Moon Cultivation [Sci-fi Xianxia]

Sometimes, you need to stop and look at yourself from the outside.

Once again, I caught myself thinking that life was carrying me along with the current. I was flailing, spinning, clinging to the rocks jutting out of the stream, doing everything I could to stay afloat — yet the river of life was slowly but surely overpowering me.

I had far too many goals and tasks. The further I went, the more they tangled and blurred together. I'd cling to what worked, or, conversely, stubbornly torment what didn't — all without any kind of master plan.

Before, all my actions had been driven by one overarching goal — to break through to the Second Stage as soon as possible.

I'd made the breakthrough, but life hadn't ended, nor had the threat looming over it. Once again, I had to cultivate, study techniques, and watch out for demons.

I needed to clearly determine what was the priority here.

Cultivation? That was a long process. I couldn't reach the Fourth Stage in a matter of days, or even months. Of course, that would've made eliminating me a much harder task.

But reaching the Fourth Stage without techniques? That was hardly ideal.

Just as techniques without a breakthrough weren't enough, either.

I needed to expand my arsenal, and to some extent, I had. I'd learned two new techniques, though their usefulness in actual combat was... questionable.

What I needed was an ultimate, or at the very least, a new major move like the Hook. Really, not knowing your ultimate at the First Stage was perfectly normal. But at the Second? It was starting to look odd.

Still, learning a new technique from scratch took time. Especially given how much of mine was being eaten up by work in the Air Garden.

Buying that technique for dust had been a huge mistake!

And yet, the demons were without a doubt the main threat. I'd begun to feel, deep down, that I'd already had more than enough calm, and that soon, there'd be another stab in the back.

The demon issue had to be dealt with — the sooner, the better.

I couldn't just go beat them up. I didn't even know whose faces I was supposed to smash, apart from the one Novak had named. But I could play my part in the process.

I invited myself over for tea with the Great One and laid out my reasoning.

Though he was grooming me to be a fighter, I told him I was refusing to enter any tournaments until this whole business was finished. Besides feeling that the demons were about to act, I remembered Novak saying his team had already reached the point where any false step from the suspects would force them to make a move.

The final battle was drawing near, and I had a strong sense that I wouldn't be able to avoid it. So I'd rather go in like a worn-out cat than a powerful but cornered mouse.

Novak gave me the go-ahead, so I devoted all my time to controlling the beetle.

Being able to perform techniques and control the drone — that was manageable. But taking hits without mixing up the streams of consciousness? That was an entirely different challenge. Pain threw everything into disarray, and I had to endure plenty of it before Artem finally said I was ready.

There was something curious about pain. I'd learned to lock it into one stream of consciousness, isolating it from the other. It worked better than a painkiller, but doing so meant I lost control of the beetle.

Still, that pain, and the training, helped me make up my mind about the final formation to add to my armour.

No, not a pain-dampening one.

Alan etched in a regeneration formation for me.

After that, Artem took my armour from storage and modified it, adding two hidden compartments for beetles on the belt.

I tested it out in the training hall, then invited myself along to the farm with Denis and Bao.

I'd bet anything they assumed I was just bored and looking for something to do, but they didn't say a word.

By the way, both of them had broken through.

Bao was the first of the two — the crystals he'd stashed in his locker until the very end had helped. But he was still only 743rd in the overall ranking. That left him 243 places behind the relatively 'safe' 500-mark. Denis was 781st, even further behind.

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I don't know what materials they used, but it was almost certain they'd both had to sacrifice the quality of their foundation to make that leap, which cost them heavily in terms of points. Now I was ahead of them in the overall standings. And Marlon was ahead of me. He was firmly focused on a perfect foundation and was still collecting points for materials.

He wasn't breaking his back grinding round the clock like Denis and Bao, either. Duels weren't paying off the way they used to. No matter the tricks and staged defeats, the fighters' true levels had quickly become common knowledge, so nobody weaker wanted to face them, and they weren't keen on fighting anyone ahead of them. That left only roughly even matches, which were no better than gambling and could leave you stuck in a med pod for days. So they were spending far more time at the farm than in the arena.

It was finally my turn to get familiar with what the place was and how it worked. I put on a protective undershirt and an amulet, then tossed a couple of bracelets into the bag with my personal belongings. Wearing them under the armour was uncomfortable, but I was going on a three-day shift, and the armour would come off in the barracks. I also packed the Rubik's cube, which was, in fact, a case for two more beetles and a recording device in one.

There wasn't a direct metro line to the farms. The underground didn't stretch that far, it ended at the outskirts, where the fields began and grain processing facilities stood. What grew here looked like ordinary wheat at first glance, but most of the work was handled by drones and automated systems. Human presence was only really needed for livestock.

