Novak first crified what exactly I was trying to achieve, practically echoing my earlier thoughts about immortalising my accomplishments through technique. As it turned out, Chen wasn’t the only one pgued by this idea. Many cultivators regarded their techniques as a unique legacy. I wasn’t seeking uniqueness, only efficiency. This gave Novak the opportunity not only to take a look himself, but also to share the material with acquaintances who understood the matter better than he did. He asked me to send all the notes and developments without exception, including raw FlowScan logs, simution schematics, and the commentary I’d tried to compile.

  He also informed me that less than a week remained until my return to the Bck Lotus.

  He said it as if it weren’t a simple transfer, but a deadline. Not my personal one, a general one. He didn’t go into details, but the implication was clear: something of such magnitude was about to happen that recent events would seem trivial by comparison. Something that would affect the entire Earth.

  Novak wasn’t the kind to dramatise for effect. If he allowed himself that sort of phrasing, it meant the information was either already confirmed.

  Wormholes?

  That was the first thing that came to mind.

  Or some other demonic shit. Either way, it was definitely reted to the demons. All human life, our very survival, had always come up against the same obstacle: demons. Their regur raids, and the resistance to those raids, had shaped the local society into what it was now.

  It seemed we were on the brink of another turn in that historical cycle. That’s why I didn’t fixate on the Chainsaw Punch any more than necessary. The technique was important, but not the only thing. And certainly not self-sufficient. Without a proper foundation, without control and stability, in its current form it could easily turn from a tool into a problem.

  I resumed training with Eriksen the next day.

  Knife and rope.

  No experiments. No improvisations. And no hints that my injuries could have been avoided, for which I was especially grateful to Eriksen. I might not have held back in his pce.

  Pure mechanics, pure control, and pure discipline. Exactly what I needed right now.

  As usual, it started with a demonstration. Eriksen cut one of the ropes himself, then handed me the knife.

  I ran through the cycles in my mind. Stance, swing, ssh — the physical component. Core, shoulder, forearm, wrist, two points on the bde — the energy component. Only this time, I added that same feeling of all-pervading sharpness that had fred within me a moment before my fingers were severed.

  I only adjusted it slightly. Redirected it away from myself.

  The sensation was strange. During the swing, the moment I linked the anchor points on the bde, a cold crity enveloped me. I wasn’t focusing on completing the cycle. I wasn’t trying to maintain circution. I simply let the sharpness emerge on the bde.

  The paper bde sliced through the rope as if it were made of dense air. The blue fibres didn’t even scatter. They parted along a clean line — no fraying, no torn edges. The knife remained intact.

  I raised the bde in surprise, still feeling the circution inside. But the moment I looked at it, the qi within began to unravel. The knife shuddered and cracked along the edge.

  I gnced at Eriksen.

  “Rest has clearly done you good,” he nodded, surprised. “I think we’re going to need more ropes.”

  My instructor had prepared a whole basket of knives but only two ropes. This time, he returned with a new basket, full of ropes. He set up two ropes at once in the mannequin’s maniputors, and I picked up a fresh knife in my left hand.

  “Try it with two knives,” he said.

  “They’re still breaking,” I pointed to the used knife lying on the floor.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Eriksen waved it off. “It’s the backflow through the core of the bde. Our target’s the discs. The circution there is entirely external, so let’s not get bogged down in that.”

  I pushed aside the thought of cracked paper and focused on the task. Not on the elegance of the cut, not on the inner sensation. On the action itself.

  The two ropes hung side by side, nearly parallel, at the same height. The distance was such that I wouldn’t be able to reach both with a single swing. But Eriksen clearly wasn’t suggesting a single swing.

  “Two sshes, one after the other?” I crified.

  “Of course.”

  I took a second knife in my right hand and adjusted my stance into something more or less neutral. Normally, when cutting with my right hand, I’d lead with my left foot, and vice versa. This time, I stepped the left foot slightly forward again, but not as obviously. Left hand forward, right hand slightly back, like a strange version of a boxing stance, only with bdes instead of fists.

  Except in boxing, things would usually start with quick jabs from the left. But I started by cutting with the right.

  I’d done something simir before with a single rope, though back then I couldn’t manage a full cut, just shallow slices. That time, the rope had been directly in front of me. Now there were two, and the cutting motion needed an extra twist of the torso: the right hand sshed the left rope, the left hand cut across the right one.

  I ran the cycles through in my mind, duplicating them for each hand and giving a slight shrug of my shoulders in rhythm. Then, I sshed.

  The first rope parted in a clean line. So did the second.

  The sensation of sharpness leapt from one knife to the other, and that one cracked. Strangely enough, the right-hand knife remained intact.

  Again. And again.

  The left ones kept breaking, while the right, always the same bde, stayed whole. Either the cellulose had been compressed better, or…

  I changed my stance and started with the left.

