Book One, Chapter 12 - Lessons Learned

Well howdy there! It's been a minute! I've been doing mixed reviews! Got distracted by some irl stuff and art, and getting into the right headspace for this took much longer than it should have. Thank you for your patience, off we goooooo.

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Paleblossom City is one of the foremost capitals of the Empire in the third ring, standing proud on the crest of the Blue-Gold Mountains between the Empire’s bread-basket territories and the harsher and more specialized lands between them and the Wall. On its northern edge, the cold becomes difficult for mortals to navigate, much less farm in, but also provides an exceptional environment for natural treasures that thrive in frigid and bright places. These can then be harvested for the wider Empire’s benefit from central locations and supply routes to Imperial cities like Paleblossom, providing anchors for proper civilization to spread and prosper and making the city an ideal location to provide for the needs of the many in its reach!

While the trench-cities that often develop behind the Wall’s greater fortresses remain hubs of civilization all around the third ring, most of the land from there to the Blue-Gold Mountains (where Paleblossom City makes its home) is inhabited only by nomads and wandering cultivators, who manage the populations of Spirit Beasts before they become threats or procure specialized resources. This stretch of the Empire holds the record for Moonfalls, as well as vast tracts of land which manifest beautiful and unique flora, fauna, and spiritual resources. 

Truly, Paleblossom City is a lynchpin for the Empire’s north-eastern stretch, a place with centuries of rich history and beautiful artistry in the face of the dangerous and inhuman lands conquered by great heroes for the benefit of all!

-Pamphlet for travelers, written by the Division of Mortal Affairs. These are offered freely to merchants, unhoused mortals and wandering cultivators at Imperial Post locations along the North-Eastern stretch of the third ring’s Grand Highways.

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The world goes on. Habits resume, new habits form, time passes. More than half a year since she lost everything, and Raika is finally starting to feel, if not comfortable, then at least familiar.

Her situation hasn’t changed all that much, at least not in most of the big ways. She misses Hisheng, the comfort he brought when she found the time for him. She misses traveling, running miles and miles in a day from one village to another, one city to another, fighting bandits, rogue Spirit Beasts, battling in local arenas. She misses her strength, how easy and fluid and beautiful it used to feel just to move. She misses the world as it was, where she could experience whole stretches of land in a week and never stop moving, never stop experiencing more. Compared to the restrictiveness of her sect, the only home she’d known since she was a child, the last few years had been as close to ideal as she could think of. 

It’s hard to think about those times, even as they resurface in her thoughts over and over throughout the days and weeks. It is so easy to just let the thought of what was wrap around her like comforting chains, holding her in misery.

And yet there is a wild thing in her chest that refuses to bow before something as weak as memories of what was. Held there, next to her heart, next to the drumbeat that tells her she is alive, she keeps a bright and shining thing that screams and laughs and flares at the thought of what will be.

Of what will be.

Still, torn between was and will-be, Raika is the first to acknowledge that she is, in fact, still a cripple. She can now walk almost thirty minutes, heavily assisted by a cane, before she has to stop, and not much has changed in application about having to manage energy levels, or starving, or being desperate.

But they have all changed in scale. If she had to measure it (and she can’t, and is highly biased, and definitely is no expert in all the science she’s pretending at) she might be just below an infant in terms of cultivation, or at least its effects on the body. She is sleeping eleven hours a night, not fourteen; she gets value out of what she eats; she actually sometimes can feel herself relax and recover some energy when she sits, rather than just mustering her will to keep going. Whatever she did to herself with her heartbeat and meditation, it changed something.

So she hasn’t stopped doing it.

It took some trial and error to figure out, and a lot of help from JiaJia, though it’s only been as bad as the first time once or twice. As far as she can tell, she isn’t actually sensing Qi, no more than a person who becomes blind is “seeing” colors. She’s not touching it directly with her will, not as before. Between Dink, breathing exercises, and focusing on and flexing in time to her heartbeat, her body is simply interacting with Qi as all things do, just in a slightly new pattern. All things that exist interact with Qi, but spiritual organs are evolved specifically for that purpose- a way to make it efficient, viable, safe. Where damage has stripped those tools from her, delusion and self-harm have replaced them. 