From the edge of the fields, we spent another half hour rattling along a dusty road in a caterpillar crawler before reaching the pastures.

I understood why Novak had decided to keep an eye on them. Surveillance drones were constantly flickering through the skies above the grazing grounds. Officially, they were monitoring the herds, but I don't think it would take much to tap into their camera feeds and set up parallel surveillance of the cultivators.

The local 'cows' looked like giant scarabs. To be fair, I wasn't exactly an expert in beetles, but I figured that, proportionally, real scarabs ought to have larger heads. These ones were the size of a prime bull, with enormous black carapaces that gleamed with a metallic sheen, as if they'd been polished with wax. Their heads were no bigger than a rugby ball, and almost entirely made up of mouth. You couldn't even see any eyes.

They didn't have any massive, terrifying mandibles. Instead of a mouth, there was a slit stretched along the 'face', vibrating ever so slightly — hundreds of tiny hooked blades working inside. They didn't chew grass, they scraped it off the surface, along with the top layer of soil, leaving behind raw earth.

They were massive, and very slow-moving. Their legs were almost completely hidden under their shells, so you couldn't see how they moved — not from above, not from the sides. The result was a movement so smooth it was almost hypnotic.

Bao, in the weary tone of a tenth-generation cattleman, explained that these were the males. Quiet and low-maintenance. They digested everything they ate inside specialised internal chambers full of enzymes — something between a stomach and a bioreactor. Their dung was processed into fertiliser bases, their shells became raw material for biopolymers, their nervous systems and certain organs were harvested for medical use, and the meat ended up on our plates. The sweet steaks? Those were from them.

The females, on the other hand, they were one and a half times larger and far, far more aggressive. Plus, they had mandibles half a metre long with the strength of a hydraulic press. If they didn't take a liking to a male, they had no problem adding a bit of beetle meat to their diet, which was why the males were only allowed near them during mating season.

Bao said all this like he was talking to some clueless city boy.

Which stung a little. My sieve of a memory rebelled, coughing up a jumble of images that, when assembled, could pass for a guide on skinning rabbits and breaking down pigs into parts. In a past life, I'd known more about farming than he ever would.

But I definitely had no idea how to care for giant beetles.

The first to greet us on-site was the local thinhorn — John 023. He led us to the barracks and gave a short tour for first-timers, which meant me and one girl.

There wasn't much to see. Just past the airlock, the barracks had four armour-donning platforms, two sleeping quarters, and two washrooms with showers and toilets, separated by a central hallway. One side for the boys, the other for the girls. Beyond the corridor was a shared recreation room and kitchen.

The fridges were fully stocked with ready-made food, but no one was giving up fresh meat. They said the beetles' forelegs tasted like veal, and the neck — like bacon.

After the quick tour, it was time for task assignments.

We weren't allowed near the females. They were too aggressive.

The males didn't require much care, just feeding and dung collection. Aside from the soil and grass they devoured in massive quantities, the beetles needed a full set of vitamins and trace elements to grow to such sizes and maintain their weight. That part was handled by drones. Once a day, each beetle received a lump of jelly dropped right in front of it — a complete nutritional package in a single serving.

As for the dung, that was the cadets' job. It was big and heavy, even in reduced gravity. A cadet with a shovel could deal with it faster than a drone.

Then there was the matter of pasture restoration — that part was handled by machinery, which sprayed processed dung mixed with grass seeds across the stripped soil. But the machines still required supervision from cadets, since the beetles had no concept of order and didn't graze evenly. Like drunk drivers, they chewed erratic, winding paths through the grass.

The senior cadets were given observation duties. Bao and Denis were tasked with operating the drones responsible for regrowing the grass. As for me and the other girl, the newcomers, we were thrown straight into the dung detail. It was an expected humiliation.

John handed me a small cargo cart, a shovel, and a farm service app for the interface. It had a bunch of different functions, though only one of them worked for me — showing the markers for beetle dung.

The surveillance drones hovering above the pastures constantly tagged fresh piles on the map. The app let me see those markers on a minimap, and the three nearest piles were flagged in the air itself, each with a distance indicator.

The beetles dropped a lot, easily ten times more than cows. And this wasn't some sloppy pancake mess — it came out as dense, uneven brown cylinders that practically writhed with the beetles' smaller cousins. On closer inspection, I'd say they were close relatives of my own drones, just freeloaders feasting on waste. Most of them scattered the moment I started swinging my shovel.

Artem's choice suddenly made perfect sense. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of the little things here. No one would ever suspect a spy hiding in just another beetle.