Kevin breathed softly, his mind dominated by a single image. A dome floated in the void at the base of his sternum. While the surface was opaque, allowing you to see the void beyond, its light blue tinge made it easy to differentiate.
No longer a mere, fleeting imagination, it was now as real as any memory he had. He’d brought it to mind three times with the same clarity of detail, and three times it had come through without a single change.
The first exercise was complete.
The triumphant thought intruded on his focus, and he let the image with a soft chuckle. Snapping his eyes open, Kevin checked the clock on the white loungeroom wall.
Seventeen minutes, not quite his record for length, but still far beyond his ability only a few days ago. Progress on two fronts; an excellent sign for the future.
He’d even made it with a few hours before he had to sleep. Enough time to move to the second exercise without risking exhaustion at work tomorrow.
Eager to begin, Kevin grabbed the Sealed Land Cultivation Method booklet from the little table by the lounge. The second exercise had half a page of warnings ensuring you had passed the first.
While confident he’d made it, Kevin still took the time to tick off every box. Once he'd confirmed his progress, he moved on to memorizing the second exercise with the same care he had the first.
Now he had a stable, empty container, it was time to fill the inside. He had to invent a complete landscape and insert it into his current visualization.
There were diagrams to provide suggestions. One held a ship floating on a half-sphere of water, waves forming on its surface, another a verdant field filled the base of a dome while the third displayed a mountain spire covered in crags, trees, and winding paths.
The one thing all three examples had in common was the unbelievable level of detail. Compared to this, the first exercise may as well have been nothing but idle daydreaming.
Shaken, Kevin laid the booklet aside and closed his eyes, leaning back on the lounge. Was such a leap forward even possible? The mere thought of putting that much detail together in a mental image sent a shudder through him, and that was ignoring the difficulty of memorizing it.
Nor was it clear what he should even put in there. Like before, he had to feel his way through the exercise, finding a landscape that resonated with him. This would, according to the booklet, ensure the ultimate creation matched his aspect.
Aspect was a word he lacked the background understanding for, but he’d heard it used enough to have an idea. It seemed to be something like an element, like the heat-aspected Qi his stove used.
The way the booklet used it suggested each person had a natural aspect, which matched common themes from the cultivation stories he’d read. If that was the case, he could see the importance of matching the aspect to the eventual Sealed Land.
It would have just been nice to have some more guidance on how to actually do it.
Kevin’s mind whirled as he focused on the problem, doubt and fear warring with desperate hope. He had to get through this if he wanted to progress with cultivation; it was only the first step, and he couldn’t expect things to get easier from there.
Staving off panic with deep breaths, he put the problem aside. It was getting late, and sleeping on the issue might provide the insight he was missing.
Mundane preparations for his first day of work helped too. He’d purchased a map of the area and asked a local to mark the route he’d have to take. Transport was available for hire, but it was only an hour’s walk.
That would be two going both ways, but he could use the time to focus on his cultivation in a fresh setting. If he had to create a detailed landscape, perhaps walking through natural beauty might help.
Besides, it would save money, reducing how much he had to push his debt.
Once his clothes were set out, and an alarm set on the little clock covered in scrawling script by his bed, Kevin turned in for the night.
And dreamed of strange landscapes.
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Waking to the little alarm clock was a strange experience. Instead of a shrill noise jerking him awake, it was like a hand lifted Kevin out of the land of dreams and into the waking world.
Between one moment and the next, Kevin found himself wide awake, strange dreams already fading. A glance at the little wonder on his nightstand confirmed it was six AM.
He had an hour to prepare, then another get there before the eight o’clock start. With his brain feeling like he’d already had his first dose of caffeine, that would be an easy task.
Halfway through a quick morning bath —his flat lacked a shower—, the solution to his cultivation problems slipped into Kevin’s brain. All he needed to do was take it slow, a little piece at a time.
Instead of trying to find an entire landscape that would resonate with his aspect and sense of self in one go, he could find one percent of it. If he could get a tiny chunk of the edge of his dome right, then he’d have a template to build the rest of.
Since any valid piece had to be part of a valid whole, this would allow him to try options at a vastly increased pace. Like finding the corner in a jigsaw puzzle, he could work out from there with certainty.
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The epiphany was like lightning flowing through him, triggering a fresh burst of motivation. He could have dived straight into deep meditation right away if the clothes he’d prepared last night hadn’t reminded him of the morning’s obligation.
Which, of course, was why he’d gone to the trouble the night before. It had been years now since he’d been able to manage a job, getting back into the routine would take work.
And all his reasons for organizing it were still valid. He might pull off nothing but meditation for a few days, but he’d go insane if he kept such a pattern up for long. Not to mention how he’d wrack up his debt.
Instead, Kevin played with the idea in the back of his mind as he finished his preparations.
The example of lush fields in the booklet had been a dome, like his, and so was the logical first choice. Grass, rows of corn, or other vegetables were all tried, but none felt quite right.
He kept at it until he was grabbing his morning coffee at Vanessa’s cafe. It would have been perfect if the image had fit, verdant fields conjured up the idea of a land filled with life.
And wasn’t that his goal? Yet, no matter what he tried, Kevin couldn’t get the idea to work. Throughout the first method, he’d grown better at paying attention to that mystical feeling, and lush, grassy areas were plain wrong.
On the walk out to work, he moved on to thoughts of mountains or hills, like those that swept up behind the town. Even with an impressive subject so close to hand, the idea fell through.
A full mountain wouldn’t fit well in the dome he’d established in the first method, and changing that now would be at cross purposes. Hills were better, but something about their energy felt wrong.