  It wasn’t the knife, it was the sequence. The bde I used first, the one that struck first, that one stayed intact. The one that received the transferred sharpness, that one cracked.

  I paused, thinking.

  Eriksen noticed immediately.

  “What’s bothering you?” he asked curtly.

  “The knife I use first sts longer,” I said. “I don’t understand why.”

  “Most likely because you let the circution fade out. For this type of technique, you don’t need to maintain it constantly. You trigger a pulse, run it through a few cycles, then let it dissipate.”

  I blinked.

  “Dissipate? But what about the nature of cycles? And why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “Because we’re aiming for the discs. With discs, you need to sustain the circution for as long as possible. I believe you’re ready for discs. Shall we switch, or do you want to figure out the release?

  “I honestly don’t see much benefit for your goal,” he added. “With a stronger bde material, it’ll work anyway, and you said you’re not pnning to rely on actual bdes. So… try it if you want, for general understanding.”

  I gnced at the knives in the basket. Only four intact ones remained, and two ropes.

  I nodded at Eriksen, signalling for him to repce the ropes, then picked up a new knife, felt its weight in my hand, and adjusted my internal model of the process according to what Eriksen had said.

  Trigger. Ssh. Release.

  Let the flow fade on its own.

  That sensation of sharpness that used to leap from the first bde to the second after a cut.

  I sshed with my right hand and simply let it go. Let it scatter into the air. The knife in my right hand remained intact.

  I repeated the motion with my left — success again.

  “Discs!” I said.

  Finally, the discs!

  We returned to the range, where I hadn’t been since my first day in Wilson’s hall. We took one of the open shooting nes. Eriksen already had trainer access, and at the far end of the corridor the holographic target lit up again, the same one, circur, with concentric rings and a central point.

  The distance hadn’t changed — ten metres. He didn’t bother to move it back.

  “I remember the Double Cycle,” he said, as if continuing a conversation from our first day. “But like I told you before, it needs space. Much more than we’ve got here. That’s for ter. Right now, your task is simpler, just unch the disc.”

  He took a stack of pstic saucers from the wall.

  I picked up the first training disc and assessed it. The pstic was much harder than cellulose. It could withstand a circution failure — not that it mattered, since the flow had to remain external anyway.

  Recalling the same instructions from day one, I pinched the disc between thumb and forefinger. I estimated two equidistant points on the edge from the point of grip, directly opposite each other.

  “Here and here,” I pointed with my left index finger.

  “Correct!” Eriksen praised. “Send the qi counterclockwise for the right-hand disc, and clockwise for the left-hand one. But today, just the right. Counterclockwise.”

  Eriksen stepped back and pointed at the target.

  I took my stance and repeated the motion I’d honed with the paper knives. The qi flowed naturally into my hand, into the disc, and began to spiral.

  The circle made all the difference. This wasn’t some awkward loop the Bde Qi had grudgingly followed. The rotation made the energy denser, faster, almost aggressive. The sensation of sharpness sshed through my nerves, and I hurried to get rid of the disc before it sliced off my thumb.

  Not that I was aiming, but the disc suddenly veered right, as if someone had shoved it mid-flight. It didn’t reach the target, smmed into the left wall of the ne, and ricocheted straight through the holographic target.

  I doubt that counts. I wasn’t even sure I’d kept a connection to the disc after it hit the wall.

  I checked my glove. No new cuts. So the sensation had only been a sensation.

  “Again,” said Eriksen.

  This time, the surge of sharpened qi racing across the disc hit my nerves just as violently, but I didn’t let go. I had to remind myself that here, they could sew fingers back on!

  It felt like I was holding a rabid circur saw. It terrified me, but it obeyed.

  The next throw went much the same. The disc flew maybe ten centimetres further before smming into the wall. This time I could clearly feel the rotation right up until the impact. But I still had no idea how to control it.

  Eriksen made me throw another dozen, then summed it up:

  “Pretty standard stuff. Don’t try to straighten out the trajectory. Don’t try to force the disc into a line and hold it there. The rotation won’t allow it. Tilt it.”

  He took a disc and threw it.

  It sliced through the centre of the target, not only spinning around its own axis, but also rotating around its flight path. The disc left his hand at about a 45-degree angle from horizontal, pierced the holographic target vertically, and completed more than a full rotation before reaching the end of the ne.

  “This will take you at least a few days,” he said. “Keep training. I’ll check your progress ter.”

  Eriksen was right.

  It took me two days. By the end of the second day, I’d learned to tilt the disc mid-flight and was hitting the target consistently.

  I even started training throws with my left hand and was finally pnning to buy a throwing technique, to stabilise my channels.

  But Eriksen insisted I’m not good enough and mowed target further. Then, on the third day, the major event Novak had warned me about occurred. My interface, all interfaces, received a global update.

  A new name appeared on the list of Celestial Roots: Space.

  MaksymPachesiuk