Staggering out of the classroom, I slumped down for a moment against the wall trying to catch my breath. I felt like I’d run a marathon in ten minutes.

Back to lazily spinning, the energy in my dantian wasn’t even overflowing anymore. It was nearly empty, actually. I recalled what dad said about one of the guys crushing his arm as the ‘mystic bullshit’ stopped halfway through. Karen’s comments about spotters for people. Yeah, I could see how it would be necessary.

But the energy in the pool was refilling relatively quickly? The current was… Huh. It was generating energy. From where? Did I have a mini-fusion reactor or a perpetual motion machine somehow sitting in my chest?

After only another minute, the energy overflowed again and I could feel the overflow energizing me again, being absorbed. Shallow pool? But if I could make the current spin faster, it generated more power and made a bigger overflow. But took effort from me to do it? Shouldn’t I just be able to use that extra generated power to spin it then? I’m so confused. What the hell is a dantian?

I stood up again, not even shaky anymore. A sniff proved I still needed to get cleaned up though. So, shower and then figure something out. Like not losing my scholarship for breaking monitors.

~~~

Several hours later found me sitting tucked onto a comfy couch in the dorm common area, trying to research dantians again, but there was entirely too wide of a net to cast to even know where to start. I’d sent a message earlier to Karen, because an academic club really sounded like they’d at least have done the major pruning of weirdness.

I’d more or less ignored the message about next semester registration now being blocked until a miscellaneous repair fee of several thousand dollars was paid. Several tabs of actual homework requirements begged for attention as well to no avail.

“So, superhero club!” Karen dropped into a chair nearby, startling me. “You’ve decided to give up your mild mannered life and take up caped crusading. Did you want to be a hero, anti-hero, or anti-villain? Dantian Seekers isn’t currently looking to work with actual villains right now, I believe. And since I know you’ve had a power usage, sidekick is out.”

“What?” My confusion was likely written all across my face as I put my own tablet down.

“Yeah, I was going to suggest the Bouncing Gymnast as your superhero name, but you’re not quite developed enough to have the most common superpower.” Karen trailed off at the look on my face, and finally broke down laughing. “Sorry, sorry. Just messing with you. So, what’s up?”

“You’re not completely wrong.” I said, trying to reset myself past the joke with a laugh of my own. “I managed to shove my fingers through one of the glasstop keyboards earlier today trying to mess with whatever happened to me. It doesn’t really feel like it’s going to go away and if it isn’t I need to be able to trust it. Not just not notice when I’m breaking things.”

“Ow, damn.” Karen looked to my hands. “You manage to stop before you hurt yourself?”

“I chipped more clearcoat than I actually chipped in nail or even scratched my fingers. And I’d gotten past my first knuckle before Professor Jones actually caught my attention.” I waved my fingers around. “Felt like I’d run a marathon and wiped out, but not actually hurt.”

“Huh, that’s a bit different than I would have expected. I thought you would have been arms, or maybe core. Guess you did hands.” Karen murmured. I gave her another confused look. “How whatever power you get starts up. I’ll get to that in a minute. I can run through the application stuff for Dantian Seekers if you want me to?”

I nodded. “Yeah. Less researching how everyone else is doing this.”

She clicked a few things on her own tablet, pulling something up. “Alright, so first thing. Dantian Seekers requires two things. One, if someone else is attempting to do something with their power and you can, play spotter for them. Basically, be ready to help or get help. Second is you’re a Seeker like you’d be a member of a sorority. No joining, dumping a local copy of everything we have, then dropping us. Yes, we had a few people do it already. Now as part of the application you agree to a ten thousand dollar fine if you do, plus paying back anything else the Seekers pay for you.”

“Who’d be that much of an asshole?” I asked, nodding to the requirements.

Karen snorted. “Mr. Solo grinding is better, for one. Alright, auth here.” She turned the tablet to me, a single page document up with the application and fine agreement up. The fine was actually only required in the first five years if you left yourself. After that, you only agreed to pay back anything else the Seekers paid for you. Easy enough, so I used two fingers to auth sign it.

“Alright, come on. I’ll take you to superhero HQ. Otherwise known as Building 17.” I gave Karen a look. “What? It’s still superhero club, I can call it that.”

“I have homework.”

“Due tonight or tomorrow?” I shook my head. “Then come on. I can go over the rest of the basic stuff I’ve got with you on the way over there, introduce you, then let you go back to the evils of Trig and idiot projection.”

