Untitled Space Xianxia - Chapter 3

Chapter 3: Debt Unpaid

I dreamt of a soft bed and a cool pillow and a woman with a warm smile and silver streaks running through a golden braid. She sat at my bedside, watching over me and stroking my hair as I slumbered. I never questioned why she did this, never doubted this stranger’s intentions. It felt nice. It felt safe.

Behind her, darkness lurked. Dread and despair loomed in the shadows, ready to inflict harsh reality upon the pleasant dream.

“Shhh,” the woman calmed me. “You poor thing. Rest now. I’ll keep them at bay until you’re ready.”

The words seemed to echo through my head.

“Until you’re ready.”

“Until you’re ready.”

My eyes snapped open.

The room had changed. Gone were the sterile white walls and the barren twin bed. I lay in a suite built for a king, or at least what I assumed kings liked. Navy blue silk sheets caressed my skin beneath a remarkably soft blanket and a silver-embroidered quilt. The dark blue and silver palette extended to the walls and trimmings respectively, bestowing a somber, royal aesthetic to the decor.

For all the copious use of silver, the cabin itself was remarkably minimalistic. No portraits hung upon the walls, no decorations nor knickknacks nor real signs of character filled the space. If anyone had ever lived here, they’d either packed up well or been a particularly boring person. The only furnishings were the massive four-poster bed, a bare desk with a single, wheeled office chair, a few rows of empty shelving on the walls, and the medical cart, which still beeped along at my side.

That’s when I noticed the tube was gone. Only the IV continued to tether me to those damn machines.

I inhaled deeply, eager to savor the sensation of once more breathing under my own volition, until the cool air passed through my throat and I realized my mistake.

Wow was I parched.

My eyes darted around until I found a pewter tray with a pitcher and cup sitting atop the medical cart. I didn’t bother with the cup.

Screw post-workout water. I’m done with ice water on a hot day. Three AM water can go fuck itself. Those first gulps awake after extubation were the gods damned elixir of life. Say what you want for saline drips, but nothing deals with a dry throat like a good old fashioned sip.

Once I’d had my fill, I set the half-empty pitcher back on its tray and took stock.

The bandages were gone. In their place was a pale green garment that could charitably be called robes and more-accurately called a nightgown. Peering beneath it, I found no scars where any of the various punctures had been, save for a curved line just next to my heart. Only the bone that had pierced my blood meridian had left its mark.

I glanced at the back of my left wrist to summon my holopad, which readily displayed all the vital signs it broadcast to the machinery on the cart. Apparently they were pumping me with saline, a nutrient mix, and some drug I’d never heard of. That latter bore a little note that read, to counteract the sedatives.

A part of me wanted to do that thing holo characters do where they dramatically rip out their IVs and go wandering around. That always seemed stupid to me. I’m no doctor, how should I know how important the IV is or how safely to remove it?

So I did the much more sensible thing and started talking to the empty room. “Hello? Is anyone there?”

“Good morning. How are you feeling?”

I jumped as the familiar voice emanated from the empty air right next to me. “I’m… um… okay, I guess. Where are you?”

“I’m right here,” the voice replied, her tone soft if a bit patronizing. “I know it doesn’t seem like it, but I am.”

“Um…” I managed, the height of eloquence. “And where is here? It can’t be a ship, not with all these unsecured objects.”

“You’re in a midsized pocket dimension. It’s where we keep living quarters, amenities, and cargo away from all the jostling of space travel.”

“So we are on a ship. Kind of.” I scowled. “Who’s ‘we’? Is someone else here?”

“I’m sorry.” The invisible woman’s voice fell. “It’s just me, now. You don’t have to worry about him anymore.”

Something in the back of my mind burned at the mention of this ‘him,’ but I pushed past it. “Why can’t I see you?”

“You can,” she explained. “I’m all around you.”

“Wait,” I breathed as the realization sunk in. I raised a hand to my forehead in shock. “You’re the ship.” I blinked. “I’m on a fucking soulship.”

“Language!”

“Sorry.” Something in her tone brought me to apologize without thinking. I never apologized for the way I talked, especially when I found certain words warranted.

