There was absolutely no way to tell time inside the training cell. Chang-li sat and cycled. He cycled every technique he learned from Joshi or the scrolls, each as long as he could before swapping to the next. Scribe Wulan had vanished on him again, telling him, not very helpfully, that he was on the right track and just to keep going.
After cycling, he practiced his techniques, braiding together weaves and letting them fall apart and unravel. He practiced Firepot with different layers of lux woven together; small ones, big ones, faster and faster until he could weave one-handed with his eyes closed. He practiced nets, but with nothing to try them against, he had no way of knowing whether they were any good. He did every training exercise he'd written down for himself in a little book. When he'd been through them all three times, he submitted to Wulan again.
"Why are you bringing me out?" Wulan asked when he appeared, much more irritated-looking this time. "You haven't changed your situation at all. This place is boring. Wait until you're somewhere more interesting before summoning me."
"You think you're bored?" Chang-li demanded. He was on his feet, pacing back and forth. Now he turned and glared at the shade. "I've been stuck in here for who knows how long, and I don't have any idea how to get anywhere on this. You say I need to progress."
"That is almost always the answer," Wulan said. His tone of smug wisdom was maddeningly calm. “A cultivator at the level of Metal Refinement will be able to enter and exit the chamber at will.
Chang-li took a deep breath. He imagined the world beyond, with Feng and Joshi locked in battle. It would do no good to escape if he wasn't stronger. He needed to progress. "Fine. Fine, but I don't know how. I never did. Joshi sounded like he had an idea. Didn't the other shades give you insights into Mental Refinement?”
"No," Wulan said. "I don't think I can help you."
"Then what's the point of all this?" Chang-li demanded.
"Just keep at it. I'm sure you'll figure something out." He disappeared, and no amount of lux channeled back into his pen case could persuade him to come out again.
Chang-li abandoned his meditations. He flung himself against the walls, pounding on them, kicking them, even trying ineffectively to bite them. He tried different colors and techniques of lux. None of it made any difference.
At last, exhausted, he sprawled on the floor of his cell. Finally, he rolled over and took up a meditative posture. Breathing carefully, he began Purification of Mind and Soul while he thought.
Assume that, despite Wulan's lack of helpful advice, the shade was correct. This was a training chamber designed for a cultivator at the Peak of Mental Refinement, and as soon as he reached that peak, he'd be able to let himself out.
There had to be more to this than just a chamber that trapped him and his lux inside. The way the walls seemed completely impervious to lux was fascinating. That was likely why his own lux didn't dissipate when Chang-li let it out. Had he been closed in an airtight room this size, he'd have been dead long ago.
On the other hand, he was certain by now hours had passed, and he felt no need to eat, sleep, or relieve himself. His body hurt a little from his fit of rage against the walls, but even those sorenesses were washing away. Maybe he was trapped in some sort of thought-prison, not anywhere real.
It didn’t matter. This was a training chamber, something created or perhaps merely kept by the tower guardian to reward the worthy. It was valuable, and it was his. The walls, with their purple hue, made Chang-li suspect that indigo and violet lux were both at work here. Indigo lux controlled space, allowing a cultivator to manipulate where he stood in the world. And as Chang-li was becoming certain, violet lux manipulated time. The two together, then, had created a tiny chamber outside of both space and time.
So, when he did finish this, he'd step out and find himself right back in the middle of the same fight, he hoped. If he didn't progress, and the chamber spat him out anyway, he'd be no help to Joshi. Feng would make quick work of them both. He couldn’t allow that to happen.
He began to weave again, this time with his eyes open, and he watched his own reflection in the wall. Despite the wall being purple, it reflected him and actually showed the colors of the lux he was weaving. Even though he couldn't see the lux with his own eyes, he could see it in the wall itself.
That was useful. He held up the weave he was putting together and studied it in the wall. Interesting how his strands of orange were thicker on the ends than in the middle, as though they were noodle dough he had rolled out imperfectly. He concentrated on squeezing the ends in toward the middle until they were all the same size, watching the result in the wall.
Then he felt as something twanged into place. He was holding an orange lux Firepot with a glow of yellow inside, but it felt different than lux weaves he had done previously, more solid, more stable. In the wall, a cord of lux connected him with the Firepot as he kept his technique active.
In the past, he had just sort of let go of that strand of lux when he hurled his technique. Now he considered it. He didn't want the technique to go off. The cell might be impervious to lux, but he might not be. Chang-li carefully severed the technique now. It remained in his hand, a perfectly formed Firepot not connected to him.
He could feel its lux moving just as he had intended, but it wasn't part of him anymore. As he looked at it the weave began to fade. He tossed it away just in time and the pot exploded against the wall in a blast of heat.
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He reached for one of the blank books and his own pen case and began jotting down quick notes on what he had seen and done so that he'd remember it later.
Chang-li crafted another pot, then a tiny one with the last of his orange lux. He formed each carefully, using even thicknesses of lux threads. When they were done it took almost no effort to keep the techniques alive, even without severing them from himself. He set each one in the corner where they remained, stable.
What good was it to have techniques stored like this? He could carry them and use them later? But they weren’t stable enough for that. Using a technique later was was exactly what a script was meant to do. Was there a way to make these techniques into scripts? Something he had read tickled the back of his mind. Where had he seen it? Chang-li dug out Wulan’s ancient journal. Finally, he found the passage he remembered.
