So you might have noticed the chapters have been slow to come...
The reason is a story in it's own right, but since around a hundred of you have done my the honor of reading the story this far, I feel obliged to tell it to you.
First - my Christmas bonus this year was finding out I'd be losing my job. It's not too surprising, considering my bonus last year was a $1 scratch off lottery ticket (which was not a winner by the way). Searching for a new job has, as you might expect, bee...
2022-11-29 17:36:25 +0000 UTC
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Some part of Yi Cao knew what was waiting ahead of them in the concourse long before he picked Xialu out from the swirling crowd. The knowledge started as a prickling across his neck, a chill wind running down his back, and the sense of being watched from somewhere just behind and above. He glanced behind once or twice without spotting anything, even scanned the ceiling. More pedestrians, anonymous in their masses, veiled by the mess of light tubes, and flying constructs, and floating trash t...
2022-11-13 18:00:07 +0000 UTC
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Yi Cao told the old man the story of his breakthrough while they sat sipping tea in the alcove at the back of Guo Gang’s library. For all that he’d told the story to Zihan only a handful of hours before, it felt good to examine the experience in the company of someone whose only interest in the story was to listen.
The old man was an excellent listener. He leaned forward at the gripping parts to squeeze Yi Cao’s knee, and sighed and shook his head when Yi Cao described the discuss...
2022-11-12 18:00:06 +0000 UTC
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TC was waiting for them when they returned to the rock Yi Cao realized he’d begun to think of as home. The warm familiar stench of piss waited with the Talyaya mutt along with the continuous murmuration of pedestrian crowds moving between work stations through the rock’s major concourses.
Zihan gripped his forearm in greeting while the girls floated from the docking port in the ceiling to land behind them.
“There is trouble.” TC told him without preamble. “Trouble with w...
2022-11-07 13:25:20 +0000 UTC
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Chapter 49 – Zhurge (2)
A kick scattered half of the elder’s images. They were many, but they also seemed to lack some of the weight the original had before he’d deployed whatever technique allowed him to split and multiply. They moved in straight lines and hard angles where they bounced from surfaces, as though free from the constraints of gravity. Zihan’s kick set them to multiplying further, but it also gave Zihan the space to grab one of the copies by an incoming fist then...
2022-11-05 17:01:00 +0000 UTC
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Yi Cao used less Ki in his future attempts at touching the fabric of the universe. He never again reached the depths beyond the normal three dimensional sea, never even touched Massu’s Star in the brief exploration of the technique, at least not while they remained in the practice hall of the Firefly Sect. Yi Cao remained firmly within the station. He reached out to the technomancer ship they would attempt to steal several times to observe the forces it used to shift the pebbles of stone ri...
2022-10-31 14:12:08 +0000 UTC
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For two hours, Yi Cao did nothing but experiment with his bubble of Ki. At Yi Cao’s request Zihan threw minute bursts of fire at his bubble, and even walked through it, warping, and splitting, and sliding aside as the Ki seemed to push right through him.
“Did you feel anything?”
“Besides the Ki?” Zihan asked. “Not a thing.”
Gradually, Yi Cao began to find the limits of the simple bubble he could conjure. It could flex, but that flexing didn’t exist in the rea...
2022-10-30 19:46:44 +0000 UTC
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Kalemal landed the shuttle, unaided by automatic systems or the tech spirits, on a ragged outcropping of the planetary fragment labeled Number Six. Number Six, was, in reality, a vast network of planetary fragments at this point in its destruction, a cloud of stones tethered together by long networks of concourse tubes and cabling that allowed constructs and laborers to continue the work of chopping the once massive world into cubes of semi-processed stone and metals for shipment to the deniz...
2022-10-29 20:15:48 +0000 UTC
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“You know,” Bealtiel shouted back from the pilot’s compartment, “when you said you had something in mind for us, this isn’t what I expected.”
Zihan lounged on the red velvet cushions of the luxury shuttle they’d rented for the shift, his head on Bealtiel’s lap. The thorny tattoos on Bealtiel’s wrists writhed as she stroked his hair and watched the lights of Aarrppaa station moving beyond the window like a shifting starscape.
“That pill cost me a fortune.” He ...
2022-10-28 18:34:44 +0000 UTC
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“How does a man calculate balance? Two men exchange a loaf of bread for a bit of silver, but the bread might save one man’s life while the silver merely puts weight in the other’s pocket. We call the justice of the heaven’s fickle, but in truth only the heavens can judge the balance of a man and his oath. Only the heavens knows when a debt has been paid, or a if a debt remains. Woe to those who sever an oath thinking that their oath has been fulfilled. Only by agreeing to the term...
2022-10-23 10:59:59 +0000 UTC
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“Bo Bo.”
