Untitled Space Xianxia - Chapter 10

Chapter 10: A Suspiciously Long Shower

I picked the third in the line of eight showers and reached in to turn the water on. A chill ran down my body as the first frigid droplets struck my arm, which I jerked away to give the stream a moment to purge the cool water before the hot could catch up. It felt like ages.

With near certainty I believed the other floors didn’t have this problem, but since I was the only one using any of the third floor bathrooms, the water up here tended to sit in the plumbing for long periods of time. As I waited, I thought through my plan.

Opening a meridian outside of a focus room would surely draw suspicion, but my two hours per week in the qi rich chambers made for too strong a bargaining chip to actually use. Unless I wanted to stink up my room and ruin the carpet, I’d have to cleanse the blocked meridian somewhere it’d be easy to wash the grime away. The showers just made sense.

Of course, I didn’t have to run the water the whole time, but the last thing I wanted was some poor custodian walking in on me. Given the size of the settlement on Fyrion, the water I used wouldn’t come close to straining the recycling system, so that wouldn’t be a problem.

Anyone keeping an eye on me would just think I’d taken an abnormally long shower, which wasn’t strictly inconspicuous behavior, but felt like exactly the kind of thing someone who’d had a public panic attack the day before might do. That was good enough for me.

I hung my towel on the exterior hook, pulled the faux-wood door shut behind me, and plopped my bare ass down on the shower floor. It felt wrong to just sit on the floor of a communal shower, but as the only third floor resident, I could’ve argued all eight showers belonged to me.

The warm water washed down my back as I evened out my breathing and turned my focus inward. My qi sat in a pool at the bottom of my center, cool and dark and unmoving. I tugged at it, and it obeyed, strands springing up and spinning through my four open meridians. My heartbeat slowed, my blood cooled, my breathing deepened. I cycled for a few minutes, the outside world a distant dream as my focus solidified.

For the first time in my cultivation journey, I opened a meridian the right way.

Rudimentary as they were, Chrissy’s exercises had been useful, at least useful enough to deduce what I’d been doing wrong. Instead of slamming a battery of qi into the blocked meridian, I formed the tiniest, sharpest sliver I could manage, and carefully, gently, pressed it against the base of my pelvis.

The pain began immediately. It was a constant, growing ache rather than the sudden spikes I’d grown accustomed to, one that slowly eroded at my concentration rather than shattering it completely. I pressed on.

Most cultivators start with their bone meridian for a pretty simple reason. If your bones stop working, it doesn’t immediately ruin your breathing. It doesn’t pause your heart and put you on a three minute timer for brain damage. It doesn’t outright knock you unconscious. Bones are wonderfully static objects, to the point that as I cleared out my bone meridian, other than body-wide ache, I didn’t notice anything particularly wrong.

Unlike heart failure or liver failure or kidney failure, bone marrow failure took months or years to kill you. If I needed months or years to clear one meridian, I’d picked the wrong calling.

The width and speed of my qi grew alongside the full body ache, washing away more and more of the spiritual gunk. My joints locked as my bones themselves seemed to swell and pulse and burn with the fires of a thousand stars, but the very qi that wreaked such havoc soothed and cooled and strengthened.

The pain vanished all at once. My cycling quickened as the last of the obstructions oozed out, widening and reinforcing the pathway as it healed the damage the cleansing had done. Moments later my eyes popped open. I checked my holopad. Only an hour had passed.

I grinned. It was a new record.

The smile wiped itself from my face as I got a whiff of myself. Already the still-running shower had washed away the worst of the grime, but a thin layer of a foul-smelling oily substance still coated my skin. Thank fuck for that new record. I needed as much time as I could get if I wanted to clean myself up before dinner.

With a self-satisfied smirk, I pushed myself to my feet, reached for the bar of soap, and got to work.

——

I strode into the mess fifteen minutes late with a spring in my step. A few of the cultivators at the closer tables gazed at me with curiosity and disdain, but the vast majority of my sect mates failed to notice my entrance in the chaos of the thousand-person dining hall.

