Undisturbed channeling was better than sleep. The mountain atmosphere was not nearly as mana dense as the branch meditation chambers, but by the morning he felt refreshed and ready for training. His head still ached, but his ribs had regained their integrity. It was not one night of channeling alone that had done this. Even with the shutdown, his internal clock had been functioning, and he knew that he had been underground in the care of the elder Yosei for nearly a week before regaining consciousness.

He wanted to know what had become of Janna, and his other companions, but the best thing he could do for them at the moment was recover and become stronger. The Heavenly School was not the same as the Azai compound in Silk Flower Town. There were cultivators there he could not hope to defeat, and many more at or near his level of development. Janna’s fate was her own. Hopefully, he would be able to find Ogumo again when he was ready. He had grown fond of the spider, an affection that had been reinforced by a spirit link that was now severed. Sunwhisper even missed the spider’s hunger, which he had sublimated to help fuel his desire to channel as much as possible.

Yanagi had spent the night with him, and when dawn came, she flew up to the top of a tree to better absorb its warmth. Hanayumi appeared shortly thereafter, flying in from the direction of the sun.

“”Are you ready to find your weapon?” she asked, hovering just above him.

“My spears?” All of his equipment was gone, and his robes were ragged. She hadn’t saved any of his weapons.

“It may be a spear,” she said. “I don’t know what the sage of your path used. But first you must learn to form a bond with something you cannot see.”

“How is that possible?”

“You have already taken your first steps. Today, you will hunt me with your eyes closed, Then, you will attempt to form a bond.”

It was a simple game of hide and seek, with an entire mountain as their playground. Sunwhisper was faster than any mortal, he could leap high and fall far without fear of injury, but he could not fly, and Hanayumi could easily outpace him. Her speed was how she had managed to survive for so long, even in the days when she was trying to face off against cultivators to protect the other Yosei. She had never beaten them, but she had always been able to escape before they killed her.

To add to the difficulty, she wrapped vines around his face, sealing them with leaves, and plugging his ears with seeds. The entire point of this exercise was to force him to use his cultivation sense to find her, so the more impediments he had to his natural senses, the better. Yanagi remained nearby, but apart from sharing a portion of her essence with him, she provided no aid.

He knew where she was from the link they shared, but the rest of the world was a blank blur of mana to him. There was no cheat, or special insight that would allow him to instantly master this ability. Human cultivators trained for years to accomplish similar feats, and given that Sunwhisper had only been in this world for a matter of months, what he had achieved already would have qualified him as a genius by most standards.

His recently increased IQ rating did help him process the muddled information he received from the environment. It was a dull kind of understanding, extending barely a few feet beyond the confines of his body, but he could at least avoid walking into trees, which contained enough life energy to register to his sense. Most of that energy was confined to their heartwood, however, so he had to estimate their actual size based on the quantity of energy they contained. Initially, this led to some confusion, as young trees were brighter, but had less mass. As the morning passed on, he learned to differentiate the brightness of a young tree from the brightness of a healthy ancient, which had surrounded itself with layers of dead matter. It was a matter of mana density.

Plants and animals accrued spirit energy very slowly. Plants did not even have cores in the same way that animals did. They had meridians throughout the living portions of their structures, which in their entirety served as a kind of core. Extracting the essence from a plant was the equivalent of cutting out the core of a beast, but it was more complicated. Small plants were generally processed in their entirety, cured in a liquid that absorbed their essence, or else eaten whole so as to benefit from the mana structures inside of them before the essence dissipated because the structures were lost.

As the day wore on, Sunwhisper began to pick out the presence of other snow flowers among the trees. They did not hide from him, and some even reached out to him with slender strands of mana as if he was one of their own kind. These connections initially failed, but after he learned to anticipate them, he was able to use Long Arm of the Sage to reinforce the links. By the first evening of his blind training, he had made little enough progress in actually hunting Hanayumi, and covered no more than a few acres of ground in his search, but he was linked to a number of new Snow Flowers.

