Moon Cultivation [Sci-fi Xianxia]

The mushroom cloud was growing fast.

"Get down!" I ordered.

Even though the atmosphere was thin, it still was an atmosphere, which meant a shockwave was coming.

I hit the ground first, setting an example for the others.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw thick meteor trails slash across the sky. Three, four…

Then the blast wave hit. It rolled over us gently, lifting shredded grass into the air and rocking the bound female bug.

The meteors vanished suddenly, as if shedding their fiery tails. They never hit the ground. Instead, suspended in the air, right around the midpoint of the mushroom cloud, hung black, convex shapes with a metallic gleam.

Another beetles?

No. Everything looked like a bug to me these days. They were black, yes, but black was the official colour of the School. And these objects were too angular. Judging by the distance, they had to be at least half the size of the barracks.

They had some sort of jets.

They were spaceships.

Shit. Had the demons called in reinforcements?

Golden threads flickered between the ships.

Energy lines stretched from one to another, forming a hexagonal box and slicing the mushroom hat in half.

The top section floated upward, cut clean off, while what remained below began to spread out across the barrier like smoke against a glass lid.

"Bat!" I shouted. "What do we do?"

"Don't interfere!" my fellow disciple yelled back.

We were on our feet again, watching the scene unfold inside the energy dome.

A pillar of smoke and dust still stood there, slowly unfurling outward, filling the entire transparent box.

The spaceships were hovering with their noses inside the array, tails jutting out into the open air. From the tips of those noses, blue beams began to shine, cutting through the dust and locking onto targets hidden within.

Those targets flared: blue, red, gold, and silver.

A massive red flash lit up the dust-filled centre beneath the formation, revealing dozens of shapes suspended in the air. A split second later, a colossal violet lightning bolt cracked across the sky. From the dust burst a gigantic, almost spaceship-sized silver-green fist that smashed some insect against the energy field.

"What the hell is going on?" Denis asked.

"Who are you talking to?" Bao added.

"Demon battle," I answered the first question honestly, and ignored the second.

"But the war's still forty years away!" Denis blurted out in disbelief.

"These aren't the main forces," I said. "Or at least… I hope not."

"Those are definitely our shuttles," Bao said, pointing at the ships. "So… the demons were already here?"

"Ours?" I echoed. "Then things are going way better than I thought. Any idea what that place was?"

Denis and Bao both pulled up their interfaces to check the map.

Bao answered first.

"Meat processing facility."

"Looks like they were using it as a base," I said.

As mesmerising as the battle inside the formation looked, we had our own problems right here. First and foremost — the thinhorn puppet.

I approached the body.

"Bao, can you take control of his vines?" I asked.

He took a few seconds, then nodded.

"Yes."

"Do it."

While Bao stripped the body of its weapons, I went through its pockets.

They were empty. I'd been hoping for some kind of trophy, maybe a spatial ring, but reality let me down. A puppet didn't need personal belongings. The weapons were easy to hide under a jacket.

Still, when I sharpened my senses to the limit, I felt something on his back. It wasn't Space Qi, it was something else. I yanked off the puppet's jacket and tore open the shirt. The skin on his back was bare, but there was definitely something there.

Above our heads, two jetboards shot past in the direction of the array. Then two more. Then three more headed there and two came back.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The place was getting popular.

We got distracted just long enough not to notice that the vine restraining the female beetle had weakened. By the time it cracked, it was already too late.

We only turned our heads as the vine snapped apart, and the female spread five of her six legs wide. Only one was broken. She shifted on her shell, then opened it, using the halves of her natural armour like a lever.

Her body rocked upwards, rising almost ninety degrees. For a second, it looked like she might tip backward, but her massive mandibles slammed into the ground, dug deep, tearing up chunks of earth and grass. That movement gave her just enough momentum to roll forward onto her belly.

She somersaulted, wrenching out a mouthful of soil with her jaws, then twisted sharply and let out a shrill, disgusting screech, spreading her filthy mandibles wide.

I don't know how well those things could see, the tiny eyes were hard to spot under the mud-caked head, but she lunged straight at me and Bao, completely ignoring Denis who stood alone.

We jumped back, abandoning the thinhorn's body.

She eagerly grabbed it.

"No!" I shouted.

Whatever had been hidden on the puppet's back was now being destroyed before our eyes. Her hook-shaped mandibles weren't made for clean cuts, but they tore through flesh perfectly well.

Within seconds, the beetle had shredded the thinhorn's torso, smearing its guts all over her head. The body was still held together by the spine, but the abdomen, ribs, and one arm were already gone.

For what felt like the hundredth time today, I swore and slammed a Hook into her head. The impact disoriented her. Bao joined in, smashing his mace into her mandibles, forcing her to spit out the body remains. Denis repositioned and planted himself directly in front of her, unleashing a powerful palm projection that tore through her head and all the way down her nervous system.

The female suddenly stood straight on her legs, doubling, maybe tripling, in height, then collapsed onto her side.

Denis followed up with a few more projections, deliberately cooking her nervous system until Bao stopped him.

