After returning to Earth Adams went to his office and made a phone call. He had asked for three other fighters to join them in that fight, but had been ignored. He needed to know why. The first person he called was Tsiolkovsky. After talking to his secretary, who said that he couldn’t come to the phone due to being too injured, Adams knew that something was wrong. He tried calling the other two, only to get a message that they were currently in battle.
He went outside his office to one of his assistants. “Lieutenant. I need to know what the situation is.” He said.
“Sir!” The lieutenant said, then explained. Just after the couple came through the gate they got an alert from the UK. A portal had opened up in Glasgow. They were sending people to help contain the situation, but several Core and one Nascent cultivator came through the portal and immediately attacked the General at his home. Within a few minutes they got two more alerts. Two other portals had appeared. One was underground in Moscow, and one was inside one of the great pyramids. Tsiolkovsky had managed to deal with the Nascent cultivator that had come to Moscow and his troops had managed to clear out the invaders, but the other two were still in battle.
“I need to know if our allies are under attack.” Adams scolded, then contacted The Monk. “I assume you also know what’s happening?” he asked.
“The home cities of our three allies came under attack simultaneously.” replied the Monk. “That can only mean that someone is targeting us. They want to get rid of Earth’s protectors, likely to soften us up for further invasion.”
Adams nodded. “That was my conclusion too. Otherwise they wouldn’t have went directly for McMillin’s house in Glasgow. They would have went for a larger UK city, like when they went for Paris or Beijing or this city, all of them major cities. While Cairo and Moscow fit the bill, Glasgow doesn’t.” He sighed. “So, I’m going to grab some supplies and head to Glasgow. I’d appreciate it if you would join me.”
“I will send my Apprentice.” said the Monk. “The battle in Cairo isn’t going well, so I will go there to help him.”
Adams nodded. “Good idea. If we split up we can at least keep the other invader occupied until the other location is safe.” With that he hung up and went to his office. He grabbed three backup barrier belts and put them on, linking them together so that they would share any incoming attacks. While this actually made them far less efficient and therefore prone to burning out more quickly, he would need the extra protection against whoever he would be fighting. He filled his new ring with Core bullets so that he could drain them if he needed a recharge, and was about to leave when he remembered something. He walked over to his safe and put in the code, then opened it and pulled out a bottle which contained two pills.
Adams had tried to research these pills before, but all that he could find was that they were level six first rate healing pills. As they came from Blood he suspected that they were created or acquired through violence, but they might be needed in the battle.
With that, he closed the safe and opened a portal to Glasgow
---
The next day we saw what had happened here on the news. There was massive amounts of destruction, likely in the billions of dollars, and it would take years to rebuild. Glasgow hadn’t taken much damage due to the attackers directly heading for McMillin’s house, but Moscow and Cairo had massive amounts of damage as well.
Locally, Dave and my apartment was destroyed, as was Liza’s. Dave decided to move in with Maria, who welcomed the change. Liza decided to stay here, and we decided to share a room long term instead of just half the time.
The Device store I worked at had also been destroyed. Tony’s techniques was still relatively intact, with only the front wall of the lowest level of the building missing, but Tony wasn’t sure if he was going to rebuild there or try and find a better location further from the gate. For now Liza was out of a job as well.
“You know, with both of us out of work, we won’t be able to afford anything, including rent.” Liza said. “One of us will need to get a job.” We both had a small amount of savings, but it wouldn’t last us long.
I talked to Randy about the rent, and he said he wasn’t going to charge me, thus relieving some of my worry. He had made seventy thousand dollars just from the trip to the other world, and would be getting royalties once the books, devices and derived technologies hit the market, so he didn’t need the money. We still needed a source of income though, as I couldn’t just live off of him.
I had an idea for earning money, though. I was in my last semester before graduating with a masters in Technique Design, so maybe I could use that knowledge. I downloaded all of the free texts from the other world, including the French and Chinese ones, and started studying them. For the next week I wrote down every principle that could be derived from them, and tested each one I could by making small, pointless techniques, asking Liza or Randy to test the Water techniques and asking Dave and Maria to test the Earth and Wood ones. Once I had broken down and understood every technique, with hundreds of technique fragments in my possession, I started optimization. Every technique relied on a spiritual root, and two days ago scientists had figured out what that meant in scientific terms. It was a tendency of qi to affect and adhere to certain types of materials based on the elements within them.
Once they knew exactly what the natives were referring to and the properties of these roots, they started testing the few things that it could be. It only took a few days for one of the labs to find the answer. The qi signature of a person looked similar to the emission spectrum of a star, but adjusted to the human body temperature. For the most part this signal closely matched the distribution of minerals in the human body. But there were always anomalies, areas where it was different than a perfect representation.
One of those differences was the over-expression of certain element’s emission spectrum. It didn’t take long before they realized that the five most popular elements for this distortion, Hydrogen, Carbon, Oxygen, Iron and Silicon, all corresponded to one of the five elements of the other world, Hydrogen to Fire, Carbon to Wood, Oxygen to Water, Iron to Metal, and Silicon to Earth. This would mean that, for example, someone with a fire root like me would have an over-represented hydrogen emission spectrum. They verified this by testing people with known spirit roots, and their theory always proved true. While there were other elements represented in some people’s qi signature, those weren’t known on the other world. Maybe those roots were part of unorthodox paths, or even demonic, where there were people with Magnesium roots using explosion techniques, or people with Calcium roots learning osteomancy, but we didn’t have any evidence of that yet.