The scale of this place continued to astound me. I’d of course been on larger stations, but never a single mess hall designed to feed a thousand people at once. It was insane. I couldn’t think of a single reason every cadet in housing D had to all eat dinner in the same place at the same time, but it seemed like a logistical nightmare.

On the freighter that’d taken us to roofie, Brady and I had been assigned a set meal block and our choice of a dozen small cafeterias. Here, they had everything I could think of in one room.

“Newcomer!” Xavier waved me over to where he stood in line for curry.

I joined him. “You can call me Cal.”

“Newcomer Cal! Congratulations on opening your newest meridian!”

I froze. How did he know? There was no way my holopad was broadcasting my physical status, and without cycling the open meridian didn’t actually do anything.

Xavier slapped me on the back, clearly reading the confusion on my face. “You look like a man with five open meridians.”

I blinked. “What… what does that look like?”

Xavier shrugged.

“Okay, um…” I sighed. “Thanks, I guess?” I glanced around the room. “Can they all see it?”

Xavier shrugged again. “I’ve never asked what they can or can’t see.” He suddenly leaned in, sticking his nose into the top of my head and taking a deep sniff.

I jerked away. “What the hell was—”

“Anyone who cycles their sense meridian within a few feet of you will smell that,” Xavier explained. “Next time, use the shampoo.”

“I used shampoo.”

“Not shampoo, the shampoo. It’s the only good way to get meridian gunk out of your hair. You can request some on your holopad. They don’t charge for it because they don’t want sect members walking around smelling like rotting meat on a pile of sewage.”

“Thanks for that mental image.” I shuddered. “I’ll have to get some of that shampoo.” I stopped to put a bowl of potato vindaloo on my tray. “In the future, if you notice I’ve advanced, maybe don’t announce it for all the world to hear.”

Genuine confusion flashed on Xavier’s face. “Why not? Advancements are cause for celebration!”

“Just… do me this favor, okay?”

“Of course, newcomer Cal!” He slapped me on the back again, causing curry to slosh out of its bowl and onto my tray.

I skipped out on veggies after my particularly vegetal lunch, and scooped up a side of brown rice and some tofu for protein before joining Xavier in the search for a place to sit. Oddly enough, he didn’t seem to have an immediate friend group to default to, which I supposed made some amount of sense. Knowing cultivators, it was because nobody wanted to befriend the guy at the bottom of the rankings.

Except, lucky for me, the guy second from the bottom.

For lack of direction, I scanned the crowd for the one other friendly face I’d found—using the word ‘friendly’ in its loosest sense. “Right there.” I gestured with my tray. “There’s some space at Charlotte’s table.”

Xavier seemed unenthused by the idea—a response I deduced both by his face and the fact he actually stopped talking—but followed as I set off. Curious eyes tracked us as we crossed the dining room, but nobody bothered us. It’d bugged me for a while, actually, the way nobody tried to bully us for our low ranking, until I’d realized the reason.

Nobody wanted to duel the bottom-rankers—they’d have nothing to gain and everything to lose. Since the sect required its members to accept challenges, if either Xavier or I challenged someone, they’d be forced to risk their position for no benefit.

So they gawked, they whispered, and they avoided us, but nobody dared single themselves out in their disrespect. I supposed in a way, I had so little status that even bullying me was beneath them. I wondered how long that would last.

The senior cadets and the elders, of course, had no such vulnerability. While I could technically challenge them, they were so far above me it would’ve been considered disrespectful to do so, and they’d be well within their rights to put me in my place. At least my immediate classmates would leave me alone.

Whatever Charlotte’s table had been talking about ceased as we made our approach. In silence, five cultivators stared up at us.

“Hi Charlotte.” I smiled at her. “Mind if we sit here?” I didn’t wait for a reply before I plopped my tray down and took a seat. The moment my ass hit the metal chair, two of Charlotte’s table-mates stood.

“Oh, is that… um… Francis?” the girl to Charlotte’s left clearly bullshitted. “I should—uh—go catch up with him.”

