Chương 105: I'll Be Back Soon

In the middle of my quarters, I sat cross legged staring at the jade slip in my hand. This could have the answer to bringing the vine back with me.

"Master," Azure called out.

"Are you ready?"

"Yeah," I said, pressing the slip against my forehead. The information that poured in was different to any information I'd absorbed before. The thing with technique manuals were that they were very rigid things. They asked you to follow a specific set of instructions otherwise the whole thing would fall apart. The Heart's Bridge was nothing like that, it was more like a guide, it was as if the ancient cultivator who created this method trusted the disciple to figure out the rest on their own.

The technique started with how I'd assume most soul bond technique would start – meditation. But this wasn't the type of meditation where you emptied your head or narrowed your focus to a single point. What this required was something harder to describe, the closest word to it was probably 'openness'. You had to be aware of your own soul while also staying receptive to the presence of something else.

"It's like trying to hear something very quiet," I said.

"If you're straining too hard you miss it, but if you just relax and actually listen, you can hear it."

"Yes," Azure agreed.

"It's about finding where two souls naturally resonate rather than forcing them to line up." The next section was about the 'bridge of understanding'. It sounded dramatic, but it just meant extending your spiritual sense outward like you were holding out your hand and seeing if the other person took it. I stopped at one particular line and read it twice.

"Azure, it says the technique works with 'any energy that carries the essence of the soul.' Why would they specify that?"

"Could be referring to Life Realm energy," he said after a moment.

"Different cultivation realms do produce fundamentally different kinds of power. Or it could be—""Something else entirely, like energy from the Two Suns World." If the technique really didn't care about what kind of energy was being used, as long as the energy could carry soul resonance, then the gap between cultivation systems might not be a problem. I kept going through the material.

The case studies were the most useful part, examples of bonds that had worked and ones that hadn't, with enough detail to actually learn from them rather than just vague warnings about hubris and impatience. The failed attempts clustered around a few consistent mistakes such as trying to force the bond, approaching an unwilling partner, or treating the other soul as something to be controlled. The successful ones all had the same feeling when I read them.

Both sides had to choose, neither side could try to dominate the other, instead they had to offer each one what they had.

"Are you ready to give it a try?" Azure asked after we'd gone through it a second time. I shifted into a more stable position and closed my eyes. The first step was becoming aware of my own soul and that turned out to be considerably more difficult than it sounds, most techniques I'd practiced dealt with qi pathways or spiritual energy, things that could be felt and directed and mapped, but trying to perceive the actual fundamental essence of yourself was a different kind of problem entirely.

"Think about what it felt like to be between bodies," Azure suggested.

"You've been there before." That actually helped. I held onto the memory of that weightless feeling, being purely myself without any physical form, nothing external, just the fact of my own existence. After some time, something began to clarify at the edges of my perception, deeper than qi, more fundamental than any spiritual energy I'd felt, like an ocean of consciousness that had always been there and I just hadn't known how to look at it properly.

Within it I could sense Azure, the connection between us showed up as ripples on that surface, steady and familiar, which was not something the technique had mentioned and I filed it away as something to think about later.

"Don't force it any shape," Azure said.

"Your soul is whatever it is. Understand it as it actually exists." Right. I let go of the framework I'd been trying to impose and just looked. My soul was a strange thing, shaped by two worlds, carrying memories and experiences that didn't always fit neatly together, and that was fine, that was what it was. Once I stopped trying to make it match an expectation it settled into something I could actually hold in my awareness.

From there I tried extending outward, creating what the technique wanted me to think of as ripples in still water, though I found it easier to imagine tendrils of perception reaching away from me in every direction. The first attempt went badly, I pushed too hard and disrupted everything immediately.

"You're searching," Azure said.

"Too much force. You're looking for something rather than being open to whatever might be there." I tried again with a lighter touch and this time managed to extend maybe a meter in all directions without losing the state. Pathetically small, but it was something. Maintaining it while moving turned out to be significantly harder than reaching it in the first place. The slightest shift in position sent ripples through the whole field and collapsed it.

I spent almost an hour just learning to breathe without breaking my own concentration, which I had to admit was slightly humbling.

"This would be easier with an actual partner," I muttered after the fourth collapse in a row.

"Practicing this without someone on the other end is like..." Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

"Dancing with no one there," Azure suggested.

"Yeah." I rolled my shoulders and sat back down.

"I can learn the movements. I just can't learn how they're supposed to feel."

"Better to have the movements solid now. You'll have enough to manage when you're in the Two Suns World without also fumbling the fundamentals." He had a point as usual. I closed my eyes again and went back to it, this time trying something different. Instead of extending my awareness outward in every direction, I focused on a single point and let the memory of the vine shape my intention.

What it had felt like to stand near it, the particular quality of its attention, the way it had moved when it was protecting me. My awareness extended further than it had in any previous attempt, more stably too, and it surprised me enough that I almost lost it.

"The emotional connection acts like a guide," Azure explained.

"The manual said bonds form more easily when there's already something between the two parties."

"So, my bond with the vine is doing part of the technique's work for me?"

"Yes." I practiced that way for another hour, switching between the focused approach and the broader general awareness to understand the differences. The focused version was stronger but narrow, the general version was weaker but could respond to anything in range, and I needed to understand both because I didn't know exactly what the situation would look like when I actually got back there.

"Try adding qi," Azure said eventually.

