

  “Ah, yes sir. Mostly level one ingredients, but about 15% level two, 3% level three, and 1% level four, mostly from the commanders, one of which had a storage ring. There should be enough to mostly restock the level one ingredients at the alchemists shops, fill about a quarter of their level two demand, and have maybe a few dozen level three pills made. We don’t have a level four alchemist yet, so that will stay in storage. The few seeds and what bulbs we found that aren’t needed will go back to Earth so that our contractors can start farming them.”

  “Right, I heard one of them has built over a hundred large greenhouses with gathering formations just for that purpose.” Adams said before coughing out a few more flecks of black blood.

  “Yes, sir. Hopefully they’ll succeed and in a year we can fill all of our supply needs and start providing the seeds to the civilian market.” While it would help the civilian population to have a wider variety of spirit plants to choose from, the move was mostly meant to silence the people that complained about how it cost us without benefiting us. Sure, they might still complain about the fact the USA was building a colony here, but they wouldn’t complain about the lack of benefits.

  “Good. I’ll look over the supply statistics and other salvage data later. For now, I’m going to activate that gathering array I had them install and meditate. Hopefully I can fix my lungs and shoulder by supper time.”

  The man saluted and left Adams alone. Seven hours later Adams had fully repaired the lung damage and almost finished with the shoulder wound when there was a knock on his door. “What is it, Walter?” he asked. It was most likely his aid, after all.

  The Colonel spoke up. “News from Earth, Sir. Fifty seven portals have opened over the last thirty six hours, and another one opens about every hour. Most of them have let through large numbers of level fours, which the local militaries have managed to handle, but thirteen have had level fives come through, and one in Buenos Aires even had a level six. The US was holding their own for most of that time, but they are starting to get worn down. They are asking that you return and help drive out the level five in Utah, sir. The Hephaestus and the Edison are handling Texas, and the Einstein and Hawking are handling New York.” The older Einstein line of battleships were equipped with early Nascent level main guns and barriers, so they should be able to hold their own, assuming they don’t go up against someone too powerful.

  “Right, with Lindstrom busy, and, I’m assuming, all of our allies defending locations closer to home, I’m the only Nascent they have to send. Tell them I’ll leave right away.” He knew that if he and the ships couldn’t take out an invader they could use one of the thirteen orbital cannons they had put into orbit so far to deal with the invader, but it would create an explosion with the force of the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima upon hitting the ground, making it worthless if they were in a city.

  Thirty minutes later Adams came out of Slipstream a hundred meters over a field in the middle of Utah, decelerating at over thirty Gs for a few seconds, something he could only stay conscious through due to his enhanced body. He had chosen that over a portal due to the fact that the situation was mostly under control and creating a portal would use a significant portion of his qi. Ahead of him was a man in what looked like an ancient middle eastern outfit, complete with a saber and turban. He was being attacked by a gang of seven men in the Core stage who were exhausting all of their energy in techniques which exploded their qi to allow them to damage him, but which meant that they could only attack for less than a minute before having to pull back and meditate to recharge.

  Adams flew over to a man in an Army uniform. “Report!” he said, and the man saluted.

  “Sir, Colonel Mark Smith, Protector of Salt Lake.” the gold skinned man said crisply. “The enemy came through the portal around three hours ago. I attempted to negotiate with him, even going so far as to offer him one billion spirit stones to stand down and return home, or two billion a month to work for us as a mercenary. He seemed to think it over for about two and a half hours, then fourteen minutes ago he launched an attack. The normal troops managed to defeat the two hundred or so troops he brought with him, but we’ve been having trouble dealing with him. Thankfully seven others in Core showed up and volunteered to help, three active duty, three civilians, and a retired marine, or we’d already be overrun.”

  The gold skin may seem unusual to most people, but it was a fairly common sight in this part of the country. It was a result of the use of a type of durability enhancing cream that was invented in Salt Lake City around the time qi was first discovered.

