In the end, Yvessa was the one accompanied back to her dorm building. But only because hers was (somewhat) on the way back to Sam’s. He made it very clear. Lest his friends start developing some new expectations regarding his conduct that he simply wasn’t going to be able (let alone want) to live up to. Thankfully, the walk back to his own dorm wasn’t that long, so he could’ve easily made it without feeling downcast about walking with nothing but his own thoughts for distraction. Him having his headphones on him, and thus not having to suffer through even that minor ill, was an even greater cause for gratefulness.
He strode into his room full of purpose, and after a short visit to the bathroom, took a sit next to his desk and made ready to optimally utilize his time until lunch. That was the plan. Instead, he found himself staring listlessly at the wall for almost a full minute without even realizing what he was doing (and wasn’t doing). Shaking his head in an attempt to refocus, he moved his reading from yesterday aside—deciding his breakfast lesson with Yvessa was enough elven history for the day—and picked up the next textbook in the planned rotation. And then he sighed. Right, of course, back to math.
It wasn’t the subject of his studies that took the wind out his sails and led to his current lethargy, but the subject being math certainly didn’t help. He slapped his face. “Alright, Sam. Take a hold of yourself. Let’s get going. Nothing that happened today is a reason for you to feel tired.” Not a rational reason, no. But certainly an irrational one. Funny how getting positive reinforcement keeps screwing my brain.
He tried quitting his mind and turning it back to the present world, but was unable to tear himself away from his daze. Working mechanically, he opened up the video lecture for today’s topic. Which was as far as he got, the cursor not hovering anywhere close to the play button. Getting up to wash his face still wasn’t enough for him to regain his focus, so that was yet another minute that he wasted without doing anything productive. They were piling up.
He let out a breath, closing his eyes and focusing on the inhalation and exhalation. Then he went through another. And another after that. Some of his clarity of mind returned, but still not enough. He could feel the lack of focus and will trying to creep back up on him. So he let out yet another breath, only this time, he turned his senses outwards.
Pretty much every person he had talked to about gathering had mentioned meditation in some context or another. And most of those had also commented on the fact that Sam’s mediation habit would be greatly beneficial for his ability to cultivate. But out of all those people, only Lin Jingway regularly mediated. Yvessa might’ve also counted, but by her own admission, she hasn’t been keeping up the practice ever since she started her studies in the academy. Felix never tried mediating. Sarah tried a couple of times but never for more than a week and not once in the last half a year. Dan simply said it wasn’t for him. And Maurice… well, Sam didn’t actually know about him; he’ll have to ask Sarah. So despite the proclaimed benefit that they kept allocating to Sam’s behavior, most of them didn’t behave in the same way.
It’s not like Sam had trouble understanding that. Understanding why meditation for meditation’s sake was so out of style on campus. Why there were four different classes—an hour meeting every two weeks for each one—on meditation and only one of them wasn’t intended to help you with your cultivating. If you spent so much of your day in silence, doing nothing but using your mind to guide magic into your core, you might be disinclined to spend any more time in silence, doing even less with your mind. But Sam soon realized that yet another cause for mediation’s lacking popularity had to do with one of the similarities between it and gathering, instead of one of the many differences. Both gathering and mediation could result in the same immediate mental improvements.
Indeed, it was a story as old as time: an anxious teenager is introduced to the concept of mediation; he is told that it can help him with his anxiety; he picks it up. But then, all the meditation guides tell him that he shouldn’t mediate with that clear of a goal in mind; with the hope that meditation would somehow rid him of anxiety. And that’s before the mediation makes him even more anxious because he’s worried that he’s not doing it right (not to mention being more aware of himself and his emotions). Despite all that, he perseveres, and indeed, mediation does end up helping his anxiety. Sometimes. Those times he enters a session with worry weighing down his heart and leaves it one worry lighter. An immediate improvement for only the cost of sitting down in silence and following your practiced method for ten to twenty minutes.
The thing is, gathering could also be used for the same limited purpose and achieve the same result. You’d go into a half-hour cultivating session, feeling worried about something, and the constant focus, together with the clarity of mind, would help you forget it by the session’s end. In that aspect, gathering had all the positives of mediation and none of the drawbacks. You knew if you were cultivating right or wrong. You could go into each and every session with a mechanical goal in mind and feel yourself inching towards it. And most importantly, cultivating made you feel better. Physically better.
