Chương 7: Impurities

The second morning was harder than the first. Zero noted this in a practical sense: Viria could not sit fully upright for the first ten minutes, Yukito's shadow was thinner and slow to gather, and Miho's corrections came with less patience than the day before. The body cleansing had taken something from all of them, and the sect's morning bell did not care. But they still went back to the smaller yard. And when Miho said sit, they sat.

By the third day, Viria had stopped vomiting. She still complained at the same rate, but the complaints were no longer punctuated by exits to the designated corner, which Miho took as progress. Yukito's fever had broken entirely on the second evening, leaving him with a steadiness in his breathing that he had not had before. The shadow under him gathered without effort now, darker and more controlled than when they'd arrived. Zero's progress was harder to describe.

He had found eight blockages on the first day, twelve on the second, and by the third day, he was no longer finding them in his limbs and chest; instead shifting to find them in places he had not known to look, like behind his eyes, along the inside of his jaw, and threaded through the musculature at the base of his spine. All of them were small, and left him with a faint sense of increased capacity that he could distinctly feel when each one was purged. On the fourth morning, he found nothing new.

He sat through the full session anyway, running the search again from the beginning, checking every path he had already cleared. After confirming that they were still clear, he expanded his attention outward, looking for anything he might have missed. He opened his eyes after finding nothing else. Miho was already looking at him.

"You finished," she said. Zero nodded.

"How do you feel?" Zero considered this more carefully than usual, because Miho was asking in a teaching register.

"Clearer," he said.

"The Anima flows without resistance."

"Without resistance, or with less resistance?" He checked again.

"Without." Miho's expression did not change into one Zero had seen before, but her tail twitched once, in the way it moved when she was processing something.

"That should not be possible in four days." Zero said nothing. Miho continued, "I did my first cleansing at age seven. It took three weeks."

"You were seven."

"I was also a genius by my clan's standards." Zero thought for a moment.

"I have been monitoring my body since before I had language for what I was doing," he said.

"The researchers gave me orders, so I complied. I did not know I was developing a useful skill." Miho looked at him for a long moment.

"No," she said.

"I suppose you didn't." She turned back to the others, who were still mid-session.

"Continue," she told them.

"Zero, sit still and wait for them to catch up. Look at me—that is not permission to improvise." Zero sat still. He had learned, over the past few days, that Miho's instructions came in two kinds: the ones that told him what to do, and the ones that told him what not to do. This was the second kind, which meant she had already thought about what he might do if left unsupervised and had decided against it. He considered what he had been thinking about doing. She was right to preempt it.

On the fifth day, Viria finished her cleansing. She went still in a way she had not been still before, and then exhaled through her nose very slowly, and opened her eyes.

"Oh," she said. Miho looked over, and Viria held up one hand. A faint violet light traced the lines of her palm, steadier than anything she had produced before.

"This is what you've been feeling the entire time?"

"Something like it."

"It's like—" Viria searched for the word.

"Like the whole floor suddenly got level."

"Yes," Miho said.

"That's similar what I felt." Viria stared at her own hand for another moment. Then she said, "I'm going to be insufferable about this."

"You already are." The exchange was so close to 'affectionate' that Zero noted it specifically, because neither of them would have accepted the word.

Zero's breakthrough, when it came, did not feel like a breakthrough. He had been in the smaller yard on the fifth afternoon, sitting still as instructed, when Miho attempted to walk him through the first circulation. It should not have been possible to attempt yet, as circulation required a cleansed body and at least a basic understanding of meridian paths, and Zero only had one of those.

What he had instead was a mapped network of Anima pathways, 14 days of renewed attention to his body's internal states, and a Talent stat that the system had called the upper limit. Miho told him to begin at the lower dantian, the one she called the 'root'. Zero looked for a while, but did not find it. Instead, he found something adjacent to what Miho had described: a convergence in his Anima flow, where multiple pathways met and briefly pooled before dispersing.

It was not the same as a lower dantian, but the function seemed similar enough. When he held his attention there, something shifted underneath his physical body. Zero had felt his physical body change thousands of times until each configuration and composite that the lab gave him felt familiar in the way breathing was familiar. This was an entirely different sensation, however. Zero compared it to touching the reverse side of his own reflection.

