Filled with a great and vicious, a prowling hope, Lily figured that if now wasn’t the ti to make bad decisions, then when was? And if there was one person in the entirety of East Saffron— or at least, one accessible person in the whole of East Saffron— who could help her when it ca to the formation nature of techniques, then it would be Min Gongwen.
Her class was just as mundane and annoying as it always was, of course, but this ti she made sure to put the fullest extent of her attention towards it. She didn’t actually speak up about anything, as she’d long learnt just how bad of an idea it was to actually discuss critically the formations they were talking about, but she did make sure to listen. As it was, they were working on a rather quite interesting formation that captured the growth— however that was defined, through so sort of complicated logic or natural treasures, or most likely, both— of a hundred old growth trees and focused it in to support the flourishingofa single spiritual herb. It was the sort of thing that she thought Avyr would appreciate, and perhaps he’d bring it up to him in the future…
Though, she supposed that he might just as well deride the whole thing for so stupid herbalist reason that she didn’t understand. He could be incredibly particular when it ca to the managing of his herb plots.
The formation itself was an elegant thing, if one had a garden with precisely one hundred old growth oak trees, nurtured from the mont of their planting and brought forth all the way to the great opening of their canopies, precisely arranged to match the nodes of the forest growth and the subterranean geography that underlaid them. If one had all of that, it’d be great! If not, then you better be prepared for an incredibly tedious process involving repeated, system testing, and the use of a variety of extraordinarily expensive wood-aligned spiritual materials…
To think that this was one of the better formations she had access to, in that it could be placed effectively anywhere with trees and built by those with only the faintest of qi senses. When it could be, instead, shifted by just editing a few of the major lines and perhaps brought into better alignnt with the exact layout of a particular case… she found herself rather disliking it on principle, even though it was a rather clever formation. Lily fought back the urge to sigh; it was a unique talent of Instructor Min, to take sothing so incredibly interesting to her and sohow transform it into sothing so very dull and boring.
All too soon— or none too soon, depending on who was asked— class was over, and they were released. There was no more boisterousness, anymore— not after Min had made an example of the first few to be too unbecoming in her presence, and certainly not now, that the Song brothers were still a gaping hole in the heart of the class.
Still, that did not an that there was no conversation. IOt was rely a whispered thing, kept to the appropriate, carried out between acquaintances and friends in a demure, solemn quiet.
Lily drew in a breath, letting the murmur of chatter wash over her as she teetered on the edge of— to go forward, and ask, or to return and simply forget about the potential indiscretion she longed to commit. On one hand, Min would know so much. For all that she could not help but feel that she knew more than the old, grouchy woman when it ca to the actual essence of formations, there was no denying that Min Gongwen had lived and entire life seeped in the broad tradition of formations and had co out the other end with an almost encyclopedic knowledge of formations of the most wide and varied sorts. The only person that knew more than she did— the only person Lily knew— was Mingtian… and it was unfair, she couldn’t help but think, to compare anyone to the mortal who’d beat a god with formations beyond comprehension.
Sothing tugged on her arm, snapping her from her reverie. She glanced up sharply, pulling back— only to find Xinshi, and nobody else. But for them and Instructor Min, the room was empty. “Co on. Unless you want to…” no, she did not want to get in trouble with the instructor, even though she did want to have a conversation with her. That would just be counterproductive.
Sighing, she allowed herself to be dragged out into the frozen early-spring of East Saffron. It was so very different from the 32nd Precinct, in a way that was hard to grasp even stood in the center of it. It was not just more alive— though it certainly was, that was an undeniable truth. Plants grew in every nook and corner, carefully landscaped to co together, flowing with the course of the qi and the gracious bend of the buildings and roads, and stately street trees— from the littlest of mosses, still covered by snow, hidden in the shadow of twisted stones, to those vast trunks, stark and fissured by their age. But even beyond that, past the evergreen pushes and the others more starkly, grew the first flowers of spring. A few of them, the earliest bloors, were already unfurling— delicate petals of yellow and white and every other color, so pastel soft, scattered almost like the echo of so passing celebration along the side of their passage. She’d never seen their like.
