A Lewd Cultivator in Brockton Bay 2: (Patreon)

Lewd Cultivator in Brockton Bay
Chapter 2: No Training Montage for You!

-VB-

Cultivation. 

Did I mention that it wasn’t too different from a Tinker or a body builder in how it functioned? 

For me, I had the knowledge of what I must do to advance my body; the mind and spirit were trickier, so I was focusing on the body first. After all, what was a mind if the body could not follow through?

So, the body! There were three paths to advancements of the body known to me, thanks to the knowledge download.  

The first path was the rigorous training of flesh against wood, flesh against steel, and flesh against flesh: the Path of Rock Flesh. ‘Through endless pain and suffering, the body shall achieve the flesh of a mountain. All shall break before the mountain.’

The second path took martial art into the realm of the supernatural: the Art of Peerless Skin. ‘Through the infusion of internal Qi onto the skin, the skin shall harden 

The third and final path, the one I intended to take, was the practical application of the accumulated ancient knowledge where Qi was the central overarching force capable of influencing the body. This was the Path of One Thousand Layer.

Now, they all sounded fancy and gave the notion that some kind of supernatural training regiment was needed. Very technically speaking, they did. One could not achieve the Path of Rock Flesh without surviving against throwing your naked skin against sharpened rock and come out stronger for it. The Art of Peerless Skin would have one master the neigong, which took a decade, if not decades, to master. The Path of One Thousand Layer was the easiest of them but also the most expensive.

Qi was not a force limited to each individual human. Qi itself was the human’s internal energy, and there existed many other forms of energy, like the infernal Qi, found in hot springs and volcanoes, and the natural Qi, found in plants and animals. 

The Path of One Thousand Layer took the understanding of the flow of Qi to gather ingredients infused heavily with Qi and infused them into the body. 

This was why it was expensive. Instead of training the body, the Path of One Thousand Layer sought to implement Qi found elsewhere into the body to supplement its progress. I needed medicinal herbs in hundreds of kilograms, and a specific ratio had to be maintained in each medicinal bath I took after each training session. 

Alan Marris on this Earth had $55,000 saved up so far as cash and credit. I blew half of that away in a single day for the herbs, and of that 10% was simply from the shipping fee.

I sunk deep into the medicinal bath, luxuriating in the steaming hot mixture of twelve different herbs ranging from Chinese Knotweed to half a century old wild ginseng. I tried not to think about how expensive this bath was. Considering that I chopped in a half of twenty-five year old wild ginseng, it was at the very least two thousand dollars…

A two thousand dollar (at the very least) herbal bath. Didn’t think I’d be doing something so … expensive.

‘I can’t imagine but the most dedicated or the rich doing this in ancient times,’ I thought to myself while practicing breathing with my body. 

‘Breathing with the body’ was not actually taking in oxygen and expelling carbon dioxide with my skin. It was the most fundamental part of neigong, where my body took in energy from the outside. This process, coupled with the medicinal bath, took in nutrients and energy from the medicinal bath and reinforced the whole of my body. When I “exhaled” with my body, accumulated wastes related to neigong and Qi. 

Under the right circumstances, “bodily breathing” was a way to purify my body as I reinforced it.

Unfortunately, I was not a master of neigong, or even the fundamental step of bodily breathing. If I was, then I would have made this bath cheaper and acquired the same benefit. But I wasn’t a master. I knew what and how to do this cultivation roughly but the exact efficiency and path eluded me, because I was nothing more than a disciple in the arts not a master, and even that was because of the knowledge. On top of that, I didn’t have a decade to master a single martial art.

Scion may be neutered, but parahuman gangs with their shards’ conflict engines was a real thing. 

I dove under it, and breathed. The water around me pulsed in rhythm with each breath. I felt the top of my head also move out of the water despite the fact that I hadn’t moved. Was I taking the herbal bath water into me? 

That’s … weird. Whatever. No one ever said cultivation wasn’t weird. 

Nothing else happened from then on, other than the fact that the bath just got a little dark and stayed that way. Seeing as I wasn’t feeling anything different, I pulled the plug on the bathtub, and felt the dirty herbal water drain. The net holding the soaked herbs held, and only the water - nutritiously valuable - left. 

Thanks to the makeup of the pipes leading out of the second basement, I knew that this water would end up in the garden underneath Amy’s three alcohol fruit trees. 

Efficiency for the win, right?

I was, of course, not going to tell Amy I was giving her trees wastewater. 

Of course, since I was thinking about efficiency, I also had invested in some … training equipment. At the same time as I had bought the herbs, I also got a baseball launcher, and used it to train my dodging speed. I spent a week dodging but now I was training in lashing out at those high speed murderballs. 

