Chương 43: Chapter 1.43: Cultor Mentis

"So my insight is weak? Can I fix it?" she said while wiping away a few tears. Brutus sighed again.

"It's not that it can't be fixed. An insight can be improved, but..." He looked around at all the people gawking at them. He shook his head, then grumbled, "Fuck it." He raised his voice so it was loud and clear enough for everyone to understand him.

"Improving an insight is possible, but there's always the danger that the way you try to improve it is too different from its fundamental nature. In such a case the Muses will grant you a new insight instead. Which leaves you with two weak insights instead of a strong one." Favius nodded along.

"So what you are saying is that a cultivator who seeks to go as far as their potential allows should always try for the most comprehensive insight possible?" Brutus snapped his fingers.

"Exactly. It's more complicated than that, but you are fundamentally right." The Magnicultor glared at the two sisters.

"I would have helped you, Urania. I even considered that you should maybe pursue a different kind of insight. But..." He gestured at Favius and everything around them.

"Things are happening too fast recently." Caliga pouted again.

"Maybe before we call Urania's insight weak, we should see what it is." She hugged Urania from behind, and the younger girl squeezed her sister's arm in return. Favius leaned forward, unable and unwilling to keep his excitement in check.

"So what can you do?" He corrected himself.

"What did you try to do?"

"Well, I wasn't quite sure what I was going for, but I know the numbers you taught me are special, and—" Brutus groaned behind them, earning a glare from Caliga.

"So..." Urania trailed off, rubbing her temple.

"I can feel it. But there's a headache." Caliga moved her hands to massage her sister's scalp, but Brutus hummed.

"You focused on numbers, but nothing specific. Hmm. And the headaches? They are not uncommon for cerebral insights. It sounds like you have become a Cultor Mentis of the scholastic tradition, unlike the martial insights your siblings gained." Favius touched Brutus's arm and held up a hand.

"Yes, but what can you actually do? If the headache isn't too strong," he corrected himself with an abashed smile. Urania returned the expression.

"It..." She ground her teeth.

"It isn't too bad. I want to see it myself. I..." She trailed off, and the others waited in silence. Slowly, as if from a distant place, Urania began to speak, her eyes fluttering strangely.

"Whenever I think of two numbers, any two numbers, wholes or fractions, it's as if I'm standing at a crossroad. I know what the result will be if I add, subtract, multiply, or divide them." Favius smiled broadly. Well, that's interesting. She already tried fractions, so…

"Can you do powers and logarithms as well?" Urania bit her lip and some blood seeped out of her mouth. Favius swallowed, hope and worry mixing in his stomach. Probably from the breakthrough and not because she's biting her lip too hard. Caliga gently massaged her sister's jaw until Urania relaxed.

"I can, but it is as if they are further down the road. They are harder to grasp. Come to think of it, subtraction and addition are the closest. I just have to reach out and I have the answer, but..." Favius grinned broadly. So she's a human calculator now.

"Urania, what's five to the power of one hundred seventy-three?" Brutus chuckled while Caliga gave him an odd look, but Urania's face scrunched up.

"It's..." She swallowed hard.

"It's a huge number. I couldn't write it down, but I know how big it would be. Roughly 10 to the power of 120. But the details are..." She shook her head, and smiled at him. There was pain and exhaustion in her eyes, yet nothing could suppress the brilliant glitter of excitement in her orange owl eyes. Favius's mind raced. The real question is if this is just computation that masks itself as intuition, or if it can go beyond what computers can do.

"Urania, you remember when we talked about prime factors?" She nodded eagerly, and Favius threw a huge number at her, but she frowned.

"I... I don't think I can do it," she said after a while.

"It's... I have to step to a new crossroads for each prime factor." Favius nodded. Well, I'm not sure if I should be reassured or disappointed about her not being able to do large prime factorization without difficulties, though the implications of that wouldn't be nearly as dire as they would have been back on Earth. He shuddered at the thought of nearly all cryptography becoming obsolete overnight. The damage she could do with that kind of ability. Urania's groaning brought him back to the real world.

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"It's... the headaches are getting worse. Do you want anything else, Favius, or can I—" Favius grimaced.

"Please, go rest." Brutus nodded.

"Indeed. It will take a few days for the headaches to go away. Try to use your abilities once every hour or so. That is the best protocol to acclimatize yourself to insights of the path of the mental cultivator." The girls set off, and everyone else got back to their work. Brutus and Favius walked over to the washing basins and used soap and water to clean Urania's blood off their robes and hands. Brutus gave Favius a long and strange look. Favius raised an eyebrow.

"Have I done something wrong?" The cultivator shook his head.

"We are going to the bathhouse. We need to talk. I'm afraid you might do something stupid otherwise." With those words, Brutus turned around, and Favius followed a step behind his protector. Favius ran his hand through the water until he touched the black stone of the pool. He and Brutus had spent half an hour in comfortable silence as they were washed and soaked under the afternoon sun, but Favius couldn't hold back his curiosity anymore.

He pushed away from the deeper side of the pool and towards the sitting area where Brutus was waiting.

"Alright, Brutus, what's so important that we need to talk about it privately?" Brutus waved a hand.

"I alluded to it at the celebration, but we need to talk about your path and paths in general." Favius couldn't help but smile. It's so strange that discussing character builds is just considered a normal part of a kid's childhood here. Well, maybe I shouldn't be thinking about cultivation in those terms, but… Brutus interrupted him.

"Out of the ten paths of the cultivator, the common ones of agriculture, craftsmanship, and corporeality are entirely unbefitting to men of our station." Favius nodded at first, yet soon narrowed his eyes.