Using this knowledge, I started optimizing every spirit root based technique fragment to rely more on this difference to produce the effect, and less on philosophical views. Once I had the fragments, I was able to reassemble the techniques to use scientific principles, improving their performance by a factor of three on average. I suspected I could do better if I had better techniques from the other world, but for now I would have to stick with optimizing third rate techniques. Still, the techniques were more efficient than the other world version and were boosted by spiritual roots based on the quality of the roots, so they should be useful.
The other world classified the quality of pretty much everything to do with cultivation using the six ranks of spiritual roots. Petty and Lower quality materials were considered third rate. Average and High quality materials were second rate. Master and Heavenly quality were first rate. Most people improved their techniques to match their cultivation level, with only first and second level cultivators being willing to use third rate techniques, so book stores or sect libraries with a variety of techniques for sell were a necessity to fuel this upgrade.
Most of the techniques that were available for free, including the ones Randy had given me, were Petty quality techniques, the one Lower quality technique he had being a Water sword technique, which is why Randy was able to purchase them for one stone each. Next time he would have to get better materials if I was to continue making improvements.
I was, however, able to get a few Lower grade techniques from other sources and disassemble them as well. Once they had been optimized the efficiency upgrade was even more pronounced, using a fifth of the energy on average.
After another week Liza had registered a new account at the technique website she used to buy from, and listed all of the twenty or so techniques that I had made so far, but with a “pay what you want” option. Sure, most people had wanted to pay nothing, but we got enough people willing to donate that I was making a few hundred per week, enough to live on.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Liza had started to do something similar with Dave’s assistance, as he was in college to learn about formations. She had studied a few free textbooks on the subject so that she was certain that all of her knowledge of formations was accurate, then broke the free other world formations into fragments. She then optimized the fragments so that they would get even stronger with stronger roots, like I had done with the techniques. She ran each of these past Dave and, after he verified them, she posted them on the Formation section of the website on the same grounds as my techniques were posted. Due to formations generally being more expensive than techniques I had more downloads, but she had earned more money, even if she did have to give some of it to Dave for his help.
Several weeks passed like that, and by a month after the attack I had posted over one hundred techniques on the website, with Liza posting around sixty formations. We had a few thousand dollars saved up in each of our bank accounts, and wanted to use it to help with our cultivation.
We had ran into a problem in our cultivation. While, thanks to dual cultivation, we had both managed to reach the peak of Condensation, both of us felt that we weren’t able to break through, though Liza seemed a bit closer to doing so than I did. Both of us had managed to get one of our spiritual roots up to Master, with an Average metal root, but we weren’t sure where to go from there. We had decided to try and use the orthodox cultivation methods of the other world to repair our cultivation from the beginning. We only had first and second level techniques available for every path, only seven of the orthodox and one non-orthodox paths having third level breakthrough techniques available for free. This would mean that we might not be able to use these techniques to advance to the third level, and may have to have Randy or another group that was going through the gate buy third level breakthrough techniques for us. If I could work out a deal to buy trade goods for them in exchange I might be able to do so.
After my research into the other world’s cultivation methods, I found the concept of a Cultivation cave. They were places one could go to dedicate oneself to cultivation for some period of time, having all of the things one might need to break through to new levels and helping to optimize one’s advancement speed. While I wouldn’t be able to take too much time off to spend it in cultivation, perhaps a week at most, I could draw some inspiration from the concept to help Liza, Randy and myself advance more quickly or have better quality advancements.
I had spoken with Randy and he agreed to let me set up a meditation area in his basement if I cleaned it, as he hadn’t straightened it out since moving in almost a decade ago. I spent three days cleaning his basement and managed to clear out a section about a quarter of the size of the basement by throwing out the worthless things and rearranging what was left. Over next few days I drew up my plans and that Saturday the three of us set out for the local home improvement store in Randy’s truck.
“Hey, Randy, I’ve got a question.” I said.
“Sure, what is it?” he asked.
“Well, Brandy has come over every Friday night since we moved in with you, and one Saturday, and I think I heard you talking to her about coming over tonight.”
“Yeah? What about it?” he questioned.
“Well, I was wondering if you two were dating now. Sure, you brought over two other women, but only one time each, so that just means you aren’t monogamous.”
Randy shrugged. “I wouldn’t call it dating. She is just Late Foundation with a Master Fire root. So I get a lot more out of cultivating with her than with the other women, as they were both Condensation like you two. You get the best experience towards improving your root when someone can overcome your element, and you get the most qi combat experience when they are on your level or just above, so she is kind of an ideal partner for me, the way you two are for each other. I can overcome her Fire and she can feed my Metal roots, and with her being a bit stronger than me, I get a bit of extra experience. The others might have been able to suppress my Water with their Earth roots, but they got most of the experience from the combat. Not enough that I would turn them down if they wanted to train together, but enough that I don’t actually ask them myself. And as far as I know, there aren’t any single women in the third level with Earth roots in Dewer, so I’d have to travel to the city.”