It was possible, she supposed, that this was the only place in the entire world they grew— nurtured over many generations specifically to fit the roles they played, kept living by the cultivators that tended the grounds for the Sect. She didn’t quite know how that made her feel.
She did know, that— thinking of the Bloody Saffron Sect itself, the sacred grounds that were said to be like this but so much more, so much further steeped in the thousands upon thousands of years, of history, of their ancestral birthright and their creation— the awe it generated coiled within her.
Xinshi glanced at her. “You’ve been… off these past few weeks. It’s not because of… you know.”
She shook her head. “It’s not because of the sunlight cultivator.”
“That’s not what I ant. I was going to ask you if it’s because of the attack.”
She paused for a long second, not responding; in a way, that was a response in and of itself. Finally, she shook her head. “Not entirely. Not that only, at least. I have to be better.”
“You are better. I don’t even know how to describe it to you without— no.” He shook his head sardonically. “I’m not going to try and cheer you up. I’ve had enough of losing to you; I won’t lose to you in this too.”
Despite herself, Lily snorted. It was just an amusing thing to say. “You don’t understand.”
“I don’t understand a lot of things. I don’t understand the Outer Elder. I don’t understand you. I think… that I must learn to not learn. To be at peace with myself, if I ever hope to be at peace with myself.”
“I don’t know whether that’s profound or obvious.”
“What’s profound to soone is obvious to another, and what’s obvious to soone is profound to another.”
“Now I know you’re just repeating yourself to sound smarter.”
The touch of a smile ghosted across Xinshi’s face, curling around the corner of his lips and leaping, on the faintest of wrinkles up to his nose and to the eyes, wide-open for a mont beneath the spring-sunlit gleaming. “That doesn’t make it less true, does it?”
She supposed it didn’t.
“So… if you forgive the indiscretion, what’s made you so attentive today, and so distracted afterwards?”
It was strange, to think that not even a whole year prior, Xinshi had been her enemy. Not a small enemy, either— though in retrospect she could realize that his mother was the truer foe of the two; he had been and had always been, throughout the eternity of her ti in the Academy, her biggest roadblock. Now that she was beyond him… it felt almost strange, to leave behind soone so. “I was going to et with Instructor Min after class. I still am, actually.”
Xinshi winced. “Well, then… I wish you the best of luck in your endeavors, and will be sure to offer my condolences to Avyr.”
“It’s not going to be that bad. She’s a tough teacher, but she isn’t going to kill .”
“I offer you my condolences, if you think that.”
Lily just laughed.
………
Standing in the dimly lit room that Instructor Min called her office, surrounded by all the various pieces of paraphernalia that the woman had collected over her long career— fixed, beneath the terrible gaze of that unforgiving woman, Lily reconsidered. She did not think that she would literally die, but… figuratively?
She tried her very best not to gulp.
“So.” Min’s voice was as unimpressed as ever. More, even— conveying in that mont, the sheer and utter disdain she felt for her. The sort of voice soone would use to speak to a bug, if they deigned to speak to a bug. “You are telling that, in your infinite and boundless wisdom, as a Shedding Cultivator— have decided to use an untested and unproven formation that you made to lacerate your own soul in the attempt to make a ridian Opening formation. The type of formation that is usually developed by Sundering level cultivators for their juniors.”
“It’s… not untested. I first used it under the supervision of my Master.”
“Who is a mortal from one of the poorest precincts of the entire city, so forgive if I am sowhat doubtful as to your claims.”
“And an inner disciple of the bloody saffron sect. She didn’t find any flaw in it either.” She also wasn’t a formations master, but just using her na was at least enough to get Instructor Min to pause for a mont. Of course, she’d never believe that Mingtain was her superior in the formations art, even though he very clearly was.
For a long mont, Min simply glared at her, before finally speaking. “You, Lily Ward, are a fool.”
