It was said that there were as many paths as there were pupils. While Sunwhisper knew that this statement was a hyperbole, it was certainly true that no one instructor could be expected to be knowledgeable in every one of his or her students' specialties and techniques. While the Heavenly School employed a sizable number of full-time instructors, much of the practical work of training initiates was farmed out to older students who shared their affinity. These personal lessons took place in the evenings, after the main classes were finished for the day but before the curfew was in place.

Elemental affinities were not evenly distributed across populations, and the four cardinal elements were more common than the mixed elements. There were a few other metal artists in the gold branch of the school, but Sunwhisper had largely eschewed their attention, and while senior students would have been obligated to tutor him if he requested it, they were happy enough to not be burdened with the training of a initiate in his first year.

He did spend time training the techniques of the Path of the Honing Edge on his own, but it wasn’t his primary focus. A few careful questions had assured him that the Path of the Wilding Hearts, or anything like it, was unheard of in the student body. It was still possible that someone like Elder Raibu would know something, but Sunwhisper was wary of revealing what he was capable of to the instructor, both to give him a potential advantage in whatever conflicts the future would bring, and also to prevent any suspicions from arising around his training.

The Path of the Wilding Hearts couldn’t be improved through meditation alone, or by tossing a spear, or drilling katas. He had to use his techniques. His link to Ogumo was always active, and he had maintained his link to Ken Nana as well since their encounter on the stairwell. Apart from that, he had begun a habit of forming temporary links with those around him. When someone grew frustrated with the meditations, or one of the tutors, he would share a kind word and a brief touch, removing their anger. He found that negative emotions often faded on their own relatively quickly, after which he would sever the link. More chronic afflictions he would return to their owner’s when the student body retired for the evening, as it would have been impractical to burden himself with the heart pangs of an entire branch.

Ken Nana’s sense of inferiority was a severe example of an affliction quite common to cultivators. Something to contemplate.

Makoto Shishio held irregular lectures, always in the open. He had gathered Sunwhisper’s class of initiates in the hills behind the academy where he let his own bonded beast run free. Shishio’s companion was a bull, a muscular, long horned monster that strutted behind its master while he spoke, ready to charge any student who made prolonged eye contact. For his part, Shishio largely ignored the bull, though he seemed to take pleasure in its mere presence, and also in the way his students were forced to show deference to the animal in order to avoid an incident.

“You are all very fortunate,” he said. “Your duties to your branches, as well as to your other masters, have been suspended for the next twenty four hours.” His eyes hovered over Ogumo a moment, flicked to Sunwhisper, and then moved on.

There was no outpouring of relief. The class awaited the price they would be paying for this temporary reprieve.

“I have arranged for an expedition,” he went on, “to the Hylian peaks. There is a species of Yosei that comes out of hiding this time of year, and we will be collecting their essences. All of you will be expected to perform a proper extraction and preserve their cores. After we return, you will receive instruction in their uses.”

“What sort of Yosei are we hunting?” Empiti asked.

“Snow Flowers,” Shishio said. “They gather in the frozen heights. This is their mating season, and they are plentiful.” He grabbed his bull by one of its horns and hopped onto its back. “One more thing, the first of you to follow me to our destination will be given a gift.”

“What…” Empiti began, but Shishio had already kicked his heels, and he was riding away from them at top speed. The entire class sprinted after him.

Despite its bulk, the bull was swift, proceeding across the foothills and into the mountains in leaps and bounds that shook the earth. Sunwhisper took Lead Grasshopper stance and proceeded much in the same fashion, with Ogumo hopping after him, and Janna skated across the soil, Karasu flying overhead. Empiti and Nana had excelled in the previous race, as water artists, their speed could have hardly been matched under the lake, but here they were no faster than any other mana-body, and slower than some. Inu and her dog were close rivals with Janna. She loped along the terrain on all fours, her body shifting slightly to accommodate the unnatural motion.

As Sunwhisper had sought to avoid any direct conflict with his fellow initiates, he had not had many opportunities to compare his physical capabilities to theirs. He had been somewhat handicapped in the underwater environment by his weight and body composition, and in that case, he had stuck close to Janna’s pace anyway. Here though, there was only the possibility of one winner, and he intended to push himself as far as he was able.

Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution all had their role to play in a long distance run up rugged terrain, and he hadn’t increased any of them since his transformation. It didn’t appear that he needed to.

They had each been made equal to his Ego at the time of the ritual, a rating of six in the third star class. While the other students did not have systematized statistics, he could hazard a guess that if their abilities were rated accurately they would have been anywhere from one to three in the third class.

The divide between them became obvious fairly quickly. Sunwhisper wasn’t as fast as the bull, but he could keep it in sight, and in a matter of minutes, the rest of the group fell well behind. They would be navigating by the echoes of the bull’s thunderous landings, as well as the occasional glimpse when it reached the apex of a particularly high jump. The chase went on for nearly an hour, and he felt no need for rest. His core was full, and mana flowed freely in his limbs. He marveled at his own power, advanced beyond even what he had experienced using Xanthous Ascendancy, as he followed the bull up a cliffside and barely felt the cost. He dodged a few trees, kicked off a boulder, and found himself in a new climate.

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The top third of the Hylian mountains was covered in snow and ice. The evergreens that survived there wore coats of white, and even the sun seemed diminished. Shishio and his spirit beast had slowed, as silent as the wintry environment that surrounded them. The bull’s hooves didn’t even crunch in the snow, instead, he walked atop it as if he had become weightless.

