Slumrat Rising

He collapsed on his sofa at the apartment. The apartment, in its entirety, wasn’t nearly as nice as the private cabin on the flight home. Should he invest in an upgrade? But Harmony was doing his national service soon. It will be just Sophia and Vigor most of the time. The apartment would only get bigger and bigger. Especially since Sophia would be going to college after her national service. Or before, if she got a deferment. Same with Vig, probably. Getting a bigger, nicer place would be a waste, wouldn’t it? Truth shrugged. Time to see the body cultivation spells.

“Summon humanoid system interface.” He growled mentally. The secret was making the word “summon” sound like a death sentence.

The little office lady sprite materialized in a glowing swirl of starlight. She looked bored as hell during the light show, doing little fluttery movements with her hands. “Yata. I’m here.” She monotoned. Then in a more normal voice- “What can I help you with?”

“Body Cultivation spells, please.” The little faerie stared at him, unamused. He sighed. “Give me a list of Body Cultivation spells suitable for me.”

“What’s the magic word?”

Truth rolled his eyes. “Give me a list of Body Cultivation spells suitable for me NOW!”

“One credit will be deducted from your account. Your list is being generated at once, dread magus!”

“Why, why do we have to do it this way? Every. Fucking. Time!”

“Because you are an NCO with the mindset of a private, and your brain never really got out of that inferior slum mentality. You need to be used to giving orders and demanding obedience. Otherwise, you will never develop as a mage, or in Starbrite. Remember, the higher up your level, the more you will encounter spiritual entities that can crush your will with the weight of their existence. And you will need to order them around. You also need to command your lesser mages, and those seeking your favor. So. You know. Show some guts or I will select only body cultivation spells that shrink your wee-wee and make you smell like rotting fish.”

“I will shred your astral body on a goddamn cheesegrater and feed it to whatever passes for your mother if you don’t present the best goddamn spells available!”

The spirit did an extremely fake “eek” pose. “Yaa. The mean mage is bullying me. Yaa.” She monotoned. “Oh look, your spell list is ready. And not a dud in the lot of them.”

Truth gave the little sprite an extra glare for good luck, then started looking at his list. Then stopped and looked back at the spirit.

“Refund my credit! Pay for it out of your own pocket!”

“Don’t push it, fleshy. Tinymeat never goes off the menu.”

“Fine, fine.” Truth looked back at the list.

Body Cultivation Spells Suitable For C-8-U Security, PMC, Sargeant Truth Medici

Daily Meditations of Valentinian

Sixteen Leaves of the World Tree

Nine Thunder Return Abyssal Formation

Dragon Chaining, Tiger Subduing Eightfold Wisdom Sutra

Heavenly Divine Chaos Grand Unifying Omnipotent Light Refinement Supreme Cosmic Body Of The Grand Sage of Eternity Almighty Warchant Unending (Volume 1)

“So… there is a range here.”

The little spirit just nodded.

“Without prices or descriptions.”

“Focus on the spell, it’ll come up.”

“Are these in any kind of order?” Truth asked.

“Yep. Most suitable to least.”

“The…” Truth reached around in his head for the most appropriate profanities. “The goat corpse slurping ‘Omnipotent Supreme Cosmic Body’ as created by none other than the ‘Grand Sage of Eternity’ is the least suitable for me?”

“It occurs to me that you don’t know two crucial pieces of information,” said the sprite. “First, the person publishing the spell gets to name it whatever they want. Second, a lot of these spells are still under copyright, so every purchase kicks the author, or their descendants or successors in interest, some cash.”

“The names are advertising?!”

“Alas, Sargent Medici, they are.” The spirit made an insultingly pouty “sad” face. “The first two, by no coincidence whatsoever, are the cheapest and oldest. Which is to say, out of copyright. Also, none of the spells are actually bad, and they are all suitable for you.”

Truth dove back in.

Daily Meditations of Valentinian- 20,000 Credits per year, no purchase available. Practitioner enters a guided meditation on their idealized form, slowly comprehending it system by system and gaining a mastery of what that particular part of the body does, and what it symbolizes. No upper limit to how far it can refine a physique. It confers no elemental energy alignment and contains no inbuilt spells.

Sixteen Leaves of the World Tree- 29,000 Credits per year, no purchase available. The practitioner is led through a series of sixteen refinements, inspired by the great World Tree. The body strengthens enormously, but more importantly, it gains wood-aligned energy and almost limitless regeneration.

Nine Thunder Return Abyssal Formation- 50,000 Credits per-

“Hey, sprite?”

“Yes, Dread Magus? Good use of the ominous tone there by the way.”

“Fifty thousand credits for a one-year rental?”

“Good old Nine Thunder. A real gift to the public there. The combination of explosive strength, lightning alignment, supreme speed, spiritual entity banishing power- superb. Even at low levels, it’s incredible.”

“Fifty thousand credits a year.”

“Lucky you get paid so much.”

“Fifty THOUSAND. I can buy an island for fifty thousand credits!”

“Not a very nice one. And you can’t take an island with you if you outgrow the planet. Your body cultivation is with you forever.” The spirit waved its hand.