“I—”
“Let speak. Interrupt again, and I will put my best foot forward in seeing you expelled from this university, and will expel you from my class. This may not be lecture, but I demand that you give the respect I deserve regardless.” Lily pressed her mouth shut, and was silent. “You, Lily Ward, are a fool and an idiot of the highest order. Because only an idiot would lacerate their own spirit for no benefit, and only a fool would attempt to build the roof of a house before they’ve even laid the foundation. There is a crucial difference between the two, I admit.” She tapped her cane against the ground, scowling. “I am certain that it would be easier to build a free-standing roof than it would be for a Shedding disciple to make any technique, much less a ridian Opening technique. Do you know why?”
Lily shook her head, but remained silent.
“Good, at least you're not that idiotic. A technique and a formation are not the sa. You may think they’re the sa, they may look similar, but they are not. A formation requires everything to be explicitly laid out, delineated and placed in their perfect position. An array requires that everything is mixed together just right, ford into the shape that it ought to be, that the world might follow suit. A technique is an impression on the very soul of a cultivator, in that soul, it is a reflection of everything that the cultivator wants and is. Take Yhe Zhao’s Great Trenching formation, or the Five-Constellation Flabringing formation, and if you knew them, if you understood them, you would not need to know how to dig a trench, or how to light a fire to dig a trench or light a fire. Take the Sansan Eight Trigrams binding formation, of the peach blossoms— you do not need to know how to bind soone, to bind soone. Yet— use any one of those to make a technique, and you will fail. Worse, you will blow yourself up, that’s how far the divide is between formation and technique.”
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That felt familiar. “A swordsman can carve a sword technique into their soul and use it beautifully, but a formation master cannot learn the sword by building a sword technique. No— moreover, fundantally, a master of formations would not be able to understand the sword in the first place. Do you understand?” A second— “do you understand, child? That you try to run before you walk?”
“I— I understand, she finally managed to choke out.”
“Now get out of my sight before I begin to feel like I should have just let you kill yourself in the trying.”
Lily fled.
Yet— she was not daunted.
………
Lily did not return ho imdiately. No— she had a different destination in mind, one she rarely went to— the library. The University of East Saffron’s library was vastly different from the one she’d spent the better part of her childhood growing up inside of— for one, it was far older, clearly made in a ti before even electric lighting had beco common. Most of the buildings on campus had been renovated to at least include the most basic of anities, but the library had clearly missed out on those.
It wasn’t that the library was made any the lesser for it, but rather that the library had simply been built to such an exacting standard when it was first made that it didn’t need the renovations. The formations that had been laid down by unspoken masters centuries, hundreds upon hundreds of years past still worked just like they had when they’d first been inscribed, keeping the air clean and dry, curating the strange and sowhat nonsensically arranged catalog, lighting the rooms and authorizing who could go where and so many other things that she could not even begin to guess at. The entire thing was one giant formation— and not even figuratively, for she could sense, crouched in the ethereal dinsions of qi beyond the pale, the actual whole of it. It was more array than formation, and wholly magnificent besides.
She paid it no attention.
Instead, she grabbed one of the quietest reading desks in the corner of the room with the authority of her access token, and headed straight into the imnsity that was the library with a single focus on her mind. She had been given a clue, however tangentially, by Instructor Min, and she would not let that clue slip from her grasp without doing absolutely everything in her power to make it real.
Yhe Zhao’s Great Trenching formation, the Five-Constellations Flabringing formation, and the Sansan Eight Trigrams formation. Each of them were not the sort of thing that most of the library-goers would have been able to easily access, hidden away in the central and most secure vaults, but she was one of the Elite Cohort, and her authority— especially as a mber of the Formations Class— was sufficient enough for her entrance. She grabbed a copy of each— and the enormous tos filled with notes and interpretations and historical musings on each— and dragged them back to her desk.
She quickly discovered that Min hadn’t chosen them at random. It took a while, but buried in the center of the auxiliary book on Yhe Zhao’s Great Trenching formation was a note that a wandering cultivator who’d ultimately reached Core Formation before petering out had made it the foundational technique of their entire cultivation, bereft of formal instruction as they were. They danced in circles around the actual thod he used to do that— less so out of purposeful obfuscation and more because the authors clearly didn’t know, historical as it was even to them, but the fact that he had…
It was obvious that Yhe Zhao— for it was him who then na ca from, rather than the original creator of the formation— was a genius of the highest caliber. The sort of genius who would look at her and even Aomao’s master and laugh at how pitifully slow they were. The sort of genius who might, just maybe be able to keep up with Mingtain.
