Untitled Space Xianxia - Chapter 18

Chapter 18: Happy Dueling Day

The next few weeks blurred past as I threw myself into my studies. Each day I awoke to my holopad’s alarm at the crack of six—formerly five twenty-seven before I’d re-synced my circadian time to Fyrion’s schedule—and joined Nick on the way downstairs for the morning workout.

Approximately two hours of weightlifting, agility training, and boring old cardio later, the four of us—who I’d in secret begun to think of as my crew—went to breakfast. Charlotte daintily dined upon strictly measured portions of unsweetened oatmeal, berries, and artificial meat grown with such low fat I considered it an abomination against nature and flavor both.

Xavier, in contrast, piled his plate high with anything from scrambled eggs to chicken apple sausages depending on his mood, always including no fewer than two waffles drenched in the appropriate quantity of maple syrup. I tended to follow his approach, stacking my plate with whatever looked tastiest that morning, more so in an attempt to get myself to eat than for lack of nutritional care.

You would think, after weeks of daily weight training, I’d have accumulated some muscle mass. You’d think after all the pancakes and potatoes and pasta and ice cream I included in my diet, I’d have gained some weight.

I didn’t.

Fat seemed to shy away from my body, leaving my wiry muscles well toned but without anything resembling Xavier’s bulk. More and more I found I had to force myself to eat, appetite staved off by the qi in my stomach meridian. Compared to the voraciousness I saw in the others, it made sense. Making sense, though, didn’t mean I liked it. You try working out two hours every morning and gaining no muscle. It fucking sucks.

That wasn’t to say I didn’t grow stronger—I readily tracked my progress as I lifted heavier and heavier weights—but nobody, I repeat, nobody, lifts weights exclusively to get stronger. We all care a little about how we look.

Nick, similarly, failed to bulk up, though certainly not for lack of appetite. The boy ate as much as Xavier and I combined, a miraculous feat at half Xavier’s weight. It was never enough. A black hole seemed to reside within his belly, unceasingly hungry and unwilling share its bounty with the rest of Nick’s body.

Charlotte balked, at first, at Nick’s absurd caloric intake, but Xavier simply slapped him on his back and concluded that even at sixteen, he was clearly still growing. I declined to weigh in, explaining it away as somewhere between being a growing boy and the cultivating prodigy his parents seemed to think him. All cultivators, bar myself, had supernatural appetites, after all. Why wouldn’t an especially promising cultivator have an especially large appetite?

After breakfast my friends left to shower and go about whatever it was they did all day while I hastened on to my nine o’clock meditation class.

Far and away the least interesting of the classes, meditation was the first to which Vihaan returned. After the ice cream day fiasco, my classmates had moved from suspicious neutrality to grudging respect, no longer outright scowling at me, but making no effort to interact or otherwise make friends. That changed the day Vihaan returned.

They all watched as their wounded peer rushed into the classroom to wrap me in a great hug, listened at lunch as he told and retold a rather exaggerated version of my actions that day, and heard in no uncertain terms that I’d saved his life.

Apparently, saving his life wasn’t enough to get him to call me anything but ‘Mister Caliban,’ but I’d take what I could get.

From then on I became an object of fascination for the children, unable to exist in their presence without answering a barrage of questions on everything from why I’d become a cultivator to my favorite dessert. I answered ice cream to both.

As for meditation itself, I made consistent progress as the days dragged on, maintaining my focus through more and more of the senior cadets’ abuse. At least, after my work with Lucy, my posture didn’t require correcting. I refused to cycle during class, feeling my qi’s numbing effects would cheapen the training, but I knew that had I tried, I could’ve advanced to meditation two then and there.

I didn’t.

Charlotte and I had already worked out a strict schedule for when I could reasonably pass out of each class without arousing suspicion. I had two months of meditation one to go.

After a lunch break filled to the brim with questions from curious classmates, Chrissy arrived to lead us in my favorite class of the day.

I realized, far later than I would’ve liked to admit, that many of her cycling exercises were designed to help improve a young cultivator’s qi sense and work towards maximizing the percentage of the ambient qi they could pull into their core. My qi sense was already so sensitive that it hurt, and even a minuscule percentage of the ocean outside overwhelmed me.

Charlotte had implied that an important step in forming your seed core was stretching out your center to fit as much qi as possible, but I was still three meridians shy of that part. All of my remaining unopened meridians weren’t taught until cycling three, a class I wouldn’t reach for another six months according to Charlotte’s schedule, so little of what Chrissy was allowed to teach actually applied to me.

I mostly ignored her instruction, keeping out of the way as I built up my resistance to the local qi’s migraine-inducing effects and practiced various illicitly-obtained exercises targeting my spine meridian.

