I lay there in bed, with Liza hugging me like a body pillow. Over the last hour she had managed to burn off all of the excess energy from the excitement of the contest, and I had spent a lot of energy as well. “You know,” I said, the evaporating sweat making me cold, “The pizza’s probably cold.”

  “I’ve got a microwave.” she said, but kept hugging me. I kept laying there.

  Five minute later I pulled a sheet over us. “Well, now I’m cold.”

  “I have a microwave.” she said, teasingly.

  “I think I’d prefer a blanket.” I responded. Laying there like that was quite relaxing, but I felt like I needed to be doing something.

  Liza could tell I was restless so she released me and sat up. “Sorry, didn’t realize you were that hungry. Still having protein cravings?”

  “No, it’s not that. I am a bit hungry, but it just feels like I should be doing something. I haven’t actually taken a break in so long, I keep thinking about all of the other stuff I should be doing.”

  “That mean you want to try for another round?” she asked.

  “Well, it would be fun, but that wasn’t really what I was thinking about.”

  “Are you a cultivation addict, then?” Some people got addicted to the feeling of growing stronger, and couldn’t go for long without improving themselves.

  “Not that I know of. Sure, I like getting stronger, but if I am, I’m not that serious of an addict.” I sat on the side of the bed and thought for a few minutes. “I think my brain is just running too fast. I keep trying to analyze everything, to increase efficiency. While we were together I kept looking for clues to what you wanted, and my brain tried to create some sort of Ultimate Sexual Technique.”

  “Well, judging by how well you did, you are at least in beta, and I wouldn’t mind helping you work out the bugs, but it seems like you don’t like this situation.”

  “Well, that part of it was fun, but now I’m analyzing the battle from earlier, and also trying to work out a better way to advance to Foundation, or at least Peak Condensation.”

  “Yeah, your brain is a bit overactive. Glad I could help you focus on something.” She slid over and hugged me from behind, then kissed me on the cheek. “How about this. I’ll go heat up the pizza, and we can look over something interesting. You offered to help me find a better formation last week, right? So how about we do that together, and I help you figure out what would work the best for different situations.”

  I nodded and she got out of bed. After going over the many mistakes I saw in my performance I got up and started getting dressed. By the time I left the room, she had already microwaved several slices of each pizza and gotten out sodas for us to drink.

  After we ate she pulled out a tablet and started showing me the website where she got most of her formations from. She had filtered the results for cost, and we scrolled through the ones that were free. I saw several variations of the one we had used at the last Social, but they wouldn’t want to use that one again. Ideally, we would practice the same technique until we had mastered it, but if you tried to do that at a Social people wouldn’t want to return. “What if we select two of them?” I asked. “Maybe the Event Coordinators can master one version, and we can find a similar one for the Social. That way you can use the new people to expand and enhance it. Not sure if that’s possible with formations, but I know there are some techniques that you can cast with other people, to improve the effect.”

  “Yeah, that’s possible. The one we used at the Social was similar to that. There was a Core section which was all that was needed to use it, but then there was a ring you could put around it to help stabilize it, and an outer ring you could add on so that huge numbers of people could add qi without destabilizing it.”

  “That sounds perfect. In that case, you, me, and a few other Condensation level people can work on creating the Core of the formation, and we just need to fill the other spots with people as they sign up. Maybe we can even learn two different Core formations, a Gathering and a Condensation, and if we don’t have enough Condensation people, we just use the weaker one.”

  “In that case, we’ll need to find a Gathering one that was modified for Condensation level, so everything is compatible.”

  We spent the next several hours looking over techniques. I did manage to find a free Condensation level technique that used special items from the five elements of wuxing, but Liza didn’t want to use that, as many people struggled with the eastern concepts. After realizing I could probably create a functional formation by myself for ten or twenty dollars worth of items, I downloaded the technique, then returned to ones based on the pentagram.

  By 22:00 I was starting to get tired, and we had found three possibilities for the next social, two which used a core pentagram and used identical enhancement rings, and one that used three different rings depending on the level of the circle.

  Seeing that I was half asleep, Liza came over and I realized that she had only been wearing her underwear this whole time. “Come on.” she said, and we went back to bed, though this time we only went to sleep.

  The next morning she woke me up at 6:00. She had to be at work at 7:30, so she needed to start getting ready. I quickly got dressed. “Do you usually eat breakfast before heading to work or not? I don’t have to be in until 10:00, so I’ll take you somewhere if you want.”

  “Not usually, and I don’t have enough time to eat today. Maybe tomorrow, though. I don’t have to be there until 9:00 then.” She threw her clothes in the hamper and went to take a shower.

  I watched her leave, admiring the view for a few seconds before responding. “Well, I have to be there at 9:00 tomorrow too, so that will work.” I called. I put on my shoes and waited for her to get out.

