Calculating Cultivation-Chapter 129: Hardships Of The Firmament
I flipped through the instruction manual while looking over the massive diagram. My head was beginning to hurt again trying to figure all of this out. The area of our vessel that had once been filled with energy pumps was now completely empty. Instead, we were attempting to make a boot leg energy processor and compressor.
The idea being we would use half our available space for this monstrosity of a design, while the other half was the final storage tank before resale. While Yang Zi could put togeather a basic one of these designs, we needed something with a bit more complexity behind it, since the liquid bound up in the energy had a higher concentration of energy that normal, due to the energy pumps reusing the liquid in question.
The problem was that the complexity of such purifiers and compressors went up massively the more one wanted to compress energy. The better they got, the more headache inducing they became. A perfect example of this was the Infinite Ring Complex. A massive structure that really compressed energy down.
That one cannister I had recovered was stupidly complex. One might think they would increase the price, but nope. Almost anything dealing with energy dealt with the final amount of energy with some minor adjustments for the level of processing it went through. Most people didn’t purchase energy in the Free Port unless it went through the Administrator’s processing facilities.
Super organizations trying to offload a lot of really compressed energy at the level of the Infinite Ring Complex were often viewed as incredibly risky purchases. I got around that simply because I was only selling a single cannister of hyper compressed energy. If I had been selling more, there would have been questions and beings would have been more hesitant to purchase.
While there were a lot of energy traders, they weren’t idiots and were often puppets of the Administrator to varying degrees. Now I had the problems I didn’t before, one of production.
Energy liquid was an annoying purchase since it would draw a lot of attention to what we were doing. Energy pumps were tightly controlled, but energy liquid was where people got slopy, according to Yang Zi. There were beings who just monitored those types of purchases very carefully. While the binding liquid wasn’t restricted, it was monitored. fгeewebnovёl.com
Even worse was that it required a massive amount of infrastructure to store and produce, since reducing the ambient energy inside the liquid was paramount. The truly big super organizations would often put this type of manufacturing in the Mechanical Layer for this purpose. Or if you had an Infinite Ring Complex that spanned all of Reality, you would put such things in the Material.
That meant we needed to limit our purchases as much as possible, which meant we needed to collect from the energy pumps as little as possible, which meant we needed a compressor and purifier for the energy liquid we did collect. Unfortunately, the design schematic for such a device made me want to scream in frustration.
“You sure this wasn’t a scam of some kind?” I asked Yang Zi who was also looking over a copy of what I was looking at.
“I am sure. I saw one of these in action. Compact, efficient, and just what we need. I really wanted this sized vessel, for these designs. We only need to use up half our cargo space, but we can compress the liquid by four times, basically doubling the amount of energy liquid we can transport. The real trick is we can run the liquid we purchase through the compressor, before putting it into the pumps, so they can get more energy, since they are recycling the liquid.” I did admit it was a clever idea to get the most out of what we had.
“Some of these designs make no sense. I suspect the key components use some kind of spatial manipulation on themselves. Look, this part is bigger than the connection points listed.” I pointed out the problem to Yang Zi who came over to take a look. He frowned when he finally understood what I was seeing.
“That does seem to be a problem,” he replied.
“Since the design lists out the individual components, probably a request of yours to make sure you understood how to build it, some of these parts go through alterations afterwards. A production step we can neither understand or reproduce. That is only the first major problem. The second is much worse,” I said. Yang Zi let out a sigh and waved for me to continue.
“They are using some sort off weird array structure, using lines of symbols, that I have never seen before. These connection pipes aren’t connection pipes, they are where the real compression in occurring is my guess. You weren’t lied to, but once again, key information has been omitted.”
“You can’t just copy them?” Yang Zi asked me.
“I can, but with the amounts of energy we are dealing with and you wanting to use the pumps on liquid without energy, there could be complications. Is there waste liquid? I don’t see an output port. And we know some energy is consumed during the compression process. I would also add that the liquid is also consumed. But it has to have energy to compress more.” Trying to run liquid without energy through the compressor would be like trying to run a gasoline car off of water. It would just mess everything up.
