The trailing sound of Avyr’s laugh followed her as she vaulted over the outer wall into their house, running across the courtyard for a brief mont before leaping up onto the roof. She smiled, the mont of levity as reassuring as ever… and obviously the inside was just a terrible place to interrogate a whole bunch of new techniques. Who did they think she was?
Her feet landed lightly on the clay tiles, shifting, ever so silently— as she rose once more to the curled lip of things, at the peak— settling, in the cool air, the frigid wind over the river catching on her hair for a mont and blowing it out— a halo caught, by sunlight turned almost, breathtakingly, luminescent.
She smiled. It was a good day…
For hope.
Then, she pulled the first manual from her bag. It was an interesting little thing— about as useless as she would’ve expected, from the disdain that the functionary had given it. The Xuanye Fluttering Leaf Sutura was… well, it was interesting in that it matched rather strongly to the mythical idea of the cultivator, ditating under a waterfall in so mystical holy land, and rather useless in that it clearly didn’t work. The cultivator was supposed to read a prayer over and over again until it was morized, and then circulate their qi in a particular manner that— according to the manual— should pull ambient qi into their core.
It looked like a bastardized version of a simple funneling array, but then again, what did she know? Snorting a little bit at the absurdity of it, she settled down into the precise ditative pose that the book instructed her to take— legs crossed, feet underneath, hands folded into an intricate handseal that did not feel like any of the real hand-seals that she’d seen from Mingtian in the slightest… back straight, elbows equidistantly apart, head upraised to heaven.
“The leaf is generated by the budding of spring.” One strand of qi, from her left shoulder to just above the right hip. “The budding of spring is generated by the yin of winter.” From her right hip to her heart. “The nourishing of yin is wrought of the vermillion autumn.” From her heart, through her lungs, and up again to her head— “the vermillion of autumn is the burning of sumr’s bounty.” Straight down to her dantian, the feeling almost heady as all the qi she’d picked up in the revolution rushed back into the center of her spirit— “and the bounty of heaven is the flourishing of spring. n strive, heaven dictates. n strive, heaven dictates. Bless, bless bless.” Five rotations in her core, and then back up— to her right shoulder this ti…
The whole pattern repeated, mirrored this ti, and slowly— she could feel it. It was a crude thing, compared to the true peace… the silent diation, the silence of the shadow over her heart, at the heaviest and most profound, the blackest of monts, but she was swept up in it nonetheless. Repeating it, again and again until it ca into being as an almost palpable thing within her, the rhythm; it caught the qi that would have otherwise simply floated by her, sweeping up into its heady currents and then pushing it straight into her core.
A great deal of the technique, she realized, was dedicated to isolating a certain type of qi. Yin qi, she figured, though it was intermingled so much with the other energies of heaven that it beca rather a pliant and weak thing, easily subsud by the harsh, blood energy of her own core. She kept a careful eye on it, just in case, but it seed that the functionary was right in that the techniques could do them no harm— she figured that she’d have to cultivate it diligently for months if she wanted to change the aspecting of her qi.
Very different from Avyr’s technique. That one was rather built quite strictly for cats— she didn’t have six limbs and a tail to rotate her qi through, after all— but she couldn’t help but imagine if she cultivated that technique for minutes then her qi would take on a distinctly different hue.
The amusing thought distracted her enough to knock the cycle out of rhythm, and rather than starting again, she just put the first manual away and brought out the second. The Nantiann Passage Scripture, as it turned out, was far more obtuse than the previous one, with so much niche terminology that’d probably been outdated when the Empire of Twelve Constellations had been in power…
She struggled through it nonetheless, discovering that it was a weak technique derived from— according to it, at least— a legendary technique from that very empire, handed out to low-tier cultivators of a certain minor sect that probably didn’t even exist anymore… really, the history of it was almost more fascinating than the actual technique itself, which was a rather simple ga of ‘grab the qi’ that might have been interesting if there was any pattern to it. It was clear that whoever had made it had a pattern in mind, only for them to do it… wrong.
She’d have fixed it if she could, but much as she tried to figure it out, the actual answer eluded her. Ultimately, when her spirit started to twinge in protest every ti she made a slight edit to the already existing pattern she called it quits and decided not to risk hurting herself any more. She still had that almost imperceptible spiritual wound from the library…
She moved onto the next, which ca from a sect of… fishern, she could only imagine how much of the complicated imagery relied on taphors of nets and knots and rope, tangled into impossibly complex sheets. This one was fascinating more as a qi-control thod than anything; the actual benefit to her cultivation was beyond minimal, though maybe that was just because she couldn’t actually do the technique.
