Realizing that things aren’t quite kosher at the moment, Jason ejects himself from NeoRealm. Skipping all the transitions meant to make coming out of VR palatable and not a barf fest. Not that he plans to be sick from it as the effect is purely mental disorientation and even if his cultivation isn’t that high, such a small disruption should be easy enough to handle.

Should be, being the key phrase there. Jason managed it, but keeping the contents of his stomach in place was much harder than it should have been, at least if the process really was just a mental thing. The fact he had such a hard time points to that “fact” not quite being as true as he was led to believe. Not that he can do much to test that at the moment as to do so would require ejecting himself again and at the same time paying attention to his mind and soul.

Jason of course files doing such a test away until he can eject out of VR without needing his entire focus to prevent messy results. Still, now that he is out of his pod those ideas about mediating come easily to him. In fact, he doesn’t even bother getting out of the pod and drops right into it.

A couple minutes pass by before he stops but within that time his brain had a chance to sort things out. Specifically, Jason is now a lot more worried about the System messing around with his head. Furthermore, this couldn’t have been the first time and the only thing to change outside of his avatar was setting his foundation.

Jason can’t help but groan at this. He already had proof that his cultivation could affect NeoRealm, what with the gain in Energy. If it can also prevent his mind being messed with, then it becomes even more important. Still, the time difference between being in VR and out of it is too great. Even setting his foundation, a relatively quick step took up more time in NeoRealm than most would spend in their early stages.

He scrunches his eyes and sighs. There isn’t much he can do about it yet. The biggest problem isn’t even getting some way to have the same time dilation outside or VR, but rather a matter of there not being enough power around. His speed of cultivation is inherently limited by how much power he can absorb at one time. With higher levels of cultivation that amount increases as he can reach out further, but those later steps still take longer.

If he figured out something to replace all the convenient alchemy products, things would go faster. But that would take either buying things sight unseen to test them, or finding some place that actually lets him see the products in person. Maybe at some point in the past you could just go and pick stuff off a shelf but those days are long gone. If you want to experience an item, you’re going to be doing so in VR.

Jason has nothing against this practice. They’ve gotten their scanning technology to a point that the physical aspects of the item you plan to buy are nearly identical to the VR version. It doesn’t help him now as he wants to sense for items that are saturated in power and for some reason he doubts their scanners will include that.

Sure, things like old plants will have developed a build up of power. But Jason needs it to be the kind of power he is cultivating. Plus, even with all the protections against scams and what not, people will still be people. Who knows if something someone calls a decade old ginseng is actually a decade old or if they just used some products to speed up the growth. Something that doesn’t matter too much for others would defeat the entire purpose for him as it takes time, not growth, to stockpile power.

Thankfully there are still traditions that focus on using older plants so such things aren’t completely missing from the market. It really just comes down to price. Buying such things in the first place is already out of Jason’s price range, let alone buying them on the regular.

This of course leaves one last potential source, the military. Or rather, military surplus. Courtney had offhandedly revealed that all the strange powers were a known quantity. Even though she said there wasn’t a known use for them, Jason finds it hard to believe that the military won’t have tried stuffing some supplement or pill full of the stuff to see what happens. There would be bad results from the corruptive elements, but they should be able to sort such things out to some degree.

Though this once again falls to him having to show up somewhere in person to judge the available items for power content. As luck would have it though, that is a much more doable thing. As ever, military surplus is at least in part catering to the preppers so of course they would have an in-person location for people to “avoid” the government surveillance. Completely nonsense, as even if they don’t record what is going on inside, they definitely know who is going in and out of the place. Plus it is surplus, they already know everything in there because they didn’t need it anymore.

With a sigh Jason adds a note to his scheduling app to look into military surplus stores in the arcology. This is going to put him on so many lists but he can’t really help it at this point. Then with that nonsense out of the way, he activates his pod and logs back into NeoRealm.

Right after this there is a bit of a disturbance right outside the arcology as the people responding to the expelling of the corrupting energies receive notice of Jason’s note. After some back and forth between the researchers and the military, a decision is made. See, Jason wasn’t entirely correct in his assumptions about the military surplus stores. They aren’t actually third party entities but rather directly owned by the military. Both to get rid of surplus but also to release fake surplus to give a false image of what tech they might have. Not the most important thing in the current age, but the spooks need to justify their budget somehow. Of course what Jason will be finding if he ever does head over to the surplus store won’t be that. The decision they made was to put a few special toys there at a decent price to see what his reaction will be.

Off to the side, Jason’s mom Jenny just laughs and laughs. Her main thought on the subject is hopefully Jason does go and ends up picking out all the cool stuff for cheap. Some of the things they talk about putting in aren’t even available to her at any price and if it wasn’t for how closely they are observing him, she would be shooting him a message right now to give him a heads up.