Untitled Space Xianxia - Chapter 13

[May be the last one of these for a bit.  Got a busy few weeks ahead of me and I'll have to scramble a bit just to get the next Dungeon Devotee chapter out in time.  I'll try and get 14 out sooner if I can because... you'll see.  You've been warned.]

Chapter 13: Ice Cream

I learned more about my budding friend group over the course of that one dinner than in the entire prior week. I don’t know if I’d reached some threshold of trust with Xavier or if Nick just had a talent for getting people to talk about themselves, but talk they did.

Apparently, once a cycle—the three-ish years it takes for The Dueling Stars to complete a single revolution around each other—the Dragon’s Right Eye and the Dragon’s Left Eye competed in some major tournament to determine who gets control of Ilirian, the system’s only habitable world.

At the age of eight, Xavier had decided he was going to win that tournament.

It explained everything. It explained why he wanted to duel everybody; it explained why he trained so hard; it even explained why he introduced himself as the ‘future champion of the Dragon’s Right Eye.’ His parents, both of which lived and cultivated here on Fyrion, had never dared shatter his dream, even if they knew how impossible it’d be for a nobody on the sect’s weakest outpost to make it to tungsten, the cultivation level of the last several champions.

For his part, Xavier seemed to genuinely believe he could do it. He had no delusions about how long it would take or how easy it would be, but he’d decided on his goal and by the threads he was going to achieve it.

I couldn’t help but root for him. Even with his tendencies for over-honesty and overconfidence, there was an earnestness to Xavier I deeply respected. He genuinely enjoyed things in a way I envied, and the pitfalls of his low ranking or regular defeats in the ring barely phased him. Xavier had a clear goal and a path towards it, disadvantages and complications be damned.

Nick, in contrast, seemed as if he didn’t want to be there. Unlike Xavier, as one of the youngest in the sect’s history to form a core and achieve full membership, Nick had an obviously bright future. The kid smacked of promise, enough that he probably wouldn’t have much difficulty finding a spot on a better settlement than Fyrion.

Shit, Charlotte even warned the lad against hanging around with the likes of us, declaring the damage to his reputation too great for someone with so much to lose. He didn’t leave.

Nick apparently wanted nothing more than to work on his parents’ herb farm, a job that didn’t require cultivation skill much beyond what he’d already achieved. His parents had disagreed, forcing the teen to stay with the sect and focus on cultivation until he turned eighteen.

Charlotte took offense at his outlook. She claimed he owed it to his family and to himself to pursue his obvious potential as a cultivator. Xavier asserted the opposite, arguing that Nick and Nick alone got to decide what mattered to him.

I spent the entire conversation thinking about Lucy’s empty garden and how much I’d wanted to recruit a crew member who knew how to work with spiritual herbs. Nick was almost too perfect.

As we moved on to dessert, I brought the topic back around to future plans, particularly where it pertained to the three of them.

I had three friends and only two focus hours each week. The solution I decided on, which they each agreed to in turn, involved a set rotation. Charlotte, Xavier, and Nick would take turns taking any spare focus room hours from me. I guaranteed them at least one per week, with the second going to whomever was next in the rotation if I didn’t need it to bargain for something.

The plan had a number of benefits. The extra hours in the qi dense rooms would accelerate their growth, helping them keep pace with mine, while also incentivizing them to remain friends with me. None of them would betray me or my secrets if it meant slowing their own cultivation.

Given the content of the conversation, then, it came as no surprise when once Xavier and Nick had adjourned to go fight their duel, Charlotte leaned over the table and whispered, “I want to know.”

I blinked. “Could you be more specific?”

“Why can’t anyone sense your qi? Why are you giving away your focus room hours? Why don’t you care about being stuck on the third floor?”

I exhaled. “Ah. That.”

“Xavier knows,” Charlotte said plainly. “I’d wager Nick knows something too. That just leaves me.”

“I trust Xavier, and Nick knows more than he should and less than you want.”