Amy had been less than pleased by the bruises all over my body yesterday.

Speaking of Amy…

“Alan, where are you?!” 

I wanted to try a few things with her. Also, why was she screaming her head off?

It’s been two weeks since I woke up as Alan Marris of Earth Bet and half-lied to Amy (both Alan’s did train for the sake of improving ourselves, just not towards cultivation). She had returned a day later but refused my offer of opening her own meridian points. Regardless, she kept returning for the usual routine. 

Which was basically to use me and my house as her “alcohol experiment and loot” room. 

“Down here!” I shouted as I dried myself with a towel quickly before putting on a dry set of red t-shirt and pair of blue nylon shorts and tossing my training shorts to the laundry bin. By the time I was dry, clothed, and dumping the now useless herbal remains into a trash can, Amy thundered down the stairs and stopped at the base. 

“Where did you hide my orange beer?”

“For the last time, Amy, fruit moonshine is called pruno.”

“Where is my orange pruno?” she insisted.

I replied as casually as guiltlessly as possible, “I drank it.” 

I too was an alcoholic and was not above breaking into her stash for a few bottles. I may have practiced the Drunken Fist after chugging three liters worth of Amy’s orange pruno, though I did not find much success. “In my defense, you still have a tank of lemon pruno upstairs.”

“I like the orange pruno the best!” Amy objected angrily. “You stole my beer!”

“Consider it a fee for keeping it in my house.”

“ARGH!” she screamed and jumped at me. 

Seeing how slow she was, I neatly sidestepped her. As she fell, I slid one hand underneath her stomach and the other on her back, swung her around, and placed her back on her feet facing away from me. This happened in two seconds. 

She stood there for a moment before turning back. “Do that again.”

“What, you want to be swung around like a kid by her daddy?” I asked her with a coo.

Maybe she was a little drunk already; she just showed reckless behavior, poor judgement (maybe), and her face was flushed. My words only made that flush deeper.

So it wasn’t a big surprise that she decided to headbutt me. She’d been too close for me to dodge, especially since I hadn’t expected it. Our skulls conked and I stumbled backward in pain while she dropped to the floor, whining in pain.

“How much did you drink?!” I, the alcoholic man of the house, demanded sharply as I held my forehead. 

“Only a gallon…” she whined from her face down fetal position. 

“Amy, I thought we agreed on half a gallon per day rule.”

She just groaned more. “I had a bad day, okay? Vicky was being her stupid self again…!” 

“She kept on blasting you with more of her aura or something?”

From the memories I’d inherited, one of the things Amy complained to me about was Vicky’s inability to control her aura. She usually only complained about that when she was really drunk, though.

“No, she set me up on another blind date with another rich snob.”

I snorted. “Then what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to call that snob and tell him that I’m not interested. And then I’m going to tell Vicky I’m not interested. That I want her pussy, not a fucking dick.”

I whistled. “You must be really drunk. You don’t say that so loud normally.”

“Shut up!”

“Yes, definitely drunk,” I said as I picked her up and moved upstairs. 

She touched my skin on my hand, perhaps in habit, and frowned. “I see less of your body than two weeks ago.”

“I have been training and cultivating at a very fast rate.”

“I still call your explanation bullshit. Tell me what biotinker got to you already~!” 

“Will you shut up if I let you drink another bottle?”

“Yessir!” she cheered before she leaned into my bridal carry. She looked sullen and upset. Something was bothering her.

“If you have something on your chest, Amy, go ahead and tell me. You know I’m not here to judge.”

“... Hey, Alan.”

“Yeah?”

“Am I ugly?”

“No. Why?”

“Why doesn’t Vicky look at me, then?”

“... Because you’re her sister?”

Amy frowned. 

“It’s not like you’re going to rape her, right?”

Despite her drunken state, those words snapped her out of her stupor easily enough. “What the f-!? NO!” she screamed, pushing me away (or trying to) when I was the one carrying her. 

“Then why not just give up? It’s not like your attraction to her is natural.”

She glared at me. “What the f-?” 

She’s saying that a lot, isn’t she?

“You know deep down that her power must have some effect on you, right? Whenever her aura flares, you told me that you just appreciate and awe Victoria more.”

She didn’t reply as I set her down on my couch in the first floor living room. 

Amy was open with me unlike how she was with the rest of her family and her acquaintances. Some of it was from how loose her lip was when she was drunk but a lot of it was just genuine need on her part to have someone to talk with. The me-before-I-took-over had been a good friend to Amy, and I intended to carry on that distinction.