  A scientist was developing a new type of organic spray foam insulation, hoping to decrease the cost of such insulation while making it safe for the environment, but couldn’t get it to foam up well enough, thus limiting its insulating properties. When qi enhanced liquids started appearing on the market, however, he decided to try adding some of them to the formula instead of distilled water. The qi in the liquid somehow caused the proteins in the foam to bond together in a way that not only allowed it to support far larger bubbles, but made the material stronger than concrete. He licensed variations of the formula to a cinder block making company in the city as well as several construction companies, and opened up two more markets for Golden Cinder Blocks and Golden Foam insulation.

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  A few months after this, he started to hear reports that many people in the Salt Lake City area were seeing their skin turn golden and had much tougher skin, with one man claiming that he couldn’t cut his hands any more. He discovered that almost all of these people either worked for the cinder block company or one of the construction companies that licensed his spray foam product. He rubbed the foam onto several lab rats and found out that, while their hair and skin were dyed golden, it was difficult to cut their hair and impossible to give them injections after about five treatments. He adjusted the formula to remove the hardening agent as well as several things that wouldn’t be needed in a skin cream and, after testing it and finding that it worked even better, as the rats couldn’t be given shots after three treatments with the new formula, he had a local animal testing lab run a study on it. When they showed that there were no serious side effects outside a bit of stiffness in the beginning, he had a skin care company mass produce tubes of it and sold them in pharmacies across the state, and later in other states.

  Much of the initial popularity was driven by a rumor within the LDS church that the formula was given to him via divine revelation, as he was also a member of the church. Even though he neither confirmed nor denied the rumor, it was wide spread, resulting in several million tubes being sold in the first six months, enough to result in him starting a company to sell the product to pharmacies and online.

  Eventually other health product companies reverse engineered the product and found that the introduction of qi to the formula caused the protein within the cream to bond to cell walls, even bonding cells together to some degree, with a strength comparable to steel. This effect would slowly penetrate deeper into the body with further use so, while the cream could make your skin strong enough to stop small arms fire and knives, making it comparable to a Gathering level barrier, the other tissue in your body could benefit from the change as well. Muscle tissue and tendons would hold together better, preventing damage from muscle use, organs would take less damage from blunt force trauma, and even bones would be more resistant to breaking. These companies reformulated it to have both a cream and pill form, removing the distinctive color, and put competing products on the market. While this caused some public outcry among the more devout members, the scientist that invented it was unable to sue them, as they had transformed the product enough to make in no longer a patent infringement.

  Adams had received a supply of the pills around eighteen years ago, but after a few months of taking them they had reached maximum effect and he had stopped. The military had issued a superior form five years later, but by then his cultivation had made it difficult be damaged by large bullets as well, thus making the product unneeded, and his cultivation since then had only made it even less significant. The man before him had likely used the ‘authentic’ original formula as well as the military issued one to reinforce his insides, leaving him with the distinctive skin tone.

  “Very well.” said Adams. He noticed that, while the invader was Middle Nascent in strength, the seven attackers had managed to inflict several dozen minor wounds on him. “If you don’t mind pulling your men back, I’ll take over. Now that they’ve softened him up, I can finish him off.”

  The Captain nodded. “Yes sir.” he said, then flew over to the six that were waiting by the side to tell them to stand down for now.

  When the last man pulled back, exhausted from his qi expenditure, Adams flew over to the wounded and panting man. He had been trying to keep up a barrier this entire time, but every attack that managed to make it through broke his concentration. Despite the fact that they had launched hundreds, perhaps even a thousand attacks against him, he only had dozens of wounds, mostly bruises. This was partly because of the barrier, but also partly because even exploding qi couldn’t really deal with someone more than an entire level above you. Most of the volunteers were in the initial or Early Core stage, meaning that they couldn’t actually harm him with their attacks, just annoy and distract him.

