Chapter 5

When the cat flue finally hit me I was expecting it to hit like a ton of bricks, but initially, it started deceptively gently. I felt off and knew that I was 'sick', felt the need to cough occasionally, but otherwise felt fine. May permanently carried a worried frown. The next week was a living hell and if it wasn't for May, I don't think I would have survived.

During the day I appeared to be fine, but when I went to bed, after a short period I would wake up feeling the need to cough, my throat would be dry and after one cough and one dry swallow, my throat seemed to shrink and I would struggle to breathe. Only by repressing my coughing would my throat recover, albeit slowly. There were times where I didn't think I would manage to get a breathe in. May was there stroking my back and encouraging me. I tried sleeping in a chair so that I was more upright, but it didn't seem to matter. Having a glass of water by my bed helped, only if I could take a sip before I coughed. In the end, May timed how long it would be before my symptoms would start, which was twenty-three minutes of sleep, and woke me up before, got me to take a sip or two of water and spend half an hour doing the EG kata.

After five days we were both exhausted but there were signs of improvement. The first two nights I had three or four of these attacks. By the third night I only had one attack and the fifth night I managed without any. After seven days it was over and I felt myself recover. Even so, I kept a glass of water by my bed for months and if I woke up, I would take a sip first, before anything else. The experience of struggling to breathe stayed with me for a while. It was very scary.

The downside to having gone through it was that I wouldn't be able to see Switch for another three months, but, on the plus side, I had survived and I was now immune. My new goal was to cure my cancer and to help with that I wanted to activate the ring. I wanted to be able to produce the pills and even send some off to Switch.

I could feel several lines of energy that led to the fingers so I didn't think it would be that hard to divert the energy into a ring. I was wrong. I went back to Liu's journal. She didn't manage it until she had been cultivating for six months. I just had to be patient and continue my hard work.

Initially, I found cultivating quite boring. Doing the EG kata or sitting in a chair and meditating requires focus but not intelligence. If you lost your focus the energy would slow down. Ice was able to keep me on track by monitoring my energy and nudging me when I was distracted. The fact that what I was doing could save my life was a powerful motivator. Ice and I had managed to fine-tune the cameras to be able to observe the energy within me and create a three-dimensional picture of the energy flows. After I had been doing it for a while some of the process became automatic and I was able to start thinking of other things while still keeping the energy moving.

In my mind, I started to come up with ideas to prepare for ascension. I was hoping that the library in the ring would help me by giving me an idea of what to expect, but the information would be twenty thousand years out of date and if I thought about our world, a lot had happened in twenty thousand years. The world could be a low technology world or a high technology world. More technologically advanced than this one or less. It could even be very primitive.

We would arrive naked, with nothing, but when I quizzed May, she reported that her mother's clothes had remained but her internal computer had not. I hoped this meant I could place the ring inside myself and carry all sorts of things in the dimensional space. At the very least, a set of clothes would be nice. Hopefully, it would also mean I didn't lose Ice with my ascension.

We needed to be able to keep ourselves safe and provide for our future. Our currency was almost all digital, so we needed to convert that into something that would be valuable on any world. We also needed to be able to take advantage of our strengths. If a world was more technologically advanced then we would be in trouble, but at the same time as technology increases, society at least pretends to help out its people. If the world was less technologically advanced then we needed to be able to take advantage of that. But we wouldn't be able to just order something online, so we would need to be self-sufficient.

I discussed this with Switch and May so we all could develop a list. It was almost funny how different our lists were. I was pretty sure that Switch was either an assassin or a spy of some kind. I met her when I was developing software for snipers and needed the help of an expert marksman, or in this case markswoman. I needed to break down all the factors that came into play when she was making a shot and then develop a targeting software to mimic her expertise. We really hit it off and became close friends.

Her list included knives, guns, sniper rifles, body armour with camouflage and either a lot of ammunition or an elemental separator combined with a fabricator so that we could manufacture our own bullets. In order for those things to run we needed a power supply and one that would either run for a long time or one where we would be able to supply it with fuel easily. She also suggested medical software with an emergency medical table, and a robotic body for Ice to inhabit to assist with any procedures. The most expensive item she suggested was a pharmaceutical fabricator which combined different chemical reagents to create different drugs not that an elemental separator was much cheaper.

