Essence, I was discovering, was a pain in the ass with an identity crisis. Like most things in my life, it couldn’t commit to one state of being. It had the infuriating characteristics of both a particle and a wave. So, I decided to imagine each ‘energy unit’—because calling it ‘magic sparkle-juice’ felt a bit too unserious, even for me—as a sort of conglomerate particle. Not a battery, but a hyper-specific Lego brick that only wanted to build one thing: a bigger headache for Jake Doyle. It was either that or accept that my entire understanding of physics was a lie, and I’d already had that particular rug pulled out from under me when I got superpowers. I wasn’t eager for a second helping of existential vertigo.
I was back on the school's roof, shadowboxing like a man trying to swat away his own bad decisions. It looks silly, but my brain apparently needed my body to be in motion to have its more expensive thoughts. Probably a leftover from my brief, ill-fated superhero career, where standing still usually meant getting punched. The small observation deck meant my footwork was less ‘dancing butterfly’ and more ‘pacing caged animal,’ but it worked. Every few steps, I’d glance at the safety rail. It looked flimsy. Then again, after my recent revelations, so did reality.
Here’s a fun fact they don’t teach in Biology 101: your nervous system is a bureaucratic nightmare. Electrical impulses have to file paperwork with chemical impulses just to get your pinky finger to twitch. I’d streamlined that process years ago, back when I was naive enough to think a better body would lead to a better life. I’d shortened the chemical reaction chains to the bare minimum, a bit of DIY neurosurgery that would give any actual doctor a screaming fit. It made me fast, freakishly so by normie standards, but it still couldn’t hold a candle to an actual speedster Alpha. My life, in a nutshell: putting in Herculean effort just to achieve mediocrity. The story of my career, my love life, and now, apparently, my attempt to become a mystical energy being.
Most cultivation fictions talk about ‘body enhancement’ as a happy side effect of magical energy. Flood your corpus with chi and let the universe’s divine contractor remodel your squishy mortal form into a celestial temple. I, in my infinite wisdom, had done it backward. I’d started with the home renovation using my own power, and was only now discovering the mystical equivalent of a Home Depot. They got the penthouse suite; I was stuck trying to figure out the plumbing for the garden shed with a manual written in ancient Sumerian. The instructions were less of a ‘step-by-step guide’ and more of a ‘poetic metaphors that could get you killed if you interpreted them wrong.’
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The literature, for all its flowery nonsense, agreed on the basic steps: find your energy pool, start pulling energy into it, and then purify it. Simple. Easy. A lie. After that, the path diverged into three scenic routes, all of which seemed to end with me falling off a roof or accidentally turning myself into a novelty paperweight.
First, ‘Body Cultivation.’ The idea is to let the energy flood your system and hope it knows how to build a ‘divine heart’ or ‘jade bones’ or some other fantasy real estate. This required a level of faith I simply don’t possess. I wasn’t about to disintegrate my own heart on the off chance that a cosmic blueprint for a better one was floating around in the collective unconscious. That’s how you end up as a puddle of goo with existential dread. Graviton’s body apparently did this automatically, compressing energy into his cells like a black hole with a gym membership. My body’s automatic functions were mostly limited to making poor choices and requiring a constant supply of tacos.
Second, ‘Spirit Cultivation.’ This involved growing your ‘soul,’ stretching it like metaphysical taffy, stuffing it with energy, and then trying to compress it all down without it snapping back and giving you a spiritual black eye. Of the three, this one had the most written about it, probably because there’s no way to prove any of it. You can’t x-ray a soul. It’s the perfect field for charlatans and philosophers, from Tai Chi masters to Bodhisattvas, all nodding sagely about ‘internal alchemy’ without a single reproducible result between them. My kind of people, really. At least the grift was consistent across centuries.
Last, and the most popular with the D&D crowd, ‘Mind Cultivation’ or ‘External Energy.’ This is where you get the flashy stuff—the fireballs, the lightning bolts, the ‘Ninth Tier Heavenly Divine Sword of Flaming Dragon-Fire Moon Ten Thousand Li Cuts.’ It’s the path for those who never outgrew the phase of making ‘pew pew’ noises with their mouths. It was also, not coincidentally, the path I’d been faking for years with my microkinesis. The irony wasn't lost on me that my foray into real magic might involve learning to do for real what I’d been pretending to do all along.
Naturally, my broken, non-ether-based power didn’t fit neatly into any one category. I’d probably have to stumble down all three paths simultaneously, a feat usually reserved for the main character of a story, not the cynical sidekick who provides witty commentary before being gruesomely slain. My dao shape was probably something like ‘Stubborn Pragmatism’ or ‘Cynical Synthesis.’
