Any time someone told Chidi he couldn’t cut something, he liked to prove them wrong. That hadn’t actually been Aconite’s point with an offhand comment she made, instead being more to herself. She was speaking about how certain compounds got stuck together, which was either exactly what she wanted her poisons to do or completely ruined them depending on the context and particular poison in question.

Now she had spent a month watching him cut apart dust. Well, the majority of the time was spent on her own studies and meditations, but whenever she looked over to her friend he was effectively swinging his sword at empty space.

She couldn’t tell if it was better or worse that he wasn’t using a lick of upper energy in his motions. If she pretended he was practicing his sword forms it made sense, except that he never really repeated any motion. She wasn’t even sure he was locked onto any target in particular, his blade never slicing through the same area for long.

It was distracting in a way his training usually wasn’t. She’d long gotten used to Chidi’s energy around her, and more recently she’d gotten used to energy suddenly going away. Or at least, that was always what it felt like. Apparently, it was all still there- Chidi just somehow managed to make an entire area balance. Even inside other cultivators, which was the truly astounding part.

Then again, she shouldn’t have expected anything less profound from an alternate path to Augmentation. Being incomprehensible was almost a given.

Aconite wasn’t looking for anything like that. She thought she would be most effective in Augmentation, simply empowering herself and her poisons. In truth, most of her poisons were already strong enough, it was delivering them to her enemies that was the issue. It was either simple, if they were careless enough to let an unknown gap slip past their defenses and breathe it in, or nearly impossible if they were vigilant of all outside intrusion.

Breaking down an opponent’s defenses only to poison them was simply a waste of combat potential. If you got through enemy defenses, it was better to just kill them. Of course, that wasn’t always feasible. Cultivators didn’t always have just one layer of defenses, even if they weren’t persistent. Someone about to be stabbed through the chest might focus all their energy internally, leaving them with broken bones and rent flesh but not a punctured heart or the like.

That was where Aconite’s claws came in, carrying with them poisons. Subtle poisons, where just traces of them were left behind for when those internal defenses dropped, pumped through the bloodstream.

“I need more dregs,” Chidi declared.

“Seriously?” Aconite asked. “You have a whole barrel full.” She looked over. “Did it all get mixed in with the dirt?”

She was obviously going to provide what he asked for. If he wanted a whole pouch of her best poison for something, she’d give it to him. If he wanted two? Well, he’d need a pretty darn good reason for that. And she was pretty sure he wouldn’t bother poisoning a whole lake or inland sea.

Sne sniffed the remnants of what Chidi had been experimenting with. She couldn’t really call it anything else, because he was serious. It wasn’t playing around… but it sure didn’t look like much of anything.

It smelled like something was missing. She couldn’t quite place why. How odd. How very odd indeed.

-----

Trying to cut something too miniscule to be seen would have been a bigger problem if Chidi could see. It wasn’t exactly simpler without sight, but he didn’t weigh himself down with figuring out how close he was to doing what he wished. He either was successful in his cuts, or he was not. ‘Close’ meant nothing.

He really couldn’t comprehend structures smaller than a certain size. There were also huge issues with air particles slamming into whatever he was trying to cut at first. But if he let himself get bogged down in the details, he’d never get anywhere. If his master had been around to ask for advice, he could guess it would have been along the lines of ‘just cut it’.

So he did that.

It really wasn’t an issue anymore. He could cut what he wanted. Any one thing, at least. Maybe two, or ten, or a hundred or thousand things along a path. All of those numbers were practically the same compared to what he was actually dealing with. Same with a million or a billion. That’s what happened when you wanted to cut individual particles.

Technically, he’d succeeded. He could cut them- and he wasn’t just destroying molecules, but actually separating them. It was… pointless. Unless he was getting attacked by a single molecule, it was much easier to just cut a person in half. Or a planet. Even if he cut a billion of a particularly important compound inside of an enemy… he could at most slightly inconvenience a small fraction of their cells.

It was pointless. His precision would be thrown off by enemy cultivators without even doing it on purpose. But… it certainly increased his awareness of the vastness of things. There was a flow to follow. Besides, now that it had his attention he felt obligated to follow it through.

He needed new handfuls of the dregs from one of Aconites projects because he couldn’t test his results without fresh powder. He had to clean up the area around him as well, enough to determine the proper proportion of what he cut.

He tossed a handful of powder. He swung, three times. Some swirled away on the wind- currently non-toxic. And some very small portion of it should have returned to a dangerous state. Based on Chidi’s very inconclusive determination, less than one part in a million. Not of the general atmosphere, but the particular substance he was working with. So, nothing. Even if it were Aconite’s most potent poisons.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

He did it again, and again, and again. He obviously couldn’t hit everything in a cloud with his sword. He couldn’t channel his energy into so many individual blades and angles. But he could cut things without a sword. He just had to want it to happen and… well, any amount of energy would completely resist him. Pointless. Chikere once cut something with a look, if he recalled correctly, but that still involved an infusion of energy.

