Chương 25: Still Mind

"Nana... let me sleep please, nana..." I heard a small chuckle somewhere above my head. I really was not ready to open my eyes, so I supposed Nana could wait another minute.

"Young Lord." … Something about this voice was not Nana. My eyes came open in pieces, as consciousness resurfaced and I remembered where I was. There was a flagstone about three inches from my face, a pale grey robe at the edge of my vision, and the faint pink of suren petals on the ground a little further out.

"Young Lord, please wake u—" The voice ended in a gasp as I jolted upright, and immediately found who it belonged to.

"Oh. Oh, I— Mireth, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to scare you." She had startled back half a step when I moved, her hands coming up slightly, and now she was smoothing the front of her robes and trying to recover the composure I had knocked out of her by sitting up too fast.

"Young Lord, I apologise. I did not mean to wake you so suddenly. I would have let you sleep longer, but—""No, please, it's me who should— I shouldn't have— I fell asleep on the flagstones, that's not—""Young Lord—""Sorry. Sorry. Yes." I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes. My head was full of the slow warm cotton of a sleep interrupted too fast.

The last thing I remembered clearly was Master Saoren telling me to breathe and circulate and close my eyes, and after that there was a long quiet stretch of something I was not sure had been meditation or a nap, and then nothing at all until I had heard a voice calling me. Mireth, in the meantime, had regained her composure.

"Young Lord. There are guards at the shrine gates. They arrived a short while ago. They are here to escort you back to the estate."

"... What?"

"They are waiting." I looked around me. The sun was not yet over the eastern ridge but the sky above the ridge was already pale, and the air had the clean mountain edge of a morning that had started without me. My grandfather had not told me how long I was allowed to stay here, I realized. I had assumed I had a week.

"Where are they?"

"At the main gates, Young Lord. They said they would wait for as long as was needed, but—""No. Of course. I'll go to them." I pushed myself up off the flagstones while my knees protested, and my back even more as I brushed the petal off my sleeve, looking once at the suren with no trace of the small blue spirit anywhere in the branches. But I was sure, in a way I could not have explained, that he was still there, somewhere in the branches or near them.

"Is something the matter, Young Lord?" Mireth was watching me.

"No. Nothing." Somewhere in the long hours of the night, Saoren had made me promise not to speak of our meeting to anyone without his permission. Obviously, I had agreed without arguing but standing here now, with Mireth waiting for an answer and the suren still in bloom above us, I felt the small sharp ache of wanting to tell her. She had tended this shrine her whole life and so did the other two keepers.

All three of them had spent their lives believing that the spirit they revered so deeply had gone, so I would have given a great deal to see their faces when I told them. But I could not, so I did not. Instead, I started for the gate.

"I will deal with the guards." I stepped out into the short path that led to the main gates as a strong wind hit me. I had to raise my voice a little for the first few words. Four guards stood on the other side of the gates in full Aridis colours. They saw me and went to one knee together, fists pressed to their chests in the martial salute.

"Young Lord."

"Captain. Please, stand." They rose in the same motion they had knelt.

"The council has summoned you back to the estate, Young Lord. We have been instructed to escort you at your earliest convenience. We will wait for as long as you need to ready yourself." I took a breath and pulled the front my robe a little closer against the wind.

"I thank the council for sending you. However, I would ask that I be permitted to remain at the shrine until the day I depart for the academy. I am not yet ready to return to the estate." The four of them had a small exchange of glances at that, and it did not take a prodigy to realize the sort of situation in which I was putting them. For that, I was sorry.

"Young Lord. Our orders—""I understand your orders. I am not asking you to disobey them. I am asking you to carry a message back to the council on my behalf, and to let the council decide." The captain's mouth worked for half a second.

"And the message, Young Lord?" I had time to think about this on my way to the gates. I knew how the elders valued my attachment to the house above almost everything else, so a reason that fit inside that line would likely get me the days.

"Please tell the council that since arriving at the shrine, I have felt a certain connection to the Axioms who came before me. I would like to use the remaining days to learn more about the history of the house from the keepers here, and to meditate on what that history means for my time at the academy. The elders will understand."

The captain seemed to be holding the words in his head for a second, as if checking them against some internal register of things that could be safely repeated to the Council of Aridis, and, fortunately for me, seemed to conclude they would pass.

"... As you say, Young Lord. We will carry the message."

