Chapter 199 - So Y'all Thought The Cyberpunk Tag Was A Joke, Huh? (Patreon)

Aaaaand we're back! With some long-time favorites in an all-new pot of setting stew! I was actually planning on putting this off until tomorrow, but then my architecture senses tingled, and my "deeply in love with these characters" organs started spasming, and my worldbuilding madness begin to seep from my brain-wrinkles and- well, here we are! Holding a chapter I really liked writing! So fucking glad I am using the Academies as a jumping point and not the sole focus, shit was Painful to write sometimes.

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Maen indulges in her freedom of movement. 

Ever since the arena fight where Raika’s blood altered her, she’s been a little bit in love with the concept of speed. Since their separation, it’s been one of her main focuses, learning to love moving fast in as many different ways as she can. Step Of The Feline is a popular one she got ahold of pretty easily, but it felt a bit stereotypical, and pulled a bit too much on her bestial cultivation, countering her orthodox style. The synergy between them is as crucial now as it’s ever been, especially as she’s felt herself approach a sort of genuine link between the two sides. Thunderous Steps is a fun one, offering massive bursts of speed and capable of breaking the sound barrier with each “step” if one is proficient enough and strong enough. Her personal favorite, Shadow’s Vanishing, is a fun mix of step-techniques to move into blind spots and between eye-blinks, with an added Qi component of allowing the user to mimic the contours of shadows and move along their edges at tremendous speeds.

But Yun Ka, just a few weeks back, offered some particular advice. 

Techniques, past a certain point, matter less than their wielder. Martial forms and specific techniques are particularly useful at the Qi Gathering and even Foundational level, where they can serve to train one’s movements and learn to better manipulate the flow of Qi. As one’s cultivation develops in its own unique way, the original technique becomes less and less useful. Unless you specifically force your body and Qi to perfectly mimic said technique every time (a difficult and impressive enough task in and of itself) it inevitably changes, more and more as one develops. The techniques you know and master shape your core, shape your Soul as it begins to form, and shape your cultivation, all flowing back into each other, minutely with lesser techniques, much more powerfully with more complex ones.

Which means that technically, forming one’s own techniques is the ultimate way to make your power exclusively yours. 

It’s harder, much more complex, requires the truly unique geniuses of the world to formulate and craft their own all-original techniques- and above all else, it doesn’t even guarantee a better result, especially if one finds a particularly powerful technique. 

So, like with so many things, Maen is working hard to find a middle ground.

Synthesis is a useful way to phrase it. Using the explosive bursts of force from the Thunderous Steps technique alongside the Shadow’s Vanishing technique makes for an unbalanced but powerful fusion of both, slower than the former but much more versatile than the latter. Trying to add Step Of The Feline, on the other hand, magnifies the perception-dodging aspects of Shadow’s Vanishing, but is entirely incompatible with Thunderous Steps, and the fusion of the three together is downright nonfunctional. But taking individual pieces out of each? That’s more doable.

And then, her cultivation.

A wild and untamed hunter, quiet but sharp, alongside an impression of yuzu, natural freshness grown wild. Raika encouraged her to support both aspects, and she’s done what she can to semi-equally divide up the resources she eats that add to her bestial cultivation and the energies she absorbs that add to her orthodox cultivation.

It’s still incomplete, and likely will be for quite some time, but hell, she’s proud enough of the movement technique she’s developed to make up a pseudonym after it.

Path Of The Wild Hunt fuses the thundering steps of the, well, Thunderous Steps technique with those of the Steps Of The Feline, meshing their incompatibility by making them overlap only in parts. Quick, soft steps along any edge of surface, followed by a sort of pounce or lunge that can match some of the higher speeds of the Thunderous Steps technique. Add in a touch of the shadow-pathing effect of Shadow’s Vanishing, and what she loses in stealth overall, she gains back in non-euclidian movement.

The smell of fresh-grown, wild citrus and running beasts fills her nose as she pushes both sides of her cultivation at once and steps along the edge of a building.

Rather than teetering off the edge or standing upright, she somehow spirals around the 90 degree angle, the shadows and terrain both shifting in ways only she can see to give her exactly the right spot to step to proceed to her destination. Her idea for Path Of The Wild Hunt is something that follows an old story of the north-western rings about a group of spirit beasts, spirits, Daemons and more that would hunt unruly cultivators when they wandered into their territories, able to follow them anywhere in the world and vanish back just as easily. Her technique takes the other techniques she’s started to learn, her own cultivation, and adds a dash of inspiration from the myth, and she uses it to push the world juuuust slightly off-kilter, shaping it into a pathway that takes angles and lines of sight as suggestions rather than harsh realities.

Imperfect? Yes. Does she switch to Shadow’s Vanishing whenever she thinks someone might notice her? Absolutely. 

But it’s hers, and it’s growing.

Between her specialization into movement techniques and the artifact Taurus gifted her, no one on the streets below or above notices her presence. 

The triple-pyramids of the Academies gleam against the horizon behind her, but the city around them is no less fantastical. While the pyramids themselves are each broader, shinier, and somehow simultaneously taller than every other building yet only half the heights of most of them, its surroundings are…

Well, for a washer girl from a mid-range sect in the third ring, it feels like a different world.

The second ring is defined as everywhere where the shadow of the continent-scale pillar of the first ring falls. Kinda. They track the range of the shadow from north to west, along where the sun travels, and use that range as the radius of a circle, splitting the second ring into four quadrants; Upper Shadow, Lower Shadow, Western Sun, Eastern Sun. The Academies sit near the center of Eastern Sun, sitting as the central structure of education for all cultivators in the Empire. Teleportation arrays in cities all across the second ring lead straight to it, so that all from across the empire can witness its majesty and learn at its feet- if they earn the privilege, or have it paid for them by their masters.

