Chapter 11 – I’m back bitch(es)

“You should get a Cultivation girlfriend, so she can cultivate you some balls. Maybe THEN, you’ll stop being such a pussy.” - Shia Le

 Lang hated this. Her best friend Vera hadn’t mirror-talked with her in a couple days. The Lye family, which was the main family to Lang’s Bao branch family, started making large moves, many of which included the Bao family.

Despite the Bao family importance, enterprise value and profits all increasing, the Bao family fell into even stronger ‘servitude’ of the Lye family.

The main families always considered the branch families to be inferior, but realistically, before Samper becoming the new stand-in for the emperor, the Lye family was only about 40% more powerful.

What made it all worse, was the fact that they created a much fairer alliance with a couple of the branch families that supported the Li family before that, namely the Young and Xu families.

Both of these families should have been inferior to the Bao family, but because of the new alliance they were allies rather than servants to the Lye family.

This wouldn’t be a problem for Lang as she didn’t care much about the ‘Family Politics’, but her parents and the rest of the family cared, and they all made sure that Lang suffered as much as they did from this disgrace.

Lang was also sick of perpetual cultivation and the fact that she was aging.

Now people normally age, but Lang had slowed down her aging by the time she was 12 to the point that her body was still like a body of a 19 year old now that she was 23.

But the parasite started changing that quickly. Every other day she would go to the LMT to see the number drop by 4 months, 6 months and her body felt older for the wear and tear.

As her own medicine was still in an experimental stage, she was not supposed to attempt anything further with it.

‘Fuck that, if Vera gets to break school rules, I get to break family rules.’ She finally decided.

During the night, she crept into her father’s study and took out the multiple layer schematic of the alchemical Lifeforce fuel created with a Spirit Signature, that she had designed.

Lang knew that in its current state it didn’t allow the person in question to reclaim the Lifeforce spent, but she didn’t much care, as her goal was to get rid of the parasite as fast as possible.

She quickly used Soul Transcription along with Alchemical Printing to create a copy of the schematic. She then put the original back to where it was, as if nothing had happened.

********

In the morning she told her butler that she would be training alchemy in the Alchemy room 4 that day, that she was not to be disturbed, except between 11:50 and 12:30 when she would like lunch brought in and taken out.

Her butler, a tall man named Robin, with a splendid mustache, kind looking eyes and a muscular stature bowed to her deeply.

Lang went down to the Alchemy room 4, it was the most useful one for her studies most of the time. The lower the number, the more equipment it had, but rooms 1 through 3 were more often used than not, room 4 was the sweet spot for amount of equipment and tranquility.

With the added benefit of adding herself to its schedule, she knew, no one would be there to complain, but more importantly, no one would witness her breaking her fathers rules.

The alchemy room had a lot more than just the basic equipment, but the three she cared about were the Alchemical Crucible, the Eldritchating Still and the Phylacterion. A Crucible could speed and slow down things, in terms of time it was the most important alchemical advancement of the past 200 years. The Eldritchating Still would turn alchemical energy into Eldritch power, which was used to power Eldritch runes. The Phylacterion was an apparatus for holding phylacteries filled with condensed Spirit Elements.

Out of the 230 Spirit Elements known to alchemists, she would only need 3; Prudentium, Permutatium and Velmutium.

She opened an iron-glass vial and she spit in it, tying her Spiritual Mask to it. She put it in the Crucible along with a couple other things it required to create a Spirit Mask imprint. She cracked her fingers, ‘This will be a long day.’

She started fashioning out a bronze basin using alchemical fire and a Rune of Shaping. The end result looked almost like a kettle with an input and output valve. She was working to create an Eldritch Rune of Transfigurement for the input using the 3 Spirit Element phylacteries and a ritual.

She fashioned two covers from Spirit-Sakura wood, inscribed one with the Rune of Time, which would later be powered by the crucible. She inscribed the other with the beginning of the Eldritch Rune.

Using Eldritch Runes was a disliked feature in any modern construct, because they required a bonding ceremony with a Spiritual Masks Imprint, but they offered themselves to a lot more workability by the person that had prepared them. This made them fall mostly out of favor, as any tool created with Eldritch runes was usable only by its creator.

Once she had all the preliminary steps finished and a vial of spirit mask bonding fluid forming in the crucible, she finally took a breath.

She had spent over 3 hours, was exhausted and covered in sweat, looking at the time it was already 11:12, so she decided to wait for her butler to bring her lunch in the designated time slot. She put everything to the side except for the Rune of Time which she put in her hand and started fiddling with it and its activation requirements.

A knock at the door came at 11:51, Lang opened the door, “Thank you.” she said to the butler as he gave her a meal of rice and vegetables. This was another thing she didn’t miss in her family, unless it was Sunday, a celebration, or guests were over, they didn’t eat sweats, or meat. But Lang missed the sweets a lot more than meat.

She spent her time eating at a small table, meant for meals. It took her only 12 minutes to finish the food, but her butler wouldn’t appear until after 12:25 with the order she gave him.

She thought of Vera and why she hadn’t called her yet.

She decided to mirror-talk with Vera directly while waiting. She put the Runes in place invoked the mask and she waited for three minutes. ‘Hmm, Vera would have declined or answered in this time.’ She decided to mirror-talk her dorm instead. Maybe someone else would pick it up.

