POV - Azra'il
There was a certain poetry in the scene unfolding before me that day.
Rudeus was unconscious on the ground of the courtyard in the specific posture of someone who had lost the battle against their own magical ambition. Arms spread wide, face turned to the sky with the serene expression of someone who had exceeded every available limit and decided the ground was a reasonable place to contemplate existence. Around him, scattered across the floor with the random distribution of a small-scale catastrophe, were the remains of approximately one hundred earth sculptures he had created before collapsing.
Some still had a recognisable shape. Most did not.
I was seated on the back doorstep, holding my cup of tea, observing the scene with the neutral interest of a naturalist documenting the behaviour of a particularly determined species.
〈Eos, status of the specimen.〉
[Mana depleted. All physiological systems operating normally. He is fine. Simply unconscious in a voluntary and temporary fashion.]
〈Voluntary.〉
[In the sense that it was he who decided to create one hundred earth sculptures consecutively without pausing to assess the reserve level. Technically it was a choice.]
I took a sip of tea.
The theory Rudeus had brought to the loft over a year ago had been presented with the enthusiasm of someone who had discovered something revolutionary. He had drawn diagrams, made estimates, arrived at the conclusion with that particular expression of intellectual pride I had learnt to recognise as the signal that he was about to explain something I already knew.
"Azra'il, I think the mana reserve grows when you deplete it completely. When it recovers, the final volume is slightly larger than before. Like a muscle that rebuilds stronger after exertion."
I had looked at his diagrams with the appropriate attention of someone assessing the work before responding.
"That is correct."
His enthusiasm had deflated audibly. "You already knew."
"For quite some time, yes."
"And you said nothing?"
"You did not ask."
The discussion that followed had lasted twenty minutes and had been, in my assessment, entirely unnecessary, but evidently necessary for his emotional process.
The fact itself was correct. I had verified it with my own eyes over the months, activating my ocular power at a low level periodically to check Rudeus's channels after each exhaustion session. The reserve was growing. Slowly, almost imperceptibly with each cycle, but consistently. With time and the dedication that the chubby little pervert was clearly committed to maintaining, he would become something considerably more absurd than he already was.
The problem was that that method did not work for me.
Depleting my mana to the point of collapse in the current body would be the equivalent of opening an oceanic floodgate inside a garden hose. The result would not be growth. It would be a situation that Roxy would need to heal and that I would prefer not to have to explain to any adult in the house.
I needed another method.
I looked at Rudeus unconscious on the ground, then at the courtyard around him, then at the tree in the furthest corner of the garden, an old tree with a generous canopy that cast a wide, stable shadow regardless of the angle of the sun.
〈Eos, analysis of ambient mana in this region.〉
[Ambient mana of Vila Buena: low to moderate density, consistent with a rural area of low human activity. Quality: high. No relevant impurities. No contamination from intense magical activity or conflict. The energy here is clean in the way that only quiet places tend to be. For the purposes you are considering, it is a reasonable starting point.]
〈Reasonable is sufficient to begin.〉
I rose from the step, finished the tea, and went to fetch a piece of charcoal from the hearth.
Cultivation is, in its most basic form, the process of refining the energy that exists in the world and in one's own body until the two become the same thing.
I had learnt this for the first time in a life that had ended so long ago that the civilisations that existed in that world were now dust in worlds that were also dust. The principle, however, was as fundamental as gravity: energy exists in everything. In every stone, in every leaf, in every breath. The question was never whether it was there. The question was always whether you could perceive it, and then, whether you could use it.
In this world, people called it mana. In other worlds I had inhabited, they called it Qi, or Ki, spiritual energy, vital force, aether. The names changed. The principle remained.
The difference between someone who simply had mana and someone who cultivated was the difference between having water in a bucket and having a river. The bucket was useful. The river was an entirely different category of thing.