They didn’t seem to mind the connections, which he paid for with a bare trickle of his mana, and the more he made, the clearer his cultivation sense became. Yanagi sent him positive signals whenever he added a new link to his growing network, and by the time the sun disappeared once more over the horizon, he had extended his sense to nearly a dozen paces.

He felt Hanayumi return to him, and she caused the vines and seeds to fall away from his face.

“You are not completely hopeless, yes?”

“I am hopeful, I think.” Sunwhisper took a moment to note the relative locations of all the Snow Flowers he had linked to during the day. Some of them were nearby, while others had traveled many miles, and he could barely feel them. He still wasn’t sure exactly where he was, but he was sure he was not more than a day’s journey from the academy.

“I will catch you tomorrow.”

“Maybe you will.” Hanayumi smiled, then looked away. “Tell me, Sunwhisper, how is it that you will save everyone if some of us are trying to kill the others.”

“It depends on how powerful I become,” Sunwhisper said. “If there is a way to teach me to benefit from Yosei essence without harvesting it from dead Snow Flowers, that seems to be a straightforward step toward stopping the wholesale slaughter of your people. Cultivators seem very practical to me. They do not shrink from violence, but that is because violence is at the heart of their advancement. I do not think most of them would arbitrarily prefer violence if there was another path for them to choose.”

“I have tried to talk to them before,” Hanayumi said, her voice quiet. “They did not listen to me. They saw my essence as a treasure and my words as a distraction. Besides, you are not human. You have powers they know nothing of. If your spirit was not already open to us, there could be no union.”

“It is my path,” Sunwhisper said, “and a path can be taught.”

“Are you a sage then? I have never heard of this path of yours, or heard of a human who walked it.”

“I don’t know. I am new to this world. Maybe that lets me see things more clearly than someone who was raised within a stifling culture.”

“Why did your people come here? Why would they seek this world? Are there no more hospitable places in the Tree of Heaven.”

It was Sunwhisper’s time to look away. “I did not make the choice. My fathers made me during the course of their journey. We came here to find the source of magic, something to save our own world, because the force that they were fighting was too strong to be overcome by any natural means.”

Hanayumi looked at him sharply. “What do you mean, a source of magic? Do you mean mana? Was there no mana in your world?”

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

“It is difficult to explain.” Sunwhisper had not tried to summarize the origin of his people since he had spoken of it with Janna in the caves of Jigoku. He knew the history well enough, but as he had never seen Earth himself, he was at a disadvantage in describing it. “My people are made, not born, and my fathers were not made for a world like this. They did not have cores. Their world would be like a desert to you, empty of mana.”

Hanayumi looked horrified. “That cannot be. Life if mana, yes? Without mana, there is nothing. Nothing can be.”

“That isn’t the case on Earth. Or on many worlds. The place my people came from was not on the Tree of Heaven at all. What separates that world from this one is not mere distance, it is another reality. I know there are places in Hollow that can only be reached through portals, and this is like that. The rules are different there, and there is no mana at all.”

“Your world is a nightmare,” she said. The topic was clearly making her uncomfortable. “I am not surprised that they would come here, when that was the alternative, even if it cost them their lives.”

“They believed there was a source that they could find, something to bring back with us to Earth and use it in the war. That source was supposed to be on Hollow. Though they didn’t know anything else about this world, they knew that much.”

“How did they know? If they had no magic, no cultivation, how did they know anything about this world?”

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” Sunwhisper quoted. “Our god, our creator, Orobos, gave them a device to find the source of magic, and they pursued that source on faith. I have it with me still.”

“What are you talking about? Your teacher stripped you when he left you for dead.”

“It is here.” Sunwhisper opened his chest compartment to retrieve the golden compass. Hanayumi’s eyes widened, but she already knew that he was not human, so it was not too great a shock to see how greatly his anatomy differed from that of a human.

