On the third day after arriving on Seagull island — an island which was quickly becoming a new home — Isaac was sitting on a log in the deepest parts of the forest. It wasn’t that far in, since he could walk through and come out the other end in under twenty minutes, but it was far enough that the noise of today’s builders was lost among the fronds. There was even a ruin of some old building with a tower nearby, and exploring was a tangent that spanned until noon, before Zach was ready to sit down and teach him his wise ways.
“Essence is in everyone and everything,” he said, as if reciting from a schoolbook. “The more you have, the healthier and stronger you become. Adventurers and delvers hunt monsters to get it, that’s why they are so strong. Others buy it, but we’re not rich nor are we adventurers.”
Isaac frowned. “Claire and Hammond are though.”
“That doesn’t matter for us now. What you need to know is that you can take essence out of the air by breathing. It goes a lot faster if you do it on purpose.” Zach chewed his lip. “I think that’s called cultivation, or meditation.”
“Meditation sounds so boooring,” Isaac groaned. “And cultivation is what you do to plants, or what plants do. I think.”
“All adventurers do it though.”
“...well, if adventurers do it, I can try too,” he said, reluctantly.
“Great! Now, for our first lesson, you will cultivate air!”
+++
It was hard to give trust when it had just been Isaac against the world for so long. It seemed obvious that someone a whole year older than Isaac was supposed to know what he was talking about. The Kanker kids on Kanker island didn’t always win the street brawls because they were bigger, but because they knew how and where to punch to make it hurt. Zach was one of those wise ones, at least, he had seemed like that about half an hour ago. Now, Isaac was increasingly sure that he was the victim of some elaborate prank.
Cultivate, Isaac thought as hard as he’d ever thought. Breathe essence from the air. Think plant-like thoughts. Cultivaaate.
“You have to be really relaxed. Breathe in, push it into your belly, then out the nose.”
The same advice, again and again. They had been at this for hours, and besides an itch, he hadn’t felt any change come over him.
Isaac kept his eyes shut and pretended not to feel how Zach was building a tower of leaves and twigs on his head. Finally, the itching became too much and he snorted, shooting to his feet and shaking his hair out.
“Nooo,” Zach cried. “It was perfect.”
“This isn’t working,” he said, then paused. “Are you sure you didn’t get it wrong?”
“I did not! Essence. Is. Everywhere.”
The boy seemed awfully offended, something Isaac could be right back. “It’s not! It’s not and it’s boring and stupid.”
“It’s not stupid! Someone very important told me that this is how it ought to be done.”
“Then they’re stupid too.”
“He was not!”
“Was too!”
Isaac didn’t see the fist coming. In one moment, he was on his feet, in the next his head hit the ground and his face pulsed like hot fire. Zach straddled him and began wailing on him. His fists landed everywhere, except where they should have. Even though he was a year older, Isaac was sure he would never have normally lost in a fight like this.
He grabbed a fistful of sand and tossed it at the boy’s face.
“I bet you’re a liar!” he yelled and followed up with a headbutt that hurt himself almost as much as Zach. “You said “follow me” yesterday, then left me alone.”
Isaac thought he had him when, all of a sudden, Zach grabbed his hands and pulled them behind his back in a way that really hurt every time he tried to move. A kick was the only way out of this. He tried to get leverage, closing his eyes to brace for the follow-up blow.
“My father wasn’t…” Zach’s lips quivered as he suddenly went still. A trickle of blood was running down his nose. Isaac was expecting the older boy to get even more mad. He would have preferred it. In the past few days Zach never was even so much annoyed at things, and he always knew better, always knew what to say and to do.
But instead of all that, here he sat, fingers digging furrows into his wrists, and sobbing.
“U-um. I didn’t mean…” Isaac wasn’t crying. Crying was a weakness.
“If you’re gonna be something’, don’t be a pansy,” Uncle Tuttle had said and Isaac loathed that his voice came to mind first, instead of something his mum or dad had said. It was unfair, just because he spent so much time living next to them, that he’d have to remember the Tuttles so much more clearly. “Hit ‘em in the chin, and if they’re too tall for that, the dick will do, heh.”
It was good advice, important for when the Kanker island kids came to turn specifically his pockets inside out for any spare change. Because ‘at least your uncle has a job’. It made him angry just thinking about it. But looking at Zach wracked with so much hot emotion over one insult made him realize that for all the good and bad, he could never feel like that about the Tuttles. Having someone, or something that important… he wanted that for himself.
He dug, and dug deeper, and the only thing he could come up with were two smudged faces, hands stroking hair, whispers in his ear.
“We love you, Isaac.”
I’ll remember those words, he vowed, sniffling and wiping the wetness from his eyes.
