Day five of my new life as Kellar Academy’s most infamous charity case and part-time academic fraud. Mindy and I had survived our tests for Doctor Menendez’s remedial “How Not to Be a Complete Moron in Public” class. The official title was something like ‘Public Image and Media Relations for the Modern Alpha,’ but my version was more accurate. The core curriculum was essentially a masterclass in sounding intelligent and responsible without actually revealing anything of substance—a skill I’d honed to a fine art across seven different villainous personas.

  Some of the historical examples of what not to do were comedy gold, mined from the rich vein of stupidity that was the 80s superhero scene. My personal favorite was a Class Four ‘brick’ who, during a live interview, proudly explained how he’d stopped an alpha assassin while buck naked. He’d apparently noticed the killer’s heat signature while he was… multitasking. And by multitasking, I mean he was enthusiastically boning the governor’s trophy wife and his mistress, a state assemblywoman, in a heroic feat of bipartisan cooperation.

  The secret service had to physically tackle the guy when he started happily recounting the stories the mistress had whispered to him about the president’s preferred brand of marital aids and where he liked them stored. Unsurprisingly, that particular conservative incumbent couldn’t even get his own dog to vote for him after that. I also learned that the team’s anchor, a walking slab of meat named Ogre, liked to ensure his boudoir was, and I quote, ‘painted like the inside of a goddamned cement truck.’ A charming visual that will haunt me forever.

  Doc Menendez seemed pleased with our answers. It turned out he didn’t particularly care if our analyses were brilliant or if we were just parroting back rumors we’d heard; he just wanted to see that we’d taken the information seriously enough to form some semblance of an opinion. A refreshingly low bar. I could have written my essay in crayon and probably still passed.

  My other remedial classes were proceeding with similar, underwhelming momentum. Criminology was an audit, a nice, quiet hour where I could pretend to take notes while actually sketching out designs for a new containment foam dispenser. Advanced Anatomy, however, was a surprise. Doctor Lindsay MacKillain, a woman with a smile that could fracture bone and a grip that definitely could, seemed delighted that I already had a ‘firm grounding’ in the subject. I didn’t have the heart to tell her my expertise came from having to put myself back together after a few particularly energetic ‘stunt coordination’ gigs gone wrong. She preemptively wrote me in for her specialty anatomy course next semester based on some online tests I could take ‘at my leisure’—a phrase that, in Kellar-speak, meant ‘by tomorrow or you’re cleaning kaiju guts out of the gym mats.’

  Then there was Remedial Teamwork. What a joy. The class was packed with every first-year on campus, all eager to prove they could play well with others. I, a lone wolf by nature and by profession, did not impress Powercry. At all. She informed me with the grave solemnity of a doctor delivering a terminal diagnosis that she would definitely be seeing me again next semester, right alongside Mindy and a fresh batch of wide-eyed rookies. Shocker. I’d built a successful criminal enterprise on the principle of trusting no one and using everyone. ‘Synergy’ and ‘group dynamics’ were just words I used to describe problems that could be solved with a well-placed explosive.

  But the real head-scratcher, the class that made my microkinetic brain hurt, was my third session of Eastern Studies with Graviton. It wasn't the volume of work; it was the sheer, esoteric alienness of it all. Last time, he’d had to correct my breathing—a humbling experience that made me feel about as spiritually attuned as a clogged drain. This time, however, when I ran through the Wu breathing exercise, he actually looked… pleased? It was unsettling.

  “So,” he rumbled, his voice like two continents grinding together. “How much energy are you at?”

  I shrugged, a gesture that felt pathetically inadequate in the face of his planet-sized presence. “Topped off. Been that way for days. I tried to overload like you said, but it’s like trying to inflate a balloon with a hole in it. I just breathe out all the excess instead of storing it. My metabolism, meanwhile, sends me a bill for a twelve-course meal.”

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  He gave a slow, tectonic nod. “Not entirely unexpected. Tu Na, or Wu breathing, is the most basic form of cultivation. It’s so fundamental that even normies with no potential can do it. It’s the metaphysical equivalent of learning to blink. So, have you figured out the hidden secret of cultivation yet?”