"There's something I was wondering about. The way you talk about corporeal cultivators, it sounds as if they are just laborers who figured out how to lift stuff better, but..." A broad smile spread over Brutus's face, and Favius felt as if the question was expected.

"But what about my insight of endurance? Isn't that—" Brutus laughed as Favius trailed off.

"Boy, if a commoner gains an insight of endurance, he is obviously nothing but a brute who enhanced his body with the kiss of the Muses through cultivation because his honest labor made him a virtuous soul." Brutus smiled, and Favius sighed.

"But if a noble like you earns an insight of endurance, it is just as obviously a foundational insight for your path as a warrior. Thus, you are a Cultor Bellator instead of a Cultor Corporis."

"Good old classism," Favius murmured, but Brutus splashed water into his face. He sputtered, yet the powerful Magnicultor continued.

"Ascetic or perceptive cultivation are not entirely inappropriate, yet their usefulness is rather limited."

"I haven't heard of those before." Brutus shrugged.

"Ascetic cultivation is weird. Sages in the mountains and priests pursue it to gain wisdom. As for sensory cultivation, their greatest strength is that they can hide themselves and other cultivators from our senses." Brutus rubbed his beard.

"I believe there was a third powerful cultivator on the evening when Marcus came to our estate. Otherwise I would have sensed the Magi he brought." Favius nodded.

"So that leaves me with five paths. And you already mentioned that two are related to becoming a Caster Magi and embracing my shifter heritage." Brutus nodded.

"You are still confident you are going to be a Magi, boy?" Favius shrugged. Haven't told him everything about the entity yet, but ultimately, yes.

"Despite my own preference of the martial path, I cannot say that casters or shifters are weak, especially with you being an eagle-owl shifter. I've heard there are ways to enhance your senses and mind if you have avian blood." Favius nodded, recalling what he had read early on in the library.

"And the remaining ones are the martial cultivation path you are on, the charismatic one of Marcus, and Urania's scholastic path." Brutus nodded.

"And by the look of your eyes in the courtyard, I can tell that you want to emulate her insight." The smile on the man's face was a startling contrast to his stern expression.

"But this time with your support and advice?" Favius ventured.

"Indeed."

"And..." He looked from side to side.

"I suspect she has hurt her own potential by not consulting with you either. After all, you have been the teacher, and I do not yet know the depth of your understanding of mathematics." Favius frowned and nodded slowly.

"It's true," he murmured.

"We've done differentiation and multivariable calculus, and yesterday I showed her the basics of linear algebra, but..." Brutus raised a hand.

"Spare me the lectures for the lessons. I will not understand things from a simple explanation." He smirked.

"I'm not your younger sister, after all." Favius laughed alongside the man.

"So you think I should pursue such an insight?" Brutus nodded.

"You told me yourself that your old world made many great advances through the use of thinking machines. If I understand correctly, you are so excited about her insight because it emulates the capabilities of these thinking machines." Favius nodded.

"Yes, but the way she described distances and had difficulties with some calculations..." He clicked his tongue.

"I'll have to perform some experiments. But I don't actually think she has become as good as one of those thinking machines." Brutus raised an eyebrow.

"If the part of her insight she showed you is truly what she possesses, it exceeds any insight of numeracy I have ever seen or heard of. It's especially interesting that she could do logarithms and powers. I wonder..." He scratched his beard as he trailed off.

"If that could be replicated by a Cultor Mentis who already has a lesser insight of numeracy." Favius hummed and sank into thought as he lowered himself into the pleasant water. He's not wrong. Cultivation. It makes you greater in whatever aspect of yourself you are pursuing. And what he said about specialization. It's not uncommon to follow two or even three paths, but I suspect that insights reinforce each other if they are similar enough. That's probably how they got the idea of those paths in the first place.

He smirked and paddled his feet through the water. Well, that and some good old class prejudice. But still, it will be over a hundred years until I can get even a rudimentary computer going. His eyes narrowed, and he spoke out loud, trying to taste the feel of his idea.

"The truth is, mathematics isn't really about numbers." Brutus raised an eyebrow, but Favius continued.

"It's about problem solving. And problem solving tends to be about framing the problem mentally." He held his head up straighter.

"If I could get an insight that allows me to think of a problem from a visualized geometric perspective and a more powerful and intuitive version of my usual number-based perspective, that could be more powerful than anything except modern computers." Brutus nodded.

"This differentiation you make there. Can I assume that your thoughts work based on rhetoric and not artistry?" Favius narrowed his eyes.

"Thoughts based on rhetoric or artistry?" He considered the words and soon his eyes widened. On Earth, this idea hadn't been discovered until the nineteenth century. But with cultivation and magic…

"Do you mean—" He stumbled over the absence of the words aphantasia and hyperphantasia.

"The absence or intense presence of mental imagery?" He described the two to Brutus, and the warrior nodded.

"Yes, I am. Like I said, some men think as artists, others as rhetoricians. I don't understand why you find this extraordinary. It is common knowledge."

"Here it is." Favius chuckled, then shook himself. They continued the conversation, and slowly Favius's idea crystallized. As the sun was setting, they had settled onto a bench overlooking the Cindrathi plains, bustling with the activities of harvest. As the last of the golden grain was brought in, the chill of the coming winter crept up on them, and before the sun could sink below the horizon, Brutus slapped Favius on the shoulder.

"It sounds like a wise plan to pursue. We'll work it into your routine. As for your sister..." Brutus merely shook his head. Favius nodded. Excitement, exhaustion, and a sense of accomplished pride all mixed into a strange cocktail alongside the evening's tiredness. Nonetheless, he smiled. Let's see how fast I can gain another insight.