May wanted us to make sure we took a download of all the available entertainment, had access to a modern toilet and hot showers, maybe a hot tub. Lots of fabricator patterns for different clothes and a food synthesiser. She also thought it would be a good idea to have a bed in the dimensional space. A food synthesiser could also provide the reagents the pharmaceutical fabricator needed.

I hoped this dimensional space turned out to be quite large, it sounded like we were going to need it. I hoped to be able to cultivate inside this treasure by having a power source and creating various energies. If I powered up a Faraday suit, I presumed I would be able to draw in electrical energy. Wind and water would need to be renewed, so was probably not practical. I also wanted to be able to manufacture our technology which meant fabricators, elemental separators and all the patterns for the different technologies. It would make sense to stock up on alchemical ingredients. I was hoping the library would enable me to learn alchemy. Alchemy might be the best way to earn money in a more primitive world. I also wondered if we could send the detoxification pill and the energy gathering pill off for analysis, whether either the food synthesiser or the pharmaceutical fabricator could reproduce something equivalent. So on my wish list was a chemical compound analyser.

I also thought we should make use of our internal computers to give us advantages. We could use Ice to highlight plants that either had value or we needed to be wary of. Likewise, when we knew of what dangers we were facing our internal computers could use our visual field, possibly supplemented by additional cameras to warn us of danger. Hopefully, the targeting software that I had already developed could help May and me to be better, more accurate shooters.

There was also a good chance that the language that was spoken would be one we didn't recognise. I researched and found software that could be used to learn unknown languages and translate written words. It was a combination of using a large enough data set to make logical deductions followed by sleep hypnotic learning.

Whatever money we didn't spend on stocking up the dimensional space we would convert to gold and silver, hoping they could be used as currency in the new world. I wasn't sure we would have anything left over, our wish list was some of the most expensive equipment in the world.

I discussed our lists and my thoughts on it. I had already liquidated most of my assets, thinking that I was going to die. Theoretically, I was still on an expected to die soon list, but with my progress, I felt strongly that my cultivating would cure my cancer, so I put that idea out of my mind and concentrated on the future I imagined. All of us ascending to find May's mother.

I was quite willing to spend my wealth but I couldn't afford everything so it was a matter of prioritising. Or, at least that was what I was thinking but Switch interrupted me, telling me that she loved the idea of the chemical compound analyser combined with the pharmaceutical fabricator as a method for reproducing the pills. She had plenty of money and was ordering both immediately, hoping we can supply her with pills that will allow her to start cultivating. For the moment we could buy the reagents cheaply, the only reason we would buy the food synthesiser was because on a different world, buying the reagents may not be possible. That could wait for later.

Within a week we were able to synthesize pill equivalents. I didn't check out the detox pill because I hadn't noticed any obvious effect until the third day, but I did take one of the newly created energy gathering pills and confirmed it worked before we sent a batch off to Switch.
Chapter 6

I had been cultivating for almost five months with another two weeks to go before my isolation came to an end when I finally was able to move a bit of energy into the ring. My first effort was a bit of a non-starter. I was just feeling a bit of elation for managing to put energy into the ring when I was plunged into a darkness so strong there was no hint of light. In my startlement, I stopped pushing energy into the ring and returned abruptly to where I was.

After a few moments of adrenaline-filled thought I realised that the dimensional space probably didn't come with a light. I grabbed a torch and a few candles. The candles would give some omnidirectional light and made a note to order some camp lights. It turned out there were already camp lights ready to go. I recognised them and clapped my hands to switch them on. Since no time passes when the ring is not in use the batteries should be well charged. I guess switching them off when leaving was a safety feature Liu designed. I would have to think about keeping the ring safe with our travels. If someone took it off us it would be a disaster.