Even then, he’d failed three tis— reportedly— to turn the formation into a technique. The book ntioned him digging an enormous trench all the way around a city with no na— now lost, according to the book flooded when the waters the trench held back had swept in after a particularly bad cyclone that so had theorized was caused by an irate cultivator of particular power— before he’d been able to ‘understand the trench enough to dig one within his own spirit.’ That line, which was apparently quoting a different book on the sa man, took her down a rabbit hole of different sources with contradicting reports, obscure languages that required equally obscure dictionaries to translate, and even legal docunts written eerily similar to modern ones, despite the gulf of millennia separating them. Slowly, though, she pried open the secrets of the man who was called Yhe Zhao.
She did not discover much. Still, she discovered enough to understand just a bit more about the difference between techniques and formations…
The others were much the sa. The Flabringing formation had been found by the elder of a sect after the collapse of the Empire of Twelve Constellations, who’d taken it as a personal challenge to extract as much from the thod as he could. Preportedly— though multiple sources said that it wasn’t true— he’d spent five years staring into five fires, each one kindled from a different constellations and brought across the unfathomable space between planets, just to comprehend even a fraction of the ancient genius that had gone into the formation.
An older source— rediscovered by one of those elder’s disciples, tucked away at the end of a long chain of references and obfuscatory remarks, told her that the Five Constellations Flabringing formation was a convenience formation made to start campfires and light stoves, and yet its legacy had lived on in Beixian until the ti of the city’s destruction— presumably, given that she couldn’t find any sources more recent than fifty or so years prior.
The Sansan Eight Trigrams Binding Formation was the most esoteric of all of them. Its origins were shrouded in mystery, as befitting of a technique so closely related to one of Aurelia’s great sects— the library did not even have the formation itself, rather re depiction of what it did— but speculation abounded that instead of a formation that had been developed into a technique, it was a technique that had been developed into a formation. It would explain a great many esoteric things about it…
Slowly, hour by hour, minute by minute and scribbled note by scribbled note, the stack of books— and scrolls, and tablets, and even the odd jade slip or bamboo journal— on her desk piled up. She had an attendant bring a smaller side table so she could stack up so of the materials, then returned her full focus back to her investigation— not just searching for the story that surrounded them, but the thod…
It had to exist sowhere. Each of them were famous examples of the interconnection between techniques and formations, which ant that there had to be sothing behind them, behind the legends and the lies and the deceptions…
It was a tireless, painful search. It was a search that felt productive, like not even speaking to Sunliang had been, and so she pressed forward. There was just… she could see, in the thousand myriad reports, the shape of it— the shape of what set formations apart from techniques. A soulful thing… perhaps, she theorized in one margin of one notebook, or in a paper she’d shoved into the notebook, that it was partially what allowed soone to control what should not be controlled, and direct what should not be directable, and reign over the myriad dinsions of the spirit without knowing the dinsions of the spirit. Like following a road, not understanding why it was built. Or growing a plant, or raising a dog—
It didn’t entirely match, though. It didn’t make sense, because that would an that if she understood formations well enough, she could make a technique of a formation, or a formation of a technique, or—
The light in the library grew dim as the day drew to an end, and yet she persisted, occasionally flitting back to the heart of the library to search for another source, or a source that referenced a source, before bringing it back to her little fiefdom. So close. She was so close…
The desire to fall asleep stole over her, but she pushed it away. She was so close.
