The morning started early, though I wasn’t expecting a call from Mendoza until after lunch. No reason to waste time. Mendoza herself had said I’d need to spend ten or eleven days in the garden. It sounded like I’d be there all day, when in reality, each visit was no longer than an hour. And if all went well, I’d need nine or ten of them.

  So. Bde Garden.

  To visit the garden, I needed essence. After speaking with Mendoza yesterday, I’d had a bit of a negotiation with Zhang. For some reason, she saw dealing with essence as a petty distraction from the grand battle against the demons.

  I gave her perspective a bit of a nudge, reminded her that personal advancement is strengthening all ‘the warriors of light’.

  Still, she didn’t take my entire batch, just 148 M1 ampoules: 50 of Wood, 50 of Point, 48 of Wind. Plus 20 ampoules of Point M2.

  In hindsight, I should have gone to Patel. I’m sure he would’ve taken the whole lot off my hands.

  She did give me 50 M1 Bde ampoules straight away. The rest, with a small profit of a few bonus ampoules, would be handed over in a day or two.

  Personally, 50 was too many for me, but with the number of swordsmen back in Bck Lotus, Bde would be my primary export.

  Most importantly, I had three ampoules on hand this morning, for my first meditation session in the Garden.

  This time, I put on my armour and headed straight to the administrator. Unlike the polite exchange in the Earth Garden where everyone went slow and barefoot, here it was all business — quick and dry.

  A few words, and I had authorisation. The administrator only asked if I needed access to the tech room for essence injection.

  I told him my armour had an automatic stim delivery system, and it was already loaded. He nodded, and we parted ways.

  A message popped up:

  Temporary cultivation clearance granted: Bde Garden.

  Now that my root growth wouldn’t trigger the security system or incur any automatic fines, I had a full thirty minutes to work in peace.

  I found a retively quiet ptform, well away from the cadets practising disc-throwing, sat down in a meditation pose, and gave the command to inject all three ampoules sequentially.

  The wave of Bde Qi was cold and swift, like spiked ice flooding through my veins. It wasn’t like injecting Fist essence at all, it was closer to one of those minor breakthrough stimunts. The ones designed to help force your way through bottlenecks.

  The stimunt spread through my body, dissolving into my bloodstream. Within a few minutes, I got my first +1.

  There was no way I could stay sitting after that.

  The grass around me had sharp-edged leaves with bluish metallic edges, but there wasn’t enough qi in them.

  I had to actively focus to even recognise them as infused with Bde Qi. And they didn’t feel dangerous in the slightest.

  I stepped down from the ptform and slowly wandered towards the silver-tinted grasses. After all, silver was the native colour of my Fist, and it was those particur grasses that gave off the strongest sense of danger and icy sharpness. It was exhirating, motivating, even.

  I found myself automatically drifting towards pces with the highest concentration of Bde Qi.

  My feet led me to the densest patches of grass, where the aura of danger and determination was sharpest and most intense.

  This time, I wasn’t haunted by visions of the grass slicing into my guts. I was wearing armour, after all. The sense of danger didn’t frighten me, instead, it sent a pleasant tingle through my nerves, urging my gnds to zily release little flickers of adrenaline.

  This time, I allowed myself to reach one of the pilrs, beneath which y a heap of paper discs.

  Naturally, the pilr wasn’t made of steel. It was some kind of composite, and the paper had left thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of different scratches on its surface, depending on the angle of impact and how much Qi the disc had held.

  Immersed in sensation, I took a step. Then another.

  Until my senses suddenly overloaded.

  Every nerve in my body screamed danger. The Qi had thickened, like a cold, invisible liquid pressing against my armour. Time seemed to stop, freeze entirely, and from what I understood of Bde Qi, that was not how it behaved. It went against the principle of cyclical motion.

  I realised instantly: I’d wandered too close to a concentration of unstable qi and was now sensing the moment just before detonation. This wouldn’t be a pilr of Fire or a Fist explosion, but it would be a storm of sharpness.

  A thought fshed through my mind like lightning — Mad Monkey.

  And I crushed it with effort. Another fine for using inappropriate techniques in the Garden?

  Fine. I could live with that. But next time, they might deny me cultivation clearance altogether!

  I’m wearing armour! I’m wearing armour!

  Instead of activating the technique that would’ve guaranteed my escape, I used all my physical strength and agility, plus the servos in the armour, to simply hurl myself sideways.

  It wasn’t a graceful leap. More a sharp, heavy drop that turned into a scraping skid across the stone path.

  The decision took a fraction of a second, and it was the right one.

  The very moment my body hit the ground, the Bde Qi detonated. That unnatural dey vanished, repced by lightning-fast cycling.

  I felt it — hundreds of bdes slicing overhead. They had sheared themselves loose, rushing through the air like a ser net.

  The epicentre was at the pilr where the pile of paper discs had been.

  The Qi that had built up exploded into the paper, flooding it with excess sharpness. The discs didn’t just fly apart, they shredded each other into millions of ultra-sharp fragments.

  Shrapnel.

  It sliced through everything in its path: paper, air, grass.

  A good portion of it smmed into the pilr and ricocheted, masking the scrape of my armour on stone with a ceramic chime. The sound was like smashing a crate of porcein in a single blow.