Quite a large room met my gaze. The floor and ceiling were black nothingness but there were walls made from bookcases although only one bookcase contained any books and even that one was not completely filled. There was also a workbench with a complicated arrangement of glass bottles and tubes with candles underneath various parts of it. On the workbench, there was a book of recipes written in a foreign language with a translation to another incomprehensible language followed by one that I understood. That was it.

I did wonder if the room was a specific dimension or were the bookcases there to make it easier on the human mind. I examined them carefully and found a small gap between two of them. I stopped channelling energy into the ring so that I returned to the normal world and found a long ruler then I returned to the ring space and prodded the ruler through the gap not finding any resistance. I didn't know if the space stretched into infinity, but it was obviously bigger than the space that had been used so far. That was good news, we could probably store whatever we wanted, we would just have to a little remodelling.

First things first, I needed to get as much information out of the small library as I could. The recipe book with a translation of the instructions may well help my language programme, so I scanned that book first. Over the course of the next week, I scanned every book in that library. I didn't want to take any of the books out of the library so I would scan books in the ring space whenever I had time available.

Underneath the workbench, there were herbs that were used to make the pills, but since we had already worked out an easy way to reproduce the pills, I didn't worry about that.

My language programme started creating a translation, but it needed help to improve. I started a book that was supposed to be a history book and pointed out the translations that didn't make sense along with possible corrections. By the end of the next week, I couldn't pick out any more obvious errors.

Whilst I was doing this, Switch was supposed to be cultivating, but that wasn't going so well. I probably should have noticed from our chats and looking back I remember thinking that she was sounding a bit off, but I was too focussed on everything else so it came as a bit of shock when she admitted that she wasn't able to cultivate.

Since our isolation was finally over, Switch came over and went through her experience. The detox worked great. Like me, she had to do it for more than four days. Still, she waited until her body stopped producing that vile-smelling black stuff and started experimenting with the various elements like I did. Ice linked in with her internal computer and worked out that she was aligned with earth, wood and fire. She did some experiments with different temperature flames and found the hotter fires produced the most fire energy. Plants and earth needed to be changed, which presented a challenge. The earth slowly declined in output, the plants quite quickly lost their wood energy. If the plants remained in a depleted earth soil they did poorly, but if they were re-potted in new soil they recovered quickly.

With the energy gathering pills, Switch was able to pull energy in. Like me some of the energy dissipated after a while but there was definitely a net gain. The difficulty came in trying to circulate the energy. She could feel the energy flow on the surface, but whenever she tried to get it to go into her core she met great resistance and the speed slowed to a stop.

“You are not getting out of it that easily,” I told her.

Switch sighed. “I'll support you in every way I can, but it just doesn't work. I'll continue to try. You just have to face facts, I won't be able to join you on this journey.”

“Rubbish! Nothing you have said suggests you can't ascend,” I stated.

“Are you not listening to me? I CAN'T DO IT!” Switch said angrily.

I moved close to her and gently stroked her face. “You are struggling to create a natural draw, but you are not struggling to draw in the energy with the pills.”

“But...”

“Ascension happens when the body has reached the maximum amount of energy that it can contain, or at least that is what I understand. If you get born anew at the next world, whatever the issue is will probably be resolved. Move into May's house, let's do this together. Once you have gathered enough energy, the next step for me was to get a feel for how much energy was in my body and how much it could contain. That only happened a week ago. We are not going to run out of the pills, each one lasts about four hours. Take three of them a day and you will probably get there faster than I did.”

“I read in some fantasy novels that taking pills causes you to build up toxins that will sabotage your progress,” Switch said half-heartedly.

I laughed. “Maybe you could take the detoxification pills occasionally?”

Switch joined in my laughter.

“I'm going to read all the books in the library and see if there are any other solutions. I also want to know why May has to wait for her fourteenth birthday before she starts. If I test clear of cancer...”

“When!” Both May and Switch corrected.

“When I test clear, I will stop cultivating until May can catch up. The idea is for us all to ascend at as close to the same time as possible and that is going to take a bit of finessing. The earlier she can start the better. Her mother was not that dedicated and still managed to get to three-quarters full in three years.”