He tried to describe it to Miho, who had been watching his face with the particular attention she reserved for things she did not seem to understand.

"It's underneath the physical body," he said.

"Something else."

"Can you feel it clearly?" If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

"No. It is like looking at something from the corner of my eye, but when I turn to look directly, it shifts." Miho was quiet for a moment.

"What does it respond to?" Zero considered.

"Intention."

"What kind?"

"I don't know yet." He turned his attention back to it, and tried to do something specific to elicit a response. First, he shifted his right hand, letting the fingers lengthen into a more precise configuration, and at the same moment, directed his intention toward the thing underneath. It moved, but different from the way Anima moved. Anima moved like current through water, fast and responsive.

This moved the way a person adjusting their posture moved: deliberate, structural, and not quite the same before and after. His right hand was still shifted, but the underlying shape beneath the bones had changed its alignment to match it more precisely. The shift was also more efficient than before; less Anima was spent to hold the same form, and the articulation in the joints was stronger than before. When Zero repeated the shift, the results stayed consistent.

"Zero," Miho whispered, though her voice had an edge he recognized as alarm contained.

"What is your status showing?" When Zero looked, a window had opened without him noticing. SKILL ACQUIRED: Spiritual Shapeshifting Lv. 1 Effect: Allows deliberate alteration of the spiritual body's structure to better align with physical transformations, martial techniques, and qi circulation. Consumes Qi. Zero read it twice before he looked at Miho.

"It says Qi," he said.

"Which means it uses something I do not yet have." Miho paused, which Zero had come to know meant that she was choosing her words to make sense to him.

"It means," Miho said after a while, "that the spiritual body responds to Qi, not Anima. Which in turn means that your spiritual body is a cultivation organ even if your physical body is not a standard one. Which then likely means—""That I can cultivate," Zero finished.

"Yes." She exhaled.

"In an... unconventional way, to say the least."

"... Is that bad?" Zero asked after a pause. Miho looked at him with an expression he was beginning to articulate: it was the face she made when she encountered something outside her existing knowledge and was trying to make sense of it.

"No," she said finally.

"It is not bad. It's just... extremely unusual, and my clan can—could—set foxfire, walk through illusions, and gain new tails. But you are something else entirely." She said it without inflection, but Zero noticed that her ears drooped slightly when she referred to her clan in the past tense. He felt he should say something, but he didn't know what words to offer that would make her feel better.

As Miho walked to check on others, Zero tried to figure out the type of response that could offer support, but didn't use pity. Zero did not yet know the word 'reassurance'. But he suspected the word was close.

The hidden quest arrived on the sixth day, though it had been quietly building since the second. It had started when three junior disciples had been practicing sword forms in the main training yard, when Zero passed through on the way to the smaller one. He had paused to watch, which was not unusual for him, as he watched most things, but what was unusual was that he watched for long enough that the disciples noticed.

They waited for the judgment that foreign outsiders typically delivered, implicit or explicit, but it never came. Zero simply watched with the same neutral attention he gave to everything. One of the disciples, emboldened by the absence of hostility, asked if Zero was a sword practitioner. When Zero said he wasn't, the disciple asked what he was. Zero said that he was currently figuring it out. His answer, for reasons Zero did not fully understand at the time, made the disciple laugh.

And because laughter is contagious in ways that Zero had observed, the other two laughed as well. When they introduced themselves, Zero replied with his name, and mentioned that he was with the group of outsiders who had arrived during the ceremony. The disciples already knew this, as everyone in the outer grounds did. What they had not known was that the outsider with the white eyes and the eerie stillness would just stand and watch them practice and not say anything rude about it.

They invited him to watch them again the next day. Zero thought for a moment, then he nodded.

On the sixth day, the three disciples were mid-form when Zero watched the leading disciple perform a technique he had not seen before. It was a dual-strike sequence, both hands moving in an overlapping pattern, each strike covering the other's angle. Though the qi integration was basic, the structure was sound. The disciple finished the form and looked over at Zero.

"Silent Mantis Dual Strike," the disciple said.

