The next day everyone gathered in the courtyard. Jessy looked rather ragged today. Apparently she’d been dragged into the lab at some point for her hypno-memory implant and experienced some things she’d have been better off not ever having witnessed.

According to Skay, she very willingly jumped at the chance to join the Brotherhood. The face she made when he said that showed a great deal of grievance however, so James decided to take it with grain of salt.

The now ever present Harvy was lifelessly standing in a very ghoulish manner nearby with flies crawling over his yellowed eyeballs. He didn’t even seem to notice though and nobody wanted to approach him to let him know because he smelled dead, so he was left like that.

Once Hao arrived, Skay dumped out all the books he’d borrowed yesterday and then he and James launched into a discussion with Hao about cultivation realms.

Through their discussions James and Skay only grew more enthusiastic, whispering and muttering with each other every now and then like two old house wives gossiping about that bitch who’s been ‘hitting on their man’ while sitting right in front of said bitch drinking coffee.

Jessy the poor girl only grew more confused as the discussion progressed. She didn’t understand all these weird terms like spirit power condensation or true spirt formation.

She gleaned a few clues in the beginnings but soon felt so lost her head started hurting. Eventually Hao had to leave and the duo returned to the lab. Jessy, feeling incredibly left out, chased the boys to their lab. When she arrived they were crowded around a computer screen pointing at something and laughing in the exact same way. Madly.

The lighting of the lab was very dim until James slammed a hand down on a button and the lab began to be bathed in blue flashing lights and ‘zzt zzt’ sounds from a spot hidden behind a curtain. From where she stood, she could only see a strange shadow being bathed on the other side of the curtain. From where James and Skay stood they could see whatever was happening on the other side and whatever it was it only made their sickening smiles grow wider.

Slightly curious but mostly apprehensive, Jessy approached the pair while they discussed and finally got a glimpse past the curtain. There, in a metal wire mesh ball, was a very wet little blue ferret writhing around with a green wire attached to him leading to the ground. The ball was suspended by a green rope made of vines and the little round metal cage it was trapped in was surrounded by a multitude of metal rods all shooting massive arcs of lightning onto the cage from every direction.

‘Torture! My god! There torturing that poor little animal to death!’ Jessy, with that single thought, ran forward and smashed the big red button James had just pushed, cutting off the lightning.

“James you disgusting piece of shit. I knew that dried up old fuck was mad but I never thought you’d be so fucking disgusting as to electrocute such an adorable little creature. Have you no shame?!”

While yelling at James she started moving forward and pulling the rods away from the cage to get in and free the little ferret.

James wicked smile fell when Jessy pushed past him towards the cage. “Jess you bitch, what the hell is shame? Can I eat it? Can I sell it? If I can sell it, I probably sold it a long time ago! Who needs something useless like shame? Also Jess, I wouldn’t...” before James finished Jess had already reached the little blue ferret but the moment she parted the wire mesh cage and touched it Little Blue let out a loud screech and Jessy was shot back across the room like a rocket, smashing into the wall of the lab.

Seeing Jessy slumped on the floor shaking and trying to get her feet under herself James put a very innocent and confused expression on his face. “Should I have started with don’t touch the ferret and discussed shame afterwards?” He very shamelessly asked Dr. Skay.

Skay of course, being as mad as he is, chose to play along as well. “Shame? Can I eat that?”

Once the little ferret had been rudely pulled out of euphoria by Jessy it started screeching and shaking the cage, until finally the ghoul had reset the rods. James then smashed the big red button again and laughed madly with Skay as the flashing of the lightning painted their faces especially malevolent.

Jessy only now truly felt like she’d stepped into a whole new world as she climbed to her feet watching the ferret role and jump around inside the cage and James and Skay laughing in their madness. “What the fuck is actually going on in here?”

James and Skay ignored her and once their laughing died down James leaned back, sitting on the bench and looked to Skay with his arms crossed. “I doubt Little Blue will ever gain the element of True Lightning because he’s already entered the True Spirit stage and it’s too late to try and teach him the wind element. He’s fairly close now though just when he uses all the spirit energy he’s accumulated in his body in one go. Hmm ... We can perhaps try it on one of the other forest hoppers? For now though, let’s just leave him in his cage to soak up all the electricity. With any luck he can push half way through to the Spirit Palace in at least a month. If we design a better method of creating electricity than these old reverse engineered pressure pumps we may be able to speed that up.”

