Chapter 36: Spirit Aura

With the day of the Brotherhood auction finally complete, life in Tech City returned as close as it could to normal. The city and guild had a huge influx of new residents, guild and clan offices, money and resources.

A few factions tried to use their newly acquired equipment to infiltrate and capture members of the Brotherhood only to quickly discover that nothing they brought from the guild could operate within 10 kilometres of the city walls.

What they also didn’t know, was that every piece of equipment sold by the Brotherhood was tracked and monitored by Jasmine. Not only that, the self-detonation from the tamper-proof system could be set off remotely by Jasmine.

Many of the factions that had designs on using this equipment to finally abduct a core member of the Brotherhood were pressured to admit defeat and all agreed between each other that the Dark Brotherhood only sold them because they had some kind of array pattern in the city that deactivated these artefacts.

That was, unfortunately, the best theory they could come up with. They neither understood or could even imagine the power of the technology James had at his fingertips. They also never got a chance to find out because every time they tried to pry something open and inspect its insides, it would erupt and leave nothing but a 10 or 12 meter crater in its wake.

Jasmine reported 42 incidents in the first 24 hours since the auction. They even had a few of those incidents in the confines of the city, which stirred up the populace quite a bit after one of them was inside a tavern and took a dozen of its patrons in the implosion.

With a new day on the rise, James reordered his priorities again. He then went for a visit to the university and sat through the entire basics course. When he returned home, he left everything in the capable hands of Jasmine and Jessy, then sat down and meditated on everything he forgot after leaving high school.

Not only him, but Gold James apparently got blasted with the implant as well. The two of them often had arguments and discussions regarding things as they both sat and meditated on the intricacies of triangles, π, basic physics, chemistry and damn near everything else.

To the great surprise of them both, they realised that when they were in joint meditation as they often were at this time, their understanding was twice as fast. They often found themselves meditating on the exact same parts at the same time.

At one point they tried to segregate the parts they were learning only to suddenly both be muttering about chemical bonds. They’d then have a half hour argument about who was meant to be doing what and then eventually both give up and agree that they clearly shared the same brain and even though they had two active consciousness’s, they were clearly still the same person and sharing the same thoughts.

Even though that was the case, it didn’t stop them from trying to train the brain to think in parallel. Although they had no results at the end of the week, Gold James refused to give up. This meant that Gold James would periodically ask what James was thinking about throughout the day to see if they were thinking the same thing.

If they shared the thoughts, which they almost always were, then he’d try and start thinking about something else. James lost count of the number of times he was suddenly and randomly thinking about lighting something on fire or boobs.

Once that was finished, he went back to the University and sat through a number of other refresher courses and even tried to stomach a few more advanced courses that he’d never considered before. He then spent another two weeks sitting in a meditation chamber sorting through all the crap in his head.

By the time he came out again, the city had been through another renovation with all the leased land in the central district filled with guildhalls, clan mansions (guildhalls with living space) and from a multitude of other factions moving into Tech City. The Arena had also apparently been finished, and the Mysterious Stranger had reappeared to finally challenge James.

Hearing that James was in closed door cultivation, she simply said “1 month” and left again. According to Jasmine, the stranger left the city, and even she had trouble tracking her after that. In other words, the moment she entered a forested area Jasmine lost sight of her.

Other news he received on his emergence from his meditation chamber was that Perlious finally made a move to try and break into the HQ building only to be captured and imprisoned. Word from Hastoel was that the General demanded his release.

Being in charge at the time, Jasmine did what she thought James would do and hacked the man’s hand off and sent it with a ransom note back to the General. Since then there was no word from any Hastoelians regarding the matter.

James admitted that would probably be his first course of action. If the General hadn’t replied by now, it meant he was probably preparing to march over here and storm the city. With that thought in mind, James set in motion the reinforcement of the city’s defences.

Starting with the instant rebuilding arrays, followed by a deflector array and the production of Mk III and Mk V Rail guns. The MK IV was a personal hand held rail gun, and James didn’t see any need to start mass production on them for the moment. By the same notion, he issued the production order of the Devastator Cannon which was basically just a huge Arc Cannon that was specifically designed to fire a Spirit Bomb warhead at supersonic speeds.

They picked up quite numerous interesting little arrays and catalyst recipes from the Founder’s Cave that limited the possibility of the ammunition suddenly exploding when fired. The trade-off was that for the same effects they had to use a larger delivery system. Which meant the layered ammo they fired from the Devastator was almost a metre in diameter, which compared to the palm-sized cube James used in the Endless Forest, was huge.

