Chương 27: Sevenfold

In through the nose. Four. Hold. Two. Out through the mouth. Six. I pulled [Focus] up first and felt the familiar band settle behind my eyes. The garden sharpened around me, and so did Saoren's breathing, the wind on the upper slope, the faint creak of the suren above. Then I pulled [Still Mind] up beneath it, and the two skills sat on top of each other in a way I had not tried before, [Focus] narrowing the world down to what mattered and [Still Mind] keeping the rest of me from reacting to any of it.

I imagined a man standing six paces in front of me. Broad shoulders, hands up, the shape Bellos used to hold when he wanted me to come at him. First stance. Left foot forward. Hands open. I breathed in and moved. The first strike was a low palm aimed at the ribs, and I let a thin thread of compressed air trail behind it. The air left my hand cleanly.

The second strike came off the first in a rising arc toward the throat, and I fed fire into it at the transition, a small bright line that traced the path of the forearm and guttered out at the apex. Third strike, staff replacement, and I did not have the staff so I shaped the motion empty-handed, pushing a gust through the gap where the weapon would have been. Fourth transition. This was where the form had always tried to break on me.

The weight had to shift from the front foot to the back while the arms were still committed to the third strike's follow-through, and the timing of it was narrow enough that my hips had always wanted to turn a beat too early. I breathed. [Still Mind] held. The hips turned when they were supposed to turn. Fourth strike, a hooking backhand with a wind cutter leaving the knuckles.

Fifth, a straight thrust with fire compressed into a point at the fingertips that I released into the air in front of me, and the small orange flash of it lit the flagstones for half a second. Sixth, another staff replacement, open palm, a broader push of air that moved the dust on the stones ahead of me. Seventh, a descending strike from above, both hands together, and I drove a sheet of fire down through the motion that hit the flagstones and spread outward in a low rolling wave before burning itself out.

I held the final position. Both hands down. Weight centred. Breathing even. Both skills were still running. That was the part that caught me. [Focus] and [Still Mind] had not competed with each other for a single second of the form. [Focus] had handled the targeting, the angles, the element selection, the timing between strikes. [Still Mind] had handled everything else: the breath, the balance, the part of my head that usually started shouting suggestions at me between the fourth and fifth transitions.

The two of them together had turned the Sevenfold Branch from a sequence I could run cleanly about seven times out of ten into something that felt, for the first time, like it had been designed to be run exactly this way. Ding! [Focus: Level 7 (86%) > Level 8 (3%)] [Still Mind: Level 2 (56%) > Level 3 (11%)] I straightened up out of the stance and let both skills drop, and the garden came back to its usual width around me while my arms were shaking again, and I did not care.

"Again," Saoren said from the wall.

"Yes, sire!"

The boy ran the Sevenfold Branch forty-three times on the first day. Saoren counted. By the fifteenth, the fire at the seventh strike had stopped guttering and by the fortieth, the fourth transition had stopped being a problem entirely. Between the sets of forms, Saoren had him do the rest: push-ups in sets of twenty, pull-ups on the lowest bough, four laps of the full path, then the duck walks, which the boy hated more than anything else in the routine and which Saoren therefore kept for last.

Somewhere around the seventieth push-up, a very quiet fuck escaped through the boy's teeth on the downstroke. Saoren, who was sitting on the wall about four paces away, allowed the corner of his mouth to move and did not address it. The forms were rough. The boy threw fire and wind the way most young mages did, which was to say he threw them outward, away from himself, as separate things launched from his body rather than extensions of it.

The fire left his hands while the wind left his palms and there was a gap between the boy and the element, it cruelly lacked precision.

"What level are you now, child?" The boy's eyes went briefly glassy.

"Twenty-four, Master Saoren."

"Again." That night, after the boy had eaten with the keepers and collapsed onto his bedroll in the inner garden, Saoren sat beside him and examined the damage. The channels were inflamed. Small hot lines through the arms and legs where the mana had been pushed too hard. He extended one of his lower hands and held it above the boy's shoulder, feeding a thin thread of his own mana into the channels, easing the inflammation enough that the boy would wake rested instead of ruined.

