Quantum Cultivation by Jace Kang (simple e reader TXT) 📕

The master’s expression brightened. “Are you able to hack back into Peacekeeper EtherSpace again? I need my pills if I am to complete my mission.”

“No.” Aya shook her head. “They’ve ended the lockdown, but they’re burning a lot of energy to run Level Six countermeasures. I’d have to spend some time probing their defenses and practicing evading high-level Sentinels in a simulation. It would take me weeks of training. The good thing is, government chatter says your pills haven’t left Kyoto Peacekeeper Central.”

“Chatter?” Ryu asked.

“I have hacker friends, and one monitors unsecured talk among government officials. There’s plenty of speculation about what the pills do.”

None of it made any sense to Ken, but the longer Master Ryu stayed in this world, the more time there’d be to learn Cultivation.

“At the rate portals are opening,” Master Ryu said, “we don’t have weeks.”

Did that mean he’d assail Peacekeeper Central soon? Would that be the end of Ken’s training?

“As I said before, if you get me to a hub inside the building, behind their countermeasures, I can physically jack in.”

Master Ryu peered through the trunks in the direction of Kyoto Central, then took a deep breath.

“Wait,” Ken said. “You were able to get us out of the building with your hacking.”

“By taking control of their cameras and projectors to hide the real you and create fake images. I won’t be able to do that until you get me to that hub. And that’s just the beginning. I still have to deactivate the internal force fields, and I won’t even know if I can until I get there.”

Master Ryu looked to Siena. “The Peacekeepers let you see the pills, right?”

She nodded.

“Would they let you in again?”

She shrugged. “Maybe. Getting out with them is another matter.”

Movies from the Age of Greed danced in Ken’s imagination. “I have an idea.”

With a single nod, Master Ryu met his gaze. “Go on.”

Ken looked to Siena. “That illusion channeling.  Could you create the image of the pills?”

“Yes, but it would only look like them.” Siena spoke several nasty-sounding words, and a glowing blue pill appeared in her hand. “It would only fool human eyes. Anyone doing a deeper scan would be able to see through it, and I guarantee I would be monitored the whole time.”

Master Ryu patted him on the head. “It’s a start. Keep thinking. In the meantime—”

“Attention all citizens,” the female newscaster said, voice muffled by the trees.

Ken tilted and craned, but couldn’t see the skyscraper through the branches and trunks.

“Here.” Aya pulled out her projector.

An old part of Kyoto, overlooking the Kamo River, appeared in the air between them.

“There were two more murders last night. The first was on the banks of the Kamo River near Shijo at approximately midnight. The victim was thirty-nine-year-old Akihiro Kovacs. A warning to all viewers: the images may be graphic.”

The scene panned in on a man lying under a bridge. Red fluid soaked into the gravel, and from the way his legs were splayed wide, the blood appeared to come from his anus.

Ken shuddered and squeezed his buttocks closed.

“Kappa,” Master Ryu said.

“What’s that?” Aya scrutinized the image.

“They’re creatures that live in rivers. Some are good, some are bad.  The bad ones try to steal Cores by reaching up through humans’ anuses.”

Ken scratched his head. “Why do they want Cores?”

“Just like we can speed our advancement with yokai Cores, they can advance with ours.”

“Wait,” Ken said. “But you said XHumans have weak Cores.”

“The portals have been closed for over a thousand years, so they don’t know that.” The master turned to her. “If you do the same trick you did to identity the Tofu-Kozo, I am sure you will see several at that timestamp, attacking the poor man.”

The newscast scene shifted to a long temple, one which Ken knew well through stories of the great warrior Musashi Miyamoto. It zoomed in on pieces of bone and flesh scattered in pools of blood. Ken shuddered.

“Peacekeepers found the second victim’s body at Sanjusangendo. Like Michiko Zhang the night before, Kayoko Kalinov was dismembered. They place time of death at 20:00.”

“Same time as the first,” Aya said.

Ken looked to the master. “What did this?”

“It could be any one of a number of powerful creatures coming in from the World of Rivers and Lakes, looking for human flesh.”

“Why?” Ken asked.

“Some crave human flesh, and the humans here are far less able to defend themselves than the ones in the World of Rivers and Lakes.”

The newscaster continued, “We believe those two murders are connected, whereas Mr. Kovacs’ death does not follow the patterns of any of the others that have occurred. After three nights, there had not been new victims whose bellies were bitten out.”

Ken turned to Aya. “Can you figure out where this one will strike next?”

“Not with just two datapoints.” Shaking her head, she held up two fingers.

“It will likely be near the same place,” the master said. “And they’ll hunt as a pack. That’s Kappa habit.”

“In other news,” the announcer continued, “Ryusuke Ishikawa is still missing.”

The image flashed to Master Ryu, in clothes he’d never worn.

He snorted. “I’m going to have to get one of those outfits.”

“You’d look good in them.” Siena winked.

The newscaster continued: “His last confirmed sighting was in Central around 18:00 three nights ago, but drone surveillance may have placed him last night around 22:23 near the Kamo River and Sanjo 3rd Street. This makes him a potential suspect in the death of Akihiro Kovacs.”

The footage showed a figure in the same clothes they’d just depicted on Master Ryu, walking along the banks.

Aya cursed. “This must’ve been captured by the Peacekeeper drone monitoring the Tivari.”

“Not the Ministry of Defense?” Ken asked.

She shook