Charlotte let out a breath. “I’m not going to say you can trust me because those words don’t mean anything, but you can trust that I wouldn’t jeopardize my focus room hours for anything. You can trust that I’m going to find the truth one way or another. I just want to save myself the trouble of looking into you and you the trouble of trying to hide from me.”

I let my eyes lock with hers for a few tense moments before casting my gaze around in all directions. I caught two different cultivators and a staff member with a mop all looking at me.

“Not here,” I said. “Too many prying eyes.”

Charlotte nodded.

We left the dining hall together, walking in silence back to the lobby and up the stairs to the third floor. As we mounted the steps, I stood ambiguously close to her, pausing to flash a smug wink over my shoulder at Arthur.

If he was going to think I was boinking my friends anyway, I figured he may as well think I was boinking all of my friends.

Charlotte noticed the gesture. “What was that about?”

“Oh, I’m just fucking with Arthur.”

She paled a little bit less over my use of profanity this time. Progress! “The receptionist?”

“Yep,” I whispered back. “He’s got it into his mind I’m sleeping with Xavier, so I figured I’d throw him a curveball.”

Charlotte didn’t even falter. “Put your arm on my back. It’ll sell it better.”

Now this I could work with. It was brilliant really. I just had to redirect Charlotte’s manipulative nature away from progressing her own agenda and towards just screwing around with people. Why befriend a scheming manipulator when I could befriend the ultimate prankster?

I shoved aside ideas of slipping hair dye into Instructor Long’s shampoo to focus on the matter at hand as we crested the steps and slipped into my dorm room together.

The moment the door closed behind us, Charlotte stepped away and spun on me. “I want the truth.”

“All business then, got it. Basically, I don’t use the same qi you do.” I explained it all, well, almost all. I left out the bits about roofie and Cedric and Lucy, cutting straight to the part about the vast reservoir of dark qi that seemed incompatible with the qi in all living beings.

Charlotte didn’t question me. She didn’t ask how I’d found it or if it could be replicated. She didn’t accuse me of being a walking corpse. She didn’t even comment on the sheer stupidity of opening meridians in the third floor showers. When at last I finished my tale, she spoke exactly two words.

“I’m in.”

I blinked. “What?”

“This plan, this secret, this conspiracy,” she explained without really explaining, “I’m in.”

“I repeat. What?”

Charlotte let out a long breath. “You’ve discovered something revolutionary, at least revolutionary as far as anyone in this system is concerned. You know what’s out there better than I do. Anyway, you’re right to keep it secret, and you’re right to hide your progress. The elders would view you as a threat. Your plan is obviously to build a small group of people you can trust, give them focus hours so they keep up with you and feel ingratiated to you, and use them to help keep your secret. I’m in.”

“Oh.” That was easy.

“You’re uncouth, you’re inexperienced, and worst of all you’re naive, but if what you just told me is true, and I’d wager it is, you’re going places most cultivators can only dream of. I’ll do whatever it takes to come along for the ride.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Does that include trusting me?”

The corners of Charlotte’s mouth tilted up into a slight grin as she moved for the door. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

With that she left, stepping past me into the hall before disappearing down the stairs. I watched her go, mind racing to try and figure out her angle. I came up blank.

I was still standing there, watching the steps when Nick’s face peaked above them, a dark spot under his left eye. I flashed him a halfhearted grin. “Duel went well, then?”

Nick grumbled indecipherably at me.

“Yeah, me too,” I replied as if he’d just made some interesting point.

I let him shuffle off down the hall and disappear into room three-eleven, taking note of his residence. It’d been nice of Arthur, I supposed, not to make Nick and I share a wall. Gods knew how loud the teenager snored.

I adjourned to my own sparse bedroom and called up Lucy for our nightly chat. True to form, she took immediate interest in Nick’s wellbeing, forcing a promise from me that I’d look after him. I gave it freely.

When at last the comms went quiet, I went about my nightly routine of lying in bed and opening my spiritual senses to the qi around me. With every evening I grew more resilient to the qi’s noise and heat, though even now, a week in, I still came away with a headache.

My last act before bed, without fail, was to push my senses just far enough to touch the infinite sea. It, too, I had to grow more comfortable with, and rather than a throbbing headache or racing heart, it left me with a calm spirit and clear head. Both ushered me to sleep.

