After Kate had calmed down a little, I offered to pay for the repairs, with great hope that she'd refuse. Thank God she couldn't see my face through the closed visor, or she might have caught on to my sneaky little plan.

Kate told me to go to hell, and I exhaled in relief.

Then a medic peeked into the hall. Just one, though I was used to seeing them in pairs. Apparently, the alert system had reported more about injuries than I'd assumed.

The interface in all its glory.

I stepped aside while he scanned Kate's arm. The radius was broken, the ulna cracked, and the gauntlet had been crushed so badly the machine couldn't remove it without causing further damage.

Kate had to choose — heal the arm or find a technician who could carefully dismantle the gauntlet. She went with the latter, and off we went to the Armoury.

Yes, I was ashamed of myself, a bit. But my wallet wasn't bottomless, and the way I saw it, she was just as much to blame as I was.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, a cautious little thought whispered that, after such a successful hit, I'd be sorely tempted to pull off the same trick at the first opportunity. I'd really have to slam into a shield just to understand what it felt like. But better consult Adam first. He had more experience in that department.

For now, while I was still barred from learning mental techniques, it was finally time to start repaying my debt.

Kate had found her technician, and I swapped out my combat armour for work gear and headed to the Wind Garden.

The Garden, as always, greeted me with hostile gusts, tugging and pulling at me, trying to knock me off balance.

I moved closer to one of the canyon walls, following the path Kiwi had shown me. I passed a few niches carved into the stone, behind which were stairs leading upwards and large steel lockers built into the rock.

If I hadn't messed anything up, it should be the third niche and the locker inside it. Up close, my interface displayed the current device status. This time, two of the dust collectors on the schematic were shown as transparent — meaning missing. So, my fellow collectors or maybe rivals were already wandering around somewhere nearby.

I wondered if there was a better time to collect dust, or did timing not matter at all?

I opened the large locker doors and crawled inside towards the smaller ones, where one of the two available dust collectors was waiting.

The interface notified me that the dust collector had been registered to my name. And immediately reminded me that my debt stood at 89.992 kilograms.

I frowned. I was almost certain I'd only turned in those four grams Kiwi had helped me catch.

The system had credited me with twice that.

Kiwi had said something back then about quality, bonuses, and penalties. So, the quality of the dust, or rather, the concentration of Air Qi in it, had been so high that my result was literally doubled.

No wonder he'd stressed how important sensitivity was when hunting dust. I'd have to try replicating that.

I slung the dust collector over my shoulder and stepped back into the canyon.

I followed the same narrow trail as before, lined with bushes like tangled wire. The wind here was stronger, and meaner, than at the station's exit. It came in bursts, aggressive gusts that nearly knocked me off balance.

Last time, Kiwi had stepped off the path somewhere around here, onto the sand.

Was this spot as promising today as it had been back then?

Considering the nature of wind and its fickleness, I seriously doubted it. Still, with my lack of experience, this place was no worse than any other.

I stepped off the path and dropped the dust collector.

Four legs unfolded beneath it, stabilisers that anchored into the sand. The top of the unit opened, and a metallic tube extended upward, ending in a sealed cap with a lever and a small green indicator light.

How do you know where the qi is strongest?

I closed my eyes and took a breath.

At first — nothing. Just wind. Buffeting my face, my chest, my arms. And then I felt something…

Like anger, at me standing in its way. Frustration, because the wind wasn't allowed to blow freely. Imbalance — that was the sensation Kiwi had been aiming for.

Air seeks balance, and that's what creates these tornado-like whirlwinds here. It's just air trying to realise its unspent potential.

I opened my eyes and got ready to catch. The sensation hit me again, but by the time I extended my arm and spun my qi along it, I'd already caught a completely different stream of air.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

At least I'd managed to execute the technique, and the swirling mass didn't explode in the process. Inside the uneven sphere, I could even see a few grains of sand floating. Charged or not, they were mine now, so I pulled the lever and shoved the sphere into the tube.

Closed it.

Began to release.

Boom-m-m.

The dust collector jolted.

So… releasing still needed work.

Maybe it wasn't just about letting go, maybe I needed to unwind the mass, the same way I'd spun it up in the first place.

And I definitely had to work on my timing. By the time I sensed the right current, it had already flown past me.

Alright, come on, my dear formation, don't fail me now. I paid good money for you. Activate.

A howl slammed into my ears, followed by the sound of my own breath, heartbeat, the scrape of sand against my armour. I tried to push aside everything connected to me and tuned in to the wind.

It split into a thousand shades. Layers, bands, currents overlapping and colliding in a chaotic dance. The wind was angry, furious at being trapped in this canyon, its movements restricted. It wanted freedom. It wanted harmony and balance.

There.

There.

And there.

Currents circled around me, twisting and shifting in unnatural ways. Trying to find a pattern in this chaos seemed impossible.

But Kiwi had done it. So I could, too.

For ten long minutes I stood like a statue, only swaying slightly under the wind's blows, until I began to feel.

Not understand, feel, how the currents moved.

One of them was heading straight toward me.