In turn, the city surrounding it is a glorious, sprawling place of cultures from all across the lands of the Empire, holding elements of myriad sects, histories, and architectural design styles. Most of the second ring is an urban sprawl, with a lines of trains that run through thousands of stations all across it and make room for hundreds on hundreds of installations spread through its makeup, such that most of the natural landscape that remains lives as a purposefully preserved area. Spiraling towers to control the weather, carved with faintly glowing runes that illuminate the nights, are matched by silos, warehouses, and sprawling resource production centers, taking the goods and resources of the third ring and the depths of the earth and sky and making them into an endless array of artifacts, drugs, ritual components and building materials. The city of the Academies (she refuses to call it Academy City, that’s so dumb, and “Eastern Gate Of Enlightenment” is too mouthy) is a shining example of that sort of design philosophy.

There are some buildings connected by railings, and only railings, their foundations floating suspended in the air and adding to their impossible heights. Sloped ceilings and ornate designs of spirit beasts decorate plenty, but they’re integrated into the new architecture, like sleek steel and shining white marble are slowly absorbing them to form something new. The roads are all paved, such that the only dirt in the city is that which comes from its inhabitants, with each tier of its structure above the other, bridges and walkways multiplying the amount of ground one can stand on and traverse.

The heights of the city are barely visible, whole kilometer-length towers half-disconnected from the ground making up a fractal skyline of glowing arrays and shining marble. Arcane designs, reliefs and mosaics of beautiful scenery and glorious conquests decorate the buildings, none so bright as to overpower the white and gold of the Empire’s own resources but enough to shape the skyline and the view. Here, most people live in expansive, spatially-shrunk manses, whole floors of their towers recreating acres and acres of land, with nearly all travel requiring something to fly upon or to traverse the more colorful and boisterous walkways between them.

Beneath this are the four “layers” of the city, each one close but distinct. Beastbloods and giant-kin intermingle with goblinoids and humans freely atop the upper “floor” of the city, where many of the towers begin their climbs; this area is reserved for cultivators and services catering to them. Traveling cultivators, the students of the Academies, and those who wish to spend their strength crafting or pursuing the mercantile way make their ways here often. The space reflects this, with most areas being covered so as not to show the lower floors, and millions of trees and points of natural growth and Qi decorating the sleek construction and ornate roofing that make the city glimmer white, red and gold from above.

The next two layers are for the mortals of the city, and the cultivators that oversee them or work in those areas. Maintaining arrays, construction-work, less successful craftsmen and, of course, actual families take up most of these, with the amount of natural light making its way down diminishing with each floor. They’re a maze, most of their architecture varying from tens to hundreds of feet above the ground but somehow still finding ways to appear claustrophobic and subterranean, even in places where people display art and intermingle with those from above.

At the very bottom are what, in other places, might be considered a normal city, and here are considered the slums. The ‘first layer’. Rogue cultivators, researchers, drug peddlers and mutant, deviated cultivations live here, below where even mortals tend to go, and most of the city’s trash and incoming deliveries of basic goods find their way through there at some point or another. Lit almost entirely artificially by candles, flickering arrays and the occasional artifact running along central lanes, the only light of the suns down there is that which comes in from the loading docks, hillsides, and the occasional cultivator-related incident that busts a hole through four layers of city.

It’s perhaps the greatest and worst place she could ever imagine, and she moves through it perfectly unseen.

She spends most of her time sprinting through the second layer. Lots more shadows to work with, and a lot more people who really don’t care about asking questions and can’t afford the same fancy arrays as the upper floors. Especially with it still being daylight, the uppermost layers are a no-go until she develops her skills a lot more, but she still makes exceptional time between the angle-warping nature of her movement technique and the sheer speed she can output naturally.

She makes it almost twenty-five kilometers south of the Academies before she slows again.

Slipping lithely through a small break between the buildings, Maen dashes through the shadows and in between piping, support beams and maintenance platforms to move upwards towards the light. She makes it up to the third layer, into an area nice enough to be connected but far enough away from everything that it’s teetering on the edge of being “second layer” architecture. The building is squat, and seems like it was rebuilt multiple times, its frame holding signs of older traditional architecture, the brutalist styles of the great expansion of the cityscape, and the new minimalist and abstract trends of its later years. Some of the windows are shut and hold no glass, while a large, slightly flickering illusion array of formulae and runes decorates the front with the scent of food, a mild memetic compulsion to visit the place, and the glowing words “Molten Wings” on the front.

Apparently it’s a joke about “molting” in the past tense, but it’s not very funny.

She slips through a window that’s barely ajar, takes the near-invisible tripwires she’s spread across the room down, and, after checking the space thoroughly with her natural and Qi senses, finally takes a seat in a small, battered room with a cot, a sword rack, a closet, and a broken wall.

She takes a few steps over towards the wall, leveraging open some of the “authentic wooden boards” (they’re weirdly grey and much weaker than natural wood) to pull out the person-sized mirror she hides back there.

With one final check of her surroundings, making sure the arrays she copied from Yun Ka’s instructions are pristine and decorating every flat plane and right angle in the room, she finally nods and pushes her Qi into the mirror.

A quick puzzle later, and her reflection clears away, bleeding into itself like a kaleidoscope of mercury.

A moment later, she’s hit by the smell of peaches and cream and the most brightly-colored person she knows.

“Maen! So good of you to come on back. How was meeting your old flame?”

Maen laughs at Kaena’s terrible joke, rolling her eyes. “Actually went better than expected. Is the boss in? I need to let him know we’ve got an expensive one. I think he might be actually useful.”

Kaena grins, their pearly whites shining against peach-pink and gold-vitiligo skin. “Well color me excited, kitten! You know I do love any excuse to violate poor horn-head’s coinpurse.”