I nodded. Liza and I were almost the same level, with her water suppressing my fire and my Metal feeding her Water or being even with her Metal, so we were closely matched. Dave and Maria were also like that, with Dave having Earth and Metal roots and Maria having Water and Wood roots, they could both be overcome by each other’s roots, leading to rapid training.
When we arrived at the store I immediately went to the bathroom section. My plan relied on a certain product that I hoped they had, and soon I was able to find it. Transparent shower blocks and tiles. Before the discovery of qi they had been made of glass, poured into molds and make to look wavy in order to distort the light for privacy. After the discovery of qi, however, the mining of crystalline quartz greatly increased, as it was a cheap way to store large amounts of qi. Not all of the stone was good enough quality to be used for this, however, so four different general qualities were decided on, to be used to describe the material for sell.
The first was Impregnated Granite. This was granite that had tiny quartz crystals in it. It had some small ability to store qi, but was mostly used for decoration. The second was Large-crystal quartz. It had crystals comparable to a human finger in size, but a fairly low qi storage capacity. It was used in some decorative pieces, but most often crushed to remove the excess granite, placed in tumblers and sorted so that it could be sold as a substitute for river rocks in paving and construction. Then came the Low-purity quartz, generally quartz with some defects or contaminants which made it difficult to see through and which dyed it various colors. This was what replaced the glass in these shower blocks. They had about half of the qi storage capacity of the next grade, Pure quartz, on average, but were far cheaper. They were rarely used in storage, however, because they couldn’t withstand higher qi pressures the way pure crystals could.
Pure crystals were only mined in a few places and were usually synthetically produced, as the standard way to use them was to encase them in something that didn’t let qi through very well, a qi insulator, then use a formation to pull as much qi into the crystal as possible, often getting it to thousands or tens of thousands of times the normal levels of stored qi.
In my case, it was an extremely cheap way to store large amounts of qi at ambient background levels. If my calculations were correct, the total amount of qi a person needed to recharge from no qi to full at the peak of Collection took about 100 milliliters of quartz to store, so 200 milliliters of this material, assuming it was average. Each block was 20cm by 20cm by 10 cm, so 4 liters, meaning that each tile could store about 20 stones of energy, in other world terms. My current maximum stored qi was about 160 stones, or 8 blocks worth, and Liza’s was about 180, or 9 blocks worth. So if I used 20 to make a room, it would store more than the two of us combined.
For it to grow with us, however, I would need to make something with a storage capacity closer to what Randy had. He currently had over five thousand stones worth of qi, and would likely be at over ten thousand by the time he was ready to advance to Core. That would mean that to store as much qi as he had right now would take about a cubic meter of this quality quartz. I could afford it, as every tile was only $10 each, but at $2500 in total it would be all of the money I had saved over the last month since the attack. If we were building on that scale, though, it would be better to purchase one cubic meter blocks from the quarry, something that could be bought for $1000 each, though it would weigh more than two tons. With Randy and I both having a magic bag, though, that wouldn’t be a problem on the small scale.
Assuming two meter square walls, I would need one hundred tiles per wall, or about three hundred and fifty tiles if I left room for a door. Randy, on the other hand, wanted to go a bit bigger. He bought one thousand tiles, most of what they had, and, after paying for them, stored them in his bag and went back to get mortar, grout, quartz tiles, and other things we would need. After that we went to the lumber section and bought all that we would need to build the walls, as well as a door. Randy considered buying spirit wood, but even with the imports from the other world it was ten times the price of normal wood, so he went with normal wood.
We ended up marking off a four by five meter area and building walls to enclose it, then hanging the door. Brandy came over that night, so we decided to call it a night and Liza and I got a shower while Randy and Brandy went to his room to gain cultivation experience. Liza and I went out to eat and when we got back Brandy had left and Randy was busy meditating, so we went to bed. We could have tried to gain some experience ourselves, but we were both tired from building walls, so we just went to sleep. We would need to work on the project again tomorrow, after all, and so didn’t have time to meditate on the experience.
We finished laying the block walls the next day, as well as the tiles on the ground, though we would need to grout them on Monday. On Monday randy decided to tile the door as well, and after doing that, we put the sealant on everything and let it sit for most of the day.
On Tuesday we stacked what blocks were left in the corner of the room and moved all of our meditation pads into there, including two extras Randy had in case one of the women he had over wanted to use the room. Three were along the back wall and two along the front, with the third position on that wall being taken up by a door. Once we were finished we realized that the room could store about twenty two thousand stones of qi, and would take about three days to recharge if fully depleted. This meant that even once he reached the peak of Foundation the room would have more than twice the stored qi that Randy had.
Now that the room was finished, Liza and I spent the mornings working on our projects and posting them, and the afternoons optimizing our cultivation. Randy mostly practiced his techniques at a shooting range behind his house in the morning, then joined us in the evenings.
