Something changed with Maria’s personality after she broke through. She seemed so much more confident that both Dave and I noticed it. Not that she lacked confidence before, but now she seemed more sure of her actions. I noticed that her relationship with Dave had changed as well. While before Dave had definitely been physically attracted to her, now I sensed that he was starting to see her as more than just someone to have some fun with, and more than just a friend.
Liza and I started hanging out more too. It seemed that she really liked combat games, so every weekend we would either go to hang out with Randy at some event or go to the Qi Tag arena. Several months passed like that, and soon it was time for the semester to end. As I had all online classes, I could just do my final tests online and had, in fact, finished them already. Dave and Maria, on the other hand, had to go into class. They had gone with us to the combat games but, while they didn’t mind QI Tag, they felt like something was wrong with firing real guns at other people in a game, even after I explained that the shield belts we wore would prevent any actual damage from occurring. It was just too much like actual combat to them.
It was Saturday morning, and Liza and I were getting ready to meet Randy at the field. Liza was already finished, and had turned on the TV while I finished getting dressed, when I an alert came through. Two other gates had opened up, one in China, and one in France. While no one had come through either gate yet, the news crews thought that it was inevitable.
As she watched, the camera switched to the gate outside of Paris, where a man in robes had just stepped through. Things there pretty much became a repeat of what happened here, with the man grabbing a local man and using some technique on him to extract the local language. The man then began giving some speech in French, only to have the Scottish RAF Officer that had come here appear in front of him. They exchanged a few words and then flew at each other. Thankfully this man appeared to be much weaker than Blood and, while it was a close battle in the beginning, Lindstrom appeared and quickly turned the battle, killing the man within a few minutes.
Thirty minutes later, as the reporters were discussing the events of the battle, the software of the television translating their speech into subtitles, the channel suddenly switched to downtown Beijing, where a man stepped through and immediately started catching and killing people. While both Boris and The Monk shortly appeared, the battle was anticlimactic compared to the other two. Boris only needed to keep the man busy for a few minutes before The Monk used a formation involving five elementally aligned items on the man and he froze. For the next several minutes the man only occasionally spasmed or tensed in pain, then, when the formation ended, the man collapsed on the ground a started crying uncontrollably, begging for mercy and forgiveness. He was quickly lead off to a prison cell.
While these two events could also be considered tragedies, the fact that the relative weakness of the attackers meant that the death count was much lower than in this city meant that they didn’t get as wide news coverage. They did, however, let the world know one thing. The other world could create new portals here if they wished, and we could do nothing to stop it. In order to defend ourselves, we would need to learn how they did it so that we could close the gates and possibly stop them from forming to begin with.
A week later Admiral Lindstrom announced that the United States Military had just sent a team through their gate, and that team had set up a small base on the other side to guarantee that no one could come through to Earth to threaten the city or the rest of the US.
Within a week several facts about the other world became public knowledge. The world was several times larger than Earth, but only had slightly higher gravity, meaning that it was significantly less dense than Earth. This gave it more land area than the entire surface area of Earth. Many scientists speculated that the lower density meant that it had lower densities of metal than Earth, at least on the surface, and pointed to the fact that the three people from the other world didn’t have any metal objects on them as further evidence. This size also meant that the gates on the surface of that world could be further apart than even on Earth, meaning that the people there might be wildly different than each other. The soldiers and scientists had been sent through were learning the local language from natives that had found their camp, and soon they would be able to start asking them questions.
A week later China and France both sent teams through their own gates to build bases of their own after securing this side of the gate. They verified that they were on the same world as the USA’s gate, as they had verified that they shared constellations with the other two nations once they had set up telescopes, and that the physical properties of the worlds were identical. They couldn’t, however, send a radio signal to the other nation’s bases no matter how much power they sent to their transmitter, so the others were at least thousands of kilometers away. Another month passed before France and China had finished building their bases on the other side, China having come under attack by some local group, and having lost seven people.
By that time the USA had deciphered the local language at their location and started asking questions of the natives. First, the region they were in was called the Black Dragon Mountain region, due to the large black mountain range that was the dominant feature of the area. It was in the middle of a large continent in the Southern hemisphere. Second, few of the locals were cultivators, and none of the ones that came to the base were. All that showed potential for cultivation were quickly selected by local groups known as Sects, and those that didn’t remained as part of ‘mortal society’. They had actually come to the base here because they had assumed that the US base was a new sect that was being built in the area or a branch of a sect, and had come in hopes of either trade or work. The fact that everyone in the base was a cultivator only verified their belief.
The doctors couldn’t understand why there were those who couldn’t cultivate, and asked to do medical tests on several of the people. They were also curious to verify that the locals were, in fact, human. This had confused some of them even more than the fact that many of them couldn’t cultivate, even though genetic and medical disorders which prevented proper cultivation affected less than one in a million people on Earth. They were, however, 100% human. They had the same number of chromosomes as we did, and, when genetic samples were sent back to Earth, they were verified to have almost identical genetics to Earth humans. Some were even tested and found to be mostly of Asian decent, with some small amount of DNA from either Europe, the Middle East, or Native Americans.
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The doctors found that every one of the people had qi levels in their bodies comparable to Cleansing level people, but that none of them knew any qi techniques, the natives even going so far as to argue that it was impossible for them to learn any. It took the scientists only a week to convince some of them to try to learn one of our techniques, and a few days later they had managed to levitate slightly off of the ground while meditating.
