Upon arriving at the main gate they checked my ID. Seeing that I was on the list of people to look out for, but that my face didn’t match my license, the gate guard checked my qi signature against the one they had on file from the last time I came to the base and allowed me in. I was escorted to the base’s medical facility. “This is mostly a formality.” said the doctor that was on duty. “We need to make sure you don’t have any diseases or underlying health issues that that might prevent you from protecting the ambassador. Since most medical conditions and diseases are eradicated by the superior immune system of a cultivator, especially one in Condensation, the main thing I’m looking for is damage, signs of injuries that haven’t heal properly or serious mistakes in your cultivation that could cause problems.”
I nodded and he had me lay on a medical bed before pushing the bed into something that looked like an MRI machine but was actually a QRI machine. It used qi in a way similar to how MRI machines used magnetic fields, but because it used qi instead it didn’t risk injuring people if they had metal on them. The company that invented it was in California, so they were pressured to call in a Mana Resonance Imager, but due to the acronym overlap and the fact that they expected at least 70% of their sales to be outside of the United States, they instead decided to call it a Qi Resonance Imager.
“Well, I don’t see anything wrong. In fact, your neural development seems better than most of the staff’s, and some of your physical development is on par with the military personnel's. I assume you have been doing some body cultivation?”
“Yeah,.” I responded. “I found a few books on how the people of the other world cultivates, and wanted to learn swordsmanship, so I decided to use their body and mind tempering techniques.”
“Interesting.” the doctor said, nodding his head. “The military started implementing body tempering into basic training and mental tempering into the skilled roles, so I’ve recently received training on how to detect and manage the issues surrounding intense tempering and its associated injuries. In fact,” he got up and rolled a device shaped like a light panel on a post. “This is a device designed to test the state of tempering in the human body. It’s still a prototype, but I was wondering if you would let me use it to assess you. I don’t have a lot of opportunity to assess civilians, only the occasional close family member of base personnel. We didn’t get the device until over a month after the base on the other side put up the barrier, so I couldn’t even get scans of the mercenaries and scientists, so most of our data is on military personnel.”
I nodded. “Sure.” I said. “Why not. It could definitely help people cultivate if they knew where they needed the most improvement.” The Doctor nodded and moved the device over my stomach, then used the device to scan me. Once it was finished he showed me the tablet with multiple categories followed by a number, usually in the eighty to ninety range. “Why do I get the impression I’m looking at my stat sheet from a video game?” I asked, a bit confused.
“Because the scientists that designed the interface are nerds.” He responded with a shrug. “If it helps, think of them more as percentages. Zero is basically completely crippled or a missing system, and 100 is the pre-mana maximum for humans. From testing we know that you need to average somewhere around twenty to not really struggle to break through to Gathering, or level one. There is a bit of variation, though, so that’s just the human average. After you grow meridians, your body will basically temper itself up to around twenty in all stats, which is why your lowest, blood vessels, is only at fifty three. I’m guessing it was brought up to the minimum of forty by a few months after you broke through to level two, and the only tempering you did was circling your fire and metal mana.”
I nodded. “I suppose you looked at my signature and figured out my roots, but yeah. The proper way to temper it is to get bruised or bleed, and I didn’t do any of that in my sword training outside of one accident where my girlfriend cut me during a sparing session. I do have these though.” I pulled the medical kit Maria gave me out of my magic bag and pulled out a tempering pill.
The doctor shrugged. “High grade? Could work. Won’t get you much above seventy five or eighty in any area, though. The tempering roughly doubles every level, too, at least with humans, as the scale is calibrated to us, so you need an average of eighty in both physical and mental, as you are using dual meridians. You can probably make it to Foundation as you are now, but if you worked on your blood vessels a bit more you would have an easier time.”
I nodded and got up. With him not finding any medical issues I was escorted to the General’s office. Once inside the guard closed the door and I could feel a sound proofing barrier go up. “Not a bad disguise.” said the Ambassador, looking me over. “And the flesh sculpting makes you look like a native, if not a bit exotic.” The Ambassador looked like he could pass as a native when I saw his last time, but he had probably just already used the technique.
“Yeah, I tested it yesterday at my birthday party and even my best friend couldn’t tell it was me, just that it was suspicious I wasn’t at my own party but someone he never met was.”
The General nodded. “In that case, you have some practice for the last test. To make sure that you can pass as a local well enough, you are going to stay in the outer sect for the night, and tomorrow morning you can leave with the other native civilians.”