As he spoke Skay was rummaging around in a wooden box filled with an assortment of strange and wonderful gadgets he spent the whole night building. Finally he pulled out James’ Gau Compass and passed it back to him. “I finished having a look at your compass last night. Spent almost half my time on the stone actually and still barely understand it. What I do know though is it’s a superconductor. Basically zero energy loss in energy transfer, like excited electrons aren’t even given a chance to jump into an atoms orbit and just get pulled forward. It’s almost as if this material isn’t so much conducting electricity, as it’s allowing it to bridge a space between both ends. Bloody thing doesn’t even heat up or create electro-magnetic waves but can release energy pulled through it at any position on its surface. Makes it very dangerous.

“The danger is outweighed by the pros though. If we were to make a cable out of this it could essentially carry an infinite level of current and voltage to any location instantaneously. This material is truly mind blowing and if I really wanted to understand it I’d need another 20 years working by myself. More aggravating is how exactly it fucking find places. If I had to guess it tracks a location by some kind of magnetic frequency that your mind subconsciously records when it memorises a place. That’s why the stronger your memory when you envision a place the more accurate the compass is. The reason tracking items or people only works with lightning elements is because it needs to charge its little black-iron box up to create a strong enough electro-magnetic field that it can sense the changes in position. Or something. That’s only my best guess. That would mean the more lightning affinity spirit energy you pump into it when placing a vision the more accurate it will be. Long distance tracking with it would almost be impossible though. It would probably work if I hooked you up to nuclear reactor and we made it an even bigger box and had a bigger spirit stone.”

Finished with his explanation on the properties of the Lightning Seeking Spirit Stone he turned to the Ghoul. “Harvy, get ready, I want to examine every possible reaction your body makes when you condense a True Spirit and break your Spirit Barrier.”

“Yes, Master.” Harvy nodded and moved to the operating table. Stripping off his clothes he laid on the table in only a loin cloth and Skay started attaching a bunch of electrodes all over his body then placed a mesh cap on his head. Jessy seeing this wandered over to James who was in deep thought and gave him a push.

“What exactly are they testing over there James?” Jessy asked. She too was curious about the stage in cultivation in which a breakthrough is supposed to be achieved as eventually she hoped to reach that stage.

“Brain waves mostly. Also physiological reactions during breakthrough. We’re trying to understand exactly what happens when your conscious mind condenses spirit energy then attacks and defeats you subconscious mind. If our theory’s correct, either you lose and remain sealed at the spirit barrier until you can break it or you break it and gain true conscious awareness of your spirit realm.” James then pointed over to a monitor with 4 wavy lines and one blank line similar to a heart monitor. Then continued to explain.

“From what the old madman’s explained to me the first few initial stages of cultivation can be described as taking full, conscious control of your own mind. When you’re running around or trying to control spirit energy inside your body that is considered the duty of your conscious mind and reflected in the Beta brain waves which is this top line, the most active line when you’re awake. At this level you essentially can only slightly control spirit energy inside your own body and can’t materialise it or manipulate it outside of your body. This line is also the weakest in magnitude but highest in frequency.”

He then pointed at the second line on the monitor. “This is your Alpha wave, it has a lower frequency than your beta waves but has a higher magnitude. We believe it reflects your Spirit Realm or rather the gateway between your conscious mind and subconscious mind. It also spikes when Harvy used his spirit energy so I’m of the opinion this level is a part of your subconscious that assists your conscious mind in controlling spirit energy. This is also where spirit energy is accumulated and the reason its storage area seems so limited is because your subconscious mind has created a barrier to prevent the spirit energy from effecting it and messing up your head. Or so we believe. So far we still don’t know what spirit energy is but we can tell it’s not any form of matter or energy we’ve observed on Earth. Skay’s convinced it’s ‘dark-matter’ and I’m slightly inclined to believe him. How exactly it came to be that a person’s mind can gather and control this dark matter is beyond me, so for now were still calling it spirit energy.

