Slumrat Rising

Down to Gehenna Or Up To The Throne

Well to do families would give their newly married offspring a choice- do you want the down payment for a house, or do you want a cultivation elixir for your kids? For many young families, it was a tough choice. Everyone wanted to own their own home but… who knew how much elixirs would cost in eighteen years? If you pre-purchased them now, you would have the security of knowing your kids were covered for their Level One breakthrough. That would set them up for life. A good elixir guaranteed a smooth break through, a large spell aperture, and would make cultivation easier in the future. They were criminally expensive, but unquestionably worth it.

Allegedly, the genuine, top notch elixirs caused a faint glow to surround the person breaking through, and the breakthrough would be accompanied with a bewitching fragrance. Balsam for a gentleman or lady, daffodils for a scholar, orange blossoms for a lover and rosemary for a fighter. Proof of high quality goods being used by the highest quality people. It was a pop-culture cliché. Couples would sometimes try to break through together, claiming a sort of spiritual, almost tantric orgasm despite sitting on opposite sides of the room.

Of course, where there are high end goods, there are low end goods. Then there are the knock-offs of the low end goods. After that, there are the cut down, adulterated, no-label-bottle econo-line versions of the knock-off low end goods. This was the tier Truth could afford. At between three hundred and four hundred wen a bottle, they weren’t even called elixirs or aids or potions any more. They were just cultivation tonics.

Truth spent extra time cultivating that night, and once the sibs were safely off to school, he did an extra round of cultivation in the morning. Was he on the verge of breaking through? Yes, but he had been for almost a month. Without an extra push, he would have to keep cultivating and hope that he got lucky. And Truth didn't consider himself a lucky person.

He made his way back to the abandoned building. The broken window looked untouched. The alley looked as empty as before. He would cheerfully kill for a flashlight. Best he could do was hope. And take a length of pipe with him.

Not a hint of anything. No off smells. No strange noises. Nothing painted horrible lines and symbols that seemed hauntingly familiar, but the more you looked at them, the stranger and more alien they became, the stranger and more alien you became as you realized the flimsy lies that propped up your so called life and you had to, desperately had to, write your own reply in that symbolic language, to prove and justify your existence on the walls in blood, bile and feces... None of that. Could use a bit of a dusting, obviously. It wasn’t even too quiet- he could hear the city noises through the walls. Truth dug out the money, put the air vent cover back on and cleared out. It took less than five minutes. It felt a lot longer.

Truth patted himself clean, and made his way to a “pharmacy.” Old Feng’s was exactly what you would expect from this city. There was no Old Feng. There had never been an Old Feng. The owner/operator was a guy called Prentiss. While the shop may have been phony in just about every way, they didn’t knowingly cut their goods with anything toxic. Best pharmacy in the slums, Truth reckoned.

“Hey Prentiss- what tonics you got?”

“Depends. What’s your problem?”

“Cultivation.”

“Oooh, yeah. That time of year again, huh? Alright, alright, let me take a look, I should have some decent stuff.” The decidedly middle aged man heaved his bulk off his stool and started shifting cardboard boxes around. Truth didn’t get itchy hands. It was widely believed, with some proof, that “Old Feng” dusted the boxes with poison to prevent shoplifting.

“Alright, big guy like you, you probably want it rough and strong. Here- Glacier Parrot-Fish Liver x Ocean Magma Vent Grouper Liver double shot, blended with a tincture of thirty five botanicals and guaranteed human-potable ethanol.” He set a rather fancy looking bottle in front of Truth. Split down the middle, one half red, the other blue.

“We also have something a little more modern. This is the latest thing from Gabbert and Gabbert Alchemy Labs. Lots of retinol and flavonoids, blended polynitrogardeniatropes WITH balanced alectrim and iso-proteins.” This was a plain white plastic container the size of a can of soda. Prentiss presented it with a flourish, then dug back into the box.

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“We also have this. Which is something. Eh, I can’t actually recommend it, but it is a lot cheaper than the others.” He put a glass jar the size of a shot glass on the counter. It looked worryingly hand made, and the contents were a rusty brown.

“You don’t know anything about it?”

“Tested it, not toxic and it should help gather cosmic rays to accelerate a breakthrough. There should be some benefit to the body, though obviously not on the same level as a real elixir. If I had to guess? Some apprentice alchemist was trying to make an actual elixir using leftovers, fucked up, and this was the result. Gets sent to the trash, then makes its way to me.”

“So when you say it’s not toxic…”

“Well, it doesn't have any of the kinds of things my poison tests check for, which is a lot of really nasty stuff. You probably wouldn’t drop dead on the spot, but no promises about getting cancer down the road. Or something.”

“So what do they cost?”