The boy stirred once in his sleep and murmured something that sounded like nana and then went still. The second day, Saoren changed the order. Meditation first, two hours, then the physical work, then the forms. The boy did not like this.

"I thought I was past this part."

"You are past nothing. You have learned to sit still. Now you will learn to sit still after your body has been broken for six hours, which is a different thing entirely." So the boy sat, fell asleep twice, and Saoren woke him both times by dropping a suren petal onto his nose. After the meditation, the physical work, and after the physical work, the forms. But this time Saoren told him to add the open-hand sequences from whatever southern set that Bellos fellow had taught him.

The combination was ugly the first three times. By the sixth, the fire and wind were starting to move with the boy's body instead of after it, the flames trailing his arms and the air compressing ahead of his palms, and there were moments, brief ones, where the elements looked less like things being thrown and more like limbs the boy had not known he had.

"Level twenty-five, Master Saoren!"

"When did that happen?" Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

"During the pull-ups. The forty-third one."

"... You were counting the pull-ups?"

"The System counts them for me."

"Of course it does." That night, the boy did not go straight to sleep. He lay on his bedroll with his arms behind his head and looked at the branches of the suren above him and talked. Saoren had not invited the talking, but he did not stop it either.

"Master Saoren."

"Mm."

"What were the other Axioms like? The ones before me." Saoren considered the question for longer than he usually considered things.

"Different from each other."

"Different how?"

"Durhain, the first, was serious. Melkor, the second, was vain. Samwel, the third one, was quiet. And Ryn, the fourth, was kind. Too kind." The boy was quiet for a while after that.

"Am I… like any of them?"

"No." The boy seemed sad.

"... That is not a bad thing. You are still becoming." At that, the boy smiled and closed his eyes, and Saoren waited until the breathing had gone slow and even before moving to his shoulder to begin the night's repair. The third day, the boy hit a wall. His legs gave out during the duck walks, his wind cutters came out formless and he sat down on the flagstones after the second set of push-ups then put his face in his hands.

"I feel slow, Master Saoren. I feel like I'm not getting anywhere."

"You have gained two levels in three days."

"It's not fast enough."

"By whose measure?"

"Well, the system's." Saoren did not speak. The boy sat there for a while, and eventually his breathing came back to something normal, and he got up on his own and finished the set. In the afternoon, Saoren introduced sparring. Not against a person, but against the air. He sat on the wall and called out patterns — fire left, wind right, duck, fire overhead, step back, water pull, release — and the boy moved through them as the garden became a place of brief controlled chaos.

Fire rolling off the boy's forearms, wind bending around his kicks, a water pull from the well that failed spectacularly and soaked his robe from the collar down. The boy stood there dripping, looked at the well, then at Saoren, and tried it again. It failed less. A third time and the water held its shape for two full seconds before the boy's concentration slipped and the water remembered it was water and went everywhere. The boy said fuck quite loudly and then apologised to no one in particular. Saoren chuckled.

The sound escaped before he had decided to let it, and the boy's head snapped toward him, startled as Saoren folded his upper arms across his chest and said "again" before the boy could comment on it. That night, the inflammation was worse than the previous two nights. Saoren held his hand over the boy's shoulder for longer, feeding his mana in with more care, easing the places where the tissue had begun to swell.

He also, quietly and without the boy knowing, reinforced the walls of two of the smaller channels in the boy's left arm that had been close to tearing. The boy would wake up feeling as if the previous day had not happened.

"Twenty-seven, Master Saoren!"

"How do you feel?"

"... Good, actually. I don't know why. I was wrecked yesterday."

"The mountain air is restorative."

"Is it?"

"Eat your breakfast, child." The fourth day was the day Saoren stopped correcting the forms. Not because they were perfect, they were not. But the boy had started self-correcting between sets in a way that told Saoren the eye was developing faster than the hands, and the eye was the harder part. He would run the Sevenfold Branch, finish, stand there for a second with a small frown, and then run it again with the frown's adjustment already incorporated. The fire would come out a fraction tighter.