It made sense, after all. If our bodies evolved to reward us with endorphins for doing certain acts, why would they forgo the same kind of reward for cultivating? The actual mechanical (chemical?) process was way more complicated than that, of course, to do with terms and concepts that Sam had no idea what they meant even after Sarah’s very dumbed down explanation. But the end result was obvious. Cultivating made you feel better. So why would you ever need to meditate knowing that?
For a lot of reasons, of course. Sam never once considering the proposition of dropping his twice a day mediation habit. At the end of the day, helping you relax after a session was a secondary effect of both meditating and cultivating. You didn’t cultivate to make yourself feel momentarily better, and you shouldn’t mediate for just that as well. The end purpose of both acts was, overall, vastly different.
Which meant that the reason Sam started cultivating right now—when he found himself unable to focus on his studies—wasn’t because he was using it as an alternative for an “emergency” session of meditation. He wasn’t after the positive physical aftereffects gathering could leave you with. Instead, he started cultivating because he didn’t want to keep wasting his time, and fighting in order to focus on seeking and excavating seemed like it’d be easier than struggling to focus on the recorded lecture.
As it turned out, he was right. It took him a couple of minutes to get into it. But soon enough, he was completing cycles at his usual pace. He didn’t cultivate for all that long, stopping a couple of minutes after he felt his state of mind completely resorted. Something which was bound to happen anyway, of course. The chances of his mental state changing anytime soon were lower than his level. But he simply didn’t feel like wasting time while staring at nothing and being moody for reasons he didn’t have the power to articulate to himself.
Feeling better (not a direct result of his body’s minor positive response to the gathering), he got up to wash his face before sitting back down, filled with intent. This time, the only thing he stared at was the screen and the equations being solved in it. He only got up from his sit after the recording ended, to take a piss and drink some water, before redirecting his gaze to the textbook; it’s examples and exercises.
When the knock came on his door, he got up while tapping his belly in satisfaction. Good session today, really good. He smiled. He managed to finish the problems required for the lecture, as well as two that weren’t mandatory. And even though he didn’t have enough time to start on the next lecture, he still managed to read the introduction to the next topic in the textbook.
“What are you so happy about?” Felix asked him once he opened the door. He ushered Felix and Yvessa in, taking his lunch from Felix’s hands and closing the door behind them.
“Math isn’t as hard as I was worried it was going to be,” he said, joining them on the floor.
“Oh, good for you. Does that mean you won’t be complaining about math anymore?”
“Now, what kind of stupid question is that? If I stop complaining about something just because it turned out better than I was expecting, it could potentially greatly cut down on the number of topics I’m able to complain about. And if I’m not complaining about stuff, then what even remains of my personality at that point?”
“Did he also complain so much to Farris?” Felix asked Yvessa.
“Hm… I’m actually not sure that he complained at all to Farris. Before that yes—”
“Now, now,” Sam said, “that’s debatable.”
“But not to Farris, I think.”
“Why not?” Felix asked. “I’d have thought you’d use the opportunity to circumvent your promise from yesterday about not complaining to your friends.”
“Nah, that wouldn’t have worked. Farris made his position on whether we are friends very clear.”
“What’d you even talk about? Yvessa just said that she joined you on your call with him, but nothing more than that.”
“I should think not! She clearly respects my privacy too much to betray it like that.”
“Not necessarily. She only mentioned Farris as we were going up the stairs. Maybe she just didn’t have enough time to spill your secrets.”
“I wouldn’t have told him anything more than that, Sam,” Yvessa said. “But would you even care if I did?”
Sam smacked his lips. “Nah… it’s not like there was anything of import being said. Although… I don’t know, maybe. At the very least, I wouldn’t care if you told it to Felix or Sarah.”
Felix laughed. “Yeah, tell it to Sarah. Spend your own time to save the group’s spending it on Sarah’s daily Sam recap.”
“Hey, at least it’s only daily now, and no longer twice a day. I think we all got bored pretty quickly with hearing on what I did before going to sleep.”