The closest he got before reaching Felton Orchards, was to have a wider landscape with tiny replica hills dotted across it. As if he was looking down on a vast area from a great height.
Perhaps that was a clue as to the way forward, but for now, he had to get to work.
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Felton farms covered a vast swath of the countryside. In harvest season, its thirteen orchards of pears, plumbs, and peaches had almost a hundred people working each shift, overseen by the owner, Anthony Felton.
Mr. Fellton, as he insisted on being called, was a grizzled man whose age no doubt exceeded his late-sixtyish appearance. Dressed in a strange hybrid between robes and coveralls, the man’s gruff demeanor was at first outputting.
Despite this, he was a decent enough boss to work for, if only because of the little attention he paid each worker. After giving Kevin a rundown of how to use the provided tools — a stepladder, and a set of woven baskets — the man left him alone for the rest of the morning.
While the work was tiring, Kevin got into something of a meditative rhythm. First set up the ladder near a cluster of fruit, grab a basket, then climb and reach for the peaches above.
Most of the time, he wouldn’t fill a basket before clearing the area within reach, but if he did, he’d have to descend to swap to an empty one. An exhausting process over time, but he expected that after a few days, he could complete it almost on auto-pilot.
Throughout the day, he found small snippets of time to chat with the other workers. All, it seemed, were part-time workers; something Kevin suspected had to do with taxes. Still, it wasn’t his place to pry.
This meant most workers moved to another shift on a different farm in the afternoons, using the two to make a full-time job. A few in the same orchard as him, however, were working part-time while they cultivated.
While there wasn’t enough time for an in-depth discussion during work, Kevin caught that they shared the cost of transport back to town. Throwing aside his plans to walk back while cultivating, Kevin offered to pitch in for a ride.
And so after turning in his haul for the day, and getting a nod from Mr. Fellton for reaching the quota, Kevin waited at the gate. Soon a small group had formed from the mass of departing workers; four men and three women from across the various orchards.
Adam, Emily, Layla, Fred, and James were locals, while Amy and Ethan were out of towers like him, though not nearly as far out of town. All of them were in their late teens or early twenties and trying to get into the local sect.
“Isn’t just being in the Body Cleansing realm enough to get in?” Kevin asked, eyebrows raised as he looked at the small group. Wasn’t that the entire reason he was pushing so hard?
Though from the awkward shuffling around the group, it may have been the wrong question to ask people already down on their luck. Wincing, Kevin gave an apologetic smile and prepared to apologize, only to get interrupted.
“It depends,” Emily, a young woman in ripped black jeans and a ragged t-shirt. With the septum nose ring, thick eyeliner, and eyebrow piercings, Kevin would have called her style goth back home. “Some big general sects will take anyone who can pay tuition, but most have specific requirements. The Severing Sword won’t take you unless you can pass their skill exam.”
“It’s a damn hard one too,” Fred laughed, halfway around the circle. Of the group, he looked the most like a sword wielder, well-muscled yet lithe and athletic. “I’ve failed twice and I do more sword training than cultivation these days.”
“I see,” Kevin responded, taking care to be more careful with his follow-up. “So what makes it worth the effort, then? I mean, if anyone can understand wanting to get into a sect, it’s me.”
“But what makes this sect worth striving for?”
“Well,” Emily spoke first again as the other locals looked toward her. “I guess the answer depends on whether or not you’re from here,” she continued, glancing across at Amy and Ethan.
“For us, the Severing Sword is our sect. Sure they come down and cause trouble now and then, but we all go when they have tournaments against nearby sects. I grew up watching them, and they’re why I decided to join a sect in the first place.”
“Emily’s right,” Layla spoke up for the first time. With her overalls covering a yellow sun dress, she would not have been a person Kevin would have pegged as an aspiring cultivator.
With quiet intensity, Layla continued. “When you’ve grown up seeing them crushing the Tumbling Boulder sect across the mountain or the Twelve Talismans from down the river, it’s hard to think about joining anywhere else.”
The other two nodded their agreement while Kevin looked toward the two from out of town.
“They’re the fourth best sword sect in the country,” Amy — a whip-thin woman who barely spoke above a whisper — said, a serious glint in her eye.
“And we’ve already failed the top three,” Ethan said with a self-deprecating laugh. The man was a little older, and a bit taller, than the woman he had his arm slung around, but he was just as thin. “But we’ve been getting better each time. This is going to be it.”
“Right,” Kevin smiled, nodding at each of them. Nostalgia wasn’t going to be a factor when the same decision came up for him in the future, but the pair of Amy and Ethan gave him more to think about.
If you had a particular interest, it only made sense to try for sects that had that as a specialty. Would there be any that focused on reaching the peak?
Somehow he doubted it, given the reception he’d gotten so far. In that case, he’d need to find one that wouldn’t care too much about his goal. And, if he could swing it, one that wasn’t so bloody focused on tournaments and duels.
“How about you, Kevin?” Emily asked, seeming to speak for the group again. She’d been the one to invite him as well, perhaps she was the organizer, if not the group leader.
“Oh, I’m a complete beginner,” Kevin shrugged, “I’m sure you’ve heard about the outsider in town. Cultivation wasn’t even real for me a few days ago.”
That, of course, brought on a fresh round of questions he couldn’t answer. Even the little he’d just said had been pushing it based on the twinge in his throat.
Still, Kevin couldn’t help but grin as they all crowded onto the disk the group had booked ahead of time. These young men and women might not be working toward the same goal as him, but it was still nice to be around people dedicated to progress.
And while he was still behind them, that was the case for almost everyone he met. It just meant he had to work even harder.