Slumrat Rising

A Special Breakthrough Party For A Special Boy

Truth was curled in the fetal position at the center of his nest of light. He thought he would have been thrashing. He was certainly covered in just about every sort of fluid his body produced. Every fiber of his being hurt. Every centimeter, every scrap of him, ached. Even his hair ached, somehow. He knew that the first thing to do after breaking through was to cultivate. He couldn’t possibly move an inch, but he could do the breathing, right? Right. Just… focus on the breathing. Don’t worry about everything else. Don’t worry about the persistent scratching noise at the door. The door is fortified, the wall is concrete. You are safe for now. Just. Breathe. And pull in the cosmic rays.

He breathed in, held, released, repeated, imagining the air flowing in through his nose, to his lungs, swirling around the aperture over his heart, then down to the base of his tailbone, before rising up and spilling out of his mouth. Over and over. It was a slightly more advanced version of the level zero cultivation breath and gods be praised! Truth felt the difference at once.

The aperture above his heart, the “Spell Slot,” was like a whirlpool, sucking in the cosmic rays, transforming them into the more gentle and generic cosmic energy. He could feel the rays bathing the sides of it, keeping it supple and strong. This is why you had to keep cultivating, he realized. It couldn’t draw enough passively. If you didn’t keep filling it up, it would eventually collapse. The energy from the rays didn’t just vanish into the hole. He could feel them being pacified and purified, then pushed through the rest of his body.

He could feel his exhausted and abused body screaming out for the energy, greedily gobbling it up. Truth swore he could feel his tendons strengthening, his bones hardening, his skin getting smoother and tougher. Most of all, he could feel the incredible mental clarity the breakthrough gave him. He kept breathing. It wouldn’t be long now, before he could move again. Then he would start cultivating properly. His mind raced. So many problems he couldn’t understand now seemed obvious. He ran through drills for the SAT. Easy, easy… not so easy. Damn it. Right. Anyone who could broke through right before they sat the test. Starbrite obviously balanced the difficulty with them in mind.

Truth gingerly stood. He looked down. The clothes were totally ruined. As thrifty as he was, this was beyond cleaning. It might even be beyond burning. He stripped naked, wiped away what he could with the wadded up clothes, then tossed them in a dark corner. There. Now this smelled like a proper abandoned building. He looked at the tap with its one functional water talisman. He really wanted to wash more. And it’s not like breaking through made him less aware of the cold. But the scratching was getting more persistent, so… priorities. Cultivation. Get the body into fighting shape as quickly as possible.

He began the stretches and movements that were supposed to help the cosmic rays circulate and invigorate the body. He nearly fell over when he tried. His body was too exhausted for that kind of nonsense. Instead, he started gently swaying and shaking out his arms. Rocking up onto his toes, then back onto his heels. Slowly, achingly slowly, he got his body reacquainted with movement. All while sucking in as much cosmic energy as he could. It worked surprisingly well.

Truth frowned. It was working surprisingly well. He could feel the state of his body very precisely, and it was, precisely, fucked just five minutes ago. It was now in a state he would call “kind of sore,” and in another few minutes he would be at “raring to go.” The change from Level 0 to Level 1 did come with some pretty dramatic improvements to the body, but that took place over months. Not, for example, ten minutes. The breakthrough was supposed to be accompanied by a slight increase in overall health, followed by the explosive increase in fitness. Likewise, the body visualization. Everybody learned how to do it when they taught cultivation at school. Everybody got better at it as they leveled up. But, again, it wasn’t meant to be this accurate, this fast. Not at Level 1.

He watched the energy moving along his body. It didn’t feel quite right, somehow. Sluggish, inefficient, sloppy. He instinctively knew he was working unnecessarily hard. As though he was insisting on crab walking everywhere. Truth desperately tried not to imagine himself crab walking everywhere. He failed. He looked ridiculous. He was a terrible crab. A goddamn embarrassment. Ah, maybe the breakthrough had messed him up more than he thought. Truth shook his head and focused. He stopped trying to push the energy around and just let it go where it wanted. The energy spasmed for a moment (a painful experience, to put it mildly) but very quickly started flowing on a new, smoother path. The difference was incredible. He could feel, second by second, the improvement in his body. Even in his d-

With a thrill of horror, he remembered the worms. The nine burning worms that opened his first spell slot and then roamed his body. This was the path they took. With a… single significant difference. He tentatively tried pissing out the cosmic energy.

