I’d been training in the tunnel last night, with Sabrina watching from the windowed enclosure of the tunnel’s airlock and decontamination seal and offering advice through the mounted comm speaker, when she’d brought it up. The rest of the team had been surprisingly eager to have a booster as our final teammate, even if it was as a secondary power support rather than a fifth combatant. A living, breathing cheat code who could potentially juice our abilities?

  Yeah, they were on board. Go figure.

  “You know that any of the team you have assembled would dive into your bed in a heartbeat if you let them think that they had a chance. Some of them would even happily share.”

  I snorted, mixing some classic acrobatics freestyle exercises with an Aikido kata. I’d brought in some weights and a hanging bar I’d mounted in the tunnel, because doing full essence circulation and draw while working out hard was apparently an important part of body tempering. Apparently, my chosen method of meditation—which mostly involved swearing and sweating—was a huge boon for body refinement cultivation.

  Each time I worked out in the tunnel I could literally feel the density of my muscles increasing, my reflexes speeding, my muscle control increasing along with my wind, and even my senses sharpening. It was creepy, like someone was dialing all my physical stats up to eleven without my consent. The essence I was forcing to flow through my body was having a much greater, preternatural effect on my physical development I couldn’t have anticipated.

  Of course, it helped that my energy absorption was also proceeding apace. The speed with which I could drain the radiation fields was growing along with the size of my energy pool. My helmet display read over two thousand essence and growing, and I was still far from filling my entire dantian-thing to the point where I would need to start compressing my chi.

  It was getting to the point where I could actually clean the entire tunnel of almost all but trace energy. At this rate, I’d be a one-man EPA superfund site cleanup crew. If this kept up for much longer, I’d probably start burning off some energy converting the active toxins and moving the entire rig farther down the tunnel towards the pile as my mere presence cleaned out the waste.

  “Including you?” I asked, chuckling as I practiced a full-stretch high kick. It wasn’t a thing I was stupid enough to use in a real fight. I mean, it looked cool, but it also gave your enemy a nice, clean shot at your crotch—a trade-off I was never willing to make. But it dramatically increased your limberness and flexibility if you could pull it off, and now, absurdly, I could.

  “Especially me.” she said, shocking me enough that I lost the stretch, and had to recover quickly into the next kata. My Dao was Momentum, not Graceful Poise, after all. “What? Why?” I asked, my voice a little tighter than I intended. This was a minefield I had no map for.

  She chuckled a little. “A number of reasons. First, you are handsome. Lots of cultivators are handsome, it sort of comes with the territory, but even as a pure mortal you were tall, good-looking, and took great care of your body. That makes a huge difference for a body cultivator, and it also shows discipline, self-control, and focus. You are nice to the girls around you, even if it’s clear you still don’t trust them, not even Mindy. Shall I go on?”

  I did a scissor backflip. I wasn’t showing off, I just honestly had seldom seen it accomplished even in movies without wire assistance, but as my reflexes and coordination increased, it became… easy. My body just knew how to do it. Street dancers back before the world decided to have a collective FAAFO moment had done it as part of their break-dancing thing, but if I had tried this last week I would probably have given break-dancing entirely new meaning as I hit the floor and broke several things.

  “Yes, actually. I need to know where I need to start adding in disgusting comments or gestures to blow off some of the attention.” My default defense mechanism was ready to deploy. A little strategic boorishness never failed to lower expectations.

  She chortled again. I kinda liked that she wasn’t a giggler. Her laugh was genuine, not performative. And while her voice was not quite as deep as Chinook’s, it wasn’t almost too shrill like Akyo’s when she got excited. Akyo WAS a giggler, and apparently her shrillness and giggling was trained, something she called Kawaii. For me the forced gestures and responses just felt fake, childish, and irritating when it got to be too much. I liked women, not little girls playing a role.

  “You don’t act like you are immune to the interest, but you also don’t go overboard with sexuality like a lot of guys in your position would. You are like that cute gay friend that socialites wish they had in their friend circle, but you aren’t gay.”

  She coughed a little, “Mindy is convinced you are a bad boy for some reason, Akyo probably has a western man kink, which isn’t uncommon for girls where she is from, Candace is just horny and repressed and you are almost available, and Abigail looks at you like you are the answer to her dreams, I don’t know why.”

  I filed that last one under ‘Reasons to be Even More Paranoid’ and moved on. “And you?” I asked, switching over to doing handstand pushups. With the muscle development from cycling and exercise, regular push-ups just weren’t doing it anymore. I was tempted to get those belt, bracelets, and anklets that were super-heavy just to get a burn. My own body was betraying me by becoming too efficient.

  “Me? I like your subdued but sense of humor, lack of the overweening arrogance which your unique position could encourage, and the fact that you are a sea of stability, a rock I could rest on that will resist the tides.” She paused, and I could almost hear the smirk through the speaker. “That and I’ve seen you naked.”

  I sighed, the sound echoing slightly in my helmet. “Everyone has apparently seen me naked,” I stated, glad that this time, at least, I was wearing my costume. My nudity was becoming a disturbingly public affair.

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  “It seems like it. At least your team and a few others did. Something about getting powerdrunk and wandering around the input dorms in your birthday suit. But the build you developed before you ever awakened has had amazing effects on your current physique, enough so that I wonder if starting body refinement before puberty might be a mistake for dual-path cultivators, at least for the males, who have a higher tolerance for muscle and nerve enhancement.”

  She was back in clinical mode, which was a relief. I could handle being a specimen. “Usually a dual-path or body cultivator has a very compact and seriously cut body, but they don’t have the sheer definition and bulk that bodybuilding or weightlifting adds. By starting late, after you built yourself as a mortal, your body cultivation path might be considerably more productive in the long run. It might not matter much if you ever advance to gold-core or nascent soul, but then again, it might also matter a great deal, since it adds to your already impressive foundation.”