  She dried off and ran into her bedroom to get dressed. “So, call you tonight to figure out where we can meet?”

  “Unless you want to meet up tonight and have another sleepover.”

  She smiled and sighed. “I would love to, but I really need to meditate tonight. I’ve been overlooking my cultivation for too long.”

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  “Then I’ll bring over my cushion and we can help each other out.”

  She giggled. “Great, you’re one of those guys that wants to dual cultivate even though no one has figured out any beneficial way to mix cultivation and sex.”

  “Well, I can research it if you want me to, but no. I just want to keep hanging out with you. I figured we might be able to give each other tips or something.”

  “Only if we were practicing the same technique. I doubt we do, though.”

  I told her what I was doing to expand my dantian, and she told me what she was doing. Aside from feeding the dantian and subnodes qi, which any technique would need to do to advance them, they didn’t have much in common. Mine was a very simplistic technique compared to hers, with hers being capable of developing the dantian by at least 60 or 70% more than mine, with a comparable increase in capacity.

  She gave me a copy of hers, even though it cost $10 on the website, and I promised to study it so that we could practice it together. When she was ready to leave I checked to make sure I had all of my things and left for home, so I could get ready too. While I ate breakfast, I read the technique and tried to memorize it as much as I could, then went to work.

  She came over at 17:00 and we left to get something to eat before flying back to her place. I remembered to bring a change of clothes with me this time, though, as I wouldn’t get a chance to go home in the morning.

  That night she helped me get started and we both spent the next several hours practicing it. This one was more complicated than the one I was practicing before, and required that you move the qi through your meridians before sending it through the dantians, letting it absorb what it wanted but not forcing it to absorb anything. This meant that, while the technique used 10% more qi that the one I was using, making it a bit slower, it was around 70% more efficient.

  I had a similar vision to the other ones this time, only this time the dolphins thought that the fish were extremely delicious. I didn’t learn anything from the vision other than that my dantian prefered the new cultivation method.

  Eventually Liza got up and started to stretch. I assumed she was just going to the bathroom or getting something to drink until she spoke. “Well, I think we should go to bed. It’s really late.” I ended my meditation and looked at my phone. 0:17.

  “How did it get after midnight?” I asked, then realized that I’d gotten caught up in cultivating before and stood up. “Yeah I guess it is.” I went to the bathroom, then got undressed and got in bed. She once again grabbed me like I was a body pillow and we went to sleep.

  ---

  The next day we got up at 6:30 and, after taking a shower together, went to get breakfast. “Honestly, I’m surprised you didn’t try anything last night or this morning.” she said as we ate.

  “Well, you said you wanted to cultivate, so I respected that. Besides, if you thought I was going to do that, why would you let me stay?”

  “Maybe I wanted you to try something. Of course, you got into that meditation, so you probably weren’t thinking of that.”

  “But if you wanted me to try something, why would you tell me you wanted to meditate?” She shrugged and I shook my head. “Anyway, yes, I got into the meditation. For some reason I’ve been having a similar vision every time I try to meditate since breaking through.” I told her about the visions and what I had figured out about their meaning.

  “I doubt that’s all that they meant, though. Assuming they were actual visions and not just your mind wondering, they should contain some sort of profound meaning. What you’ve said so far is all surface level stuff that should be obvious. Except maybe the ties to yin and yang. You might be onto something there, but I haven’t really looked into it. I’m not really into Eastern philosophy.”

  By then we had finished eating and it was 8:30, so we decided to pay and go to work. Outside the restaurant I gave her a kiss and we agreed to meet up tomorrow. I had gotten behind on my school work, so tonight I would do as much as I could.

  ---

  Over the next week we would spend about half our nights together, usually after a date of some sort. I hadn’t brought her to my place yet, because I didn’t know how Dave and Maria would react to her, or how she would react to them, so we ended up staying at her place.

  She had shown my suggested formations to the others and they had picked one of them to practice. After work on Saturday about half of the people that worked at Tony’s and a few other people went out for pizza. Liza took me to meet all of them. They were all of the event coordinators, other than one person that had to work that night. We discussed the formation and, after the meal, we went to an open field nearby to practice it. We had to cycle different people to different locations to figure out who did the best in the different positions, but after two hours we managed to find a highly efficient way to cast the core of the formation as well as the stabilization circle. Most people ended up learning most of the roles during that time, and I learned five different roles, including the leader, but we could create the barrier in less than five seconds.

  “You know,” said Marcus, “I think this will work really well for the next Social. It isn’t that hard to learn, so we can substitute roles if we have to, but it lets us use up to a few hundred people to reinforce the barrier if we want, so no one who comes won’t have a role. The only downside is that I can’t punch it if I’m part of the group that’s creating it, since I’ll be busy.”

  “Of course the muscle head is disappointed that he can’t punch anything.” said one of the other guys, and Marcus gave him a mean look, after which several people started laughing.

