“I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777 - 1855)

-x-x-x-

“Yao?” a muffled voice called out. “Yao, are you in there?”

I slid the door open. A man younger than Yao’s twenty by a few years was standing there, and despite his younger age his broad and tall frame occupied nearly the entire doorway.

Zhen Haonan, I recognised from memories that weren’t my own. An outer disciple who’d only joined just a few months ago, and that Yao had taken on as something of a mentor seeing as no one else spared the younger boy any tips. Luckily for him, he wasn’t in quite as terrible a state as Yao had been – in fact, from what he knew, it seemed that Haonan was doing amazingly well for himself among those who’d joined at a similar time. Word among the other outer disciples was that he was certainly soon going to be scouted out by one of the inner disciples, if not members of the sect’s clans.

Right, then. How did Yao typically interact with other people in the sect?

Surprisingly enough – similar to how I would have gone about it. Maybe there was something there to consider about just why it was that I’d been mapped from my body to his.

“Haonan,” I greeted. “Is something the matter?”

Worried-looking eyes peered at my own, his hair tousled and caked with dirt. The fabric of his robes was just as coarse as mine were, though they were more frayed and torn than last Yao had seen him.

“You haven’t been at the training ground recently,” Haonan said slowly. “I… heard about the spar with Gao Han, and that you’ve been keeping to your room ever since you left the infirmary…” He raised a straw basket I didn’t realise he’d been carrying, offering it to me with both hands. “This spirit stone is to repay you for helping me with my cultivation, older brother! For your swift recovery!”

Aww. What a sweet gesture from such a bulky man. He was almost like a big, soft teddy bear. The cutthroat world of cultivators was going to rip him to shreds.

“You should keep it. You’ll need all the qi you can get,” I said, waving him away. His eyes widened, and I could sense a protest about to burst forth. “No, seriously. I don’t think I can get any value out of it – not yet, at any rate.”

That was the conclusion that Yao had come to after not seeing any advancements in his cultivation after exchanging points for several spirit stones of the lowest quality, and one that I now agreed with after that brief thought organisation session. There was a critical method that I was just missing, preventing me from expanding my capacity for more qi.

“Are you sure?” he asked worriedly. “It’s just… you’ve never missed a day of training before, and…”

His voice trailed off. I frowned, wondering what it was he’d meant to say, but then I noticed just where his focus was directed to.

Ah.

His eyes boggled wide with mixed awe and uncertainty. He peeked past what little view he had of the walls of my room, staring at the countless post-it notes.

Well, it’s not like I was going to keep this a secret forever. I stepped out of the way, inviting him in.

For several long moments, he just stared. Good taste, that lad. The vesica piscis provided no real useful mathematical insight, but it looked pretty cool. He stared next at the brachistochrone, though unfortunately I didn’t have the space to cram in the derivation of the curve’s equation in the space of a single talisman.

“What is all this?” he finally spoke, swallowing audibly. “Is this… have you been learning from an array master?”

…eh?

“That must be it, older brother!” he gushed, wide eyes flooded with newfound respect. Haonan slammed one meaty fist in the other palm. “This is why you’ve been keeping away from the training ground! You’ve been training in secret! When that despicable dog Gao Han stirs trouble with you again, you’ll whip up a talisman and unleash one of the arrays you’ve learnt!”

I frowned. Come to think of it, I hadn’t considered arrays and formations at all. How did those even work, though? The typical novels were light on the details, though some did sparingly mention manipulation and compatibility of the five elements, conduits and pathways of power, principles of Feng Shui, and consultation of the Eight Trigrams or other works of divination.

Yet another topic to add to the to-do list, I believe. Notions of circuitry and programming weren’t all that familiar to me, but that seemed an easy parallel to draw.

Perhaps the brachistochrone could unleash a wave of gravity magic once I worked out the details? It was the curve of fastest descent, after all.

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

Ooh, how cool would it be to construct an illusory array that threw anyone who entered its domain into hyperbolic geometry? I gushed. I always wanted to experience life on a plane where every point was a saddle point and mess around with some triangle tomfoolery…

“Yao?” Haonan’s voice snapped me out of the illusion of my own making. “Are you sure you’re alright?”

“Forgive me,” I said, hoping that my hastily feigned tiredness was convincing enough to make him believe I was merely fatigued rather than an otherworldly parasite who’d taken over his deceased senior brother’s body. “It is as you say. Gao Han shall not know what surprise he’s in for.”

Haonan whooped loudly, then covered his mouth as he peered past the door to both sides of the common corridor. Only after a few seconds did he heave a sigh of relief that no one had heard our little conspiracy.