“In addition to protecting the subconscious, we believe the barrier creates an opportunity for the conscious mind to gain control of all the spirit energy it’s collecting in the Spirit Realm. If you manage to crack the barrier and still haven’t gained sufficient control it can affect your subconscious mind much like poor old Harvy over there.”

When he said this far he looked at the ghoul on the operating table saying “yes master” and singing the praises of the Dark Lord. He then quietly sighed, shaking his head and looked back to Jessy. “Normally such a situation is incredibly rare because your subconscious builds its barrier to be greater than the relative strength of your spirit energy and thus limits its growth until you can consciously keep it under control. We’re not sure if everyone’s spirit realm is the same size but we suspect its size is a reflection of the combined strength of your conscious and subconscious mind. Some people may step into the True Spirit Realm vastly more powerful than others, but again, only a theory for now till we have some more subjects.”

He then pointed at the third wavy line. “This line represents Theta waves and is considered to be your subconscious mind. This guy’s job is things like breathing and keeping the heart beating but also other things like your own superstitions, fears, joys, prejudices and assumptions. Your subconscious mind keeps a track of all these mundane things for you and influences your conscious mind with them in your day to day life. Although we doubt we can just delete our prejudices or alter our own character once we break through to the subconscious in later realms we suspect we gain an incredibly fine degree of control over other things.

“The journey of realms between the barrier and the level in which our subconscious mind and conscious minds assimilate each other is the most important however and considered the foundation of one’s power much later into their cultivation, unfortunately Hao couldn’t tell us much past the 3rd realm which is the Spirit Palace.

“Now back to our realm, once you break through the barrier there will be nothing holding back the progress of gathering as much fuckin’ spirit energy as you want because your Spirit realm is infinite. The catch being that you have to be able to control it and not let it influence your subconscious mind. If that happens it’s referred to as cultivation deviation but we don’t know shit all about that yet apart from Harvy’s ... Ahhm, condition.”

Jessy’s face scrunched up cutely and her eyes spun around in her head as she tried to wrap her brain around all this stupid sounding science stuff. Finally she couldn’t help asking about the True Spirit. “James, you’ve told me the spirit barrier is a shield your subconscious mind makes to protect itself. What about the this true spirit thing? When Hao described it he said you had to condense your spirit energy into a true spirit. What in the fuck does that even mean? He says it like it’s something we should all just know!”

James had a smile split his face and then started patting Jessy’s head like a dog. “There, there Jess. I know not all of us finished high school.” He then spun around and walked back to the computer to sit on a chair before Jessy even had the chance to try and scratch his face off.

“I’m sure by now you’ve entered your spirit realm a few times, played with your energy and noticed, when your there you’re just a ghostly, ethereal body with no other sensations than what feeling your spirit energy gives you. No doubt even in that cute little head of yours you’ve discovered that it’s a great deal easier to control energy in your spirit realm than out here trying to control it in your body. I believe that it’s because the conscious mind simply isn’t strong enough to properly control the spirit power straight away and requires practice much like anything else in regards to your body, think of it like muscle memory if you want.

“I also believe the true spirit is a reflection of your subconscious and once you merge with it in the spirit realm it will assist you subconsciously with your control. The old madman’s of the opinion that it’s not to do with practice and subconscious control but is because the subconscious mind is purposely limiting your conscious minds ability to control spirit energy outside your spirit realm and once you merge with your true spirit it releases that control.

“The reason I mention that is because regardless of which theory is correct, your control of spirit energy, even in your spirit realm, is based off both your knowledge, experience and understanding of how the element operates, which is gained from either learning about it second hand like going to school or memorising their meditation mantras or learning about it first hand through experience. It seems learning about it through first-hand experience greatly increases your level of control in comparison to second hand.

“Amusingly, control over ‘your’ element can be trained by gaining more knowledge on how it affects the human body. Or it could simply be trained by constantly creating twisted sexual fantasies in your head and having an excessive amount of depraved animalistic sex. The more you feed your lust the stronger your control will grow and the faster your spirit power will grow in meditation.”

At the mention of her spirit nature, and worse still, the way to train her control of it, Jessy could hardly contain her shame as her face blushed bright red and she averted her gaze towards the floor looking quite upset. Seeing this, James frowned then got up from his chair, took two steps forward and slapped Jessy across the face.

