A Lewd Cultivator in Brockton Bay 12: Plus One (Patreon)

A Lewd Cultivator in Brockton Bay
Chapter 12: Plus One

-VB-

The Empire Eighty-Eight suffered for their transgression. 

Oh, Kaiser attempted in vain to assuage the angry masses and capes by stating that they were in no way connected with the shooter. Unfortunately, the idiom was “once is a happenstance, twice is coincidence, and thrice is enemy action.” The white supremacist villainous organization had been involved in too many “accidents.” 

There was no denying this time. No jail out of free cards left for them to use.

I was so tempted to go out and crush them, too. Thanks to an influx of external capes taking the fight to the Empire, I would have had an easier time exacting my revenge, too.

But I made a promise to Amy. She wanted me by her side instead of out there.

So I did. 

And Amy fulfilled her promise to me, of becoming stronger herself, by allowing me to open her meridian  channels and train her.

Amy sat nervously at the center of the padded basement floor. 

“So I-I’m going to become like you?” she asked me.

“Maybe,” I replied with a shrug. “It really depends on how you guide your advancements.”

“So… some kind of customizable Trump power?” she asked me.

I thought about it for a moment. “I suppose it is, but it’ll take a very long time before you can reach truly ‘parahuman’ levels.”

She frowned. “But I thought we were trying to make myself stronger.”

“We are. It just won’t be an instantaneous show of power. Remember what I did half of the time I spent in the house?”

“Train,” she groaned. “You trained so fucking a lot.”

“Yes, and we’ll be doing it together now,” I grinned. It turned lustful in an instant. “Among other things.”

She blushed and fidgeted on the spot. 

“So how is this going to happen?” she asked me. “Is it going to be like what happened to you? Slowly becoming something … more?”

I nodded. “Yes. As you advance through the stages, you will become stronger, but there are procedures that you need to do first. It’s the same as not expecting the body to become stronger without first ingesting and digesting food.”

“So what is this procedure?”

“Well, first, I have to open the channel. That is the most basic of the procedures.” I sat down behind her and placed both of my palms on her back. “This might be painful with how abrupt and invasive it is, so brace yourself.” A pause. “Are you ready?”

She tensed her body, took a deep breath, and nodded curtly.

“Then… here we g-!”

I was already at a stage where I could control the flow of energies, externally or internally. I wasn’t sure what to name the stage I was at, but I’d already passed through energy stockpiling, body adapting, and so on. If I had to roughly give it a name, then it would be “middle stage.” 

It was with this ability to control and direct the ebb and flow of energy that I used to push my own into Amy and then force their way through Amy’s closed pathways.

She jolted on the spot and shrieked a little. 

I grimaced as my energies just barely made it through her two of her eight internal meridians, the ones associated with her internal organs. 

Two became three became four became six became seven-.

I caught Amy as I opened the last of her internal meridians, but she was already unconscious from the pain of forcibly opening the pathways. Grimacing further, I scooped her bridal carry and tried to stand, only to realize that I’ve used a lot of my own energy to open her pathways.

Groaning, I laid her down gently and flopped down next to her. 

Hopefully, no one would bother us until at least one of us recovered from this…

-VB-

Amy glared at me even after finishing the breakfast I’d prepared for her in my own pained state.

“That hurt,” she hissed at me.

I laughed nervously. “I did say it was going to hurt. At least, you have new powers!” 

She scoffed. “What new power is better senses?” she grumbled. 

My smile dropped a little. “Say what?”

She looked at me and my slightly confused face. “I can smell stuff better?” she repeated. “And tasting, too. I know you tried hard to bribe me with … whatever that was,” she added as she gestured to the licked-clean plates.

I blinked. “Huh. I didn’t expect that.”

“What?” she asked tersely and maybe a little apprehensively.

“Nothing. It’s just … your body already recognizes what’s good for your advancement.”

“... Huh?”

“The breakfast I made for us used ingredients that cultivators like ourselves would appreciate. I would actually go so far as to say that the ingredients alone were worth nearly a thousand dollars.”

Amy choked on her spit before her wide eyes stared at the empty plates. She rounded on me. “You should have told me to enjoy it, then!”

I raised my hands up in surrender. “It’s the kind of meal we need to take every now and then.”

“No, I want it everyday!”

I blanched. “U-Uh, honey? I don’t exactly have that kind of cash flow…” 

She scoffed before narrowing her eyes. “What exactly was in it that made me feel so … good? Like I was getting filled up in parts that I didn’t even know about?” She paused and then blushed. “And not sexually!”

I chuckled. “That would be your body feeling your meridian pathways fill up a little.”

“My meridian pathways?”

“They would be a conceptual pathway and reservoirs through which energy flows through. Unfortunately, our bodies don’t make those energies, so the only way we would fill up those pathways and points would be to-”

“-eat things that have those energies,” she finished for me. Really, it should have been a basic concept for her to grasp because the how’s of lower level cultivation had many similarities with regular biology.

“Yes. And some of the roots I used to cook our breakfast are long-living plants that absorb the natural energies. Eating it made your body happy because it could fill up your internal energy in turn.”

She frowned. “Sounds new age.”

“New age got their stuff from the ancient age,” I scoffed. “All of their talks of karma, qi, chakra, and stuff are just concepts that they nicked from more traditional philosophies and ideas of the ancient world.”

She hummed. “So what do I do?”

“You eat.”

Amy blinked confusedly. “That’s it?”

“And take medicinal baths, if you want tough skin.”

“Not into that,” she frowned, and then her eyes brightened, opening up wide. “Wait, can I fly?”

I blinked. “... Actually, yes. If you-”

She jumped into my arms, laughing. “I’m gonna fly! I’m gonna fly!” she cheered with a big fat smile on her face.

Seeing her smile, I couldn’t help but smile too. “Yes, you will fly!”