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

Orders? What was she about to do? He strode toward her. “You’re not really a science envoy, are you?”

“Stay back!” She opened her other palm, revealing a small disk.

The holoprojection of a male Elestrae appeared in front of her. When he looked over his shoulder at Ryu, his face looked so familiar. Maybe because it was so similar to Siena’s. They had to be related.

“I have it, Aran,” she said.

“Good.” The Elestrae’s voice sounded beautiful, as if all the heroes from the past had come marching into the present. “Send it to High Command.”

Send it? No! Ryu darted toward her, claiming the space between them in the blink of an eye.

Following his lead, Ken moved to cut off her retreat.

Siena spoke a word. The veins in the crystal beads around her neck lit up. The glowing blue pill disappeared with a barely-audible pop of air, and she collapsed to the floor.

No, no, no, this couldn’t be happening! He knelt by her. “Wake up! Where is this High Command? Your embassy?”

“Ahem.” The holoprojected male cleared his throat. “Senior Adept Ryusuke of the Heaven’s Dawn Sect.”

Ryu’s head jerked around. He hadn’t told Siena these details, so… “How do you know my title and sect?”

“I was with Siena, along with our third triplet, when she was stranded on Earth over a thousand years ago.”

Ryu gawked. She’d mentioned the commando team stranded on Earth, but made it sound like she’d just heard about it, not actually been here. Also, she was much older than she looked. Then again, so was he.

Aran continued: “We entered what you call the World of Rivers and Lakes. You might know us as the Three Fairies of the Sun-Moon Sect. You may call me Aran.”

Yet another stunning revelation. Ryu could only stare.  No wonder both Aran and Siena looked so familiar. On a diplomatic visit to the Sun-Moon Sect, he’d seen a mural depicting them with a third Elestrae woman and a little sprite, all four surrounded by a dancing silver dragon, on the wall of sect’s ancestral temple. That’s why her fighting style resembled that sect’s. “Then you know how rare and invaluable that pill is. Where is High Command?”

Aran smirked. “On Eles Prime, about twenty-three light years from here.”

Kentaro had said something about folding space requiring more energy the farther it was sent. Twenty-three light years was a long way. Ryu turned to Keiko. “How can I get to the starfighter shipyard on the moon?”

“You can’t. You need all kinds of clearance.”

He waved about the room. “As you can see, your laws don’t apply to me.”

Keiko smirked. “Can you survive the vacuum of space for the amount of time it would take to reach the moon?”

Anger burned in Ryu’s chest, and he turned back to Aran. “You better be farther than twenty-three light years away, because if I—”

“Far more than twenty-three light years.” Aran laughed. “I’m the guardian of a secret planet that is the key to preventing another Onslaught by the Tivari. I was the one who sent the young woman to retrieve the Dragon Pearl from Honnoji Temple, and she helped thwart their attempt to regain their istrium source.”

Kentaro gawked. “So it was a Dragon Pearl. And that girl was from another planet!”

Ignoring the boy, Ryu jabbed a finger at Aran. “This is all your fault, then.”

“From a certain point of view.” The Elestrae shrugged. “I was the one who, centuries ago, sent that girl’s ancestor to hide the Dragon Pearl on Earth in the first place. It was needed back here.”

“So you took that, and now you’ve taken this pill. What do you need it for?”

“I’d heard about them during our sojourn in the World of Rivers and Lakes, but we were never able to learn the ingredients to make one, nor obtain a sample to study it with modern technology. Our High Command is convinced that the perpetual energy it produces is the key to bringing peace throughout the—”

The image wavered, his words stuttered beyond comprehension.

Then he blinked out.

Chapter 39:

The Hacker

I f Aran’s planet was supposed to be secret, Aya needed to know why, and where it was. Finding the signal’s carrier waves was near-impossible given Elestrae encryption protocols, but once she’d pulled the thread hidden in the tapestry of Earth’s communication networks, she started tracing it from the Peacekeepers’ external communication hub through relay stations on the planet, and then to a deep-space transmitter and receiver.

From there, she tracked it through several folding space apertures, but she didn’t dare try to hack into alien networks—her SI wouldn’t be able to translate the code, and would throw her perception into chaos from which she could never escape.

Then the Ministry of Defense jammed the carrier wave.

Thankfully, she had already been on her way back.  Though the signal scrambling made the road home a tangled maze, she was eventually able to make it back to the Peacekeeper communication hub. Only a few seconds in real time had passed, and she shifted her perception back to the smoldering lab.

“What happened?” Ryusuke was asking.

Keiko’s finger drew a line from Siena’s comm up into space.  “The signal must’ve been cut off.”

“The Ministry of Defense is jamming it,” Aya said. “Which means they plan a follow-up attack. All Peacekeeper channels are down, so I don’t know what they’re sending. Needless to say, it could be more challenging than this last group.”

“Then we need to get out of here.” Ryu scanned the area. “Get the rest of my pills.”

“We need to get Aya first,” Ken said, on his hands and knees as he reached under a table for yellow pill.

“Of course.”