The boys got up. They were snotty all over, and a little roughed up. Claire would have something to say about that later. Seeing as Zach was thinking the same thing, they both just sat opposite each other in embarrassed silence, red eyed faces and cheeks sticky with the dirt from their hands.
“I never got to meet my mother,” Zach started. “I don’t know what she even looks like. My father, he… liked to travel. Went from here to there, collecting all sorts of doodads. Pictures, seashells, fancy rocks, names, miniature cars and robots.”
At the lull, Isaac picked right up.
“My mum, she was a seamstress. She sewed things. My dad, he was all colors. He looked for plants and powders, mixed them, and put the colors on the clothes mum made. They were pretty, and so, so soft.”
He sniffled.
“I’m sorry I called your dad stupid.”
“It’s alright.” Zach heaved a sigh, rubbing his chin. “That headbutt smarts.”
“It’s ‘cause the noggin’ is harder than hands or noses,” Isaac said, then after a pause. “Here, let me show you how it’s done.”
After a few slow-motion demonstrations and explanations on how to make even bigger kids curl up into a whining ball, Isaac was fairly certain that he was the better scrapper of the two. Even though Zach complained about them as ‘dirty tricks’, he tried to learn them with as much eagerness as possible. In fact, now Isaac was feeling bad for mouthing off at him after what was certainly not more than half an hour of sitting still.
“Hey, Zach? If this cultivation stuff is so good for you, why doesn’t everybody do nothing but that?”
Zach shrugged. “Beats me. Maybe because it really is kinda boring?”
Isaac hummed in thought. “Ok. I’ll give it another try.”
“Great! You should start noticing a difference in a week, maybe.”
“A week!?”
+++
They got a mouthful from Claire on proper behavior, mediating fist fights with words, and not being rude. It mostly went in one ear and out the other for Isaac. He’d heard the same schtick a hundred times already, and the Kanker kids never cared for any words he said, unless he thought up a particularly clever insult.
Either way, it was now Isaac and Zach against the world. And Claire. And Hammond too.
Besides, he was busy. A week was so freaking long. Isaac almost didn’t believe it when one day he looked up from eating crab a la cucumber soup and suddenly, a week had come and gone.
The ‘Zach is a huge prankster’ theory was starting to hold bathtubs of water. After what he did to Hammond, Isaac was sure that he should never be let within a hundred meters of wet cement ever again. It would have been downright ungrateful, if Hammond hadn’t turned the ground beneath his feet into quicksand for a second, and then left Zach stuck there with only his head sticking out.
“You will rue the day I get out of this,” Zach said, triumphantly.
His head looks like a golden turnip.
“Hah,” Hammond laughed, walking away with one foot still stuck in a bucket. “Maybe I will, little shit.”
After a while, he had a feeling that maybe the whole meditation was making some difference. Cultivation made him hungry, though so did all the running around as they explored every nook of the island. He did the whole breathing stuff exactly as long as he needed to, waking up early on the seventh day just to say “hah, I knew you were lying!”
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Instead, when he jumped to his feet, he felt… odd.
He jumped in place, just to be certain. Sure enough, he didn’t just feel like he could jump that slightest bit higher, but he knew it. There was a feeling of more-ness to every twitch of his toes, every jerking of his elbows. When he popped his knuckles, and then tried again, he discovered that he could pop them as many times as he wanted in a row.
It was awesome and the smell of fresh plaster mixed with everything else into a wonderful feeling of just existing.
He met Zach on the way back from jumping down the flight of stairs in their new home. The boys grinned at each other.
“This is so cool!” Isaac said, jumping up and down, taking just as many steps as he used to, even though it felt like he was skipping three at once.
“I know, right? Race you to the old castle ruin!”
By the time they returned, they were a panting, sweating mess. Claire smiled warmly as she plated them a hearty breakfast, and even though it was the seventh time they’d eaten fish in seven days, he didn’t mind one bit because it smelled heavenly.
“So. Boys. Explored the island, have you?”
Two bundles of frantic nods answered her.
“Good. Then we can start talking about taking classes soon. Do not look at me like stranded blobfish, life cannot all be about swimming in circles. Sometimes, you must swim against a current or… run uphill? You two know how to swim, yes? No. I will teach you how to swim, and the other things too.”
“But you’re not a teacher,” Isaac said through a mouthful of eggs.
“I can learn at your side.”
“Not a real teacher,” Zach commented, eating his sunny-side-up with a fork and knife instead of inhaling it all at once like a normal kid.
Claire leveled a stare at him. “Nobody would want to drive a ferry for two hours just to teach two boys math, or history. I fought monsters, teaching you mundanities should be easy.” She nodded to herself. She was confident enough that Isaac wanted to believe her. “Hammond and I will split the duties. I will teach Language, Culture, History, Astrography, and Arts. In addition to Wetlang you will each know Standard and speak it like you were born in space, as well as P’cleek like you were born underwater. Hammond will teach Maths, Chemistry, Biology, and Geography, so all the really boring subjects.”
