Street Cultivation 3

by Sarah Lin

  "Given the potency of what he was taking, that's not surprising." Lisa was silent for a long time, so long that Melissa checked to make sure that the call hadn't disconnected, but when she spoke, her voice was firm. "I'll come to you. Send me the YLAA address and I'll be over as soon as I can."

  "Great. Thank you so much, Lisa."

  With that call finished, things were a little more hopeful, but Melissa was alone again. She desperately wanted to help, but handling it all alone felt a bit much, especially since she knew so little about his condition.

  Abruptly Melissa realized that she wasn't alone: Rick's demon must still be hanging around invisibly. Just having someone to talk to would help, but there didn't seem to be any way to make contact. Melissa poked at her brother's tattoo, with no response except an incoherent mumble from him. Going to the demon realm was impossible, but there must be another way...

  Melissa actually snapped her fingers as she remembered a minor detail from weeks ago. She headed out, carefully locking the door behind her, and padded down the hall to another one of the YLAA rooms. There was another girl in the program named Jane who was somewhat friendly, even if a bit more of a party girl than Melissa.

  More importantly, she had something useful. When Melissa reached the door, she was relieved to find it unlocked and the other woman inside. "Hey, Jane!" Melissa poked her head in and waved. "Is there any way that I can borrow that mirror of yours? The demon one?"

  "Just why do you need it?" Jane looked up from where she sat on her bed and narrowed her eyes. "I mean, I'm not using it right now, but I doubt you want it to throw a demon party. If this is for some experiment, I can't risk it being damaged. That thing is a family heirloom."

  "It's just for conversation purposes, honest! There's, uh, a cute demon boy I want to flirt with."

  Jane snorted. "Right. I totally believe you. Really, Melissa, can you promise me that you aren't going to do anything weird to it?"

  "Cross my heart and hope to die!"

  Thankfully, Jane didn't interrogate her further, just handed over the mirror. Melissa took it and immediately scrambled back to her room, even though there wasn't any real rush. The ornately gilded mirror had an oddly black surface that barely reflected her at all, but she'd seen it used to make a connection. It was actually considered too old-fashioned and limited to be practical, but it could be used to talk to her brother's demon.

  She got back and discovered that her brother was still resting, thankfully. Not that she'd really expected him to disappear. Melissa balanced the mirror on her desk against the wall, then tried to figure out how to activate it. There wasn't any obvious switch and she couldn't find anything to consume aura.

  "Uh, Melissa? What the heck?"

  Only when she heard Jane speak did Melissa realize two things: she hadn't locked the door, and Jane had followed. Her sort-of friend was now standing in the doorway, staring at Rick as he lay in Melissa's bed, only partially covered by the blanket. She realized how it must look to non-family... and that she didn't care.

  "That's just last night's hot hookup," Melissa said, pushing Jane out the door. "Now I'm trying to set up a threesome with a demon. Give us some privacy, okay?"

  Though Jane looked flabbergasted, she didn't object as Melissa closed the door. As soon as it latched, Melissa found herself smiling.

  The dumb joke had just spilled out of her without thinking about it, or without feeling forced. For a long time after the torture, she hadn't been able to joke around except occasionally with her brother. Yet at the moment, she was feeling much more free than before. Her memories still weighed on her, but she felt strong enough to bear them.

  Perhaps it was the fact that she was out of her head, and this time she was helping him. For so many years, her brother had sacrificed to keep her healthy, always caring for her. She knew that he didn't resent that in the slightest, but it was satisfying to be able to take care of him for once. Now, when he really needed help, she wasn't just a dependent, she was family.

  "That was a pretty casual incest joke." The voice came from the mirror, where Melissa now saw her brother's demon. Katenka turned out to be stunningly beautiful in an unnatural sort of way, but more importantly she was smirking. Melissa could understand a demon like that.