Yang Zi looked really tired and defeated, far more than I had ever seen him, after I explained what I had found about his diagrams. “We need to find someone who can build or trade us such a device as well as this specialty liquid these energy pumps use,” I replied.
“I know people, but it won’t be cheap. If anything we would need to bring in another partner who could handle this aspect, but then our shares would be reduced by quite a bit,” Yang Zi said. If we had a 50 way split, then adding one more person wasn’t a big deal. But with only 2 people, the loss of potential profits was far greater.
“The other big problem is finding anyone trustworthy. These kind of traders requires having a super organization behind them. The super organizations sell their excess production, but for most of these traders it is a trap for energy pirates like us who don’t have official backing.”
“Why aren’t there any super organizations who just sell a lot of this stuff to make trouble,” I muttered.
“They get targeted. Once we start selling energy in the Free Port, questions will be asked. If it was another super organization the rest would just shrug, but if it is an independent, that would get a lot of attention since they know they can target us without repercussion.”
It wasn’t a monopoly, but more of the rich looking down on everyone else. If anyone actually made it past all the roadblocks and hurdles, well that was like a hobo who managed to get some money entering a posh country club. They were still a hobo at the end of the day and that kind of distinction would not be easy to change or hide.
While Yang Zi had a near endless directory of contacts, what he didn’t have was a direct line to super organizations. Again, it would be like a hobo having the contact information of the leader of a nation. At best they would get intermediaries or a top businessman, but never a leader of a nation. The gap in standing and power was just too great for that relationship to work in a meaningful manner.
Also, no super organization would actively advertise they were willfully recruiting energy pirates. We both knew that there was a super organization out there in the Firmament that would partner with us, but the impossibility of the situation was finding them and communicating with them. Even the nicest super organizations would prefer a more forceful way of negotiating.
An ant does not negotiate with an elephant, it just avoids being stepped on and might occasionally get a lift. We were the ant in the metaphor, the tiny near helpless ant.
“Well, the only option is to collect the energy from the pumps and to try and trade that for what we need,” Yang Zi let out a sigh.
“What we need is a third partner, who has backing and can provide support. There has to be someone out there you know who has ties to a super organization, who can provide us with what we need,” I suggested.
“Unfortunately, no. The individuals I know would be at too low a level to make such a deal on their own and benefit from it. If there was someone like that, I would have tried to do this long ago without your support. And we don’t have the power to negotiate with a super organization. They would likely just capture us and take the information right out of our minds,” Yang Zi muttered the last part. He had told me stories that chilled me to the bone regarding super organizations and what they were willing to do.
Since there was no need to cater to public perception of other super organizations and with communications outside of super organizations highly controlled, there was no need to even pretend to take the morale high ground. It was all about projecting strength and trying to prevent threats to their power long term. Being seen as the kind super organization was not an advantage.
The only person I knew that might be able to help was Yang Heng of the Heavenly Alliance. But I didn’t know how he felt about me, after being rescued from the Infinite Ring Complex. He might be upset with me or grateful. He could even be indifferent. It was hard to say how he felt about what had happened. I also knew his importance wasn’t that much. Sure, he was in the core of the Heavenly Alliance, but he wasn’t a decision maker as far as I knew.
If he was important enough, he would have been rescued. While he might have brushed it off as not being worth the effort, if someone was important enough then effort would be made. There were ways to check if he had truly died or not and track him down. The Heavenly Alliance was an old super organization from my understanding. It wasn’t the oldest, but it was in the top 20% based on publicly available knowledge from the Free Port.
I couldn’t resist any longer, I had to ask. It had been bothering me for a while, but I had felt the question was a bit rude. “What about your family name, Yang? Do you have connections with the Heavenly Alliance?”
“No, well my ancestors might have. Since a group of cultivators fled to the Free Port long ago. That is probably why my family name seems familiar. But at the moment, there is no connection there, at least that I know of. The Heavenly Alliance is very isolationist. There is minor trade back and forth, so they don’t remain ignorant about changes in the Firmament, but there is no immigration in either direction as far as I know,” he replied.
