I slipped back over the wall at Checkpoint 9-B just as the fog started to turn a sickly, bruised yellow under the rising sun.
Down on the approach road, Sergeant Vane and Pell were swapping shifts with two tired-looking night guards, their backs to the wall. I dropped off the ledge, landed on my heels in the mud near the coal drums, and slid into the shadow of an alley before the arc lights even swung my way. Vane was rubbing his eyes and his bad knee at the same time. He looked straight at the spot where I'd just landed and saw nothing.
Get some sleep, Sergeant.
The lower sectors of District 9 were waking up, and it wasn't pretty. Coal-powered trucks clattered down 4th Street, spewing dark exhaust over the cobblestones. Vendors set up wooden carts and hawked cold radish skewers and fried dough to long lines of bleary-eyed workers. Near the central square, hundreds of teenagers and parents were already crowded around the municipal announcement boards, waiting for the labor draft lists to be pasted onto the iron frames.
I kept my head down and my hands in my jacket pockets and walked straight past them.
At the edge of the crowd, a couple of kids from my old shelter block were arguing about whether a sanitation assignment was better than a coal-loader permit. They didn't look my way. Yesterday I'd been the orphan who broke the testing terminal. This morning I was a ghost in a faded tunic, drifting through the smog.
It should have felt like freedom. It felt a little like being dead. Nobody had noticed me leave, and nobody was going to notice me gone.
I turned down my alley and climbed the stairs.
The six flights felt different. Two hours ago, every step had been like dragging fifty pounds of wet iron. Now my feet barely touched the concrete. My joints didn't creak, my chest didn't heave, and my pulse stayed a slow, steady drumbeat.
On the fourth-floor landing, Lin was sitting on the top step again.
She had her arms around her knees and her braids were redone, a little better this time. When she saw me, she scrambled up so fast she nearly tripped.
"You weren't in your room." She said it like an accusation. "I knocked. Twice."
"I went out early."
"Mom says they're calling names." She squinted up at me. "Is it your turn?"
"Not yet." I crouched until we were eye to eye. Her gaze dropped to my wrist, where the faded red thread still hung, and some of the stiffness went out of her shoulders. "Hey. Remember what you said yesterday? That maybe it was just slow for me?"
"Yeah."
"You were right." The words came out rougher than I expected. "It's slow. But it's moving."
Her whole face changed. It was like watching a lamp being turned up.
"I knew it," she whispered. "I knew it."
"That's a few words," I said. "I'll get you the rest. Every one. I just can't yet."
She studied me with the grave suspicion of a nine-year-old who has been lied to before. "You're doing the face Mom does before she goes to work."
"What face?"
"The one that's pretending everything's fine."
I laughed, short and surprised. "I have to go away for a while. For work. A few weeks, maybe more."
She didn't cry. She nodded very slowly, as if she was filing it somewhere.
"Will you come back?"
"Yes."
"Promise?"
"Pinky," I said, and held out my little finger. She hooked hers around it with the same grave force as before.
Then I dug into my pocket and found the last thing I owned that wasn't on my body: a bent paperclip, silver and crooked. I'd had it for two years. It had gotten me through a lot of nothing.
I pressed it into her palm. "It's lucky. It's been in my pocket through everything."
She stared at it as if I'd handed her a jewel. "I'll keep it safe."
"I know you will."
I climbed the last two flights before my face could betray me.
The room was exactly as I'd left it: the dented tin pot in the corner, the splintered wooden box, the dried Blood-Root scattered across the cold floor. But at the center of my mind sat something enormous and bright, four manuals fully understood.
I kicked off my canvas shoes, slid the iron bolt home, climbed onto the cot, and crossed my legs.
"Alright," I whispered, rubbing my hands together. "Let's see what we've got."
I closed my eyes and turned inward. The four techniques glowed in my mind like four small suns.
The Nine-Rotations Celestial Aether Method (Spirit)
The Primordial Tyrant Body Art (Body)
The Sovereign Mind Palace Construction (Mind)
The Astral Anchor & Soul Sealing Art (Soul)
"Spirit first."
The Nine-Rotations Method was meant to draw pure Aether, the force of Creation, out of the air and compress it through nine internal cycles into a dense liquid sea in the dantian. I straightened my spine, rested my wrists on my knees, and began the breath.
Inhale for three beats. Draw through the sternum. Rotate at the core. Exhale through the teeth.
The moment my lungs filled, something unexpected happened.
