That night, Boneroot had trouble getting to sleep. The revelations of the day regarding the true nature of his techniques, his cultivation, and the world at large, even, weighed heavily on his mind. He knew that, realistically, he wouldn’t have a shot at getting any answers until he was much stronger, but that was hardly a comfort in the silence under the moonlight.

When he finally did fall asleep, it was only briefly. He was jarred awake by a voice creeping into his thoughts,

“sneaky sneak ATTACK!” 

Boneroot bolted upright to take the assault head on. Unfortunately, the mighty paw which sliced through the air felled him in a single blow. His tongue lolled from his mouth and his ragged breaths surely meant the onset of death, rather than suppressed laughter.

“Get up faker, I know you’re just pretending.” The cat’s yellow eyes caught a glint of the moonlight peaking through a slat in Boneroot’s wooden walls. He was pacing around the room, looking antsy.

“Hello to you, too, Kuroki.” The boy smiled at his companion. After a couple months with only Kroshieshi to talk to, the arrival of a genuinely friendly face was all-too-welcome. He did have some questions, though.

“Where have you been? I’ve only had Kroshieshi to play with and she’s hardly any fun.”

Kuroki could hardly contain the excitement in his mental voice, as he exclaimed, “Feli took me on a secret mission! I had to do it all by myself, too! She didn’t help at all. We went to the top of a mountain! And then Feli just left! I wasn’t scared, though! Only a little bit. There were these monkeys on the mountain and they were so big! They wen’t BAH PAH” The little tsovar propped himself up on his hind legs to jab out with his front paws. “They were pretty strong, but I’m super strong! And then—”

The cat’s face fell. Boneroot looked at him quizzically. 

“Uh oh. It was supposed to be a secret! You can’t tell anyone, OK! Promise!

Doing his best to resist laughing, Boneroot promised.

“So did you get stronger on the mountain?” Boneroot couldn’t help but be slightly worried Kuroki would pull farther ahead of him. He was going to struggle to catch up as it was.

His companion slumped down a bit, though.

“No, not really. Feli says I’ll be Yellow realm for a super long time. She says it’s important to be, uh... waity.”

“Patient?”

“Yeah, that!” 

“That’s good. Being patient is another way to be strong, after all.”

“Really?” The moonlight sparkled in the cat’s widening eyes. “Feli didn’t even tell me that. Was I supposed to figure it out? Don’t tell her you told me, OK? Promise!”

After making his second promise of the night, Boneroot wondered if this was a new concept to his friend.

The hellecat’s tail twitched as he lowered his mental voice further, “I’m going on another secret mission, OK? It’s super secret so no telling. Feli said we’ll leave tomorrow, but I wanted to say hi just in case.”

Boneroot smiled and whispered good luck to his feline companion slinking out the door. As nice as it was to see Kuroki, sleep was good too.

The next morning, Boneroot rose quickly to wolf down one of the small, but hearty meals of rabbit meat left at the door to his room each morning. He wondered who was preparing them and how they knew what human stomachs can handle, but that was hardly the most mysterious part of his new life. He had only a few minutes to ponder, though, as he immediately crushed a spirit stone from his basin and began cultivating.

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As he began to cycle his qi and ki, he tried to examine the energy within him. Now that he knew he didn’t just have stores of Light and Shadow ki, but also Space and Void, he was eager to better understand the power residing within him. 

After some time of cultivating with this specific attention paid, he came to realize that he was, indeed, mistaking the nature of quite a bit of the ki within him. It took a while to separate the pulse of Light ki in his body from that of Spatial ki, but once he did, he noticed they weren’t quite separate at all. They were more like two sides of the same leaf. He would have to talk to Kroshieshi about what that meant for his cultivation art. 

The old cat had mentioned a cultivator’s strength in one attunement had to be in balance with that of another. Someone with a major attunement in Fire, but a minor attunement in Lightning, would not have the same power in their Fire techniques as someone with only a major attunement in Fire and nothing else. 

It made sense to him at first, but now he had to wonder how something like Space ki would affect the power of his Light techniques. He knew that it wasn’t something he could fully control, though. Once a cultivator reached the age of their awakening, their ki attunements were almost always set in stone. Besides, if the idea he had for his Radiant Claw panned out, he would be more than happy to embrace the Space ki it represented.

After examining his ki reserves, Boneroot refocused on simple, efficient cultivation. He felt the stream of essence, which formed the very fabric of reality, flow in and around him. He guided it into the cycle of his own energies, adhering it to them, and permanently trapping a sliver of it within his body, where it would assimilate with his ki and qi to flow only within his body instead of outside it.

Kroshieshi’s lessons on the nature of essence and cultivation had been enlightening. He had always had a vague sense of what he was doing, of course. Without one, he never would have broken through the Red realm. 