Again. Again… she read through all the different scrolls, tried out the different thods, learnt as much as she could about the shape of the spirit— however little she could— and when she was finished the sun had gone down in the sky and the qi of East Saffron had changed. At night, that swirling and incomprehensible mix had a different quality to it… rarified, almost, or perhaps brought down to earth with the heaviness of the pressing dark, cloying as it draped itself over her shoulders, over the buildings, over the river that glittered with iced-over edges and waves that caught the moonlight.
She did not attempt to parse the whole of it. So sort of cultivator could, she was sure… the Outer Elder, maybe, with his boundless power, could capture it all in his aura and know it, intimately know it… the Sect Master, the Immortal Ascension cultivators that were to her at least, more myth than reality…
Yet she wasn’t them, and they weren’t her, and in that mont beneath the moon and bitter winds, beneath the whole of it spread out before her in stunning, picturesque imperfection… there was a peculiar sort of hearty beauty in the shadows and the hidden, and the unknowable profundity that swirled all around her. She strove to be the sort of person that could capture it all in her grasp, but in striving, would she lose… this?
Her smile was softer, then; more real beneath the moon and stars, and whole vast vista of the heavens. They were always changing anyways, and… she wondered what new beauties she would be able to see, as one of the demigods at the top of the world. Change… it was one of the key components of so many of the techniques. The leaf that changed with the seasons, the rope that was woven into a net to catch the fish, the soldier turning his body into a temple for sunlit benediction… and so many more, so many further little changes.
Distantly, she rembered Mingtian’s words on the subject of the sword. Not the part where she’d joked about fish not existing, though that had been funny, or even the far more worriso prospect of demonic cultivation… but, rather, simply— the conversation on the essence of things. Perhaps, it was fitting— that the essence of cultivation was the essence of change. She breathed in, for the briefest fraction of a mont feeling as though she stood on the verge of sothing profound and terrible— before breathing out, breath misting the air in front of her and fleeing with the sensation. No, she did not understand cultivation well enough to make any such judgents.
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Lily laughed to herself. A single day of outdated techniques, and she was already trying to probe the deepest secrets of cultivation? What a joke…
Her fingers still found their way to the jade slip containing the real technique she’d been given. The Farr-King’s Purple-Colored Herb Tract. The na was pretentious, and the technique was— apparently, according to the functionary at least, useless, as the so-called Purple-Colored herbs didn’t even exist anymore.
Yet, it still carried exactly what she wanted from a technique. The knowledge of how techniques themselves worked. She pulled it out of her pocket, and brought it up to the light, and marveled at its intricate structure, as it shimred under the cold moon.
How stunning.
Whatever profound secrets underpinned its making, she could not comprehend. In all honesty, she could barely even comprehend the secrets that were freely accessible within it, which was not a great sign to start out with…
She knew the basics of ridian Opening. At least, the publicly available basics, the sort of things that had leaked into the public perception over so many hundreds of years, so thoroughly and completely that no sect bothered stamping them out anymore. While advancing to Shedding and Opening was done with pills— or natural treasures, in the rare case— the sort of treasure that would advance soone to Foundation Establishnt were the things of myth and legend. Opening— as the na suggested— required a cultivator to open a set of ridians that would absorb and filter the qi of the world into their dantian at a significantly advanced rate.
From what she’d heard, they also compressed the qi, sowhat, turning it into the concentrated form that a Foundation Establishnt cultivator would have. Which made sense, because the ridians stayed until… core formation? Maybe, the details got very iffy at the higher levels— but it was logical that a Foundation Establishnt cultivator wouldn’t be building their foundation with Opening-level qi.
So… if she wanted to develop her own ridian Opening technique, she’d count it as a success if it absorbed qi at a significant rate— faster than Avyr had at the hot-springs mountain, fast enough to allow him to reach Foundation Establishnt in the ti they had, or at least make good progress— filtered the qi properly, and compressed it to the level of a Foundation Establishnt cultivator. Luckily, she knew what a Foundation Establishnt Cultivator’s qi felt like— and a Core Formation cultivator’s at that, from all the ti she’d spent around Zhihu and Qinfu. That, she imagined, would’ve been rather a bit of a stumbling block if she’d tried doing that before…
Now, the only question remaining was how she was to actually accomplish it.
