He nodded. “That’s what the magic rectum is accessing. A level of power of undefined soul and spirit. Now, we are only human… I have no idea how soul works, but spirit? Well, every single human uses shape constantly to interact with the world, from the moment their eyes first open, they start recognizing self-defined objects and their own ability to interact with their body and environment.”

  “Fully X-enhanced humans, alphas, have a direct line to that wellspring of power. They use the shape in ways that both define and defy the other forces, and because that wellspring of shape and soul are as undefined as it’s possible to be, uncontaminated by the ‘self’ and waiting to be formed into whatever ‘self’ is defined as in THIS world, they can use their gifts, gifts which pretty much magically permit them to define that raw self into whatever their gifts dictate. Got me so far?”

  I nodded. “Yep. The cosmic pucker is full of raw, unformed magic, so most Alphas can just mold that into whatever their gifts need it to be. They’re sipping from a magical juice box with a built-in straw.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, but it also brings with it soul, and that soul builds up as well. That soul is the very definition of life, so as they use their powers effectively, more and more soul accumulates.”

  “That makes them more and more alive, and an alpha cannot accumulate more ‘spirit’ energy than their soul permits, because the soul is sort of the container for the spirit. Otherwise, the energy is just lost into the real world like an overfull glass, where it gains its own identity.”

  “It’s a slow process, but it’s natural, and it seems very fast because the soul constantly draws more spirit from the wellspring to equalize it every time the alpha uses their gifts to define and use it.”

  I nodded, the theory clicking into place with a satisfying, if terrifying, mental thunk. “That’s a pretty good theory for magic. So what about us Y saps? We don’t have a straw to the juice box. We’re the kids licking the spilled drops off the table.”

  “You ever read Xianxia books?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Yeah, for a little while. Got bored with the constant face-slapping and young masters. I’ve also seen some of the Chinese magical dramas, like Two Princesses and a Phoenix, The Jade Dragon, and Hidden Finger Crouching Llama.”

  He nodded, ignoring my terrible naming. “Well, it’s like the difference between a fish and a creature that lives on dry land. They will never understand the concept of drinking because water is what they live in, even if they can recognize when they are beached and out of energy, and being out of energy for too long can kill them.”

  “Us bastard mammals, though, know damned good and well what drinking is. We are not going to dry out in an hour, and we can also lug around water in a way the fish couldn’t even dream of… their bodies don’t NEED to be made of mostly water like ours do, because they are never away from it for more than a few moments.”

  “So you are saying that I can learn to drink?” I asked, the hope-rat now fully out of its shelter and doing a little jig.

  He nodded. “Right now, you are just regaining energy like a normal, unenhanced human. Occasionally, you tilt your head up during a rainstorm and get a mouthful of water, and while that’s plenty for normies, you burn a lot more off by defining it with your gift. The ‘function’ part of function and concept, which is, to be fair, a pretty poor way of defining it. If you strapped your power-reading machine to a nonpowered human, they would have about the same energy pool you started with, which is more than enough for their constant drain from living and the occasional emergency expenditure, like a mom that knows her baby is in trouble from far away, or a guy that survives a fall that by all rights should have killed him."

  I nodded. “Yeah, I heard the whole function and concept thing before from a BSA assessor in a tacky Hawaiian shirt. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense except for explaining why super-brains crack. Like a bad philosophy textbook.”

  He nodded. “Super-brains crack because they are exposed to the soul of the power without being able to experience or connect with the spirit. It would be kind of like being a ghost. Exposed to all of the world but never able to touch it. A fate worse than death, or at least, a fate that leads directly to it.”

  “Can you come up with an example from the fish metaphor?” I asked, wanting to cement the image.

  He gave me the stinkeye, the kind that could curdle milk. “Do you need one? They have a normie soul, which can’t use any spirit other than their own, but it’s constantly dragging in more spirit that they can’t touch. Their minds and souls expand with the constant life gain, until it eventually pops like an overfull water balloon. Simple enough for you?”

  “So wait,” I said, my mind latching onto a horrifying implication. “You are saying that if there’s an afterlife, they just disintegrate and never show up at the pearly gates? They get retroactively edited out of existence?”

  He grinned. “That’s why the word soul is loaded, too. I don’t really know if there is an afterlife that we would recognize as such, since, you know, things like memories and personalities are part of our body’s brain, but I am absolutely certain that our souls live on as long as we can self-define, and that self-definition is absolutely the meaning of soul.”

  “And no, I think that their souls just hit a point at which they can no longer effectively draw in spirit, and just… cut loose of everything that is NOT their soul, or self-definition. They leave all definitions that are not themselves behind, just like a soul whose body has died. Of course, if the person is still alive, it just leaves a living body with only the barest amount of soul to keep their cells working. The body and brain are alive, but the mind is gone. A super-powered vegetable.”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “Cheery,” I muttered. “So how do we drink? Where’s the water cooler for reality’s rejects?”

  He grinned. “That’s the easy part. Drinking is not the problem; when we learn how, we can hold many times the water that a fish can. The problem is, the spirit essence that is in this world is like muddy water. Instead of drawing it in pure and defining it instantly like an X, we have to hope we find water that matches our gifts, so we have to do the least amount of cleaning up to make it drinkable without killing us.”

  “So the Xianxia stuff,” I said. “Cultivation. Sitting on a mountain for a hundred years absorbing the essence of the heavens and the earth.”