This surprised the locals and soon they sent messages home or went themselves to fetch loved ones, so that they could come to the base to learn from the people there. Even the mayor of their city, the man with the most education who had once helped a cultivator, believed that people had to have something called a ‘spiritual root’ in order to cultivate. It was something that the cultivator he had worked for had told him when he asked to become a cultivator himself. But if all of them could learn to cultivate using the techniques of Earth, that couldn’t be true. It would, at best, mean that the techniques taught here were flawed in some way, as they required such a thing. The doctors, however, weren’t sure what a ‘spiritual root’ was, and would have to find cultivators to test to learn such a thing.
By the time France and China had finished their bases, they had also learned the local language and verified that the people of that world, at least the locals, believed that one needed a special trait to learn cultivation. They repeated the training of the locals, however, and got similar reactions, with some of the locals being able to learn various Cleansing level techniques. France even gave a few locals gathering bracelets, and started to teach them to break through to Gathering by growing meridians.
A month later this resulted in several cultivators from a local sect showing up at the French base and attacking them, claiming that they were some sort of Demonic sect using evil magic to grant false cultivation to the locals. Despite calling themselves a ‘righteous’ sect, they even burned the nearest village to the ground and slaughtered every villager that didn’t manage to escape to the French base. Luckily, the French military was able to kill or wound the attackers and drive them away.
As things escalated over the next few months the other two bases saw similar attacks, and were forced to defend themselves. In a few cases Lindstrom or The Monk had to go through the gate to help defend the bases of their countries, with France relying on Core level grenades and weapons like RPGs, which is much larger and easier to enhance to High Core level.
On Earth, however, life went on as normal. Information and techniques came through the gate instead of invaders. We learned that, as well as paper, the local cultivation Sects used jade slips to store information. This knowledge came from the few people who were willing to trade with the bases, as well as the small sect which France was forced to attack and subjugate in order to stop the attacks on their base and scouts. France posted copies of over a hundred techniques on the internet in the local language, French, and English, and the various scientific groups of Earth were studying these techniques.
I started studying them as well. Their techniques were quite interesting, and appeared to be based on a completely different set of principles than the ones I had studied. While ours were usually based on our understanding of science, there’s appeared to be based on philosophy and mysticism, like most religious talismans. I was only able to make one of them work, a simple fire control technique that let me float a small flame off of the wick of a candle and keep it burning. Liza, on the other hand, managed to float a spoon using their Metal control technique, while I was barely able to make it wobble around slightly on the table.
This was most likely related to me having a descent Fire spirit root and her having a descent Metal spirit root, but Earth had yet to figure out exactly what those were. Multiple labs were looking at possible neuron patterns that could contribute to people having a specific talent for specific types of techniques, and these five new types became a part of that research, though there wasn’t any progress in that area so far.
In the middle of January Lindstrom held a press conference. Several news agencies showed up to participate and, knowing that it was about the Gate, Liza and I sat down to watch it. At first he gave a basic overview of what had been accomplished with the Gate, how they had built a base, deciphered the local language and learned much about the world and its people. Now that the area was secure, however, they would now be opening up the other side of the gate for civilian travel.
Going there had several downsides, however. First, you had to tell the military everything that you learned while there. That meant wearing a camera that constantly recorded your movements, though they promised to censor any private moments that might occur. It also meant that you would be inspected upon entering and leaving, so that they could be sure that you didn’t bring in anything that might aid the locals too much or leave with anything they didn’t know about. They didn’t want the locals to learn how to make guns, after all, or be able to buy them.
Until I learned about the downsides, I thought it would be nice to travel to another world. Then I learned about the restrictions and decided that I no longer wanted to go. While I didn’t mind sharing everything I learned, I valued my privacy too much to wear a camera 24/7.
Randy, however, seemed to love the idea. I don’t know why, but he really wanted to got to the other world. As he was initial Foundation, most groups would be willing to accept him, even if he was just there as hired muscle. He ended up signing up with a group of scientists that just needed protection and would be leaving that Sunday.
That Saturday, instead of going to another mil-sim with him, Liza and I went to help him get everything he would need for traveling to the other world. We got the normal survival and camping supplies, as the team he joined wouldn’t always have a place to stay, and Liza and I showed him around where we worked for anything he might need from there. He preferred devices to techniques, and mostly bought items from my store, mainly utility items as he already had gathering, barrier, flight, and non-lethal items. He also picked up a few items from Liza’s place of employment, however, such as a kit for deploying a Foundation level barrier that they recently put together as well as several pills and elixirs from the alchemy section.
After that we double checked his weapons. He was bringing his AR15 and 9mm pistol, and I helped to double check that all of the bullets were charged. The casings had a formation drawn on them which would gather qi from the environment and send it to the bullet, with the bullet containing about a dollar worth of an exotic mixture of minerals which could store as much qi as an upper Condensation level attack. In the case of the AR15, however, he had managed to get one hundred Foundation level rounds, and each of them had a bullet that was entirely made of this material, about 10$ of it, and could store as much qi as an upper level Foundation level attack. Hopefully that would be enough to deal with any threat they might face.
While there were Core level bullets made out of far more expensive material, at $200 of material per bullet, only the militaries tended to use those, and he would have trouble finding them even if he could. Even the bullets he used could take years to fully charge, which was why I was helping him check their charge levels, but in the case of the Core bullets they usually needed to be charged from an outside source. The guns the military used even contained gathering formations of their own in order to guarantee that the bullets they fired were at maximum charge and so that they could use some of that qi to help accelerate the bullet to even higher speeds. Randy’s guns, however, were civilian models, so they didn’t have that feature.
