Untitled Space Xianxia - Chapter 2

Chapter 2: The Survivor

“Caliban? Caliban, can you hear me?”

The words drifted through my mind even as consciousness eluded me, the first trickle in the oncoming storm of sensory information to break through the blackness around me. It sounded distant and tinny as if it echoed from down the hall, yet a distinctly feminine character survived the trip to my ears.

“Caliban, you need to move.”

I groaned and rolled my head to the side and muttered the only response my addled brain could think of in the moment. “It’s Cal.”

The feminine voice let out a patient sigh. “Alright, Cal, listen to me. I know you’re in a lot of pain, but you need to—”

“Pain?” I mumbled. “What pain are you—” It hit me all at once. “Oh. There it is.” My head throbbed like an army had marched across it. My right hand sent stabbing jolts up my arm, a curious reaction considering it hadn’t been my hand that’d been stabbed.

It’d been the rest of me.

All across my torso and legs, small spots of red burned with their own rumbling infernos. Blood trickled down my leg, my side, my chest, its warmth and wetness sticking my clothes to the wounds. A hole in my left lung hissed air with every pained breath. A puncture in my abdomen wafted a foul stench into the hallway, indicating intestinal damage. Neither of these individually life-threatening injuries gave me much pause.

The three-inch shard of bone sticking through my upper chest did. The fact I hadn’t kicked it quite yet meant it must’ve missed my heart, but if the pain was any judge, it’d certainly hit something. What felt like the rhythmic crashing of waves upon a beach slammed against the bone shard, each sending ripples of agony down my entire body. That single wound on its own almost drove me back into unconscious delirium, but the voice had other ideas.

“Cal, you need to move. Cal? Caliban! Stay with me. Cal, can you hear me? Open your eyes if you can hear me.”

I grit my teeth and blinked my eyes open. Well, eye. Despite my best effort, my left eye opted to remain shut.

A horror scene greeted me. An even layer of blood splatter coated the floor and walls in a circle around where the cultivator had once stood. Bones and bits of tissue scattered about the floor and walls.

I’m going to do you the favor of not describing the man’s remains any further than as a pile of goo. Trust me, that’s all you want to know.

My holopad blared with a dozen alarms, by I ignored them all. I already knew I was fucked up. It was the loud and unceasing whistling sound that grabbed my attention, a sound I’d come across all too many times in my line of work: depressurization.

My eye darted left to the source of the noise, where I found a hole roughly the width of a rib in one of the viewing ports. The bone had pierced the window clean through.

One of the problems with living in deep space is that you can’t crack open the windows whenever you want a bit of fresh air. In fact, ‘keep the windows closed’ was a very important lesson that I was already in the process of learning the hard way.

“Cal,” the feminine voice returned. It sounded middle-aged, soft, and comforting, a weird set of characteristics with which to be shouted at from a distance. “Cal, you need to get out of there. The gangway is losing pressure. Can you move?”

I grunted.

“I’m going to take that as a yes.”

I certainly hadn’t intended it as a yes, but who was I to argue with the mysterious disembodied voice that called to me in my dying moments?

“Okay, Cal, I need you to follow my voice. Can you do that? I can’t help you if you can’t get to me.”

I tried lifting my head first, making it a full inch off the ground before a twitch in my spine sent the back of my scalp slamming into the metal grating. The pain barely registered as it added itself to the pile. My injured right arm lifted easily enough, though the act of lowering it again sent fresh and unpleasant sensations rocketing up my shattered hand. My left arm refused to budge below a gash in my bicep.

Standing was right out, but I did manage to drag my heals up half the way to my ass, even if my knees fell to the side rather than actually raising up. As I pushed my ankles away, the second miracle of the day occurred.

My body shifted backwards. I’d only made a few pathetic inches of progress in the direction of the closed end of the gangway, but I would take pathetic. I could work with pathetic. I couldn’t work with dead.

Now I just needed to figure out a way to turn around so I could—

“Yes! Cal, that’s perfect. Keep that up!”

What? But I’d moved the wrong way. If I kept going I’d just end up at the door that’d shut in my face before… I let the thought die before unwanted memories could derail my focus. I coughed. Blood dripped down my chin.

In more of a twitchy flop than anything that could really be called a glance, l tilted my head back to look for the dead end that had sealed my fate.