********

Chao Li had a familiar waiting at Vera and Jill’s home looking like himself, but he wasn’t paying him much attention. Looking into the possible attackers on Vera had taken precedent, along with the obvious fact someone wanted the parasite as a long-term political power.

This however changed, when the familiar felt a disturbance. Someone was attempting to mirror-talk with Vera or Jill in their dorm room. ‘Wait, have I left my familiar there for a whole two days now?’ That was not common behavior. He decided to have it leave, and mirror-talk to her friend Jill instead.

Jill picked up “Hello Jill, I have been trying to catch Vera’s attackers out, however they never showed up in your dorm. I will be making a leave, don’t hesitate to call on this line if you have news on Vera, or another cure possibility, it seems someone is working to make sure a cure never gets created.”

“I understand.” Jills voice was shaky. ‘Someone is murdering cure makers and I’m supposed to be comfortable in my dorm.’

Chao’s information network brought in some interesting information, namely the fact that after the conference a number of powerful Li supporters, especially from the Li family itself had gotten the parasite.

‘No one is stupid enough to just infect their own people after this, that’s the stupidest bluff.’ ‘Or they’ve thought ahead and think that anyone logical would come to the conclusion that this absolves them.’ Ultimately, it made no difference if they got sick. The only thing left to do was to find out, what pattern there was to the sick people.

‘I can pretty much say that it wasn’t one of the main families. The Lye, Mar, Huang and Yang main families suffered too heavily, while the Zhou and Fong families stayed supporters of the Li family. The Wang family didn’t support the Li or Lye family before or after, however their losses were not negligible.

That leaves two possibilities, one of which is much scarier than the other.

The first possibility: It was one of the branch families trying to become a main family.

This was the more likely option, as most of the branch families pretty much wanted that. Again, there were about 9 families he would have to put away as families that suffered too much. Realistically it was only families that stopped supporting the Li family. As someone from the Li family, this way of thinking was problematic… But that was the whole point, unless it was the sloppy work of a childish member of the Li family, which he couldn’t deny, it was one of the 6 defectors from the Li faction.

The Young and Xu faction spoke up pretty early, making them the obvious targets, but that probably meant the family spoke up much later, such as the Sun or Lin family. This train of thought was still too unrefined.

The second possibility: It was a family that wasn’t in the thirty, a single prodigal Spirit explorer could have designed the parasite to attack humans instead of whatever it attacked in its original Spirit Dimension.

The person who attacked Vera had, according to eye-witness, multiple invisible Soulcraft spells capable of erasing her on contact, along with the large area orange beam, a technique that worked well against low armor targets and large swathes of enemies.

This put him at the Rank of Emperor at the very least, more likely an Emperor of Force.’

The Rank Emperor of Cultivation was a combined rank and was the first, which signified mastery of cultivation to the point immortality had been achieved.

‘There was at least three hundred cultivators without affiliation at the Emperor rank, at least four hundred that don’t belong to any of the families, but are affiliated by long-term contracts and such and then there’s 973 reported among the families, out of which 376 are sick and most have taken stasis.

If this continues, they might infect all families other than their own and dominate the world. What’s worse, some of the people who claimed to be infected might have used stasis to leave and many more might use stasis to get out of this situation.’

Chao Li was stopped in his thoughts ‘Did someone find a way to kill Emperor’s in stasis?’

An Emperor stasis removed them cleanly from the Body, Soul Realm and Spirit Dimensions, entering the Astral plane. If they died in the Astral Plane they would still associate with this world after their death. Along with each of the anchors they left in the Spirit Dimensions, there were so many things to get rid of.

‘If someone close to my level, an Emperor of the Four Elements, decided for world domination, it would be enough to kill his oposition at the Jade Emperor and Emperor of Four Elements levels and they could probably dominate everyone else, especially if they had the support of the rest of their family.

That is why the timing is such. The God-Emperor will be woken up from stasis for the Demon Moon, as was planned for the worst opponents. During the time when he is at his weakest, they will remove his anchors in the Spirit Dimension, kill his Astral Projection and finally entrap him.

AND THEN THE PARASITE WILL FINISH HIM. Of course, it was such a clean answer. Emperors with over 1000 years of Lifeforce stored up would reincarnate. This would allow the God-Emperor to reincarnate over a hundred times, and get him cured of the parasite, if he was killed, well that’s the conjecture at least.’

Understanding the strategy, Chao had to think up some measures to break that line of thinking.

********

Jill came back to the dorm, relieved to see Chao Li gone. She decided to prepare something to eat, the room was in a general state of decrepity, and Vera’s things were still there, both her dresser and her bed had a large amount of things strewn around them.

She cared about clean dishes but not so much about clean clothes. Jill missed her, ‘What do I do with her things though?’ She tried to think of the future, ‘I will need to clear this up and get a new roommate to share the bill.’

“The least I can do is send it back to her parents.” She said out loud ‘but that’s about the only thing I can do.’ A sense of helplessness along with paranoia had been permeating her, making her hands jittery. ‘I gotta get it together, what will I do when I’m operating on someone and I get like this?’

She took some of the calmant she had brought Vera just days before.

She was folding Vera’s clothes when the doorbell rang.

‘Panic!’

She picked up her sword, knowing it would likely do little to defend her from whoever was there.

She looked through the looking glass and it was Chao Li.

Again. ‘He played me like a fiddle.’