…Cultivator Kang spends every night preparing for the tower by imprinting techniques. He has used almost my entire stock of lux paper…
He didn't have the right sort of paper. Those were written on paper that had been infused with lux. Well, he had nothing but time. He might as well try anyway.
Chang-li took one of the four blank notebooks he'd been carrying in his satchel. He carefully undid its binding, setting aside the threads in case he thought of some use for them, then placed the covers back inside his satchel and left the stack of inner sheets. He took just one sheet and considered it.
His instincts were telling him that green lux was the key here, that just as it glued together physical and spiritual luxes, so too it would allow him to preserve these lux techniques in a more permanent form. He purified out the green lux in his core, easier now that most of his physical lux was bound up in the Firepots. Then instead of trying to spin it into a technique, he channeled the lux at the first sheet of paper.
The lux spilled out of him, pooled into the air, and dissipated. Not discouraged, Chang-li pulled the green back in, cycled it through his core again, and tried a second time. By the fifth attempt, the green lux was starting to feel different to him somehow, like he was becoming more familiar with it. Instead of feeling like water, it started feeling more like ink.
That gave him an idea. He held on to the green lux in his core and used Swirling Mists to instead vent all the rest of his lux from his body, pushing out the red, the remnants of yellow, and the bits of blue and indigo he had gathered.
Now his core was entirely green lux. He sat holding a sheet of paper in both hands, crouched on his heels, staring at that page as the purple walls cast a hue across his hands and the page both.
This time, instead of trying to force the lux into the paper, he let the lux spill out of him as he wished it to do. Then he dipped the paper into the lux, watching himself in the wall. He could see the green pool in front of him as he carefully lowered the page down, imagined it soaking up into the page the way ink seeped into the paper as it leaves a brush. The green lux still dissipated back into the air, but this time he knew something had changed. He could feel the paper in his lux perception. It was heavier, somehow.
He sucked all the loose lux in the room back in, storing it safely in his core. He didn't like the feel of an empty core. Then he considered the paper in front of him. He had infused it with lux. Now what?
Chang-li picked up the smallest of the Firepots, which had only a thimbleful of yellow wrapped inside of the orange. If it went off in his hand, it probably wouldn't do much more than scorch him. He cycled Swirling Mists, but in reverse. It worked too well. The lux flowed back into him, rushing back to his core where it joined with the rest of his lux. He felt better, but that wasn't what he was trying to do.
This time, as he picked up the next Firepot, he was more careful about his handling. He severed the thread binding the technique to him and touched the end of the lux thread to the page. For a moment, nothing happened. Then as he took a breath, the lux from his technique flowed into the lux of the paper. It was quick as a flash. He was staring down at a page, which in his lux vision glowed three different colors. In normal sight, it was still a white page, but marred with some black scripts. Frustratingly, it didn't look anything like the scripts he'd used before. The black marks weren't characters; they were just marks.
Chang-li stood up and paced. There was progress here, he could feel it. He undid and drew the lux back in from each of his Firepot techniques. It felt better inside of him. Then he started weaving Firepots again, just for something to keep his mind occupied while he paced.
The scripts he'd seen before had been written with what looked like ink and a brush. The symbols hadn't been characters he knew, and they hadn't been an exact representation of a technique either. There was more to it than that. He was tempted to summon Wulan and ask him, but stubbornness prevented him. He'd figure this out. Though what good would it do to have a Firepot on a script?
One step at a time. Chang-li sat back down. He took one of his brushes from his case and inked it, then infused his brush with red lux. After the practice with his sword, this was easy, though his right hand did not want to infuse a tool. He had to switch to his left to manage it. Then he touched the brush to the paper as he carefully began weaving the framework of a Firepot, deliberately spilling it out onto the page. The strands of lux caught on the page as he painted.
Excitedly, Chang-li finished the framework, then had to separately infuse the brush with yellow. He painted that on, and this time it did look like a script. Not a language he knew, but a script, and he could almost sense the meaning in the characters. He finished it, tying them off, and sat back on his haunches to study the page.
It looked like a script. It felt like a script in his lux senses. Was it really one? The point of a script was that you could push undifferentiated lux into it, and it would activate along the patterns it had been drawn with. A skilled scriptwriter could store up lux ahead of time and then power a technique by just shoving raw lux into it in a hurry.
He wasn't entirely sure he wanted to test that in this confined space, but if he didn't, he'd never know if it worked. Taking a deep breath, Chang-li stood. He held the paper in one hand at arm's length, then pushed it up against the wall and thrust a bit of lux into it, the way he did when trying to summon Wulan.
The instant he'd done so, he darted back as far away as he could get. The paper hung in the air for ten heartbeats, its symbols glowing red and yellow, before exploding.
The force of the explosion blasted against the crystal. A quick wave of heat rushed back onto Chang-li, and scraps of burning paper filled the room. They vanished quickly. The smoke cleared.
Chang-li was too busy staring at his own reflection in amazement to notice. He'd done it. He'd made a script and activated it.
Something was wrong with his reflection. Though he was back against the wall, crouched down with his hands up to protect his face, his reflection didn’t match. The Chang-li reflected in the wall stood on his feet. He had his sword drawn, and he had a cocky look on his face Chang-li was sure had never been on his own.
"So, you have some promise after all," his reflection said, before stepping out of the wall and into the room.
The image stared down at him, still smirking. Chang-li realized the image had his sword in the wrong hand. The false Chang-li shook his head. "Are you planning to sit there all day, or are we going to train?"