Moon Cultivation [Sci-fi Xianxia]

I spent the entire first day diligently shovelling dung, avoiding the urge to activate any drones. For the first hour, I kept glancing around, trying to see if anyone was watching me. A fairly pointless exercise, really, a whole swarm of surveillance drones hovered overhead, and in my black-and-yellow armour, standing out in the middle of the beetle fields, I was about as inconspicuous as a flare in a cave.

I gave up on that by the start of the second hour.

Shovelling dung wasn't exactly hard work. I was at the Second Stage, gravity here was reduced, I was used to moving my limbs around during training, and the armour helped offset the weight of the dung. The job was more humiliating than physically demanding. I even had time to train some techniques — I used Monkey to move between the piles and split my consciousness without boosting my brain activity. It didn't take much mental effort to shovel, and whenever I did accelerate my mind, one part of it inevitably got bored and started doing something idiotic.

By the end of the day, I'd earned twenty points. Not bad, considering it hadn't even been a full shift. Dung was surprisingly profitable.

That evening, most of us gathered in the barracks, where a small queue formed at the kitchen. The impatient ones settled for pre-made meals, but Denis cooked three massive steaks with herbs and spices for me, Bao, and himself, while Bao tossed together some sort of salad.

Our rich boy, who not long ago was being fed by the family chef, turned out to be pretty handy with a knife. To be fair, slicing and mixing vegetables didn't exactly count as cooking, but I was still surprised by how readily he did it. He and Denis worked like a well-oiled machine.

I could have taken advantage of their generosity, but that wouldn't have been fair. Somewhere in the ragged mess of my memory, I knew how to cook stews and soups, though they all had the same basic components: meat, carrots, and onions. Earth ingredients. None of which were common here. Even the meat tasted different.

Except the steaks. Those were one hundred per cent veal.

"How long did it take you to get used to the food?" I asked.

"About three weeks," Denis admitted. "At first my steaks came out raw. Then Bao started overcooking them."

"Give me a few days," I said. "I'll try to make a stew."

After dinner, the recreation room was packed. At the big table, they were playing poker for units, using a portable wallet as the pot. Smaller tables had chess, go, and shogi laid out. Denis and Bao chose poker.

I ended up playing chess with the unfamiliar girl.

She absolutely wiped the floor with me by the tenth move, and that was after I'd boosted my brain. I bowed out with as much dignity as I could muster and declared myself done.

I returned to the sleeping quarters, where there were six bunk beds, and climbed into mine. This time, I got the top, which was great. No one could see what I was doing up there. Well, unless there were hidden cameras under the ceiling. So, just to be safe, I made a little show of going to the bathroom and brushing my teeth. All part of the plan to leave my bag 'accidentally' open. Then I 'went to sleep' — meaning I closed my eyes and activated Thousand Sparks of Awareness, Mind Parallelisation, and launched the drone link app.

I had four drones available for simultaneous connection, but realistically, I could only control one properly.

The first and second drones were inside my armour, and the armour was in storage. The third and fourth were in the Rubik's cube, tucked in my bag.

I linked to the fourth.

The cube automatically opened its compartment. I unfolded the beetle's limbs and cautiously climbed out. Above me, the unzipped opening of the bag loomed like the curved ceiling of a training dome. I extended the wings and took off, tilting them upwards and steering toward one of the corners near the ceiling.

The buzzing of the wings drowned out one stream of consciousness, and was still audible in the other. Thankfully, the flight was short.

The beetle latched onto a technical protrusion in the wall — a perfect spot. From there, it had a clear view of the entire sleeping area. I nudged its body slightly, adjusting the angle like a camera mount.

But I quickly noticed one of the cultivators, who'd been reading something on his tablet, sit up and start glancing around the room, turning his head from side to side.

Did he hear it?

He definitely did.

I ordered the beetle to freeze. The cadet lazily swept his eyes past it, gave the room another vague look, then flopped back onto his bed.

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I'd intended to scan the entire barracks, get a proper look at everything, but I wasn't about to risk blowing my cover now.

I left the beetle in that shadowy corner, as a mobile surveillance cam. If someone spotted it, they shouldn't be able to link it to me, and I could still reconnect to it whenever I wanted.

Beetle number three, I'd hidden behind the kitchen extractor fan earlier that morning. Beetles one and two were stationed on the roofs — one on the barracks, the other on the nearest technical building. The one where the dung was processed into fertiliser. Cadets almost never went inside, and the whole process was automated.

The only sentient being with access to the machinery was John.

Could the thinhorn be working with the demons — or even be one of them?

I'd seen enough by now not to rule it out.

