Untitled Space Xianxia - Chapter 5

Chapter 5: A Way Forward

Lucy let me cry.

She didn’t interrupt to ask if I was alright, she didn’t try to stop me or convince me it would all be okay or to look on the bright side or any other meaningless bullshit. She stayed present, her perception lingering in the core room ready to listen or remind me I wasn’t alone, but she made no attempt to halt the outpouring emotions.

A blanket found its way around my shoulders. A tray with a couple of cups, a pitcher of water, and a bottle of bourbon materialized on the floor next to me. A thermos of chicken soup shortly followed.

I partook in all three, nourishing and hydrating and intoxicating myself in turn. I found the latter’s numbness more acceptable than that of the infinite sea, more human in the way it left my emotions ragged and raw rather than entirely detached. From whiskey I knew I’d eventually sober up. If I waded back into those eternal waters, gods knew if I’d ever return.

Sleep took me before my eyes could fully dry, thrusting me cruelly into an endless race down twisting hallways with demented laughter echoing behind me and a twitching cultivator around every corner.

I won’t bore you by further relaying the contents of my dreams. Nobody wants to read that.

I awoke to a dull headache and faint nausea, symptoms that I knew Lucy could probably treat yet felt appropriate. I rubbed the grogginess from my eyes and forced myself to my feet, leaving the blanket draped over shoulders as I picked up the tray with the half-empty bottle and used dishwater. I shuffled over to the door before muttering my first words since my return from the infinite sea.

“Where’re the showers?”

“In your quarters.”

“What? All of them?” The joke came half-hearted and poorly timed, the best I could manage given the circumstances.

Lucy laughed anyway. “Just yours.”

“And where do I…?” I trailed off and gently shook the tray in my hands.

“I’ll take care of those,” Lucy said as two strands of gray and golden qi whisked the dirty dishes away. “You go take that shower, and then we can see about the full tour. You remember the way back?”

“Yeah, thanks.” I truly, deeply, meant it, but at the moment I lacked the mental capacity to fully express my gratitude. Instead I shuffled off, retracing my previous steps back into Lucy’s pocket dimension and my luxurious bedroom. Sure enough, opposite the entrance were two more doors, one that led to a walk-in closet, and another that opened to a private bathroom, complete with sink, shower, and a massive open tub that I couldn’t comprehend filling.

Pocket dimensions really broke down the basic rules of voidcraft design, huh?

I let my nightgown fall to the tile floor and embarked upon the umpteenth revelation of the past few days.

Seriously, this shower changed my fucking life. A sensor in the wall must’ve measured my skin temperature or something, because the moment I tapped the touchpad, a mid-sized creek’s worth of perfectly-heated water rushed from the head above.

People who talk about water pressure are full of shit. How fast the water comes out of the pipe is only ever relevant if there isn’t enough of it, and let me tell you, speed makes a poor substitute for quantity. Or is that a pour substitute?

Either way, the shower didn’t blast me with water or attempt to pressure-wash my skin off. It simply let fall under Lucy’s artificial gravity the bounty it had to offer, a waterfall of such warmth and mass that it relaxed muscles I didn’t even know I had. Did all cultivators shower like this? ‘Cause honestly, if so, fuck immortality, I was in it for the showers.

Feeling refreshed down to my very soul, I emerged from my new favorite room, toweled off, and strode back into the bedroom to face my next conundrum: clothes. I assumed Lucy had disposed of the vac suit and underclothes I’d been wearing when I came aboard, especially since she’d have had to cut them off me to get to my injuries.

I made a beeline for the closet. Given how thoroughly she’d cleared out the rest of the cabin, I could think of no reason beyond my own use the clothes should’ve remained. An embarrassing amount of digging around in drawers and trying things on later, I left wearing a T-shirt that bore the logo of some qi supplement brand I didn’t recognize and a pair of what I’ve decided to call ‘cultivator pants.’

The dark brown synthetic-cotton bottoms hung just loosely enough to allow the full range of motion as they tapered down in a slight cone towards the feet. They felt like just a bit too much fabric to comfortably fit under a vac suit, but if I needed to kick somebody in the head, I’d have that option. The loose elastic bands around the ankles would even keep them from bunching up or getting caught in any hatches or doorways.

To my eyes they looked a touch too much like sweat pants or pajama bottoms, but the strength of the fabric and the complete lack of any other style in the closet confirmed that this was just how cultivators dressed. The void psycho had been wearing something similar when… you know.

I shook the thought from my head as I stepped back into the hallway. I didn’t even have to open my mouth before Lucy greeted me.

“Feeling better?”

“A lot, thank you,” I replied. “Seriously, thanks. I haven’t exactly been the best houseguest, and you’ve been absolutely amazing to me.”

“It takes a million little goods to pay off one great evil,” Lucy said, an uncomfortable darkness to her voice. “But enough of that. Can I get you some breakfast? Tea? Or would you prefer to start the tour right away?”

