Street Cultivation 3: Chapters 45-46 (Patreon)

And so we begin the recovery. My goal with this was to show that Rick finally has the capacity (and support circle) to get out in front of what's screwing him over instead of getting blindsided by it. This is nearly the last lull before the big climactic sequence, but we have a bit to go yet.

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Chapter 45: Dependents

Melissa paced back and forth across the floor of her room. It should have made her feel like her brother, scowling about something, but instead there was only formless uncertainty and discontent. Her research and other projects lay half-finished on her desk, abandoned as she became restless again.

Rick had messaged her to say that he was coming due to "the family emergency". That was obviously a lie, though Melissa had checked with Uncle Frank just in case. The thing was, he said it in a way they had a long time ago, when their parents had been drunk or high and caused problems. She knew that her brother had shielded her from much of it, but there had been times when he hadn't been able to pick her up because he was bailing their parents out of jail.

So what did he mean this time? There was something off about his text, like he thought that someone else might be reading it. If that was true, then it was a secret message. She worried that she might need to do something, but the way he said he was coming to her suggested that she should stay put. Unless the message was even more deeply embedded?

Accepting that there was nothing she could do for now, Melissa forced herself to stop pacing, sit down, and breathe. Unfortunately, when she stopped moving, that left her alone with her thoughts.

Months since the incident, she still occasionally awoke from a nightmare of the demon torturing her. But it wasn't the pain that crept under her skin and left her feeling disgusted. It was the way she had been helpless, treated as nothing but an asset to be exploited. She had tried to explain all the exact reasons, but the closest she had ever gotten was with her brother.

Now that she was back in the YLAA, she felt both separated from those experiences and unable to escape them. The young, rich, and successful people all around her didn't seem to deal with trauma, they just went on their merry ways. Melissa had thrown herself into her studies with such ferocity that several people had asked her if something was wrong, but she didn't see what else she could do.

The problem at the core of it was that she didn't think there was any real solution. It wasn't as if she could become so powerful that no one could ever hurt her: even the strongest people in the world still had peers, and anyone could threaten people she cared about. In fact, some of the strongest YLAA fighters struck her as paranoid, desperately needing to prove themselves strong in a way that meant they would never be happy.

So it was all in her head. That didn't help at all when her head insisted she had a cold knot in the pit of her stomach.

All she could do was try to keep her wild swinging between anger and pain under control, and keep herself productive the entire time. She still had several months as a Young Lucrim Artist of America and she intended to use them to their fullest. After that, in theory the world would be open to her.

By the time it was over, she doubted that she would feel completely comfortable with herself again. But she hoped that by then, she would know exactly where she wanted to go next. There were plenty of positions related to medical research, or even advocacy groups regarding unusual aura conditions. The issue was putting aside everything else to really focus on herself.

When there was a knock on the door, she stopped focusing on herself and leapt up to get it. Most likely it was just another YLAA member, but it might be...

Rick stood on the other side, shivering with his shoulders hunched. Melissa instantly knew that something was deeply wrong and moved to help support him, but when she touched his arm, it didn't seem like he was going to collapse. The muscles of his arm were flexing strangely and it actually seemed like he had too much energy, like he couldn't keep it contained.

"I need your help this time, sis." He stumbled forward, shuddering violently.

Quickly helping him inside, taking his pack, and getting him seated, Melissa locked the door and then turned back to him. He sat on the edge of her bed, still trembling, his eyes unfocused. She didn't think he was cold, but she lifted up the blanket to wrap around him and then sat beside him as he had done for her.

"I'm here, Rick, I'm here," she said soothingly. "Can you tell me what's wrong? Are you the family emergency?"

"That was... an excuse to put H on the wrong track. To buy time." Rick began scratching at his arms, then stopped the motion only with obvious effort. "I left. It's crazy, but I had to leave. I stopped taking the Formula T just one time and it was bad. And just keeps getting worse. It hasn't even been 24 hours and I'm already... already..."

