Susi was working through her meditation. At three in the morning, her penance ended. She had come to the conclusion that Une-Myung would decide her fate, and that required her only to perform as best as she could.

The worries of her exchange with Marcus and the Tornetum itself left her. They became far away memories of another life. She went through the jhanas in her mind and body, maintaining her anchor within the breath.

The first objective in this state is to begin the bodily rejuvenation process. She created a protective shield around her to prevent any negative energy or evil spirits from entering.

From here, a warmth spread over her, cleansing the scrapes she had sustained throughout the first day of the Tornetum, purifying her aura of the negativity she had picked up from being within such horrible circumstances. The stress left her muscles as she fully relaxed so that they too could heal.

Susi traveled up and down her spine, adjusting her nerve endings. Meditation in the beginning was a serpent coiled at the base of the spine. As one progresses, the serpent that was also bodily pain would move up the back to the neck. Once there, it could finally be released.

Every person is afflicted with their serpent. That was only one of the many foundations the practitioner constructed when it came to meditation. Just when one thought it was physical, it was actually mental.

A person is taught not to think of the past or future during meditation. However, during an advanced state of mental awareness, a person can travel back through their past experiences via their stream of consciousness—and it quite literally is a stream that can be navigated in reverse.

Susi felt Marcus’s lips upon hers while they were in the corridor the previous evening, but only briefly. She couldn’t associate or become emotionally involved with the moment. Then the thinking would become the experience. No, she traveled way back, back to when she was a child.

For only a few seconds, she was walking in the rain next to Grobeche as they made for his hut in the forest for the first time. She set the table with Tharsa while she was staying at the cathedral with the sisters. The earliest memory she had of Yatner, her first guardian, was clutching his hide jacket as the back end of the horse bounced her into him.

Her memory didn’t have anything farther back to reciprocate but she traveled farther still. She had been here before, but only a few times. It was a shattered place; very difficult to perceive as everything is separated. It’s like the difference between the river and the ocean because the consciousness dissolves into nothingness before the vessel for it to take hold is formed.

But there is a further back. The Talea teaches that it is possible for one to witness the previous existences that one’s consciousness inhabited. Susi had never reached that place because she couldn’t come together again prior to the dissolution. How is one to form if they never experienced that vessel? That’s where she got caught because the experience isn’t a memory. Experience and memory are very, very different states of being just as thought and moving backwards through time as a visitor are different.

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This time, though, something did materialize. She saw a hazy reflection in the mirror as the towers of a strange otherworldly city arose in a metropolis surrounding her. For one horrifying moment, the vessel and herself seemed to realize one another.

The excitement she felt at that second of being in that moment, and the equal horror she felt to know it was happening on the other end caused her eyes to open as she gasped out loud in the midst of her room in Narcuss Castle.

Blue morning light bled between the curtains covering the window. Susi scanned the stone brick floor beneath her as she reflected on the place she saw.

What a strange world, with cities within buildings rising to the sky. It wasn’t like the tower city of Roah in Chartan, although it was similar. These were hundreds of towers and they were all full to capacity with people. The humans spoke of cities like that on Earth. Could she have lived there in her past life? It was impossible to tell for certain.

Susi closed her eyes and tried to go forward, but all she felt was pain. A sense of worry met her as she opened her eyes again. She had never been able to see the future. She had felt anticipation, anxiety, sometimes joy—but never only pain. Was it a projection: her own natural pessimism trying to keep her in check?

She took a deep breath and pushed herself to her feet. She began to execute her daily stretches, beginning with Maeil Meugneun Pang—eating of the daily bread. She didn’t have a staff, so she held her hands up as if holding an invisible one.

She stood on one leg while going through the block techniques, shifted to the other to do the same. Her ankles never wavered. She remained perfectly centered throughout the exercise.

The staff was extremely important in the Talea religion. A person cannot live in the world without assistance from the world itself. The staff represents man’s symbiotic relationship to nature. The staff defends him when he is young and provides a crutch with which to walk when he is old.

If Susi didn’t have to deal with this tournament, then her next objective would be to acquire a proper telum or assistant’s staff. She could either request one from the Ancients, or find someone who knew how to core a staff for proper combat use. Neither option would be a possibility before the end of the Tornetum.

The morning birds had begun to chirp in the trees on the balcony beyond her window. Susi was finished with her morning routine. Her stomach was ravenous. She hadn’t eaten since she and Grobeche had rice with mushrooms the previous morning. He had offered her a second helping, which she declined. She had regretted it when Marcus was offering her all the food in the castle and city last night.

She was about to leave when someone knocked on the chamber door. Susi answered to see a castle guard standing there. “You have been summoned by the chancellor.”

Susi glanced at her broken staff resting on the dresser. She decided against taking it. The staff wasn’t useless to her, but its advantage in battle was severely diminished. It seemed unnecessary to take it. She nodded to the guard and followed him out into the corridor.