“I don’t know… I would’ve loved to hear you describing how you jerked off that prior evening. But alas, we never heard about that. I wonder why…”
“What? So if I had jerked off, then I should’ve told you about that the morning after? What is this, Catholic school?”
“It’s just important for the full picture. I mean, I don’t know how long it takes you to jerk off. But let’s say half an hour. You really going to leave that huge chunk missing for your recap? That’s not fair to Sarah. That’s not fair to me or Yvessa.”
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
“Yvessa would be more than fine without hearing about that aspect of other people’s sexual life,” she said.
“Does masturbation count as ‘sexual?’” Felix wondered.
“Of course it does,” Sam said. “What kind of organ do you think you perform the verb on?”
“Hmm… yes, good point, that. Still, it feels weird saying that someone who never had sex but just jerks off daily has a very active sex life.”
“I think that in the grand scheme of debates that don’t matter,” Yvessa said, “this is certainly one of the debates that don’t matter the most.”
“But it’s not the debate, right?” Sam asked.
“What?”
“Well, it’s like the most boring person paradox… Doesn’t ring any bells? Fair enough. It’s not mine, by the way, but I don’t remember where I picked it from. Doubt it was anything by a serious—or even amateur—logician, though. So the paradox goes that the most boring person in the world can’t possibly be the most boring person in the world.”
“Right…” Felix nodded. “Because if they’re the most boring person in the world, then that’s an interesting fact about them, which means they can’t be the most boring person in the world.”
“Exactly. So then you go down to the second most boring person in the world and you end up with an infinite regression. A classic paradox. It’s the same thing—although maybe not as strong—with what Yvessa said. The thing ‘debate that matters the least in the world’ must end up mattering more by the simple virtue of being the one that matters the least. Like I said, it’s not exactly the same, but if you squint hard enough…”
“Why do you have to squint so hard? Jerking off got your eyesight?”
“Oh good, we’re back to that. Not my fault this time, Yvessa.”
“I’ll take full credit for diverting the conversation to that particular topic today.”
“Good for you. And I think I also know why you are doing that.”
“I really doubt it.”
“Oh. It doesn’t have anything to do with you not wanting to hear me narrate my conversation with Farris because you know that you’re just going to hear it again during dinner?”
“No… that would have been a way better reason. Like some sort of internal defense mechanism, saving me from going down conversational forks that will end up with me wanting the fork to become tangible so I could stab myself with it.”
“So what’s the real reason, then?” Yvessa asked. “Let me guess, it’s been a long time since you had sex and you’re—”
“What am I, some sexual pest that takes out his frustration on my friends…? You’re not answering, you know that, right? You’re not saying no. This is really not a nice thing to joke about.”
“Darn!” Sam snapped his fingers. “There goes my homophobic joke.”
“Yeah, well… Think of a better one. That one’s way too easy.”
“It was purpose made to resemble you.”
“Better. And no, if you must know the real reason why I kept making jokes about jerking off—”
“We don’t,” Yvessa said.
“The real reason is that I watched a stand-up yesterday, which was almost only masturbation jokes. It wasn’t good. But I kept watching it for some reason. I think it fired my brain a little bit… Anyway, that was the reason. I’m putting it out there for you to chastise me as you will. Although, speaking of what we were just speaking about—”
“Please don’t.”
“No this is good, I promise. Javi, your medic friend, sent me a message last night, Sam.”
Sam shrugged. “Not really my medic friend. He just saved my life. You’re the one who had sex with him.”
“Are you telling us this because you want us to know that you’ve made plans to hook up?” Yvessa asked.
“Nothing of the sort,” Felix protested. “We didn’t even speak of our joint experience together. Like everything else in my life since Sam entered it, the short back-and-forth had to do with him.”
“That’s creepy,” Sam said. “Also, the first part of that sentence was a joke, right?”
“Yeah, don’t worry about it. And it’s not creepy. I just gave the conversation a connotation that it didn’t have by how I brought it up. It was literally just a short exchange of a couple of texts. He wrote me asking if I’ve met you and if I knew how you were doing. He read one of those news articles about you.”
“Fucking Farris…” Sam shook his head with a sigh. “It’s his fucking fault people know about me. I should’ve given him what for.”