Here, they were warranted, and they’re still warranted, so here’s some more. Do you have any idea what it takes for a ship to develop a fucking soul? Of course you don’t. It’s a long ass time.

For an inanimate object to grow a soul, it has to experience a critical mass of life as well as the entire breadth of purpose for which it was designed. For a sword, that’s easy: cut things, maybe parry a few blows, maybe impress some cute girls. For a ship? Those massive juggernauts with six-figure crews take centuries to gather enough experience for a soul. A skiff like this with a crew of no more than two at any given time would’ve taken millennia. Multiple millennia.

If a sapient ship told you it was probably a couple thousand years old, you’d swear too.

“How did I get here? How did you find me?” I paused for a moment before building up the courage to add, “Why did you help me?”

Sorrow and regret colored her voice. “You came to me in your hour of need, and I abandoned you. I feared for my life, so I left you to your fate. Only when the threat was… gone, dared I return to find you by some miracle alive. Restoring you to health as best I could but scratches the surface of the debt I owe.”

My heart quickened. “You couldn’t have stopped him.”

“No, but I could’ve given myself. My core alone holds more qi than most of your crew put together. How many died so that I could live? How many innocent souls were lost to save the one who delivered such destruction to them?”

“He was insane! There was nothing you—”

“Thank you, Cal, for your forgiveness, but absolution isn’t yours to grant. It’s mine to find. I fear I’ll carry this shame for the rest of my life, but in the meantime, I swear by the stars, the galaxies, and the threads that bind them, I’ll aid you in whichever way I can.”

There was a weight to the words, a solemnity that carried past the voice itself and deep into my core. I knew, in that moment, more than I’d ever known anything, that I could trust this woman.

I swallowed and blinked away the gathering moisture in my eyes. “Thank you,” I managed.

The conversation lulled for a few breaths as I collected my thoughts. Look, this was a lot of information, okay? We can’t all just blow through life-changing events like they’re nothing. I couldn’t even think about what’d happened back on roofie. Every time the thoughts bubbled up in my mind, they seemed to blur and distance themselves. I think the ship might’ve had something to do with it.

Mentally referring to her as ‘the ship,’ brought me to my next question. “What do I call you?”

“My official designation is LC-81535, but my former partner called me—”

“Lucy,” I murmured. Apparently cultivators and mortals used the same naming conventions.

“Indeed. I quite liked it.”

“Lucy it is then,” I said, a smile stretching across my face. “You really did a bang-up job on my injuries.” I tensed and stretched my once-shattered hand. “No residual pain, no stiffness, only the one scar.” I glanced down at my holopad. “It says here I was dead for a few minutes?”

“That’s not the strange part. The strange part is that you both died and came back to life before I found you. As far away from any gravity well as I’ve ever been, you managed to find enough ambient qi to not only restart your heart, but open three meridians.”

That last bit came with hint of disproval that for some reason hurt far more than it should’ve. “Was I not supposed to? I thought that’s what cultivators did.”

“That’s what cultivators do in a safe and stable environment under experienced supervision. You did it sedated, intubated, and with a hole in your chest. The damage to your blood meridian may’ve forced your hand, but it was foolish to continue as you did. It’s a marvel you didn’t hurt yourself.”

I blinked. “I didn’t? Well that’s good, at least. I’m new to this whole cultivation thing.”

Lucy let out a patient sigh. “How much do you know?”

“Um… I know it’s all about taking in qi from the environment and circulating it through meridians. I know once you’ve opened all twelve you start forming a core. Cultivators judge each other based on how big their core is?”

“How dense,” Lucy corrected.

“Sure. How much energy is in there, anyway. There are…” I tallied them up in my head. “Twenty two core levels, categorized into five stages. I think advancing from stage to stage is supposed to be significantly harder? I don’t know. The strongest cultivator I ever saw had a titanium core, so still in the metal stage. I know they meditate a lot, and they breathe a certain way, and they care way more about respect and their little hierarchy than any sane person should.” I paused for a moment as I tried and failed to remember anything else before I asked, “How’d I do?”