“I’ll join you,” the other standing cultivator added, pushing away from his seat and leaving the table.

The other two unfamiliar cadets simply stood up and left, either tagging along with the first excuse or simply not bothering to make one. Now alone with me and Xavier, Charlotte rubbed her eyes under her glasses and let out a sigh. “Great. Now I’m sitting at the loser’s table.”

I squinted as I watched the others leave. “Those guys are about as mature as the ten-year-olds in my class.”

“They left for a reason, Cal,” Charlotte said. “If you’re seen hanging around bottom rankers, people will think you’re weak. You’ll have a harder time finding a skilled sparring partner, and lower-ranked members will see you as an easy opportunity to climb. I’ll probably get at least two challenges because of this dinner alone.”

I scowled. “That sounds like a shitty system designed to stop people from ever making friends.”

Charlotte groaned and reached for her glass of wine. “What do you want?”

With questionably mean and unquestionably funny intent, I waited until she took a sip before I answered. “I want to give you one of my focus room hours.”

She spat out her pinot.

Somehow, being Charlotte, she managed to do even this with poise and grace, collecting herself and dabbing at her mouth with her napkin even as Xavier and I broke out laughing.

“You’re joking,” she exhaled as she watched us cackle. “Of course you’re joking. That was cruel.”

“No, no, I—” I took a breath to force the laughter back. “I’m serious. Your reaction was hilarious, but I do want to give you an hour.”

Her eyes shot open. “What? You can’t. You need those. The entire purpose of—”

“Charlotte,” I interrupted her. “Do you want it or not?”

“Yes,” she answered immediately. “Of course I want it. I just need to know why. You’re not going to gimp your advancement just because I helped you out yesterday. You started with what, four open meridians? If you give away any more hours, it’ll take you years to open the other eight.” She sat back in her chair. “What’s so important to you you’d trade away your most valuable resource?”

Interesting, I noted. She hadn’t noticed my newly opened meridian. Was she particularly insensitive, or was Xavier particularly astute? I filed that little tidbit away for later.

“I need instruction more than I need qi,” I answered vaguely. “The kiddie classes are useful enough for the time being, and Xavier here can spar with me, but I need someone who really understands how things work around here.”

“I understand—” Xavier started to say but Charlotte’s glare shut him up. The gap in social skillset between the two couldn’t have been more apparent, and we all knew it.

“So, what? You want me to be your teacher?”

“I want you to be my friend,” I countered. “If I have to frame it as an exchange of resources so it fits into your worldview, then sure, I’m offering you an extra hour in the focus rooms in exchange for advice and information, but really I just want to be friends. Friends that help each other.”

“Deal,” Charlotte didn’t even take a moment to think. She didn’t negotiate, didn’t haggle, didn’t press for any more information. She just jumped at the opportunity I’d offered.

Maybe I’d underplayed my hand. Ah well. I still had another hour to trade away, and that was just this week’s budget.

“So,” she set her wine glass down as she spoke, “what do you want to know?”

I asked the first question that popped into my head. “What’s with the glasses?”

“I haven’t needed them since I opened my sense meridian,” she answered without hesitation. “I keep wearing them because I like how they make people perceive me—bookish, subdued, calculating.”

“Calculating alright,” Xavier muttered.

“Like you know what you’re doing but aren’t threat.” I nodded along. “That’s smart. Manipulative, but smart.”

She flashed me a dry look. “Anything else?”

“Tell me about the void horde.”

“I was only twelve when it happened. Anyone else here would know as much about it as I do.”

“I didn’t ask anyone else.”

She sighed. “You can find the details on the local net. It’s public info. A few cycles back, a horde of void beasts like we’ve never seen came after us. My father was critical in fighting them off. Nobody knows where they came from. Nobody knows why they wanted The Dueling Stars. We do know that in the past decade, void beast attacks have been coming more frequently. My father thinks it’s just a matter of time before another horde shows up.”