The bonus to that however, was that the things were fucking heavy, which meant they could be fired from the city to damn near anywhere in the entire Katsu province without air drag slowing their ammunition to the speed of a sickly dog.

In order to set the thing up without the sudden accidental decimation of the entire city, they decided to once again rebuild the Spire. It soon reached a kilometre into the air which was almost twice the height of the world trade centre.

Strangely, it was just as sturdy and rock solid as if it were a one story building on the ground. If anything, with the more advanced arrays holding it up ... and together, it was even more solid. It also had such an unimaginable pressure on the top floor that even if one of the ammo bombs went off on the roof, it would be like pouring a cup of water into a bathtub.

When James first saw this huge new Spire standing in the middle of the city, he and Skay had a short discussion. Skay readily admitted that it would be catastrophic if the main, secondary and tertiary support arrays were to ever simultaneously fail.

The combined pressure from the top hundred floors would not only flatten the city like a pancake, but it would be the same as 30 megatons instantly colliding with the face of the planet.

The impact alone would decimate the entire Empire. Following that would be the persistent earthquakes that would plague the continent for days. Irreparable damage would be done to the tectonic plate and could actually result in a fracture of the continent as a whole.

Not only that, but the impact would most likely set off the super reactor (because a reactor they couldn’t even measure wasn’t already crazy enough) that was housed below the tower.

Then, not only would it be a 30 megaton impact, but also the detonation of an uncalculatable super reactor and a dozen cube reactors on top of that. Skay wouldn’t say what he thought the result of that explosion would be, but he did mumble something about ‘how the dinosaurs died’.

Doomsday sort of stuff.

Being the kind of person he is. James freely began to advertise all this information. He even vamped it up a bit and declared that if the tower ever fell, the continent would join it. Most people took it for a hoax and a scare tactic. This didn’t stop all the people in power from keeping a wary eye on the horizon and an ear to the ground praying that it was all talk.

-War Room-

After this short week catching up on the city and watching the spire be rebuilt, James joined Goliath in what they referred to as the War Room. Naturally, it was an underground bunker outfitted with all the highest tech and out of this world crap they could stuff inside of it. James had Jasmine designing this thing ever since Artimus first visited his office and started putting thoughts of war in his head.

On the mention of that fact, Artimus had apparently been in contact demanding a meeting with James and saying something about agreeing to the deal. James decided he’d just let Artimus keep sweating for a little bit. Whether Artimus liked it or not, a war that would shake the continent was coming and he could either jump on board with the Dark Brotherhood or hope to ride it out in his tiny little Empire.

Now that James thought about it. The amount of space that the Jetsu mountain range covered was actually many times larger, because it was all stuffed into that strange spatial pocket. That meant regarding relative space within the borders of an empire, Yori was one of the biggest. Still not reaching the size of the three great nations, but definitely close.

Pushing those thoughts aside, James wondered around the war room. It actually had shit all in it apart from a huge table nearly ten meters in diameter. Covering the table was an unnaturally perfect but slightly blurry 3D resemblance of the entire Atsunari continent, with national borders, notable landmarks and cities.

Most of it looked slightly fuzzy and out of sync except for the Yori Empire and a few hundred kilometres of its three surrounding nations. A few glaring problems with the representation were the areas that looked all pixelated and faded into black. The Jetsu Mountain Range for one. These places pot marked the map, but the most glaring area was the place referred to as the black lands.

The entire black lands were ... black. Jasmine literally couldn’t see anything there which left James wondering just what the hell kind of place it was. The next largest area was the Jetsu mountains followed by increasingly smaller areas scattered all over the place.

After a quick look at the map, James made a pinching motion with both hands towards the Yori Empire then spread his hands apart. Following this motion, nothing happened. James then did it a few more times then stopped mid-motion with a twitching eyebrow.

“Jasmine, what’s going on?”

“Hello James. How are you?”

The workout James’ eyebrow got from interacting with Jasmine was enough that he was pretty sure those few muscles that made the twitching motion were the most powerful muscles in his body. With eyebrow working into a furry, James crossed his arms and stared up at the ceiling.

“Jasmine, I’m not starting a polite conversation. Why aren’t the hand movements working?”

“Oh, I’m sorry James. I’m just sooo overworked right now. Maybe if I could possibly redevelop a newer core hardware platform, I could keep up with all the work you have me doing.”