  “Exactly. Spirit exists in everything, and soul exists in all living things. When we pull, we expand our soul and fill it with spirit. Unlike the fish, though, our gifts only use certain shapes of spirit, or our dao. There’s energy in everything, and each thing has its own shape, but there are certain similarities in groupings that let us either purify it more easily into what we can use or pull directly from it because it’s a shape we can use. If your soul can use pink essence, well, every shade of pink works, although we can make all those swirling variations on the shade of pink mix together and purify it eventually into our BEST pink.”

  “For example. If we were to pull spirit essence that strongly resonated with fire, or magma, from the bottom of a volcano, and our gift was strongly associated with that spirit, it would fill us up quickly, we would barely have to purify it for use, and our soul would easily grow and expand to hold more quickly. Way faster than those who constantly draw pure spirit from the sphincter and have to define it as fire-shaped to use it.”

  “And that’s uhh… cultivation?” I asked, the word feeling silly in my mouth. It still sounded like wuxia bullshit, like if I paid attention, I'd start shooting off 7-word names for each of my techniques and spouting off about Mount Tai.

  He nodded. “Right. First, you learn how to pull in essence consciously. Then you learn how to clean it up and transform the close-enough types into what you can use easily, and then you get the fun time job of trying to get rid of the bits that are contaminated with shapes that are so alien to your body and soul that you cannot do anything at all with them. Cultivation, purification, and expulsion. You have been increasing your pool by running yourself completely out of energy, right?”

  I nodded. “Pretty much. I call it ‘pushing until I collapse into a metabolic despair coma and then eating my body weight in cheap carbs for a week.’ It’s a great diet plan if your goal is to hate yourself and your grocery bill.”

  He nodded. “That works, but really, really slowly. What you are doing is not expanding your soul, but strengthening it so that it compresses the essence, allowing you to get more out of it more effectively. That is, without a doubt, our greatest gift… we can advance in leaps and bounds by both expanding our souls and then strengthening them to compress the energy. The ancient Chinese scholars even have names for the different stages, although I probably should look them up. Foundation Establishment, Core Formation, that sort of thing.”

  “Expanding your soul is the opposite of what you are doing. It means filling yourself up with so much spirit that your soul is stretched out and gets bigger to hold more. Obviously, you don’t want to draw too much, or your soul, your foundation, could rupture, but if you can compress the spirit energy far enough, amazing things can happen.”

  “Is that what you did?” I asked, looking at the living legend before me.

  He nodded. “Yeah, things start getting really complicated at some point, whether you focus on your mind, your body, your soul, or all three. I tried to focus on all three for a while, but eventually I cut out power expansion in favor of focusing on improving my body since gravity is already a hell of a force without increasing it too much. Power compression just fits my gifts too well. Right now, I could create a microsingularity that could easily kill me, but if I focus enough on my body, I should be strong enough to survive it, and maybe pull it into an updated gravity punch.”

  “What would that do?” I asked, my voice barely a whisper.

  He grinned, and it was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen. “Punch Cthulhian in the face and his entire body, all half a mile of it, implodes and is sucked into a space the size of a molecule. I imagine that he would feel that, and I’d feel a little better. Call it therapeutic.”

  “But if you could do that, you’d be at your peak, right?” I pressed, the scale of it boggling my mind. “I mean, dimensional invaders, Kaiju, supervillains, nothing could stand before it, right? You’d be the ultimate hero.”

  He shrugged, as if discussing the weather. “Maybe, but we have beaten that stuff before. We aren’t winning the wars, but we aren’t really losing either, at least not anymore. That’s not what scares me.”

  “What scares you?” I asked, unable to imagine what could frighten a man who could weaponize physics itself.

  He sighed, and for the first time, he looked his age. “We have poked a hole into a dimension made up entirely of pure spirit and soul essence. Soul is by its very definition self-defining. I am worried that whatever lives in there, in an environment of almost limitless power, might decide to find out where the hole leads.”

  “Like the Beyonder. Secret Wars II. Umm… comic books,” I offered weakly.

  He shrugged. “Sure. I haven’t read that. So, now that I have your attention,” he said, clapping his hands together with a sound like a small thunderclap, “your first lesson is breathing.”

  I smiled a little. “Pretty sure I figured that out a while back. Inhale, exhale. Repeat as necessary. It’s kept me alive this long.”

  “Not that kind of breathing,” he said, his voice dropping into a patient, instructive tone. “Can you tell what your current energy is? Right now. A percentage.”

  I concentrated. Without the accuracy of a quantum displacement meter, I couldn’t be exact, but the feeling was there, a deep-seated sense of reserve, like a gas gauge in a beat-up car. Right now, I was a little less than a quarter full. I could honestly feel it, the same way I knew if a particular power use was going to drive me into power debt. “About twenty-five percent, I guess? Maybe thirty on a good day with a tailwind.”

  He nodded. “Well, that’s why I am your teacher, your personal Mazer Rackham, except I am not Maori, you aren’t a child fighting the buggers, and our time is limited by my patience and your learning speed, not an interstellar fleet.”

  I was profoundly relieved. At least he had some taste. Ender’s Game was a pretty good book, even though I disagreed with the kiss-and-make-up-with-murderous-aliens philosophy of the rest of the series. And kids that age were idiots at best, no matter how high their IQ score was. I’d take a grizzled, Fiji-erasing sensei over a child prodigy any day of the week. But Orson Scott Card was a good writer, even if, like most sci-fi writers, his theories were kind of insane.

  “Now,” Mister Bob said, settling into a cross-legged position on the floor. “Copy me. And try to empty your mind of everything except the terrible, crushing weight of your own existential dread. It’s a good starting point.”

  I sat down, a flicker of genuine optimism cutting through my customary cynicism. For the first time in a long time, someone was offering me a straw to the juice box. And I was damn well going to learn how to use it.