After the meeting with old Chen, I was left with a strange sense of incompleteness.

  I had expected either a ‘strike,’ metaphorically speaking, because a big, scary Fifth Stage wouldn’t stoop to beating up a Second, or some kind of reward. Instead, I’d simply sat there, drunk ordinary tea with ordinary pastries, and left.

  The old man hadn’t opened Novak’s gift. He hadn’t insulted me, but neither had he threatened me. He hadn’t tried to apply pressure or bargain; he’d simply been nostalgic. He behaved not like a top-tier cultivator, but like a retired old man. Like someone whose best years were far behind him, and with them all pleasure as well, leaving only regret behind.

  I’d been preparing for things to shift. In any direction. That after the tea, something would change: status, conditions, position. That something meaningful would happen. But nothing did.

  The meeting passed as nothing. Not in a bad sense, but in a human one. Without a result that could be recorded or used. Without a clear resolution.

  The only thing I took away from it was a trophy sword I didn’t need at all.

  When I returned to my room and, without any hurry, ran the bde through the search systems, I learned that this piece of metal was worth anywhere from fifty to three hundred thousand units. A more accurate valuation would have required a specialist.

  I would have gone to one, if I hadn’t promised the old man that I wouldn’t sell it.

  At that moment, it had been the right decision. Not profitable. Not rational. Right.

  Who knew what the old man might have done if I’d shown less respect for his gesture. He didn’t look like someone who reacted impulsively, but he did look old in the cssic sense of the word, and old people could fall into a rage over the smallest provocation. I didn’t want to give him one, considering that ordinary old people didn’t possess such colossal personal power.

  So now the trophy sword stood in the corner of my room, like a broom in a house with a robot vacuum.

  Leaving the sword behind, I returned to my own problems and training. Or rather, to their surrogate.

  The left ached a bit again, nothing critical. Unscrewing bottle caps will do that. However, for another three days I was forbidden from training properly because of the regenerator on my right arm. That cursed tube wouldn’t let me put on armour, move normally, or even pretend I was training. Still, sensitivity was returning to it, and it no longer hung like a dead rope. I could already lift my shoulder and bend my elbow. But I still couldn’t feel my palm.

  The approach to treatment puzzled me a little. Then again, local medicine differed little from magic, as far as I was concerned. At least the level of understanding was about the same.

  When Kate lost her arm, she hadn’t worn a regenerator. She had separate sessions in the infirmary that slowly turned her creepy outgrowth into a normal-sized arm. Kate had left her arm behind on the raid, though, while the doctor had picked my fingers up.

  I still couldn’t feel them, and I couldn’t see what was happening inside the tube.

  Dwelling on the tube and the lost time was unproductive, so I changed my approach. If I couldn’t train the body, I should train the mind.

  In addition to FlowScan, I picked up a free technique-modelling program. I loaded all my FlowScan recordings into it, including the mess I’d collected during the sparring session with Zhang, and started rebuilding the Chainsaw Punch from scratch.

  More precisely, I started by erasing what wasn’t needed.

  FlowScan recorded the entire body, all movement of qi through every channel from every active technique.

  The Monkey was there, Thousand Sparks was there, and the deformed channels in my arms were there as well, while the overall recording quality was blurry and left much to be desired. Eriksen had been right when he said that for a proper recording I’d need better software and external equipment.

  Still, after three days of work, I had four functional schematics. Because of the recording quality and the channel deformation, a lot had to be filled in by guesswork. With my limited knowledge, almost entirely by intuition. I had precise copies of the channels of the traditional Chain Punch, so I wasn’t worried about the section up to the elbow, but in the forearm I was already starting to guess.

  On the st day of working on the schematics, sensation returned to my right hand. Now I was sure the medics hadn’t thrown my fingers away. They itched to the point of tears. Itched so badly that I started scratching the regenerator tube itself.

  At night it got even worse, and I didn’t sleep until morning, and then for several more hours until my appointment at the infirmary, where the duty doctor zily opened the tube with a command through the interface.

  I immediately went to scratch myself, for which the doc smacked my left hand.

  “Too early!” he scolded me, and just as zily sprayed my arm with some kind of foamy solution.

  The colour of my right arm was very different from the left. It had an unpleasant greenish tint. After the foam, which quickly melted and covered the arm in a uniform yer, the tint shifted to bluish.

  The doc took my arm, squeezed the middle of the forearm, and in one motion peeled a thick yer of dead skin off it, as if it were a torn glove.

  Along with the skin, the itching went away, but the sensation, a sharp shot through the nerves, was so strong my front teeth actually ached.

  The new skin was noticeably pinker than the old, and there were no scars on the fingers. The hand bent and straightened like a well-lubricated mechanism fresh off the assembly line.

  “That’s it,” the doctor said. “But I recommend washing it thoroughly. I definitely didn’t remove all the dead cells.”