It wasn’t there.

The door at the end of the gangway stood open, the dingy, depressurizing hallway coming to an abrupt end as a well-lit, pristine airlock took its place.

There was a ship here. Someone had come to save me!

“Don’t stop!” the voice called from aboard the vessel.

I obeyed, too wrapped up in the idea of rescue to bother wondering who could’ve come to my aid. We weren’t due another fuel shipment for three weeks, and not once in my years on roofie had we gotten two visitors in one day. I also didn’t waste time asking why whoever it was refused to leave their ship.

I couldn’t exactly joke about making the mortally wounded man come to you when I couldn’t breathe deeply enough to get out more than one word. Well, I guess I could have, but the timing would’ve been all wrong.

So back I inched, pitifully, painfully, desperately. Hair tore from my scalp as it caught in the grating. New pain rose up to join old as I tugged on muscles that had previously known rest. All the way the voice cheered me on, telling me how good of a job I was doing even as I bled out. I kept my breathing shallow, terrified of the coughing fit I’d trigger if I inhaled too much. The increasing thinness of the air exacerbated things, constantly reminding me of the need for haste.

Not that I needed much reminding.

The sliding door slammed shut behind me the moment my feet cleared it. Fresh air filled the bright airlock, forcing my lungs to start sputtering up blood as they clamored to fill themselves. I didn’t stick around long enough to start coughing. The last I remembered was a prick at the base of my neck and the words, “You did it, Cal,” before the blessed darkness reclaimed me.

——

I awoke in a fog.

My thoughts slurred as my eyes drifted open, panic and pain driven away thanks to whatever drugs were being pumped through me. I glanced down to find myself lying on a bed, the blankets stripped away to leave me upon just the fitted sheet. My vac suit and the jumpsuit I’d been wearing under it were gone, leaving my bare skin exposed to the open air.

What little bare skin that wasn’t covered in bandages, that was. About as much of me was hidden beneath stripes of white cloth as was actually exposed, thought whoever’d bandaged me hadn’t bothered to cover my uninjured… private portions.

Saliva pooled in the back of my mouth, but as I tried to swallow it, the tube down my throat got in the way. Oh. I had a tube down my throat. As I glanced to the side, the clear tubing seemed to be coming from a four-wheeled cart that also contained various medical supplies, equipment, and the bags of whatever high-quality narcotics ran through my IV.

Before I could get much of a look around the unfamiliar room, the voice came back. “You’re awake. Good. I need your help with something.” The voice spoke in the same nurturing tones as before, yet this time it sounded as if the speaker was right next to me. However I angled my eyes, I couldn’t find her.

“Don’t try to talk. You have a tube down your throat.”

Yeah. I’d noticed that.

“I’ve fixed you up as well as I can, but this last injury is more… complex. A qi-infused bone fragment has punctured your blood meridian. Right now it’s holding the hole shut, but if I take it out while you’re unconscious, all that qi in your system is going to rupture it. The problem is, you can’t integrate the qi with your meridian blocked up. Here’s what I need you to do. You’re going to reign in that qi you absorbed and keep it out of your blood meridian as best you can while I remove the bone fragment. Then, I’ll apply a patch to the meridian that’ll hold long enough for you to integrate the qi. Understand?”

I shook my head no as vigorously as I could manage.

“Okay, that’s okay.” The voice reassured me. “How long have you been cultivating?”

I blinked in surprise. I’d been cultivating?

The voice let out a breath. “It’s okay. It’s okay. Can you at least sense the qi you took in?”

I nodded.

“Is it hostile?”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Is it all one type of qi?”

I nodded. Whatever energy had flooded me after I’d been drained was definitely uniform.

“Is it bucking wildly or just trying to run through your injured meridian?”

I raised an eyebrow again, unsure how to answer an either-or question with a nod.

“Blink once for the first option, twice for the second,” the voice offered.

I blinked twice. The energy felt familiar, not foreign, and much as it sent waves of anguish through my body, it did so in a rhythmic manner as it crashed against the bone in my chest.

“Okay, good. That’s good,” the voice reassured me. “I don’t know where you managed to find that much qi all the way out here, but it’s good you did. Okay, I want you to shut your eyes and focus inward. Give me a nod when you’re ready.”

I obeyed, the calm and soothing voice helping to keep the fear at bay.

