World Seed

Author’s Corner: My body has determined that I shall not be allowed to sleep tonight, so therefor have another chapter! The gift that keeps on giving!

Since I had already been accepted as a crew member of the Nostromo, I was allowed onto the ship, and given my own room. As a possibly added bonus, the room I received was at the edge of the ship, meaning there was only a thick sheet of metal separating me from the vastness of space. On the one hand, this meant that if the ship was attacked and my section was damaged, I am pretty much a dead man. On the other hand, it is the perfect place to cultivate void mana!

The inside the ship was very different from X-23, as the corridors were all much smaller. On the station, there might have been enough room to drive a car down the hall, but in the ship, there was just enough room for two people to walk next to each other. I did a few estimations in my head, and figured that the ship needed at least a hundred people in order to fully function. And that was a bare minimum, not even taking into account everything else that could be needed, such as rotating shifts.

The facilities inside the ship were more like what you might find on a military vessel than a transport ship. There was a kitchen and dining area for the crew, but no tavern. There was a small recreation area which contained an interactive hard-light hologram. Aside from that and living quarters, most of the space on the ship was used for essential systems or weapons. The thing that scared me the most was that the chief engineer still seemed to think it might not be enough. I had played some space games before, and a cruiser of this caliber could generally take on a small fleet by itself.

As the chief engineer(whose name I can’t pronounce, so I’ll just call him Chief) told me, the ship was severely understaffed, especially when it came to noncombat personnel. There was no lack of soldiers aiming to join the forces at Crailor to help establish the new world, but engineers, doctors, even chefs were all in short supply. In total, there were only fifteen engineers. Three senior engineers, including Chief, were stationed at the main power core on rotating shifts. The rest of us all had the ship divided into twelve sectors, and we were each in charge of our sector. Aside from eating, we were to remain near our sector. That way, if an emergency were to occur, we could all make it back in time to tend our areas.

Sadly, my sector did not include the hologram chamber, so I was unable to play with that. Hard-light holograms were still considered a work of science fiction in the real world, so I always wanted to test them out whenever I was in a game that had them. Naturally, there was no trouble before we even left the station, so I went ahead and practiced my cultivation. Although we had not yet left the station, I could still sense the void mana slightly permeating the air around us. With Celeste’s help, I was able to quickly isolate it and began cultivating.

Before we left, Chief took each of the engineers on a tour of the ship, making sure everyone knew and was able to perform their duties. This included making us crawl through small air vents to reach enclosed equipment, and being able to force our way past stuck doors. The latter took quite a bit of my mana to work, as I had to use my Technomancy to achieve it. Hacking the door open wouldn’t have achieved anything for the situation, so I decided not to simply do that.

Thankfully, by the time we left, I had managed to cultivate 3% Void Affinity, moving it up to the top three secondary affinities that my status screen automatically tracks. I also experienced a large increase in cultivation speed as soon as we left the station, even greater than when I trained Plant Affinity in the forest.

“All crew, brace for warp speed in three, two…” After a loud voice appeared on the intercom of the ship and spoke briefly, there was a slight tug of gravity towards the back of the ship, which was quickly dampened. “Proceeding at warp, estimated time to arrival is three days and two hours.”

I shook my head at the voice, and resumed my cultivation. With the speed I was working at, I only needed a single day to get all the way up to 5% and gain the related ability.