They hung in orbit for ten days while his realm fully recovered. Hector alternated between restoring his reserves with his externality and training his other apertures. It was monotonous in the extreme, but with familiar determination, he sunk himself into the joy of incremental gains.

  For most of his life, weight lifting held a sacred significance for him. Consistently showing up to put in the reps was how he worshiped at the altar of self-improvement. He continued going to the gym for quite some time after his transformed body could no longer derive any benefits from the activity. Cultivation eventually replaced his gym obsession.

  Yet until recently, it had not truly felt the same.

  Immersing himself in an optimized training plan that targeted every aspect of himself felt like coming home. It made the constant ache of his realm easier to handle. He was improving every day, moving towards his goals.

  The experience of cultivation in the past had been Hector slavishly executing techniques designed by other people. There was very little personal touch to it. Now, with his attitude shifting, he began to notice subtleties. Much like how he could use his mind-muscle connection to improve the quality of repetitions of an exercise, Hector found he was able to perform the standard techniques better by emphasizing various elements.

  Of particular value was the Shuttle Technique. Hector began to understand why it was so foundational to the Azure Spear Maiden Sect. Reflecting a stream of cosmic energy between the aura and domain was an efficient method of improving both apertures. But if he adjusted the tension to maximize the strain without allowing any leaks, the benefits improved noticeably. Not significantly, but noticeably.

  That was enough to spur on further innovation and experimentation. The reason different techniques were needed and why they tended to stop working over time became obvious to him. Apertures were not monolithic entities. They were built up of smaller elements. Those various pieces were selectively exercised by different techniques.

  It wasn’t just the focus of techniques on specific aperture ‘muscle groups’ that was a problem. People tended to find a favorite way to perform something and then slavishly stick with that method. In communal environments, methodology could become enshrined as an unquestionable truth.

  Within the weightlifting community on Earth, it was a well established fact that every rep had to be executed with proper form. The standard advice, seldom questioned, was to stop as soon as form degraded. People who swayed their body when curling were considered to be cheating their gains. People who performed shallow squats were considered to be wasting their time. Yet in both of those cases, the ‘bad reps’ could be extremely beneficial if used in the right way.

  Hector had lifted with a different mentality. He would perform exercises with strict form until he couldn’t any longer. Then he would continue with a sub-optimal form. Use some swaying to get a few extra curls – reps that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise and introduced a lot of stimulus to his exhausted biceps. Or switch to quarter squats when he couldn’t go to full depth any longer. It was all about finding ways to increase tension on the muscles being worked. Not only was it beneficial, it also was harmless providing he didn’t cross the line from a ‘bad’ form to a ‘compromised’ form that put strain in the wrong places.

  The analogy let him milk more benefit out of every training session with the familiar techniques. Every incremental improvement was tiny, hardly worth the effort of puzzling out. Yet as he accumulated a mental library, their combined value accumulated to something impressive. Not necessarily something he could teach another person. Much like the mind-body connection lifters developed, the only way to make use of the things Hector discovered was to obsessively train techniques with an inquisitive mind.

  His training regime was also only possible due to his restoration rates. Though even those were not anywhere near what he wanted them to be. At first he thought it was due to the fact that he’d become too used to stealing the energy invested into miasma. It soon became clear that the discrepancy wasn’t just in his mind.

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  After some investigations, Hector arrived at a surprising conclusion. The pressure of chaos within the primordial was at level ten, the same as the energy density of a world. At lower levels the density difference between the primordial and his own soul made it so that he was almost being force-fed energy. To him, having his externality touch the primordial was like being immersed within pure cosmic energy at level ten density. As he approached parity with not just reality but the underlying primordial, an advantage he never realized he had was being stripped away.

  Before the ten days of recovery ended, the rifts on the planet below closed on their own. Only a small amount of miasma had escaped after the defeat of the tiger. Not enough to justify spending further time there. Cruiser Erin convinced Hector that they should move on to a new world as soon as he was ready for action once more.