"Third form of the outer disciples' sword curriculum." Zero nodded. The disciple, who had been watching Zero watch him for four days now, asked with some pride and curiosity, "Can you follow it?" Zero considered the question in its full literal sense: if he could reproduce the movement pattern he had just observed.

"Yes," he said. He did not have a sword. He stepped away from the wall, settled into something approximating the starting stance, and performed the opening of the Silent Mantis Dual Strike. Since he had no sword, his hands were open. Zero had been watching the form for four days at this point, as the three disciples trained the same sequence every morning, and had allowed Zero to watch.

He had not consciously catalogued it, but he had been mentally present when it happened repeatedly, and his body had arrived at an understanding that his mind had not formally processed yet. He suspected that it might have had something to do with his new skill from the prior day, which was subtly affirmed with [System Intuition].

Zero performed the first half of the sequence, then became keenly aware that his hands were empty, and the technique was designed around a blade, and its motion seemed incomplete without something to anchor it. So, almost instinctively, he shifted his hands. It was a small shift, not visible from a distance. His fingers lengthened slightly at the distal joints, and his wrists took on a fractional resistance that matched the weight and center of gravity of the technique's intended blade.

And because he was curious about whether [Spiritual Shapeshifting] would interact with it, he tested the skill without thinking much of it, adjusting his spiritual body's alignment to match the form. His hands resolved into the shape of a praying mantis's forearms. They were angular, precise, each one a natural blade. When Zero completed the form, the three disciples did not speak for a moment. Then one of them said, very quietly, "How long have you been training?"

"I have not trained," Zero said.

"I watched you." Another silence.

"That was—" The disciple sputtered.

"You just performed a form you have never been taught! With modified hands! And it was cleaner than mine!"

"Your left shoulder drops too far on the follow-up strike," Zero said.

"Which reduces your angle. I attempted to compensate in my version." The disciple stared at him in gaze that he would receive often, and soon come to recognize as 'awe'. Currently, however, Zero was not certain what expression would be appropriate, so he defaulted to his usual stillness. The disciple turned to the others, said something in a low enough voice that the system didn't translate it, and then turned back.

"Can you show us again?" Zero did it again. By the end of the morning, there were eleven disciples watching.

The system notification showed up that evening, when Zero returned to the smaller yard where Miho was running Viria and Yukito through basic qi circulation. By that point, their results were measurable, though minimal. HIDDEN QUEST DISCOVERED: Respect of the Heavenly Cloud Sect Goal: Train within the Heavenly Cloud Sect and earn the recognition of its members. Requirements: Earn the respect of at least 1 Elder, 3 Instructors, and 25% of junior disciples.

Reward: EXP, reputation adjustment, and passage permission for the Cloud Sea Crossing. Current progress: 0% Viria opened her eyes to read it and made a sound.

"That's a quest." Yukito looked at the requirements.

"25% percent of junior disciples. How many disciples are there?" Zero had counted on the third day.

"I estimate between 60 and 80 in the outer grounds. The inner disciples are not accessible to us, so they likely do not count."

"So 15 to 20 people. How many are currently watching you practice?" Zero thought for a moment.

"Eleven. As of this morning." Miho, who had been listening without comment until that point, spoke up, "There are two instructors who teach the outer disciples. They walk through the training yard during morning sessions. One of them paused to watch you yesterday."

"I noticed."

"Did you notice how long she paused?" One minute." Miho's tail moved once.

"That is significant, for an instructor." Zero thought about this.

"Should I do something different?"

"No," Miho said.

"Do exactly what you have been doing. Do not perform for them or adjust your behavior to seem more impressive. Continue training as if they are not there."

"I always train as if they are not there."

"Good. Keep doing that." Miho said before returning to correcting Yukito's circulation posture. Viria watched Zero for a moment with an expression he had learned was the one she used when thinking about something she was not going to say immediately. Eventually, she said it anyway.

"... You know you're strange, right?"

"You have mentioned it."

"I just want to make sure it doesn't become a problem." Zero considered her statement.

"I cannot guarantee that."

"Fair enough." Viria turned back to her circulation.

"Neither can any of us."