Chapter 4 – Finally, Double Cultivation

“Old school cultivators aren’t serious about advancing the civilization, they are too proud to concede that there are faucets of knowledge, whose exploration leads to faster advancement than cultivation.” Mark Hugh, headmaster of the Royal Cultivation University

Vera was interacting with her bacteria for almost an hour, before she started jotting down experimental data from her other experiments, noting, she needed many Koshi products along with sick tissue from humans, along with sick tissue from a human after he’d had some Koshi-based product.

She added a couple Koshi mushrooms from the stash to her backpack and made a note about needing more to the supplier. She finished up in the lab and went back home at 6 pm.

On the way back home, she heard a man selling newspapers: “The God-Emperor has entered Stasis! Extra, Extra!” and from another place “Breaking News! The God-Emperor has entered Stasis!”

If what they were saying was the truth, then it was terrible. Vera bought a newspaper and sure enough:

After battling the Kung parasite for 3 weeks, his Majesty God-Emperor Qiang Qianfan has decided on a big leap and taken complete stasis, giving reign to his long-term disciple, and right-hand man, Emperor of the Four Elements Chao Li of the Li family, who’s main goal is going to be preparing a plan that didn’t involve the God-Emperor dealing with the worst of the Demon Moon.

There were many more news articles associated with the Li family becoming top and raking rewards from their namesake becoming the leader. Such as, the youngest lady of the Li family, only 22 was now looking for courtiers, Li business stocks went up 20%, a short article about insider trading and family representatives of Li-friend families receiving this information before anyone else.

What caught Vera’s eye was a short article talking about important families and how they got affected by the parasite. It included 15 of the 22 extended families and 4 of the 8 main families. Oddly, it seemed the further from the Li family they were, the more likely they were to have the parasite infect them, Vera mused, ‘is this a conspiracy?’ ‘can I talk to anyone about this?’ she decided there was ‘no way that Chao Li would actually abuse the trust the God-Emperor had in him… Right?’.

Coming back to home Jill japed at her “Had fun with your fate~” she stopped herself when anger and sorrow were clear on Vera’s face. “Did anything happen? What’s going on?” Jill came towards Vera and hugged her, burrowing her head in Vera’s breasts. Vera was caught a bit off-guard and she patted Jill’s head, “Don’t worry, it’s noth~” it was an obvious lie, both of them knew it.

Vera continued “The God-Emperor has entered stasis” Jill knew how much Vera adored the God-Emperor, even though she herself was a bit lukewarm to the propaganda.

“Who’s replacing him?” and Vera told her about the Li family and how they had forged ahead in terms of influence. Jill didn’t seem too interested in the details tho, she hated politics and most talk about the main families, probably because she came from an unimportant family.

They prepared dinner and ate in silence until Vera said “I have the mushrooms for you.” Taking them out of her bag in the small sack.

“Ok, I’ll prepare the relaxant as we agreed?” Jill wasn’t making sure, she just wanted to question Vera, as it still seemed a bit weird to her.

“Yes, yes.” Vera was already thinking of the expected results of the calmant and as she went to sleep, many conspiracies were slowly filling her head.

********

The next day, Vera bought some Koshi mushroom tea on her way to school after missing the train. She waited for Lang at the courtyard. This time, she showed up. Her face looking indifferent, Vera knew this meant she had been affected heavily, as she would normally hold a smile no matter what.

“Have you heard of the God-Emperor?” Vera asked, slightly hesitant, knowing that not only had Lang heard about it, but it’s definitively heavily affecting her.

“Have I ever, I don’t hear the end of it at home.” Lang said almost angrily, more of a frustration and resignation in her voice than anything else, “My uncle thinks the Li family taking over is even more important than my Dad trying out partial stasis – by blocking out Soulforce and the creation of Qi, he is trying to reduce the speed at which the parasite multiplies in him.” She looked like tears were about to well up in her eyes “And I don’t even know, if it will work!”

Lang was stomping ahead, Vera jogged to catch up, put her hand on Lang’s shoulder and said “I understand that it’s hard on you, but we’ll get through it.”

The one thing Vera enjoyed about being tall was, that she could pull someone against her chest and they’d almost always feel better, no matter how dumb her words of reassurance were. It worked again this time, with Lang sobbing for a short while and then stopping.

After they separated, Vera felt a wet stain on her shoulder, but she didn’t make it much of a deal. She went on towards the Lab.

On the way, she noticed the message-board wasn’t empty anymore, it had information about a Tournament with the Li and Xu family’s Full Cultivation Academy, likely the intended announcement. Alongside Dark curtains on another part of the message-board, which had a simple message “The God-Emperor has entered Stasis, may he protect us from the Spirit Realms.”

She thought ‘that’s interesting, wonder what disciplines there are’ as she continued towards the lab.

As usual, she casually went through the seals, one at a time. The alarm went off, clothing infected.