“Yes?”
…
“Ni liaojie wo ma?”
The pistol pinged in his ear. “System regulations permit only Urdul for interactions with higher orders of implants. Please rephrase in a sanctioned language.”
Yi Cao shifted on his makeshift bed in the dark. He stared at the ceiling while a vent hissed softly from its grate. The girls snored softly in the bed above him.
“Would you still work, if I took you home?” He asked quietly.
“The phy...
2022-10-22 21:51:38 +0000 UTC
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The group spent the night drinking and playing cards in Te’klub after the last candidate failed their test with the cube. The games had an air of celebration to them, as though they’d already finished the heist they hadn’t yet begun, while the drinking had an edge to it that suggested most of them knew that they could die in the attempt.
“When we’re rich… “They said those words a lot as they passed the cards back and forth across the table, fairly throwing them when the en...
2022-10-16 17:00:06 +0000 UTC
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“There is one thing that I don’t understand.” Agate said to Zihan.
The two sat at the table after a round of candidates who’d all failed to unlock the cube in front of them. Some had done better than others. One managed to shift a chunk of the liquid metal that coated the cage within and looked like he might succeed until the cube grew a stinger it plunged into his hand. He’d hissed at the pain and made threats until Hao Dong’s cape tapped at his foot and looked up at him wi...
2022-10-15 17:00:00 +0000 UTC
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In a departure with protocol, they met at Te’klub. Feiruhn was the one who suggested it, through the intermediary of TC. “Our friend Izzi can host.” The half breed told them as he shared their table, puffing at the smoke stick Zihan provided when he sat down. He waved at the smoke and coughed as he gestured to the little bartender wiping grease onto a glass in a corner of the bar. “He is known to do so at times, for a fee, but his discretion is also guaranteed. He knows what will happ...
2022-10-14 12:59:01 +0000 UTC
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Agate leaned forward in his chair aboard the Mama’s Teets, trailing little blue sparks that whirled around him like bees or glowing moths, with him the flame.
“What about the fence?” He asked. “Once we’re off the ship, how are we getting paid?”
Feiruhn clasped his hands and rocked back in his chair. “In some ways that is the most delicate part of the whole operation.” He said. “I’s spoke to the system ambassador on the station. He’s heavily monitored...
2022-10-09 17:01:02 +0000 UTC
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The “Mama’s Teets” matched its name. At sixty yards long, the “ship” barely merited the title. It’s designation in urdul, “Kophmu”, twisted in Yi Cao’s brain to present him images of boats like man sized pots bobbing on the sea.
The ship itself might have been one of those pots, expanded to the size of a small house then glued to one of its own. Nestled amongs the girder’s and cranes of the drydock at the end of concourse A, the thing looked like a woman’s...
2022-10-08 17:00:08 +0000 UTC
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TC served as their go between in the shifts that followed Zihan’s demonstration. Mostly he played messenger boy, carrying Zihan’s requests for updates to the Casino when Zihan couldn’t go himself, a separation the Casino Manager had asked for when he told them that the team he’d brought together had “agreed to the go ahead” and needed time to get to the rock so they could start to make their plans.
“This is fucking stupid.”
Yi Cao had taken to “serving him”, fo...
2022-10-07 16:33:56 +0000 UTC
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Feiruhn sent them to a hall devoid of down.
People still moved through the concourse. They swam through the air, in lanes of traffic defined in lines from loops that hung from the ceiling and huge fans shoving air through the open tunnel in the rock like the current of a steam. Everything moved in that current. Lights bumped along it like boats, people surfed it, and machines with huge containers strapped to them plowed through them like barges on a narrow channel. Windows along the ent...
2022-10-01 17:00:18 +0000 UTC
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“Oaths made on false pretenses will always punish those who lied, regardless of which party actually breaks the oath in the first place.”
-Excerpt from: “A Treatise on Soul Oaths Dictated by the Sage of Threefold Wisdoms at the Request of Elder Bou Tian of the Leaves at Sunset Sect During the Festival Held in the Sage’s Honor”
Rain.
Yi Cao never thought he would miss the rain.
Back home the rain meant many things. Whirling clouds and silver ...
2022-09-30 14:14:50 +0000 UTC
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Bo Bo was silent as Yi Cao pushed through the destruction left in the wake of the Young Master. Fire Ki suffused the air, like the aftermath of a natural disaster instead of some boy barely two decades old. Sympathy flames, pale and thin, provided the only illumination, tossing jagged flickering shadows across shattered halls as they slowly dissipated into Ki.
Sheets of steel pinged and popped as they cooled. Distant machinery rumbled as they forced sporadic bursts of air down ducts and...