"Thank you." They bowed again, more briefly this time, turned, then started back down the rock-cut stairs into the wind, and I watched them until the first bend in the path took them out of sight then I came back through the gates and found Mireth waiting for me in the inner courtyard.

"Is everything well, Young Lord?"

"Yes. The guards will carry a message back to the council. I've asked to remain here until the day I leave for the academy, if that is not an imposition on the shrine or on any of you." This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

"An imposition?" The small smile came back to the corner of her mouth.

"Young Lord, this shrine was built for the Axioms of the line, and no Axiom has walked through those gates in over a thousand years. So your presence here is not an imposition but the very reason the shrine exists. You are welcome for the rest of the week, and for longer than the week if the council ever permits it."

"Thank you, Mireth."

"Is there anything you will need for your stay? The library is open to you, of course, though some of the older texts require care in handling and I would be happy to bring them to you myself. We also have a small training hall on the eastern side of the complex that has been used by keepers for light practice over the years. It is nothing compared to what you are accustomed to at the estate, but if you require equipment, a weapon rack, a training dummy, we can prepare the space within the hour."

"None of that will be necessary, thank you. I won't be needing books or equipment. I will be meditating." She did not quite manage to hide the small flicker of perplexity that crossed her face at that.

"... Meditating, Young Lord?"

"Mm-hmm."

"For… the whole of the week?"

"For as much of the week as I am able to, yes. I read last night, after you retired, the oldest texts in the garden shrine, and something in what I saw has stayed with me. I would like to sit with it properly before I leave for the academy. I would also ask, if it is not too much, to not be disturbed while I am in the inner garden. Meals can be left at the gate and I will come out for tea at sunset if the keepers still take it on the bench outside."

She did not seem to be any less curious despite my excuse, but to my relief, she did not press further, and instead inclined her head.

"Of course, Young Lord. We will see to it that you are not disturbed. The meals will be left at the gate, as you ask, and the tea at sunset is yours to attend if you wish it."

"Thank you." I moved past her toward the inner garden before she could ask anything else and she bowed and left the way she had come. I walked under the suren. The wind from the gates did not reach in here, and the morning light was starting to warm the flagstones at the base of the trunk. I looked up into the branches. Then left, then right, then up again.

"Are you there, Master Saoren?"

"Where else would I be?" He was standing in front of me before I had finished turning my head.

"Oh, good morning, Master Saoren. I am sorry about last night. I don't remember falling asleep. I'll do better today, I've thought about it on the walk back from the gates, and I'd like to go twice as long this morning, and if we can get through the first proper meditation cycle before midday I think we could start on something more advanced after tea, and I have questions about the circulation I was doing last night, I think I was bending it inward at one point when I was supposed to be letting it—""Child."

"... Yes?"

"Do not rush. A boy who runs at a mountain on his first day of climbing reaches the foot of it with bloody knees. Go slowly enough that you arrive. Go too fast and you will trip and break, and then there will be no arriving at all." Oh.

"That being said." He shifted one of the lower arms.

"You held your attention on the breath last night longer than I had expected of a boy your age, and the circulation began on its own without my having to prompt it twice. That is several stages ahead of where I had been planning to start with you. I would like to know why."

"Ah! That's because of a skill I have. It's called [Focus]. The System gave it to me during the entrance trials, Rank B. It lets me hold attention on one thing very cleanly and filter out everything else. It was at Level 4 by the end of the exam. So when you told me to notice my mana and not get in the way, I just used it to not get in the way very precisely."

"... I see." He turned and walked a few steps toward the centre of the garden.

"Back to work, child." I sat back down on the flagstones, folded into the same posture as the night before. The shoulders, the spine, the hands, then I closed my eyes. In through the nose, four. Hold, two. Out through the mouth, six. [Focus] came up the way it always did, the mana moved out of my core, settled in a thin warm band behind my eyes, and the world stepped into sharper definition without me having to do anything for it. My breath and heartbeat were suddenly the loudest things I could hear.

The wind on the upper slope. The faint creak of one of the suren branches a few paces to my right. The pressure of the flagstone under each ankle, the seam of the inner robe against the back of my neck.

"Notice the mana, child. Do not pull, and do not push." Saoren's voice was somewhere off to my left. I noticed it. The core sat as a warm weight a little below my sternum, holding the sliver of reserves my walls would let me hold.