I dreamt that night, as I’d found myself doing frequently, of Cedric. He’d look at me pleading with blue or gold or green eyes, whichever they’d been before the void induced psychosis had turned them black. I never knew what he wanted from me, but there was always a desperation to his face, never the hunger or the cruelty or the muscle spasms that’d been there the only time I’d seen him.

I wrote it off as trauma. Threads knew I had enough to explain a few weird dreams.

The following morning, twin suns dawned on my first real day off on Fyrion.

Actually, that reminds me, you’re due an explanation of all this time stuff. It gets complicated.

Individual systems all had their own measurements based on the local celestial movements. I’ve already mentioned cycles in The Dueling Star system, for example. If you live in deep space or do much traveling between systems, though, local measurements fall apart, so we use circadian time. As a spacer myself, I still think in terms of that universal standard—twenty-four hour days, seven-day weeks, twenty-eight-day months, twelve-month years.

Since days on Fyrion technically only lasted eleven hours, we measured our days there in circadian time, existing almost completely out of sync with the rising and setting of the binary suns. Months and years, in contrast, held no meaning at all to the Dragon’s Right Eye. They didn’t care about the former, and preferred the aforementioned cycles to the latter.

All this to say, we got one day off a week, but every seventh week we had to spend that day fighting pre-scheduled duels. It bugged me to no end that they refused to make it every two months, so now I’m going to bug you with that little tidbit of uselessly frustrating information. Enjoy.

Anyway, I still had a few weeks before I had to step into the ring again, so after my morning workout and a breakfast shared with my three co-conspirators, I found myself playing ping pong with Arthur in the staff break room.

He spoke as he served. “You didn’t sleep with either of them, did you?”

My paddle missed the ball entirely.

Arthur grinned. “Seven-two.”

I chased the ball into the corner behind me. “How’d you figure it out?”

“I’ve been working this job for three cycles now. You think I don’t know what’s going on under my own roof?”

I tossed him back the ball. “She told you.”

“I guess she’d rather screw with you than with me.” Arthur served.

I managed to actually hit the ball back this time, but he returned it with the speed and ferocity of a hypersonic missile.

“Eight-two,” Arthur chimed as I spun to chase after the ball once more.

Okay maybe I wasn’t so great at ping pong. In my defense, I came from interstellar freight followed by a refueling station, neither of which had the square footage to spare for ping pong. Arthur’d been playing this very same table for the better part of a decade. Sure, I could start cycling and absolutely wipe the floor with him, but where’s the fun in that?

“So I guess I don’t have to try and trick you into thinking I’m boinking Nick, then.” I served.

Arthur volleyed back. “I’d report you if you did. Nick’s a minor.”

I hit back at a hard angle. “You’re right. That wouldn’t be very funny.”

He caught the angled shot with an easy backhand. “Is that really all you care about? Whatever’s funniest?”

The ball slowed as I popped it up. “Would I be here if it was?”

Arthur tapped it back gently. “Here in the sect? No. Here in the staff room of housing D? Probably. From what I gather, you aren’t even trying to get a lower room.”

“I like it here. I think I’ll stay until I outgrow Fyrion.” I spiked the ball.

Arthur lunged for it, lobbing it up for me. “Outgrow Fyrion? From the bottom of the rankings? Ambitious, aren’t we?”

“Don’t worry. There’s a method to my madness.” I smacked the ball down. It slipped past Arthur’s guard. “Three-eight.”

“Is that why you’re down here with me instead of spending your off-day doing something productive?”

I smiled and served. “Making friends is productive.”

Arthur tapped it back. “Most cultivators prefer friends with actual influence.”

I had to lean hard into the table to catch the ball and pop it back over. “You said yourself, you know what’s going on under your own roof.”

“So you want something from me.” He smacked it hard, and ball slammed into my side of table and off into the back wall. “Nine-three. Game point.”

I smiled sheepishly as I chased after the ball. “Let’s say I wanted to bring some ice cream to the kids in my class. How would I go about doing that?”