The manual had been written for standard Celestials, beings with an innate affinity for Aether alone. It assumed the body would act like a fine sieve, taking in the bright, creative energy of the atmosphere and leaving the rest behind.
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
But I wasn't a standard Celestial. My bloodline was Creation and Destruction fused, and my affinity wasn't one spectrum. It was Universal Harmonization.
My body didn't act like a sieve. It acted like a collapsing star.
BOOM.
Every thread of energy within fifty feet of my tenement room was yanked toward my chest.
The air of District 9 was full of Aether, thin and ordinary, the breath of a living world. But mixed into the smog were traces of Void leaking from the garbage rifts, dark and jagged. And beneath the cobblestones, faint and invisible, lay threads of Anima, the force of soul and life. Millions of lives, pressed together for centuries, had left it behind like a residue.
Aether was plentiful. Void and Anima were scarce, scattered fragments. An ordinary cultivator's body would have rejected the mismatched mixture, or choked on the Void. Mine reached out like invisible claws and dragged every thread of all three into my lungs at once.
"Ngh!" I gasped as they hit my sternum together.
In my chest, the three forces collided.
By every law of the cosmos, that should have killed me. Creation and Destruction are opposites. When they touch, they annihilate each other and tear living cells apart. For a fraction of a second, I felt an icy, searing heat behind my ribs as black Void slammed into golden Aether, with the faint threads of Anima spinning wildly in the middle.
Then the Primordial Echo flared in my soul.
BZZZZZT.
A deep, ancient pulse rolled outward from my core. It didn't suppress the forces. It harmonized them. It locked the violence of Destruction and the wild expansion of Creation around the stable pivot of Anima, and instead of annihilating each other, the three of them folded inward into the one thing they'd been before the Primordials ever split the realms.
Primordial Essence.
DRIP.
A heavy, ringing tone echoed through my soul. In the center of my lower abdomen, where my dantian had always sat empty, a single drop of energy formed. It wasn't pale gold like Aether or black like Void. It was a thick, swirling sphere of liquid starlight, threaded with gold, black, and silver, humming with a density that felt almost indecent.
The moment that drop touched the floor of my dantian, the System erupted.
[ALERT: CULTIVATION METHOD MUTATION DETECTED]
[TECHNIQUE OVERRIDDEN BY USER PHYSIOLOGY]
[PRIMORDIAL ECHO HARMONIZATION COMPLETE: 10X YIELD MULTIPLIER APPLIED]
[TECHNIQUE RENAMED: NINE-ROTATIONS PRIMORDIAL HARMONIZATION METHOD]
[DANTIAN STRUCTURE MODIFIED: PRIMORDIAL CORE FORGED]
[CORE DENSITY: 1,000% OVER STANDARD LIQUID SEA EQUIVALENT]
[SPIRIT CULTIVATION RANK UPDATED: REALM 1 (QI CONDENSATION) - LEVEL 1 UNLOCKED]
[SPIRIT CULTIVATION RANK UPDATED: REALM 1 (QI CONDENSATION) - LEVEL 2 UNLOCKED]
[SPIRIT CULTIVATION RANK UPDATED: REALM 1 (QI CONDENSATION) - LEVEL 3 UNLOCKED]
I opened my eyes and let out a long breath. A thick stream of silver-grey mist poured from my mouth and hung in the air for five full seconds.
Tiny threads of liquid Primordial Essence were moving through my channels, washing away fifteen years of dust and damp and tiredness. My muscles were warm. My head was clear as water.
And the ache was gone.
I hadn't known it was there, not really. It had always been under my ribs, a deep, hollow throb so constant that I'd stopped hearing it, the way you stop hearing a machine in the next room. I'd thought that was just what it felt like to be me. Now it had stopped, and the silence where it used to be was so total that I had to press my hand flat against my chest to check that I was still breathing.
My eyes stung. I wiped them roughly on my sleeve and laughed at myself, a wet, ragged sound.
Fifteen years, I thought. I carried that around for fifteen years.
When I could see straight again, I looked inside. The new Primordial Core sat in my dantian like a miniature dark star, spinning slow and heavy, drawing in threads of world energy even while I wasn't practicing.
I pulled up my status.
Spirit Cultivation Rank: Realm 1 (Qi Condensation) - Level 3
"Level 3," I murmured. "Three levels in five minutes."
An ordinary human at Level 3 had a thin gas sloshing around in their belly. If they tried to fire a pulse of Spirit Qi, it was like squirting water from a leaky toy. My core held compressed, harmonized Primordial Essence. Even now, a Spirit pulse would hit with the weight of an iron battering ram.