For all her talk about not trusting me, Charlotte hadn’t hesitated to break sect rules and offer instruction on things she was absolutely not authorized to teach. The spine meridian, according to a few documents she’d sent me, governed the lower nervous system, including but not limited to instinct, reflex, and pain. The latter of which made it the fucking worst to prepare for, as most exercises involved teaching yourself to ignore your instincts, your reflexes, or your pain in anticipation for all three to go haywire.

If anything was going to give my desperate crawl down roofie’s gangway into Lucy’s airlock a run for its money, it’d be opening my spine meridian.

Theoretically, with my skin, bone, kidney, and stomach meridians open, I could’ve advanced out of Chrissy’s class any day, but again, Charlotte’s schedule held me back. I was happy to oblige. Chrissy was nice, and while incessant, my classmates had finally started treating me as a friend rather than a threat.

For those first few days after he came back, Vihaan clung inseparably to my side as we walked from Chrissy’s classroom to the dojo. I made a point of hastening as we passed through that hallway.

Of them all, combat class proved both the most painful and the most challenging as either sparred with or suffered under the instruction of one of the three senior cadets.

The void horde attack had firmly placed the class’s importance into my mind, so I bit back my glib impulses and took my lumps with an eye towards improvement. Some combination of my renewed diligence and Vihaan’s extolling of my virtues managed to earn some respect from Instructors Charleston and Davis, but Instructor Long maintained I’d done an underwhelming job of something any true cultivator could’ve achieved far more easily.

I didn’t like Instructor Long.

Of them all, combat class posed the biggest barrier to achieving Elder Lopez’s deadline of catching up to the other cadets by the year’s end. Rather than sandbagging my ability to hide my progress, I’d have to train hard to meet the necessary milestones. It didn’t help that I needed to convince Instructor Long of all people of my skills, but I’d cross that bridge when I came to it. In the meantime, I started drilling with my new sword.

They didn’t let me spar with it for obvious reasons, but I spent hours drawing and sheathing it over and over, until I could bring the blade to bear from its home on my back without conscious thought. The steel and silver’s difference to the weighted practice swords threw my balance off entirely, forcing me to relearn the minutia of the basic swings I’d spent weeks practicing. It came easier the second time.

Xavier had absolutely gushed over the weapon when I’d first shown it to him, insisting I run through some forms with him then and there. By his judgment, I’d performed miserably yet demonstrated ‘a hero’s resolve to accept failure.’ Threads that man had a confusing outlook.

On his advice, I carried the sword with me wherever I went, less for protection than to grow comfortable around the weapon. According to Xavier, true mastery required a cultivator’s weapon to act as an extension of his body, both as a tool for dealing death and a channel for his qi.

In addition to my combat class, he gave me a list of forms to work through each night, dominating yet another hour of my already packed schedule. At least the AI that judged my accuracy with the forms just beeped how badly I’d failed rather than smacking me with a stick to make corrections mid-motion. It made for a less productive lesson, but a significantly more pleasant one.

Dinner each night varied on the whims of housing D’s cooking staff, but it always included enough variety to keep everyone at least mostly happy. My only consistent dining behavior was to forego the salad in favor of something I’d actually enjoy eating, usually some kind of meat, starch, and roasted vegetable.

Only Charlotte and Nick partook of the nightly salad, the former as a part of a well portioned plate and the latter as the first course of four.

After dinner I had an hour to spend either sparring with Xavier, peppering Charlotte with questions and requests for more documents, or reading. Threads I did a lot of reading. I read about void beast classifications—they’re entirely based on size, by the way, any link between type and threat level is completely arbitrary. I read about cycling techniques, fighting styles, and pre-meridian exercises. I read about anything and everything that caught my interest, staying up long into the night before I finally called Lucy for our evening update before bed.

And so the days passed.

I spent my off days playing ping pong with Arthur, sparring with the others, and in ceaseless meditation, only allowing myself to relax in those late hours alone in my room with endless dense manuals and academic papers to read and the curiosity to wade through them.

The work never stopped. The training never ended. The nights blipped by in a matter of seconds before my alarm blared again and I set about once more upon the grind of repetitive, incremental progress. No revelations came, no mastery sprang from nought, no void beasts descended. I woke up, I worked tirelessly to improve in some small yet measurable way, I went to bed sore and exhausted. Rinse and repeat.

I told you I wouldn’t bore you with this stuff, so let’s cut to the chase.

Six weeks into my stay on Fyrion, the twin suns rose on a day I’d been anticipating and dreading since my arrival: dueling day.

It began, as all important days ought, with breakfast.