There is a slight issue, though. Natural formations happen over decades, and necessitate changes to the environment that can be dramatic. A living body isn’t good at dealing with dramatic changes to itself, and she’s not taking decades. 

Which means she’s getting Qi poisoned.

In cultivators, it would be called Qi deviation. Happens when foreign Qi of sufficient amount or different enough conceptual “flavoring” enters a person’s cultivation, forcing it to deviate from where it’s “supposed” to go. At higher levels, it can be extremely lethal, but even at the lowest realms of cultivation it can lead to permanent damage. In a mortal, there’s no official “path” to one’s Qi, so it doesn’t deviate- ergo, poisoning. Having a lot of Qi in your body that isn’t being digested, managed, or guided into proper patterns is more or less the definition of Qi deviation, but without a significant amount, the body is naturally designed to handle it. With the amount she’s interacted with, she’s pretty sure it would usually manifest as a cough, maybe some soreness for a few days.

It almost killed her.

Which means it’s working!

Which means other things can work too!

She’s found a rhythm between heartbeat, breathing, movement, and Dink that seems to still cause the tingling, but not as intensely and with less diarrhea involved (she was very relieved when she found out how to more or less stop that from happening). Cultivation is an incredibly detailed and vague process, and even at early levels, can be as complicated as any other biological system- but Raika’s decided that doing it badly is better than not doing it at all. At the least, she’s pretty sure she can send some of the vibrations she’s meditating on into the Qi drifting in and out of her, which, left wild and outside a body’s intended organs, can wreak havoc.

As that first moment of epiphany proved, a violent enough “Qi deviation” is as potent as any toxin, and one of the most common and dramatic ways that overzealous cultivators end their journeys. She’s seen some before; younger or more brash cultivators assuming they had what it takes to enter secluded meditation in one of her sect’s high-concentration Qi rooms, only to be brought out later on stretchers or already dead, leaking blood out of every orifice or just straight out of their pores.

If she ever starts bleeding out of her skin, she’ll know she’s on the wrong track. Other than that… she’ll have to keep winging it.

Sighing, she leans back on the crate she’s sitting on, letting the moment flow through her and the thoughts she’s having. Idly, she bats away a stray snowflake that flutters onto an eyelash.

The winters are long in Paleblossom city, and its spring short. Even so many months into the cold, it’s only now reaching its deepest levels, and Raika has been using her new energy to make sure she’s moving whenever she can be, flexing muscles and stretching subtly when she can to work out kinks that have long ago taken residence. She’s pretty sure the movement helps to influence the Qi in turn, though not as much as proper katas might. Still, anything that might help with holding the Qi in the right spot for a little bit, or help it to saturate a little deeper, and she takes the excuse to range further and further from her home. Despite the cold and the ankle-high snow and the occasional patch of ice- none of which are particularly kind on her ailing body- she’s made a point to be out and about whenever she can be.

She inhales, and then exhales, hating how the cold burns her throat and enjoying it as the reward for another day.

Then she refocuses, watching JiaJia go through the forms she’s taught him.

And then whacking his leg with her cane when he fucks up a particularly important step, to which he jumps back with a hiss.

“Gah! Damnit! Stop doing that!”

“Stop fucking up,” she rasps. “Do them wrong, hurts worse than some little whack.”

He rolls his eyes, but thinks better of whatever he was going to say as he notices her glaring. Instead, like a proper student, he gets back into the right pose, feet shoulder-width apart, arms out in front.

“So,” JiaJia asks, probably trying to distract her so she doesn’t whack him again, “got any plans for the Cold Sun festival?”

Raika frowns at him. He’s still pointing his toes the wrong way, and one shoulder is just a bit more tense than the other, but it’s better than before. The kid can’t hold his focus for more than a few minutes, and her crutch-wacking muscles are getting a workout trying to keep him from wasting both of their time.

“You should be focusing,” she rasps.