“You sound like a mortal,” Lucy answered.

“I should hope so. I am a mor—shit.”

“Language.”

“Sorry,” I exhaled, the words soft on my tongue. “I’m a cultivator now.”

“Barely,” Lucy said. “Three open meridians does not a cultivator make, and this far away from any gravity wells, you’ll have a hard time finding enough qi to open a fourth, let alone the full twelve.”

“But I found some before. Maybe I could find it again.”

“Perhaps, but I don’t consider recreating your prior circumstances a viable option.” She paused for a moment, allowing the silence to hang in the air. “How did you do it?”

“I don’t know. I was drained. I was dying—or dead, I guess, and I had a thought about the infinite void of space, how my emptiness and its emptiness were the same and its vastness rendered my existence nothing in comparison. So… not the most poetic of dying thoughts.”

“An epiphany, then,” Lucy muttered. “Epiphanies bear great power as we forge a connection to one of the threads that binds the universe. You mentioned meditation. One of the reasons cultivators meditate is in contemplation of life’s great mysteries in the hopes of bringing about such an epiphany. You must have touched upon something truly great to survive as you did.”

“So that explains it, then? I realized something and got a bunch of qi as a reward?”

“Not quite. It explains how you went from a clueless mortal to someone who could sense and manipulate qi enough to take it in, condense it, and open three meridians, but it doesn’t explain where it came from, nor its… unique properties.”

I scowled. “What properties.”

“It doesn’t exist.”

“Excuse me?”

Lucy let out a breath. “Well, obviously it exists. It saved your life. It opened your meridians. But no matter how I look at it, it just isn’t there. When your holopad gave me access to your vitals, I could deduce its presence. I could see how the bone in your chest shook with each impact. I could feel how the pressure in your core fell to zero as you condensed it. I could watch your meridians clear themselves of impurities. I could see the ways it acted upon the world—”

“But you couldn’t see it,” I finished. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. You seem to have stumbled upon something I’ve never heard of. I’m sure someone somewhere knows something of what you’ve done. It’s possible it took having the epiphany you did while being utterly drained of your natural qi to even sense the energy you found. I doubt many—if any—have accomplished such a thing, but the cosmos are vast.”

I nodded along. “I can’t be the first, right?”

Lucy didn’t answer.

In case you were wondering, uncertain silence is an even more disconcerting answer coming from a thousand-year-old spaceship. I bit the inside of my cheek, gaze flitting around wildly as my instinct to avoid eye contact clashed with Lucy’s lack of eyes. “What happens now?”

“If you’re feeling up to it, I think your first step should be to see if you can find this qi of yours again.”

“Okay. How do I do that?”

“First you leave,” Lucy replied. “Whatever you found, I doubt it was hiding in a pocket dimension. You’ll have to come out to the upper deck.”

“Yeah, just let me…” I reached down to remove my IV, but already the needle was gone from my vein, a small bandage in its place. “The fuck?”

“Language,” Lucy chided, sounding more bored than irate.

“Sorry. How did you—”

“How did I remove your IV? A bit of qi manipulation. How did I do it without you noticing? A bit of very gentle qi manipulation,” Lucy bragged.

“Damn,” I cursed, pulling the blankets off me to reveal my gorgeous green cotton nightgown. “That’s how you treated me?”

“That’s how I do most things. Like you humans, ships don’t come with mechanisms for moving things around inside us.”

Opting not to make the ‘inside you’ joke to someone who chided me for swearing, I swung my legs around and pushed myself out of bed. I almost collapsed then and there, not from weakness or anything, but surprise at what awaited my bare feet. “Holy shit. You have hardwood floors. Actual, real, hardwood floors.”

“Language.”

“Sorry.” I recollected myself. Why had I believed pocket dimensions and a living soul but not a wooden floor? Shaking my head, I moved for the room’s only exit. The metal door slid open for me as I approached, reacting quickly and suddenly enough that I didn’t even have to break my stride.

At least until I stepped through it and realized my dilemma. “Um… which way?”