  “So, have you thought about the offer to retreat or work for us?” Adams said in the Black Dragon Mountain Dialect. He was only about ten percent through the Nascent soul realm, but still likely had several times the qi reserves of this exhausted man.

  “Get sodomized by a driscol.” the man said. Adams didn’t know what a driscol was, but he understood the man’s sentiment.

  “Wrong answer.” he said, and swung down at the man, using slipstream to accelerate at the last second. Then man flew downwards at a roughly thirty degree angle and slammed into the ground, kicking up a massive cloud of dust and leaving a twenty meter deep crater in the middle of a corn field.

  Thirty minutes later the man climbed out of the nineteenth crater Adams had used his body to create. “You know,” said Adams, “I can keep going if you need me to, but there are still only four options for you to take any time you decide you’ve had enough.” Adams had actually burned through about half of his reserves already, but the man didn’t need to know that.

  “Four?” the man asked, coughing up a large amount of blood as well as a piece of flesh that was formerly part of his right lung.

  “Yes. One, you can surrender and sit in a prison cell, your cultivation suppressed until we figure out what to do with you. Two, you can leave, though we won’t be paying you to do so, as you turned down the option to leave peacefully. Three, you can come work for us, and I’ll even throw in a cultivation cave with a decent gathering formation and full medical treatment. Or four, I crush your skull and use this handy talisman my Buddhist friend gave me to seal your soul into your core so that you can’t take possession of a new body until we decide to let you do so.”

  The man coughed again, even more blood than before coming up, then ignored the blood he was drooling out of his mouth. He looked at his right arm that was shattered and would take months to heal and at least a level four bone or regeneration pill to fix, probably several of each, which would eat up most of his remaining funds. And that didn’t include the severely damaged internal organs or broken ribs. He sighed, realizing that coming here had been a very bit mistake, but not resigning himself to die yet. “So, you said two billion per month, plus full medical?” Full medical was starting to sound pretty good right now.

  “Two billion in energy, not actual currency, as you’ll be here where we use a different form of money. We’ll pay you well enough in that currency too, though.”

  The man nodded. “Does it matter that my mercenaries are all dead? I won’t be able to provide additional troops any more.”

  Adams shrugged. “While it would be nice to have them, they aren’t necessary. If any survived, we’ll make them a similar offer, though with an amount of qi comparable to their level, as they are lower level than you.”

  The invader nodded. “In that case, consider this my audition for the position of Elite Mercenary under...what was your group called again?” That much qi would allow him to mostly deplete his reserves of qi daily in cultivation, thus advancing far faster than he could in the other realm. For someone at his level, especially among independent cultivators like him, it was hard to gather so much, and they were guaranteeing that as a minimum pay.

  “This country is the United States of America, and I work for a branch of the military called the Airforce, which deals with flying enemies, which I suppose level five cultivators count as. My name is General Adams. You’ll be working directly for me, so that I can deal with you in case you get out of hand. You likely have a lot of studying to do if you are going to live here.” Adams figured he could teach the man the basic rules of US society, English, and get him a green card once he was sure he could trust the man. For now, he would have the doctors fix the man up and implant a few of those new tracking devices. While Adams would prefer a nascent level bomb or even something that released a deadly toxin, much like how the government handled superhuman strike teams in his favorite comic book series, he would settle for tracking the man for now. After all, all they currently had was a device that would detonate his core, and all that would do is level a city block while leaving his soul around to find a new host.

  Adams opened a portal to Nellis Air Force Base, where much of the military’s experimental hardware was, and the two of them stepped through. After having the man implanted with the latest tracking device, with a 37 AU detection range insuring that he couldn’t hide from them anywhere in the solar system, and having several Nascent level devices heal most of his injuries, leaving only scars the devices couldn’t deal with, he took the man to a different Air Force base. There he asked the General in charge to give the man a cultivation cave with a decent gathering array and at least two billion stones of qi per month in energy allowance, then started to leave.