The General explained that this would be the second time they had opened the outer barrier to launch an attack on those that were besieging the base. During that time they would be sending and receiving personnel via a transportation array they had set up with cooperation from the Eastern Gate sect. While the sect was happy to trade and move personnel around for the base, they refused to officially join the side of the USA in this war, as they lacked a fifth level powerhouse to actually challenge the rival sects. For that reason the Ambassador would meet with their sect leader first to try and work out a deal.
Once the Ambassador was in costume and they had verified that none of my belongings would blow my cover, my license, wallet, and cell phone being left here in storage, they let the two of us go through the portal. I did have a few jade sips on me that had been loaded with techniques from a computer, which made them harder to use, but only those that had experience with computer loaded jade data would know why it didn’t easily mesh with the human mind.
After we were through the portal the Ambassador and I were given bags of stones. These were made from crushed granite that had been polished so that only the stones roughly as big around as a finger were left, and had been sitting in the other world for long enough that they were fully charged. Several smaller city-states made spirit stones in that manner, so they should pass as something from that world. I followed the Ambassador to the outer base, through a high-security area where the put a level five barrier behind you and a hole in the barrier in front of you to prevent people from teleporting through it. Once we got there he entered one of the lower end inns. There was a restaurant on the lowest level, but he went to the counter and got us a single room first.
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Inside the room there was only one bed, but also a simple gathering array in the middle of the floor with a memory foam meditation cushion. It should roughly double the amount of qi around the user when activated. “Because the base provides basic cultivation knowledge to everyone and encourages them to cultivate, all rooms are set up with these things.” the Ambassador said, looking the room over. There was a small room to the side which contained one of those asian squat toilets and a tiled and drained area for bathing. In addition to the normal hotel things like dressers, a table, and a fire place, there was a clothes line and a laundry tub with a bucket of water. “We can hire one of the locals to do the laundry most of the time.” said the Ambassador, “but if one isn’t available you’ll have to do it for me. I only have five changes of clothes in my bag.”
I nodded. “Makes sense. You’re the boss, after all. Even if it isn’t really part of a body guard’s job. More of a butler, then.”
He gave me a look like he thought I was being ridiculous and we went downstairs to the restaurant. It was lunch time, so the place was pretty busy. One of the groups that was there eating at a large table asked if we wanted to sit with them and the Ambassador agreed, as the one available table was too large to just have two people sit there. There was already food on the table, but he ordered a few more dishes and they gave us each a set of dishes to eat with before bringing out the food. I grabbed one of the small dumplings in front of me with my chopsticks and put it in my mouth. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t what I was expecting. It tasted like radishes soaked in soy sauce.
“So, a level three and a his level two peak body guard.” the man to the Ambassador’s right said. “Haven’t seen you before.”
“My name is Yu Fei. This is my bodyguard Lee.” he said motioning towards me.
“Li Kev.” I said. Kev was the local word for Herb, or more accurately, medicinal plants, and was an uncommon, but not unheard of given name. “Itinerant cultivator. The boss hired me to watch his back.” Level two body guards were fairly common, especially among caravans, and many unaffiliated cultivators did such work in order to earn money for cultivation resources.
The man nodded. “Nice to meet the two of you. I’m Tau Mu, caravan guard captain.” the other four went around the table introducing themselves and their occupations. Three of them were also guards, two of them and Tau Mu being level two, but one was an level two alchemist that was traveling with the caravan as their doctor when the caravan got stopped here. “We’re leaving tomorrow morning, but tonight we can share a drink with you.”
The Ambassador, ‘Yu Fei’, nodded. “Very well. We were actually leaving tomorrow as well. I’ve done about all I can in this city to arrange for trade, so it’s time I left.”
“Merchant ambassador?” asked Tau Mu. “Wouldn’t have guessed.”
“Why, what did you think I did for a living?” Yu Fei asked.
Tau Mu shrugged. “I would have assumed you were some sort of scholar. Maybe a traveling member of some rich family.” The ambassador looked to be in his early thirties, so he might pass for a spoiled rich kid.
“Why’s that?” The Ambassador asked. He thought he had gotten his cover identity fixed properly.
