Misbegotten Memories

Chapter 284

Over the next several days, they went out on several patrols.  There had been a few casualties during Hector’s absence, making his return especially welcome to the troops.  Beyond that, the renewed optimism brought about by the budget surplus inspired the soldiers christening his team with a sobriquet of sorts.

They were now known as the Miracle Squad.  The team was composed of Hector, Rover Fred, the Titans Ajax and Nestor, the Xian Isabel and Esther, and the Sage of Restoration.  It was a walking HR poster for diversity.  Xian, Titan, Jinn, and Arahant were represented.  All they were missing was an Orisha and an Alfar to have the complete set.  Well, also a User, but their existence was still being kept confidential.

Days passed.  Then months.

Miracle Squad accompanied every patrol that left the gates of Stronghold Gamma.  None of their escorts died.  The Xian on the team cultivated like mad while outside.  They bonded during free time by spending time together at the garage so Fred could be part of their hangouts.

Hector visited Union Central only a couple of times to receive some Fufu soup from the cafe.  Otherwise he remained in place.  His life was as simple and satisfying as it could possibly be.  He was growing stronger, he was spending time with friends, and he was fighting in a worthy cause – without taking undue risks.

It was a rare occurrence in his life when he recognized the good times were happening before they ended.  That was largely helped along by the fact that he’d seen so many people die in the past.  The wider war did not go well, he knew.  The successes on Aes were not true victories.  They didn’t retake any land – the Reconquest still failed to live up to its name.  They simply spent less lives to hold the small amount of ground claimed by humanity.

He liked to think that every day Union Central became stronger as a true world.  Maybe the Users would tilt the balance.  If not, then they could at least prolong the final days of the species.  Countless people receiving extra time was a good thing.  If winning wasn’t a real option, then delaying the inevitable for as long as possible could content him.

That and growing stronger.  Hector consumed resources and obsessively trained his domain and aura.  He’d adapted to less and less sleep over time.  Even without the One Minute Nap Technique, he felt well rested after spending just an hour unconscious.  It had mostly been a mental adaptation.  His mind had long since reached the peak of level seven.

His mind, body, and domain apertures were all close to the peak.  Given how much cosmic energy he threw at them, he felt they should have been there long since.  Yet that didn’t bother him much.  He was making steady progress and that was what counted.

What did bother him was his aura.  It barely seemed to budge no matter how much time he dedicated to it.  Perhaps if he visited Union Central the survey results would reveal some slight increase he couldn’t notice on his own.  But visits home weren’t on the schedule considering he didn’t want to waste the energy on his transit sphere.

Over time, Hector dedicated more and more of his time towards his aura.  It was clear that he’d reach the peak soon in his other apertures.  The main problem was the lack of relevant techniques.  He had Sweaty Fire for his domain, which was a phenomenal shortcut for someone willing to throw cosmic energy at it.  He had consumed plenty of resources for his body.  There was plenty of chaos and miasma on the mental band.

For his aura, he had plenty of techniques.  Pumping it in aural cultivation had once been something he considered an exercise of sorts, though he didn’t count it any longer.  There was also stretching his aura as large as he could – again, not a real technique.  In Tian Tower, people would resist being squeezed by cables.  That was moderately effective at lower levels.  It wouldn’t do anything for him now beyond waste his time.  Resisting the pressure of miasma with an aura could have been a valid exercise if he was able to walk outside by himself.  He was too important to the cause to go without an escort, however, and he wouldn’t force anyone to face miasma exposure when he was capable of converting it.

The Reverse Priming Technique from the Shaocheth family’s general library was slow in the extreme, remarkable only because it didn’t waste any energy.  The Bursting Dam Technique from Isabel initially provided a lot of benefits, but those plateaued long since.  It now mostly ate up energy.  There was only a single other technique he had that could help his aura develop.

The dreaded Sandwich Technique.

He’d come up with a lot of analogies to explain to himself why he refused to do it.  Slamming his finger in a car door hard enough to break the bone.  Catching his manhood in the zipper of his pants hard enough to take out a chunk of flesh.  Pouring bleach into his open eyes.  Submerging his hands into boiling oil.  The theme was very simple.  It was things you’d have to be stupid to do the first time and an absolute nut job to try twice.  The pain was that bad.

Every couple of days he would consider whether he could get drunk enough to use the Sandwich Technique again at full intensity.  Half measures didn’t get much.  He knew that from experience.  Days of agony for little benefit.  You either went all in or shouldn’t bother at all.  Thus… alcohol.  The traditional solution to the problem of 'I am too smart to do this very foolish thing'.

Hector wasn’t sure what stopped him from that course of action.  He liked to think it was because he didn’t want to be out of commission when the patrols depended on Miracle Squad.  That was what he told himself every time he abandoned the idea.  The truth, he suspected, had more to do with fear.  While unpleasant to admit, he could not deny it was a very understandable position.

There were many aspects of cultivation that felt adjacent to torture.  Endless sessions of monotonous energy restoration.  Consuming disgusting resources.  Challenging aperture training.  Hector did it all and even enjoyed it to some degree.

But the Sandwich Technique was a whole other beast.

Finally, out of frustration, Hector turned his attention elsewhere.  He went all in on body enhancement.  Night after night, he invested his energy reserves into his body using the cold forged method.  Aware that Matthias had never consumed a resource and still managed to reach nearly the peak of level eight, Hector did not slack off on his own mission to reach the peak of seven.

His bones and tendons were completed with resources from the Zing auction long since.  Then he’d consumed some small amount of the Mother Elixir, which provided broad enhancement to his entire body.  Since then, he’d finished his circulatory system and his respiration.  After that, he’d switched to using the flood method instead of continuing with digestion, then muscles, then nerves, and finally flesh.  His primary reasoning was that he didn’t intend to imbalance his muscles.  Given he was skipping the muscles, the digestive system didn’t grant any immediate benefits worth focusing his attention there.

Now, though, Hector wanted to push forward as quickly as possible.  So he started at the tongue, went down the throat, hit the stomach, then the small and large intestines before moving on to the secretion organs.  It went fast due to the copious amounts of energy he gained while out on patrol.

Then came muscles.  As tempted as Hector felt to go out of order at that point, he intended to follow the best practices.  However, he did innovate a few minor changes to the method.  Instead of saturating individual muscles to the peak before moving on, he partially saturated groups of muscles.  He’d do all muscles attaching through the hips ten percent above their current enhancement before increasing another ten percent.

In that fashion, he hardly noticed any imbalances.  They were kept small enough that he could subconsciously adjust on the fly.  It did take longer than following the more basic version, but not having his combat capabilities degraded in a war zone was worth a slight delay.

He completed the entire lower body before moving to the core muscles.  The reasoning for his ordering was that he was more likely to need to run than punch.  His primary method of combat involved forming cables with his domain, after all.  And if his reserves dropped low, he’d avoid flying to retreat on foot instead.

Following his trunk, he did the neck and all the small muscles of the head.  Finally, he brought the muscles of the arms up to full strength.  The cold forged method had taxed his patience a bit, even if it had been great for training his steadily improving mental sense.  By this point, there was only his nerves and his flesh to go.

But the extended focus on his body was burning him out.  Hector wanted a quick win for the serotonin boost, so he chose to go hard on his mental strengthening next.