“Yeah,” Yvessa said, “I was really surprised that you didn’t.”
“Eh… It’s not really his fault. Well, it is, but it was due to something done for my benefit. Probably.”
“You read any of those articles yet?” Felix asked.
“No, why? Do the Terran ones have any more information than the original elven one that Yvessa showed me?”
“Nah, just more speculation. That still don’t know anything besides your name, that you’re the most unique Taken in history, that you’re taking sanctuary inside these walls, and that Farris is your mentor. Well, that and what you look like naked.”
“Oh… maaan!”
“Only from the back, though. Your crowd for small dick jokes remains the same size.”
“Yeah, just like my dick, unfortunately…” They high-fived.
“So what did Javi the medic want to know about Sam?” Yvessa asked Felix.
“Like I said, just if I’ve met him and if I know how he’s doing.”
“What’d you tell him?” Sam asked.
“I said we’re friends. And that you’re doing fine. No lines of your privacy were breached, I assure you. I told him that I’ll pass on his well wishes to you, and that I’m sure you’ll appreciate it.”
“Do I appreciate it?”
“You better. Don’t make me out to be a liar.”
“Appreciate it is. Send him a thank-you message, I guess. That’s the polite thing to do, right?”
“Nah… you don’t have to. On the other hand, he did save your life, by your own admission.”
“Yeah. Better write him something. Consider it your payment for your new PC.”
“I thought me bringing you lunch was my payment for that.”
“It was, but then Yvessa also offered to join me for lunch, so that made your contribution unnecessary.”
“But I only offered to join because you were already meeting with Felix and I also wanted to help him buy a PC,” Yvessa said.
Sam shrugged. “It still counts. What’s there to help, though? I thought we were just buying you the same build I have.”
Felix scrunched his face. “Yeah… I don’t know how I feel about buying exactly the same build you have. I mean, I know it’s not my money and that you don’t need it… But still, it feels wrong to pay so much extra for no reason at all.”
“What do you mean, ‘no reason?’ There’s a marginal difference in performance that made all the money I spent worth it.”
“How?” Yvessa asked. “You haven’t played a single game since you bought it.”
“It’s not about usage. It’s about the possibility of usage. I want to know that my PC is capable of outperforming every other on the market. In case that I’d want to use it. I want the option to be there.”
“It could be there, just way cheaper.”
“Look, the PC is bought. We’re not having this discussion anymore! We’re here to pick one for Felix. Not criticize nonexistent spending habits. So, if you’re not buying what I have, do you know what you are buying?” he asked Felix.
Felix nodded. “Yeah, I looked through a couple of options yesterday; I think I’ve made my pick. Want to help me confirm, Yvessa?”
“Sure.” She shrugged.
“You do that,” Sam said. “I’ll clean up and join you.” He picked up their trash and stepped outside to drop it in the garbage chute.
Yvessa saying, “Stop trying to look for porn,” was the first thing he heard when he came back into the room.
“These, ladies and gentleman,” Sam said as he joined them (standing because the youth of today had no manners), “provides us a glimpse into the deepest recesses of Felix’s psyche. We now know that he likes his porn downloaded onto the hard drive.”
“I wasn’t just looking for porn,” Felix said. “I was snooping in general. Just seeing what you have.”
“Disappointed?”
“Very. You haven’t even downloaded a single game yet.”
“Yeah, well… Choosing which game, or even which bunch of games, to download is a great big hassle. It’s the paradox of choice. Having every item—surviving item—of pre-Integration entertainment for free at my fingertips is robbing me of my ability to make a decision.”
“And yet you still managed to download a bunch of shows and movies,” Yvessa said.
“Different thing. It’s like my playlist. I’m not making any active decision, but just trying to return things to how they were on my old PC.”
“You do realize that you can do the same things with games, right?”
“Yeah, but it’s not the same thing. Most of the video games I had as a mainstay in the old days come with the extra baggage I already told you about. And the one I can think of right now that doesn’t… I’d have to mod it and I’m not even in the mood to play it right now. Anyway, enough about me and where my porn folder hidden is, you’ll never find it, and it’s not even there. Where are you on the PC search?”