  It was a hellstorm of sharpness.

  I was hit dozens of times.

  Well, not me. The amulet shield.

  Novak’s gift had decided the threat level was too high.

  I reckoned the real damage to my armour would’ve been far less than what was done to my nerves, but the shield nullified it completely.

  Within a few seconds, everything fell silent.

  I got to my feet, brushing shredded grass and paper fragments off myself.

  Everything around me that hadn’t been protected by the broad column had been sliced clean at about waist height.

  The silvery grass had been unevenly trimmed, turning into a carpet of stubs.

  I checked the armour. It was intact, no serious damage. Just some scuffing on the surface, especially on the right shoulder, which had taken the brunt of the fall and scrape against the stone.

  Without fifty kilos of reinforced alloy around me, that incident would’ve been fatal.

  And I was thrilled.

  In that final moment of tension before detonation, when the chill of danger became unbearable, and I genuinely believed I was in real peril, my adrenal gnds had dumped a hefty dose of adrenaline into my system, and I was still trembling from the surge.

  This wasn’t the clumsy rage of Fire. This was refined, cold, absolute sharpness.

  I hadn’t been wrong.

  Maybe Fire broke through shields more effectively, but Bde suited me better.

  A few seconds ter, I pulled myself together, and my eyes stopped scanning the scene of total devastation across the grass beds. They finally managed to focus on the messages in my interface.

  Bde Root +1

  Current Level: 18

  Bde Root +1

  Current Level: 19

  Bde Root +3

  Current Level: 22

  Bde Root +1

  Current Level: 23

  Wow.

  Good thing I had clearance, otherwise, I’d have a lot of expining to do. And even I didn’t fully understand what had just happened.

  Well, that +3 in one go, that had to be an enlightenment.

  I’d never received one like this before. Not like that.

  But hey, I’m not compining! +3? That’s a solid, serious enlightenment.

  Bde – 23. And I came in here at sixteen.

  Not bad for a visit! +6 from three vials of essence, and I still had fifteen minutes left on the clock.

  I finished reading the notifications just in time to hear the sound of jet engines. Logic suggested they were headed my way, so I gnced around and stepped away from the column, clearing a nding spot for the jetboard.

  Seconds ter, the artificial sun, well, the mps that passed for it, was blotted out by a descending shadow. It swept over the clearing as the board dropped in, braking hard and tilting nearly vertical. The hot exhaust ignited and scattered a few of the shredded paper scraps.

  A stranger in full yellow armour with curved horns jumped off the board and quickly stomped out the small fmes before they could spread to the grasses.

  A thinHorn! The first one I’d seen in full armour. Not a training suit or some light protective gear, this was a proper exoskeleton.

  My interface identified the familiar to me model: Albert. Albert 35.

  He approached, stepping around the mess of shredded paper and grass. His movements were cold and precise, like a well-banced disc.

  “Cadet, are you alright?” he asked.

  “Better than alright!” I replied cheerfully.

  He didn’t get the enthusiasm and asked for crification.

  “The system registered a significant local detonation. I see…” His gaze swept over the aftermath. “…and the use of restricted Qi.”

  Oh, hell.

  I should’ve used the Monkey after all.

  “I didn’t use any forbidden techniques!” I denied quickly. “Maybe a system glitch?”

  I didn’t want to reveal my trump card, just in case the local demons hadn’t caught on to the shield yet. I could tuck it away into my spatial pocket, sure, but if it came to an inspection and they went digging through my gear?

  They might detect the pendant-pocket... What then? What excuse could I possibly spin?

  “Show me your logs,” he ordered.

  Damn. This Albert was just as authoritarian as the one I knew.

  But fortunately, my logs were clean.

  I granted him access.

  “Whoa,” he said as soon as he saw the root growth.

  “Yep,” I grinned. “From just three vials!”

  “Well, a +3 in one go, that’s definitely an enlightenment,” said Albert. “Has nothing to do with the essence, so overall, still fairly standard… maybe even below average.”

  “Couldn’t care less,” I replied.

  “And you’re not carrying any protective amulets?”

  That question nearly caught me off guard.

  I lied before I even realised it — pure survival instinct and the result of all my prior mental prep for spinning a decent excuse.

  "Of course not!" The excuse came out expressive, just not very decent.

  Would they check? Would they not?

  Luckily for me, he couldn’t see my face behind the visor. And apparently, he wasn’t in the mood for paperwork.

  “Alright,” he said after a small pause, waving me off. “You’re free to go.”

  I didn’t argue with my luck. I turned around and walked away in the direction he’d vaguely indicated. On the way, I passed two heavily armoured drones, clearly sent to clean up the mess from the Qi detonation.

  And a few minutes ter, I got another +1 to Bde. The fourth one from those three vials. So Albert was wrong. This wasn’t below standard, it was above it.

  I was in an excellent mood all the way to the Armour Hall.

  Then, the moment I took the suit off, life decided to throw me a lemon.

  The next cadet in line pointed a finger at me.

  “I know you! You’re that little shit from Bck Lotus!”

  He flipped up his visor, and I recognised him instantly — the pampered grandson from the Lightning Garden. The one with a grandfather in the Order.

  MaksymPachesiuk