Arthur blinked. “That’s it? I’ll do you one better. I’ll introduce you to—”

I served hard and sharp while he was mid sentence. He returned it flawlessly, rocketing off my side of the table.

Arthur flashed a wolfish grin. “Ten-three. Good game. As I was saying, I’ll introduce you to Mindy.”

“Who’s Mindy?”

“Your new favorite person. Mindy’s entire job is deal with all the elders’ special requests, at least the ones the mortal staff can handle. Means she has wide power to get shit done, and spends all day bored out of her mind until it’s time to organize a four-course banquet on one hour’s notice.”

“That sounds stressful.”

“Remarkably. But she’s usually bored enough that she’ll do pretty much any favor as long as you ask her nicely. Ice cream for a bunch of kids? That’ll be the easiest phone call of her life.”

“I’m sold. Where is she?”

Arthur shrugged. “Nobody ever knows where Mindy is. You don’t find her. You call her.” He raised his left arm and typed away at his holopad for a moment. Seconds later, a voice echoed through the room.

“What do you want?” Mindy sounded strangely relaxed for the abrasiveness of her words.

“Mindy! It’s Arthur. I have someone I want you to meet.”

A feminine moan came over the comms. “Excuse me,” Mindy said, completely unabashed. “I’m trying out a new masseuse for Elder Berkowitz. She’s good.”

I glanced at Arthur. She certainly didn’t seem stressed. Perks of the job, huh? “Mindy, I’m Cal. It’s nice to meet you. I was hoping you could help me bring some ice cream to a class full of kids.”

“Easy enough. When, where, and how many?”

“There’s thirty kids. Any day’s fine. I just need a portal freezer or cooler or something to keep the ice cream cold. I can pick it up and drop it off from wherever, as long as you let me kno—”

“It’s done.” Mindy said.

“Thanks, I really appreciate it. Just let me know where I shou—”

“A stocked cart’ll be waiting for you by Arthur’s desk tomorrow morning. Anything else?”

“Um… no. That’s all. Thank you! The kids will really appreciate it.”

“I’m sure they will. Don’t give them my name. Nice to meet you Cal. Next time, call me from your own holo. Goodbye Arthur!”

The line went dead before Arthur had a chance to reply. “So… that’s Mindy.”

“She… seems like she leads an interesting life.”

Arthur laughed. “That’s one way of putting it.”

“So will we know when the ice cream is all set up?”

“Oh, it already is.”

I blinked. “It what?”

“When Mindy says it’s done, it’s done. She probably typed out a message on her holopad while you were talking.”

“Damn. She’s good.”

“You wanted one thing with an entire day’s notice. On the Mindy-adjusted scale, you may as well have asked her to keep breathing.”

A message beeped on my holopad confirming it’d logged Mindy’s number. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“So.” Arthur cocked an eyebrow at me. “Ice cream for kids? Doesn’t sound funny or productive.”

“No, it’s nice. Turns out I’m capable of more than just productivity and bad jokes. Who’d have thought?”

Arthur sighed. “If you were any other cultivator—if I were a cultivator—I’d accuse you of playing some angle.”

“Good thing I’m not any other cultivator.” I grinned and held up the ping pong ball, ready to serve. “Best two out of three?”

——

Before any of you get your knickers in a knot, I’d like to clarify that I did not spend my entire day off playing ping pong. I just figured you’d find my conversation with Arthur more interesting than me sitting alone in a room for eight hours with a marginally-declining headache from all the qi screaming in my ear. I was technically making progress, just not the kind of blazing, immediate progress that makes for a good story.

Anyway, true to Mindy’s word, I returned from my workout the next morning to find a rectangular object obscured under a brown woolen blanket next to Arthur’s desk. After bidding him good morning, I asked the obvious question.

“What’s with the blanket?”

“You wanted it to be a surprise, right?”

“Right. Good point.” I peeked underneath to find a simple battery-powered steel freezer on a set of wheels. At over four feet long, the thing was absolutely massive for the three-dozen ice cream bars inside, but I’d work. “Mindy’s used to feeding more than thirty people, huh?”