“The tour,” I answered. “Then I’ll know where to get my own breakfast. I can’t have you doing all the work around here.”

My ears thought they picked up something akin to a patronizing laugh, as if my words had been those of a naively cute child rather than a guest offering to help out, but the noise just as easily could’ve been the air-scrubbers kicking in. Either way, Lucy didn’t give me much chance to analyze the noise, whisking me away on a tour of the lower deck.

I had absolutely no frame of reference by which to judge the size of her soulspace, so I just decided to be deeply impressed by everything she showed me. What I had originally thought to be a two-man skiff actually housed a crew of five, climbing to eight if the three king-sized beds slept two.

None of the cabins matched mine for size or luxury. The two larger rooms each contained their own closets and washrooms and workspaces, while the two smaller quarters only housed twin beds and had to share a bathroom.

Though it had been deeply cleaned, the smaller room in which I’d first awoken still reeked of the impurities I’d expunged when I’d opened my meridians. I gagged as I stepped inside before thanking Lucy then and there for not treating me in the captain’s quarters. The core room had a drain in the floor for a reason.

Beyond the surplus of bedrooms, the lower deck contained a fully-equipped gym, a sparring ring complete with blunted wooden weapons, and a fucking swimming pool. Lucy could’ve easily housed fifty people and carried enough cargo to make a fortune in inter-station shipping with all the space she’d devoted to amenities for her crew of five. Fucking cultivators.

Past the exercise wing, I found the garden. Three rows of mint and basil and other basic cooking herbs filled one side, but six rows of fertile soil sat unsowed, as apparently neither Lucy nor her former partner had the necessary training to cultivate the rare and valuable plants for which the space was designed. That made three of us. I made a mental note to either learn some herbalism or recruit someone who already practiced the craft before the absolute insanity of the thought struck me.

I’d known Lucy for all of two days and already I wanted to recruit new crew members.

The water and biomass recycling systems sat understandably close to the garden. I nodded along as Lucy explained how all of it worked, pretending I understood half of what she was saying. Look, I was a welder, not an engineer. You point me to a hull puncture, and I’ll patch that son of a bitch right up, but life-support systems? They may as well have been black magic.

Having had my fair share of black magic over the past couple of days, we moved past the deep freezers with enough food to last twenty years and into the most important room on the whole ship: the kitchen.

Fire qi direct from the fusion core powered the stovetop and oven, next to which sat a holopad integrated terminal for requesting ingredients. I simply had to wirelessly sync up to view inventory and press a few buttons to summon a freshly-thawed ingredient warmed to my desired temperature and peeled, chopped, or sliced however I needed.

A set of knives and cutting boards sat ready should I want to prepare the food myself, and I’d have to combine and cook it all manually either way, but the sheer convenience of it all astounded me.

A twenty-foot bar separated the kitchen from what appeared to be a combined dining room and lounge. A wooden table long enough to host dinner guests sat closest to the bar, beyond which rested a plush red couch and two armchairs overlooking the room’s most absurd feature.

A fucking fire crackled in the hearth.

“The logs are carbon cellulose composites,” Lucy explained at my aghast expression. “It takes a fair bit of energy to reform them from their component parts after they’re burnt up, but I have the qi to spare.”

I decided she could show me the holotheater and upper deck another time. I was gonna sit by the fucking fire for a bit.

Moments later found me leaning forward in the soft armchair as I stared into the flames, a mug of earl gray in my hand. The sheer opulence of it staggered me. Back home on Veruma, mom used to put on a fire every night, but that’d been a prebuilt holo with heat and sound effects.

The real thing had a smell to it, a cozy smokiness that my body found relaxing even if my brain knew it was technically poisonous. The air around it moved in subtly different ways, pulling in and up rather than blowing out into the room. That was it. Those were the only differences. And here Lucy was, spending absurd amounts of energy to manufacture her own sustainable firewood. I repeat myself: Fucking cultivators.

“Cal,” Lucy broke me from my musings, “it’s time we talked about what’s next.”

“I’m a cultivator now, right? I guess I should do… cultivator things?”

She sighed.

“Okay, okay, seriously,” I said. “I want to learn more. I want to finish opening my meridians; I want to form a core; I want to cultivate. I want to be strong enough that the next time someone comes for me and mine, I can do more than run and hide, and I want to find out where all this qi is coming from. Why does the qi in your core feel so wrong to me, and why am I the only one who pull from the vast supply of qi out in space?”

“So you did find it again,” Lucy breathed.

Right. I hadn’t told her. I’d been so caught up in my whole nihilistic crisis and overwhelming grief I’d forgotten to mention the gods damned ocean of qi out there. “I did. I found a lot of it. It’s different from your qi, quieter and stiller and dark in nature.”

“That might explain why you thought my qi was too loud,” Lucy said. “The qi you’d found, the first qi you’d sensed, is silent. If it’s incompatible with normal qi, that could be why you only discovered it once all the regular qi had been drained from your system.”