The desire to do anything but what she was currently doing ca upon her, to eat, or to drink, or whatever— but she pushed it away, because she was finally grasping the whole shape of it, and to abandon things at this late hour— she could not, would not allow that. No… it was in the shovel, she was sure, the repetitive shoveling that Yhe Zhao had done, that had built the formation in his spirit as much as he built the formation outside of it. It was contradictory, and nonsensical, because the trenching formation didn’t ever actually use even the image of a shovel, but she was sure that was what he’d done. She theorized that even if she did the exact sa thing, she wouldn’t be able to follow his path. The circumstances were just not the sa—
Yet they had to be the sa, yet the had to be different, yet— the wound in her spirit hurt, yet she pressed on. She had to press on… had to… had…
“I was wondering where you were.” A sudden clarity sparked in her, re monts before she fell asleep on her own pile of books, and she realized just how long she’d been working in the library. It was not quite light yet, but it was not entirely dark, either, and the very first echoes of morning were already heralding their saffron glow beyond the edge of the horizon. “You look horrible.”
She blinked, poor, tired brain refusing to process the sight in front of her for a long mont. Then, slowly— “Avyr? Wha… what are you doing here?”
He frowned at her. “Do I even have to answer that?” She blinked back at him, slowly. “Looking for you, obviously. You’re not an easy woman to find when you don’t want to be. Co on. We’ve got to get ho.”
“I—”
“We are going ho.” He hissed the last words, and she realized with a start that the big cat was angry at her. It happened so rarely that it took her a long second to realize it, and then— and then, the startled awareness that she’d been suffused with before twisted, shivering as it transford into startled guilt. “You can’t do this to yourself. Pack up, and we’ll head back.”
Guiltily, she gathered up all her notebooks and papers and invaluable formation tools, shoving them into her backpack and standing— only to totter woozily. Despite his clear displeasure, Avyr moved instantly to support her.
Perhaps… perhaps the big cat had a point.
They walked out of the library draped in exhaustion, and the mont she stepped foot into the cold she winced. It was… cold. What a la way to describe it, but it was true— the crystal silence of the night pressed down on her, heavy and deep, prickling sharply her skin after so long spent in the cloistered warmth of the library. “I… I had a lead. On the formation… technique. Thing.”
Avyr was silent for a long mont, just lashing his tail side to side. “I’m not your senior. I’m your friend. So, when I say this, know that it’s coming from a place of friendship. You can’t keep doing this.”
“I can’t just abandon—”
“I’m not asking you to abandon your project.” Of course he wasn’t. She knew that he knew her too well to ask that. Still, the directness of the statent blunted her to silence. “I’m just… take better care of yourself. This isn’t the only ti in your life that you’re going to co up against sothing that you can’t solve in a week, and you… you really can’t do this every ti that happens.”
“Just…” she sighed, her breath billowing out in front of her for a mont. “You’re right, but I hate it.”
“As it tends to go, when you lose an argunt against yourself.” She smiled. It was hard to stay angry at her best friend… “you were too young to rember when your parents… you know.” Slowly, she nodded. “I think, for a long ti, I was very similar to you. Not ever in the sa way as you can get, so single-mindedly focused on pushing yourself to the finish line, but… it is easy to throw myself into the need for vengeance.”
“You’re not like that.”
“In a way, I still am like that. But tempered, so that I might not burn myself out. You can hold the fla, Lily— you just need to make sure that it doesn’t burn you. I had already been burnt, and I was already limping by the ti that I arrived to East Saffron… really, it was only Mingtian that brought forth from that.”
“He’s very kind, isn’t he?”
“He’s the best of us. I don’t know how it’s possible, that he can just… relax so, even though he’s clearly done more than either of us has, in the lifeti of a mortal no less…” he shook his head, ears flicking back and fur rippling in the night’s cascading silence, and the murmur of creaking trees beneath the wind. Lit, ever so faintly— golden fur cast pale and golden by the rising sun. Elegant. Lily couldn’t stop herself from running a hand down his head, earning herself an amused chuff from the big cat. “I don’t want to see you lose your fire, Lily. That fire, that understanding of fire… it’s part of why I get along with you so well, despite…” everything, the species barrier and the barrier between their experience, and so much more. They were very different, and yet— in that one, fundantal way, the sa. “So please, temper yourself.”
“I’m not going to stop.”
“But you will slow down, just a little.”
Lily mock glared at him. “Fine. But only because you’re so insistent.” For a long second, silence hung between the two of them.
They both laughed.
………
She didn’t figure out the secret, ultimately. That was fine, though.
She had ti.
She would figure it out. That she swore.
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