“Your hands.” said Tau Mu, pointing at them. “Anyone that sees them can tell that you don’t use them much. They show a bit of martial arts wear, but not a lot. My guess is that you trained a hand to hand skill a bit for self protection, but never did much with your body outside that.” He then pointed to me. “Now Li here, I can tell he’s a swordsman. Mostly ambidextrous, as his arms are roughly the same size, but his hands are properly calloused. Probably not his primary means of earning a living, but he’s put in at least a few hundred, if not a thousand hours of sword practice. Also a few minor burn scars, which tells me he has a fire root. Most Fire cultivators have them from messing up a technique.” I had actually made a few mistakes while practicing with some of the more complex techniques I had rebuilt, especially my final project technique, so I had burnt myself, but I didn’t realize the scars hadn’t completely gone away.
“Quite observant.” said the Ambassador. “Now let me try you.” Tau Mu nodded and the ambassador looked him over. “Earth cultivator, like me. Spear wielder, sometimes with a shield. Injured your left knee on the way here but still had to walk. And you like women with makeup. Went to a brothel a few hours ago at most.”
Tau Mu smiled. “I get the spear and the shield things. The way I’m leaning on the table is similar to holding a shield, and both my hands are calloused like a spear holder. How did you figure out the rest?”
“Your left shoe is worn in a pattern that suggests a bad leg that you limped on for a long time. Earth Cultivator is because you have dirt under your fingernails and a lot of sand in your hair, but don’t care. That means you like Earth, and knowing that you are a cultivator, that means you are probably an Earth type. As for the woman, you have lipstick on your collar bone and smell slightly like perfume.”
Tau Mu wiped at his collar bone with a napkin and saw a bit of red lipstick on it. “Dang, thought I got it all off the visible areas.” he said, and his men laughed. “Nice job, though. I can barely smell the perfume myself.”
“Enhanced my sense of smell. You’d be surprised how often having the nose of a wolf is useful.” Tau Mu nodded and the conversation turned to other random topics.
I started a conversation with the alchemist. Maria hadn’t explained much about the pills, so I showed him the first aid kit Maria had put together for me and asked about them. The pills weren’t the best quality. Most of them were average quality, though, with some Lower and High qualities mixed in. “You really shouldn’t mix qualities like this as you may need specific quality ones at different times, but I suppose for a starting assortment it isn’t bad. Missing the Blood ones though.”
“Yeah, and that’s the main area I need to temper.” I said and he nodded. “My martial brother’s Dao companion made them for me, but she was missing a few ingredients for the blood pills.”
“Beginner Alchemist, huh? Not bad, though. You can sell anything Average or above in stores, so most alchemists will buy them off of you for around half the sell price. You have to make a good number to meet all of your living expenses at level one, which takes a lot of time away from cultivating, but I used to do that until I signed up with a mercenary group. For alchemists starting off, it isn’t a bad deal.”
“She’s actually paying an alchemist to teach her for the next few months, but she will probably do that once she leaves the apprenticeship.” I explained. It was a reasonable explanation for what a college did.
“I heard that some trade companies and retired alchemists did that to earn money, but never really saw one that was doing it. Good Karma to her in her endeavors.”
I nodded. “Do you have any suggestions on what she should do after this? She is at the peak of first level in her cultivation, so I assume she can start making level two pills once she breaks through.”
“Well, that’s not quite how it works. You can make level two pills at level one if you are good enough, but most people can’t make more than a few at a time due to a lack of qi.”
“Yeah, she did mention that she didn’t make any level two pills for me because she had trouble finding the needed level two plants, so I should have guessed that.”
“Really? Level two ingredients cost a bit more, but they aren’t usually hard to find.”
“Well, I think they were out of stock on most of them.” I lied. I didn’t think he would accept that our country just didn’t have many of them.
“Well, in that case, maybe she could grow her own? There’s an alchemist shop in town where you can buy seeds and the guide to grow them.”
He gave me directions and I thanked him. “Maybe I’ll visit there. Maybe I can convince Mister Fei to swing by there after we eat. We might need better pills than this after all. Especially Tempering pills, if he is going to get in a bit of practice today. I’m almost at the limit of their effectiveness at level two, so he has to be over it at level three.”
“Yes, you really need to get level two or three tempering pills. Body and mind, since the two of you seem to be dual path cultivators. And blood pills too, though you might want to get a full kit of level two pills.”
“Sounds a bit expensive.” I said, “But, if he doesn’t have one, I’ll try and convince him.”
“You don’t know if he does? I thought you were his bodyguard.”
“Well, he only hired me once he realized it was time to leave through the array, so I’ve only known him a few days.” That was technically true, since I didn’t meet him until less than a week ago when I was hired as his bodyguard, and made a reasonable excuse.
“Makes sense.” he said.