She closed her eyes, and pressed the jade slip to her forehead, and dove into its sylvan dream. A man split the earth and drew the water, and planted, and nurtured. The darkness of the earth deepened, and the brilliance of the sunlight beat down on his bare back. Everything was in its proper place. Everything turned according to its proper cycle. A man split the earth and drew the water, and planted, and nurtured; this ti, it was his spirit he split, and his qi he drew, and his darkness he nurtured, and his light that burst forth. Everything was in its proper place. Everything turned according to its proper cycle. And the plants unfurled accordingly, each to its own, growing—
She gasped, pulling back from the slip. That had been… intense was a word to describe it, but she couldn’t help but feel it didn’t do it justice. The emotion of the slip, the perfect harmony, the faint mory of his spirit as he carved— bored, more like— the precise lines into its form… she shivered. Disconnected from the jade slip, it faded, only the faintest echo at the edge of her mory— the mory of a mory…
The mory was within the jade slip in the truest sense of the word, she realized— which ant that to truly learn its secrets, she would have to follow its contours, to conjure its every aspect and comprehend each and every one of them, all while…
Well, she’d never let sothing so simple as a single slip of jade beat her before, and she wasn’t about to let it now. Drawing in a deep breath, and relishing the sting of it as it settled in her lungs, cold as moonlight— she pressed the token back to her head.
A man split the earth and drew the water, and planted, and nurtured. THe darkness of the earth deepened, and the brilliance of the sunlight…
………
Lily groaned as she pulled back the token for the fifth… the sixth? She forgot exactly how many tis she’d delved deep into the mories stored within the slip. She’d have gone right back in too, if gravity hadn’t rudely reminded her that it existed— and pulled her off the roof in an ungainly tangle of limbs and sudden panic and, thankfully, cultivation-enchanced reflexes. She just barely managed to catch herself before she fell the dozen feet down into the courtyard, one hand grabbing onto the gutter and the rest of her swinging hard against the wall.
A few monts later, a rather frazzled looking Avyr stepped out of the house, glancing up with an almost comical slowness. “I see.” That was all he said. It was, still, enough to make her snort in barely repressed laughter.
“It’s not funny.”
“I wasn’t laughing.” He wasn’t, but he certainly was now. “Just drop down. You’ll be fine. And you really ought to get so sleep. It’s…” he frowned, thinking for a second— “two in the morning. You’re going to be tired tomorrow if you don’t get any sleep.”
“I don’t need sleep. It’s a weekend tomorrow anyways, so…”
“You’re going to be tired.”
“Fine…” as ever, Avyr was right. She probably shouldn’t have stayed up so late, but the jade slip had just been so fascinating… she dropped the last few feet off their house, landing elegantly in the bushes. Elegantly. She would describe it with no other words, not even under duress.
Avyr just laughed so more.
Returning inside, Avyr sauntered up to the counter, setting the water to boil and parceling out a bit of so herb or another… for tea, she was sure, given that she could not for the life of her understand half of the different herbs that Avyr used when he made tea. Other than that none of them were actual tea, given he couldn’t drink it…
The aroma was pleasant enough, though. She blinked as Avyr pushed a cup into her hands, waiting until he was sure she was holding it before pulling his paws back and pressing them against the floor in mory of the boiling heat. “Thank you…” she really was tired, wasn’t she? Well, at least she’d been successful. Even without the slip actively in use, the mory of its mory was ground strongly into her mind. Or, at least, the most important parts… she could not rember the exact texture of the soil, or the feeling of cool water as it ran over her hands, but she could rember exactly what it felt like to carve a technique into her spirit. She could probably do it right then if she wanted to, if it weren’t such a remarkably bad idea…
She blinked as Avyr bopped her on the nose with a single paw. “You really need to go to bed if you’re zoning out this much. What caught your interest so strongly? I’m curious, now.” He settled down beside her, wrapped in counterpoint half-circle in front of the couch, languid in the way only a cat could truly be.
“A technique. I went to the treasure pavilion today, and got a technique.” Avyr raised an eyebrow. “It’s nothing special. I’m not even going to use it.” To a certain definition of the word certainly. She would use the information she got from it, if nothing else… “It’s a complicated farming technique for a herb that doesn’t even exist anymore.”
“You’re up to sothing.”
“No…” it was, perhaps, one of the most unconvincing denials of her entire life. Avyr just huffed, and gave her a look so laden with sarcastic understanding that she felt like just curling up into a ball and dying of embarrassnt…
“I’m sure whatever you’re doing, it’s going to be incredible.” Great, now the embarrassnt was worse. Avyr laughed, patting her on the shoulder with a paw before slinking away. “Finish up your tea, and get to rest. You’ll have plenty of ti tomorrow to start working on whatever it is that you’re doing.” She rolled her eyes back at him, but it did make sense… it was clear that it was going to be a long term project even if she was able to actually play around with the techniques, which was… not exactly true. Or rather, she was pretty sure that building the technique in her spirit would utterly ruin her prospects of joining the Bloody Saffron Sect, which was why she’d been warned away from it so explicitly, so many tis.
That was fine, though. If she couldn’t build the technique in her spirit… then she would just have to build it outside of it.
She finished her tea, and went to bed, and dreamt of farming herbs that didn’t exist.
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