Looking closer, I saw that the light wasn't the warm yellow of a lamp or the red of a fire. It was silvery, thin and cold, and it flickered across the back of my hand like tiny threads before it slowly sank under my skin and disappeared. Searching inside, I found a few faint wisps of spirit energy crawling just beneath my skin, carrying the same crackle I had felt in the air.
(So lightning-type spirit energy is silver. Good to know.)
Curious, I calmed my mind and spread my senses outwards again. The silver energy was only a small part of what floated around me. Something heavy sank towards the floor, something cool hung near the washbasin, something light drifted in from the window, and something warm clung to the lamp — earth, water, wind and fire, the most common attributes Elder Hale had mentioned. I could sense all of them, but when I tried to pull one in, it simply slid past me. Only the silver energy answered the path Thunder Sovereign Art had carved inside me.
(Sensing is one thing, absorbing is another. The technique decides what goes in.) I wrote it down in my notes and went back to cultivating. I had chosen lightning on purpose, after all.
...
After that, the days settled into a routine.
Since classes were optional for us, I went every other day and spent the rest in the library. The one assigned to our class was Instructor Merrow, a broad-shouldered middle-aged man with a short beard and a voice that could wake the dead. Most of what he taught was already written in the books on the library's first floor, and for anything to do with techniques, my golden finger had already laid it out far more clearly.
Even so, I kept going, because every now and then Instructor Merrow would stop in the middle of the lesson, look at the troublemakers whispering in the back and the ones dozing off by the wall, and remind them with his own experience.
One morning, while explaining blood tempering, his eyes stopped on Hollis's group, who were laughing about something, and he said,
"Laugh while you can. Twelve years ago, I sat in this same room, and the boy next to me laughed just like that. He was faster than me through the skin stages, and he rushed his blood tempering in a single month to take first place in the quarterly exam. He got it, too."
"Half a year later, our crew took him into the Hundred Beast Mountains for his first hunt. A demon wolf caught his calf — only a scratch, but his blood wouldn't stop. Rushed blood is thin blood. We carried him for two days, and by the time we got him back, his leg was finished. He sells cloth in the East Zone now."
"The exam rewards you once. The mountains test you every day. Temper properly, or don't bother tempering at all."
The classroom was silent after that, and even Hollis sat a little straighter. That kind of lesson wasn't in any book, and it was exactly why I kept going.
...
The library was where I spent the real time. By the end of the first week, Elder Tobber had got used to me. Every time I came in, he would look up from his upside-down book, nod, and go back to humming, while I sank into the first floor until the lamps were lit.
The first thing I filled in was the geography. The Everdawn Kingdom was divided into nine prefectures, each prefecture into nine counties, and each county into multiple towns. Graywolf Town, which I had always thought small, turned out to be the most prominent town in the Hundred Beast County, second only to Direwatch City, the county seat where the county chief resided. And the Hundred Beast County itself was the top county of the Boundless Frontier Prefecture.
The reason was the Hundred Beast Mountain Range, which held more demons than anywhere else in the kingdom. The hunting crews, the demon meat, the butcher shop I grew up in — all of it came from those mountains. Because of them, even our prefecture was counted among the top three in the kingdom, since the people here were fighters who had gone through life and death countless times and come out alive.
Reading this, I couldn't help but think of my father and Uncle Bram. (A crew from the most dangerous county in the prefecture, and the Hall's guards call one of them "Lord".) I set the thought aside. Digging into it now would get me nothing.
Next were the realms, which the books at home had never laid out at all. Above Martial Warrior was Martial Master, above that Martial Grandmaster, and above that the legendary Martial General. No one in Everdawn had ever gone past Martial Master — the last two appeared only in old legends and accounts from far away. One book also mentioned that beyond the kingdoms surrounding ours there were lands with even more powerful individuals, but reaching them meant crossing multiple dead zones, where even strong cultivators went in and never came out.
I read that paragraph three times. Town, county, prefecture, kingdom, and now whatever lay beyond the dead zones — the ladder had more rungs than I had thought, and I meant to climb every single one of them.