And my ceiling wasn't ten like a human's, or twenty like an average Celestial's. It was twenty-five.
I breathed in. I breathed out. Then I turned my attention to the second manual.
The Primordial Tyrant Body Art didn't harden the skin the way Azure Star's cheap tempering did, with herbal liniments and beating forearms on wooden posts until you had calluses like old boots. It tempered skin, muscle, marrow, tendon, and organ all at once, at a cellular level, turning the body into an indestructible vessel without adding bulk.
But as I read the requirements for Level 1 of the Ironhide Realm, my brow furrowed.
Spirit cultivation could be done by breathing. Body cultivation couldn't. Cells needed matter and dense energy to rebuild themselves, and the manual listed three inputs: concentrated energy such as spirit stones, beast cores, or elixirs; heavy kinetic and thermal stress; and high-grade beast blood, iron-skin herbs, or rare mineral earths to supply the raw building blocks for bone and tendon.
I looked around my room. The empty tin pot. The shattered box. The patched trousers on a crate.
Fifteen years of stale steam-buns, thin radish broth, and scavenged trash-herbs. My Primordial Physique had kept me alive, agile, and healthy, but my cells had been running on starvation rations compared with what a royal Celestial body really needed. That goblin had died because of raw potential, not tempering. If I wanted a real Body rank, to push all the way to Level 25, I couldn't sit on a cot and breathe.
"So Spirit takes breath," I murmured. "Body takes resources. Or, in my case, points."
I pulled up the System.
[CURRENT CELESTIAL SYSTEM BANK BALANCE: 75 POINTS]
Seventy-five. A single bottle of entry-tier Vajra Blood-Nourishing Pills cost three hundred. A low-grade Spirit Stone set cost two hundred. And somewhere on a list in my head, a Lung-Clearing Pill sat at a hundred and fifty, and two names sat under it.
I leaned back against the wall, and a dry smile crept onto my face. The loop was simple.
I needed points to buy pills, ores, and resources for Body, Mind, and Soul.
To get points, I needed to kill Void Beasts and let the Primordial Echo multiply the yield by ten.
To kill bigger beasts and earn bigger payouts, I needed to push all four paths as high as I could.
"Back to the rifts," I said to the dark room.
Outside my filthy round window, the streetlamps of District 9 were flickering off one by one. Down in the street, the municipal sound-array crackled on, and a clerk's flat voice began reading out the names of teenagers who had to report to the Sector 4 hall for their labor assignments.
"Registration Number 3871: Mark Higgins, Sewage Filtration Maintenance. Number 3872: Sarah Cole, Spirit-Coal Scrap Sorting. Number 3873..."
I leaned my head against the glass and watched a flock of mechanical smog-doves flutter past. In an hour or so, the clerks would reach Registration Number 4092. Adrian. Orphan. Unclassified Null. A guard would come up these stairs with a clipboard and a pair of rubber work boots.
They'd find an empty room and an unlatched door.
I thought about Dugan, standing up there at the Bureau hall, reading that number out loud. I hoped, unreasonably, that he'd say it quickly. I hoped he'd pretend he hadn't noticed that it was still empty.
I pulled my canvas bag from under the cot and checked it: a spare linen shirt, a water canteen, a pouch of salt. I looked at the empty sheath on my belt, where my knife used to be, and unbuckled it and left it on the crate.
I didn't need it. I had a core in my belly, three levels of Spirit in my nerves, and fists that could go through brick.
I left the room and shut the iron door behind me. At the end of the corridor, a rusted ladder led up to the roof hatch. I climbed it, pushed open the wooden cover, and stepped out onto the gravel roof, into the biting morning wind.
From the sixth floor, all of District 9 lay below me, the crowded alleys, the smoking stacks, the iron barricades, the long gray line of the perimeter wall. Beyond it, the Outer Garbage Rifts glowed under their bruised purple tears.
I took a breath and felt the Primordial Core pulse in my belly, warm and steady.
"Let them post the list," I whispered, stepping up to the edge.
Twenty feet of open air separated the tenement from the roof of the four-story grain warehouse across the alley. Yesterday, looking down from this height would have made my stomach drop. Today my Primordial Physique evaluated the gap in a fraction of a second and handed me the answer, calm as a clerk: Light leap. Fifteen percent muscle output. Zero risk.
I took two steps back, pushed off the ledge with my right heel, and flew.