“Well, you aren’t, so why should I?” He answers. He does adjust his footing when she squints her glare at him harder, though, so at least he’s taking her cane seriously.

“Dink,” agrees Dink. She’s raising such a fine apprentice! Honestly, he’ll carve up the heavens in no time at his pace.

“Shut it, ya lump,” she hisses at the tuning fork, ignoring JiaJia’s look. “And you, don’t waste time talking. I am focusing, I am just better than you. Now get your breathing right. Eleven counts breathe in, ten counts breathe out. If it hurts your ribs a bit, it’s good.”

Back to the basics. Katas. Pre-Cultivation practice. Stupid, considering she can’t see his Qi or correct him, but he asked about why she walks weird and what made her sick, and she answered, and he asked for more, and she offered to show him, and he damn near jumped at the opportunity. It’s all she really has to pay him back with, and it’s… not nothing.

He’s taken to it like a sparrow to a river; flapping about and making a big mess every time he fails to take off.

He does as instructed: eleven counts in, ten counts out, once, then twice. Then-

“I just mean there’s more guards than normal,” he continues, “but there’s going to be tons of goodies. Good place to beg, if you can get there early and no one knocks out your spot. Just don’t stay right too much in the middle of things and you’d be great!”

“Not going,” she rasps. “Trash is there tomorrow, people aren’t. Hiding from the cold like babies.”

“Oh yeah, real dumb of them, huh?” JiaJia says with a roll of his eyes, to which he receives another crutch-wack. “Ow! Listen, it just might be nice, alright? You spend all your time sitting in the snow, walking in weird patterns and going through the trash. Isn’t it better to take a break sometimes? Hang out near the fires, watch the lights?”

“Maybe,” she rasps, “but not as nice as you sticking! To! Your! Form!” Each exclamation is followed by a whack, though she has to stop and breathe for a bit after to get her breath back.

“Ow, ow, ow!” he yelps. “What’s even the point!” he yells. “It’s not like I should be taking advice from you anyways, I have chores and work to do.” 

“Then go, idiot child. I have better things to do than give you some of the most important knowledge humanity ever learned!” Raika shoots back. “Proper form is crucial to proper development This is the basics. Discipline and diligence, dipshit. You wanna crush rocks, spit stars out of the sky, fuck better than any man has ever fucked before? Then get in your stance, take your fucking breaths, and feel for your goddamn Dantian.”

“I am using my Dantian!” he whines. “It feels full and this is stupid, you’re just making me feel sick!”

“Well if it’s full, then you start moving it around!” Raika exclaims, coughing a bit. “That’s what the meridians are for. You think those little tubes are made to sit around empty? Take the Qi from your Dantian and push. Let it flow. I don’t know what will work best, but it’s hard to go wrong with moving it to your heart, gut, and lungs. It’ll be hard at first, but it will get easier the more you do it. Figure out a pattern that feels right and goes through an important part of you, then put the rest in the order that feels right. Not easy- right.”

It’s the most she’s said all day, and he can tell by how she’s rasping at the end that it cost her. Obviously that’s the part that gets through to him, not the incredible advice she’s providing, but… better than nothing. Raika watches as he stops, blinking, before resuming his stance, almost properly. She refrains from further whacks; if he’s actually listening, now’s the time for him to focus, stance proper or not. 

It takes a few minutes, which she spends getting her breathing back under control, but for once, he stays quiet. Eyes closed, head slightly down, he slowly moves from one stance to the next, carefully. Then to the next.

“I… can feel it,” he whispers, a bead of sweat forming on his forehead. “It’s like… it’s like a spring. It’s slippery, I can’t-”

“Focus”, she hisses. “Breathe as you go. Even breaths, in slow, out slow. Wait for it to settle, then find what it needs. Soft guidance, firm control, mantras, mental imagery, it can be anything; just do what feels right, and when you find it, do it well and do not stop doing it until you feel it move as you will.”

