Kate had been…shocked, to put it mildly, when she’d realized her power wasn’t broken or permanently gone, just…refurbished. Like a haunted toaster. I’d gotten a new lease on life via a full-body spiritual enema; she’d gotten hers through a metaphysical firmware update she never asked for.

  When I’d thought our powers were nearly identical, it turned out I was making the classic mistake of comparing two cars that both go fast while ignoring the fact that one has an engine and the other is powered by a team of angry hamsters on wheels. In function, sure, we both played with kinetic energy. But the underlying mechanics? Katie was an instinctive kinetic redirector, a force of nature with the finesse of a sledgehammer.

  I was a microkinetic momentum manipulator with eidetic positional memory—a real mouthful that basically meant I overthought everything down to the atomic level while she just did it. Our end results and Dao were kissing cousins, but how we got there was a very different, and in her case, far less migraine-inducing, route.

  That included our favored environments for absorbing energy. Once I’d explained the basics of not being a helpless passenger on the chaos-energy rollercoaster, she was able to restore her ridiculously small and dense energy pool by absorbing ambient or directed energy.

  It was almost enough to make me jealous, but I locked that down quick. Comparing my microkinesis to her raw absorption was like comparing a Swiss watch to a bulldozer; both are impressive, but only one of them is fun at parties.

  We were working out in a hot room. And by hot, I mean I’d jury-rigged an industrial heating unit to turn the place into a reasonable facsimile of the sun’s less-fashionable rear end. I gained more energy from radiation, but it was a constant, teeth-gritting effort of will.

  Kate? She absorbed energy as naturally as breathing, once the basic concepts were in place. It was instinctive, effortless. As a result, despite her near-fatal attempt to turn herself into a screaming human supernova, she was now damned near immune to a ton of molecular energy effects like heat, electricity, and even lasers. The universe’s irony is not subtle.

  “No!” she said, stomping her foot irritably. The floor tile cracked. See? Sledgehammer. “It doesn’t work like that!”

  “How does it work, then?” I asked, trying to sound reasonable.

  She shook her head, her now incredibly long hair swishing around the air mask we were both wearing. “The motion thing inside works perfectly, but I can’t just… stop some things and move others like that. I’ve tried like a hundred times, but I just don’t SEE stuff like you do. I feel the energy, and I can soak it up, and I can use it, but that’s it. You can see the particles or whatever; all I can detect is the flow. ”

  “Does the targeted absorption work?” I asked, clinging to one last shred of pedagogical hope.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  She nodded, and with a slight motion of her hand, created a wall of freezing mist in the two-hundred-degree heat. Not bad. A moment later, she held out her other hand and shot off a jet of superheated air that would have left a trail of fire if we weren’t busy defying several laws of thermodynamics.

  “For every action there’s a reaction. I fill up fast, but then I have to get rid of the excess. I either have to kick in super speed or fire off a flame burst to get rid of it.”

  I sighed. She was hanging onto the energy longer, stretching her pool’s limits, but it was a glacial process. I’d been hoping she could figure out how to yank apart molecular bonds to gain energy or solidify them to blow off the excess, but as she said, her power didn’t work on my wavelength. It still felt horribly inefficient, a testament to my utter failure as a sensei. My dojo would be a pamphlet. A poorly drawn one.

  Sabrina’s static-laden voice cut in through the still-experimental communicator nestled in our masks. “Jacob, your own start was not a good gauge of how quickly people can push through lower levels. You are a statistical outlier. Kate’s advancement is, by any normal standard, very fast. Her body refinement and essence cultivation is keeping pace with her energy levels. She can’t cheat like you did because she doesn’t have innate dao sensing like you do. Almost no one develops full spirit sensing until they are damned close to immortality.”

  “So what kind of time frame are we talking about?” I asked, already dreading the answer. “Weeks? Months? Do I need to start charging her for this prime real estate?” I gestured at the sweatbox.

  “Well, normal humans in a world with stable, gentle essence might take thirty years to progress through body refinement and into essence cultivation, and then another fifty or so to push into core formation. Because of Earth’s overloaded essence from the chaos gates, Alphas are immediately catapulted into forming one or two cores, skipping both foundational stages entirely. It is like building a skyscraper on a foundation of wet cardboard and hope.”

  “You both are catching up incredibly quickly, but you have an incredible advantage she doesn’t… because of your spirit sense, you are able to identify and expel impurities easily. Her body refinement is literally holding back her essence cultivation because she has almost no foundation, like most Alphas, to support her advancement rather than just using her cores. It is a spiritual chicken-and-egg problem, and the chicken is on fire.”

  “So how do we fix it?” Katie asked, fanning herself with a hand that could probably generate a category five hurricane if she tried.

  “In this environment? Time and training. There are pills that can help, but like I said, I have no ingredients. No spirit grass, no natural treasures, unless you want to go around executing Alphas and stripping their organs and cores out for potion ingredients.” Sabrina said it with the chilling casualness of someone suggesting we order a pizza.

  Katie almost gagged. Note to self: open-circuit comms for horrifying alchemical suggestions. “No, no fucking way. That’s beyond disgusting. Have you really done that?”

  “Katie,” Sabrina’s voice was flat, even through the distortion. “I was a slave. I have done lots of disgusting things much worse than that. That was merely a theoretical suggestion from a purely academic standpoint. A bad one.”

  Katie’s eyes looked sympathetic even through the face mask as she sat back down, passively absorbing the blistering heat. “I knew the farmer families were bad, but that bad?”

  Sabrina’s voice crackled. My quantum distortion hardware was top-notch; the software, however, was being held together by hope and a few lines of code I’d copied from a microwave. “No… they were very practical, though. They probably would have if I told them about it, but my family had a life before we transmigrated here, and where I came from was even more horrible. The purity sects made sure that we had no resources other than what we could create ourselves, and survival can be rough. It makes one consider… unpalatable options.”