“We couldn’t reach out to these traders to deliver a message, asking for support?” I asked.
“There would be very little upside for them unfortunately. Unless a super organization is already doing something like this, it is a strategic decision not to. My guess is that the Heavenly Alliance is weary of infiltration or Chaos,” he replied.
“But the Forever City has beings from all over? How does that even work if they have closed their boarders,” I replied.
“They probably closed their boarders due to incidents in the past. Let me guess, large portions of the Forever City were a mess?” he asked.
“Yes, they were,” I answered.
“There is your answer. The mess from having open borders became too much. The Forever City is a hub of their entire super organization. Building something like that is not simple, especially when you have been there a long time. They would want to keep their current systems in place for as long as possible before redoing everything. And even redoing stuff isn’t easy once built.”
My mind immediately went to the elevator between the Firmament and the Mechanical Layer. How would one even go about replacing something like that? And shutting everything down to rebuild would use up a lot of energy, they wouldn’t be harvesting.
For the Free Port, the spheres could just have entire sections replaced. That would be easy enough for the Administrator. But stuff built with energy would be more complicated. There was also the risk of disaster and entrenched interests. One would have to set up another Forever City and move everything over but was it really necessary if the original could be maintained?
“Wouldn’t it help with energy security?” I asked. Having a set time period for rebuilding would create breaks in the energy harvested reducing the risk of Chaos.
“Some do, but they have their own problems. Knowledge can be lost. Various factions are formed over time. It is cheaper to maintain something than rebuild everything,” Yang Zi answered.
I could guess a lot of these answers myself, but I wanted a second opinion. My hope was that it would give me insight into our current problem. We needed too much supporting infrastructure.
There was a loud bang sound, and the displays turned into alerts. We had hit something. That wasn’t supposed to happen. The primary principle of the spatial drive was to compress space. With solid objects creating an obstacle.
For the gas of the Firmament, everything was pushed aside just ahead of the vessel and folded back behind us. Not a lot of space needed to be cleared. For a vessel the size that we had, only the size of space about the size of an arm or a couple arms needed to be cleared normally. The top spatial drives could even go down to the size of a finger or needle, in the amount of space that needed to be altered in order for the vessel to move.
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The spatial drives were incredibly powerful, which was how there could be such vast distances at slower speeds while making it hard to track anything. Since things shifted around, maps were more about travel times between locations and the orientation of super organizations too each other than actual distance to be measured.
Hitting something that didn’t destroy us should be impossible. That meant there was something that we had somehow impacted that got through our spatial drive. That shouldn’t be possible because they were fail safe. If something interfered with the spatial compression, then nothing should be hurt. It just wouldn’t work.
While we had to keep our spatial compression as small as possible to hide, it should have been impossible for us to impact something unless Yang Zi or I personally set the vessel into the object.
“Something entered the cargo area. We were impacted at almost a right angle,” Yang Zi said. I felt a slight bit of concern at this statement. Taking a deep breath, I let it out and tried to let my mind relax and drift.
“I am picking up some danger,” I replied. “Where are we?”
“Nowhere important. A gap between two super organizations’ borders.” Just like they could drift into each other, they could drift apart. Traveling through these gaps was actually safer, when possible, while avoiding areas of overlap.
I reached down next to my chair. Using spatial storage on board was a bad idea if it could be avoided. That was why I kept my sword with me at all times. My gun, which I hadn’t used in forever was in my personal cabin.
The vessel shook again. Any shaking was a really bad sign. “What is that?” I asked.
“There was another impact. I put up what defenses we have, but anyone will be able to spot us now.” There was another vibration. “We can’t move. There is some sort of spatial disturbance inside the cargo bay. It is anchoring us to this position. Dammit! It is probably a native.”
“Native?” I asked while standing up and looking at the door to the command center we were in.
“A creature that is natural to the Firmament. There aren’t many, but there are some that naturally exist. They often have a strong spatial sense or ability. The smaller impacts are the creatures family trying to get in like the first one,” Yang Zi replied.
