Chương 63: Chapter 59: A New Calculation

Joe began his morning with a heavy breakfast. A large bowl of grain porridge, two eggs, bread and most of the sliced meat left from the previous evening. He finished with one of his stronger nourishing packets. Simon watched from across the table.

"You ate half the cake last night."

"Yes."

"And now all that."

"Yes."

"Are you sick?"

"No." Simon narrowed his eyes but eventually left for the morning guard meeting. Joe waited. Medicine needed time. Swallowing nourishment was not the same thing as having nourishment available to the body. Only after the warmth from the packet had spread through his abdomen did he enter the courtyard. The morning was clear and cold. Frost still occupied the shaded corners, but sunlight had reached the upper wall, turning the bricks pale gold. Joe rolled up both sleeves. Left forearm. Right forearm.

The matching areas would make comparisons easy. Skin IV was already underway, although progress had been painfully slow before yesterday. Joe knew exactly how both arms felt. He chose a strip along the outside of the left forearm and gathered blood energy. Three complete temperings had made the outer pathways astonishingly smooth compared with his first years of practice. The energy reached the skin, spread evenly through the selected region and settled. Joe performed one complete tempering effort.

Then released it. His eyes opened immediately. Heat rushed through his forearm. Not ordinary warmth from circulating blood energy. This was deeper. The skin flushed visibly as increased circulation spread from wrist toward elbow, followed by an intense prickling sensation through the living tissue beneath the surface. Joe watched his own arm. The skin tightened slightly, then relaxed. Something was changing. One effort. He pressed his thumb into the treated area, then into the matching point on the untreated arm.

Left. Right. Again. The difference was small but obvious. The left side responded more uniformly to pressure and felt fractionally denser without becoming stiff. When Joe dragged a fingernail lightly across both forearms, the treated region transmitted the sensation more clearly. He opened the panel. Skin Tempering IV had moved. Visibly. Yesterday, individual sessions had disappeared into weeks of accumulated work.

Today, one proper effort had moved the stage enough that Joe could watch cultivation progress happen almost in front of him. He laughed softly.

"A hundred means a hundred." Joe performed the second effort using what the first had already taught him. His initial distribution had concentrated slightly too much energy near the wrist, so he corrected it. The second cycle spread more smoothly and required less conscious adjustment. Again, the skin flushed. Again, progress. Again, insight. This time Joe immediately noticed that the region nearer his elbow absorbed the tempering slightly more slowly. His holding phase was also longer than necessary.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon. A normal practitioner might repeat the same cycle for weeks before confidently noticing those details. Joe had completed two efforts. Excitement began rising. Then hunger struck him. Hard. Joe stopped. His blood-energy reserve had also fallen much farther than two ordinary sessions could explain. There it was. The price. One effort really had produced roughly one hundred efforts' worth of progress.

That meant his body had also undergone an enormous amount of actual improvement. The energy had to come from somewhere. The tissue had to be rebuilt from something. One Effort Equals a Hundred multiplied the result. It did not create matter. Joe sat on the cold courtyard stone and watched the forearm continue settling even after cultivation stopped. Heat slowly receded while tiny internal sensations continued beneath the surface. He went inside. Simon had returned briefly to retrieve something.

He watched Joe reach for bread.

"You just ate."

"I'm hungry."

"You ate more than me."

"That's unfortunate."

"For whom?"

"Both of us." Joe continued eating. Several hours passed before he performed another Skin effort. He used the waiting period to check flexibility, tenderness, temperature and blood-energy flow. The change had stabilized remarkably well. His treated forearm bent normally, the skin remained elastic, and the improvement was still present after the initial heat disappeared. The next session was done without taking another nourishing packet beforehand. The progress remained hundredfold. Recovery did not.

Joe felt emptier afterward, his blood energy took longer to restore, and the tissue stayed warm longer. The following session came after a stronger packet. Better. Again, the actual cultivation gain did not become larger than one hundred efforts. Instead, the medicine allowed his body to pay the cost more easily and become ready for another effort sooner. That distinction was crucial. Over the next several days, Joe turned the courtyard into an experiment.