“You guys should’ve seen the gym this morning,” I greeted them, wiping sweat from my brow as I sat at our usual table. “Absolute ghost town. Would’ve thought people wanted to warm up before they fight.”

“There’ll be time before the first round,” Xavier explained. “Better to save your energy for when you need it.”

I shrugged and grabbed a chocolate chip banana muffin off my tray. “Not like I could win even if I wanted to.” I sank my teeth into the muffin top, tearing away almost half of it in a bite so large I immediately regretted it.

Xavier scowled at me. “You should always desire to win. The ceaseless drive for victory distinguishes the cultivator from the mortal.”

I swallowed, pausing to gulp down water to wash it down. “I’m pretty sure generational wealth distinguishes the cultivator from the mortal, but I see your point. Counterpoints: I don’t need any of the rewards the sect grants for a high ranking, I won’t waste time fighting off challengers if I stay at the bottom, and somehow winning when six weeks ago I only had four meridians open would draw way too much attention.”

Charlotte nodded along. “He’s right.”

“I know,” Xavier grumbled. “I don’t like it, but I know.”

I took another bite of my muffin.

Our conversation lulled for a few moments as we ate, each absorbed in our own pre-duel worlds, before a cacophony exploded through the vast mess hall as a thousand holopads beeped at once.

“Huh.” I glanced down at the message. “Pairings are up.” I discarded my now-empty muffin wrapper and moved in on some hash browns.

Xavier and Charlotte both similarly nodded and continued eating, leaving a bewildered Nick to gape at us while all around our neighbors pored over their pairings. “Y…you guys don’t care?”

Xavier beamed. “A true champion accepts any challenge that comes his way.”

Nick blinked. “Right. You, I get.” He glanced over at me. “And you don’t care because you’re going to lose anyway.” He turned his eyes to Charlotte. “But why are you not obsessively crafting battle plans right now?”

“I already have. I set my pairings up weeks ago.”

Nick gaped. “You can do that?”

Xavier glared at her, his voice turning sharp. “No. You can’t.”

“You can’t,” Charlotte clarified. “The elders make the pairings, and most elders are willing to move things around a bit if the right person asks.”

I raised an eyebrow at her. “And you’re the right person?”

“Threads no, but I know who is.” She opened her holopad, spinning its display to show off her three scheduled duels. She started at the top. “Benjamin Plithe, rank thirty-nine-oh-two is the son of Elder Plithe. He feels my father got too much of the credit for his grandmother’s work during the void horde a few cycles back. I hired a dozen mortal staff members to talk about how great my father is as he passed by, just enough to remind him of the bad blood between our families, just enough for him to convince his daddy that he needs to put House Velereau in its place.”

She lowered her finger to indicate the next name. “I chose Barbara Duff, rank forty-two-eighty-six, because it’d look suspicious if I only fought people ranked above me. She was easy. I just had to throw a sparring match against Xavier right as she walked by to convince her I would be an easy target. She ran straight to Elder Chang, her mother’s best friend.”

She moved on to her final match, her voice dripping with pride. “Last but not least, Lucas Ulrich, rank thirty-seven-nineteen. Two months ago, I let slip to Wendy Grant—known gossip—that I had a thing for him. Two weeks ago, I sent flowers to his girlfriend under Harris Brown—his best friend’s—name, making sure the security cameras in the flower shop saw me do it. They all got in this huge fight—I think Harris wound up with a black eye—before they tracked the flowers back to me. Now Lucas thinks I’m a crazy stalker who almost ruined his relationship and his friendship, so he asked his godfather, Elder Smith, to pair us together so he could teach me a lesson. If all goes to plan, I should be in Housing C by the end of the day.”

Nick stared slack jawed. Xavier bristled with disproval.

I actually spoke. “That’s insane.”

Charlotte smirked. “That’s the game.”

“It’s dishonest,” Xavier snarled. “If you deserve a higher ranking, you’ll win naturally.”

“You think any of those three got their rankings by just being better fighters?” She shook her head. “The nice part about this trick is it only works on people willing to abuse their family connections.”

“Then challenge them normally,” Xavier said.

“He has a point,” I added. “Why bother with all this when you can just challenge people whenever?”

Charlotte sighed, leaning in and taking on the tone of explaining the obvious. “If you specifically challenge someone several hundred ranks above you, it sends the message that you prepared a tactic specifically for them. That makes you look weak for your rank and thus paints a target on your back. But I couldn’t have preprepared for my matches today. I only got the pairings this morning.” She winked.

“You think nobody’s going to realize what’s going on here?” Nick asked.