“We just ran into one? How dangerous are they?” I asked.
“Anything than can happen, will eventually happen.” That wasn’t a real answer to my question, but it was enough. Travel about enough and we would eventually encounter something like this. “As for the danger it varies. Since we aren’t dead and our defenses aren’t breached, you should be able to kill it.”
I wanted to complain about me having to do the killing, but it was the logical choice. Yang Zi was better at operating the vessel than I was. In addition, due to my cultivation I was much sturdier than Yang Zi. While he had two pistols he kept on his hip just in case, it was a hold out weapon of last resort. While powerful they each carried only a single shot.
One shot from his pistols would seriously injure an immortal cultivator. The cost of these weapons was insane as well as the ammo, 20 million units each for the pistols and 5 million each time one was fired. They required special ammunition which Yang Zi didn’t have. The cost was immense due to their stealth nature and power.
It wasn’t easy compressing that much energy down into such a compact form. But it also allowed Yang Zi confidence in killing or deterring singularly powerful enemies. They would register a threat if they had any kind of danger sense. Once that occurred, a lot of conversations went much more smoothly.
We also didn’t have the kind of internal weapons that could take out an intruder, besides blowing up our vessel. We would be able to detect one easily enough, but to remove or kill an intruder one of us had to do the task personally.
“I will handle this,” I replied, slightly nervous. Anything could be out there.
“You got this,” Yang Zi said. The vessel shook again. “But try and hurry. Our defenses should hold, but there is a lot of risk.
I left the command center of the vessel and made my way through various corridors to the cargo area, sword in hand. I pulled out my breathing mask, I kept on hand and strapped it over my face as well. That was another reason it had to be me who went. Yang Zi would need to get on a special suit to survive in the environment of the Firmament, while my cultivation helped protect me to a certain extent. It wasn’t perfect protection, and extreme environments were still dangerous, but I would have a better chance of fighting unencumbered.
“Nothing is ever simple,” I muttered. It constantly felt like I was taking two steps forward and then two slightly smaller steps back with this entire endeavor. Being an energy pirate was incredibly frustrating in many ways and this new situation was just another example of the dangers we had to face.
I reached the cargo bay airlock and went through. There were large amounts of dark Firmament gas floating about. The lights were still working, but the gas made it much harder to see than normal. If anything, it reminded me a bit of the Mechanical Layer where the gas was lit up and made corridors.
My danger sense was giving a strong warning at the moment. Not enough that I needed to turn around and fleet, but enough to make me worried. I looked above and below and didn’t see any kind of creature.
I scanned the massive cargo area for any increased signs of energy, force, or anything else that might indicate its presence. I noticed that there were gravitational distortions through my ability to sense force.
Taking a deep breath through my mask I advanced into the cargo hold. I kept making sure to look above and behind. I felt a sense of nervousness that I hadn’t felt in a long time. While I had been in the Great World, I was stronger than everything there, or close enough that I wasn’t worried. In the Free Port the Administrator was watching everything.
Here in the Firmament, it all came down to chance. Everything shook again, which was not a good sign. I needed to hurry up. “Fine. If you won’t come to me, I will come to you,” I muttered to myself. I probably shouldn’t have done that, but trying to out stealth my opponent wasn’t going to work as a strategy. I leapt forward, passing through several clouds of gas.
That was when I saw what I was up against. A mass of tentacles and hooks on those tentacles. I didn’t hesitate, but still took a moment to judge the vessel’s walls compared to the monster. The tentacles also went back into a cloud of gas, so I couldn’t see a core. The energy in them was quite high, higher than me, which meant this monster was probably stronger.
“One Swing To Separate Heaven And Earth!”
Instead of cutting once, I cut three times in front of me. Purple blood gushed out of the wounds and the tentacles froze. They had just been drifting about before, but now they began to head towards me. I kicked off the ground, aiming for a spatial disturbance in the air. My entire body rotated, and I swung again, while allowing myself to be pushed back.
More damage was done. I landed on the floor of the vessel and the vibrations were a lot worse and more constant. Even though my strength was increased in the Firmament from the ambient energy, the strength of my opponent was also increased.
