Chương 172: Chapter 33: Too Much to Learn

That weekend, training with Remo was particularly tough. It was no longer just her; the group had expanded slightly with the start of the new academic term. They were few mostly men, but not a crowd: counting Selena, merely five students. The packed dirt yard seemed vast and empty with them scattered about, but Remo's presence, unflinching as a rock clad in leather, filled the space with silent authority. Meditation, as always, was non-negotiable and the starting point.

But Selena no longer focused solely on clearing her mind; she had learned to listen with her other senses. Closing her eyes, she felt the texture of the wind on her skin, the shifting humidity in the air, the faint crunch of the dirt beneath the others' feet, even the rhythm of their breathing. It was an enviable level of control, forged in the fire of Remo's deliberate interference and the necessity of perceiving invisible threats. Then came combat. Though this time, Remo changed the rules.

After the customary first bout, where Selena faced him and was brought down with his usual brutal efficiency, the instructor raised his voice, dry as the crack of a whip: —Fight among yourselves. Rotate. I want to know who the best student is right now. There is no prize, only knowledge. Selena faced the other four, one after the other. The first, Liam, was a broad but slow youth; she defeated him using her speed and redirection.

The second was Scarleth, who was more agile; she fell after a series of blocks and a precise counterattack to a pressure point. With the third, named Efraín, a serious and methodical young man, the match was far more even, ending in a technical draw when neither was able to subdue the other before Remo halted the fight. But the fourth... the fourth was different. He was tall and lean, with a wiry physique and a calm, unblinking gaze.

His movements were fluid, economical, and he seemed to anticipate every attack Selena launched. He overwhelmed her. The young man was pure technique, and it was so refined that every defense Selena offered felt clumsy, every attack predictable. In less than a minute, she was on the ground, her wrist immobilized and his fingertips a single centimeter from her throat. Remo observed without expression. Then, he gave a single nod. —Well done, Fergus. It was to be expected after five years of continuous instruction.

At least you demonstrate you haven't learned in vain. He paused, his gaze shifting from Fergus to Selena, and then to Efraín, the young man with whom Selena had tied. —Starting today, Fergus will fight Selena and Efraín. The day you manage —Remo pointed at Fergus— to have one of them clearly impose themselves over the other, consistently, I will teach you a trick of the style. Something not found in the movements you know, boy something learned only in war.

It was an incentive, a carrot for Fergus, and at the same time a test for Selena and Efraín: they would be the examination ground, the hurdles to overcome. Selena pushed herself up, dusting herself off, and looked at Fergus. He looked back at her without arrogance, showing only that professional calm. It was a gaze of mutual recognition; she sighed, knowing he would be her teacher for a while. The following weeks passed with the dizzying speed of someone who has too much to learn and too little time.

Selena advanced step by painful step toward mastery of the written touch under Isolde's strict tutelage. She now understood that runes were not arcane symbols; they were a highly complex technical language.

The first thing she noticed was the overwhelming variety: a single word-concept, such as "protection" or "healing," could have up to twenty different runes, each carrying specific nuances: runes for use on one's own body, runes for activation patterns in resonant objects by emotion, intent, or the simple repetitive motion used in ordinary parchments, runes to index bodily transformation effects, such as granting the temporary rigidity of stone or the flexibility of water and runes indicating the use of parchments to alter the properties of external matter, such as making water burn like flames or causing air to turn dense as jelly.

It was simply that: a notation on paper, one that offered an explanation to anyone who knew the symbols. Understanding them was by no means easy; the memorization, the sheer scope, everything was complex. In the written touch, theory was one thing, application quite another. The price of mistakes was immediate and painful. In her first serious attempt to modify a property of water in a bowl, a backlash struck her with the force of a mallet, fracturing several delicate bones in her right arm.

Isolde healed her on the spot, with a cold efficiency that permitted no complaints. —Pain is a very effective teacher —the master had remarked as the bones knit beneath her fingers with a dry snap. And so it went: with every new concept, every new combination she attempted to internalize, there was a risk of backlash, an internal burn, a muscle spasm. But each mistake also carved knowledge deeper into her mind and flesh. Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere.

Support the author by seeking out the original. Norrun remained a strange challenge, though she understood it better each day. It felt like a natural resistance to a language that, while close to Erahari or rather, originating from the same ancient linguistic family, was on the verge of splitting off permanently, forging its own unique words while retaining a handful of terms from Erahari and others from even older northern tongues.

Speaking it with Fjora and Samira was now less exercise and more a conversation, clumsy yet functional. —Njich wótcojo na twój wulki postup spomnjać, njich so twója swójba přeco dale rozmnožeć —Selena repeated with a furrowed brow, attempting to improve her pronunciation. Then Fjora would provide the translation: —May the ancestors take note of your great fervor; may your family grow ever larger —she would say with the sweet cadence of her voice.

