Hector woke slowly. He wanted to cringe at the new memories that had been uploaded into his brain. Surely he had never been as awkward as Volithur. The two weeks of overly formal interactions between Volithur and Khana almost proved more than he could bear.

  He wished he could talk some sense into his dream counterpart. Shake Volithur by the shoulders and give him the facts. First, Khana had obvious issues. That wasn’t a reason to run in like a big damn hero, it was a red fg worth heeding. Second, feelings of infatuation were normal for a teenage kid and could go away as quickly as they came. Third… the kid needed to get id. Not with a noble, and not with the stalker cook’s assistant either. Just some random hookup with a commoner girl to release some of the pent up angst.

  Of course, he couldn’t have that conversation with Volithur. Fortunately, with the time dition of the dreams, the awkward phase shouldn’t st much longer. He would dream over a year of Volithur’s life over the course of a single month. Khana should be gone soon, which would put an end to the teenage drama.

  Hector emerged from his room to find Jen waiting for him at the dining room table. Maybe I should have stayed asleep. Estranged wife drama has the potential to be even worse than teenage angst.

  “Are you fucking her?”

  Hector did his best not to show any emotion. “No.”

  “Are you pnning to?”

  “Nope.”

  Jen’s voice went up an octave. “Then what are you doing with her?”

  “She has visions of the world ending and we’re going to prevent that from happening.”

  “Are you serious? No. I want to know what you’re pnning, Hector.”

  He folded his arms. “We’re not together, Jen.”

  “Are you bringing some young girl around just to punish me?”

  “Again, Jen, we’re roommates. You don’t have the right to get upset when I start hanging around with a woman.”

  “She’s a kid.”

  “She’s at least twenty-one,” Hector corrected.

  “Still looks like a damn kid. What adult puts on bck lipstick?”

  “Jen? Whether or not you live here, me and you are done.”

  Her nostrils fred. “Should I file for divorce, then? Take half of your precious money? Is that what you want, Hector?”

  Hector ran some quick mental calcutions. If he considered his retirement portfolio, his private investments, his home equity, and bank account, he could survive on half of everything if he downsized his lifestyle. Given that his future would involve mostly cultivation, with perhaps dying in an apocalyptic monster invasion, a small apartment didn’t seem like a disaster. Because he had effectively retired, there wouldn’t even be alimony payments.

  “I’m fine either way,” he answered. “If you want a divorce, we can draw up papers today to get you half of everything.”

  Jen screamed and charged him with fists swinging. Hector caught her wrists to stop the attack, then had to twist his torso to avoid the kick aiming for his crotch. “I’ll become a dog kin if you divorce me, Hector!”

  “That’s up to you, I guess.”

  She stared at him. “I don’t even know who you are anymore. All those years your work was everything to you. Then you quit your job, start hanging out with jail bait, and don’t even care about your finances. I finally came to terms not being the most important thing in your life, but… now all the things that ranked ahead of me don’t matter at all. What does this girl have that I don’t?”

  He released her wrists. “It’s not the girl, Jen. The job and the money were only ever ways for me to track my progress in life. I’ve got better metrics now, so the job and the money don’t matter.”

  “So all you care about is cultivating. Isn’t that a grand life. You sit on your ass all day.”

  Hector shrugged. “This is who I am, Jen. Who I’ve always been. I obsess about optimization and self-improvement. I should have been born a Xian, because I’m built to succeed as one.”

  She drew herself up. “Well, you can’t get very far as a Xian on this world. Enjoy failing.”

  “It’s not about achieving any specific goal, Jen. I just like to put in the work.” He turned to leave the room and paused. “Though I’m pretty sure the monster invasion is going to happen. Hopefully I can do something about that.”

  “I’ll take my chances with the monsters, thanks.”

  After the confrontation, Hector threw on his running shoes and hit the road. He did his standard five mile loop, then ate, showered, and drove to the casino. He walked a circuit of the floor, slowly drawing in cosmic energy with his aura. Walking and cultivating proved perfectly doable, but Hector found his efficiency declined somewhat.

  So he identified a bar with a big screen television and settled in for an extended stay. He bought two mojitos over the course of two hours and managed to make some good progress towards filling up his soul. Then he moved to one of the restaurants off the main floor to eat. He spent an hour there, cultivating some more, before going to stand next to a game of craps. He pretended to watch while he focused on cultivating.

  As the afternoon brought a lull in the action, he found a seat off to one side and simply cultivated in silence without even pretending to be a patron. When the pce began to get busy around dinner time, he left to return home. Hector ate a quick dinner and climbed on top of his roof. He ignored the voice in his head telling him that Jen had been right about him sitting on his butt the entire day. That wouldn’t st forever, surely.

  Or would it? Did cultivating at the higher levels mean sitting still for years at a time? Hector felt a twinge of concern at the thought. As much as he enjoyed tangible results and the feeling of progress, he did not want his life to entirely revolve around a repetitive practice.

  That would have to be a problem for a ter date. At the moment, he was busy striving to reach level two. If he did his math right, it would take someone like Volithur about a month to go from level one to level two without resources. Because of inherent talent and environmental optimization, Hector anticipated being able to achieve that in half the time.

  The days began to blur into one another. Soon, over a week had passed. Hector cultivated by day and dreamed of cultivating by night. His only reprieves from the dull repetition of aural cycling were Volithur’s sparring sessions, Khana’s lessons, and Hector’s daily workout. Otherwise, it was a steady monotony of stockpiling cosmic energy to fuel advancement.

  Volithur spent about half of what he collected daily to further strengthen his femur bones, but that practice wasn’t much different than drawing energy in. At least the awkwardness between Volithur and Khana faded into a background tension. It helped that Volithur had made serious strides in developing his mental voice. According to Khana, it actually sounded like a human voice now. A male voice, even. It didn’t quite match his natural timbre yet, but that would come with time.

  The hour a day Volithur spent on mental enhancement had begun to show results. Most surprisingly, the pce those results were most obvious was in sparring. Volithur’s thoughts moved fast enough and remained steady enough for him to out-think opponents more often than not. The sensory exercises had also begun to show their worth as he could now more accurately see cultivation levels. It was possible to detect how far along someone was in bodily cultivation by scanning them. People looked like inverse x-ray films, with their bones show up as bckened whenever they were sufficiently enhanced. Most of the soldiers in the first group had very little bckening of the bones, whereas those in the intermediate group tended to have bckened their entire skeletons. The advanced group had gone even further and tissues throughout their body were filled with a willful darkness.

  Hector felt an eagerness to embark on the next steps of his training regime. Once he reached a level three soul, he would begin enhancing his mind and body and training his aura. His efforts, combined with his location choices, helped him pack his soul at a rapid pace.

  Evelyn had given him several new pces to try. The public swimming pool proved to be no better than the rooftop bar. A high school football stadium proved surprisingly potent. The busiest intersection downtown easily surpassed even the casino in energy concentration, though he could only sit at the bus stop bench for so long before a w enforcement officer would show up to hassle him for loitering. Evelyn called every day to check in on him, though the two of them didn’t meet in person during that time.

  Her best advice, though, was not about a pce but a time. She told him to cultivate outside during a thunderstorm, and it was his most productive session ever. It almost resulted in hypothermia, but he judged it worth the risk.

  Meanwhile, Jen had ignored him for several days, then pestered him constantly with moral arguments for another few days, before threatening to date other men. The tter two phases only served to make him miss the silence. The dogs didn’t seem to mind the conflict so long as someone put food in their bowls and they were given attention.

  All in all, things were progressing in an acceptable fashion.