The purple blood began to turn into crystals. Interesting and I wanted to avoid that stuff if possible. I swung again for a third time, separating several tentacles apart. They began to drift and the vibrations finally stopped. A single short beep came over my communicator and I quickly retreated from the cargo hold.
Making my way to the command center, I was breathing heavily. “It retreated?” I asked Yang Zi.
“The spatial block disappeared, so I am moving us now. Did you get it?” he asked.
“I cut some barbed tentacles, that is it,” I replied.
“Well we should be fine now, but the cargo hold will be a mess and we need to do a patch job.”
“Also, some large sample containers. You know some crazy people like this weird stuff,” I replied.
“I have to keep watch,” he replied. I rolled my eyes in frustration and made my way to our materializer. I began building a lot of sample containers. The technology that was part of the container design would keep things inside in stasis for the most part. I also picked up a flame thrower. It wasn’t strong, but it should hopefully remove any remnants left behind by that creature.
I then began using a force projector to move the blood crystals and tentacles, that were as big as me into sample containers, pushing away the gas and burning any remaining residue. The cargo area was massive, and the work was slow, but necessary.
It was annoying Yang Zi didn’t have to do this, but that was the division of labor we had. It would also be irresponsible to leave the command center unattended, since he needed to keep watch for more threats. Also if there was something left behind, then I would need to deal with it.
There was a large hole in the hull of the vessel, but I only set up a force projector to keep out the gas. It wouldn’t stop a surge of the Firmament gas, but it would keep the worst of it out while I pushed the rest of the gas in the cargo hold out of the opening.
At the far end, there were already stacks of sample containers. I had done a lot more damage than I initially thought and the tentacles were extended quite far. My guess was that the monster was spread out like a spiked ball. It used some kind of innate ability to get through our spatial drive and latched on.
Unfortunately, it hadn’t been able to get its main body inside. If it had, then we would have been in big trouble. The vibrations were probably the monster attempting to force its way inside. Once inside, it would be able to leverage whatever weird abilities it had much better. As for the damage I had done it was just a flesh wound, but enough to force it away.
Anything living in the Firmament would have some kind of ability to regenerate. That was why I picked the design for the more durable sample containers, to make sure mini-monsters didn’t form from the cut off flesh.
Once I did a pass over the cargo area, I got some replacement hull paneling and began to replace the damaged hull sections. Due to how it was made, we weren’t able to repair it ourselves. We could just replace sections as needed. Thankfully the scratch marks on the outside weren’t that bad and didn’t damage our stealth. The only section that needed to be replaced was the section that was broken through. There were also no friends that had remained. I still checked the entire hull just to be sure. I even used a long stick to sweep over sections of the hull to make sure nothing was hiding in stealth on it.
After that I got a much bigger flame thrower and a protective suit, I began to liberally coat the inside of the cargo area with burning liquid. This stuff didn’t need air to burn but would emit a poison gas, which was why I wore a protective suit.
While all these steps might seem excessive, skipping any of them would lead to bad things. It wasn’t a question of if, it would be just a matter of time. Creatures and monsters swimming about the gasses of the Firmament that were willing to prey on vessels were not simple in the slightest. That was why we couldn’t risk a single cell being left outside of one of the sample containers.
The poison would kill anything living and quite a large number of crystalline entities. The exact mix was rated for my suit and the material of the vessel that made up the interior of the vessel. After the round of fire and poison, I let the cargo area rest a bit while I went back to the medical room to get a more in depth scan before going back to the command center.
“Anything hanging off me?” I asked.
“Scans came up negative. No changes to your biology or clothing,” Yang Zi said. I nodded at this. “Cargo area cleared?”
“The fire is out, just leaving the clouds of poison behind for now. We can cycle them out whenever we need to.”
“That means we will have to replace a lot of interior stuff like lighting.”
“Better safe than sorry. And that stuff is free, so it isn’t a big deal,” I replied.
