POV - Azra'il
Roxy's departure left the Greyrat house with that particular quality of spaces that have lost an element which had become part of their rhythm without anyone having planned it. Not silence exactly. Simply a different frequency, like music that keeps playing after one instrument stops.
The routine had reorganised itself with the pragmatism of families that know how to do that. Paul resumed his patrols with his former regularity, appearing for the sword training sessions on the afternoons that work permitted. Zenith returned to the garden and the sewing and the unsolicited embraces I had learnt not to dodge. Lilia kept the house running with the unshakeable precision of someone for whom external chaos was merely background noise.
Rudeus returned to the clay figures and the advanced magic book Zenith had given him for his birthday, with the energy of someone who had lost the teacher but not the objective.
I returned to the tree in the courtyard.
For approximately two days.
Then I looked at the courtyard, the henhouses, the stable, Paul's practice space that smelt of sweat and dedication, and concluded with the objectivity of someone who had evaluated thousands of cultivation sites that this one was functionally adequate and structurally limiting.
The mana of Vila Buena was clean. But it was like trying to fill a lake with a watering can.
I needed something better.
After a few days, Rudeus found me in the kitchen that morning with the particular expression of someone who had been accumulating questions and had decided the time had come to ask them.
"You disappear every morning," he said, in the tone of someone presenting evidence.
"I go for walks."
"For three hours."
"Long walks have documented benefits for physical development."
He looked at me. "You hate walking."
"I have learnt to appreciate it."
"Since when?"
"Recently."
Rudeus crossed his arms with the expression of someone arriving at a conclusion they did not like. "You are doing something."
"I am always doing something. It is the nature of conscious existence."
"Something you do not want me to know about."
"Rudeus." I picked up my tea with the serenity of someone closing a meeting. "If I wanted you to know, I would have said so. That logic is simple enough for anyone to process."
He looked at me for a moment with that contained indignation he had developed specifically for conversations with me. Then he conceded with the restraint of someone who had learnt when a battle was lost before it began.
I went out through the back door with the tea still in hand.
〈He is going to try to follow me again.〉
[Third attempt this week. The previous two ended with him lost near a barn, convinced you had used illusion magic. You had not.]
〈He simply has a dreadful sense of direction.〉
[Also correct.]
Eos had begun cataloguing the map of the region in the first week, scanning passively as I walked, recording mana densities with the methodology of someone who had developed analytical systems across more existences than most civilisations had lasted.
The result had been, for the most part, disappointing with the specific disappointment of places that were not designed for anything beyond existing.
The village square: low mana, contaminated by constant human activity. The market: worse still, that type of dense, impure energy that accumulates where many people exchange things and emotions in small spaces. The wheat fields: better, but still within the parameters I already knew from the courtyard.
The forest had been the interesting variable.
Paul had said not to venture too deep. Which was reasonable advice for a five-year-old child with limited combat training, which I technically was by the criterion of physical appearance, and completely irrelevant to what I was by any other criterion.
I went anyway. Carefully, because prudence is a virtue I had learnt after dying in avoidable ways more times than I preferred to count.
The near zone was clear of monsters thanks to Paul's patrols, which was convenient. The vegetation grew denser as I advanced, the sunlight arriving at different angles between the trees, and the ambient mana changed in texture with every fifty metres of depth.
Cleaner. Denser. Less disturbed by constant human presence.
And then Eos signalled.
[Mana concentration approximately three times that of Vila Buena. Quality: high. A nearby running water source creates a natural energy circulation. I recommend investigating.]
I followed the direction.
The waterfall was four metres high, which made it modest by any geographical standard but genuinely suited to my purposes. The water fell over dark stones with that sound running water always makes, and the stream that flowed from it was crystalline with the clarity of something untouched by anything other than the surrounding forest.
I activated the eyes at a low level.
The mana here had a different texture from anything I had found in the village. Not merely denser. More alive. There was in the current of water a natural circulation of energy that created a constant flow through the environment, like a heart pumping into the space around it. The stones near the waterfall had absorbed that flow long enough to become passive conductors, and the surrounding trees contributed with the particular energy of old plant life.
It was reasonably good. Not comparable to the cultivation sites of the great worlds I had inhabited, where generations of cultivators had refined the energy over centuries. But for a beginning in this body, in this world, it was what was available.
〈Sufficient.〉
[For current purposes, yes. For future purposes, we will eventually need something better.]
〈Eventually is a problem for eventually.〉
I chose a wide, flat stone near the stream, at the right distance from the waterfall to feel the mana circulation without being in the middle of the water flow, and sat with my legs crossed.
The cultivation system I had learnt in Shénvara, one of the first worlds where I had encountered cultivation in its organised form, divided the path into thirteen progressive realms. Each one represented not only an increase in power, but a fundamental shift in what the cultivator was capable of being.
The first realm, the Path of the Mortal Spirit, was the starting point: the perception of Qi, the learning of how to feel the energy that exists in everything. In Shénvara, beginners spent months simply learning to perceive the Qi around them. I had passed through the stage during the sessions in the courtyard at the speed of someone who already knew what they were looking for and only needed the body to learn to look alongside them.