  "Oh, hush, you vile temptress." Melissa walked over to the mirror and stared back at her. "I'm sure you've done a lot worse."

  "I might be able to make myself look like an incubus, but I'm not really that type of demon. My illusions tend to be... rather cold. So I'm afraid I won't be able to fulfill your creepy fantasies."

  Melissa grinned. "Says the demon literally living in my brother's arm. I don't think I even need to get into how creepy that is."

  Though Katenka smiled back, her expression sobered. "I don't watch at all times, but I've been watching now. What you've done for him is an excellent first step, but you're right, that won't be enough. From what I've seen, this withdrawal will be brutal, and I won't be able to directly help in any way."

  "You're helping just by being here so I don't go crazy. Really." Melissa gave the demon in the mirror an earnest smile. Mad as it seemed, the two of them were going to work together to help her brother recover from addiction to a secretive lucrim elixir.

  This was her life now. She wouldn't have it any other way.

  Chapter 46: Withdrawal

  Rick woke up staring at the ceiling, briefly disoriented. A convulsion clenched through his entire body, forcing him to roll onto his side. By the time it passed, he had started to remember.

  Though his sense of time was utterly distorted, he thought that it had been a day or two since Melissa had moved him to a hotel. That was part of what had disoriented him at first, since he'd been expecting her room. Here they had privacy as well as hopefully a hidden location, if H did attempt to track him down.

  Suddenly paranoid, Rick groped on the nightstand for his phone to check his messages. More from H disapproving of the family emergency and insisting that he continue his training to prepare for the upcoming fight. Also offers to send him more Formula T if he ran out, which now seemed doubly suspicious.

  Setting down the phone, Rick lay back and tried to get the shivering out of his system. He wasn't sure if the paranoia was part of his withdrawal symptoms, but he definitely felt mentally unstable. But as Lisa had pointed out, feeling this miserable overall was likely to have mental consequences entirely separate from the withdrawal. Not that it mattered, since he needed to suffer through it all regardless.

  The one constant was the shaking, ranging from trembling in his fingers to painful convulsions. For most of one day he'd lived bent over the toilet, emptying his guts, but thankfully that seemed to have passed. He'd been running a fever for a while, though that symptom was allegedly a necessary part of healing. His body would wildly range from aching and just wanting sleep to suddenly overflowing with energy and needing to train.

  Worst of all was the immense sense of weakness, even during his manic periods. When he tried to summon aura, it felt as if he didn't have enough lucrim, even though it was obviously there. Testing his Bunyan's Step, he'd frequently faltered out mid-way through the technique. Even his defensive core felt like it was constantly running on fumes.

  He tried to tell himself that it was just a lie, his body demanding more Formula T and insisting that it couldn't cope without it. Sometimes it felt like he'd fall apart without the drug, but he forced himself to repeat his exercises no matter how wrong it felt.

  Strangely, the cravings weren't as bad as he expected. Every eight hours he had an intense urge to take more Formula T, but if he could suffer through those times, it didn't consume his mind too much. He was still glad that Melissa had locked away all of it so that he couldn't be tempted. Being across the world from his source certainly made it easier to quit cold turkey.

  "You doing okay?" Melissa came in, speaking gently as she always did. She'd brought food and water, so he made himself sit up.

  "It could be worse, b
ut I don't feel like the symptoms are getting any weaker. I was hoping they'd wear off after a day or two." As he spoke, Rick mechanically chewed and swallowed the bread, though it didn't taste like anything.

  "Lisa said that it could be longer than that. She let me know she departed, by the way, so she should be here soon."

  "That's good."

  "Also, the library called back. Are you feeling good enough to talk? I'm not sure what you have in mind with them, but I assume you want to be at your best."

  "Oh. I forgot... yeah, I'll try." Rick rubbed his eyes, which constantly felt filled with sand. "How bad do I look?"

  "Well... you're not going to be winning any seals in the beauty contest part of the Showdown."