“These people don’t know each other,” Charlotte said, “and even if one of them began to suspect, nobody would ever admit to being played.”

“It still feels shady,” I said. “It’s a lot of dishonesty for what, a room with a bit more ambient qi? Isn’t the extra focus room hour enough?”

“Every edge, Cal,” Charlotte replied like a mantra. “Every edge. We don’t all have an infinite supply of qi right outside. The sect allocates its extremely limited resource to the most promising cadets. More resources means more success means more resources. The higher up you get, the bigger the feedback loop. If you want to reach the top, you need every advantage, every trick, every edge.”

Every cultivator thinks it’s gonna be them, Lucy’s words echoed through my head. I exhaled. “Alright, well, as long as you don’t use your mind control powers on any of us, I guess go ahead.”

“It’s not mind control,” Charlotte scoffed. “It’s an art. It’s about finding out what people want and what they’re afraid of and finding opportunities therein.”

“Social voodoo,” I teased, “got it. Just don’t use it on me.”

Her face flattened, her gaze going cold as she spoke with dead even tone. “Who says I haven’t?”

I stilled. My eyes met hers, the hubbub of the meal hall around us fading into the background as tension mounted. My mind raced. Had she been playing me from day one? Had she known I’d give her focus room hours? Could she—

Her mask cracked. A sly smile stretched across her face. It shattered as she let out a laugh. “I’m kidding. Most people I manipulate come out the other side really disliking me. I’m going to make some enemies today. You, Cal, I hope never to consider an enemy.”

“Yeah,” I said, still unnerved at her social voodoo, “me too.”

“Hey, Cal?” Nick’s voice broke the moment. He gazed down at his holopad. “I think you should look at your pairings.”

By the look on his face, I already had some idea what I was going to find as I opened the missive with my dueling schedule. Sure enough, there it was, right at round one.

0930, Ring 12: Caliban Rex v. Nickolas Vesper

“Well, hey.” I reached across the table to pat him on the shoulder. “Congrats on your free win.”

Nick gulped.

I recognized neither of my other two opponents, but a tap on their names brought up a headshot and some basic info. Both sat near the bottom of the standings. Both would probably whoop my ass if I let them.

Taking his cue from the rest of us, Xavier finally checked his own pairings to find yet another surprise. “The threads favor me! Look!” He shoved his holopad in Charlotte’s face. “I’ve got my own match at housing C. No maneuvering required.”

Charlotte squinted at the name. “Darla Young? She’s six hundred spots above you. How did that happen?”

“It must have something to do with my meteoric rise.”

I had to give it to the big guy, he had improved. I couldn’t tell you what part the extra focus hour or bonus sparring sessions with Charlotte played, but in the six weeks since my arrival, Xavier had climbed over five hundred ranks, from the absolute bottom at five thousand and six up to forty-four ninety three. I guess his habit of constantly challenging people to duels was finally paying off.

Charlotte groaned. “That’d be just like them, throw a rising star against a wall to either accelerate their trajectory or knock them down a peg. Darla’s going to want to beat you bad. She needs to send a message.”

Xavier clenched his fist enthusiastically. “I eagerly await this challenge!”

I couldn’t help but grin. For all his weird idiosyncrasies and way of speaking, Xavier probably had a healthier mindset about all this cultivation stuff than any of us. I gestured with my head to the growing mass of people flowing out of the dining hall. “Shall we?”

We stood as one, wading through the rapidly emptying mess together to bus our trays. Only there did we part, Nick and I to join the masses on their way to the gym, Charlotte and Xavier to the transport platform to catch a pod to housing C.

But before we left, before Charlotte’s scheme could come to fruition, before Xavier could run headlong into a wall named Darla, before Nick could pit himself against cultivators years his senior, before I could struggle to lose with as few injuries as possible, Xavier stopped us. One by one he looked us in the eyes, his brow furrowed in stern solemnity as he gathered our complete focus.

A big dumb grin stretched across his face. “Happy dueling day!”

Charlotte let out an exasperated breath. Nick blinked in uncertain silence.

Something about Xavier’s earnest enthusiasm rent clean through my rising trepidation, pierced my cynicism of the whole ranking system, obliterated any ounce of misanthropy that might’ve lingered in my mind. Here, amidst the schemers and the bullies and the nepotists, existed a man who honestly enjoyed the challenge, who truly wanted to better himself, who really was just happy to be there. It made me glad to call him friend.

I smiled back. “Happy dueling day.”

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[AN] Hey everybody!  Just a heads up, I may or may not have a chance to write chapter 19 before I need to switch back to Dungeon Devotee.  In the meantime, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the story so far, as well as another potential title.

How does The Empty Core sound?