Chapter 6 – The butterfly effect when influencing family politics

“One must be careful which families they interact with. Saying yes to one family might mean another will take offense, which is almost as bad as saying no to a family. I urge you to reconsider on your decision… Minister.” - A quote from Sem Li, in a theater reproduction of ‘The Great Li rise to power.’

Vera was excited. In just 20 minutes she could stroll in, and experiment on real samples of people who had the parasite, if only she wasn’t stopped again. She was thanking Lang in her head, for this opportunity, and thanking lady luck for not getting caught… yet.

Normally getting stopped wouldn’t mean anything, but getting stopped by the automatic system two days in a row meant a bunch of checks that Vera wanted to avoid.

She was pretending to wash her hands when Helena Young entered the restroom.

“Ah Vera, how did you fare on yesterday’s full physical?” Helena asked matter-of-factly.

Vera was confused “There was a physical yesterday?” Then it clicked for her, the announcement she had the Microbiology Professor Tsu Shengu do.

“Ah I was already in the lab, behind the curtains, so Professor Tsu said I didn’t need to get tested for the parasite.” Vera said sheepishly.

“Oh so you DO know what this is about.” Helena said. “Do you know anyone who is sick?” Helena asked pointedly.

“Well Lang is, Tsu had me get Lang to her, after she was informed that Lang’s mother was also sick. I believe that’s the reason she had everyone tested.” Vera offered, hoping that it would sound reasonable enough.

“Interesting, I believe you.” She said sarcastically, so sarcastically that it sounded sarcastic even to Vera, who started blushing a bit. “Except for Lang, Tim Lye and David Nam were also sick.”

This gave Vera a stop. The Lye family was one of the 8 main families, to whom the Bao family were just a branch, the Nam family was also an important family, the branch of the Mar family. She hadn’t heard about this yet, but it almost looked like the parasite was attacking only the olden families.

“This might sound rude...” Vera trailed off, to which Helena raised her brow, “but has anyone from your family been… you know” Vera started slurring her words to the end, trying not to anger Helena.

“Hahaha,” Helena laughed, releasing Vera’s stress “There’s no need to act so guarded with me.”

She put her hand on Vera’s hand and continued “Our most important sick is Master Zhang Young, who was one of the earliest followers of the God-Emperor.” She stopped for almost a second and after that she added “May he watch over us.” The distance between the gestures felt a bit odd, Helena probably didn’t like the God-Emperor.

Vera didn’t know how well liked the God-Emperor was in the Young family so she asked “Do you have many sick?”

“A couple, but outside of Zhang who entered full stasis two weeks ago, no one important for the pedigree of the family.” Helena replied disinterested.

“How close is your family to the Li fami...ly?” Vera blurted it out without giving it too much thought, she tried stop herself at the end.

This piqued Helena’s interest and she said “We’re on good terms, I’d like to think.” She tilted her head, her flower brooch making a pretty bell noise. She was giving Vera her full attention and asked in a commanding tone “Why?” A sinister feeling crept up on Vera but she didn’t back down, at least not completely.

“It’s just, I feel like the parasite has helped the Li family a tremendous amount.” Vera yipped to Helena.

“Hmm.” Helena stopped for a moment and went through her memories in her head “I suppose you are right, I should ask Great Grandfather about it.” Helena had curiosity colored all around her face.

“Don’t do that.” Vera panicked a little, understanding Great Grandfather to mean ‘oldest ancestor’ or ‘current head of the family’ “If there really is a conspiracy, I don’t want anyone to know that I know.”

“If its for my family’s sake, I don’t care.” Helena answered, Vera visibly recoiled from this and pleaded: “I won’t tell anyone about it, just don’t mention you got this idea from me.” Contending against any of the families even a branch one like the Young family was suicide in more than one way.

“They wouldn’t believe it came from you anyways.” Helena mentioned pointedly.

Now Vera was even more confused “What?”

“Everyone thinks of you as an airhead, the genius airhead is how you are referred to on some reports, some say you are also super thirsty.”

Vera looked at Helena with an incredulous look.