Cultivation took the internal energy, refined it until the impurities were removed, compressed it into more efficient channels, and then gradually expanded it as the body became capable of sustaining larger volumes. At the same time, it absorbed the ambient energy of the world around, refined that too, and integrated the two into a circulation that fed the system continuously rather than depending solely on the internal reserve.
With time, the benefits accumulated.
The body became more resilient. The bones, the muscles, the organs, everything tempered by the refined energy circulating through the meridians like water through a stone bed that is being gradually sculpted. Recovery accelerated. The senses expanded. Longevity increased. At advanced levels, the benefits became things that mortals called miracles and cultivators called the natural consequence of a sufficiently advanced process.
I had reached some of those levels in other lives.
In this one, I was starting from nothing with a four-year-old body and mana channels that were still learning to exist.
It was humiliating in a way I had learnt to accept with philosophical resignation.
〈Eos.〉
[You are about to ask me whether I have any objections to the fact that you are restarting cultivation in a four-year-old body for what is estimated to be the thousandth time or above.]
〈I had a different question, but now I am curious about the answer to that one.〉
[I have no objections. I have historical data suggesting that every time you begin, you go further than you say you will before you start.]
〈That is almost a compliment.〉
[It is a statistical observation.]
The plaque was ready in a few seconds.
Basic earth magic, the kind I had mastered weeks after beginning lessons with Roxy, applied with the precision of someone who had no need of an incantation to shape a rectangle of clay with reasonably straight edges. With the charcoal, I wrote on the plaque in the careful hand of someone who wanted the message to be legible:
DO NOT DISTURB WHILST I AM MEDITATING.
One line below, in letters slightly smaller but equally clear:
P.S. CHUBBY LITTLE PERVERT.
I drove the plaque into the earth at the edge of the tree's shadow, sat down with my legs crossed, rested my hands on my knees in the posture that my fingers assumed from memory, and closed my eyes.
The first step of cultivation was always the same regardless of the system: silence.
Not the silence from outside. The silence from within. The process of shutting off the constant flow of analysis, observation, and commentary that constituted the standard operating state of my consciousness, and leaving only perception.
〈Eos, silent mode. Interrupt only if there is an emergency.〉
[Silent mode activated.]
I breathed.
The mana in the body moved through the channels with the characteristic irregularity of a young, untrained system, flows that came and went without established pattern, energy that accumulated at certain points and grew scarce at others. It was the natural state of any beginner. I had seen it hundreds of times in pupils at the start of the path.
Seeing it in myself had a particular quality of irony that I preferred not to dwell on.
I began with basic circulation.
The most fundamental technique of any cultivation system I had studied: guiding one's own mana through the meridians in deliberate circulation, establishing a pattern where there had been chaos, transforming random flow into intentional movement. It was the equivalent of opening a path through terrain without a trail, slow and laborious at the beginning, progressively easier as the path established itself.
The meridians of this body responded with the expected resistance of something being asked to do something new.
I continued.
The mana gradually found its way, the flows organising themselves, the points of accumulation dissolving as the circulation established equalised pressure. It was a process that in this body would take multiple sessions. Many sessions.
I had time.
Then, when the internal circulation had assumed some stability, I extended the perception outward.
The ambient mana of Vila Buena was different from the Qi of the cultivation worlds I knew. More diffuse, less structured, without the compressed density of places where generations of cultivators had refined the energy over centuries. It was the energy of a place that had never been worked in that way, clean with the cleanness of something that had not been touched, but without the richness that accumulated spiritual work produced.
It was like the difference between spring water and cultivated water from a developed source.
Both were water. The spring was purer. The cultivated source was more nourishing.
Here I had spring water. It was sufficient to begin.
I guided the perception along the ambient mana with the delicacy of someone touching something fragile, feeling its texture, its temperature, its quality. Each world had its specific energy signature. This one had something I would classify as fresh, with a gentle vegetal quality that probably came from the concentration of natural life around it, the trees, the herbs in Zenith's garden, the earth that had not been much disturbed.