I let her pull me up, not like it was that hard to tempt me from homework. “So, basic stuff? How much isn’t basic? I mean, it’s only been six months since we’ve even known this stuff might exist.”

“The power of the human collective wikis. Well, that and apparently the Seekers got a pretty big grant, so I think there was a purchase of a lot of cloud computing to put stuff together.” She shrugged, flipping something new open on her tablet as we walked. “So anyways, first thing up is what’s being called your element. There’s a whole bunch of these, some of them really creepy. Hopefully you’re not one of those who thinks they need to drink blood or something.”

“I keep finding myself more and more confused.” And if I was supposedly one of very few not on a false path, worried.

“No, seriously. There’s a few people out there that insist they get stronger drinking other people’s blood. I saw a post a couple of months ago from someone saying they were a zombie. Haven’t seen it again. I don’t know if that’s because he killed himself, or got arrested for trying to eat brains.” Karen shuddered.

“But really, like ninety percent or more say it’s more like real elements. So, yours. Does it feel like a fire you’re pulling from, clay you break off and use, blowing air through yourself, squeezing water from something? There’s a lot of people that say things like beating metal into shape and other things. Religious crazies too, but I didn’t see you shouting scripture when you came off the bars yesterday.”

That was a lot. “Uhh, originally it was like light threads that blew through me, that I had to hold back? But now it’s more like a pool with a current.” I answered.

Now Karen was giving me an odd look. “It changed? Must be one of those weird cases. But since it’s a pool now, we’ll put down water. That gives you a focus. If that doesn’t work, you can always try air since that’s what the first one kinda sounded like.”

“Now, another basic is the only thing everyone seems to agree on is there’s stops in the power. Once you get through a stop, your power gets stronger. Gates, merdians, chakra points, nodes. Whatever you want to call them.”

I paused after we got into the building. “Which one is right? Or least wrong, or whatever?” Because this now sounded a lot like ‘throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks.’

“All of them, I think?” Karen shrugged. “I can’t use it, though I hope someone figures out how to teach it because I’d like to. But different ways work better for different people. Hold on, you’ll see. We’ve got a converted lecture hall and a couple of offices.”

I don’t know what I expected when Karen walked me into the hall, but dozens of full sized display panels showing a mix of scaled up old papers and clips of random cartoons was not it. Each of the panels showed a person with spots highlighted, some weird energy system, or a mix of the two. At one of the displays a guy had some full body scan he was flipping different super-imposed images onto, looking at something between them.

Elsewhere in the room there were desks and tables, a couple of them with people sitting at them looking at personal tablets.

A polite cough drew my attention back to the entrance again, where a guy was sitting at one of the desks. “Nicole Firen? I’m Danny Sidre, President of the Dantian Seekers. Your application automatically was sent over to me once you signed.”

Well, that at least explained how he guessed my name. “That’s me.” I looked back out over the room again. “Uhh, I’m not exactly sure what...”

“I needed the props, so I hadn’t gotten to this yet, Danny.” Karen offered from beside me. “Like I was saying, all of them seem to work so it’s a matter of figuring out which one is best for you. And when I say all of them, there’s been people able to use everything from old Chinese stuff to anime and everything in between.” She waved a hand towards the displays. “So you can look up different things that have worked and see what works for you.”

Mystic bullshit. I thought to myself with Dad’s overtones.

“We also can get full body CT scans or a few other things, if you want to try to map it directly onto yourself.” Danny added, motioning to the guy still superimposing different features onto what I now figured to be himself. “Generally, if you can give me a good argument for some test I can try to arrange it.”

“This is a little overwhelming, and quite a bit stranger than I was expecting.” I offered.

Danny smiled. “Don’t worry, I understand. And yeah, it’s definitely a lot.” He typed something on his screen. “Alright, I flagged your school account for the Seeker’s app, so you can pull it onto your tablet whenever. It’s a little barebones, but you can see who’s up for spotting you if you’re going to try your power purposely, or register any times you’d be available to spot for others. Right now you’ve only got search functionality for research, you can’t download anything. You’ll have to come here for the actual information. After a month, local caching gets unlocked.”

“So, welcome to Dantian Seekers.” Danny said, before pointing at Karen. “Not superhero club.” She laughed then pouted.

Figuring any of this out was going to take me a while.