2022-09-27 17:00:06 +0000 UTC
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“It’s rude to stomp into someone’s home and start slaughtering them without announcing your intentions.” Zihan said. Air forced down the long dark tunnel by captive machines made his ear length hair dance in the gentle breeze. Fire Ki glittered in his eyes like the reflection of lights howhere to be seen in the dim length of the maintenance tunnel. “Go tell them that they have to leave.”
Yi Cao shuffled nervously before the tunnel. “And if they don’t?” He asked.
...
2022-09-26 17:00:08 +0000 UTC
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“On your arrival, you no doubt noticed the huge variety of men and women who looked more like creatures than the typical people’s of the world you grew up on. Men with goat horns or salamander eyes, fur, and discolored skin. Scales. Feathers. Wings. These are the races of the Kispuhru, human beings warped by their priestess progenitors and the gift of the Udug worshipped in their world. Those you see on the station are outcasts, refugees, or, in some cases, servants sold to the statio...
2022-09-25 17:00:05 +0000 UTC
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Feiruhn nodded to TC. “Send that one away, and we can talk.”
Zihan waved a hand in TC’s direction.
TC hesitated, then scowled as the guard behind Feiruhn stepped forward. He glanced over his shoulder several times as he allowed the burly guard to lead him out, but no one spoke until he was gone.
Feiruhn took a long pull on the tobacco in his hand then looked at it as he let the smoke curl between his lips. He stuffed the stick back into his mouth and looked at Zihan. T...
2022-09-24 17:01:01 +0000 UTC
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“Aarrppaa station’s population is recruited from only half of the accessible worlds. Of those worlds, Mubra, the System world, and the races of Kispuhru are the most heavily represented and the oldest inhabitants of the station. The Inscrypti of Nshamti and the Talyaya of the half world of Djabol were only brought to the station three hundred years ago after a race of constructs conspired with the previous governor to break away from Guild control, the Inscrypti because they offered e...
2022-09-23 14:17:02 +0000 UTC
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“This is unacceptable behavior.”
Yi Cao pounded down the corridor, each footstep reawakening his injuries from Elleppu station.
Green lines flickered across the floor in front of him, but Yi Cao waved his hand at his ear, interrupting the technomancer magic before the pistol’s absurd spirit avatar could appear.
It huffed in his ear. “In emergency situations you should never give in to fear. By fleeing, you only delay what must inevitably devolve into violence....
2022-09-19 17:00:10 +0000 UTC
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Three Oshpik, or goblins, or Talyaya, or just short people with the huge ears and oversized noses of Izzi the barkeep, stood on boxes in the center of the concourse playing howling instruments of bags and pipes and copper horns as pedestrians streamed around them to either side and one of their number, adorned in hundreds, if not thousands, of dangling golden trinkets and smoking brasiers extolled the passer bys on the virtue of generosity in a high reedy voice that seemed to issue entirely f...
2022-09-18 17:00:06 +0000 UTC
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It grew so that Yi Cao struggled to differentiate between his waking and sleeping worlds.
There were differences. In the waking world he stank of impurities, stank of them enough that patrons shied away from him when he went to the bar for his meals, or stopped cold in the hallways to press themselves to the walls so he could pass.
In the waking world he ate, when he remembered too, and had to listen to the pistol humming whenever it thought he needed a reminder of his promise tha...
2022-09-17 17:01:01 +0000 UTC
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The “Ki Bath” advertised by the bath-house several turns down the concourse from Te’Klub was nothing like the cultivation experience described by the mesmeric stone outside its door. “Remove impurities while re-invigorating your cultivation.” It said.
Perhaps if he hadn’t come straight from cultivating with a powerful source.
Hot water streamed into a tub as Yi Cao entered the little booth assigned to him by the attendant. Steam filled the room making the white tiles s...
2022-09-16 18:13:36 +0000 UTC
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Pedestrians had returned to the long concourse back to Te’klub as Yi Cao made the walk “home”. Not many. A trickle here and there. People sitting outside businesses or moving quickly through the intersections on their way to whatever brought them this deep in the station in the first place. He saw a few signs that had been dead on his way through flick to life as though preparing for the day.
Green lines shivered across the floor of the station as he walked and a smiling face mate...
2022-09-11 05:01:01 +0000 UTC
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Only a fool tries to force a soul oath. This is common knowledge. Nine times out of ten, when it has been tried, the one attempting to force the oath explodes on the spot. Caught in one that did not result in your enemy’s cultivation ripping them apart from the inside, however, the one thing you should never do is try to kill the one that bonded you, lest the heavens turn their judgement upon you instead.
Excerpt from: “A Treatise on Soul Oaths Dictated by the Sage of T...
2022-09-10 14:00:05 +0000 UTC
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