It wasn’t a hard slap but it was enough to rock her head back and bring tears to her eyes. Once she regained her footing her rage rocketed to the sky and she prepared herself to strike out and beat James into pulp. “James you piece of fucking shit! Just what the...”

James then blurred and slapped her again. “Shut up! Jess, do you not fuckin’ get it? Your element is the fuckin’ reflection of your inner nature. If you’re so bloody ashamed by yourself you’ll never become a strong cultivator. If you can’t even fuckin’ muster the willpower to accept who you are and strive forwards your shame will tie you down like a bunch of fuckin’ shackles and chains.

“If you don’t have the strength of will to accept your own true nature then you will never even approach condensing your True Spirit and you’ll never fuckin’ get a chance to break your spirit barrier. You’re like a spoiled fuckin’ princess that can’t fuckin’ accept that deep inside your just a horny bitch and even if you had another element, this one will most likely always be your most powerful. Show some self-respect for your true feelings! Otherwise, get the fuck out of our lab and stop wasting my time explaining all this shit!”

Finished his tirade of monologue he swished the sleeve of his long grey robe and sat back down in his chair watching Jessy’s reaction with a dissatisfied face. In the corner of his eye he saw Skay giving him a huge thumbs up while stabbing a suspicious looking shiny rod covered in cables and some glistening liquid into the general area of the Ghouls bum. James almost couldn’t contain a straight face as he laughed maniacally inside both because of the poor ghoul getting probed by the madman and because they’d just stepped into the next phase of Project Cockgobbler.

Jessy’s face became complex again until eventually it settled into an angry looking contemplation and then finally settled on a resolute expression. Once she’d calmed down she could see some sense in what James had said, besides, as far as she knew she couldn’t change it even if she wanted to, so why not just accept it. Once she came to this conclusion she decided to urge James into finishing his explanation of the True spirit. “I’m sorry James your right. Please finish your explanation.”

James put on a gentle smile like a proud parent, gave a sharp nod and a ‘good good’ then continued speaking. “Good, let’s not haf’ta have this conversation again. The Dark Brotherhood doesn’t support mortals or freeloaders. Now where was I? Hmm ... Ah, right! The reason I spoke about your spirit nature and spirit power control, is because when you create your true spirit your actually taking part of your spirit energy that you’ve been accumulating and creating a new spirit body in your spirit realm. This spirit body is a reflection of your affinities and subconscious mind and was described to us as ‘a shadow of your soul’ or something.

“Once that happens, and you merge with your brand new spirit body, your control over the spirit energy in your Spirit Realm increases dramatically and you can even gain better control outside your body. To such a degree actually, that you can fuckin’ materialise your elemental spirit energy as natural laws and shit.” James grew a little excited at this point just imagining being able to start training a spirit aura. After a short sigh of longing he continued.

“Essentially, we think you’re fusing your alpha brain waves and your beta brain waves or rather fusing your conscious state of mind and your meditative mind together leaving you in a state where your mind is constantly in both states. Consciousness maintains the benefits of being in meditation and vice versa. So far this is our theory on the True Spirit and the Spirit Barrier.”

At this point Jenny started scratching her head confusedly. James sighed, shook his head and then tried to explain more simply. “What it means, Jess, is that the true spirit is made from your control over your spirit energy and once you make it you step into it, go through a whole ... thing, and then use your brand new spirit body to control the rest of your spirit energy and break open your barrier.”

Jessy’s face scrunched up like she’d just been insulted and gave James ‘the look’. “I get it, bastard! Don’t treat me like I’m an idiot! So you fuse your brain waves into one and it gives you enough control over your spirit energy so you can break your barrier.”

James gave a sagely nod then stood up when he realised Skay was nearly ready. Harvy now looked to be in a rather sorry state with needles stabbing into him everywhere and cables running all around the place. Once he’d finished, Skay excitedly moved towards James and started watching the screen with Harvy’s brain waves. He pulled out his Black-Pad and started writing some notes, hit a few buttons then gave a loud yell. “Alright Harvy you can begin consolidation of your true spirit.”

Harvy gave an “mmphf!” through the ... whatever that thing in his mouth was, and then closed his eyes to enter into his Spirit Realm. The moment he closed his eyes the alpha brain waves rapidly started decreasing in magnitude and the beta brain waves inversely began to increase dramatically in magnitude. Finally after a short time of this they mostly levelled with exception to an occasional flare in magnitude from both brain waves simultaneously.