“If my Great Grandfather read any of the reports containing you, he wouldn’t believe that you had any idea of the inter-family feuds, much less the insight to reveal a conspiracy like this.” she quickly added “if it even is a conspiracy that is.” and continued “You know, I think if I told him YOU were the one who told me, he’d ask me who my real source was and it would put my good standing in the family in jeopardy.” That one hurt, Vera stopped smiling all-together.

“That was pretty mean.” She sighed “Except the genius part, that was very flattering.”

“You’re welcome, miss Genius.” Helena’s sarcasm had resurfaced, this time with some playfulness.

“So where are you going today?” Vera asked casually.

“I was thinking of alchemy research, but decided my chances were best with combat.”

“Combat?”

Helena rolled her eyes “Really? After saying ‘being called an airhead is mean’ you’re going to ask what I’m talking about...”

“Yes” Vera looked down.

“The message board two days ago… ring any bells?” Vera had that look like ‘Oh, now I get it’ but Helena didn’t give her time for recouping her honor “The Cultivation University tournament is a tournament between different cultivation schools, that has multiple categories, including alchemy, which my family excels at, and a 5 on 5 melee, which is the most important discipline by far. I was thinking of joining either, but the medical class has that Ivan Mar...”

“The sexy tall blonde guy?” Vera remembered seeing him a couple of times landing in the courtyard next to her.

“Yes the very, anyways he’s always been the best at alchemy from our year, the odds would have to be stacked in my favor for me to win.” She sighed “But I can probably make the melee, I’m faster than the Shan sisters and I’m good at defending from Soulcraft, plus alchemy is always a large boon in contests like these.”

“So they are opening a new combat class for that? I think I’ll give it a try as well.” Vera ventured.

“Don’t you want to go for the Soulcraft competition?” Helena was surprised but you couldn't tell from her well-composed face.

“I’ve never been actually that good at Soulcraft, both Mike and Lang from our class are definitely better, but last I heard someone from the Organic Chemistry class had achieved Soul Rank 40 with the Soul Furnace technique.”

“Simone Tai is also sick with the parasite.” Helena said, Tai was another of the minor families that didn’t play nicely with the Li family.

Now that was faster than she thought, if people were getting sick at this rate, she couldn't just sit around randomly, she had to make the cure if that was the last thing she would do.

“Actually, never mind. I need to do research.” Vera said in a grave manner.

“Is it actually progressing well?” Helena knew that no one had any real progress with their projects, but Vera spent the most time doing research of all the people she knew.

“I’ve felt like I was on the tip of a breakthrough for a while now.” Vera conceded “I don’t know how close that really is though.”

“Well, I wish you good luck.” With that, Helena entered one of the stalls, so Vera left the toilet and went towards the research lab.

There she was happily adding the new ‘strictly legal’ test tubes, from the box of samples into a bunch of new experiments. The experiment was to see if human juices which had a little bit of Koshi extract would have the changing Koi Koshi bacteria eating up the parasite.

As she was preparing one of the samples of Lang’s blood, adding Koshi extract to it, she had a realization “I gave Lang some of the Koshi Tea.” She stopped herself before saying anything more out loud ‘I should also check if that works’. She did some calculations for two cups of Koshi Tea in the blood stream of a fully healthy human. Then she added a small amount of Koshi Tea to the another sample of the blood, after that she added some of the bacteria.

After writing it all down, she looked at the time, still only 2 PM, she had lots of time to play with her Sweethearts.

Using her Soul body to probe them she realized that their rate of gathering Soulforce was not bad. The lucky thing was of course, that the soul stays mostly the same no matter what organism has it, the Qi, which is tied to the body will be limited by the number of cells this organism has.

She checked their progress, seeing Four Brain cells in a diamond shape, surrounded by approximately 40-50 of the regular cells. ‘Hmm, something’s wrong’ Looking around, she found 3 clusters of 9 cells each, these clusters were assailing the regular Koi Koshi cells. After using a combined tentacle to touch a Koi Koshi mitochondria, they had a change, and started eating the plentiful agar in the Petri dish instead of the Koshi mushroom.

‘Now that’s interesting, if I learn more about that trick I could use it to edit them to eat the parasite cysts. Maybe even the parasites themselves.’

Of course, they already ate the parasite cysts, but only if they were attached to the Koshi fungus, at least according to all of her tests. The bacteria with Koshi infused water would sometimes result in a reduction in the cysts, by a large sum, but it wasn’t enough to be considered a cure.