I noticed it without reaching for it, and after a few breaths it began to move with the breath, the way he had told me it would, in a slow circle out from the core and through the channels and back, picking up something faint from the air on each inhale, releasing the spent traces of itself on each exhale. The ambient mana in the air was thinner here than the air in the practical exam grounds had been, but it was there. A quiet steady supply of it on each breath in.

The core took what was offered without my asking it to. The walls did not flare and clamp the way they sometimes did during training. The mana just... moved. [Focus: Level 4 (100%) > Level 5 (0%)] I did not open my eyes. I just kept the breath as the notification sat at the edge of my attention for a beat and then dissolved.

"Good. Continue." Another circle, then another. The proficiency climbed to six percent, twenty-one, forty and soon…. [Focus: Level 5 (100%) > Level 6 (0%)] The cost was not nothing. I could feel a small steady drain on my reserves with each pass of the circle, the same drain I had felt during the long sweeps in the forest, but it was being replenished almost as fast as it was being spent because the breath was bringing in more than the technique was using. The pool was holding, so I kept going.

Saoren said something I did not quite catch. I caught the shape of it more than the words. I adjusted my breath a fraction without thinking about it, then the circle smoothed out, and I kept going. Sixty percent through level 6, then eighty. The ache behind my right eye that had come up by the fifth sweep in the forest did not come up this time. The breath was doing something for it, as was the circulation.

I had thought the ache was the cost of [Focus] itself, and I was learning, slowly, that the ache had been the cost of holding [Focus] without knowing how to feed it. [Focus: Level 6 (100%) > Level 7 (0%)] I felt my reserves crest somewhere past where I had ever held them at rest, a little fuller than my usual ceiling, and I noticed the cresting without grabbing for it.

Somewhere past the second hour, my arms started to feel heavy, like I had been awake for a long time and was running into the soft edge of my own endurance. That was surprising, as we'd only been at this for less than two hours I thought. [Focus] was getting harder to hold, and the breath was beginning to take more effort than it had taken at the start. I pushed for one more circle, and the proficiency on Level 7 ticked up to eighty-six before I had to let [Focus] go.

The world did not get smaller the way it usually did when I dropped the skill. The breath kept moving, the circle kept turning, but Saoren had stopped speaking some time ago and the garden was quiet around me, and my mana was still moving with the breath the way it had been moving with [Focus] holding the shape of the attention for me, except now there was nothing holding it. I was just doing it. I do not know how long I sat like that. Ding!

[New Skill Acquired] Still Mind — Level 1 (0%) — Rank A Only then did I stop. I opened my eyes, surprised to find it was night, and not the early sort. The moon was already high over the eastern ridge, and the silver of it was lying flat across the flagstones around me. I had sat down a little before midmorning. I had not meant to skip the rest of the day, and I sat there on my heels for a long second trying to fit the missing hours into a head that had not been keeping track of any of them.

I had not eaten lunch, and the afternoon had come and gone past me without leaving so much as a mark in my memory, and the realization of that was… unsettling. A small lacquer tray had been set down beside me at some point I had not registered. There was a covered bowl on it, a smaller covered cup, and a folded piece of paper tucked under the edge of the tray. I picked the paper up. Young Lord, you seemed too deep in your meditation to disturb. I have left dinner for whenever you should wake.

The cup keeps the heat. M.

"You're finally out of it." Saoren was sitting on the low wall at the edge of the garden with his lower legs hanging over the side, watching me.

"Master Saoren, I— I didn't realize how long I'd been—""Eat, child. You have earned the food. I will say what I have to say to you while you eat it, so do not stand on ceremony for my sake."

"Will you not join me?"

"I do not eat the food of your world. It would be wasted on me. Eat plenty. You have been very still for a very long time." I lifted the lid off the bowl, and the smell came up at me in a warm wave that made my stomach contract so hard I almost gasped. There were dumplings inside, fat, pale and steaming, sitting in a shallow pool of broth with herbs floating on top of it. I lifted one out with the small wooden picks Mireth had left at the edge of the tray, and bit into it. Hot juice ran down my chin.

The dough was thin and soft, the meat inside was richer than anything the kitchens at the estate had ever served me, and the broth carrying it was warm. I had not noticed how hungry I was, not at all, and I made a small involuntary sound around the mouthful that I was glad nobody outside the garden was around to hear, then I reached for the second one before I had finished swallowing the first. Halfway through it though, my chewing slowed as I remembered something.

The System had given me [Still Mind] at Rank A, but I was fairly certain the quest reward had said S… Somehow, I felt robbed.