"Slow down, Rick. Tell me what's going on."

He eventually explained, his words slowly coming together more as he focused on the conversation. Though it seemed a bit crazy, Melissa didn't doubt him for a second. Whatever he intended to do, she knew that she'd support him, but she was unclear on just what he was up to. When he finally trailed off into uncertainty, she spoke up.

"So what now? Did you quit the Showdown?"

"No. Can't." He shook his head violently and Melissa gently rubbed his shoulder.

"Why not? Alger may have been manipulating you, but he didn't get you contractually obligated to fight in the whole Showdown. They can cut off your funding but they can't repossess what they've already given you, right? All you need to do is quit, like a normal job."

"The fight for the immortals... that isn't normal... I need to at least show up." Rick took a deep breath and became a little more stable. "But Alger will be there and might notice... and I'm worried that H will try to do something. Not sure what."

"Well, whatever happens, you're planning on getting clean first, right? You didn't bring any Formula T with you?"

"I... I did. Haven't taken it, but Lisa might want to see... not sure. You should probably... take it away. And can I have some water?"

Melissa immediately hopped up to get him a glass. She also took his pack and locked it away in the personal safe that came with her room. Rick didn't know the combination, so he couldn't be tempted to take more Formula T. If he begged her for it, as their parents sometimes had, that would be agonizing, but she would stay strong to help him get through the withdrawal.

The first thing they tried was having her manifest her void through him, the way they had improved his foundation. Melissa hadn't really expected that she could burn away the addiction, but she'd still hoped. Neither of them was surprised when it didn't work. He'd been taking an incredibly potent drug for months and his body couldn't just magically get over that, even with an ether void.

Actually, his foundation and all his Lucores felt strange, like they'd been dismantled. That couldn't possibly have happened just because he went off the Formula T, but Rick was getting less coherent and so she couldn't ask him. It didn't feel like his portfolio was collapsing, just definitely messed up. The Dark Blood Kettle was everywhere, but she thought it was trying to help.

Her brother was starting to sweat more, so Melissa helped him get his shirt off and put him to bed. He fell into a restless sleep and there was nothing more she could do for him. At least not directly.

Though he'd come to her in bad shape, her brother hadn't plunged into this completely unprepared. It hadn't been completely coherent, but he'd suggested that he'd called the Peakless Wildlife Refuge and others to try to get what help he could. And the public library, for some reason he hadn't properly explained. So he had a plan to survive the withdrawal, he just needed her help.

For a start, Melissa decided to call Lisa. They tried not to talk about Rick, but this was obviously an exception. The other woman picked up on the second ring. "Melissa? Is everything okay?"

"Wait, what? I haven't said anything yet!"

"No, it's because of the message Rick sent me." Lisa sounded nervous. "Do you know where he is? He said that he needed my help about the Formula T, but there was so little information, I was worried th-"

"He's here, with me." Melissa was surprised that her brother had contacted Lisa, but supposed that she shouldn't have been. That made things easier. "You're in Branton, right? Wait, no, you moved. Do I need to come to you, or can you come here? Because we can afford a flight, but... he's going into withdrawal, I think. His life isn't in danger, but it's bad."

"Given the potency of what he was taking, that's not surprising." Lisa was silent for a long time, so long that Melissa checked to make sure that the call hadn't disconnected, but when she spoke, her voice was firm. "I'll come to you. Send me the YLAA address and I'll be over as soon as I can."

"Great. Thank you so much, Lisa."

With that call finished, things were a little more hopeful, but Melissa was alone again. She desperately wanted to help, but handling it all alone felt a bit much, especially since she knew so little about his condition.

Abruptly Melissa realized that she wasn't alone: Rick's demon must still be hanging around invisibly. Just having someone to talk to would help, but there didn't seem to be any way to make contact. Melissa poked at her brother's tattoo, with no response except an incoherent mumble from him. Going to the demon realm was impossible, but there must be another way...