“OH NO!” Vera exclaimed, ‘she must have gotten sick during the funeral.’ Vera took off her lab coat and the shirt she had underneath it and placed it inside of the box in her research area. It pained her to go away without saying hello to her little babies, but Lang and everyone else’s health took precedence over her petty things.

She came out and the alarm didn’t sound, basically confirming her suspicion, she started running towards the Soul class when a voice stopped her “Where are we running?” Tsu Shengu her microbiology teacher asked in a joking tone.

“Lang has the parasite” Vera looked at Tsu and continued “I have to tell her before she can infect the class.” This left Tsu in disbelief as Vera filled her muscles with Qi and using a combination of techniques increased her speed to be over 20 meters per second.

She arrived in front of the class, while it was going on.

Rather than knocking, she entered and said “There’s an emergency, I require Lang Bao!” the teacher Sima Li looked incredulously, who was from a far enough branch of the Li family, that was far enough to use the Li surname again.

“Is this a joke miss Shim?” she asked in a stern voice.

“You will get an explanation after class Miss.” Vera bowed and closed the door, which opened a couple seconds later as a confused Lang Bao left the classroom.

Not giving her much time, Vera said “You have the Kung parasite, after you sniffled on my shoulder, the machine beeped saying my clothing was infected.”

Lang sank to her knees, getting the parasite meant that a lot of people in her family who didn’t know about it, got it yesterday at the funeral. This could completely ruin the Bao family, one of the twenty two.

Vera now had to find a way to test all her classmates, arousing as little suspicion as possible. She went back to master Tsu and asked her “Can you test all my classmates to see if they got sick from Lang?”

“A sensible way of doing things, if a bit round-about.” he confirmed, keying the PA system, he said “Attention masters class year 2, microbiology. A regular checkup is going to be performed on all of you today.”

Vera could almost imagine the sighing that was bound to happen, but she didn’t want to expose her friend as a sick patient.

She went back to her research lab and back to her little rascals.

This time she witnessed an unexpected scene, 45 or so of the attracted bacteria had combined into a circular blob of sorts, with a larger single bacterium in the middle, serving out the neural network. This time, she noticed some regular Koi Koshi bacteria in there, so she looked around and saw about 50-60 of them in the agar, but around the small Koshi the amount surged to thousands.

‘So there was a single Koi Koshi and a single Sweetheart at the start, but the Sweethearts have the same slow multiplication of Koi Koshi even with Koshi mushrooms.’ Looking back at the ‘Sweetheart’ bacteria, as Vera named them, she found over half of them had moved out and were bringing in pieces of the Koshi mushroom, and some of them were bringing pieces of her eyebrow. They brought them to the middle, where Vera saw that they gave it all to what Vera considered to be the brain of the Sweetheart complex. After all the bacteria had assembled again, they added themselves to the connecting lines.

The brain shrunk and pieces of both Koshi mushroom and Vera’s eyebrow flew to each of the bacteria in equal amount. About 15-20 of them unhooked themselves from the cluster and began doubling, as before, this made Vera hot and bothered, but she stopped herself from doing anything. Each of the duets kept a small tether between each other, but one of the newly created duets didn’t stop there, they agglomerated with another duet to create another brain cell.

‘So 4 cells create one brain, interesting.’ The new brain cell hooked itself to all the nearby cells including some from the previously hooked cells. Some of the bacterial cells that were unhooked from either brain stayed frozen in place until the two brain cells shone a light and the liquid they were in began a slight reddening. Once this reddened liquid reached the solitary duets, they followed it and found the two connected clusters. After a couple of seconds, the clusters then started moving together eating up all the reddish liquid, getting about 70% of it back within a couple minutes.

After going through all this, the two clusters were at peace. Vera felt it, she knew something special was happening. She opened her Mind’s Gate and activated Spirit Resonance, in which she saw the organism she had labeled ‘Sweetheart’. Unlike her soul, which was beautifully rounded with many geometrical shapes on the middle, the organism was disheveled and made up of incoherent and tiny strings.

One of those strings was attached to Vera however and she could feel its conscience. It was in the state of meditation.

“Oh God-Emperor, this might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever done.” She said in the Soul Realm.

As she focused, small wafts of Soulforce started gathering around her, the most elementary way of gathering Soulforce, but she didn’t take them in. She made an imaginary current around her, that had the crowds of weak Soulforce slowly spin and twirl on themselves and around her. She saw a small number of the tiny yellow specs representing Soulforce pass through the ‘Sweetheart’ Soul agglomeration.

There was no reaction, but that was normal, she focused a little harder and a large swathe of Soulforce started passing through her creation. As it was reaching close to its tail end, One of the strings, fatter than any other, except the one tying Vera and the agglomeration together, snapped together, holding in a single grain of Soulforce.

Vera had successfully moved the bacterial drove into the Soul Gathering stage.