She wipes her chin, looking at him. For all she knows, he’s just standing there like an idiot, eyes closed and staring at nothing. This is all wrong, of course; a teacher should be able to sense one’s student, detect deviations in their cultivation or their Qi, be able to reach in and offer corrections as needed. A real teacher would have actual techniques to gift him, an understanding of what kind of process might best suit him, what affinities he might have. All she can do is watch and give the most generic advice possible. What worked for her won’t for him, and she never looked too deeply into other cultivation manuals back at the Hungering Roots sect. The best she can offer is basic knowledge, and she hopes he doesn’t fail, doesn’t set himself back.

The kid was kind. He is kind, in spite of him being a little shit. He helped her. If the most she can do is talk and make sure he’s standing properly then that’s what she’ll do, as well as she fucking can.

Then she blinks. 

That- huh. 

What’s that smell?

Not a smell. Close, but not quite, like her brain doesn’t quite know what else to call it. It’s like when you know you have smelled something, but have no idea what it is.

JiaJia exhales, long and slow, his stance shifting unconsciously to a better form, his whole body untensing, and Raika can’t help but hold in her breath, can’t help but tremble across her whole body at what she feels.

He inhales again.

In the dead of winter, standing next to a blossoming cultivator taking his very first steps, she is hit with the tiniest, faintest hint of tangerines.

JiaJia opens his eyes, letting out a deep exhale that immediately turns to a cloud of steam in the cold, even warmer than normal. He smiles, a grin so deep and so wide that it alone would be worth this entire exercise. “I… I think I did it!” he yells. He whoops, short and bright, jumping a solid few feet straight up, laughing harder than she’s ever seen him. “I got it! It fit, it moved a lot and it kinda hurt to touch but it shifted and it all connected, they’re full! Granny, they’re-” 

He stutters to a complete stop when he looks at her. At first she blinks in surprise, assuming he was used to the scars by now, but then she realizes she’s smiling and crying both, which must make for a truly horrible appearance. She laughs through it, though. “Good for you, idiot,” she rasps, quiet. “Good job. You’ll want to remember that pattern, and keep trying little changes to see what fits. Make sure you keep filling your Dantian all the way, that will give you a bit more force to move into new meridians with. Keep it up and it’ll keep growing.”

As she’s speaking, he tears up a bit too, like an emotional little idiot. He bows, still like an amateur, but so deep his head passes his waist, as low as he can go without losing his balance.

They both felt it. The moment he passed from someone living life passively to someone actively cultivating. 

“Thank you, master,” he whispers.

She whacks him on the back of his head with her crutch.

“OW!” he yelps, falling face first into snow and shooting up a good bit faster than he used to. “What was that for!”

“For being an idiot, idiot boy,” Raika rasps with a smirk that hides her smile. “I’m no one’s master, and I won’t have you calling me that. Do better for yourself. You’re cultivating now- once you’ve taken a few more steps, you’ll get yourself a proper master, someone from a sect. Don’t waste the title on fucked up old ladies like me.”

His mouth flops open and closed like a fish, idiot brain trying to puzzle through what she means before eventually clicking shut. Then, the smile comes back.

“You called yourself old,” he says in his brattiest tone.

“Older than an acorn like you, anyways,” she mumbles. “Get out of here. Go solidify the pattern, and when you have room again, pull in more. Make sure that you feel comfortable with your Qi and can move it, slowly, without discomfort. It should feel natural, like… like something that’s always been there, always worked like that, and you’re just… remembering. It’s part of you. The world made into you.”

He bows again, though only half as deep this time. “Yes, old master shitty grandma!” he says, grinning at her and sprinting back through the snow before the crutch hits him on the head again. Any composure his escape might have had is ruined when he slips and falls in the snow, but he’s back up, panting for breath and laughing, before she could even start walking, taking off down the street like a rocket.

She doesn’t try to follow anyways. Even if she could keep up, she’d still be distracted.

When he got up. When he ran just now, faster than before.

She smelled tangerines again.

She smiles, as sharp and happy as she’s ever seen.

Natural formations necessitate and cause dramatic changes to an environment. Her body is an environment. 

She smelled something she’s never smelled before.

This has implications, she thinks.

“Dink”, agrees Dink, with what feels like concern and hunger both.