Melissa actually snapped her fingers as she remembered a minor detail from weeks ago. She headed out, carefully locking the door behind her, and padded down the hall to another one of the YLAA rooms. There was another girl in the program named Jane who was somewhat friendly, even if a bit more of a party girl than Melissa.

More importantly, she had something useful. When Melissa reached the door, she was relieved to find it unlocked and the other woman inside. "Hey, Jane!" Melissa poked her head in and waved. "Is there any way that I can borrow that mirror of yours? The demon one?"

"Just why do you need it?" Jane looked up from where she sat on her bed and narrowed her eyes. "I mean, I'm not using it right now, but I doubt you want it to throw a demon party. If this is for some experiment, I can't risk it being damaged. That thing is a family heirloom."

"It's just for conversation purposes, honest! There's, uh, a cute demon boy I want to flirt with."

Jane snorted. "Right. I totally believe you. Really, Melissa, can you promise me that you aren't going to do anything weird to it?"

"Cross my heart and hope to die!"

Thankfully, Jane didn't interrogate her further, just handed over the mirror. Melissa took it and immediately scrambled back to her room, even though there wasn't any real rush. The ornately gilded mirror had an oddly black surface that barely reflected her at all, but she'd seen it used to make a connection. It was actually considered too old-fashioned and limited to be practical, but it could be used to talk to her brother's demon.

She got back and discovered that her brother was still resting, thankfully. Not that she'd really expected him to disappear. Melissa balanced the mirror on her desk against the wall, then tried to figure out how to activate it. There wasn't any obvious switch and she couldn't find anything to consume aura.

"Uh, Melissa? What the heck?"

Only when she heard Jane speak did Melissa realize two things: she hadn't locked the door, and Jane had followed. Her sort-of friend was now standing in the doorway, staring at Rick as he lay in Melissa's bed, only partially covered by the blanket. She realized how it must look to non-family... and that she didn't care.

"That's just last night's hot hookup," Melissa said, pushing Jane out the door. "Now I'm trying to set up a threesome with a demon. Give us some privacy, okay?"

Though Jane looked flabbergasted, she didn't object as Melissa closed the door. As soon as it latched, Melissa found herself smiling.

The dumb joke had just spilled out of her without thinking about it, or without feeling forced. For a long time after the torture, she hadn't been able to joke around except occasionally with her brother. Yet at the moment, she was feeling much more free than before. Her memories still weighed on her, but she felt strong enough to bear them.

Perhaps it was the fact that she was out of her head, and this time she was helping him. For so many years, her brother had sacrificed to keep her healthy, always caring for her. She knew that he didn't resent that in the slightest, but it was satisfying to be able to take care of him for once. Now, when he really needed help, she wasn't just a dependent, she was family.

"That was a pretty casual incest joke." The voice came from the mirror, where Melissa now saw her brother's demon. Katenka turned out to be stunningly beautiful in an unnatural sort of way, but more importantly she was smirking. Melissa could understand a demon like that.

"Oh, hush, you vile temptress." Melissa walked over to the mirror and stared back at her. "I'm sure you've done a lot worse."

"I might be able to make myself look like an incubus, but I'm not really that type of demon. My illusions tend to be... rather cold. So I'm afraid I won't be able to fulfill your creepy fantasies."

Melissa grinned. "Says the demon literally living in my brother's arm. I don't think I even need to get into how creepy that is."

Though Katenka smiled back, her expression sobered. "I don't watch at all times, but I've been watching now. What you've done for him is an excellent first step, but you're right, that won't be enough. From what I've seen, this withdrawal will be brutal, and I won't be able to directly help in any way."

"You're helping just by being here so I don't go crazy. Really." Melissa gave the demon in the mirror an earnest smile. Mad as it seemed, the two of them were going to work together to help her brother recover from addiction to a secretive lucrim elixir.

This was her life now. She wouldn't have it any other way.