“Fair enough. I will get scanned myself, keep an eye on things,” Yang Zi said, and I gave him an affirmative. That was also another safety measure, making sure both of us didn’t have anything hidden in or on our bodies. We would repeat these scans to detect if there were changes, since if there was something, we would probably be only able to detect changes, not whatever was left behind.
Yang Zi had countless horror stories that I didn’t want to hear right now but served as the basis for these types of procedures. The sample containers were a risk, but the material they were made from was designed to block everything and be inert as possible. They weren’t perfect, but they also had a double wall, with a pressurized acid between the two walls and a pressure gauge on the outside.
If the interior wall was breached, the sample container would be flooded with acid and the visible gauge would indicate that something had happened so we could toss the sample containers off the vessel. Again, some of these steps felt excessive, but there was no medicine for regret. An ounce of prevention was worth a pound of cure, or a couple of pounds. Since, if something did get past all our safety procedures we would be in trouble.
I checked the readings from the medical room on the display in front of me. Yang Zi didn’t have anything different about his body and the readings were from right now. That was good. Hopefully neither of us had anything hiding inside our bodies. I was at a much greater risk, having fought the creature myself, but I also had my cultivation. That would make it much harder for something to happen to me, making me better protected.
“No hitchhikers,” I said as Yang Zi came back.
“I hate these types of creatures. You can never be completely sure. They always have some sort of weird trick. Hopefully the fire and poison got rid of whatever was left behind. Venting the poison from the cargo hold. Have fun replacing stuff and scrubbing it all down,” he said, and I rolled my eyes once more.
While it was tempting to have something automated do the work, I needed to look over everything to see if there was something weird or unusual. Also, my danger sense would provide a useful warning.
Two thirds of the way through, making repairs and removing the poison, I found a discoloration on one of the interior hull panels. I didn’t hesitate removing the entire panel, only to find eggs. The hull panel was chucked off the vessel and the eggs were put into sample containers.
Funny thing was, that the location of the eggs was nowhere near where the hull breach occurred. I then went through the rest of the cargo hold, cleaning and removing the poison. After that I began removing interior hull plating and checking for more eggs. Once the cargo hold was clear, I did it for all the rooms in the front of the vessel as well.
I didn’t find any more eggs, but we couldn’t take any chances. The eggs could have been long term sabotage and not from the monster, but that still meant we had to check everything to make sure nothing was hiding. I couldn’t be happier that we had chosen a minimalist and functional design for the interior of the vessel for this very reason. That was Yang Zi’s knowledge coming into play when he picked everything out.
“Done,” I muttered, completely exhausted as I collapsed in bed. It had taken several days to go through everything. Annoying, but necessary. I didn’t want to have something bursting out of my chest while I was asleep or giving me a hug.
Unlike creatures I was used to, the things floating about the Firmament were the worst of the worst and the top of the food chain. The fact this creature was willing to prey on a vessel put it higher up on the food chain than me. Despite wounding it, I wasn’t about to go preying on other vessels myself.
As for using the energy or anything from the creature, we weren’t equipped to handle that. Biological research was a massive field of study, even more so with energy being involved. That subject was even more complicated than arrays and formations. While humans might have only so many paths and cell structures, once you got into weird life forms it could get crazy.
The blood of the monster was the perfect example. It turned into a crystal once it left the monster’s body. Was that some kind of weird coagulant mechanism or something more sinister? Those kinds of questions could be left to someone or something else who was willing to pay.
While we wouldn’t get nearly as much for the samples as we would the main body of the creature, we would get a nice payday to help offset the cost of repairs, specifically the hull plating. That stuff wasn’t cheap, and any little bit would help.
Trying to find these creatures on purpose was something that certain beings did. Monster hunters were crazier than energy pirates, at least according to Yang Zi. At least we just had to worry about super organizations and whatever methods they used. Often this was overwhelming force. But the unknown regarding each monster in the Firmament was enough to stress anyone out.
It wasn’t the tentacles that killed people, it was stuff like those eggs or some weird interaction with the monster’s purple blood. Instead of turning into crystals, it would have turned into mini monsters spreading throughout our vessel.
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