James smelled a rat the moment he heard this. He had checked in with Skay after the last upgrade and was assured by him that Jasmine now had enough processing power to run everything she’d already been doing a million times over. He even let slip that she didn’t even need the last upgrade.

Seeing James silently staring at the roof, or supposedly her, with a frown on his face, Jasmine couldn’t help but give an embarrassed cough. “Ahem ... Can’t blame a girl for trying.”

With that said, the projected map suddenly enlarged in onto the Empire and the few hundred surrounding kilometres that Jasmine had mapped out in full detail using drones. Odd areas soon began to light up all over the place with various colours depicting unmined resources in the Empire.

Quite a few had the seal of the Brotherhood marked on them depicting that the land had already been bought up by Jessy and the area was ready to be cleaned out by the Brotherhood.

James continued to ignore the sudden good behaviour of the map interface and continued to stare at the ceiling with a frown. “Jasmine.”

“...”

“Jasmine!”

“...”

“Jasmine God Damn It! You answer me right now!”

“Yes, Guildmaster James.”

“What did you do?”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand the...”

“Don’t you play dumb with me Jasmine! You tell me this instant!”

“It’s not fair! Everyone else gets to play with cool toys! I wanted one for myself!”

James pinched the bridge of his nose to fend off an incoming headache and then let out a long sigh. “Where is it?”

“Promise you won’t get mad?”

James felt his finger twitching, getting ready to sprint to the reactor and set it off. The only thing preventing this was the fact that he’d most likely be engulfed in the pending spirit explosion holocaust. He placed both hands over his face and groaned into them.

“It’s in the hanger isn’t it?”

“It doesn’t even have any weapons on it yet!”

Hearing the yet declaration James and Goliath shared a look and then sprinted out of the War Room.

-HQ Hanger-

James stood frozen in the hanger staring wide-eyed with shock written on his face. Stood next to him was Goliath and on the other side Skay. Skay seemed to be the only one still cognizant as he watched over his masterpiece with a dreamy grin and chin cupped in hand.

“Magnificent isn’t it?”

James’ eyebrow then started doing its thing and his face slowly developed into a scowl. “What the hell is that thing?”

Skay patted his chest proudly, with a twinkle in his eye and a face filled with pride he smiled broadly and declared; “That my boy, is dominance.”

“It’s a fucking spaceship isn’t it?”

“It’s not a fucking space ship. It’s a true Dropship. That piddling little Velocity thing could hardly be considered more than a cargo plane. You know it’d take us more than 2 hours to fly from this continent to the next closest one and more than 8 to get to the centre of the next continent. With this, we could fly around the world in three days. If you fail to comprehend the magnitude of that statement allow me to simplify. This thing is twice as fast as the velocity.”

“Yeah, it’s also 8 times as big. It must be nearly 2 kilometres long.”

“2.2 to be exact. Not only that, it’s nearly 600 metres in width and houses 31 decks from a hanger bay big enough to fit three velocities side by side and a launch deck capable of dropping 8,000 combatants in groups of 200. That’s just the beginning. It can be run almost entirely by Jasmine and can operate with only a skeleton crew. Even though I say that it has the room to house pretty much the entire 8,000 people required for a full drop.

“Eventually I plan to have Mk V Rail Guns mounted on this beast along with a Devastator, maybe even two of those, then there’s the array powered missiles I’ve been working on along with the pulse cannon and something special I’m sure you’re going to love. I guess also ... it’s capable of breaking the atmosphere and maintaining space operations for a few days.”

James just let out another long sigh as he watched hundreds if not thousands of drones buzzing around a huge exoskeleton of a ship and welding materials in places or running LS3 cables housed in some type of protective rubber Skay cooked up in the lab.

Sparks flew like rain and materials of all kinds were being constantly dragged over by the drone army. It resembled fly’s picking a corpse to pieces in reverse.

James now realised where all that processing power of Jasmines was going. It wasn’t because she had to control so many drones, no that was easy. She had nearly 5,000 drones flitting about in the empire, endless forest and other places all at once. No, the processing power was going into computing the design for this monstrosity.

James could only let out another sigh and then scowled. “How long do you expect to be working on this project?”

Skay scratched his chin and readjusted his glasses. “Hmm, well ... shouldn’t be more than a month or two I suppose. Then it’ll just be a year or two for Jasmine to finish construction and maybe a few months added here or there if we hit any roadblocks that need testing and re-engineering.”