“You don’t want to know what kinds of things she’s had to transport on ice.”

I opened the freezer and stuck my nose in. “Smells fine to me.”

“You also don’t want to know what kinds of cleaning products she has access to.”

I yanked my head out from under the blanket. “Don’t ask questions. Got it.”

I bid Arthur my thanks and set off for class, receiving my fair share of questioning looks as I wheeled the covered freezer in front of me.

I stashed it in the corner for meditation class. The kids kept glancing at it and whispering amongst themselves, but none dared peek within, and nobody willing enough to violate my excommunication asked me about it.

At the end of the three-hour class—in which, as it happened, I finally managed to keep my focus through one of Instructor Park’s harder strikes—I gave the kids some time to eat their lunches before I made my move. Without immediately calling attention to myself, I slowly and deliberately pushed the covered cart into the center of the room. The slight squeak of the front left wheel slowly drew in more and more eyes as I approached, the children quieting one by one as their curiosity took hold.

By the time I came to a stop, silence had claimed the room.

“Hey everyone,” I addressed my audience. “I think we may’ve gotten off on the wrong foot. I’m… newer to this cultivation thing than all of you, and I realize that means your instructors have had to pay me some extra attention. I’m really sorry for that. I’m working really hard to catch up and pass out of your class so I can get out of your way, but that’ll take a few months. In the meantime, I’d rather be friends.”

“So.” I clapped my hands together for dramatic effect. “As my way of saying thanks for putting up with me, I present to you… ice cream!” I whipped the blanket away with a great swoosh, the brown wool rippling through the air theatrically as I revealed the freezer beneath.

The classroom went silent.

“He’s trying to bribe us,” one boy said. “Don’t listen to him!”

Damn, these kids were smart.

“We can still eat it,” a girl countered. “We don’t have to like him to have ice cream.”

Yet a third child didn’t speak at all, simply jumping to his feet and running up to the freezer cart. I wordlessly handed him an ice cream bar.

That opened the floodgates.

I spent the next five minutes frantically distributing frozen treats while simultaneously fending off the greedy little bastards who kept trying to slip in for seconds. The kids that actually looked at me did so with all sorts of facial expressions ranging from exaggerated anger to grudging acceptance to outright joy. I may not have won them all, but I’d won some. That was progress.

I’d finally finished distribution and begun unwrapping a bar of my own when a voice echoed from the doorway. “Ice cream, huh? Got any for me?”

I smiled up at Chrissy. “Only if you behave extra well for your cycling instructor.”

She laughed and approached the cart. “I guess we’ll have to work on our stomach meridians today, focus on processing all this sugar.”

I grinned back at her. “Teach on.”

True to her word, Chrissy led the class through a number of exercises for the one beginner meridian I hadn’t opened. I still found plenty of opportunity to be productive, working through a few more complicated techniques I’d found on the sect’s local network that could utilize my heart, lungs, and blood a bit more.

The moment her class time ended and Chrissy left the room, the kids swarmed the cart once more, ready to fight for the five leftover ice cream bars. I put an end to that, tying the brown blanket around my neck like a cape and declaring myself the grand defender of the ice cream.

We walked to combat class together, a giant mass of children crowding around me arguing why they should be the one to get seconds. I let them. At least they were talking to me.

That is, they were talking to me, when halfway down a long, windowed hallway, Lucy’s voice blared from my holopad.

“Cal! Get to shelter. Get to shelter right now. I’m holding off as many as I can, but—”

The line went dead. The lights flickered and died. Red emergency lights flared up in their place. A siren screeched.

I stood there, frozen, surrounded by children, with a blanket-cape trailing along the floor behind me and a freezer cart ahead, when an announcement filled the hallway from a speaker in the ceiling.

“Please remain calm. A void horde has descended upon Fyrion. Please remain calm. Make your way to your nearest emergency bunker. Please remain calm.”

In my defense, I managed to remain startlingly calm as I did the one thing you’re supposed to do when you get that kind of news while surrounded by children. At least I kept my voice low. I swear, none of them even heard me over the siren.

“Aw, fuck.”