Elder Cultivator

The hole was a clear blemish in the old woman’s basement, but Abder much preferred it to being a charred corpse. Of course, fixing it was the best option. Moving aside the boards that might not actually stop someone from stumbling into the hole, Abder began to drop down. “I’ll head down first. Somewhere down here the barrier undercuts the city and we don’t want you stumbling into that.”

“Wait, you were outside?” Karl looked at him incredulously.

Abder gestured to his whole body. “How did you think I ended up like this, huh?”

“... Fire cultivators?”

“And the stab wounds?”

Karl furrowed his brow. “I’m gonna be honest and say I can’t really tell that’s what those were. Uh, I do need all this stone. Isn’t the barrier pretty far down? Maybe I should just seal stuff up here.”

“I brought a storage bag for the chunks,” Abder said, wrapping the opening of said bag around the stone he’d cracked apart. “Most of it ended up in the tunnel behind me, since I didn’t really have a better option. Anything outside the barrier will probably reform but I figured we shouldn’t leave huge gaps.”

Karl frowned as he saw Abder lifting heavy chunks of stone. “As long as you’re fine doing all that. I can’t really lift stuff right now, with my ribs. Should you be moving?”

“My muscles are mostly intact,” Abder explained. “Just some damage to my pecs on this side but I can use one arm just fine.” Or he could hook things with his foot. Even if he couldn’t grip things, balancing anything was simple enough.

The tunnel went further than he remembered- and that was just the vertical portion. He hadn’t had a good sense of time, though he hadn’t been extremely careful with the state things ended up in.

“It’s not going to look pretty,” Karl commented. “Like stone mushed together. I’ll have to thin some of it out. But as long as nobody tries to mine it out for solid material, it should be good.”

In the end, the storage bag Abder brought wasn’t enough. He had to settle for taking some of the larger and more stable chunks and piling them up in the basement.

“I hope you’re not planning to leave those there,” said the old lady.

“Of course not,” he shook his head. “This is just part of the process.”

“Pfeh. I’ve heard that before. Still got holes in the wall- and one that isn’t standing anymore.”

“We might look at that after,” Abder said. Then he climbed back down, until he finally felt the edge of the barrier. “Okay, found it! Karl, come climb down here. There’s a little ledge I made that you can work from.”

Abder remained in the tunnel above Karl with his body pressed against either side of the tunnel to hold him steady. Karl began pulling material out of the storage bag, taking small bit and mixing them with some of the stony powder they’d ended up with. The whole mass sort of began to melt into shape with the power of his natural energy. He soon had a vague disc which he lodged into the bottom of the tunnel, fusing it with the sides. Then he began piling larger rocks, and once he’d filled up the very bottom he had Abder begin bringing larger chunks, fitting other material around it. The repair process was much slower than tearing apart the rocks to begin with, though if Karl was also a Life Transformation cultivator he might have been able to match Abder’s digging speed.

“You should take a break,” the old woman said after a couple hours. She brought seasoned mushrooms out on chipped plates, with cool water in cracked ceramic cups.

Karl couldn’t help but seal up the cracks in his own mug, but made no other comment on it. By the end of the day, he’d only managed to fill in maybe ten percent of the tunnel. Repairing a hole a meter wide and dozens of meters long wasn’t that easy, as it turned out. It was good practice though.

-----

It took until the third day they returned that the old woman actually gave her name. Mostly she just watched them working while fiddling around in her basement- as if there was actually anything she could do to promote the growth of the mushrooms without cultivation of her own.

“Thank you for the amazing lunch, Suraya,” Abder said.

“Bah. It’s nothing to praise. Little more than cheap spices.” She paused, getting a faraway look. “Though they didn’t used to be so easy to get a hand on.”

“Really?” Karl asked. “I can’t remember a time without salt and pepper.”

“Used to be only cultivators had them,” Suraya commented. “Before the big cultivator incident.”

Karl nodded. “Ah, that makes sense. I heard things changed significantly after the Alliance showed up.”

“Tends to be. That’s how my son got killed,” Suraya said. Then she made her way out of the room.

Karl looked at Abder wide eyed. He transmitted his voice so he wouldn’t be overheard. “Did you know about that? How was I supposed to know her son died?” R

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Abder shook his head. “I had some idea he was gone, but nothing more.”

“... Should I apologize?”

“I don’t think she’s the right type. We’ll just try to avoid bringing it up again.”

-----

Avoidance worked until Karl finished the original project, smoothing out the floor of the basement. He actually lowered the whole area by almost a centimeter to make up for lost material, but that was just expanding the basement… or something.

“Good,” Suraya said. “Now I can get to my crop without falling down to hell.” Though she said that, she seemed rather pleased with the results.

“You said something about… other walls in your house, right?” Karl asked. “If they’re stone, I can probably do a repair.”

“Is brick stone?” Suraya asked. “I don’t know what you cultivators can do.”

