21. Romance of the Tower

  My romance with Mai Mai continued in the background of my life. She had to share me with Atla, although we were able to find a babysitter for him often enough that we had plenty of time alone, while I continued to send out avatars to deal with matters of the alliance and establishing the network of Waygates.

  At my mother’s insistence, we announced to the public that we were officially courting, a matter that was met with a public celebration in the streets, to my surprise. Taimei made a point of being seen in public with Mai Mai, gossiping and being friendly, so that those who watched such things knew that there was no animosity between the two women.

  Taimei was my disciple, and I appreciated her role in the ruse to conceal Atla’s origin, but I never felt anything for her but fondness. Mai Mai was … igniting something in me that I hadn’t felt before in this life. Something intense and emotional, and distinctly intimate.

  After a few weeks of this intimacy developing, after we’d shared our first and second night together, I finally noticed Atla’s jealousy.

  “You know I can know what you do when I’m not around,” he pouted at me during our time together out by the elm tree that he’d grown in a few hours. It was covered in birds which had come at his call.

  “Is this about Mai Mai?” I asked.

  “You’re making normal babies.”

  “Are you jealous?”

  “Will you love them more than me?”

  “That isn’t possible. I’ll love them, but not more than you. Differently and as much, but not more,” I answered.

  He frowned. “Mai Mai will make good babies. I checked. You know, the things that make good babies are good in her. She doesn’t have the bad things that make bad babies in her blood. Neither do you.”

  My eyebrows rose. “That’s something you can check?”

  “Yeah. I’m trying to fix the bad things in people but it’s hard. Sometimes I can’t fix the bad without breaking the good and making things worse. I don’t know how to fix everything and make everything better,” he said, looking at me like I was supposed to give him the answer to his problem right then.

  “I’m not even sure what we’re talking about, Atla,” I said. “But I think it’s sweet that you’re worried about your maybe human brothers and sisters before they’re even conceived.”

  “Oh. I guess she didn’t tell you yet,” he said, and he ran off. “Or maybe she doesn’t know herself.”

  I blinked after him in surprise, and had to take a seat to wrap my head around what he had just informed me of in his very Atla-esque way.

  I was going to be a father. Not just a world-father, but a father-father.

  For the rest of the day, I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face.

  ~~~~~~

  The wall of flame engulfed half of the battlefield that made up the center of the tower. I pulled up a defense of water and wind, the storm circling around me as it clashed with the fires that swept over and around me, but burnt me not.

  I called to myself a lance of lightning and fired it at my opponent, but lightning was not so uncommon on Doe’s world as it was on mine for cultivators to attune themselves to, and my opponent had countermeasures. He redirected the lightning with his own Qi and it flew off to strike the wall.

  It never impacted; burrowing instead through space in the tunnel that I’d set up for it.

  The opponent – I don’t remember his name – was taken in the back, gasping it pierced through his defenses perfectly.

  He staggered, but that was not enough to take him down, so I followed it up by crossing the distance between us and launching ice lance after ice lance at him. He gasped and brought up a shield of flames, but the ice lances concealed a spear of earth, and he was impaled in each shoulder and his stomach.

  Mortal wounds to a mortal, but only enough to take him out of the fight at our level.

  “I concede,” he announced, and the screens around the arena lit up to show my face and the word “Victor!”

  Throughout the demesne of Duke Doe, a fortune had changed hands as those betting on me began collecting their winnings, and those who bet again settled their debts.

  That was one purpose behind this brutal system, I had learned. After a certain level, there was no more hiding it, as the crowd favorites began earning sponsorships and patrons. On the seventieth floor, it was an open secret, and I had been disgusted to learn that from the beginning my fights had been recorded for those who enjoyed this sort of bloodsport.

  I was uncertain how I felt to know that the betting was five to one in my favor on this last match. I had pushed myself to defeat my opponent, yet I didn’t feel that I was reaching my limits.

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  Rather, I felt that my limits were stretching out further than ever before. I was much stronger than when I had arrived. I estimate that I had been a quarter of the way through the diamond path, yet now I was brushing up against platinum.

  I left the opponent where he had fallen – I would not be helping him by helping him stand or tend to his wounds. His sponsors didn’t like to see that sort of thing. So I simply walked to the elevator and pressed my hand against the handprint scanner. It beeped, and I ascended.

  Thirty floors left to go.

  ~~~~~~

  Lukal Lukal stood before the fire.

