Chapter 16 | Mongrels, Die!

The first thing Calid Asigoth became aware of was that he was no longer in pain.

This was so unusual and so fundamentally at odds with every waking moment he had experienced since arriving in this world, that his brain refused to process it and instead filed the sensation under ‘probable hallucination, revisit later.’ He had grown accustomed to pain and now it was all gone without a trace as though it had never been there.

The grinding sharpness of fragments cutting things that should not have been cut and the deep ache that had taken up permanent residence in his sternum gone.

It was now replaced by a sensation so foreign that it took him several seconds to identify it.

His body was comfortable.

This was deeply suspicious, Calid found.

He blinked as words assembled themselves in his perception with a crisp certainty. Taking up space without asking:

[Core Elimination: COMPLETE]

[47 Core Fragments: Dissolved]

[Dantian Status: Clear, Reconstruction Initiated]

[New Core Formed: Qi Initiate, Early-Stage 1]

[Qi Reserves: 100 / 100 (Full)]

[Body Condition: Restored, All internal haemorrhaging resolved, meridian atrophy reversed, organ laceration repaired]

[Soul Integration: 97%, Near Complete]

[Experience Buffer: EXPIRED, 645 points lost]

[Experience Allocation System: ACTIVE]

[Current Experience: 0 / 10,000]

[Next Threshold: Qi Initiate, Mid-Stage 1]

Calid blinked hard at the notification. It helped that his other senses hadn’t caught up, no sound or touch outside of his body had returned yet.

Then he read it a couple more times, because the number at the bottom deserved the particular kind of sustained attention one normally reserved for bills that seemed too high and medical diagnoses that seemed too creative.

Ten thousand experience points. Does that say ten thousand?! To reach the mid-stage of Qi Initiate? Are they kidding me?

Qi Initiate, which was, according to Shao Wen’s memories, the preliminary tier below Qi Condensation. The tier that children occupied. The tier that the youngest, most inexperienced disciples passed through on their way to being considered actual cultivators, the way a tadpole passed through having a tail on its way to being considered an actual frog.

He was below the bottom rung of the ladder, no. He was below the ground the ladder was standing on.

He was, in cultivation terms, the dirt beneath the foundation of the building that housed the room that contained the ladder. Now the system was cheerfully informing him that climbing from dirt to slightly higher dirt would cost ten thousand points of experience that he currently did not have and had, in fact, just lost six hundred and forty-five of due to a buffer expiration policy that would have made the most vindictive university bursar weep with professional admiration.

It had taken a lot of work to get just the six hundred experience, he couldn’t imagine what it would require to reach ten thousand.

Nor could he begin to imagine what Foundation Establishment would cost.

The strongest of his current students operated at that level, and the distance between where he stood and where they stood was the kind of distance that cartographers represented with the phrase ‘here be dragons’ and a tasteful illustration of something eating a ship. Mostly because it was undiscovered and they’d rather not think about it anymore.

Calid set the notification aside.

He’d leave it for a later time to study and figure out. It would be perfectly placed for quiet evenings with a desk, a quill, coffee, and the luxury of not being unconscious in a hole.

What mattered now was the core itself, and the core itself was—

He turned his attention inward and found it; a sphere spun lethargically.

It was tiny, barely the size of a pea, sitting in the dantian space where forty-seven jagged fragments had been grinding his organs into a state that medical professionals would describe as ‘incompatible with continued existence.’ The sphere was smooth like a marble and spinning in a slow, steady rotation that drew ambient Qi inward through meridians that were no longer dry riverbeds but actual functioning channels carrying actual functioning energy.

The Qi inside it was warm and he understood that the comfortable feeling came from it arriving and finding its purpose and place in the core.

Said core was full to the brim as the system had said, and it was right.

A hundred out of a hundred, which sounded impressive until you considered that a hundred out of a hundred in a pea-sized container was roughly equivalent to filling a thimble and declaring yourself the owner of a lake.

But it was his thimble.

His core, his Qi, his channels, his meridians flowing with energy that responded to his intent without the grudging reluctance of ambient manipulation. He reached for it and it moved without fighting back… obediently, flowing through the channels with a speed and precision that ambient Qi had never managed, because this was internal energy, refined and personal, and it knew who it belonged to.

Calid found the difference was staggering.

His Qi scaffolding, the external framework that had been holding his body together, was still there and humming against his skin.

But now it had a foundation to anchor to.

The partial armour matrix, which had been running on ambient Qi and prayers, suddenly had an internal power source feeding its nodes. Said nodes responded by brightening, stabilising, strengthening, and settling into their spiralling channels with the satisfied hum of machinery that had finally been plugged into a proper mana outlet after days of running on mana batteries held together with ropes.

He flexed his fingers.

They moved with a crispness that made the previous days’ performance feel like he’d been operating the body through a series of pulleys and levers and a very long stick. His knees held without negotiation or complaint. Not even with the faintest suggestion that they might prefer to be doing something else.

His spine was a column instead of a suggestion.

The matrices he could build now—

Even at Qi Initiate, Early-Stage 1, with a core the size of a legume and reserves that a serious cultivator would consider a rounding error, the combination of internal Qi and external manipulation opened doors that had been firmly shut. Compression matrices with actual focal precision. Deflection planes with edges sharp enough to cut rather than merely redirect. Dispersal webs that could be deployed and maintained simultaneously rather than sequentially.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

He could build proper matrices now.

Low-tier, certainly and nothing that would impress a review board or earn tenure at any institution worth attending.

But proper, functional, and reliable constructs that didn’t leak efficiency at every node and didn’t require him to spend two minutes coaxing the energy into shapes it found philosophically objectionable.

Fire included.

He was, by any honest assessment, still extraordinarily weak.

A late-stage Qi Condensation cultivator could crush his new core with a firm handshake and moderate intent. A Foundation Establishment practitioner could do it by looking at him with disappointment. Anything above that could do it by existing in his general vicinity with insufficient care for the wellbeing of nearby pea-sized cores.

But he was no longer nothing.

He was something, and something, however small, fragile, and laughably inadequate by the standards of a world where people punched mountains and mountains lost. It was infinitely more than nothing, in the same way that owning a single match was infinitely more useful than owning no matches when you were standing in the dark.

Calid opened his eyes.

Green-filtered shadow from the moss curtains met his gaze.

The limestone overhang above him remained unchanged and indifferent to the sixty-eight hours that had passed beneath it.

He had been unconscious for nearly three days while his students—

His hearing returned in a single explosion and wave of screaming and shouting and agony filled cries.

It hit him like a boulder thrown by a giant.

Dozens of voices, layered and overlapping, filling the corridor beyond the moss curtain with a sound that Calid had heard before in wars, collapses, and the aftermath of experiments that had gone wrong in ways that required new vocabulary to describe. The screams of the young, the ones that contained surprise and outrage and the discovery that the world could do this, would do this, was doing this right now while they bled and broke and called for help that wasn’t coming.

Groaning, sobbing. The wet, ragged breathing of people whose lungs had been punctured and they did not understand why they were struggling to breath.

And underneath it all, woven through the screaming, laughter.

Delighted laughter.

Laughter of people who were enjoying themselves.