“Fifty thousand, though. How much is the Omnipotent one?”

“Just squeaked onto your list on the basis that you can earn bonuses to cover your cost of living requirements and just spend your entire base salary on-”

“No.” Truth shook his head. “Just. No. Fuck no. Absolutely not. Tell me more about this Valentinian and why his meditations are so perfect for me.”

“And here we have the commanding tone I’ve been looking for!” The sprite beamed. “It’s number one because I figured this would be how you reacted when you saw the prices. That and it genuinely is one of the best body cultivation methods on the planet. Not the best universally, or anything, but very, very good.”

The sprite waved its little hand and a tiny nude mannequin popped up next to it. “This is how it works. Everybody’s body gets a little bit better the higher their level is because your natural flow is making your body resonate with the stars better. The more energy you hold, the more you resonate, and the more your body improves. A virtuous cycle, but mostly just for astral energy. The physical improvements become less and less relevant with time.” Little glowing lines flowed through the mannequin, making it look mysterious.

“The Meditations just intensifies this process and makes it conscious rather than unconscious. As a result, while it doesn’t, by itself, let you shoot concentrated blasts of light from your eyes, it does mean that in every physical way imaginable, literally imaginable, you are better. As long as you meditate on it, running this spell, with a good enough understanding of what you are trying to do. This also works on the, no joke, conceptual level.” The glowing mannequin slowly hollowed out and filled with spinning stars and galaxies, looking godlike and mysterious.

Truth just looked confused. The Sprite elaborated.

“Your hand is your hand, but the concept, the idea of your hand exists too, right? It’s the thing you grab stuff with. All the stuff, all the grabbing. Like, if you tried to pinch a star at night, you know you are really just playing a trick with perspective and you can’t actually pick up a star. But, theoretically, at a staggeringly high level, that is a thing you could actually do with the Meditations.”

“Prager’s yellow teeth!”

“Because what the spell actually does is it makes you a little more “real” than everything else around you. Or maybe you could think of it as conferring a… higher rank in the material hierarchy? It’s not omnipotent, obviously. You need to convince the universe your conception is more real than the existing conception of whatever. Every top-quality body refinement spell does some version of this, by the way. Just so happens that the Meditation is focused on it. And dirt cheap.”

“So if I really, really focused…”

“Yes, Dread Magus. At long last. You can finally fix that face crime you were born with. No saving the personality, and no one likes a cheap date, but the face is now salvageable.”

Truth stared at the sprite for a long moment. “Can I beat you up if I get far enough in the Meditations?”

“Theoretically.”

“Sign me up!”

The Meditations of Valentinian did exactly what they said on the label- you meditated. The first stage was visualization. It seemed very easy. Truth pictured the idealized form of himself and tried to hold the shape in place. Except he couldn’t. Something would always shift, or become blurry. He would realize with a jolt that he had forgotten his back muscles, then a second later, when the back was a glorious V with definition that would make a bodybuilder weep with envy, he realized that his hair and feet had vanished. It was like nailing jelly to the wall.

Truth had to give up. In a fit of desperation, he went to the Treasure Pavilion and hunted for a guide to cultivating the Meditations. There were dozens, which didn’t help. Discarding any with “fun” names, and then by length (opting for the more is more theory and praying for luck), and then, having no more useful sorting criteria, bought the third most expensive.

The answer turned out to be painfully obvious- visualization was its own skill to be mastered and not one the System could master for you. With that in mind, one should focus on specific things like your arms, your back, your skull, skin, teeth, gums, the webbing between your thumb and index finger. Anything small enough to properly fix in your mind, and big enough to be useful when you improved it.

You didn’t have to have perfect knowledge of the thing you were improving, but the better you understood it, the better the results of the meditation. The better you could persuade the universe that your idea was correct. Truth sighed and bought an anatomy textbook, then a guide to male aesthetics. This was going to be a long haul. Time slipped away as he forced himself to read.

Then his alarm went off and he had to drag his sorry carcass to bodyguard school. Which, to his immense surprise, involved pretty girls.

The training was actually rather fun. It was a surprising amount of classroom learning. It seemed the fine art of guarding a body began with understanding what terrible situation they had put themselves in, then figuring out how to keep them alive in that situation. With the understanding that you were not allowed to just pull them out and send them home. Truth struggled with that last part.

Vocabulary was another problem. Apparently, “If you drive your convoy between two semi-deserted shitholes of course there is going to be a fucking IED on the road and OF COURSE there will be trap demons waiting to swoop in the second the wards are breached, you absolute FUCKWIT,” is not an appropriate way to communicate a disagreement about a proposed transit with your client. Nor was it appropriate to say “Just fuck your lover at home. You are already cheating on your husband, you don’t need to make the security risk even worse.” Apparently, that was not the bodyguard’s call. That was not the one that almost washed him out of the bodyguard program, however.

The scenario was simple. It was a long-term protection job, assigned to a detail for the daughter of a high-tier Starbrite officer. She was spoiled, bossy, vain… and whenever it looked like no one was watching, she would hit on Truth. The trainer was staggeringly gorgeous. He never stood a chance.

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