As for her complementary courses, this year she had selected the same ones as in her first term: Weapon Practice and Handling, now focused on Denadi Stili with Remo, and Dead Languages, though this time she had swapped Volg-Thûr for Veritasilba. Her progress there was... non-existent, absolute zero. Veritasilba was as foreign to her as Mandarin would have been to a native Spanish speaker in her previous life.

She could recognize a few basic pictograms and infer their meaning through context, but the grammar, the syntax, and the internal logic of the language slipped through her fingers like sand.

It was during one of these sessions of quiet frustration, while she was attempting to decipher a funerary inscription that looked as though it had been written by a drunken spider, that the instructor, a lady named Dinael, an older woman with a serene face and eyes that held the curiosity seen only in children, approached her table. Selena was not alone; three other students were struggling with similar texts. But Lady Dinael stopped specifically in front of her.

Without a word, she extended a sheet of paper sealed with the emblem of the Faculty of Historical Linguistics. Selena took it, bewildered. Lady Dinael then spoke, her voice soft yet clear: —Make good use of your time, Countess. As soon as winter ends and the roads are passable, I recommend you visit this place. —She paused, her wise eyes scanning Selena's face— They are not dangerous ruins; they are usually filled with competent archaeologists and philologists.

Sometimes, to internalize the meaning of a dead language, books alone are not enough. One must know the society that spoke it. See its walls, touch its stones, imagine their voices among the rubble. The context... breathes life into the symbols. She sighed, a sound that laid bare her vast experience. —Perhaps there you will find what you cannot grasp here, within these four walls. Selena looked at the paper.

It was an official permit, signed and sealed by Rector Cyril Laurence Sterling-Gale himself, granting permission to visit the Ruins of Ashkharum. The text specified a particular zone: a Copper Age city that, according to the tidy marginal notes, had fallen not to war or natural catastrophe, but to a mysterious and devastating plague. A place that had lost everything in tragedy, but perhaps also a place of petrified words awaiting someone who knew how to listen.

In advanced medicine, things were going reasonably well, albeit with dark undertones. That semester, Selena immersed herself in toxicology and antidotes, a field where chemical and biological precision, based on herbal extracts, animal venoms, and pulverized minerals, struck her as fascinating, tangible, and immensely practical. She also studied diseases and plague containment, an area she observed with regret to be still deeply archaic, far closer to superstition and brutal quarantine than scientific epidemiology.

However, it was the subject of Medicine of the Mind and Trauma that brought her into direct collision with the boundaries of Erabergh's medical knowledge. Compared to the basic psychology she knew from Earth, however popular and simplified it had been, what was taught here bordered dangerously on the most obtuse pseudoscience.

—The mind is a complex realm to study —mentioned a white-bearded, glassy-eyed old man who was impeccably dressed— Many afflictions are caused by errors in the vital flow, by straying from the natural harmony of Aelthra. Quills moved with fervor as notes were taken, while Selena could only sigh at what she had just heard.

—The discipline was born from the many hysterical women we found ailing, others suffering from deep melancholies, and soldiers who could not erase the war from their sight —Benedict pointed to the slate board— One of the most prominent theories we currently hold is that of the wandering womb, consisting of the displacement of this organ throughout the body, inducing melancholy and all manner of ills. Selena listened to the first lecture with a mixture of disbelief and rising horror.

When Benedict solemnly began describing how melancholic madness could be treated with bloodletting to rebalance the humors, and how skull shape dictated an inclination toward criminality or genius, a theory that sounded vaguely like phrenology to her, she could not contain herself. A dry, involuntary laugh escaped her lips. It was not a laugh of amusement, but of pure and absolute intellectual contempt.

The professor and the other students looked at her as if she had uttered blasphemy in the middle of a sacred sermon. Without a word, Selena gathered her belongings and stood up with as much rudeness as she could muster. She never returned to that class. She chose instead to focus her efforts on what she could learn and apply with certainty: toxicology, basic surgery, and herbal pharmacopeia.

She decided that, in this world, she would heal bodies, not minds, at least not until she possessed the power and knowledge to challenge centuries of dogmatic ignorance.

And so, her frantic rhythm continued: medicine in the mornings, written touch with Isolde on alternate afternoons, hand-to-hand combat and Denadi Stili with Remo, and the study of the two languages challenging her in opposing ways Norrun, which she was beginning to feel like a harsh yet familiar second skin, and Veritasilba, which remained an impenetrable wall of silent pictograms.