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Chapter 46: Withdrawal

Rick woke up staring at the ceiling, briefly disoriented. A convulsion clenched through his entire body, forcing him to roll onto his side. By the time it passed, he had started to remember.

Though his sense of time was utterly distorted, he thought that it had been a day or two since Melissa had moved him to a hotel. That was part of what had disoriented him at first, since he'd been expecting her room. Here they had privacy as well as hopefully a hidden location, if H did attempt to track him down.

Suddenly paranoid, Rick groped on the nightstand for his phone to check his messages. More from H disapproving of the family emergency and insisting that he continue his training to prepare for the upcoming fight. Also offers to send him more Formula T if he ran out, which now seemed doubly suspicious.

Setting down the phone, Rick lay back and tried to get the shivering out of his system. He wasn't sure if the paranoia was part of his withdrawal symptoms, but he definitely felt mentally unstable. But as Lisa had pointed out, feeling this miserable overall was likely to have mental consequences entirely separate from the withdrawal. Not that it mattered, since he needed to suffer through it all regardless.

The one constant was the shaking, ranging from trembling in his fingers to painful convulsions. For most of one day he'd lived bent over the toilet, emptying his guts, but thankfully that seemed to have passed. He'd been running a fever for a while, though that symptom was allegedly a necessary part of healing. His body would wildly range from aching and just wanting sleep to suddenly overflowing with energy and needing to train.

Worst of all was the immense sense of weakness, even during his manic periods. When he tried to summon aura, it felt as if he didn't have enough lucrim, even though it was obviously there. Testing his Bunyan's Step, he'd frequently faltered out mid-way through the technique. Even his defensive core felt like it was constantly running on fumes.

He tried to tell himself that it was just a lie, his body demanding more Formula T and insisting that it couldn't cope without it. Sometimes it felt like he'd fall apart without the drug, but he forced himself to repeat his exercises no matter how wrong it felt.

Strangely, the cravings weren't as bad as he expected. Every eight hours he had an intense urge to take more Formula T, but if he could suffer through those times, it didn't consume his mind too much. He was still glad that Melissa had locked away all of it so that he couldn't be tempted. Being across the world from his source certainly made it easier to quit cold turkey.

"You doing okay?" Melissa came in, speaking gently as she always did. She'd brought food and water, so he made himself sit up.

"It could be worse, but I don't feel like the symptoms are getting any weaker. I was hoping they'd wear off after a day or two." As he spoke, Rick mechanically chewed and swallowed the bread, though it didn't taste like anything.

"Lisa said that it could be longer than that. She let me know she departed, by the way, so she should be here soon."

"That's good."

"Also, the library called back. Are you feeling good enough to talk? I'm not sure what you have in mind with them, but I assume you want to be at your best."

"Oh. I forgot... yeah, I'll try." Rick rubbed his eyes, which constantly felt filled with sand. "How bad do I look?"

"Well... you're not going to be winning any seals in the beauty contest part of the Showdown."

"Let me clean up and get myself awake. Then I should talk to them."

Shaving and washing his face helped a little, though his body insisted that it wanted to curl up and die. Rick forced himself to exercise and forced lucrim through all his old channels. It got adrenaline moving and made him feel briefly better, though his body would keep demanding more lucrim and eventually he'd slump back into withdrawal symptoms. Still, he should be alert enough for a phone call.

To his surprise, Melissa instead brought a small blue pyramid into the room. "Uh, they said we're supposed to use this thing for private communication? Not sure exactly how it works, but I'll let you figure that out. Let me know if you need anything else."

The pyramid was a strange communication device, but it was modern tech: it had idiot-friendly labels saying which side should be set down and a normal switch. Rick set it up at the side of the room and flipped the switch. After a bit of static, he saw Heather on the other side, sitting in the scroll room of the library.

"Are you okay?" she asked. "Given what you said about wanting to quit the whole fucking Showdown, I wasn't sure what to make of it..."