  Without a good technique to test my new strength on, the Flight technique being my only Condensation level one, I decided to learn a defensive technique, and once I was done with that I would learn a new offensive technique. Maybe that lightning stun technique we sold a device for at the shop, or an upgraded form of chi blast?

  I found a version of the Condensation level barrier for free, and spent an hour downloading several dozen Condensation level techniques before I realized I had gotten side tracked. Still, why wouldn’t I learn telekinesis? After getting back on track I started looking at the cheap, but not free, techniques. I remembered how the $10 technique Liza had given me was so much better than the one I was using and wanted to see if the same could be true for these techniques as well. I ended up finding two for $20 each and compared them. The first promised to triple the protection against physical attacks, and the second promised to triple the protection against qi based attacks. Eventually, I decided that, as I was planning on getting a military barrier belt which specialized in physical defense, I should get the qi defensive one.

  Now I had paid for one technique, breaking my streak of only using free techniques. Though I suppose using a technique that cost money but was gifted to me would also count. Still, I practiced both it and the free technique and, while I would estimate that the improvement made it roughly 2.5 times as strong, not 3, it did seem to be worth the money.

  Randy had found me one of those Chinese Military vests to gather qi, and I met him near the end of the month to pick it up. Next weekend would be the Social in which we would teach the new barrier to hundreds of people, so I wanted to be as strong as possible when that happened.

  I told Liza that I wanted to cultivate using the vest for the next week, so, while we talked on the phone every night, we didn’t actually meet up for a date or something more intimate. I did what I told her, however, and every night, after getting off for work, I put on the vest and did the meditation she taught me. With its help I was able to make rapid progress, reaching up to 25 times my Gathering level amount of qi. I quickly realized why the Chinese soldiers complained about it being uncomfortable, though. The vest dug into your arm pits and was too tight in the chest, making it somewhat difficult to breath. I wasn’t sure how a woman like Liza, with moderate sized breasts, could possibly breathe while wearing it, much less a woman with a larger chest. I looked up the issue on the internet and learned that, unlike the US and most other military’s version of the vest, there wasn’t a special version for women.

  I eventually got used to it and, Friday night, decided to wear it out to meet the Event Coordinator group again. They would be renting the park the next day to hold another Social, so we would all be going to the location to make sure we were certain how everything needed to be set up.

  When we got there just before sunset, however, we saw a man in a robe, standing in front of some swirling mass of chi. He spoke a strange language then grabbed a man that was nearby, moving ten meters in less than a second, and using his other hand to grab the man’s head. After he seemed to experience a bit of discomfort, the man he was grabbing was released and crumpled to the ground. I wouldn’t be surprised if the man was killed in that moment.

  “Ah, so this is how you speak the local tongue.” the man in the robe said. “It sounds so strange. So barbaric. Still, I suppose it fits this backwards planet that is only now undergoing Awakening.” The man paused and looked around before looking confused. He ran over to another person, this man being over twenty meters away, reaching him in only a fraction of a second, and grabbed him as well. The man looked terrified, and the robed man looked into his eyes. “Strange. How can you have formed a dantian, but have no spiritual roots?” He quickly shifted, grabbing another man twenty meters away with his other hand, and looking the man over. “You at least have some roots, though they are extremely muddy. Yet you have only barely formed your meridians. Strange.”

  During these few seconds, the group froze. Who was this man? Did he really just learn English? What were these ‘spiritual roots’ he was talking about? No one seemed to know the answer.

  The robed man turned to look at us. “Are you from some pathetic local sect?” he asked. “Come to stop me?”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t know who or what you are, so I don’t know if you need to be stopped.” I responded, trying to keep myself calm. “You appear to be far too strong for me to have any hope of fighting, so even if I thought you needed to be stopped, I wouldn’t attempt to do so.”

  The man smiled, the started laughing. “Quite right. You, who have barely reached the second realm, couldn’t hope to face someone like me, in the fifth, and nearing the sixth.” If I understood him, he was claiming to be Late Nascent. “In fact, there seems to be only five people on this entire world who may provide me with an interesting fight, though I doubt any could defeat me, as they seem to be too early in the fifth realm.” He was right. While the knowledge was classified, it was rumored that even the strongest of the five Nascent souls were only in the Middle of the level.

  Just then a man appeared in the sky above the park. I looked up to recognize Colonel Jacob Adams. While there was only one Nascent Soul person in the United States, the military had dozens of Golden Core fighters. The Pentagon had assigned one to every capital and major city in the US. They claimed it was to make sure that they could protect us from significant threats to our safety, but many people believed it was a way to keep the people in line. I wasn’t sure which was closer to the truth, but USAF member and former fighter pilot Colonel Jacob Adams was our assigned Golden Core fighter, and at Peak Core, he was likely the only person in the city that could survive even a single round against a Nascent Soul cultivator.