  "Let me clean up and get myself awake. Then I should talk to them."

  Shaving and washing his face helped a little, though his body insisted that it wanted to curl up and die. Rick forced himself to exercise and forced lucrim through all his old channels. It got adrenaline moving and made him feel briefly better, though his body would keep demanding more lucrim and eventually he'd slump back into withdrawal symptoms. Still, he should be alert enough for a phone call.

  To his surprise, Melissa instead brought a small blue pyramid into the room. "Uh, they said we're supposed to use this thing for private communication? Not sure exactly how it works, but I'll let you figure that out. Let me know if you need anything else."

  The pyramid was a strange communication device, but it was modern tech: it had idiot-friendly labels saying which side should be set down and a normal switch. Rick set it up at the side of the room and flipped the switch. After a bit of static, he saw Heather on the other side, sitting in the scroll room of the library.

  "Are you okay?" she asked. "Given what you said about wanting to quit the whole fucking Showdown, I wasn't sure what to make of it..."

  "I'm fine." A blatant lie, but she didn't need to know about his withdrawal symptoms. "But I'm going to leave and you said to remember the public libraries. I'm willing to cooperate with you in any way, I just don't know how valuable what I know is."

  Heather winced. "I hope I didn't set your expectations too high, but... probably not very. There are a shit ton of people who fail or quit the junior leagues, so we have some information that way. It's the top levels of the Showdown where we really need both information and sponsors."

  "Yeah, I was afraid of that."

  "But, listen, that doesn't mean I'm not glad you called. You've probably ran into some interesting things while you were traveling, right?"

  "I hope so." Rick had thought through what he wanted to say, but wasn't sure where to start. Maybe with the most striking one. "I have direct evidence that some people are creating lucrim elixirs that are intended to addict the people taking them. Not just power addiction, but creating dependents. I don't think that's publicly known, is it?"

  "No, but unfortunately that's 'dog bites man' type news. Don't get me wrong, if you really have evidence, I'm real fucking interested. But most people already assume that elite athletes are doping in unhealthy ways, just like corporations don't have our best interests at heart. It's normal."

  He'd been afraid of that, but the rest might be grasping at straws. Since straws were all he had, Rick pushed on. "I may not have been at the top of the Showdown, but I've interacted with more immortals than you'd expect. There's some sort of competition between several major groups of them..." He went on to tell Heather about Josiah Craw, Qing Shan, and the others. Mostly he left out anything that sounded conspiratorial about H and Alger because he wasn't sure it would be believable.

  Surprisingly, the thing that interested her most was the Triune Golden Spheres. Apparently they were a relatively rare technique and librarians would jump at the chance to publicly log it. Though Rick knew that would instantly tie the information to him, he was also likely to make a lot of enemies anyway, so he wasn't sure it made a difference.

  When he was finished, Heather spent a while muttering curses under her breath, then finally nodded. "Okay. Let's just fucking do this. I should say, I didn't expect this to be so dramatic when I mentioned it to you, but I guess you don't do anything half way."

  "Uh, what do you mean by doing this?"

  "The public library system is a neutral party, so we can't get directly involved or help you materially. At least not right now - if you want to let us study the lucrim techniques you know, you'd be compensated for that. But I can pledge to help out with anything knowledge-related."

  Rick could only nod. He knew that the library system sticking out its neck to help him had been a long shot and hadn't been counting on it. "Do you know any secrets about overcoming addiction or rebuilding lucrim portfolios?"

  "I could send you some books, but..." Heather shrugged. "You probably know the basics already. No easy solutions there. Anything else?"

  "What about ways of forging demonic bonds? I've been putting together an idea that would pair weak demons with poor humans."

  Heather's eyebrows, which he only that moment realized were dyed the same green as her hair, shot up. "That is not what I fucking expected when I started this call. Hell, not what I expected from you at all. Hmm... though the library is not in the bond business, we do have a great deal of information about demonic contracts. If you can deliver everything you've said, I'd be happy to connect you to the right people."