“We haven’t started yet.” Yvessa gestured towards Felix.
“Well hop on to it! You do know that I’m kicking you out of here at the end of the hour, right?”
Felix nodded. “Yes, you’ve made your timetables abundantly clear to us. Numerous times.”
“Then you’ll have no one else to blame but yourself if you don’t leave here today with a new PC on the horizon.”
“OK, OK, I get it. Is your credit card intimation on here?”
“Uh… no. No, it isn’t. Here it is. Have fun.”
“I don’t need it just yet. We still need to finish going over everything.” That didn’t take too long, however. Felix came prepared. With a top of the line build, which was definitely way more bang for your buck than Sam’s. He ended up only changing one component from his initial choice. So most of the debate ranged around the external hardware. That too was over in short order and before too long, Felix had his wish fulfilled thanks to the power of unbridled expectations heaped upon Sam (or compassion from a supernational political entity, if you’re buying into children’s fables) which manifested themselves in his unlimited (within reason) bank account.
Felix and Yvessa then hijacked Sam’s computer and tried forcing him to download games for himself. When his will proved stronger than their ability to challenge it. They moved on to downloading games of their own volition. Yvessa just had the maniacal idea of looking through lists ranking pre-Integration games when the clock struck true and Sam was finally able to kick them out. Crisis averted.
He spent the rest of his time until dinner following the same exact plan he described to Farris. First, studies. He finished math, watching the next recording, and finishing all its exercises and examples. Then actually something magical for a change, some preliminary reading on the finer aspects of magical theory that Dan was going to start introducing into their lessons together, finally moving on from just tracing and gathering practice.
It was still highschool level stuff, and as Sam Sam understood it, the jump from it to the academy material was very similar to the jump in difficulty when studying a subject in highschool to majoring in it at university. Which meant that Introduction to Magical Theory—a course that only existed by the name on the textbook, as no one else at the New Point academy had to study it (by virtue of not being accepted if they did)—was going to displace elven history as his most studied subject for the foreseeable future.
Independently studied, at least. Because until Dan weaned him off from gathering practice every day. Gathering was going to be what he spent most of his week on. Although, it depended on whether you counted practicing gathering as studying. Sam figured that he did, which gave rise to the next question—occupying his last free moments before he started his after-studies cultivation session—did his cultivating in his free time count as studying? Sam wasn’t sure. In his practice with Dan, he was actively trying to improve himself by following Dan’s directives and new information. On his own, he really was just cultivating. Doing everything by rote. He was getting better, for sure, but… You can’t really call doing an activity for the purpose of receiving its ends, studying. Of course, both very much counted as training.
Consensus was luckily achieved just as he sat down (oh, how he wished he could lie down instead, alas the floor was too uncomfortable) to start cultivating, so he had no problems focusing on the process from the get go. Thankfully, by this point of his short cultivating career, he was able to avoid keeping count of his completed cycles when he didn’t want to like today; the act was too distracting, and more importantly, annoying when you kept going for longer than ten minutes.
He only had to stop midway through the session once to go to the bathroom and grab a drink, using that as an excuse to rest after his loss of momentum during a particularly poor execution of his basic excavating technique. Sam was very far off from knowing just how much of his magic really went to his core, but he was willing to hazard an unsubstantiated guess of only a fifth making it through before dissipating that time (seemed good enough a guess from a self-flagellating perspective). That was his worst cycle of the session though, and he finished the rest of it without noticing the quick passage of time until the dinner alarm made it known.
Just like he warned Felix, his call with Farris was the first topic of conversation at dinner. A short (by Sarah’s standards) recap later, and the conversation managed to steer itself away from Sam. Then it made a wrong turn, as Sarah was still adamant in her refusal to allow discussion of academy subjects that were too complex for Sam to understand yet, before settling back on Sam. This decision was pure malice on part of the participating parties, as both Felix and Yvessa made the conscious decision to revive their discussion about which games Sam should download.
Turned out well enough, though, as the four of them ended up back in Sam’s room after dinner. Playing one of the very games that Yvessa suggested. Sarah, of all people, won the most. Of course, the most important thing was that Sam successfully managed to end the evening without uttering nary a complaint. Even when the game really fucked him over.