“The two legit tonics are seven hundred each, and I’ll let you have the experimental one for three fifty.” Prentiss said grandly.

“Seven hundred! They were four hundred a couple of months ago!” Truth was outraged. Prentiss spread his hands and looked helpless.

“Elixirs are way up in price, which means that every cultivation enhancing product is way up. It’s the war in Reban. They grow a bunch of elixir ingredients.”

Truth looked rebellious. “Yeah, but this ain’t exactly Green Lotus. No offense, but it ain’t.”

Prentiss shrugged his flabby shoulders and flatly replied. “It ain’t. You couldn’t afford to breathe the air in a Green Lotus shop. You can afford Old Feng’s. These are the prices. Take ‘em or scram.

Truth glared at Prentiss, who could not have given less of a shit. Then, with immense reluctance, he picked up the glass jar. “At the very least, throw in some pain killers. And a flashlight.”

Breaking through didn’t take long… generally. It was the subject of a lot of debate. There were well documented examples of people breaking through almost instantly, while rare cases could take as long as a day. The frustrating thing was that there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to it. Nor was one better than the other. People were just different.

The average, Truth remembered, was about ten minutes. Theoretically, you should just go home and do it in a nice, quiet room. It was a spiritual awakening, and if you had a good elixir, there would be a gentle improvement in overall health, and a massive improvement in physical capability. Level One was the first step into super-humanity, a literal higher tier of existence. However, the consequences of being disturbed during a breakthrough could range from extreme pain to permanent disability. Truth was not going to break through at home.

Still plenty of time left in the morning, Truth reckoned. He made a beeline back to the abandoned building. Not much in the way of usable scrap in there, it had been cleaned out long ago. Still, there were things like interior doors that could be removed from hinges, along with hollow metal doors from the toilet stalls. He collected a few of them and did his best to fortify the bathroom. He had seen no sign of others in the abandoned building, but he flatly didn’t believe such a thing was possible. No such thing as free real estate.

He pried the mirrors off the walls. That was a big job! But he did get them off and lined them up so that the light from the flashlight would fill the whole room. He sat down in the middle of the nest of light, one meter of iron pipe by his side.

Truth said a brief prayer to whatever gods or devils might watch over the desperate and unwise, and took out the tonic. It felt heavy. Like the tonic knew his future depended on it. It was a lousy, unreliable thing to hang your hopes on. But he had to. The sibs had lost all hope.

Truth unscrewed the lid. It smelled like rusty water and rotting leaves. He knocked it back in one go, and waited. Nothing happened.

Which was normal. Truth forcefully reminded himself. It was normal for nothing to happen at first. The tonic had to be digested. It had to get through the stomach lining. It took time. His fingers dug into his thighs. It was normal. But what if it didn’t work? What if he wasted his shot? What if he ruined his chance to pass the Starbrite Aptitude Test and…

His body convulsed. He almost bit his tongue off. The fingers digging into his thighs almost tore away the muscles as they clenched. His spine felt like it was being replaced with superheated wires. The clench relaxed and he fell forwards. Before he could breathe, his stomach imploded. Vomit ripped through his esophagus and out over the floor. It didn’t stop. The volume reduced to a dribble, but he couldn’t stop it. Every scrap of bile in him was squeezed up and out and over him.

The room started going dark. He thought the flashlight was dying but no, it was his eyes dying. Distorted shapes, too unnatural and obscene to be called ghosts, haunted him. Iron screws, cold, merciless, twisted through his skull. He wished he could scream, but his throat had been burned away. All that came out were little rasping wheezes. Only he knew that they were prayers for death.

For a horrible second, Truth hallucinated that he was a speck of dust floating in the void between stars. Something impossibly vast, terrible, and malicious, was out there. Then there was an oily ripple of movement and he realized that it wasn’t that he couldn’t see the monster. He was in the monster.

“I am going to die.” Truth had just enough of himself left to form the thought. “I can’t die. I have to break through.” He tried to focus on the spot over his heart, but he wasn’t sure he still had a body. Nine burning worms crawled over him and started chewing away at the idea of his chest.

Truth tried screaming again, but that mercy was still denied him. The nine worms chewed their way into his chest, then chewed open the aperture that would hold his first spell. They seemed to wiggle around inside it, as though they were thinking of nesting. Instead, the burning worms slithered out and crawled through his body before exiting. A grim, stately procession through the entirety of his flesh, departing in a trail of fire via the urethra. Not because they had to. They just wanted to hurt him that little bit more.

At this point, Truth sank into oblivion. His last thought was a faint hope to never wake again.

It was to be expected, given the inherent cruelty of the universe, that he did wake up. In agony. Covered in piss, vomit and shit. Covered in blood. Exhausted. Something was scratching at the bathroom door.