I blinked. That was news. Void beasts tended to follow the qi, so out in deep space they’d always been trivial to avoid. That something was driving hordes towards systems as weak as The Dueling Stars seemed important, but as someone who knew fuck all about anything, I was probably the last person that needed to be worrying about it. It wasn’t like I could stop them.

“Is that why you’re out here?” I asked. “Your dad wants you on the planet they’ll come for last?”

Charlotte raised an eyebrow. “On the least defended outpost in the system?”

“Right.” I looked at her expectantly.

“My relationship with my father has no bearing on your ability to prosper here on Fyrion,” Charlotte finally answered, a sharpness to her voice. “Satisfied?”

“Not really, but that’s okay.” I took another bite of curry. “How well can you gauge my cultivation level?”

Her brow furrowed. “Is that a trick question?”

“No?”

“I can’t. I’ve asked around. Nobody can.” She gestured widely to the room around us. “I can tell you exactly how close to making copper each and every person on D-block is with a glance, but I get nothing from you. It’s like staring at a corpse.”

“Huh,” I muttered. “You’re the second person to tell me that.”

“Then why did you ask? You clearly know more about whatever technique you’re using than I do.”

I spared a sideways glance at Xavier. How the fuck was the overbuilt buffoon the only one who could guess my cultivation level? I guess it was a good thing nobody wanted to talk to the guy, at least as far as hiding my progress went. As far as maintaining a functional society, it was a very bad thing.

“Just curious,” I said. “Always want more data.”

Charlotte snorted. “You just wanted to know if I would lie. It’d be easy. Everyone knows you entered with four open meridians, and you obviously haven’t opened another one on your second day.”

I shoved another forkful of vindaloo-covered rice into my mouth, hoping that even if she cycled her sense meridian, the spicy curry would cover the lingering stench in my hair.

Thankfully, it never came to that. Charlotte downed the last of her pinot noir, set her glass delicately back on her tray, and looked up to me. “If there’s nothing else, I need to go salvage what’s left of my reputation. Cadet Wallace just walked in, and if he sees me with you he’ll challenge me not he spot.”

“Alright, alright, go on,” I waved her off. Just as she turned and picked up her tray, I added, “See you at breakfast.”

She let out an audible groan but still strode away without looking back.

“She’s not very nice,” Xavier said.

“So I noticed.”

“Then why her?”

“I already have a nice friend.” I patted him on the arm. “I need a devious one. There’s good in her—otherwise she wouldn’t have defended me yesterday—but she knows how to get what she wants. Lucy was right. This place is a viper’s nest. I need someone who knows how to navigate it.”

“Ha!” Xavier laughed. “I rise above their paltry machinations through sheer willpower and glorious combat!”

“That’s funny,” I said, pantomiming scrolling through my holopad. “According to this you’ve fallen below their paltry machinations. Right to the bottom of the rankings.”

“That just means there’s more work to be done.” Xavier declared as he shot to his feet, the entire table shaking with the motion. “Care to join me in the ring, sparring partner? A cultivator’s training is never done.”

“Tomorrow,” I told him, rising to my feet without moving the table. “It’s been a long day.”

“Of course, newcomer Cal.” He smiled at me. “If you change your mind, you know where I’ll be. If not…” He clapped my shoulder. “I’ll see you in the gym tomorrow morning.”

I lingered for a moment as I watched him leave, taking some solace in the momentary lack of gawkers. Apparently my sect mates had already begun to grow bored of staring at the newbie.

I realized as I moved to bus my tray that I really couldn’t afford to be taking evenings off. Xavier was right. A cultivator’s training really never was done. I knew I’d have way more spare time once I graduated out of the kiddie classes and moved on to the more freeform instruction the adult cadets enjoyed, but until then, I had to keep busy. Elder Lopez had put me on a clock, after all.

Then again, I doubted she’d thought I’d open another meridian on my second day.

The grin stayed stuck on my face as I left the dining hall behind and mounted the grandiose staircase to the third floor. Xavier and I could spar another time. Between my first classes, my bone meridian, and my deal with Charlotte, I figured I’d had enough excitement for one day.

Besides, I still owed a certain someone a phone call.

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