Amy sighed. “... I still love her.”

“As you should, you are, at the very least, family.”

She looked up at me before nodding. “So how’s your training been?” she asked, blatantly changing the subject. “Your body changed again.”

“Faster than I imagined,” I replied with a grin. “It’s only been two weeks since I arrived at my current level, so I really can’t say there’s been an increase in my cultivation base. What I have improved though is my body.”

“I noticed,” she narrowed her eyes. “I could see what you were doing with your body, but not all of it. There were even portions that I couldn’t change.”

That's good news, actually. If a power as versatile as the Shaper could not change me in the hands of Amy, then there were many lesser Shards and powers that wouldn’t be able to do that to me either. 

Amy continued to talk. “But why are you training so hard? From what I could tell, you must be training all of the time that I’m not here.”

“To do what I want, I need power.”

She narrowed her eyes. “And what might that be?”

… What exactly did I want to do?

I was in Earth Bet, the home of Worm. This was supposed to be a pseudo-death world, but I had taken charge of this scenario, twisting away calamity like the Golden Morning, by taking options in a …

…

I don’t know. I spoke words that sounded right, but they rang hollow to my own ears. I wanted power, yes, but that’s because - in truth - I was scared to fight people on my own level. I didn’t want to risk myself. I didn’t want to put myself on a kill or be kill scenario. I didn’t want to fight, but by the rules of power that existed in Earth Bet, I would not have a choice in the matter. Sooner or later, there will be people who seek me out to fight, to dominate, and to kill me.  

I leveled a serious, half-lidded stare at her, meeting her eyes. She blinked and then flinched.

“I don’t want to be a victim in this pitiless world,” I replied honestly. “I don’t want to be just another parahuman who dies in the first year of getting their power. I don’t want to be forced into some asshole’s gang, federal, corporate, or criminal.” I straightened myself up and allowed myself to just … release the frustration that I didn’t know I had. “I want to have a family. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to suffer. Being powerless means that I won’t have choice in any of this. Some random dipshit can kill me if I’m weak. If I’m weak, the government can screw me over and I’ll have to take it up my ass and deal with it. If I’m weak with a family, then I might have to watch as gangsters break into my home, rape and kill my family, and I’ll be too weak to stop them.”

I stared at Amy, whose adopted family had an experience in the latter kind of experience.

“I don’t want to be weak, Amy, especially not in a city like Brockton Bay.”

“... Is that why you’re training like a masochist?”

I grinned, letting my serious demeanor fall apart. “Being able to grind concrete into dust with my hands also makes me feel better. Girls also like these muscles,” I announced gleefully as I put my left arm up and flexed. Now, my body may be on the slim side, but my training was starting to show off in my growing muscles. 

Amy merely raised an eyebrow, and then she snorted. 

“What?” I asked curiously. 

“I just realized that the only reason I haven’t seen a pot belly on you despite your daily dose of alcohol was because of your training.”

“... A pot belly that you might get, too.”

She gasped. 

“Join me in my training! You shall become a macho girl by my side~!” 

“Never.”

Then we laughed.

Amy left soon afterward, and I was left to nurse a cup of lemon pruno by myself. My conversation with Amy played itself again in my head, and I couldn’t help it.

I felt weak. No, I knew that I was weak. In a city that hosted Hookwolf, Lung, Kaiser, Skitter, Amy, Victoria, and so many more, I was weak. There was no way I could survive against Kaiser or Hookwolf. Lung would burn me alive. Armsmaster had more combat experience and thus would wipe the floor with me. 

I didn’t feel weak; I knew that I was weak.

My jaws clenched hard and my hands balled up into a fist, I finished the pruno in my hand and went downstairs to train again. My skin broke but didn’t bleed, my bones buckled but didn’t break, and my mind struggled under the exhaustion yet I persevered through. 

I would get strong.

I had to be strong.

-VB-

Life, unfortunately, did not give me a chance to get stronger. 

I was out in the middle of the night , two weeks after that heart-to-heart with Amy,   getting groceries from my favorite cheap supermarket when I ran into the Undersiders.

Undersiders who had just robbed Ruby Casino.

Undersiders who were just escaping the ABB gangsters.

Undersiders who, in the middle of the night, ran into me in high alert. 

And I, who had been training to the point of learning all of my own martial arts movements and strikes were ingrained into my body as a habit, lashed out in habit at the fast approaching team, just like I had ingrained myself to lash out at the baseballs that I used for training.

My hand lashed out and I struck the lead gigantic dog on the nose, earning myself a “Keh keng!” of a dog screeching in pain.

“Ah.”

I fucked up.