The third realm, Condensation of Qi, was where the cultivator learnt to manipulate energy freely, to direct it with precise intention. I had technically already reached that stage through the mana mastery I had developed with Roxy. The magic of this world operated on that principle without anyone here knowing that was what they were doing.
Which meant I had passed through the third realm without realising it, by the wrong route, in the most inconvenient manner possible.
[For the record: you did this in incarnation 412 as well. And in 678. The pattern suggests you have a structural tendency to advance through realms in the wrong order.]
〈I am unconventional.〉
[That is a generous way of putting it.]
The second realm was where I was focusing now, precisely because I had leapt over it without consolidating what needed to be consolidated. Corporeal Refinement. And this was where things became physically interesting in the specific sense of interesting I had learnt to associate with processes that cost more than they appeared to.
Corporeal Refinement had six internal stages, each working a different layer of the physical:
Stone Skin strengthened resistance to impact and surface damage. Steel Bones densified the skeletal structure. Tempered Blood purified and fortified the circulatory system, improving the distribution of energy throughout the body. Golden Muscles rebuilt muscle tissue into more efficient fibres. Jade Body was where the entire system began to operate in harmony. And Adamantine Body, the final stage, was the point where the human body ceased to be a human body in the conventional sense.
I had completed Stone Skin in the preceding weeks in the courtyard. With the richer mana of the waterfall, the pace had accelerated considerably.
Steel Bones was next.
Strengthening bones required directing refined mana into bone tissue with a precision that skin did not demand. Bone is dense. Resistant. It absorbs energy differently from soft tissue, and the process produced sensations that I would describe as generalised cramps if I wished to be euphemistic about the matter.
I do not wish to be euphemistic.
It hurt.
Not with the intensity of real damage, but with that particular pain of something being reorganised against the preference of the nervous system. In conditioned adult bodies, the adaptation happened gradually enough to be manageable. In this body, which was still growing and whose bones had the particular plasticity of childhood, the process had a quality all its own.
〈Eos, this is extremely uncomfortable.〉
[I have records of you describing this stage in significantly more dramatic terms in previous incarnations. "Uncomfortable" represents a considerable evolution in perspective.]
〈I am maturing.〉
[Alternatively, the young body has a higher pain threshold than expected. Also possible.]
[For the additional record: in incarnation 289, you stated specifically that you would never again undertake Corporeal Refinement in a body under fifteen years of age after the experience at the Second Peak of the Iron Mountain.]
〈What happened at the Second Peak of the Iron Mountain stays at the Second Peak of the Iron Mountain.〉
[Noted. With the observation that this principle did not exist when you applied it retroactively.]
I continued regardless.
The process of Steel Bones in a five-year-old body would take longer than it had in any body I could recall. But the result would be proportional: bones refined during growth would have a different quality from bones refined after they had fully formed. Like forging metal whilst it is still hot rather than after it has cooled.
There were advantages to beginning early.
There were disadvantages I preferred not to enumerate.
The subsequent realms, Foundation Building and Spiritual Core, were where the process began to produce changes that went beyond the physical. The spiritual foundation formed, that base which allowed the cultivator to begin operating at larger scales without collapsing under their own weight. The Spiritual Core was where internal energy ceased to be merely energy and began to become something with its own identity, a sphere of power that circulated at the centre of the body and fed everything around it.
I had reached those stages in other lives.
In this one, I was in the second realm, in a five-year-old body, at a small waterfall in the interior of a medieval village.
It was humiliating in a way I had learnt to accept with philosophical resignation and a reasonable quantity of dark humour.
〈Eos, projected time to complete Steel Bones in this body.〉
[Between two and four weeks with daily sessions at this location. Faster than would be possible without the technical knowledge you carry. Slower compared to your other lives.]
〈Relative efficiency.〉
[It is what we have available.]
The routine established itself with the naturalness of things that work.
Breakfast with the family. The conversation with Rudeus that invariably involved him attempting to discover what I was doing and me offering responses that were technically true and completely useless for that purpose. The walk through the village and then through the forest to the waterfall. The hours of cultivation on the flat stone with the sound of the water as a constant backdrop.
Lunch back at home to confirm continued existence, consume Lilia's cooking which had improved notably since I had begun offering suggestions on seasoning, and listen to Zenith describe her day with the particular warmth of someone who genuinely wanted to know how every person in the house was getting on.
Then back to the waterfall until late afternoon.
On the fourteenth day, the progress in Steel Bones was measurable.
Not visible to any external observer. Not dramatic by any standard this world would recognise. But I felt the difference with the precision of someone who knew every meridian of this body better than any local physician could, the subtle density that had begun accumulating in the bone tissue with the particular solidity of something being built to last.
It was slow. It was consistent. It was sufficient.
The waterfall continued falling with the particular indifference of water towards the philosophical concerns of whoever happens to be sitting near it. The local mana circulated with the rhythm I had learnt to recognise as the pulse of that place, constant and clean.
I closed my eyes and returned to the work.
With the patience of someone who had done this more than a thousand times and had learnt, across all of those times, that there was no shortcut to the work.
There was only the work. The time. And the stubbornness to keep going.