Chương 10: Respect

On the twelfth day, something shifted in the outer grounds. Zero noticed it first in the way the junior disciples moved around him. They did not give the wide berth of the first week, nor the careful curiosity of the next four days, but now with something that had no avoidance in it at all. When he crossed the training yard, disciples nodded. When he stopped to watch a form session, the disciples performing it did not stiffen or adjust their behavior.

When Lao Min ran the Silent Mantis Dual Strike during the morning session and corrected his own shoulder drop before Jianyu could, the elder looked up and found Zero before he found anyone else. Zero was beginning to understand what Miho had meant by 'standing'. The hidden quest updated mid-morning. Hidden Quest Progress: Respect of the Heavenly Cloud Sect Elder respect: 1/1 (pending) Instructor respect: 3/3 (confirmed) Junior disciple respect: 25/20 (28%) Status: Requirements met.

Completion pending formal acknowledgment. Viria read it over his shoulder.

"We did it!"

"The system says requirements met," said Zero.

"But it also says 'pending'. Those are different things."

"Eh, close enough." Miho shook her head.

"No.

'Requirements met' means we have done the work.

'Formal acknowledgment' means the sect has decided to confirm what the system is measuring." The formal acknowledgment came from Elder Meilin, the outer grounds overseer, whom Zero had identified on the seventh day as the elder most likely to matter for the hidden quest, and had subsequently watched her with the same attention he gave to anything he was trying to understand. She came to the smaller yard in the late afternoon, unannounced, while Miho was running Yukito and Viria through a final circulation drill.

She stood at the yard's entrance for forty seconds before Miho noticed her. Miho stopped the drill without explanation and turned to face the elder, settling into the specific posture she used for sect elders: head angled, spine straight, sword hand visible and still.

"Elder Meilin," she said. She was on the shorter end for woman who looked to be in her sixties, with the grey-streaked hair and unhurried movement of someone who had stopped needing to prove things a long time ago. She looked from Miho, to Yukito, to Viria, and then paused at Zero. The pressure was different than the two elders from the ceremony. What it carried instead was something closer to the careful attention a craftsman gave to work they had not made but were deciding how to regard.

"You have been in the outer grounds for twelve days," she said to Team Zero, "Placed here under restricted conditions."

"Yes, Elder." Said Miho, tilting her head at the angle that indicated respect.

"You were denied formal instruction."

"That is correct, Elder." Meilin looked at Zero.

"I have spoken with Elder Jianyu." Zero waited for her to continue.

"He tells me that the outsider with the white hair and eyes has attended two technique sessions as an observer, has identified four errors that had persisted through several months of regular correction and suggested a methodological adjustment to the Returning Step practice that even I have been intending to implement for two years." Zero did not know what the correct response to this was.

"Is that true?" she asked.

"I told him what I observed," Zero said.

"I do not know if it was useful."" He found it useful." She looked at him for another moment.

"How did you do it?"

"I watched." This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it. Elder Meilin sighed, "That is what Jianyu said you would say." The corner of her mouth moved slightly.

"He also said you would say it as though it were sufficient explanation."

"Is it not sufficient?."

"It is incomplete." Zero considered this.

"I have been monitoring my body's systems and patterns my entire life. In my previous circumstances, the purpose was to obey instructions more precisely. Here, the purpose is different. But the skill itself is the same." Meilin was quiet for a moment. Zero had learned that this silence meant she was deciding whether to press further about his origin.

"You leave before the week ends," she said instead.

"The Cloud Sea Crossing has been approved for all four members of your group. This is conditional on the crossing attempt being made before the outer gate's next seal cycle, which begins at dawn in three days. If you have not attempted the crossing by then, the approval expires."

"We will leave tomorrow, Elder." Meilin looked at them for a final moment and nodded.

"You are outsiders who have not cultivated here, sworn to any lineage, or earned standing within this sect's hierarchy. What you have earned is the respect appropriate to skilled outsiders who have conducted themselves well. That is not the same as trust or belonging, nor will it carry to any sect member who did not observe you directly." She paused.