  I looked back at my butt, a futile gesture in full armor. “My foundation is not that impressive.” I wasn’t getting energy through special breathing since my air was filtered, but just circulating my essence through my body seemed to be helping to build it up from both my natural absorption and intentionally stripping the radiation of it’s energy.

  Supposedly, if I advanced far enough, I could just absorb energy directly through my skin and then purify it, leading to much greater energy absorption, but that was probably a long way off. I just sort of wished that I had a way to measure the energy, store it, and release it into controlled bursts that helped me develop intentionally rather than simple unguided absorption, but I had no idea where to start. My entire cultivation method was a series of educated guesses and near-fatal experiments. The Jacob School of Figuring It Out As You Go Along.

  She laughed, “Not your butt, your power foundation. Everything you have, from your conditioning to your power techniques, your soul space to your dantian, even your psychology, bloodline, and cultivation roots, contributes to your foundation, and then eventually your soul cauldron.”

  “So what does dual-path mean, is it like dual cultivation?” I asked, genuinely curious. The metaphysics were a tangled web, and she was the only spider I trusted to explain it without trying to eat me.

  “No… dual cultivation is what happens when a man and a woman cultivate using sex as their meditation medium. It’s a powerful technique, but it ties cultivators together, spiritually. Unless one of the partners is using the other as a cultivation vessel, where they use the dual cultivation as a way to increase and then suck out the other person’s cultivation base.”

  I froze mid-pushup. “That sounds like rape.”

  “It IS rape, even if it’s willing. At it’s best, the cultivation vessel is left without any foundation, and has to rebuild from scratch. At it’s worst, it sucks out their potential, maybe even their life or soul, leaving them as a mindless husk or straight-up killing them.” Her voice was flat, matter-of-fact. It was the tone of someone describing a known, horrific hazard, like a poisonous plant or a unstable cliff face.

  “And that’s demonic cultivation?”

  She laughed, a dry, humorless sound. “No, Demonic cultivation isn’t a technique, or a method, it’s the name assigned by righteous sects to any cultivation method that isn’t shrouded by secrecy and shielded by oaths of loyalty and behavior. It has a huge variety of methods, most of which are freely available to anyone who tries to learn them.”

  “Of course, a lot of them are unethical if used, just like a lot of behaviors, but demonic cultivation is more of a political label, and those unethical methods being available gives them the excuse they need to shut down and destroy anyone that gains power without swearing to a sect, academy, or lord. The only real exception is alchemy, because it’s used by everyone and very rare, but if anything, alchemy guilds and academies are even more secretive about their knowledge.”

  I nodded, the pieces clicking into into place. It was just like everything else. Power structures, control, and labeling your enemies as monsters to justify your own atrocities. Some things were universal, whether your power came from a radioactive spider bite or meditating on a mountain for a hundred years. “And my method?”

  She smiles, “I can’t actually use your method, but if it was freely distributed by the Serenoids, it would be labeled demonic instantly. Serenoids ARE demons after all. Demon is a… different term. What it really means is ‘outsider’, not particularly like the Christian definition of satanic or evil.”

  “But your method, as it currently exists, contains both energy-drain components as well as atmospheric gathering techniques… well, since it seems to be something only you understand and can practice, and you haven’t made it freely available, might potentially be added as one of the righteous schools… if you built a powerful sect around it and used it for political maneuvers. What would you call it?”

  I thought about it as I switched directly into some physical judo exercises I was working on perfecting. “Umm… the Jacob method?” I offered. Simple, direct, egotistical. Seemed fitting.

  “No…” I heard the slightly tinny voice from the speaker, dripping with disapproval. “If you create a method, or combine methods into a whole, it needs a grandiose name, like the seven circle heaven-hell energy gathering method, or Jacob’s phoenix foundation earth cycling toxic conversion method.”

  I thought about it for a second. My creativity was better suited to nanoweave schematics than pompous titles. “I am not real good at coming up with grandiose names. I mean, the individual techniques seem to have natural names, but some of them are straight-up copies and adaptations that already have names, I just don’t know them, like the umm… four limbs radiation momentum retrieval technique, or maybe the some sort of term for stripping toxins and using the bits that are useful while throwing the rest away.”

  “Ah, you are right, that’s terrible. And you want to avoid adding the word toxin anywhere into it, because that resembles gu techniques, which are pretty awful forms of demonic cultivation.”

  “What’s gu?” I asked, immediately regretting it.

  She sighed deeply, the sound of someone about to describe something deeply unpleasant. “Technically it’s considered one of the alchemy techniques, but it involves filling a jar with venomous and powerful essence-infused insects, letting them fight it out until only one survives, and keep adding bugs to the jar until the most powerful one remains, the Gu toxic spirit. Then you… uhh… invite it to inhabit your body. It burrows in, adds to your cultivation and power, especially with toxins, but drains and partially possesses you in doing so. Gu ascension involves becoming a hybrid of both forms, and the techniques they use for gathering power can be disgusting and horrifying, like laying larvae in a cultivation vessel and gaining power from the horde of your offspring.”

  I felt a wave of nausea. “Usually the survivor is one of several kinds of centipede, beetle, wasp, or mantis abominations, but occasionally it’s a spider spirit… spider spirits are the LEAST disgusting ones.”

  “Right,” I said, my voice a little strained. “Avoid toxic bugs. I probably would anyway, since heavy metal poisons are easy to work with, but biological toxins are usually nightmarish organic molecules.” Note to self: never, ever get on the bad side of a Gu cultivator. Just nope. Then again, with my luck? it's almost guaranteed to happen.