“Left.” Lucy’s voice made me jump as it sprang from the empty space in front of me rather than the empty space in the bedroom I’d grown accustomed to. This whole disembodied voice thing was gonna take some acclimation time.

The hallways kept the wood flooring, but forewent the blue and silver for a soft eggshell white with stressed-wood crossbeams. It made for a jarringly rustic aesthetic, as if I’d stepped from a spaceship into a medieval reenactment.

Lucy directed me past a number of unmarked doors and even a long window into what looked like a garden before we arrived at a matte white set of metal sliding doors, their hue just different enough from that of the walls to be unsettling. Like the bedroom, the doors opened automatically to admit me into what I could only assume was the ship proper.

As I’d have expected from a skiff, space was tight. Matte white panels coated the floor, ceiling, and inner wall of the four-foot-wide hallway. The first four feet of the outer wall housed a curved-top enclosed space for storage and wiring, above which only a single panel of glass separated me from the vacuum of space.

I gaped. Lucy had a fucking hallway with a window as big as the entire viewing deck on roofie.

Misreading the sudden pause in my step, Lucy raised her voice in concern. “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine, I just…” I trailed off, eyes glazing over as I gazed out into space. It beckoned to me, whispered promises of infinite mystery and untold adventure, of hope and possibility in limitless supply. I found music in the dark between the stars, a tune at once that urged I listen, a song I dreamt one day to sing.

Of course, I couldn’t explain any of this to Lucy. Hell, I can barely explain it to you. At least I don’t have to worry that you’ll think I’m crazy. You already know.

“Cal?” Lucy pulled me from my reverie.

“Yes, yes, sorry, just… contemplating.” She’d said cultivators did that, right?

She led me down the almost painfully white hallway until it curved back around at the skiff’s rear. I swear to you here and now, you’re never gonna hear me call it Lucy’s rear. That would be rude.

Glancing down, I saw how the windowed outer hall seemed to traverse both sides of the skiff, leaving various small rooms and the entrance to the pocket dimemsion—or ‘lower deck’—in the middle. We didn’t head that way. Instead, Lucy led me through a door at the very back of the ship.

The ten-by-ten room inside had padded flooring, a drain, various painted qi formations that I didn’t even come close to recognizing, and a nuclear reactor.

As it turns out, the only difference between the fusion core a high-level cultivator will eventually develop and the fusion core that powers a ship or a station like roofie is whether or not it’s inside a living human. Surprise surprise, sustained nuclear reactions, qi-based or chemical or otherwise, are a lot easier to set up outside the spiritual space of the human soul.

The two did work a bit differently in practice. There were all manner of corners to cut in the manufacturing process that led to most ship reactors burning a bit dirty, and of course, since ships didn’t gain energy from eating like us fleshy meatbags, most of the qi output went towards keeping the lights on and the thrusters working.

When the void psycho had drained roofie’s core, he hadn’t actually drained it, but rather pulled enough qi that the station’s other demands overwhelmed it and caused it to fail. It wouldn’t have taken much. A sentient ship could, in theory, advance its core enough to generate excess for personal use and empowerment, but Lucy didn’t know any that had, at least not into the next core level.

The reactor sat within a metal pillar at the room’s center. Only a small glass window revealed the core itself. It looked like a ball of metal that glowed bright yellow, not quite as bright as a star, but bright enough it made me squint to look at it.

“This is the core room,” Lucy explained. “Cultivators spend their time here, cycling and absorbing any qi that inefficiencies in the reactor give off. It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing. It should go without saying you only take the spill-off. Draining the reactor itself will kill it.” The following ‘and me’ went unsaid.

“Right,” I said, scratching the back of my head. “So I just…”

“Take a seat,” Lucy instructed. “Anywhere works.”

I obeyed, plopping down right where I stood into a crosslegged pose.

“Good. Now straighten your spine. Shoulders back. Eyes level.” She went on for some time, making smaller and smaller corrections to my basic posture before at last saying, “Cultivation takes time. You may or may not perceive it, but odds are you’ll be sitting in this same position for hours. If your posture’s not right, you’ll hurt yourself.”