James accepted that for the moment, he couldn’t do anything about the old madman’s desire to build a fucking space ship and that Jasmine no doubt wanted this more than anybody. Considering his options and his care factor, James just let out a grunt then turned to leave the hanger.

“Fine, but Jasmine, you’re to limit your attention on this project. No more than half your processing power. If this project limits your ability to perform your other duties, then I’m going to come down here with a couple gravity bombs, and you can consider the project cancelled. Is that understood?”

“Certainly James.” Replied a cheerful sounding Jasmine.

-Tech City University-

James once more returned to the University. Every month the University hosted one of Tech City’s three challenges. The Science Fair. The whole idea of this challenge was to give academics and scholars a chance to share their knowledge or breakthroughs with their peers.

The rules of the fair were simple. A person or team had half an hour to introduce an interesting idea or project and describe how they planned to implement it. Their idea or project could incorporate anything from arrays and alchemy to basic physics and chemistry. It could span every field from farming to industry and then all the way on to commercial or even just entertainment.

The whole idea was to encourage people to creatively learn more about their world. At least, on the surface it was. James instead had more nefarious reasons for the science fair and looked out solely for powerful minds that he could rope into his guild.

Skay was stretched thin, and if James could conjure up some at least slightly capable scientists, then his guild would rocket forwards.

He’d held this competition just before the Auction and found a few worthy candidates. The best part was that they willingly jumped at the chance to join the guild after he started listing all the things they could study once they joined.

In saying that though ... it wasn’t like they were anything special. They only came up with a few clever ways to use basic arrays that hadn’t been thought of in the lab. In saying that, it shouldn’t go without mentioning that Skay had leapt over huge amounts of research on his path. He simply didn’t have the time to run all the tests that he could in all the thousands of variations that he could.

This was the whole reason James had the idea of starting a science division.

It was now a month later though, and James was fairly certain that there should be some better results. First of all, the number of people to pass basic testing from the elementary courses had quadrupled.

There were now hundreds of people that had managed to wrap their heads around a grade 10 education. To have achieved that in only the few months the courses had been available, with this world’s prior poor ... or rather entire lack of scientific knowledge and theory, was actually quite remarkable.

It was obvious that this could only be attributed to the nature of the implant, but by the same notion, the majority of people had taken 3 months just to complete the first part. That went to show that the few hundred that had already finished were something like the cream of the crop. Not to mention that most of them had actually only studied the 4 elementary implants over the period of 1 or 2 months.

In a theatre of the University, James and the reluctant to waste time on this Skay, sat overlooking an empty stage. One by one a person or group of people would march out onto the stage, usually with some kind of experiment, and try to convince James and Skay that they did something interesting.

Skay looked ready to fall asleep, and James looked like he was already asleep, as yet another group of three walked onto the stage pushing a cart. This trio was much more interesting than the last few, being made up entirely of young scholarly types who couldn’t be much older than James. That meant they were either quite advanced in their cultivation and had stepped into True Spirit in their teens or early twenties, or they were just very young and had brilliant minds.

Either way, both scenarios granted them a glance from James and meant they would be recruited into the guild. Seeing the disinterested looks of the pair in the audience seats, the girl from the trio just shared a look with the two boys like it was to be expected and started unpacking equipment from the cart and setting up what appeared to be an array pattern without saying a thing.

It was one of the most complex and convoluted arrays James had ever seen and had patterns that neither Skay or James remembered ever seeing before. If anything, it actually looked more along the lines of volume formulas, mass and density calculations, molecular bonding diagrams and what James was pretty sure were the atomic makeup of certain materials from the periodic table.

Lore patterns replaced numbers and names and support patterns formed geometric equations and molecular bonds. The foundation patterns did what they always did and powered everything.

They then placed a single copper coin in the centre of the array and the three of them jointly channelled spirit energy into three separate parts of the array. They also each had a different state of matter as their element. Water, Wind and Earth. Or rather, liquid, gas and solid.

Seeing this, James finally became interested and leant forwards in his chair to observe more closely. After a while, the array still failed to activate, and James nudged Skay and nodded.

The duo then walked up to the stage and observed the array pattern. By now they’d somewhat guessed what the trio was trying to prove with this experiment and using everything they could remember from their own array research they looked over their patterns.

James finally broke the silence of the array hall. “Is this the first time you’ve run this experiment?”