But sword intent mattered as well. It was what he used to cut through things during Negation, and a large part of what made Chikere better than other swordmasters who would have otherwise been her match in technique and even energy. If you just cut more, it was enough.

But if he thought about it too much, he’d just think himself in circles. So he stopped thinking and cut. He didn’t have anything in mind for what threshold would be a ‘success’. He’d just know when it was, and be done.

-----

Aconite watched Chidi toss a handful of powder in the air and cut it. She wasn’t really surprised when nothing seemed to change. The powder didn’t even swirl around the trail of his blade. Since he could cut apart wind, it wasn’t odd he could choose to not cut apart the air. The sort of thing that only made sense when going beyond the normal laws of the universe, but Aconite got it.

However, Aconite was very sensitive to particular things. Chidi could detect swords without his energy actually interacting with one, and so it wasn’t odd for her to be able to pick out poisons before she even sniffed them or felt their aura.

As for what a ‘poison’ was, that was something based on her own internal understanding. Just like the limits between swords, polearms, axes, and other weapons often blurred. Aconite knew what one was, and could confirm or deny any substance was a poison, and even determine something of its potency without interacting further.

So it was wild for a handful of powder to go from not having any poison in it to, well, having some. It would have been one thing if it was undergoing a chemical reaction in a lab- or really anything but having a sword swung at it.

Aconite watched. The sword slashed. She blinked.

Oh. That was a good idea. Cultivators had a lot of instincts about poisons and protecting themselves. But if something wasn’t poison… would it even register in their thoughts? Obviously she couldn’t just throw a random powder at someone and expect them to breathe it in. Nobody she cared about fighting would be so stupid as to assume she had no purpose in that. But if it were hidden… and then became poisonous later?

Actually, that fit in with a traditional poisoning technique. Two substances on their own might be completely harmless, but when mixed together…? They became deadly. Yet Aconite had found cultivators often sensed that. But would they sense one substance that had the potential to be one or maybe even two deadly toxins if split? If only she could accomplish that somehow.

And no, she wasn’t going to ask Chidi to cut things for her. Because he could just kill the enemy at that point. But… she might gain some sort of insight.

A sword slashed. Chidi smiled. And Aconite forgot all about everything around her as she swirled energy within her, locking memories in her brain. Alone, it wouldn’t be enough for Augmentation, but she had many other insights already.

She subconsciously moved forward towards her waste barrel. What she did would have been incredibly foolish if she hadn’t immunized herself against everything she used- even those things that were normally impossible to develop a resistance to.

She buried her head in the powder and transformed it. It came naturally to her. A rush of energy filled her. Then she spent the next several minutes catching the now extremely potent toxins before they swirled away on the wind and devastated the local ecosystem. Chidi helped too, of course, slicing the winds that were most problematic.

-----

Despite their prominence in the Scarlet Alliance, neither Timothy nor Catarina were frequently in the public eye. Of course, that didn’t mean people weren’t paying attention to their activities. For security reasons they attempted to keep the movements of most people private, though the Scarlet Alliance rarely managed anything more than preventing such news from being precise and current.

Too many people were interested to entirely obfuscate most things, and they merely did their best to keep enemy spies from having information more recent than a few weeks. Many cultivators would feel that such information was quite timely, but the Scarlet Alliance tended to work on shorter timescales than that.

If they truly needed to, they could slip away on a private vessel, avoiding populated areas. But the thing they were trying to keep secret wasn’t something that affected national security interests. Nor was it entirely secret. They just avoided making any sort of announcement.

They chose their timing based specifically around Chidi departing on a training expedition. But he returned somewhat earlier than expected- and came straight to see them.

Obviously they weren’t going to refuse him entry.

“Aconite broke through to Augmentation!” he said excitedly. Obviously the two of them had already felt that from the wolf standing alongside him.

“Congratulations,” Timothy said, nodding. “It’s difficult, especially as you haven’t had a proper master, and very few of merit along a similar path.”

Catarina agreed. “It’s really something. Nobody could have expected much faster.”

Aconite sniffed. Chidi tilted his head.

It wasn’t possible for Catarina to hide anything without making it obvious she was hiding something. So she’d gone for the most subtle approach she could.

Chidi looked like he was trying to say something. Catarina could imagine that if her son had eyes, they would be locked on her lower torso.

“I- was that what it was for?” Chidi was flabbergasted. Surprised, certainly, but not upset. “You could have just… wow.”

The two parents smiled.