“Well…” Karl frowned.

“If you want it to match, it would be better for me to do it,” Abder said. “Let’s see what it looks like.”

Suraya took them to the kitchen. Or… her bedroom? The house only had a few rooms off the one hallway leading from the basement to the door out. Some cutting surfaces and something vaguely like a fireplace indicated what was probably supposed to be a kitchen, given the pile of plates and cups.

“Is there no sink?” Karl asked.

“It’s old style,” Suraya said. “I’d think the bigger problem is that,” she gestured.

By that, she of course meant the fact that the wall between what might have been a bedroom and the kitchen was just… rubble. Much of which had been pushed against one side or removed long before, but there were still uneven surfaces on the floor.

“My son knocked that wall down, after I asked him to put the fireplace between the bedroom and kitchen so I wouldn’t waste the heat.”

Karl nodded slowly. “And then he… never got an opportunity to finish.”

“Oh no. He had plenty of opportunities.” Suraya crossed her arms. “It was dragging on for months before the cultivator incident.”

“... right.” Karl didn’t really know what to say, and looked to Abder for help.

“We can get this fixed up real quick,” Abder redirected the topic to more productive things. “It might not match the outer walls perfectly, but maybe I can find someone who knows the same style of bricks.” He could do the work himself, if he knew the style. Carrying around a tonne of bricks wasn’t too difficult- he’d moved that amount hundreds of times to dig himself back into the city, after cracking the dense stone.

-----

Halfway through that project, for which Abder found similar looking but sturdier bricks, he sensed a draft from one of the other rooms. The city was big enough to have some differences in pressure and airflow, but without any natural weather drafts were pretty rare. It would have to be a pretty significant hole to get movement he could sense outside the room. When he brought it up with Suraya, she opened the room. “That’s the wall I mentioned. The wall with the holes.”

She was right, in some sense. Though Abder might have described it more as holes with some semblance of wall. A great number of mostly regularly spaced punctures filled the outer wall of the room- which looked like another bedroom. A dusty one.

“We can fill those in,” Abder said. It was difficult to imagine what might have caused such a thing. Clearly it couldn’t be an accident. Looking more closely, he got an idea. These should be marks from various puncturing weapons. Was Suraya’s son a member of the Twisting Spike? That would explain how he died in the ‘cultivator incident’. Abder had been fairly certain that after Anton showed up he prevented anyone else from being killed… which also meant that Anton had almost certainly been the one who killed her son.

Everyone had family and people connected to them… even the Twisting Spike. Even when family was strained, they still provided something. Even if this particular fellow might have only provided holes in the wall, Abder still thought that he should help make up for some harm Anton indirectly caused… even if it was decades later than it should have been.

Abder briefly wondered why the woman hadn’t asked for help from anyone- especially the city’s services. They would have at least repaired the outer wall, and would have probably made certain Suraya had running water as the city began to actually develop such things.

But all of that had to do with cultivators, and she didn’t seem to really trust them. She wasn’t afraid of them- otherwise she wouldn’t have used a broom to hit one one who broke through her basement floor- but a lack of understanding didn’t bring much trust.

Abder wondered if he should try to convince her to cultivate energy. On one hand, he had a perfect example of an older person who had begun cultivating late. On the other, that was the very person she probably was the most wary of. Even non-cultivators had been able to feel Anton’s presence when he fully revealed his aura.

-----

The walls were easy to fix, but they weren’t really the problem. The actual problem was that Suraya didn’t have anyone to help her. In the more than a week that Abder and Karl had been around all day, nobody had come to check up on Suraya- neither friends nor family. The Alliance had helped the city set up services to assist anyone who came to them. Abder sought out people who were passed over… but clearly he hadn’t found all of them.

He doubted he could have personally checked on the million of people in the city, but he’d sort of missed a certain category of people because they appeared to be in good condition. To someone who had grown up on the street, having any sort of building to keep your things and your self safe within had seemed like luxury. But even ignoring the disrepair, that clearly wasn’t the case for Suraya.

Abder wondered what her life had been like in the years before she was able to grow her own food. Having learned more about her, it could have taken some time to adopt that practice. Before that, he didn’t know what she could have done to earn money. She didn’t have any apparent job, but peeking into other rooms Abder saw a writing table and old inkwells. A scribe, perhaps? Except it certainly didn’t seem like she had anything currently. Perhaps it could have been her husband who did such work, but Abder got the feeling he hadn’t been around on account of having never been mentioned once. And he may never have been an actual husband.

Abder wondered if Anton knew about Suraya. Unlike some, he knew Anton wasn’t omnipotent and omniscient. A single woman who had no natural energy and wasn’t being harassed by any cultivators could slip through even his significant senses. He might ask, but it really didn’t matter. All that mattered was what he did now. He could have been satisfied with fixing what he broke, then a little bit extra to make up for the trouble… but he wasn’t.

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