I snorted. “Of course I stumble down the only cultivation method that requires you to die before you even begin.”

“The weft and warp are never simple,” Lucy calmly restated the ancient phrase about the threads of fate. “You’ll be forging your own path for some time, possibly your entire life.”

“Which leaves one question. What’s the next step?”

“You need guidance,” Lucy said with no uncertainty. “I can guide you through the absolute basics, but the complexities of human cultivation are beyond me. My tutelage will just as likely leave you dead or permanently spiritually stunted as help you.”

I nodded along.

“You’ll have to join a sect,” she continued. “The Dueling Stars system is your only option if you don’t want to wait through a two-year-journey, but it’s a good option. The sects there are weak enough that their outer stations might accept new recruits even if they can’t sense your qi, and their affiliation with Eternity’s Maw means there’ll always be opportunities for advancement.”

I blinked. Even vac-welders from bumfuck nowhere knew of Eternity’s Maw. Built around a massive black hole, they were the strongest sect in viable distance. That meant to find anyone stronger, you’d have to either be a powerful enough cultivator to walk the threads or somehow survive a two-hundred-year trip sub FTL. All this to say, Eternity’s Maw was the biggest fish in a very big pond.

But I digress. Lucy wanted me to join one of their subsidiaries, and from the sound of it, not one of the stronger ones. It made sense. We all had to start somewhere, and a three-week trip certainly seemed preferable to a multi-year one.

“Okay,” I finally said. “Dueling Stars it is. I assume we have enough fuel to make the trip?”

“We do,” Lucy acknowledged. “We only came to RF-31 to avoid going out of our way to visit that backwater.”

I cringed internally at the thought of my first sect being a backwater, but coming from roofie, anything under a year away fit the definition to a T. “Alright.” I stood. “We’re good to go, then?”

“Cal,” Lucy stopped me, hesitation in her voice, “we’re still docked. All you had on you when you came aboard was a torn-up vac suit and your holopad. You should go back and get—”

“No,” I cut her off. My heartbeat sped. “We should go.”

Lucy’s tone dripped with patience. “Cal, we won’t be coming back. You had a life here. You had family. I really feel it would be best if you brought something with you to—”

“To remember them by?” I exploded at her. “Is that what this is about? You don’t think I have those people imprinted on my fucking soul? How dare you. How fucking dare you. I could run the the gods damned edge of the galaxy and I’d still see Brady’s face whenever I close my eyes, still watch him rush out to help people when he could’ve hidden, still hear the sound he made when his corpse hit the floor. You don’t get to tell me what is and isn’t best for me, and you cannot make me set foot on that station.”

For the first time, Lucy didn’t chastise me for my profanity. She didn’t sigh, she didn’t raise her voice, she simply spoke in a soft whisper. “I’ve lost people too, Cal.”

“Yeah, well, at least I brought you a few chunks of his bones to remember him by.”

The room went silent. The crackle of the fire washed through the still air. My heart pounded. Adrenaline rushed through me. I breathed in sharp and shallow breaths until I forcibly slowed them. I swallowed. “I’m sorry. That… that was cruel.”

“It’s alright.” Her voice sounded tired, not sad, not angry, just tired. “You’re grieving. It’s natural.” She let out a long, drawn-out breath. “Is there anything I can say to change your mind?”

I shut my eyes for a moment—a moment was all it took—and the memories came flooding back. I shook my head as I realized it wasn’t anger that had driven my outburst.

“I can’t go back there.”

“Okay.” Just like that, she let it go. “I’ll set course for The Dueling Stars. You’re welcome to come up to the upper deck to watch us depart, or stay down here and enjoy the fire or other amenities. And Cal, remember, if you ever want to talk, I’m here.”

“Thanks,” I murmured, my eyes fixed on the empty tea mug in my hand.

I can’t quite explain what Lucy’s presence felt like, and thus find it difficult to relate how I knew she’d departed. Even with the warmth of the fire, the room seemed to grow slightly colder, somewhat less comfortable and welcoming than it had been before. It was the only indication I received that she’d diverted her attention elsewhere.

I sat back down and took a long, deep breath. The pocket dimension felt none of the telltale jerks of undocking, but I knew the procedure well enough to imagine them. I didn’t bother returning to the upper deck to watch roofie fade in the distance. Instead, I gazed into the fire.

The past could go fuck itself. There, staring into the flames, into this crackling, warm, cozy symbol of unimaginable opulence I found, for a few precious minutes, a glimpse of the future.

The Dueling Stars, Eternity’s Maw, the great and terrible world of cultivation awaited me. For the first time in my life, I stood at a precipice of countless mysteries and untold opportunity. For the first time in my life, I had a way forward. For the first time in my life, the path ahead of me was mine to build and mine tread.

I just had to start walking.

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[Author's Note] Hey everyone!  Thank you all for the feedback.  I hear you on the title, and you raise some really important points.  How does Cultivating Infinity sound?
-Nixia