"I'm fine." A blatant lie, but she didn't need to know about his withdrawal symptoms. "But I'm going to leave and you said to remember the public libraries. I'm willing to cooperate with you in any way, I just don't know how valuable what I know is."

Heather winced. "I hope I didn't set your expectations too high, but... probably not very. There are a shit ton of people who fail or quit the junior leagues, so we have some information that way. It's the top levels of the Showdown where we really need both information and sponsors."

"Yeah, I was afraid of that."

"But, listen, that doesn't mean I'm not glad you called. You've probably ran into some interesting things while you were traveling, right?"

"I hope so." Rick had thought through what he wanted to say, but wasn't sure where to start. Maybe with the most striking one. "I have direct evidence that some people are creating lucrim elixirs that are intended to addict the people taking them. Not just power addiction, but creating dependents. I don't think that's publicly known, is it?"

"No, but unfortunately that's 'dog bites man' type news. Don't get me wrong, if you really have evidence, I'm real fucking interested. But most people already assume that elite athletes are doping in unhealthy ways, just like corporations don't have our best interests at heart. It's normal."

He'd been afraid of that, but the rest might be grasping at straws. Since straws were all he had, Rick pushed on. "I may not been at the top of the Showdown, but I've interacted with more immortals than you'd expect. There's some sort of competition between several major groups of them..." He went on to tell Heather about Josiah Craw, Qing Shan, and the others. Mostly he left out anything that sounded conspiratorial about H and Alger because he wasn't sure it would be believable.

Surprisingly, the thing that interested her most was the Triune Golden Spheres. Apparently they were a relatively rare technique and librarians would jump at the chance to publicly log it. Though Rick knew that would instantly tie the information to him, he was also likely to make a lot of enemies anyway, so he wasn't sure it made a difference.

When he was finished, Heather spent a while muttering curses under her breath, then finally nodded. "Okay. Let's just fucking do this. I should say, I didn't expect this to be so dramatic when I mentioned it to you, but I guess you don't do anything half way."

"Uh, what do you mean by doing this?"

"The public library system is a neutral party, so we can't get directly involved or help you materially. At least not right now - if you want to let us study the lucrim techniques you know, you'd be compensated for that. But I can pledge to help out with anything knowledge-related."

Rick could only nod. He knew that the library system sticking out its neck to help him had been a long shot and hadn't been counting on it. "Do you know any secrets about overcoming addiction or rebuilding lucrim portfolios?"

"I could send you some books, but..." Heather shrugged. "You probably know the basics already. No easy solutions there. Anything else?"

"What about ways of forging demonic bonds? I've been putting together an idea that would pair weak demons with poor humans."

Heather's eyebrows, which he only that moment realized were dyed the same green as her hair, shot up. "That is not what I fucking expected when I started this call. Hell, not what I expected from you at all. Hmm... though the library is not in the bond business, we do have a great deal of information about demonic contracts. If you can deliver everything you've said, I'd be happy to connect you to the right people."

"Great. Thanks, Heather."

"It was the least I can do. Really, I'm sorry I can't do more."

After the call ended, the blue pyramid went dead. It was probably far too much security for a simple conversation, but the public library system didn't mess around. Soon after Rick began shivering again, his adrenaline running out and his symptoms returning in force.

When he sat down on the side of the bed, clutching his stomach, he just tried not to black out for a while. But when he recovered enough to straighten, he saw Katenka floating beside the pyramid, regarding it curiously.

"I think this was the last step we needed, Rick. We don't have any real public libraries in Siberia, not in the sense you do here. But with their help combined with everything else, I think we can create the demonic bonds."

"Great." Rick turned over onto his side and tried to squirm under the covers. "Now we just have to survive the rest."

"I think you're doing better, and you'll have more help soon. Stay strong."

He nodded in response, but that wasn't what he'd meant. Rick knew that he'd get through the withdrawal - he was worried about what came after.