“Imagine flexing your heart to force it to beat. Or to push food down your throat manually, without the aid of reflex and unconscious control. If you could concentrate on only one thing, and one thing alone, it would be doable. Feasible, even. But imagine trying to walk while doing both of those, and also placing each and every movement with serious intent.”

The Artisan tapped her paw against the stone slab. “That is how you need to look at this task. You can’t do anything by instinct, or let your body and system take over the heavy lifting for you. That can come later, once you’ve mastered it so greatly that you can do it with barely an errant thought.”

She pulled a bundle of arrows from the slab, all tied together with thin string. Then she waved her paw, and the arrows split perfectly down the middle before they clattered to the ground and were reabsorbed into the stone.

Noem raised an eyebrow and looked up at her. “I’ve been at this for less than five minutes. I’m still in the ‘try shit out and see what sticks’ phase, not the ‘ask for cryptic advice’ phase. That’s in another thirty minutes or so.”

“You said you would need more Qi to try this. I’m just telling you that’s wrong.” The Artisan said seriously. “You don’t have a huge capacity, but it’s more than enough to make one arrow. For once It’s your skill that’s lacking, not your innate qualities.”

“Wow, thanks for the vote of confidence.” Noem chuckled. He sidestepped another arrow, completely ignoring which of the three types it may have been, and refocused on the slab. “I don’t know how you added this property to my Qi without bonding me, but it’s working like how I read real bonds work. It’s like trying to work a third limb you just got, and it doesn’t have the same bone or muscle structure as the rest of your body. Metaphorically, I mean.”

He gently ran his fingers across the stone, feeling his Qi travel through the strange programmable matter. Unlike every other time he’d used a skill or manipulated his Qi, he couldn’t coax it along with the help of his spirit. Nor with his will. His mind’s influence dulled greatly the second his Qi was no longer connected to his body, and though he could force a skill through the stuff in the wall, it would be fruitless.

Its makeup was simply too different. He couldn’t treat it like a mass of bones, muscle, and nerves; it was its own beast of stone, electronic traces, and whatever responded to his Qi’s commands. Dash had done something completely different when he’d pushed it into some of the stone, yet it had still somehow worked. The intent went through, even if the skill itself couldn’t properly form.

That had to be a hint. Well, not a hint, since he’d given it to himself. Whatever the word for a self-given hint was. Progress?

Noem shrugged. Good enough.

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His fingers dug deep into the stone. It parted with a resistance akin to pressing through thick gruel, shifting and moving along to commands from the Qi in Noem’s fingers. He could get it to do simple things, yet when he tried to command it to do anything, it simply didn’t answer.

“What else am I doing wrong?” He mused as he clenched his hand into a fist and pulled out a palm-sized chunk of stone. “That was a question for you, by the way.”

The Artisan smiled sharply, revealing her teeth in a silent laugh. “Are you sure? You can struggle for another few hours, then come to the exact same conclusion I’d tell you right now. But you’d have come to it yourself, and that has to count for something.”

“Maybe if I was a little more prideful.” Noem squeezed the stone in his hand. It barely moved, even though it had been so malleable a moment ago. “But I threw away all of my pride long before Mona got sick. I don’t need to use as much Qi as I think, and I need to take full control of the process. I’m doing both of those right now, and the stone’s still not turning into an arrow.”

“Well, you’re not actually in full control of the process, for starters. You’re pushing Qi into the stone, and trying to control that Qi like you would with the Qi in your body. Did you stop to think that maybe using Qi is second nature to you?” The Artisan asked.

Noem shook his head.

“That’s what I thought.” The Artisan said simply. “Do you know the difference between a genius, a prodigy, and a master, Noem?”

Noem nodded. “Yeah. A prodigy just knows how to do something, a genius can tell you how they did something, and a master can teach you how to do that thing.” He recited, then twisted the stone in his hand. It took on a slightly cylindrical shape, but it still very much looked like a lump. “One of my teachers loved to quote that from some book or another, and if you were about to quote it to me, then it’s a lot more popular than I thought.”

The Artisan silently pouted, then sighed. “It’s not from a book, Noem; it’s from one of the most famous cultivators in existence. The Ascended Benefactor of the A.A.G.C. Her words have shaped how people teach for thousands of years, and she’s pretty much single-handedly responsible for countries training everyone, not just their elite.”

“Because prodigies don’t always become geniuses, and geniuses don’t always become masters.” Noem muttered to himself. “I know. So what does that have to do with this right now?”

“You aren’t a prodigy. And you aren’t a genius. But, for some reason, you have a very limited mastery.” The Artisan flicked a paw off to the left, and another stone slab rose from the ground. This one showed a simplistic outline of a human body, with countless pathways that shone with Qi. Noem instantly recognized them as his own. “Nothing about you is special. Your pathways are standard, your Qi is slightly above average, and your mind’s makeup has nothing in common with anything prodigal.”

Numbers etched themselves into being next to Noem’s outline. Four of them, to be exact, and each of them were next to a corresponding word. Quality, 80. Capacity, 20. Density, 103. Control, 227. One outlier so far removed from the others. The last time Noem had had the tech to check his own Qi in such detail, his numbers had been a little lower, And his control had been a lot lower.

“Now, those numbers don’t mean a lot, which is why they don’t show up in your system. Realm and Qi quality are more than enough most of the time, unless you’ve been stuck hard for one reason or another and forced to work with what you have while everything else stagnates.”

The Artisan gestured at the absurdly high number next to Control. “Don’t let your mind get ahead of you, Noem. You control your Qi, not the other way around. The system is a tool to be wielded, not a crutch, and you’re more aware of that than literally anyone your age. You aren’t a prodigy. You aren’t a genius.”

Noem clutched the stone in his hand as he stared at his numbers. “But I’m a master at what little I know.”

The Artisan nodded sagely. “Put all the principles behind what you know to use, not the actual skills. It’s nowhere near as complicated as you think. Flex those muscles you don’t have, and imagine what it’s like to be something you’re not. You’ve been doing that for a decade, so what’s one more day?”