Another problem was, that the Koshi extract made the water have a low pH, which made a bunch of things not work in the regular human body.

‘Time for more double cultivation’ she giggled to herself.

Entering the Soul Realm, she saw the tentacle from before deftly bringing in spec after spec of Soulforce.

‘Can I teach it Qi building?’ Vera was thinking of the next step, for anyone that had accumulated enough Soulforce, generating Qi was the next step, but Qi was heavily limited by the object in the real world. As the primary force of Body Realm abilities, Qi generation was necessary to continue advancement through the stages.

It seemed the re-programming of the Koi Koshi bacteria, happened purely off chemicals and wasn’t attached to Soulforce, changing its programming on a purely body level, ‘this means that if we could infuse it with Soulforce we could change the Spirit Signature.’ At least that was the plan.

Vera decided to help the Sweetheart in obtaining Soulforce. She started spinning the surrounding clusters of Soulforce around the Organism, ‘You won’t be getting any hard love from me just yet.’ Vera adopted an almost owner-pet stance to the bacteria.

After a while she felt a small disturbance, but ignored it, because as she was about to leave her mind wandering into the Soul Realm, the Sweetheart organism managed to coil a second, smaller tentacle around a Soulforce spec. After a minute or so, it coiled two more smaller tentacles.

‘This is very good progress.’ Catching the small globules of Soulforce was effective at the start, but after understanding more about Soulforce, one could have an even smaller liquid-like sheen attached to themselves sieving the Soulforce ink that was attracted to her and slowly, in an ebb-and-flow entered her throughout her body. Focusing on the feeling felt pleasant but Vera told herself she would spend too much time if she didn’t get a move on.

After she finished, she took another look into the microscope when she heard a cough from the back. She turned around to find Mike Zhou, “You know cultivating in the lab is heavily dissuaded right?”

“It’s a requirement for progressing my experiment, not only reading Spiritual Masks, but slowly changing the Spiritual Masks of the bacteria.” Vera replied, trying to act matter-of-factly.

Mike smiled “Sure.” He said in a mix of sarcasm and open mockery “Anyways, I was looking for Torpota, and I didn’t want to intrude on your cultivation.”

“How long were you standing there?” Vera entered embarrassed mode.

“About 15 minutes.”

Vera calmed down a bit, ‘so he didn’t hear me talking to my Sweethearts.’ She went to one of the freezer boxes and took out some Tarpota root in a box.

“Careful not to touch it with bare hands, it can mess up your fingers and your spiritual mask for Soulcraft.” She extended the box to him “Also, I’ll need you to sign this paper and then submit a report with the amount of Tarpota used.” After he took it, she took out a form and gave it to him.

She turned around and started clearing out all of her samples. Mike finished writing and placed the filled out form on a table and said “I’m off then, good luck.”

Vera exhaled when the door closed, stress quickly falling off her. She didn’t know how to act when people came in. ‘But didn’t I nail it?’ she thought, when she noticed her notebook, it felt off. “Did he actually read through it or just pick it up?” She said out loud, heart starting to race again.

She used Mind’s Gate to remember the exact state she had left it in. While concentrating on the notebook, she went deep. Looking at the details, not only was it placed at a slightly different angle, the pages inside were ruffled ‘Mike you dirty dirty boy’. For some reason, her run-in with the little voyeur had made her hot and bothered.

“Luckily I don’t keep ‘Sweetheart’ information there, and I used L Blood to simplify Lang’s blood” Vera was thinking out loud. She stopped herself before she could continue, even though it helped her concentrate. ‘Will Mike try to claim my research for his own, or is there something else at play?’

She decided to be safe and take with her, the Sweetheart dish, along with a sample of the Koi Koshi bacteria that ate the parasite in the lowest concentration of Koshi, which was still too high for humans.

“I need to publish a research paper, and quick.” She told herself as she looked at the time, it was still only 5:12. So she started writing a fast draft titled Koi Koshi’s love of Kung cysts ‘that sound’s about right, just enough sensationalism to get people talking.’

A rough first draft was all she had time for, so she packed up and left, with enough time to get to the 6:07 train.