The wind would compress a half-beat earlier. The water pull, which three days ago had been a comedy of soaked robes, was now arriving in a clean arc that held for four seconds, then five, then six. The boy tried, without being asked, to pull a chunk of earth out of the flagstone during the sparring round. The cost hit him so hard his knees buckled and his nose bled.

"Not yet, child."

"I…I almost had it!"

"You almost had a nosebleed and a nap. Earth is not air. Respect the cost." The boy wiped his nose on his sleeve and went back to the wind forms without arguing, and Saoren noted that the arguing had stopped entirely by the fourth day, which was faster than any of the others. That evening, the boy came back from dinner with the keepers carrying four suren plums. He set one down on the flagstones near where Saoren usually sat, without saying anything about it, and ate the other three during his final meditation.

Saoren looked at the plum for a long time. He did not eat the food of this world. He had told the boy as much, yet the boy had left it anyway. It was late when the boy finished his meditation. He did not go to his bedroll.

He just sat under the suren with his back against the trunk and looked up at the branches, and after a while he started talking again, not about the Axioms this time but about the books Serre had brought him, and the stories inside them, and how he used to read under his blanket, as well as how he had imagined, every night, that the heroes in the books were people he would meet one day when he finally left the estate. Saoren listened from the wall without interrupting.

The boy talked freely and without watching himself, and Saoren understood, hearing it, that this was a thing he needed in the same way he needed food and sleep. The boy needed someone to talk to who would not report what he said to a council in a dark room. He fell asleep mid-sentence, his head tipping sideways against the trunk of the suren, and Saoren came down from the wall, moving to his shoulder to begin the night's work.

"Level twenty-nine, Master Saoren! One more. One more and I'm there!"

"Then stop talking about it and start training." The fifth morning came cold and clear. The boy had woken up earlier than usual and was already in the garden, in first stance, already breathing. He did not greet Saoren or ask what the day's training was. He ran the Sevenfold Branch once, then dropped into the physical sets without being told. Push-ups. Pull-ups. The run. The duck walks.

He did them in silence in the grey light before the sun had cleared the ridge, and during the wall squat, which he held for nine minutes, he said fuck exactly once at the eight-minute mark in a whisper. The boy ran the forms. Then again. The fire was clean, the wind was clean, the water pull from the well came out in a smooth arc and held its shape for the full duration of the sixth strike, and the boy did not pause to notice it.

He transitioned from the Sevenfold Branch into the southern sequences without breaking the breath, and the elements moved with him as if they had been consulted about the choreography, fire trailing the arms, wind compressing ahead of the palms, and for a few seconds at the peak of the form the boy looked like a true mage. Soon enough, the sun cleared the ridge, and the boy was in the middle of the twelfth repetition when his body locked. Saoren knew this phenomenon.

It was what happened when a body that had been climbing toward a threshold finally reached the top of it, and the core decided, without permission, to reorganise itself around everything the body had earned. On this one, the boy's mana simply rose. It came up out of the core in a single clean wave that ran through every channel at once, filling them past their usual capacity, pressing against the walls until the walls gave and settled at a new width.

The excess bled off into the air in a soft visible shimmer that lasted about three seconds. The boy's eyes flew open." YES!" The scream went up into the morning air and bounced off the rocks above the shrine, and the boy dropped to his knees on the flagstones and pressed his fists against the stone and screamed again. From the main building, footsteps started toward the garden before Mireth's voice said something short that stopped them.

The boy stayed on his knees for a long moment, breathing, his forehead almost touching the stone, and then he sat back on his heels and looked up at the sky with his face wet and his chest heaving and a grin so wide it seemed to be borrowing from parts of his face that had not been used before.

"I did it, Master Saoren! I reached Tier 2!"

"Yes, child. You did."

"I can actually feel it, my channels are wider, the mana is moving faster, the core is—" He stopped.

"What is it, child?"

"It's the System..."

"What about it?"

"It's... it's asking me if I want to merge [Focus] and [Still Mind]. Into something else. A single skill. It says the rank would be higher than either of them alone and free a slot."

"... I see." Saoren looked at him as the boy in front of him had, once again, managed to be slightly more surprising than he had expected.