"Just enough to give the field some structure." That was harder than everything before it. Too much qi and the entire state of receptivity collapsed immediately, too little and it had no effect at all, I had to find a balance that was genuinely annoying to locate, like trying to add one drop of water to a cup that was already completely full without spilling any of it. The first several attempts failed completely. Then they started failing in more interesting ways, which I chose to count as progress.

Then somewhere in the middle of the third hour I found something that actually worked, a thin steady thread of qi feeding into the awareness field without overwhelming it, giving it a kind of structural backbone that I hadn't had before.

"It feels like balancing something very fragile on the end of a very long stick," I murmured.

"An accurate description of most advanced techniques, yes." I practiced walking slowly around the room, maintaining the field through each step, and by the time the sun started going down I could cross the room without losing it, though anything sudden still broke my concentration immediately.

"Is that enough for tonight?" Azure asked. I let the field go and sat back down, my head starting to ache in the specific way that came from maintaining very fine control for too long.

"Yeah. I think I have the basics. The rest depends on having something to actually bond with."

"And whether the technique will work with a completely different type of energy," Azure added. That was the real question and there was no way to answer it from here. The manual had examples of bonds forming between cultivators of different elements, between cultivators of different realms, even between cultivators and spirit beasts that used unusual energy types, but nothing that came close to what we were actually attempting.

"At least we know more than we did this morning," I said, stretching properly.

"The principles are sound and I can hold the state. Now we just need to figure out how to actually get back to the Two Suns world without going through a breakthrough."

"That's a significant complication," Azure agreed.

"You've made the journey before but never deliberately." I sat back down, letting my breath slow. The two suns were always present in my inner world, always orbiting, always pulling, and the pull toward the Two Suns world had been there since I arrived in this sect, a persistent background sensation like a sound you can't quite stop hearing once you've noticed it.

"I can feel them calling," I said.

"I think I can follow that."

"Take your time," Azure said.

"There's no point attempting it when you're already tired." He was right. I closed my eyes and focused on recovering first. The soul technique practice had taken more out of me than physical training usually did and I needed to be at my best for this, whatever this was going to turn into. I sat with the evening qi-rich air moving through my meridians and slowly felt the ache in my head begin to fade. The moon was out by the time I felt ready.

"Better?" Azure asked.

"Better," I confirmed. I settled my posture, making sure I was comfortable because this might take a while and I didn't want a cramping leg disrupting my concentration at the wrong moment.

"Let's try."

"You've made this journey before," Azure said.

"The connection is already there, you just need to find it." I closed my eyes and turned my attention inward. Forming a spiritual body in my inner world was easier now than it had been at first, more natural, one moment I was sitting in my room and the next I was floating in that space where the usual rules about direction and gravity and physics didn't really apply.

The Genesis Seed filled the center of my inner world, its roots spreading out through each quadrant, its branches reaching up into a sky that wasn't quite a sky, but I wasn't focused on the seed, I was focused on the suns. The red sun pulsed with its familiar warmth, the energy that ran through my fundamental rune, steady and confident.

The blue sun was different, gentler in its call but no less persistent, and I'd never really paid attention to the difference before but now that I was looking for it I couldn't un-notice it.

"Both of them," I said quietly.

"They're each a connection."

"A bridge," Azure agreed.

"Two anchors." I reached out with my awareness, not fighting the pull this time and not surrendering to it either, just following it the way you follow a path you already know is there. The suns began to orbit faster, their light intensifying, and the Genesis Seed responded in the way it always did when significant amounts of energy were moving, its branches swaying in something that wasn't wind.

"You're maintaining control," Azure observed.

"This is different from before." It was. Previous transitions had felt like being grabbed and pulled, like the world had reached out and decided I was going somewhere whether I wanted to or not. This felt deliberate, my own decision, following a route I already knew existed. The light kept building until it filled everything and I felt my soul begin to prepare for the separation from my body, but there was no fear in it, I understood what was happening now, I had done this before, and I knew what came after.

"I'll be back," I said, not entirely sure who I was saying it to. Then I let go. The void wasn't empty, it never had been, I just hadn't been paying attention before. Streams of energy moved through it in every direction like rivers of light and some of them were familiar, recognizable as things adjacent to qi, and others were completely alien and I had no framework to understand what I was looking at.

The suns' pull moved through the void like a current and I let it guide me, their energy wrapping around my soul and keeping everything together as I moved through that cosmic space between places. The streams around me began to take on more definite shapes as I moved, the void thinning, reality trying to reassert itself in fragments and pieces. I could feel something ahead, a specific point drawing me toward it like water finding the lowest point.

Then I was accelerating, the void going blurry around me, but there was still no fear because this was right, this was correct, this was the direction I was supposed to be moving. Colors came back first, just hints of them, then entire ranges that I had no names for. The void kept thinning. Another body was waiting somewhere ahead, familiar, something like a garment you've worn so many times the shape of it is part of your memory, and my consciousness reached toward it and settled in.

The last of the void-space fell away and everything came back at once, the weight of armor across my shoulders, woodsmoke in my lungs, the heat of two suns pressing down on my skin from above. I twisted sideways without thinking about it as an arrow passed so close to my cheek that I felt the wind of it, the projectile burying itself into the wooden post behind me with a heavy thunk.

Maya was staring at me with her hand still extended, she had clearly just tried to pull me out of the way and found that I had already moved.

"Has fear addled your wits, To—" She stopped mid-word as she registered what had just happened.

"How did you..." I turned to face her and smiled. I was back.