“Good, good. Normally I’d give you a breathing technique for this, but the ventilator will do that for you. You just focus on keeping that qi away from your meridian. I’ll know when you’ve done it.”

I didn’t bother nodding my assent. That she’d tactfully neglected to mention what a ruptured meridian meant implied she didn’t want me thinking about the consequences of fucking this up. Still, my instincts urged me to trust this woman. It probably had something to do with the genuine sense of care in her voice, along with the fact she seemed to have done a damn good job of patching up the rest of me.

I reached for the swelling mass of energy within me. It reacted in exactly the wrong way, gushing with renewed vigor against the blockage. I struggled to constrain it, my will grasping like fingers through vapor. I realized then and there that that’s what it was, vapor broadening in volume as pressure drove it to fill as much space as possible. If I wanted it to stop, I only had one option.

I had to condense it.

Rather than pushing away from the blockage, I stretched my will across my entire body, encircling the gaseous energy in a bubble of sorts. At least, that’s how I envisioned it. The bubble had other ideas, specifically, one other idea: popping.

I tried and I tried and I tried to completely wall in the qi, each time holding it in for just a few moments longer before my control inevitably wavered. Still I pushed, the tubes, the IV, the entire outside world fading away as the energy claimed the forefront of my mind.

It was like trying to catch an air bubble rising to the surface of a pool, except the bubble was as big as I was and very determined. Luckily, it wasn’t the only determined one. Imminent death makes for a hell of a motivator.

I don’t know how long it took. Some combination of my meditative focus and all of the drugs blurred the minutes into hours as attempt by attempt, I reigned the qi in. The first time a droplet formed on my imaginary walls, my excitement shattered my focus. After countless tries and unknowable hours, I managed to form a small pool of liquid qi at my center while the gaseous stuff continued to condense.

That’s when she yanked the bone out.

The sudden shock and pain of the reopened wound blew a hole clean through my tight focus. The liquid qi stayed put, but what remained of the vapor spilled out into the hole. Fighting through the pain, I redoubled my efforts, capturing as much as the spilled qi as I could and continuing my condensation. I dared not stop. Already a dangerous amount of energy had slipped my grasp. The more I could condense, the less havoc it’d wreak before my meridian had a chance to heal.

I felt as a complex web of foreign qi pressed itself upon the chest wound, sealing the spiritual hole for the time being. Still I condensed, unwilling to cede an inch of the progress for which I’d fought so valiantly.

Nanometer by nanometer my imaginary bubble pulled in, forcing more and more of the vapor to condense as the pressure within built. The process grew both easier and more difficult as it went, easier as I reduced the total surface area I had to maintain, yet more difficult as the pressure grew. Rather than broad, consistent control, now I needed only sheer force of will.

Compared to my crawl off the gangway, it was a piece of cake.

A jolt ran through me as last bit of vapor disappeared, leaving only a calmly-rippling pool that filled the lower quarter of my center. Carefully, I withdrew my will.

The qi stayed in place.

Elation filled me at my success just long enough to break my meditative state and return my senses to the world around me. A bandage pressed down against my sutured chest. The tube chafed against my dry throat. The disembodied voice was mid-sentence.

“—an’t believe you managed to condense it! I just needed you to hold it back. This is… this is good. Great, even. It’ll make the next step easier.”

If I could’ve, I’d have let out a groan. Why was there alway a next step?

“Don’t worry.” No hand touched my own, but I felt a comforting presence in the room with me as the voice spoke. “The worst part’s over. The blockage is out and the patch is in place. You just need to cycle qi through your blood meridian. The patch will take what it needs to fix the hole and direct the rest where it needs to go. If the meridian wasn’t open before, the good news is, it’s about to be. Try to keep your focus on that.”

I blinked. The meridian certainly hadn’t been open before—I think I would’ve known if I’d secretly been a cultivator all this time. I didn’t know much about meridians, you know, not secretly being a cultivator all this time, but I knew they were passages for qi that corresponded with particular body parts, and I knew opening all twelve of them was the first stage of cultivation.

What I didn’t know at the time, was that opening a meridian was a famously unpleasant process. Curiously enough, the comforting voice neglected to share that information.

“Take your time,” she urged me. “I’ll be right here with you.”