I needed to get inside the facility, but I didn't have the connection range from the pasture to control the beetle. And I couldn't come up with a plausible excuse to hang around there too long. The problem was, the dung carts moved automatically, they didn't require an escort once they were loaded. They could carry a passenger, and there was a manual mode if someone wanted to play pilot, but there was no actual need to operate them manually. A new one simply arrived once the last one filled up.

My best shot came at lunchtime. The signal from the barracks reached the fertiliser building just fine, so I split my consciousness: one half lazily chewing a juicy steak, the other waiting for the automatic doors below to open.

The moment they did, the beetle zipped inside and, out of habit, tucked itself into a corner near the ceiling.

Unexpectedly, what I'd taken for a structural protrusion turned out to be a surveillance camera. The instant I realised, I panicked slightly and veered off course. Then I thought, no, that's even more suspicious, swerved again, and landed right on the camera lens.

Naturally, I slid up and off it, settling just above, making sure not to block the view and risk some operator deciding to send someone in to swat the annoying bug.

I decided to stop there. The observation spot was perfect, and my cube was recording footage from all four drones. All I had to do was review the video in fast-forward before going to sleep.

Not that I could catch any details at that speed, the important thing was that there didn't seem to be any hidden rooms in either the barracks or the fertiliser facility. Detailed analysis of the footage wasn't my responsibility.

Mine was to sign up for another job in a different department once this shift ended. The most promising place, to my mind, was the slaughterhouse — a massive complex, with plenty of room to hide all sorts of things. Still, I couldn't rule out the warehouse, the cart and drone hangar, the feed mixer, or a dozen other technical facilities.

With the beetles in position, I was more or less resting and studying local cooking recipes. On the third day, I prepared a goulash from the neck, hind legs, and vegetables.

Denis wasn't impressed by my culinary efforts, and, truth be told, neither was I. There was too much sweetness in both the meat and the vegetables, despite my attempts to mask it with spicy seasoning. Bao, on the other hand, was thrilled with the sweet-and-hot combination.

It was our last lunch in the barracks. After that, we were due to return to the dorms, and there wasn't really any work left, so we just lazed about on our bunks. That was when one of the junior thinhorns, also named John, John 214, came to call for help.

"Need help!" he barked, bursting into the sleeping quarters. "You, you, and you..." He picked four cadets and explained that a few of the females had gone wild. One had flown into the second pasture, another into third. They had to be cut off from the males before they tore the whole herd apart. Then he asked for volunteers.

Since both Bao and Denis were among the chosen, I raised my hand too. My friends immediately told the thinhorn they were taking me with them.

"Suit up and get to the field," the thinhorn ordered.

Bao switched back into his generational cattleman mode and explained that, in cases like this, we had to move in groups of three. That way, the female wouldn't dare attack. And if she charged anyway, a few solid blows would quickly cool her temper. There wasn't any real danger for a Second Stage cultivator.

The thinhorn sent each group a geolocation marker and disappeared. We rushed off to gear up.

We split from the other team at the barracks exit, but by the time we reached the designated spot, it was all over. The thinhorn had handled it himself.

A massive female, her mandibles thick and spiked like my thighs, was lying on her shell, rocking side to side, trying to break free from the vines binding all six of her legs. Outstretched like that, legs that were usually hidden beneath the shell, they extended nearly two metres, making the beast look truly gigantic.

Her mandibles clicked in frustration, and an angry chittering hiss escaped the gap between them.

We approached, studying the monster more closely.

"You broke her legs," Bao observed matter-of-factly. "Planning to write her off? And, by the way, where are the male carcasses?"

"Ha!" the thinhorn chuckled, shaking his head. "Smart lad, noticed right away."

Bao didn't get it. None of us did. But then he turned to me and asked—

"Are you working as a group, or are they unaware?" he asked, nodding toward my friends.

Bao and Denis exchanged a look, and a chill ran down my spine.

"I don't know what you're talking about…" I said, already opening my contact menu and trying to call Novak. I didn't immediately notice the contacts were greyed out. The interface had to flat-out inform me I was outside the network for me to realise just how deep in it I was.

Not only was the comms link down, I couldn't assess his level either. The interface refused to give me any information on him. Not that I believed it would've been accurate if it did. If Novak's trainees could disguise themselves as others, then demons were surely even better at it.

"Oh, spare me. You really thought I'd miss those bugs?" the demon said, "I believe, your friends know nothing. But they're here because of you. I think I'll kill one of them, to prove I'm serious, and keep the other to use as leverage."

"What the hell is going on?" Bao snapped, unable to hold back any longer.

I didn't know what to do. I hadn't been issued a panic button, the signal was blocked, and the least I could do was clue the guys in on what we were dealing with.

"Our thinhorn seems to have much thicker horns than he lets on," I said bluntly. "That's a demon in someone else's body. The female never escaped, he brought her here himself. All of this was just to get me alone for a little chat."