I nodded, which apparently moved my neck and back enough to warrant a whole new set of posture corrections before she was finally satisfied. From there she guided me through a breathing exercise, which turned out to be less about breathing into your belly through the nose and out through the mouth or whatever, and more about keeping the correct rhythm.

Humans are actually pretty shit at keeping time. Our heartbeat, our pulse, the rhythm that drives our entire biology, keeps changing. The next time you hear a crowd clap along to live music, listen for how out of time they get.

All this to say, it took about an hour before I managed to breathe right. Lucy told me it’d get easier with practice, but I think cultivators just stop realizing they’re fucking it up when instructors stop looking over their shoulders.

“Okay,” Lucy said once I’d learned how to breathe. “Next I want you to visualize your core.”

I gave a slight nod. This part was easy; I’d done it already when I’d opened my meridians. I just had to—

“In, out, in, out,” Lucy started counting as my breathing once again fell out of time.

Okay, maybe the ventilator had helped a bit. I tried again, focusing in on my breathing until I could trust my subconscious enough to take over. I focused inward, searching for that pool of mysterious energy that’d saved my life. I found little more than a puddle. Apparently recovering from all those shrapnel wounds had cost a bit of qi.

“Good, good,” Lucy said, somehow aware that I’d successfully visualized my core. I’d have wondered if I needed to revoke her access to my holopad’s bio-data, but that train of thought would’ve earned me another hour of breathing lessons. I kept focused.

“Next, I want you to circulate your qi. Split it evenly between your three open meridians, even if that means they aren’t flowing at full capacity. We’re not trying to reinforce your meridians, just increase awareness.”

I wordlessly obeyed, splitting the liquid qi into thirds and sending a stream through each meridian. I made it four seconds before inhaling for just a little too long.

“You’re doing well,” Lucy reassured me. “You’re doing very well. Now, again. In, and out.”

She counted me back into time and I delved once more into my core. This time, I lasted nine seconds.

We progressed from there, repeating the frustrating start-and-stop as I progressively managed to maintain my breathing for longer and longer. At something like attempt number eighteen, gods know how many hours in, I finally reached the next step.

“Okay,” Lucy spoke the word carefully as if afraid of upsetting my focus. “Now in the same way you’re visualizing your qi, I want you to expand your focus outward. Start slow, maybe just an inch away from your skin. Don’t think about the air or the floor or the ship. Think about qi. There’s energy all around you. How does it feel?”

It felt loud, loud and weak like a sick child crying for attention. It grated against me, foreign and wrong and asserting its existence as if for some reason I should care. It was strange. I’d expected it to be scarce. I’d expected it to be thin, so little that I could barely perceive it, but the opposite was true.

I perceived it so much it hurt. Okay, maybe not quite hurt. It was more like a fly buzzing in my ear, small and annoying and useless but impossible to ignore. So little couldn’t possibly overwhelm my senses, but it could certainly distract them.

It went away the moment I opened my mouth to relay all this to Lucy. Look, I’d been cultivating for two days, cut me some slack if I can’t talk and meditate at the same time.

“That’s… not how I would describe it,” she said once I’d finished my explanation. “I’d call it… warm, full of life, eager and energetic. Yes, the qi here is weak, we are in deep space, but you’re the first I’ve heard liken it to a crying toddler.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means we all perceive qi in our own way?” Lucy offered. “I’ve known a lot of cultivators, child, but I haven’t studied the art. I’m a ship, not a teacher.”

I took no offense at her calling me child. After however many millennia she’d lived, the difference between twelve and twenty-two didn’t really matter. “Back to it, then?”

“Back to it,” Lucy agreed, counting off once more.

I was thankful when she didn’t let me try and take in any of the hyperactive qi. I found it almost repulsive. Imagine that—a vac-welder from bumfuck nowhere turning his nose up at qi on his second day cultivating. I could already feel myself becoming the entitled asshole most cultivators were. I guess when you spend all day looking inward, it’s easy to think the world revolves around you.

