The purge took exactly one day.

  I’d expected it to drag on, for the Order to methodically go through every cadet. Weeks, months, waves of inspections, bureaucracy, and tug-of-war between internal factions like the Order and Diplomacy. But no. It all happened fast, almost rough and loud.

  A few minor demons definitely slipped through the trap and went to ground, but the main mass was covered by the very first shot.

  Talents with a Space Root of fifteen or higher rushed to the Hall of Order for the freebie. A free M1 ampoule, at current prices, isn’t something you ignore. The Order received them calmly. Politely. With checks, of course, but without any demonstrative pressure. Exactly the way it had to be done for the system to look transparent and safe.

  The demons couldn’t allow that.

  They tried countermeasures. Dumps and semi-anonymous messages ciming that talents were being sent to the sughter, that experiments were being conducted on them, that people with high Roots were disappearing without a trace. There was even a version about ‘draining Space for the elite’, which had absolutely nothing to do with reality. That’s not how Roots work.

  The overly hasty countermeasures only resulted in cadets who repeated those rumours with particur enthusiasm being subjected to additional checks.

  Naturally, by the end of the day there were several new suicide attempts and new detentions.

  And, as always, the wave of rumours only grew. On the basis of the demon-unched disinformation campaign, a new informational mutant emerged. Now people were saying that Space Qi drives you mad and induces suicidal tendencies, or that the global interface update breaks the psyche and causes side effects that were immediately dubbed ‘space madness’.

  I watched all of this through forum posts and text messages from Zhang. She’d left my ft after lunch. She wanted to be closer to the action and see everything live.

  I had no such desire. I much preferred the position I was in.

  Late at night, when I was already getting ready for bed, Mendoza called me.

  Briefly and wearily, without preamble, she told me I’d been added to an unofficial exclusion list. The Hall of Order would have no questions for me. I could return to training.

  That was exactly what I pnned to do. The only problem was that I wasn’t Mendoza, I couldn’t ring Eriksen in the middle of the night. So I had to wait until morning and arrange an evening session.

  And so as not to waste time, I went ahead and bought the Double Cycle after all. The red version, of course, along with a pack of pstic discs. I’d decide on combat-grade ones after I’d at least somewhat mastered the technique.

  To train the Double Cycle, I had to rent a hall. There were no such rge spaces avaible for general use, and I didn’t want to leave the school grounds. Too much open space. Too many directions an attack could come from.

  The demons weren’t having the best of times tely, and they could be irrationally emotional. No point giving them an excuse to take it out on poor little me. Out there, I wouldn’t have my hidden advantage anymore. Out there, everyone wore armour.

  This world had started affecting me in strange ways. At this rate, I wouldn’t just grow cautious, I’d develop a full-on fear of open spaces. The reverse of custrophobia. I’m sure there’s an official name for that, but I’d rather not learn it.

  Besides, I knew the school’s med teams worked efficiently inside. Still, I put my armour on anyway. No point giving them extra work.

  The hall was forty by forty metres, with a high ceiling and no columns. More space than I needed, really. I took my pce in the centre.

  The Double Cycle sounded simple enough in theory. You unch the disc, and it circles around you in loops ten to twenty metres wide. I’ve no idea what the ‘double’ part referred to, or what exactly was meant by ‘cycle.’ If the discs were small enough, you could unch two, and they’d keep circling as long as you had the energy and focus to maintain them.

  In that sense, Chain Punch was a much more descriptive name. But I didn’t care about the naming. I opened the holographic schematic and saw, for the first time, the full map of the channels.

  Some of them were familiar. Core to shoulder — identical to my previous offensive techniques. Shoulder to forearm — pretty close to the usual variations. A few lines followed older routes almost exactly, as if the technique had been designed to integrate into existing infrastructure.

  But others… Like the channels in the thumb and index fingers. Two channels in each finger, thin as thread, and coiled in spirals!

  Just looking at them made me uncomfortable.

  Fist was simpler! Fist techniques had channel exits at the knuckles — none of this refined nonsense.

  Still, I already had something vaguely simir in my hands. Rough, uneven grooves had formed in my fingers during training with Eriksen. Back then, I worked purely on instinct, not thinking about form.

  That wasn’t enough anymore. Those channels definitely hadn’t branched or twisted into spirals inside my fingers.

  I pulled one disc out from my spatial pocket and slowly released my qi. No pressure, no forcing. I let it follow the old grooves, let it spread freely all the way to my fingertips, until the tension between them sparked that familiar sharpness.

  Then I threw the disc.

  Of course, it didn’t start circling around me. It didn’t circle at all, it just arced out and flew straight out of my control zone.

  The channels were only half the problem. I had to learn how to control Bde Qi outside the body, the same way I did with Fist projections. The tilting Eriksen showed me was only good for keeping the disc straight.

  Chain Punch was too fast for that. But Hook…

  I released one with my left hand, aiming low, forcing the projection to rise mid-flight, and the second with my right, doing the opposite.