“All the important subjects,” Hammond nodded sagely, then paused and turned to Claire with a frown.
She barreled right past him with a cheeky smile. “We start at two past sunrise and finish at an hour past noon. Sometimes, we will go longer, especially if there is something important to teach, like navigating by sun and stars, or not math.”
“Such treachery.”
The boys were eating more quietly now, watching as the adults planned to take their entire morning away for the foreseeable future. How could they? Isaac was already fidgeting just trying to sit still for an hour of meditation. He wanted to go and do some now. It was kind of addictive once you got over the initial hurdle.
“Can we get up?”
“You may not.” Claire’s tone made both boys freeze mid departure. “Isaac. Did you try any breathing exercises involving Essence?”
They were in trouble, so, so much trouble. He didn’t want to throw Zach under the boat though, he’d probably take getting found out a lot harder. So he’d have to lie, to Claire.
It was hard to look her in the eyes, so Isaac didn’t, and it was so hard to say anything that he felt his voice crack after just one word. “N-no…”
“I see.” She turned to Zach. “Do you have anything to add?”
“I… I taught him the exercises. I tried them first, and when I found out I—”
Claire held up one jam-covered finger. “I know. It is alright. You wanted to do what you thought was best, and share it with your friend. Sharing is good. Lying is not good, but you were trying to protect your friend, is that not right Isaac?” She licked her finger clean, pondering. “Alright. I think we will be holding our first class on Essence. In fact, we will hold it right away. To the dojo!”
They all got up, leaving Hammond to scrub the plates.
“We have a dojo?”
“Hammond flattened a plot behind the house for the purpose of your education, and maybe turning it into a future sporting field. I am calling it the dojo. Now sit.”
Isaac sat, nervously looking between Zach, who was sweating perhaps a bit too honestly, and Claire, whose tone suggested this was supposed to be some sort of punishment.
“Lesson number one,” Claire said. “All life comes from rifts, and from life comes essence. Essence is existence, essence is power,” she said, holding up a rock and slowly crushing it with her fist until it cracked. “To be specific, it comes from the cores of planets, surfaces through rifts, and is then hoovered up by all life, which gathers it and with that starting amount continues to create more in small amounts, like seeds growing into plants.”
“This is what people call cultivating. The more essence there is in and around you, the better you can breathe, take in nutrients, sleep, walk, swim, think, and so much more.” She breathed in and, after a follow-me motion, Isaac did the same. “Essence is breathed in, but then you hold that breath of life, and do not breathe it all back out again, instead adding it to yourself like a greedy crab. Once you have enough, you will form a core somewhere inside your body, a core which you can add to, and make it grow larger.”
She poked Isaac below the jugular, in the middle of his chest, and at the navel, then did the same for Zach. “This is what it means to move up to Tier 1, and from the lowest at Tier 1 to the highest at Tier 30, every step takes more essence than the previous one. A lot more. Does that make sense so far?”
Isaac and Zach nodded.
“Now, essence can be found inside not-alive things too. Zach, catch.” She picked up a fist-sized rock and lobbed it at him.
It was an oddly slow throw, and he caught the rock as it had barely left her hand. It knocked him straight on his back, even though such a small rock shouldn’t have.
“That is Tier 2 Basalt. It has all the features of mundane basalt, but the essence has — in this case — increased its weight, and likely its hardness. It has become more itself. If a rock is porous, it might become spongier at higher tiers. Sometimes, entirely new rocks appear at a higher tier, or other things that work in odd ways. Burning water, wood that screams when you cut it. But no matter what it is, making dead things go up even one tier takes a long, long time.”
“How long?” Isaac asked.
“Hundreds of years, thousands, sometimes even longer. The slowest trees take a tenth of that time, and the slowest, laziest human another tenth of that. That is the advantage of all life, it can learn how to gather essence, and make themselves be more more quickly.”
“Is more always better?” asked Zach.
Claire made a so-so gesture. “Some say the climb does not stop until you reach the thirtieth tier and ascend. But having power and learning to use it responsibly are two different skills. I have gathered essence for many years, but to keep you all safe I have to limit myself to Tier 3 while on Wett. And then I have to be extra careful not to accidentally turn around and smash something on accident.”
“That’s why you broke so many plates!” Isaac said. I wonder how old Claire is.
She coughed, nervously. “Yes, well, moving on. With a core and enough essence, you can produce the second energy, called mana.” The air warbled above her palm before suddenly bursting into fire. “Where essence is gathered to strengthen your cultivation, mana is expended to cause other effects.”
“Magic!”