Of the surrounding kingdoms, two were mentioned in every history book, and never kindly: the Crimson Sun Kingdom to the west and the Azure Tide Kingdom to the south-east, both rivals of Everdawn.
A book on cultivation theory gave me another key point: the Martial Warrior realm can only be reached by opening the dantian and storing spirit energy there. Until then, everything a Martial Disciple absorbs spreads through the body itself, which explained how Elder Hale could float as if it cost him nothing.
Then came the grading I had been most eager to find. Techniques and martial arts were divided into ranks named like the realms — disciple, warrior and master — and each rank into early, mid and high levels. Alchemists, who made elixirs from the herbs in the herb dictionary, and blacksmiths, who forged weapons from ores, were ranked the same way.
The same book cleared up something I had been mixing together all along. The grade of a technique and how much of it the user has learned are two different things, and the second has its own scale. Introduction means 10%, where the user can start using the technique in fights. Minor accomplishment means 30% mastered. Major accomplishment means 70%. Peak means 99%. And perfection means 100%.
Perfection is only a 1% difference from peak, but the power generated at that point lets the technique accomplish what a technique a grade above it can. A high-level disciple-rank technique at perfection, for example, can match an early warrior-rank technique at major accomplishment.
I stared at that line for a long time. (Only 1%, and it's worth a whole grade. And I bet that 1% is exactly where almost everyone gets stuck for the rest of their lives.) Then I thought of the guide in my head, which pointed out every mistake before I even made it, and I couldn't help but smile.
Naturally, I wanted to know the rank of my own technique. The next time I passed the counter, the name was already on the tip of my tongue — and I stopped with my mouth half open. (Wait. The cover is torn.) The only place I had ever seen those two words was inside my own head. A golden finger is only a trump card as long as nobody knows it exists.
So I turned it into a polite cough and asked instead,
"Elder Tobber, the torn lightning technique I took — what rank is it?"
He looked at me over his thick glasses for a while before saying,
"That one? Thunder Sovereign Art. Master rank. Or it was. It was already half destroyed when the Hall Master got hold of it, and nobody can cultivate half a Master technique past the Martial Disciple realm, so it went upstairs for mediocre disciples to get a good enough power out of." He sniffed. "None of them picked it. They all wanted something complete."
I bowed and thanked him with a calm face, gnashing my teeth inside to keep from laughing. (Mediocre disciples, huh. I'll take that.) A Master-rank technique sitting on a shelf like a consolation prize, and I was the only one who could see the missing half.
The last thing I learned mattered most to my daily cultivation. Those who had eaten demon meat since young found the first four stages of the Martial Disciple realm much easier, because their skin and blood were already used to a little spirit energy. The real challenge began after that. Bone refining required every bone in the body, down to the smallest one in the toes, to be refined until it was shiny and strong, and one book listed over two hundred of them.
(Two hundred bones. Of course it wasn't going to be easy.)
...
Every night, back in room 305, I sat cross-legged on my bed and cultivated. The needles turned into a burning heat that left black, foul-smelling filth on my arms by morning — exactly as Elder Hale had described — and whenever I got stuck, the guide showed me where my breathing had gone wrong or where I had pushed too fast. My roommate never said a word about the smell, but he started leaving the hall window open. (He keeps to his terms. So do I. I started washing twice as long.)
I also set aside time every day for the other two. Thunderclap Leg Art I practised in the narrow space between the bed and the wall, and with the guide pointing out every wrong angle of my foot and every moment my weight shifted too early, I brought it to minor accomplishment, the 30% I had read about, a level most disciples needed months of sweat to reach. I could already use its kicks and its short burst in a real fight. What I couldn't do yet was go further. The guide had laid out the path to major accomplishment as clearly as the rest, but it demanded an explosive burst of lightning-type spirit energy through the legs in a single instant, and my body, still at skin tempering, couldn't carry that kind of power. (Force it now, and the only thing that bursts will be my own muscles. Patience is also a skill.)
Thinking of this, I stopped, wiped the sweat off my forehead, and looked at the Ghostveil manual lying on my shelf. The more I thought about this simple yet profound technique, the more fascinating it became. It wasn't just a camouflage technique that hid your breath, but—