  The projections responded, though I could feel how off they were, how sloppy, because of the mess in my channels. Some of the qi was just leaking out, completely wasted.

  Yeah, I was definitely having marigold tea tonight.

  I pulled another disc from my spatial pocket. Good thing these things had been decssified. No one would question how I kept pulling them out.

  Whatever the case, my energy network was already a disaster, so I decided not to make things worse. I would only throw the disc once the channels were primed, only when I could send energy through them cleanly and accurately.

  Each throw took me nearly a full minute. After ten of them, I’d spend several more just collecting the projectiles. I tried unching them all in one direction to save time on cleanup.

  I spent several hours training like this. Didn’t achieve much, but I id the groundwork. Something Eriksen was clearly not happy about.

  “This isn’t what you should be doing right now!” he snapped.

  I was starting to get the impression my improvising and deviations from the training pn were seriously testing his patience. From a cheerful, accommodating young instructor, he’d turned into a yelling, authoritarian coach who believed there was only one correct way to do anything.

  “If you’re going to train,” he said, barely containing his anger, “you could at least work on what I showed you. The tilts!”

  “I was working on the throw,” I replied calmly. Recent events had done wonders for my nerves, and I still had plenty of patience left. His raised voice didn’t bother me. “I was working on having any kind of influence over the disc mid-flight.”

  “That’s a completely different principle!” he barked.

  He really seemed to be asking for a fight.

  “What crawled up your spine today?” I asked.

  “Nothing!”

  “Uh-huh. So you’re always this angry, just usually better at hiding it?”

  Eriksen wagged a finger at me.

  “Follow me!” he barked, storming toward the throwing range.

  He grabbed a pack of discs from the rack as we passed and flung one down the first open corridor, didn’t even bother with a target, physical or holographic. The disc shot straight down the hall and hit the far wall, rotating twice in a perfect 360-degree rotation along a clean, stable axis.

  “That’s aiming skill,” he growled, then looked around like the space was suddenly too small. “Step back.”

  I did.

  He turned sideways toward the far wall and threw a disc with a weird motion, not extending his arm all the way.

  The disc shot down the corridor, curved back like a boomerang, looped around his figure, and zipped down the corridor again.

  I didn’t see where it went next, I’d moved, but I heard the familiar cck of impact, and Eriksen pointed.

  It hadn’t gone far.

  “Learning to spin discs around yourself won’t help you hit anything!” he snapped. “You’ll end up just running it around in circles, hoping your opponent steps into its path. I’ve seen it.”

  “Fair,” I nodded. “But it still doesn’t expin your mood. My channels are a mess after our sessions. I need to get them in shape. I can work on ‘spinning’ in the morning and ‘tilting’ in the afternoon.

  So what’s actually got you so worked up?”

  He turned away, not like I could see his face through the visor, and didn’t answer right away.

  “Sorry,” he said at st, the edge mostly gone from his voice. “It’s… You’ve heard the rumours? About ‘Space Madness’?”

  “You?”

  “No!..

  “I… I started seeing someone recently. Not serious, but… I really liked her.

  “Yesterday, her Space Root opened. Twenty-one.”

  Ah, fuck.

  “She killed herself?” I asked.

  Eriksen hesitated.

  “She tried… The Order stopped her. The Order — not Medical!

  She’s not in the infirmary. She’s not anywhere. I tried texting, calling, asking around, and that made the Order interested in me! They held me in a cage for two hours like a criminal, then messed with my head for six more!

  What the hell?!”

  “I don’t know, man,” I lied with sympathy in my voice. “Any idea what’s going on?”

  “No clue. But I’m not raising my Space Root, that’s for damn sure. You, though…”

  He froze, finger aimed at me, clearly checking my stats.

  “You weren’t kidding! 52? Seriously?

  “No… urges yet?” he asked cautiously.

  “If Space Qi made people lose it, half the senior cultivators would’ve slit their throats by now. You’ve seen their root stats?”

  “Honestly? No,” he admitted. “That’s not natural growth. You’ve used Essence.”

  “Yeah,” I said. It was obvious.

  “Even if you’ve got talent like Jenny, that’s thirty doses. Fifteen hundred points. Not cheap, buddy.”

  “Back when I was using it, there was no price. Gift from my master. And I think it’ll get cheaper soon.”

  “So… you’ve got a pocket too?”

  I sighed and pulled a pstic disc out of thin air. No point hiding the obvious.

  It finally hit me, a high Space Root was now a dead giveaway not only for demons. It meant a cultivator had a Pocket and connections.

  “Damn,” Eriksen muttered.

  “…What?” I asked.

  Pockets were cool. Stuff popping out of thin air? Cool. What could disappoint him?

  “If it’s not Space causing the madness… then it’s the update?”

  “Still not following.”

  “The update to the interface, maybe that’s what caused Space Madness.”

  “I think there’s a more reasonable expnation.”

  “Yeah, right, let me guess. Demons again, huh?” Eriksen shot back with a bitter ugh.

  MaksymPachesiuk