“Yes Isaac, magic.” She held up two fingers, and the fire above it turned into the number two. “The second lesson: Mana is a natural result of decaying essence. It is volatile, sometimes dangerous, but easily used as energy by many things. Like our car the one that… broke down.”
“Why are you saying it like that?” Isaac asked.
“It’s because she did something,” Zach stage-whispered. “Something Hammond would get angry at her for.”
“I did not! I was just trying to make it go faster,” Claire muttered.
“Maybe she put in so much mana that it almost exploded,” Isaac whispered with a chuckle.
He thought it was funny up until he noticed how Claire was looking quite innocently at a fallen leaf and Zach’s face was turning pale.
“It would not have exploded, just… burned a bit. Things are allowed to burn a little. And we were right there, so me and Hammond could have done something before it did. Which it would not have.” She cleared her throat. “Anyways, without essence tucked inside you, you will not be able to generate your own mana. The gathering and imbibing of essence is called cultivation, and that is what you two were trying to do. Lesson number three: When it comes to cultivation, do not try something you do not absolutely know the result of. That was your mistake, Zach, thinking that you know better than everyone.”
“But it takes so long, which means it’s better to start early!” he said, before another of Claire’s stares shut him up.
“You are correct, and yet, you are very wrong. Cultivating natural essence takes so long because it is so thin, and because it is poor material. If all you do is hunt rift monsters all day, you will advance much, much quicker. Lesson number two: If someone tries to teach, sell, or gift you something too good to be true, it likely is. That was your mistake, Isaac.”
That didn’t seem entirely fair. He had trusted Zach… somewhat. And he didn’t even know what cultivation was when he tried it.
“Now, there are two ways to cultivate. One way is to kill rift monsters. The essence they release on death is pure, it is what they are made of fully and totally.” She took some twigs and stones and, faster than they could follow, stacked them into a miniature house complete with veranda, mailbox, and cotton smoke coming from the chimney. “This is what your cultivation looks like if you build it piece by piece with pure essence. Now, can anyone tell me what happens when you take essence out of the air?”
There was a long bout of silence before Zach tried to answer.
“It takes longer? Because there’s less of it.”
Claire turned to point at him. “Not what I was thinking about, but yes, it takes longer because the essence in the air is thin.”
A lightbulb went off over Zach’s head. “It’s not good to build your cultivation out of air?”
Claire grinned. “Exactly. If you take your pure essence, you can put the rocks at the bottom, the wood at the top, and build a nice house out of it.” She grabbed an armful of sand. “And if you build your house out of natural essence, which is made up of millions, billions of different types in all kinds of concentrations, you get this.”
She dropped the sand. It was strewn everywhere, making a little heap that was half as tall as the rock and wood house. The more Isaac stared at it, the more he felt unwell.
“Ah, no panicking during class! You have not done any permanent damage to yourselves, yet. Until you tier up, you can always fix your cultivation easily by doing what you did in reverse. Now,” she said, plopping herself down. “This is going to take a while, and be very uncomfortable. When you gathered essence, you were feeling a, hmm, a ‘high’, like after eating sweets. And you will feel sad when your cultivation is gone. But you will do it now, and when you have done it, you will know the last reason why you should not have cultivated without plumbing the depths of knowledge.”
If cultivating meant drawing in essence from all around, then the reverse meant pushing what you had away, short breaths in, long breaths out.
Claire was right: it did feel uncomfortable, like trying to dig out ear wax with a spoon, scraping against raw skin over and over. They spent the entire day following Claire’s advice. By the end, they were a heap of misery, sweat and full of pounding aches.
“Now look inwards,” she said. “Feel that feeling you did when you cultivate. How much do you think is left?”
Both boys paled.
“A lot.”
“You have found an inconvenient fire to burn yourself at, but burning is learning.” Claire nodded wisely. “This shall be the height of your stupidities. Lucky for you it will only take months to fix. If you had gone until the end of the month, I might have had you sitting here for a year. Well, we will still be sitting here for a year, but I will be giving you practical cultivation exercises.”
“So we can become strong like you?” Isaac asked and Claire’s face took on a rare and sincere softness.
“So you can choose when and where to cultivate, even while cooking, or running, or doing your chores. I want for you to choose what life fits you. You are going to learn the Claire way, the right way.” She drew them both into a hug. “All I want is for you to be ready when you tier up, ready for life, ready for anything and everything. Tomorrow we will start the day with exploring our island, and a jog,” she said, bopping them both on the nose, “and you willll feel so refreshed. Then we can play games — big games, small games, fun games — and it will be great! Unless you cheat. I will be very sad if you do. There will be no lazy flounders in this school!”
How very lucky. Isaac could tell that Claire was trying to make this fun, but maybe she was trying a tiny bit too much. Or maybe she just was like this.
One thing was certain: After this, math and history were starting to feel like a welcome relief.