  I wracked my brain, trying to find the angle. “Does it have to do with normies?”

  A slight smile touched his lips. “Yes and no. The basic secret is that if you can teach a normie how, figure out the appropriate method, and—most importantly—find a way to clear out all the useless spiritual garbage clogging their energy channels, they can awaken the same potential an Alpha does. We’re not special; we’re just normies who survived a traumatic plumbing incident that blasted our pipes open and flooded us with the specific shape of spirit energy we needed.”

  “How does that apply to single-power users?” I asked, my mind already racing through the implications for my own unique, non-ether-based mess of a power.

  I shrugged, playing the idea out. “I guess it means if we can find the right ‘shape,’ we could potentially unlock our other major branch without playing Russian Roulette with our lives?”

  “Basically,” he agreed. “Supposedly, people used to know how to determine your perfect shape, but that knowledge is lost. The only thing we have that comes close is a library we captured from the Serenoid empire during their cheerful little invasion attempt back in ‘97. The problem is, the diagrams were made for people with six arms, and our best linguists have only managed to translate a tiny fraction of it.”

  A spark of my old, villainous curiosity ignited. “Is there any chance I could look at it?”

  He raised a single, skeptical eyebrow that probably weighed more than my entire dorm room. “You think you can translate it when our best minds have failed?”

  I offered a grin that I hoped was more confident than I felt. “Nope. But I have a unique perspective on energy and matter. If there are any cultivation methods that resonate with me, knowing how they feel should give the big brains a primer on the language, right? By comparing my subjective experience to the squiggles on the page?”

  “You can tell what shapes resonate?”

  “Yeah. It’s not sensing, exactly. It’s more like… monitoring my own internal energy state. I haven’t exactly pinned down my own ‘dao shape’ yet, but I’ve managed to exclude a ton of possibilities. I’ve got a list of likely candidates.” I pulled out my notebook, a chaotic mess of diagrams, equations, and doodles of frowning stick figures being struck by lightning. “Bear in mind, a lot of this is cobbled together from translated pulp novels and online forums where people argue about whether chi can power a toaster. But the cross-referencing seems solid.”

  “If I had to pick one,” I continued, “it would be motion, or acceleration. I tested a bunch of others—air, height, sunlight, pollution, the romantic allure of a distant nebula—but a swift storm yesterday blocked out a lot of the noise. I did more tests on the trams. I’m about ninety-five percent certain my ideal shape is acceleration. Or something kissing cousins with it. I get the strongest effects from strong gravitational fields, and the most efficient transfer of motion is an orbit. I get more juice from altitude than wind speed—probably a slightly increased orbital velocity—and more from a huge mass of moving air than from a transit tube.”

  “So, if I were hunting for a method, I’d be looking for one that embraces motion, particularly one that’s all about acceleration. It tracks, since every single one of my power’s applications can be defined as acceleration in some form. That’s probably also why I spend energy to decelerate things; my power treats it as acceleration in the opposite direction rather than just… stopping. It’s pedantic like that.”

  “Damn, you did do your homework,” Graviton said, sounding genuinely impressed. “I’m confident too. Confident enough to think that if your Dao embraces a different concept, it’s one so close to motion or acceleration that the difference is academic.”

  I chuckled. “Oh, I did the homework. It’s either that or stare at the wall and contemplate my life choices, and one of those activities is significantly more depressing. Now, I could be slightly off. It might be acceleration, motion, action, or some weird mystical concept that embraces them all, like ‘lightspeed’ or ‘circularity’ or ‘the universe’s tendency to spill coffee on your clean shirt.’ But based on feels, this feels right.”

  He nodded. “I’ll see what I can do. I can’t promise you the original documents, but I’ll try to get the diagrams. On the condition you document everything you find. The BSA hoards knowledge like a dragon with trust issues. Half the time, it seems the only people who really understand this stuff are the ones trying to kill us with it. So, what else did you dig up?”