I thrust out my hand and spun my Qi into it.

This time, my catch was better. More dust in the trap, and I could feel the Air Qi it carried. The trap exploded again when I lowered it into the tube and began to unwind the flow, but it held for a second longer this time.

That was progress.

I exhaled, centred myself, and reached out to catch the next stream.

After two hours of work, I'd caught 167 grams of dust.

I was utterly exhausted, having blown up about half the dust traps I set, but by the end, I was dropping them into the intake tube with almost no problems.

The trick was to unravel the currents vertically, up and down the tube, stretching them along the vertical axis until the pressure faded. If you tried it horizontally, the air slammed into the tube's walls and reacted violently to the obstruction.

The quality check didn't come immediately, but the next day, when I picked up another collector, I saw the result:

Out of those 167 grams, only 77 were accepted.

Nearly a threefold downgrade.

The following day, I was back in the Garden right after Rene's hall, and luck was on my side. I caught a tornado.

The vortex had formed much deeper in the canyon. I hadn't planned on venturing that far, but the activated hypersensitivity formation warned me early — the angry winds had begun swirling into a chaotic dance well before they formed the first uneven pillar of dust.

By then, I'd already grabbed the collector, slung it over my shoulder, and sprinted toward the storm, boosting my speed with Mad Monkey.

Even if I got penalised for quality, the catch was going to be worth it.

The metal box clattered noisily against my plastic back as I ran. I passed another collector, who stared after me, confused.

Then the dust gathered into a pillar, and he scrambled to ready his equipment as well.

The senior cultivators let the tornado grow a little, and then pounced on it like hawks on prey, ripping it to shreds.

By the time I arrived, the wind had already begun settling as dust.

It was impossible to tell what was charged and what was just ordinary sand. But I could feel it — that same frustration, that confusion. The wind was displeased.

It had been moments away from perfect balance.

I sympathised with the wind.

But I sympathised more with my debt.

So I quickly set up the collector and started grabbing whatever was falling to the ground. Because I acted fast, my bloody traps detonated one after another, drastically lowering the quality of my haul.

All I could do was grit my teeth.

I decided to go for quantity over quality.

When the dust had mostly settled and the air was becoming clear again, there were four of us still working.

Three of my competitors were guiding air and dust into their tubes with smooth, deliberate movements. Even they weren't perfect — if they failed to hold a stream, it simply burst back out of the open intake. Apparently, my method had some advantages after all.

My haul from that single tornado was decent 584 grams.

Sure, they'd cut it down hard in processing, but it was still progress.

One tornado gave me several times the output of regular streams, so I decided to take a break and dig up more information about them on the forums.

Turns out, most tornadoes form a few hours before and after midday. That timing matched the schedule of most cultivators working on saturation. More cultivators meant more variation in active techniques and more variety in blowing winds.

If you were lucky, you could catch two tornadoes both before and after lunch. Unfortunately, the post-lunch peak coincided with my block patrol shift, so those hours were out.

Still, I had other things to focus on. And in just one more day, the restriction on studying mental techniques would be lifted.

That day turned out to be fantastic.

In the morning, I caught two tornadoes — 645 grams from the first, and 671 from the second.

Considering how hard they'd downgraded my last batch, I figured I'd get about 220 to 240 grams from each. Still not enough, but my results were improving, and fewer of the traps were detonating inside the tube.

After lunch, I put on the helmet and, for the first time in ages, saw Artem's hologram. Our tech genius seemed deeply focused on something and asked me to work solo for now. His hologram didn't disappear, but it was clear he was staring at something I couldn't see.

So I closed my eyes and tugged at the reactor... Then let the qi go, allowing it to disperse across my chest.

Working with air had taught me a lot. The moment I pulled on that thread of qi, I knew what it wanted to change. That was its nature, its core purpose.

I released it, and it lost all structure, floating freely around my core. I pulled again. And again. And again. The reactor began to shimmer with a haze of unshaped Qi.

I took a wisp of that aimless energy and guided it upwards into my head, along long-established channels. Slowly. Carefully. No rush.

The helmet's many sensors traced across my neck and skull, tracking the movement of the Qi and how it branched and split to saturate specific regions of my cerebral cortex.

I didn't feel nauseous. No headache. No sense of being smacked with a bat.

Looked like I'd finally done everything right. The qi spread so delicately across my cortex that there was nothing left to even collect.

"Jake," Artem called gently.

I opened my eyes.

"Did it work?" I asked.

His hologram was split between staring at a tablet and something else I still couldn't see.

"According to the data," he waved the tablet, "yes!"

"Then why don't I feel smarter?"

"Feelings are subjective."

"But I did feel dumber after the failed attempts," I pointed out.

"Maybe you're just prone to overthinking," Artem replied, brushing it off. "Look, I get that this is a huge breakthrough for you, but I'm this close to one myself. I've been working on this model for years and now it finally seems to be working!"

"Later," I said.

"Later," he echoed, and cut the hologram.

Everyone has their own struggles and their own breakthroughs.

And someone else's success rarely means much to us.

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