“Rest assured, senior Yao, I shall not breathe a word of any of this,” he declared solemnly, though mischief and anticipation made themselves plainly evident. He hesitated for just a moment. “But that aside… senior, have you made any more progress in your cultivation?”

“Not really,” I admitted. “I do have some ideas, but I would admit that having a manual to study would be a great help.” I tilted my head quizzically. “How’s your cultivation getting along, anyway? Have you gotten used to cycling qi the way that I” –I admit, it took all I had not to wince at the blatant lie – “taught you?”

“Yes!” He nodded excitedly. “I think I’m getting close now! If… if I use this spirit stone and perform the exercises you taught me, I think I’ll be able to fully reach the second phase of Qi Gathering!”

Such was the nature of the sect. Outer disciples could exchange points for a manual, but that was on a lease-only basis, unless you ingratiated yourself to a member of the leading families as many bootlickers did. The little apprenticeship Yao and Haonan had struck wasn’t uncommon among outer disciples, but it meant that it was essentially diluting down what were already inferior techniques.

“I’ll leave you to recover now, senior,” he said, eyes flicking once again to the supposed ‘arrays’ I had on display around my room. He stood by the door, cupping his fist in an open straight palm, and bowed with respect. “I hope you find the breakthrough you need soon, senior Yao! If you feel up to it, let’s have a spar at the training field!”

I was about to respond, but the animated teen already closed the door shut and departed.

I chuckled to myself. Cute kid. Excitable and naive, but I could see just why Yao had taken to him.

“The training field, eh?” I shook my head. “Sorry, but I don’t think that spars are really quite what I need right…”

I trailed off.

Wait.

What had he said?

“At the training field,” I echoed.

Training field. Field.

Groups. Rings. Fields. Qi. Elements. Elements of a set. Sets. Qi.

The dantian. Fields.

Yes, the dantian – roughly translated as the Elixir Field.

Coincidence?

I think not.

Holy hell.

This was why I had been struggling!

Yao’s use of the inferior Closed Skies Scripture had merely brought in ambient ‘primordial’ qi as a substrate to be cycled and condensed within his nascent dantian without any semblance of order, collecting them as elements in a set without any consideration to the relation between them. His mixed bag of inferior spiritual roots had only worsened the already poor method, leading to the formation of a congealed, entangled mess within his dantian. As such, the currents of its flow were eddy and choppy, requiring intense focus each time to draw upon even a fraction of its power.

I scrunched my eyes in focus, trying to recall from Yao’s memories what he’d seen of spars among the more talented outer disciples, and the inner disciples who’d taught them. Yes, they definitely had far greater ease in bringing out their energies compared to the rank and file members of the outer disciples.

What I needed to do, then, was to focus my efforts not on cycling qi through the meridians, but to first tame the elements of the set and construct a field. And if not a field, ring, group, or some other abstract structure, at least something with some semblance of structure, rather than just an arbitrary collection.

After all: how could one hope to master the power within and bring its full power to bear, when the underlying axioms weren’t even established? When there was no order or reason to any of it?

Indeed, how could one possibly seek mastery over the laws of the world – when one’s inner world was a lawless mess?

And thus, I achieve enlightenment…

I looked skyward with anticipation.

The grime-encrusted ceiling stared back at me.

Drat. No change, huh? And here I’d been hoping for a sudden powerup.

Still, this newest theory of mine did have some good points, though I wasn’t certain just what the ‘elements’ contained within my dantian were. It certainly didn’t feel like it contained discrete objects. Was I to work with symmetries instead? Or was I meant to somehow create those subsets and enforce the order myself? Conversely, was this just an analogy to be built upon further? Was it even right?

Whatever the case, It was a far better lead than anything I or Yao had. Everything I’d attempted were mostly variations of cycling qi within the meridians as Yao had done in order to refine and coalesce the energies they contained into the dantian, without questioning whether or not the dantian was fit for advancement.

It’d be like… eating while fully constipated, except that all Yao was doing was the equivalent of increasing gastric churning and mechanical digestion, only to clog up the bowels with even more compacted faeces. As if that wasn’t enough, this metaphorical double had the misfortune to be cursed by genetic lottery, and had the cultivator’s equivalent of Hirchsprung’s disease on top of that. What I now needed to do was unclog said faeces, to allow gastric contents to smoothly pass into the duodenum, and hope for the best that this fix was enough for my meager spiritual roots.

…right.

That crappy comparison was a sure sign that I really ought to get to work.