Gently, with the technique of a system refined across more lives than I could account for, I began to guide a minute fraction of that ambient mana towards the internal channels.
The body reacted with the surprise of something that had never been asked to do this before.
I continued.
It was a thread. Less than a thread. It was the idea of a thread, the smallest quantity of external energy I could work with the current channels without forcing something that was not ready. But it was entering. It was being absorbed. It was beginning to integrate into the internal circulation I had established.
It was a beginning.
I did not know how much time had passed when the shadow of the tree had shifted angle enough for me to register the sun moving through my closed eyelids. Enough time for the internal circulation to be more stable than when I had begun. Not dramatically. Not in a way that anyone outside could detect. But I felt the difference with the precision of someone who knew every channel of this body better than any local physician could.
There was also something else.
A presence in the courtyard.
Not threatening. Familiar. With the mana pattern I had catalogued in the first months of life and had associated with the smell of leather and sweat and the sound of heavy boots on wooden floors.
Paul was training.
I had noticed when he arrived. I had noticed when he had seen the plaque, from the way the footsteps stopped completely for a few seconds. I had noticed the moment of hesitation, the decision he made in silence, and then the footsteps moving away towards the training space on the other side of the courtyard.
He had stayed.
He had not disturbed. He had not called out. He had simply remained nearby with the particular quietness of a father who does not know what is happening but has decided that staying close is sufficient for now.
〈Eos, end of silent mode.〉
[Silent mode concluded. Status: first cultivation session complete. Progress: minimal, but real. The channels responded better than expected for a body of this age. The ambient mana was absorbed in quantities I would classify as homeopathic, but the process worked. You have established the path.]
〈A good beginning.〉
I opened my eyes.
The courtyard was lit by the golden light of late afternoon. On the other side of the space, Paul was practising with his sword, the rhythmic, precise movements of someone who had done it so many times that the body followed without needing conscious instruction. He was not looking in my direction.
But I had noticed the way he had positioned his training, not with his back to the tree, but slightly sideways, so that peripheral vision reached the corner where I was sitting without him needing to turn his head.
Near where I had meditated, Rudeus had finally woken. He was sitting on the ground with the expression of someone who had regained consciousness without fully remembering why they had been lying in the middle of the courtyard. He looked at the earth sculptures scattered around him with the expression of someone conducting a post-battle inventory. Then he looked at me.
"How long was I unconscious?" he asked.
"Long enough for the sun to shift position considerably," I said.
He processed that. "So it was hours."
"Yes, you were out for a few hours."
Rudeus looked at the sky with the expression of someone arriving at a verdict about their own afternoon choices. Then he looked at the plaque still driven into the earth beside the tree, read it, and looked back at me.
"'Chubby little pervert,'" he repeated, in the tone of someone reading an official designation.
"It is descriptive and specific," I said. "It works as identification."
"You could have written 'Rudeus.'"
"I could have. But 'Rudeus' does not convey the same quantity of preventive information."
He looked at me for a moment with the expression of someone who has a response and is evaluating whether it is worth the effort of formulating it. He decided it was not. He looked back at the earth sculptures scattered around him with the expression of someone making plans for tomorrow.
〈He is going to attempt 120 sculptures tomorrow.〉
[One hundred and twenty-two, given the escalation pattern observed over the past several weeks.]
〈And he will pass out again.〉
[With high probability, yes.]
On the other side of the courtyard, Paul continued training with his customary methodical consistency, the rhythmic sound of the sword cutting the air filling the space between us with the regularity of a clock. The light was shifting tone, that particular gold of late afternoon that made the courtyard slightly more beautiful than it deserved to be.
I stood up, brushed the dust from my clothes, and went to fetch more tea.
Tomorrow I would return beneath the tree.
And the day after.
And every day after that, for as long as was necessary, with the particular patience of someone who had learnt long ago that things worth having always take longer than you would like and less time than you fear.