This repeated for a good hour or so until eventually the alpha and beta brain wave magnitudes both simultaneously went through the roof and Harvy’s body began to spasm and shake on the operating table. Jessy reached out a hand and pointed to the bottom most line which was now no longer dead flat but jumping about dramatically as well. “What brain wave is that one meant to be?” Jessy asked naively.

Skay’s face changed and his fingers become a blur of light across his pad as he explained. “That would be Gamma waves lass. They’re usually dead flat because hardly any brain activity operates at this frequency but when they do react it’s because the Ghoul is having a moment of enlightenment and his brains going through the roof processing it. This suggests the act of fusing with your True spirit really does create an experience that vastly increases your control and understanding of your spirit energy.

“I’ve never seen Gamma waves this dramatic, I suspect our boy Harvy’s flash of insight may only be so powerful because of his already heightened control over death. That indicates that the level of control used when creating your true spirit may actually affect the level of control you gain after fusing with it. That would suggest my initial hypothesis that your subconscious was limiting you was wrong and give more credit to the boy’s hypothesis that the subconscious mind assists you once you merge with its shadow.” Skay then glanced at the smug looking James and gave a harrumph.

After another good half hour, Harvy’s brainwaves settled back down, only this time the magnitude of his alpha and beta brain waves was mostly synchronised even though there frequencies weren’t.

James cupped his chin as the wheels of his mind spun crazily. ‘So it appears that instead of merging the thought patterns they remain separated but operate at the same level of magnitude as if they were both the main state of mind. Is that like creating a copy of yourself inside your head? Hmm that doesn’t sound right. Wait, old Hao mentioned that your true spirit was your true inner nature and a shadow of you soul, so I suppose it’s like your soul? Does that mean your conscious mind remains in your Spirit realm and out here in your body simultaneously? Like literally being in two places at once. How does the mind even process that?’

His building level of questions was driving him mad but he knew he couldn’t go over and slap Harvy around a bit to describe the True Spirit realm properly to him. If this sudden synchronisation of spirit realm and consciousness is just the moment he was fusing with his True Spirit then that meant Harvy had still yet to break open his barrier.

Soon the trio saw his alpha and beta waves going through sharp dramatic changes in their synchronised magnitudes. Harvy started sweating profusely and all the muscles in his body started to tense and shake like he was under some enormous pressure. This continued on for a short time until at last his body relaxed and his brain waves started to drop in magnitude slowly.

When James looked over he saw that Harvy, that undead bastard, had passed out before he could even start answering the million questions he had. Skay was even more pissed off than James was and his swearing and cursing scared away every living thing for a few hundred meters around the lab.

Jessy just stood there confused having absolutely no idea what all these changes in brain waves meant. She only guessed that from James’ and Skay’s frantic slapping and shaking, trying to wake Harvy, while shouting questions, meant that he had most likely succeeded.

Regardless of what they did, Harvy appeared to be in a comatose state for now so they left him on the bench with all the various equipment that was still stuck, stapled or jammed inside. They then huddled together again like children sharing secrets in the playground and began to discuss.

Once they started, Jessy was once again left out and could only try to go play with Little Blue who’d let himself out of his lightning cage. She very quickly realised her mistake and come to acknowledge that even a ferret can hold a grudge, as she backed away from the hissing and screeching ball of fur that was clearly still rather upset with her for interrupting it earlier. James looked over his shoulder to see Little Blue getting ready to unleash a bolt of lightning. “Blue, don’t pick on the silly girl, come!”

Little Blue glared at Jessy once more before scurrying over and once again climbing onto James’ shoulder. Jessy then ended up sitting there for another 2 hours until falling asleep while James and Skay had a back and forth that went through every conceivable swear word in the English language and then a few other languages for good measure.

One of the things they’d discussed earlier was the nature of spirit energy in your spirit realm. When James enters his spirit realm he sees the spirit energy separated into different states of lightning, plasma or wind all exhibiting the properties he’d envisioned them with when he began to use them. Although his lightning wasn’t actually ever directly envisioned it was created more from an intuitive feeling and understanding and so James felt no issues with how it appeared in his spirit realm. The tornado of plasma also was much the same because in his mind that’s how he’d have imagined it if he was directly aware of what he was trying to create. In this sense he felt his subconscious mind must have stepped in and helped him out.