  “And that is the story of the first disciple of the worldfather,” he said, his voice heavy with loss as it always was at this point in the story. “He took a wound meant for another, dying with honor and earning his place of honor that he had once claimed in hubris. But it was not hubris which earned him his title. It was the pride he carried with him, enough for each of the disciples and well earned, for he faced the specter of death and saw that it was his time. His last act was not only to save his companion from a mortal blow, but he also ignited his meridians to prevent his corpse from rising again. To prevent his friends from having to deal with one more enemy, and this one wearing their friends face.”

  The children, orphans mostly, but his disciples now, all looked in the fire as they tried to ponder the story that he had just finished.

  “Xol was my friend. That he was a jaguar matters not. I honor his memory by telling this story, and you shall honor his memory by hearing it and carrying his courage and pride in your heart,” Lukal Lukal said. “Now then. We have heard a good story, and everyone has a belly full of food. It is time to practice our Qi cycling technique and go to bed. Tomorrow we will hold another tournament to determine who is the strongest disciple of Lukal Lukal, and who had grown in strength since the last tournament last week.”

  The children – for the oldest was only fifteen years old and the youngest was a foundling of three years – all nodded and split off into groups, where Lukal Lukal walked among them, examining their techniques with the critical eye of a golden path cultivator.

  This continued for three hours. The younger children fell asleep cultivating and were carried to bed by their elders. The oldest would have continued through the night had Lukal Lukal not sent them to bed. In the darkness, the fire continued to burn. The remains of the boar that the children had eagerly devoured was cooling nearby, and it would be picked clean in the morning.

  Lukal Lukal had never appreciated how hard his first master had hunted for his disciples until it was his turn to do the same.

  Some of his followers were familiar faces from those days. Others he had tracked down himself. Others had been drawn by rumors and whispers that spread among the street children of Mer’cah.

  Two hundred children now called Lukal Lukal Master. They were children, for at age sixteen he would send them off to fend for themselves. But for now, they were his responsibility.

  “Master, will you take part in the tournament, as you did in the one where you met the great Worldfather?” one of the disciples asked with sleepy eyes.

  He grinned. “Of course I shall,” he said. “It will make a great story.”

  ~~~~~~

  The question came out of nowhere, and Taimei was floored by it. She had been scrubbing Atla’s back when Mai Mai asked. Despite the boy-world’s constant teleportation, it seemed that he brought the dirt along with him when he appeared at his destination.

  “I can appear without the dirt,” he had explained when the women had told him it was time for a bath. “But I can’t appear without the dirt and with my clothes, and you yell at me when I don’t bring my clothes with and why are you telling me to take them off?”

  But once he was in the water he decided he liked baths and was perfectly cooperative, if a bit splashy.

  The women didn’t mind, as they were bathing with him. It wasn’t just that he was too young to be interested in them that way; they were perfectly aware that he was literally omnipresent, so they had no reason to be modest in the presence of his eidolon.

  “How do you know if you’re pregnant?” Mai Mai repeated.

  Taimei flushed. “Um, I don’t actually know. I mean, there’s the obvious. Your flow stops, but we’re cultivators so our flow is irregular anyway. I heard you get sick to your stomach in the morning, so maybe—”

  “You’re pregnant, Mai Mai,” Atla said suddenly. “I thought you knew but wasn’t sure and father said that I shouldn’t tell you unless you asked, but yeah, you’ve got a baby in you. It’s a girl. She’s going to be healthy, I checked that too.”

  Mai Mai gaped at him, then sat back in the water.

  “Thank you for telling me, Atla. Not knowing was driving me crazy,” she admitted.

  “You’re welcome,” he said, then he dunked beneath the water and started blowing bubbles.

  The women exchanged looks. “So I guess one way of knowing is when the eidolon of your world tells you you are,” Taimei joked nervously.

  “I guess,” Mai Mai responded.

  They sat in silence for a minute. Atla didn’t surface, but they weren’t worried about him because the bubbles kept coming long after a normal boy would have run out of breath.

  “So, this affects you too,” Mai Mai said. “The public believes that we’re both concubines. I’ll support you however I can, but—”

  “We should talk to Tonilla,” Taimei said. “She’ll know better than us how to manage the public on this matter.”

  “What about Little Bug?” Mai Mai asked.

  “What about him? It sounds like Atla told him weeks ago and he never said a word. I say we just ignore him until he comes rushing to apologize,” Taimei said, turning up her nose.

  The women laughed and then helped the other wash their hair.

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