Instead, we worked on expanding my external perception beyond the first few inches. Lucy told me that the wider a cultivator’s sphere of influence, the more qi they could take in. How much of the qi within your radius you managed to gather was an entirely separate axis of improvement we hadn’t reached quite yet. For the time being, she just wanted me to touch the boundaries of the core room.

I made unsteady progress. Sometimes my reach would leap a foot or more in a single go, others I’d manage barely an inch before losing focus or hitting some block, but on we pressed.

At one point Lucy pulled me from my meditation to reveal a ham sandwich and a glass of lemonade had magically appeared at my side. I gaped at that, barely holding back profanity as I realized that a thousand-year-old soulship had made me a sandwich.

Yep. I’m still not over the soulship thing. It’s gonna take a bit.

I devoured the delicious lunch with all the reverence and grace of a twenty-two-year-old vac-welder, thanked Lucy profusely, and went back to the grindstone.

When my senses reached the reactor core, that buzzing in my ear turned to a scream. My focus fell apart as I gasped and clutched at my ears, a headache building behind my temples. I fell back against the padded floor.

“Cal! Are you okay? What’s wrong, child?”

“It’s loud,” I managed through gritted teeth. “It’s so loud.”

“Shh, shh, it’s okay. You’re okay,” she cooed.

Patronizing as her words were, they worked. My heart stopped pounding, the ringing faded from my years, and the headache drained away. I sat back up. “Okay,” I echoed. “I’m okay.”

“Do you want to stop?” Lucy offered. “Perhaps it would be best to wait until we can find an instructor who knows what loud qi means.”

“No.” I straightened my posture, getting back into position to try again. “Again.”

She didn’t question me.

I tried to prepare myself for the onslaught of overstimulation, but the mere act of bracing set my breathing off and forced me to start over. The second time I sensed Lucy’s core, I was ready for it. I knew going in that the obnoxious demands of the weak ambient qi would explode into an onslaught of noice.

It still took me by surprise. It still shattered my focus in under a second.

“Again,” I grumbled through my headache, jumping right into it before Lucy could talk me down.

The essence of cultivation, I discovered, seemed to be learning new skills through brute-force repetition. I had no idea if I was acclimating myself to the brightness of the core the correct way, only that if I tried it enough times, I’d get there eventually.

The problem with brute-force repetition is that it’s remarkably boring. It’s boring to do, and it’s boring to hear about. There are only so many ways I can say ‘I tried over and over again for hours until I finally did it,’ regardless of how difficult or painful those attempts were.

So here’s the deal. I’ll try to avoid boring you with pointless descriptions of brute-force repetition, and you’ll pretend that just because something took a short time to read doesn’t mean it took a short time to do. Got it?

Good.

It took a few hours before I could reliably maintain my focus and breathing with the fusion core screaming at me, an hour more before I could keep expanding my senses past it. I’m hesitant to say I got used to the core’s presence, but I at least made decent progress towards learning how to ignore it.

I’d dismissed two of my holopad’s bedtime reminders before my qi sense finally touched the boundaries of the room—directly to my left as I wasn’t sitting quite center. I suppressed my elation, eager to push on as much as I could before my concentration inevitably lapsed. Just a few more inches, I told myself. Just a few more inches and I can—

The core went silent. The buzzing in my ear faded away. The floor beneath me, the air around me, Lucy’s calming presence all vanished as the leftmost point of my perception passed the outer hull to touch hard vacuum.

It was right there. It had always been there. It was cold and comfortable and quiet and dark. It demanded nothing. It didn’t impose its existence upon me; it asked not for attention or influence. It simply was.

From barely grazing the edge of space, I went from a man squinting at the sun to one standing upon a flimsy raft in an endless ocean. No more could the core perturb me, for noise could find no footing in the face of so much silence. In its vastness, I was nothing, yet how could it be vast without something by which to measure it? As it defined me, so too did I definite it.

I reached for it, longing to once more sip from these eternal waters that had deigned to spare my life. It heeded my call, rushing in to join with its kindred spirit. I drank it in, eager and joyous and rejuvenated in the bounty of the infinite sea.

Until the waves came crashing down.

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