  "Great. Thanks, Heather."

  "It was the least I can do. Really, I'm sorry I can't do more."

  After the call ended, the blue pyramid went dead. It was probably far too much security for a simple conversation, but the public library system didn't mess around. Soon after Rick began shivering again, his adrenaline running out and his symptoms returning in force.

  When he sat down on the side of the bed, clutching his stomach, he just tried not to black out for a while. But when he recovered enough to straighten, he saw Katenka floating beside the pyramid, regarding it curiously.

  "I think this was the last step we needed, Rick. We don't have any real public libraries in Siberia, not in the sense you do here. But with their help combined with everything else, I think we can create the demonic bonds."

  "Great." Rick turned over onto his side and tried to squirm under the covers. "Now we just have to survive the rest."

  "I think you're doing better, and you'll have more help soon. Stay strong."

  He nodded in response, but that wasn't what he'd meant. Rick knew that he'd get through the withdrawal - he was worried about what came after.

  Chapter 47: Community

  Over the course of several weeks, Rick began to find the other side of withdrawal. His fever subsided and his body only trembled involuntarily on occasion, or when he was particularly stressed. Unfortunately, the urge to drink more Formula T was as high as ever, grinding at him every eight hours. He also thought he was far more restless than he had been before, seeking energy to burn.

  Lisa's arrival had been immensely helpful, though she kept a professional distance at all times. That seemed impossible, given that she had come across several states just to help him. Yes, he was more than paying her back in the form of all the excess Formula T, but she hadn't known about that. She'd come solely because she cared.

  Several times when she'd helped ease the withdrawal symptoms, he was so grateful he could have kissed her. Rick chalked that up to being delirious, or in any case he didn't want to make any decisions while he wasn't thinking clearly. She gave an odd smile when he thanked her that he didn't really understand.

  As he finished his meditation, Rick got to his feet and ate everything she'd left for him. She said he shouldn't have any serum or philosopher's elixir, since it might inhibit his recovery, but there were plenty of other supplements to help him. Some to reduce withdrawal symptoms, some to rebuild his lucrim portfolio, and some to make sure his body modifications remained stable during the time of heavy transition. He hadn't even thought about the last one, but Lisa seemed to have a handle on everything.

>   Once he'd eaten, Rick returned to his training. His physical condition was still good, but there was something oddly off. Not just the occasional feeling that he didn't have enough strength, but odd twitches that inhibited his movements. Despite all his footwork training, occasionally he clumsily used too much power and smashed himself directly into a wall.

  Overall, however, he felt much stronger. His base lucrim generation rate still lagged at the edge of six digits, but everything else had improved.

  His defensive cores seemed to have taken the ordeal as an opportunity to grow, and if the Triune Golden Spheres had languished, at least the rest of him was stronger. Strangely, his foundation seemed to have dissolved into the Dark Blood Kettle, but he didn't feel weakened by it, so he assumed that it could only be a good thing.

  Most likely, the fact that he'd been able to rebuild himself was due to what Teragen had done to him. That assault had dissolved the boundaries of his portfolio so that he could rebuild it more efficiently, so it was good timing that it had happened at the same time he'd been trying to get off Formula T... unless Teragen had predicted that as well.

  The door to his room clicked open and Rick leapt, raising his fists before he realized he was being unnecessarily jumpy. On the other side, Melissa raised her hands cautiously. "Easy there, brother. Let's not have any sibling on sibling violence."

  "Sorry. I'm just tense." Rick gestured for her to enter and then shut the door after her. "Are you doing okay?"

  "I should be the one asking that, but yes. Having Lisa and Katenka to help me honestly makes my YLAA work a breeze. But more importantly..." Melissa triumphantly raised something in one hand, a vial containing a dark gray liquid, and imitated a victory sound effect. "This is done!"