However, his teacher had given him a much clearer sense of what exactly he was doing when he cultivated. He understood, or so he thought, how he was growing stronger, rather than just knowing he was. Regardless of how else he may be treated, or even used, he would always be grateful for that. He felt deeply, however, he’d end up grateful for much more than that.

As he rose from his daily meditation, Boneroot noticed the black mass awaiting him.

“No faults in your meditation after the first hour. I assume you were experimenting?”

Nodding, Boneroot confirmed, “Something like that. I wanted to differentiate the different ki types. There’s a lot more Spatial ki than I expected.”

“Good, good. You’re not being idle. As to the Spatial ki, that’s not entirely unexpected. I don’t know about the other members of your village, but spatial techniques are fairly common among the higher-cultivated tsovars. Similar to the ‘Radiant Claw’ of yours. Speaking of which, I imagine you’d like to continue your work from yesterday?”

“Definitely, but first I wanted to ask you how my Spatial ki will affect my other techniques. Will my Light or Shadow ki be weaker? I had a hard time figuring out where the Spatial essence begins and the Light essence ends.”

“As I mentioned, this is a contentious area of study, so nobody knows for certain the exact mechanics, but it is known that these sub-attunements, as some of your Empire like to call them, grow in proportion to their more general essence type. So long as your Light ki improves, so will your Spacial ki.” 

Kroshieshi gave him a moment to process before continuing, “They do not limit each other, but grow with one another. It is the same for a cultivator of Mist ki’s relation to Water ki. As for Void ki, though, I wouldn’t expect anything significant. Felindei mentioned it is rare to see a sub-attunement within a minor attunement, so the power of any such techniques will be middling at best. Regardless, it may come in handy and these are important questions to ask. Come to the training grounds so we can put all of this into practice.”

Satisfied with the answers he was given, as well as his mentor’s notable lack of harsh criticism thus far in the day, Boneroot strode behind the tsovar happily. 

This feeling did not last more than twenty minutes into their training. Since his realization of the Radiant Claw’s actual composition, Boneroot was set on modifying it to materialize at a distance, rather than travel out from his hand. As it turned out, though, that was easier said than done. 

Kroshieshi clarified to the boy that tsovars rarely used their version of the claw more than an inch away from their actual claws. Even then, it was hardly the most useful technique for a species with, well, claws. That did not mean, however, his master was going to let Boneroot settle for returning to his old version of the technique Apparently, it was already decided that Boneroot would master this. He didn’t ask what the consequence of failure would be.

Several hours into the day’s training, Boneroot had made little progress and his teacher

“Again. Your ambition is nothing without the wherewithal to pursue it. You are a cultivator, yes? You want, yes? Show me!” 

Boneroot channeled the Spatial ki through his hand, as he normally would, but, instead of forcing the energy forward from his palm, he tried to bring the force into existence in the empty space a short distance ahead of him. Most of the time, this resulted in the technique emerging from his hand as before and quickly fading out of existence. 

In retooling the technique, so far, Boneroot had come to realize that maintaining a Spatial technique was exceptionally costly. It was not just that the way he did it before was completely ki-inefficient, it was too ki-intensive to begin with. 

Kroshieshi confirmed his suspicion late the previous night, after he’d exhausted his reserves trying to manifest his new technique. Naturally, this energy cost increased exponentially with distance, size, and power. So, that left Boneroot in the position of trying to manifest his radiant claw at the exact distance, exact shape, and exact power necessary to quickly attack his target. 

At first, he had the idea to start at the shortest distance he could. It was logical, he felt, to increase the distance as his control improved. Kroshieshi let him try this for about an hour. It was only when Boneroot grew suspicious of his master’s silence that he realized his mistake. Materializing the Radiant Claw just a few inches from his hand was so similar to pushing the claw forward that distance, he was lapsing into the motions of the old method far too easily.

For her part, Kroshieshi offered the slightest consolation.

“Took you long enough. Though, I suppose it’s better than not realizing at all. Try a distance of three feet. That should be enough to feel the difference without tapping into too much of your ki.”

Afterwards, Boneroot tried repeatedly to get just a single claw of Spatial ki to come out at the right spot, regardless of whether it had any power behind it. Unfortunately, he was unable to that in his first day of training. Or the second. Or the third. And so on.

Boneroot’s new routine became the same eight hours of daily meditation, followed by four hours of instruction from Kroshieshi, which included entirely too many lectures, and four hours of independent practice. In the latter two, he frequently had to meditate to replenish his ki reserves. Fortunately, doing so was much easier than meditating to permanently increase them. His body was always eager to replace the energy it’d just expended.

One consequence of the exorbitant meditation he was doing each day was the exceptionally quick passage of time. Boneroot hardly noticed the beginning and end of each day. All his attention lay on getting stronger and that’s exactly what he was doing.