  And he was right. I scraped off another forty grams or so at the sink in the nearest restroom.

  But none of that really mattered. The important thing was that I had two hands again, and I called Eriksen to resume our training. That, however, would be tomorrow. Today, I needed to reproduce my success.

  In armour!

  Definitely in armour, with gauntlets made of a thick, ultra-durable alloy that was supposed to protect me from another finger fountain. Unless I managed to create a bde effect inside the glove…

  I shouldn’t.

  From the infirmary, I went to the Armour Hall, then to the nearest training ground that didn’t require a booking. It was a small, cube-shaped hall, simir to the one where we used to run our Mutual Aid club back at the Lotus.

  For the sake of a clean experiment, I excluded the use of any stimunts or auxiliary techniques. I didn’t even activate FlowScan, since that required Thousand Sparks of Awareness.

  I swung my fists a bit to warm up, clenched and unclenched my fingers twice. The sensations were a little strange, as if both hands were still not fully mine, yet they responded without any dey. No phantom pain. No dead zones.

  I pulled up the first schematic as a hologram through the interface, ran through a short cycle of physical movements, then another, tracking the required Qi flow through the channels, and finally…

  Inhale. Exhale.

  Punch, punch, punch…

  My fists shot forward, alternating one after the other. I wasn’t trying to strike, wasn’t trying to cut, I just held the sensation of all-cleaving sharpness in my mind. I let the projections form and fly without excessive focus.

  And they appeared. One, two, three. Silver, crisp, vertical bdes with a characteristic tilt, like the teeth of a saw. They moved in a clean series, at equal intervals, without distortion.

  I stopped and caught my breath. My heart was pounding, but not from pain or fear. From triumph. I’d just done it.

  I’d succeeded. Bite me, Eriksen!

  And my fingers were still there. Though the bck coating on the gloves was crossed by a thin line of natural metallic sheen, which clearly indicated the technique’s imperfection.

  So, not quite perfect yet.

  But now I wouldn’t forget it. You could say I had a save file, and I could always continue working from this exact point.

  Just in case, I repeated the technique, pushing the speed to the maximum.

  A dozen bdes tore free from my hands without colpsing back into fist projections.

  Great. And honestly, I hadn’t been prepared for such a significant success right away. I’d expected to have to grind at it and make adjustments to the training, so I didn’t immediately move on to the next point, the next schematic.

  I did everything exactly the same as with the previous attempt and got exactly the same result, and it worked.

  The third schematic went the same way.

  And only with the fourth schematic did I get a hiccup. Out of ten projections, one turned into a fist. On top of that, the groove in the paint on the armoured fingers became noticeably wider.

  Good thing it wasn’t deeper, the armoured alloy held up just fine.

  The cause of the failure wasn’t entirely clear. I still didn’t have well-defined channels for this technique. The qi flow was being controlled more by my will than by instinct. Chain Punch was a fast technique, and at that speed I couldn’t guarantee that I was doing everything correctly.

  Still, I executed the technique using the st schematic three more times, ten strikes each, and got two more failures.

  The difference between this schematic and the previous one y in the divergence of the channels in the fists. It was in the fists that my channels had suffered the greatest deformation while learning the Bde; that was where the qi spilled in the least controlled way, and where I had to improvise its movement.

  What was strange was that a channel shift of less than a centimetre to the side caused such a drastic change.

  I still didn’t understand channel mechanics. Not at all. So I decided to execute schematic number three, the one closest to the fourth, and it worked without failures.

  My success suddenly led me into a dead end. I literally stopped understanding where to go next.

  For deeper understanding and proper comparison, I would need to run FlowScan again: record, analyse, compare. On top of that, I’d only evaluated the external form of the technique so far — literally, the ability to form vertical silver bdes. I hadn’t yet assessed damage output or energy consumption.

  My reserve, since my breakthrough to Second Stage, had been among the best of any cultivator I’d encountered at my level. After the minor breakthrough to mid-stage, it had grown a bit more, but…

  Energy: 349/433

  Damn. Half an hour ago I’d been full.

  The energy costs for a fast technique were significant and dangerously close to Hook, my primary damage dealer. If the damage of Chain Punch hadn’t increased, and I could guarantee it hadn’t increased by much, more likely the damage type had simply changed. Fast techniques literally trade damage for speed.

  I really didn’t want to end up with exactly what Eriksen had warned me about: a fast, fshy reserve-drainer. To avoid that, I needed help.

  I wasn’t Chen, and I wasn’t about to invest my entire life into this technique, or pass it on to students. In other words, I wasn’t going to make a whole saga out of it. And I didn’t have that kind of time anyway. The invasion was already close. Forty years would fly by in an instant. I needed a finished, effective technique now.

  And the only person I could turn to for help was Novak. After all, what was a master for, if not to set you on the righteous and correct path?

  I called him, and only then did it occur to me to wonder what time it was at the Bck Lotus.

  MaksymPachesiuk