Deepwinter sunlight moved slowly across the wall while steam from medicine pots drifted into the cold air. Between patrols, Joe trained one limited region at a time, recorded the result, adjusted his medicine and observed how his body settled afterward. The left forearm became uniform first. Then the right. He moved to the backs of the hands, then parts of the upper arms and shoulders. Every correct effort produced progress he could physically recognize.

After several hundredfold efforts compressed into days, Joe began noticing flaws he had never realized remained after the third complete tempering. Small differences in how energy crossed the wrist. Slight inefficiency around the shoulder. Tiny weak transitions near joints. One by one, they disappeared. His technique improved just as quickly. By the fifth day, Joe changed how he began distributing blood energy into a region. By the seventh, he shortened the holding phase without sacrificing progress.

By the ninth, several corrections that had once required conscious thought had become automatic. The process compounded. One effort improved the next. After ten days, Skin IV had advanced farther than Joe would previously have expected in months. His medicine shelves had also begun looking alarmingly empty. One evening, he counted them carefully. Redroot was below half. Bitter vine, two bundles. Marrowseed, perhaps enough for twelve strong packets. Recovery bark, low.

The shelves had looked abundant before his birthday. Now they looked temporary. Joe pulled out the old calculation he had written when Skin IV still seemed unreasonable. The first pass had cost roughly one baseline unit of meaningful work. The second, around two. Third, around three. Fourth appeared close to four. Assuming the pattern continued, the first three were already finished. What remained was: 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 = 39 Then came the new talent. Joe divided by one hundred. 0. 39.

The number looked almost insulting. The pure training requirement had collapsed. Joe translated it into calendar time using the rate he had observed over the last ten days, then adjusted for each later tempering becoming progressively more difficult. He added recovery time. Then additional caution because later passes might reveal new limits. He recalculated twice. The answer remained ridiculous.

If Joe possessed enough medicine, food and blood-energy recovery resources to train whenever his body was ready, Skin IV through IX could plausibly be completed in roughly five or six months. Half a year. Before his birthday, the same project had looked like it could swallow years of his life. Then Joe looked toward the shelves. His actual circumstances were nowhere near ideal. The guard provided two nourishing meals each week. Useful before. Almost meaningless now.

The discounted herb allowance helped, but the monthly limit was tiny compared with what he could consume. His salary certainly could not support full-speed cultivation. The money from selling his recipe had once seemed like a small fortune. At his current consumption, it was beginning to look like a temporary reserve. With his present resources, periods of slower training, cheaper ingredients and time spent rebuilding medicine supplies would probably stretch the project much closer to a year.

Joe wrote: Adequate resources: ~5–6 months. Current resources: ~1 year. He stared at the two lines. Yesterday, time and money had both been obstacles. Now time had nearly disappeared from the equation. Money was cultivation speed. Medicine was cultivation speed. Food was cultivation speed. Access to raw herbs was cultivation speed. Joe laughed quietly. For years he had wanted the ability to progress faster. Now his cultivation could outrun his wallet.

His original plan had been sensible: complete Skin IV, perhaps test Skin V, then move into Muscle Tempering. That plan no longer made sense. The reason to stop repeated tempering had been the time required for increasingly smaller improvements. That cost had changed. Skin IV was still improving clearly. So Joe would continue. If a later pass stopped producing meaningful benefit, he could move on then.

But for the first time, he had the ability to search for the actual limit rather than stopping because reaching it would consume too many years. Another thought followed naturally. Skin was only the first body layer. Muscle came next. Then Bone. Whether repeated tempering would work the same way there remained unknown. Joe folded the paper. Five or six months with enough resources. Closer to a year with what he had now. The difference was not effort anymore. It was resources.

That was a problem Blackwood might be able to solve.