Ignoring the fact that I knew I was in an empty room, I obeyed the instructions. She’d gotten me this far, after all. Under the forcedly rhythmic breathing of the ventilator, I fell back into a meditative trance, and the pool of qi returned to the forefront of my mind’s eye. With every beat of my heart it thrummed with power, a ripple spreading from its center out to its edges and back again. As my will touched it, it stirred in answer.

I directed a trickle up away from the pool and into my blood meridian where its entrance sat just beside my heart. It swept in slowly and weakly, a scarce few drops entering the passage at a time.

Agony erupted throughout me as qi ran through my blood meridian for the very first time. The body’s longest meridian ran a full loop through every limb before returning back to the heart, spreading the anguish of this first traversal across every inch of my body. Less qi came out the other end than went in, some going to reinforce the meridian as a whole while the rest joined the patch across my spiritual wound.

I forced more qi into the meridian.

The pain intensified as more of the liquid energy surged through my blood meridian, opening it up and clearing out two decades of toxins. It wasn’t long before I managed a continuous stream, yet bolstering and thickening that stream took yet more effort.

Bit by bit I purged my blood of impurities, opening and stretching my meridian while I fed the stranger’s patch the qi it needed. I lost myself in the rhythm of it, sweeping up new qi into the channel even as old qi came out, until, at last, the pain abruptly ended.

The qi still flowed, looping around and around, but no more impurities impeded it, no more patch drank it up. My blood meridian, my longest meridian, my punctured meridian, was whole and clean and, most shocking of all, open.

And I still had qi to spare.

I’m not going to pretend my next decision was particularly informed, well-thought out, or even good. I will remind you that I was elated at my success, brimming with qi, and hopped up on drugs I’d never even heard of, so you’ll have to forgive me if I got a bit over-excited.

I tugged once more at my reserves of qi and sent a trickle towards the next closest meridian: my heart.

It splashed against it like spit against the ground.

A single, sharp stab of pain echoed from my heart as it skipped a few beats, but its pounding did return. I tried again, launching more qi at the barrier this time. Again I failed.

My third attempt finally forced itself through.

It also stopped my heart.

Ignoring pain that didn’t hold a candle to my earlier crawl, I pushed through, forcing the cramped and polluted channel to widen and clear itself to fit the growing deluge of qi. Toxins secreted from my stilled heart into my blood, where the open and clean meridian whisked them away, or would have, had my heart been beating.

But I’d been through this once before, or at least something like it. If I could cleanse one meridian, I could cleanse two. I just had to finish up before the hypoxia caused permanent brain damage. Simple.

My extremities numbed. My thoughts slowed. A low ache spread throughout my entire body.

And then it didn’t. Just like before, the pain stopped all at once. The qi flow solidified.

My heart beat once more.

Learning at least a little bit from my mistake, I opted to leave my brain meridian alone. With my newly cleansed heart and blood, my limited anatomical knowledge led me to what I thought was the obvious next step: my kidneys.

I began the process anew, embracing the pain as my qi battered through the various toxins that blocked the meridian. I was ready for it this time, ready to steel my will against it, and confident in the knowledge that I had what it took to accomplish my goal.

By the time my third meridian of the day came open, my pool of qi had depleted to little more than a puddle. I had enough to cycle through my new channels, enough to minutely reinforce my heart and blood and kidneys, but a dubious quantity to go for a fourth. Instead, I allowed the qi to still, and returned my focus to the world at large.

The world at large stank.

All the toxins I’d purged had excreted through my skin and various orifices I’d prefer not to list, soaking my bed and bandages with foul-smelling grime. The disembodied voice of my benefactor greeted my return to awareness.

“You did well,” she cooed in my ear. “You did so well. So, so well. But it’s time for rest now. I know you have questions, and I’ll be here to answer them when you wake. Don’t worry. I’ll be right here.”

The gentle comfort in her voice paired beautifully with the mental, physical, and spiritual exhaustion that filled my body to send my mind right to the brink of sleep. The fun new meds she pushed through my IV knocked it over.

My final thoughts weren’t of my accomplishments, nor of my survival, nor even, I’m ashamed to admit, of my brother. No. As peaceful slumber drew in, I thought of the cultivator. I thought of the way I’d broken my hand against his jaw, of the speed and power with which he’d moved. I thought of how helpless I’d been before him.

And I thought of never being helpless again.

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