The explosive pain made him white out. Truth collapsed to his knees, clutching his groin as a thin whimper escaped his mouth. The agony moved up, back, around, taking a little tour of the region and lingering where it seemed to have the most effect. Cosmic energy was supposed to leave via the mouth and nose. No alternate routes permitted. The worms, apparently, had just wanted to hurt him one extra, extra time.

“What the fuck was that tonic?” Truth hadn’t realized that he had spoken aloud. “What the fuck were those worms? What the fuck is happening to me?” He looked over at the door. The scratching was getting a bit frantic. “And why am I hearing music?” It was muffled, quiet. Familiar in a way he couldn't quite put his finger on.

Truth shook his head and carefully got back to his feet. The new… well it was all new. The newer energy path (the Nine Worm Path?) worked scarily well. He was already in better physical shape than when he walked into this bathroom. No weird growths or unnatural mutations either, which at this point he was kind of expecting. Giant pincers, for example. Or a sturdy carapace. Truth shook his head clear once more.

He tried the stretching routine again, and this time he could do it fluidly. Very fluidly. Everything flowed easily, from one form to the next, his body hauling in and processing the wild Cosmic Rays with every breath. A couple of minutes was all it took to leave him feeling warm and loose.

He picked up the iron pipe. It was a bit heavy when he carried it in. Now? It was worryingly light. Truth swished it through the air. It made a hollow wooshing noise, almost a ripping sound as it tore through the air. He shifted into a club fighting drill, moving through the steps, attacks, counters, blocks like he had done it a thousand times before. He had never done it before.

“How the fuck am I so good at fighting? It’s not just talent. It can’t be.” His voice carried more than a tinge of madness now. The music was getting louder.

It sounded like church music. Not that they were regular church goers or anything. Just that Mom had figured that it would be easier to run her MLM scams on fellow church goers. They only lasted a couple of months in the pews. The congregation, initially welcoming, literally barred the door to them. The priest preached against them. Twice. Truth hadn’t much cared for it, but some of the songs were good. This didn’t sound like any of them, but it kind of sounded like the way the church songs made him feel. Like he was very small, but that was ok, because he was part of something impossibly greater than himself. “He” was temporary, but “It” was eternal. So in a way, “He” was eternal too.

Except this wasn’t something eternally good and grand. This was something vast, indifferent to the point of cruelty and too powerful to be made to care.

He looked at the window. Thick iron bars, firmly set into place. He might be able to chip his way out through that, but he wouldn’t bet on it. Not even with his improving strength. Light was getting low too. How long had the breakthrough lasted? A lot more than ten minutes, apparently.

Truth rearranged the mirrors so all the light was shining at the door. He removed the fortifications. He could see long fingers, gray, dusty brown, ashy black, poking through the door. Dragging rents into it. He tried not to remember the man on the street. He tried not to think about the times he ran into discarded bits. It was hard to not think about them. The door was going down, and soon. Truth didn’t wait. He undid the lock and let the door swing open.

An unholy scream blocked out the music as whatever was in the hall fled from the light. Truth jumped out and started swinging at whatever moved. He caught a head, splashing its contents against the wall. The follow through came down on another head, then he had to duck crap- broken cement? that someone in the dark was throwing at him. More things were launched from a distance, more breathy hissing noises that scared the piss out of any slum resident.

The pipe smashed down on an upraised arm, as milky white eyes glared at him. The bone broke, but it didn't make the withered face even twitch. Of course it didn’t. He was fighting the Ghūl now. The Ghūl did not care if you hurt them. They did not care if you screamed, or laughed or yelled. They weren’t hungry. They didn’t want your money. The only thing in their heart was beauty. Sculpture, of the found art variety. And their medium of choice was humans. Your suffering flesh was all they demanded. And, as Truth desperately parried a kick to his naked gut, this bunch seemed above average demanding.