“So it’s you.” Shishio turned enough to give Sunwhisper a considering stare. Even Ogumo had yet to catch up to them, so they were truly alone amid the frozen wood.

“I am the first,” Sunwhisper said.

(So is this when we kill him?)

{I don’t think we can. Also, no, we have no justification to attack, and witnesses will be arriving shortly.}

(Just checking.)

Starscream hadn’t said much since he returned from his sojourn in the restricted section of the library apart from claiming he hadn’t found anything of use. He’d mentally shared a file with Sunwhisper, a copy of several scrolls claiming to detail the physical properties of the Tree of Heaven, but those had mostly concerned themselves with descriptions of other fantastical worlds that had once existed in the boughs of the tree, but were said to have all been lost in the deep past.

They were the only two mechanoborgs in Hollow, and they had become a part of one another’s lives in the most literal possible sense, but Sunwhisper had more trouble reading his passenger than he did the humans around him most of the time. There was no face to give away his secrets, and little enough body language. His mental voice was always consistently cavalier. The Red Spider had been preoccupied with something, but he wasn’t sure what.

Shishio reached into his multicolored robes and drew forth a box the size of a thumb, tossing it to Sunwhisper, who caught it easily.

“A Ginzu pill,” he said. “Take it before your next morning meditations, and it will give you an edge over your peers. Or another edge, it seems.”

Sunwhisper bowed, stowing the small container in his robes. “I am grateful, elder. Are the yosei you spoke of near?”

“All around us,” Shishio’s mouth thinned with derision, “can you not sense them?”

Sunwhisper’s spiritual sense was less developed than he would have liked, perhaps because he had always been able to gain awareness of his inner development through his status screen rather than the strict meditative means that human cultivators were forced to practice. It was a sign that his swift advancement was not without some costs. He had also come to rely on Starscream’s additional sensorium, but while his passenger was stowed in his chest compartment, those perceptions were dimmed.

He closed his eyes, and tried to feel.

At first there was nothing. His status screen rendered the mana flowing through his own system in perfect detail, and yet it gave him no information regarding the environment beyond his skin. He deactivated it.

There was something to this place, the snowy peak. It wasn’t a high-magic zone, and yet the mana did flow strangely here, gathering in eddies and pools before dispersing once more. There was a pattern to the movements, and he accessed a subroutine to generate a prediction matrix. A list of possibilities played out across his mind, and he jumped, opening his eyes as he went.

He smashed through a bush as if it wasn’t there, shattering the quiet and the stillness of the peak in a shower of ice and sticks. Blue white shapes, partially transparent, swirled in the air around him as they sought to escape the disturbance. His hand shot out, snagging one, and it struggled in his grip.

The yosei indeed looked like a flower, with a torso like a stalk, and long tendrils for arms that scratched helplessly at his hand. Its head was surrounded by delicate petal-like structures, crowning a surprisingly expressive face. It was not human at all, but it had eyes and a mouth of a kind, and they were both stretched in what Sunwhisper interpreted as terror. The little creature was more mana than flesh, but it was solid enough to be caught, to be killed, to be used.

He let it go.

“You had one,” Shishio dropped from the back of his bull and closed the distance between them with a few steps. “Why did you let it go?”

(Don’t tell me you care about these things too. Kid, you have to draw the line somewhere.)

{I think I am drawing a line.}

(Not what I meant.)

Sunwhisper faced his instructor, unsure of what to say. They had come to the mountain to harvest a natural resource, these yosei. It was what cultivators did. The fact that the so-called Snow Flowers experienced emotions as rich and genuine as any human was simply not something they would consider. Pure artists did sometimes make allowance for the essential value of some nonhumans, their bonded beasts, but they did not make extending that kind of consideration a rule. But Sunwhisper himself was not human, and therefore did not have the luxury of considering human lives and human feelings to be uniquely valuable. That understanding was part of why he accepted Karasu and Ogumo as true companions, even as different as they were from him, and as limited.

He didn’t know how intelligent these Yosei were, but the moment of contact had been enough for him to activate Hand of the Gentle Sage, and he knew that their suffering was as real as any human’s.

“It was in pain,” he said, after a long pause.

“What?” Shishio was genuinely nonplussed.

Sunwhisper sighed.

“I will not kill these creatures.”

“Are you joking?” Shishio sneered. “What madness is this? The Snow Flowers have to be harvested for their essences. Do you even know what we use them for?”

“I do not.”

“Of course you don’t.” Shishio slapped Sunwhisper with the back of his hand. It wasn’t an attack, merely a gesture of disrespect. “Snow Flower essences are an essential ingredient in the Ascendancy potions that will allow you to forge your spirit tokens. Or at least, it will allow my less stupid students to do so.”

He was referring to the techniques Sunwhisper’s System called Shining Soul Blade and Shining Soul Shield. It was the method Wen Lambo had used to create his fantastical sword. Those branches of the technique tree had remained stubbornly gray even after Sunwhisper had met their requisite Dao Rating. So this was why. There was another ritual to unlock them. How unfortunate.

“I will not kill them.” At Sunwhisper’s pronouncement, there was a quaver in the air, barely perceptible. The Yosei were retreating from the cultivators, or else concealing themselves with absolute stillness.

“Enough of your games,” Shishio said. “As your master, I command you to catch another Snow Flower, and to follow my instructions as to the extraction of its essence.”

Sunwhisper met his eyes.

(Kid, just do what he says. You need this. We need this.)

He answered them both at once.

“I refuse.”