"It is, however, real. And it will be recorded." Once she left, the smaller yard was quiet for a moment. Viria let out a long, slow breath.

"So… that's acknowledgment?"

"Yes," said Miho.

"Then… We did it?" Miho closed her eyes and nodded. Viria sat down and laughed dryly. Yukito looked at the doorway where Meilin had been.

"She said it would be recorded."

"Yes," Miho said.

"What exactly does that mean?"

"It means that if we ever come back here, or if we are known to other sects who communicate with this one, what we did here will already be on record." Her tail moved once, in the thoughtful way.

"In these worlds, reputation is a document." While Zero thought about that, Yukito spoke up.

"In my world, what people were called followed them." Miho looked at him.

"Here, what people have done follows them. It is a better system." Miho's words were tinted with something that Zero would soon learn was called 'pride'. At mealtime, Zero turned those words around in his mind.

The hidden quest completed that evening. Hidden Quest Complete: Respect of the Heavenly Cloud Sect Reward: EXP awarded. Cloud Sea Crossing permission confirmed. Level Up! User has reached Lvl. 6 Zero read the level notification twice and then opened his status to look at the numbers, which was something he had started doing less for the numbers themselves and more for the way they described something about how the past twelve days had changed him. His Intelligence had increased by 2 since the tutorial.

His Endurance was higher than he expected. He closed the status and looked at the stat points, considering. Miho had told him, when he had asked three days ago, that efficient stat investment was something she would not give him a generic answer since his development path was too unusual for generic answers to apply.

He considered what the next day would require, what the Cloud Sea crossing would require, what the worlds beyond it might require, and allocated the points into END and WIL with the same deliberateness he brought to everything he did not yet know enough about to be confident in. When he was done, he told the others about the level-up. Viria checked her own status.

"Level 8," she said. Yukito checked his.

"Level 9."

"Level 10." A pause.

"Why are you both higher than me?" Viria asked.

"Combat experience," Miho said. Viria huffed, but did not argue any further.

The last night in the sect, Miho trained alone. Zero did not follow her this time. He had learned the difference, over twelve days, between the alone that meant without conversation and the alone that meant without anyone. This was the second kind, and he knew it by the way she had said goodnight, which was the same as every other goodnight, and by the way her sword hand had been still in a way it was only still when she was deciding something.

He sat in the room with Viria and Yukito and did his own kind of preparation, which was internal and quiet and involved spending a long time with the map of channels he had built over the past twelve days, testing each one, noting which were fully clear and which still had resistance at their endpoints. Viria was not sleeping either. She was sitting cross-legged on her mat, running small spatial exercises with one hand, opening and closing a pocket the size of her palm.

She had been doing this for an hour by the time she said, without looking up, "Are you nervous?"

"About the crossing?"

"About any of it. The crossing. What's after. All of it." Zero considered the question.

"I don't know if what I feel is the same thing as nervous."

"What does it feel like?"

"Like… the space between two states. Like when the researchers finished one test and before the next instruction came. Except the next instruction is not coming from outside." Viria stopped opening and closing the pocket.

"And that's different?"

"Yes."

"Is it better or worse?" Zero thought about it.

"Better. But a harder kind of better." Viria looked at him, and the expression on her face was the one she used when she was going to say something true and had decided not to wrap it in anything.

"Yeah," she said.

"That tracks." She went back to her spatial exercise. Yukito said, from the corner, without opening his eyes, "Get some sleep, Viria."

"You're not sleeping either."

"I'm resting."

"That's the same thing."

"It's not."

"Name the difference."

"Sleeping is when you're not aware. Resting is when you are." Viria considered this.

"That's an unusually precise distinction for this hour."

"I spend a lot of time doing one when people think I'm doing the other." A pause. Viria looked at him for a moment, then looked back at her spatial pocket.

"Fair enough," she said. They did not speak again for a long time. Eventually, Viria slept, and Yukito went on resting. Zero went on mapping channels, and thought about the harder kind of better, and waited for the morning to come.