  On the dawn of the eleventh day, Hector probed at his realm for a bit before deciding the ache wouldn’t hold him back. He could perhaps have given it a few more days out of an abundance of caution, but there was a chance they wouldn’t immediately encounter another world facing a monster invasion. Wasted time represented more of a risk to their ultimate mission than a little soul ache.

  While sitting with his retinue in the rec room, the familiar announcement came over the loud speakers, telling everyone aboard to prepare for singularity travel. Piercing jumped to his feet so quickly he knocked over his chair, then disappeared down the stairs.

  Hector turned to Esther. “What is that about?”

  “He likes to watch from the shuttle bay windows while we travel.” Esther shrugged. “It gets him away from the rest of us for an hour or two. What I don’t understand is why we need the big announcement every time.”

  Conrad laughed. “It isn’t made for your benefit.” When he noticed their confusion, he explained. “Jinn crew have a strict protocol to follow during singularity travel. For most roles, it doesn’t have anything to do with battle stations. They’re supposed to release a steady flow of legal energy to stabilize the spacetime corridor. That’s the main reason Jinn vessels have crew.”

  Esther leaned forward. “What do you mean?”

  “Jinn crew are basically collectors and reservoirs for legal energy. A cruiser like this could function much the same with just three uploaded minds. One with a gravitonic realm, one with a fusion realm, and one with a quantum entanglement realm. Maybe a fourth with a normalization realm to resist miasma. Remote controlled drones could do all the maintenance humans do on Cruiser Erin. You’d get rid of all the space and equipment dedicated to housing and life support. But then there wouldn’t be a whole crew of legal energy batteries extending the duration of the mission.”

  “That’s insane,” Esther said.

  Conrad shrugged. “It’s a rational choice. Only souls can store legal energy. If you want those people to be effective at restoring their reserves, they need to serve a purpose within the overarching order – in other words, they need jobs to perform. Most battles between Jinn and Xian forces end with Lords retreating after their reserves run low. A lone uploaded mind can’t reliably outlast every enemy. That requires an entire crew of cooperating Jinn. The limit of a Jinn vessel’s endurance is always mundane energy production. Cruisers have stores large enough to hold lithium for eighteen months of normal operation. On the other hand, their crew size is calibrated to provide indefinite legal energy.”

  As Cruiser Erin relocated them to a different universe, Conrad went on to explain the functioning of Mercom’s fleet. War barges were the mobiles fortresses that served as the backbone. Gunboats carried a schism beam, laser turrets, and plasma weapons. They cost a fraction the price of a war barge and were almost as dangerous – the drawback being that they couldn’t induce singularities and were thus reliant upon war barges for travel across the multiverse.

  Cruisers skipped much of the weaponry, possessing only laser turrets for defense. Much of their internal space was dedicated to the extensive arrays of gravitonics necessary for singularity travel. They tied together much of the Mercom republic’s remote territories, strong enough to dominate unempowered populaces and fast enough to flee more dangerous foes.

  There were other vessel types in the fleet that performed highly specific roles. Industrial barges carried shipments of refined materials back to Terra. Scouts were too small to travel the multiverse or carry weapons, basically just a flying sensor array with two uploaded minds – one to control the gravitonics and one to maintain the quantum entanglement for communications. There was even something called a mobile factory that was basically a machine shop with limited flight capabilities.

  Back on Terra they also had Citadels. Those military bases sat in geosynchronous orbit and guarded vast swathes of territory from potential threats. Conrad couldn’t describe their qualities due to the fact that none of the specifications were public knowledge. He admitted that even what he knew of other vessel types could be inaccurate if the military decided to obfuscate their true capabilities.

  Eventually the fascinating lesson ended when they arrived at their destination. There was miasma present. Not too much. Not too little. For their purposes, Hector considered it a Goldilocks situation. It was time to harvest cosmic energy.