That being said, during their discussions James raised the issue of how it was described earlier that filling your spirit barrier was similar to pumping gas into a canister until it was so condensed you couldn’t fit more. “If that was the case how then can you possibly further condense it into a True Spirit?” When they both thought back to this assumption on their part they felt like idiots. They quickly began to remedy that assumption by making a whole handful of new hypotheses until they settled on the fact that they had no idea what spirit energy actually was and had no way to guess how exactly it operates. At some point James said “It would be good if we could measure the rate at which we draw in primal spirit energy. I suspect it’s not an issue of the container being too full but an issue with the pump not being powerful enough. If we could increase our rate of intake, or I guess the pressure rating of our pump then we may be able to fill our spirit realm with even more energy and give us a drastic advantage over others in the same realm, and perhaps even future realms.”

Once he said that Skay’s eye started twitching. “What the fuck is fucking primal spirit energy?!”

James of course was also surprised at this random thought he’d carelessly blurted. Then he began to explain his thoughts. “Well think about it this way. When you ate that fruit and it granted you some spirit energy did you feel your body grow warm? From your face I’m going to assume you did. Well then take a moment and consider where exactly our elemental spirit energy is coming from. In my mind its generated equal to my level of control in each element. For example my lightning element has the greatest control and when I’m in my spirit realm I can ... sense I guess, that it’s the most abundant. Inversely, although the plasma is so fuckin’ powerful it actually scares me a little, it’s the least abundant.

“When I meditate, they all grow at rates equal to my control of them, the moment I use some in my body the other two slow down and the one I used speeds up to catch up to the others. If I use too much the other two stop generating entirely, unless I consciously try to speed them up when I meditate but the point is they don’t decrease.

“Leaving aside for the moment that if you have multiple elements your subconscious tries to maintain a set ratio between them, the total lack in decrease of my other elements to equalise spirit energy ratios suggests that once spirit power has been ... I want to say refined? Into an element, then it’s permanently that element and there’s no inter change between them. If that’s the case then where the fuck am I drawing spirit energy from when I meditate if my other two elements aren’t generating from wind, because I sure as fuck don’t see any plasma tornados or lightning anywhere that I can be drawing spirit energy from!

“Hell, even Hao himself told us that cultivators draw spirit energy from their surroundings and cultivation resources. If that’s the case I suspect our inner realm is filling with primal spirit energy at a set rate constantly and that rate increases when we meditate. The increase, I reckon, is tied to a person’s ‘talent’ which in my opinion is just a neat packaged way of saying willpower and elemental affinity. More importantly than that however is that if our elements don’t interchange then the spirit power you ingested from that fruit had no element and was only converted to your light spirit after you envisioned it in that fashion. By the same token if my spirit barrier is made of spirit energy that our subconscious is stealing to build it, then why isn’t it aligned with any of my elements? Thus I’ve started calling this spirit energy with no element that I’m drawing in and refining, primal spirit energy. Pheww.”

After that very long explanation James felt somewhat out of breath. Old madman Skay also seemed to be out of breath as he began panting harder and harder. Slowly the veins in his eyes bulged out and he began berating and screaming out through the lab. “You stupid brain dead mother fucker! How fucking blind could you possibly fucking be! You’ve been doing this for 65 fucking years and the fucking boy barely out of diapers is fucking picking up your fucking mistakes, you stupid old...”

As his self-criticisms bounced around in the laboratory he ran to the computer and started madly typing and clicking.

Once their discussions had gone on for nearly 4 hours the lifeless cadaver suddenly sat up from the operating table. When James and Skay noticed this they both immediately stopped what they were doing to rush over and rain down a shit storm of questions onto their ghoulish slave. This then continued on into the night mostly because Harvy had difficulty explaining anything in a way that they found acceptable.

Before the time they realised it, the sun wasn’t setting but rising. Strangely enough they didn’t even feel remotely tired. They both considered this a side effect of spirit energy that your subconscious mind automatically did for you, much the same as the fitness of their bodies increased. The mad old doctor had even appeared to slowly be aging backwards these last few days.