"That's enough! She was probably dead after the first one."

"Better safe than sorry!"

Denis stubbornly added a few more projections, making the beetle's legs twitch with each hit.

Once I was sure nothing else was going to attack us, I turned my attention to the shredded corpse.

Whatever had been in the thinhorn's back, I couldn't sense it anymore. That opportunity was definitely wasted. There was no point dragging the remains anywhere.

Meanwhile, the battle under the array continued to escalate.

The smoke and dust from the explosion still hadn't settled, in fact, there was even more of it now. The array looked like a golden glass bowl, filled to the brim with hot cocoa, inside which some kind of magic was unfolding.

Currents of that cocoa spun and boiled, and I quickly realised some powerful air cultivator was fighting inside. Silver — my own path of the Fist. Gold — the Palm. Green — Wood, mixed with something else. I couldn't see any cultivators directly, but I could've sworn that a power brawl at this level had to involve some Point and Mace cultivators as well.

But what were the red and blue beams?

Well, considering they were coming mainly from the shuttles, maybe those were just combat lasers?

I still didn't fully understand this world, even after over half a year living in it.

Suddenly, the ground beneath us trembled. To the left of the array covering the meat processing plant, five explosions went off one after another. No mushroom clouds this time, just some smoke and jets of dirt.

And then something shot out of the ground. Fast. Faster than the shuttles had fallen from the sky.

That 'something' slammed its sharp nose into a lone figure riding a jetboard in the middle of the sky.

A silver shield sphere flared up around the figure.

The sleek, sword-like spaceship and the person in its path froze, and a few seconds later, the deafening sound of a glass bell reached us.

I don't know what kind of engines were powering that ship, but its exhaust changed from blue to white, like it was maxing out, and still, it couldn't push that one person back.

Not just a person — a Cultivator with a capital C.

I have a wild guess on its personality.

The clouds around him darkened, and violet lightning danced between them. Winds rose, strong enough to buffet even us down on the ground.

The protective sphere around the cultivator sparked. The ship was attacking with something I couldn't quite see. Then he struck back.

The winds twisted the storm clouds into a tight shape, forming a giant fist. Lightning wrapped around it, and the fist fell on the starship.

It crumpled like cardboard. Still in the air, the silver hull folded in on itself, lightning rippling across the metal, and then the fist projection detonated, tearing the ship apart, scattering its remains across the fields.

A massive shockwave rolled across the sky, and what used to be alien tech began raining down on us.

"Take cover!" Denis shouted, diving first behind the carcass of the female beetle.

We followed right after him.

Denis grabbed one of her legs, still stuck in the ground.

"Let's turn her!"

Together, we rotated her until her shell was facing the explosion.

A large chunk of metal sliced through the air above us and slammed into the dirt ten metres away like a crooked knife. Bits of iron and burning plastic were falling everywhere.

"Oh, this is going to piss the beetles off like hell," Bao said.

"You care about that?" Denis barked at him. "Mate, we're in a real war here!"

"Yeah, and raging beetles mean more work, more points," Bao pointed out. "Someone's going to have to clean up this mess."

"Ha…" Denis muttered, just as light shrapnel started pinging against the beetle's shell.

That last wave of small debris seemed to mark the end of the falling wreckage, but not the end of the battle. We could still hear thunder, explosions, and impacts echoing from afar.

I cautiously peeked out from behind the beetle's body.

The sky was a full-blown storm. Lightning cracked one after another, but none of them hit the ground, they were striking targets mid-air. Flashes of silver and green flickered between the bolts. Around the central figure, still shielded by a silver cocoon, others were swarming.

How did they even survive that explosion?

Farther away from the sky-fight, a number of other cultivators on jetboards were patrolling the edges, filtering out anything that tried to escape the blast zone and fall to the ground.

Sometimes, what came out wasn't quite dead, so they made sure it became dead.

"Who the hell is that?" Denis asked.

"Novak," I said. "Ten credits says it's Novak."

"Cheapskate!" Bao grinned. "You're the rich kid here. At least bet a hundred."

"Did you hit your head or something, peasant?"

"Happens every duel," he quipped.

"Jake!" Bat called in my ear.

I'd almost forgotten he was still on the line.

"Listening!" I replied.

"Open the dung-collection app."

"What?!" I blinked. Had he hit his head too?

"Launch it! The dung collection programme!" Bat ordered. "We've temporarily reconfigured the remaining drones to track large fragments of debris."

I tore my eyes away from the battlefield and looked around. A few drones were still hovering in the sky.

"Take your friends and start gathering scrap," Bat ordered. "Focus on the big pieces. We'll send drones for the smaller stuff later. If you find anything interesting, report it to me immediately. Interesting stuff means more points. Everything gets points, but cool stuff gets more.

"Don't ask how much, that's still being decided."

I launched the app and called a cart.

"You were right," I told Bao. "Someone does have to clean this up. We've been drafted for scrap duty. Let's go."

I had a tiny sliver of hope I'd find a ring...

I definitely wouldn't be allowed to keep it, but gods, I wanted to.