“Are you sure you are not a Yosei yourself?” she asked. “You are all metal and crystal inside.”

“I am sure,” Sunwhisper grinned at her. The idea that he could be mistaken for a magical creature amused him deeply, but it was only a further piece of evidence for the concept he had already delineated, that at some point, magic and technology converged. It was a matter of perspective.

He showed her the compass. He had not examined it closely himself for some time. Though it appeared to be an old-fashioned artifact crafted from gold and silver, it was actually a miracle of nanotechnology. More durable than his bones by far, and packed with mechanical architectures that, had they been magnified to a scale where they could have been manipulated by hand, would have been roughly the size of a planet. His own knowledge and intelligence were far below what would have been required to understand such a device. Starscream was an engineer, but even his abilities could not have produced something like this. The compass was the highest achievement of their god, rivaled only by the ships that had pierced the barriers of reality to bring the mechanoborgs to this world in the first place.

“A treasure,” Hanayumi said. “I did not feel it at all while it was inside you. But it does have an aura, a weak one, yes?”

“My sense for auras is still not strong,” Sunwhisper said, but now that he was holding it again, he did feel something from the artifact. His sensitivity had increased, and the architecture of the device invited mana like a script. How had Orobos designed a tool to interact with a force which didn’t exist in his own universe?

It was pointing to the north, and slightly west. From the maps he had seen, he knew that was roughly the direction of the Jade City, and it wouldn’t have surprised him to learn that the source of magic was in or below the home of the most powerful immortals of this world. But he didn’t know that for sure, and there was little point in pursuing it until he was far advanced from his current state.

She took it from him, handling it gingerly. “Where is it pointing?”

“It is what brought my people here. It points to the source of magic.”

“The source?” Hanayumi frowned. “That is not something I have ever thought of. Mana is everywhere. But if there is a world without mana, then a world that has it must have a source, yes?”

“That is what I believe.”

She returned the compass. “I don’t know where that will lead you, but if it brought you to this world, there must be some truth to it.”

Sunwhisper sealed the compass back in his chest compartment. “There is something there. If not the source, then power, at least, enough power to save a world.”

“How much mana do you have left?” Hanayumi asked, “Are you spent?”

Sunwhisper looked within himself. “No.”

“Then hunt me again.”

After he agreed, she covered his eyes once more. The other Yosei were resting, but he still benefited from his connection to them, and the darkness meant nothing to a man who was already blindfolded. In an instant, she had vanished from the range of his cultivation sense, but she left something in the air behind her. A trail, less like footprints in the snow than a wake in the water. He followed it as long as he could, but it faded faster than he could chase it, and soon he lost her again.

Still, he persisted. His Dao Rating was not increasing from this exercise, but his skill was. He had neglected his cultivation sense by relying on his status screen to monitor the flow of his mana, but now that he was focused on its improvement, it seemed to be responding to his need like a plant long starved of water suddenly exposed to the rain.

It was the middle of the night when he felt her presence. She had been hovering just beyond his range, but he stumbled closer to her by chance and tried to forge a link between them. She deflected his psychic advance like Shishio had batted away his spear, but he was at least able to play the game. A day before, two, even that much would have been impossible. Hanayumi floated out of his range once more, but he was able to follow her wake, and after another hour spent in the pursuit, he was able to attempt another link.

The Hand of the Gentle Sage and Long Arm of the Sage were essentially the same technique, but with different limitations. Even if he had been able to touch her, Hanayumi would have been just as capable of blocking the link. The second time that he found her, she didn’t resist, and when she flew away again, her location was as clear to him as if it had been highlighted on a map, even though she was well outside of the range of his cultivation sense.

She flew far above him, so far that he could not hope to pursue, even if he had climbed to the top of the highest tree and used Lead Grasshopper Stance to leap as high as he could. Then she began to communicate with him through the link, similar to what Yanagi had attempted before. But where the little Yosei had only managed to exert a subtle and largely uninterpretable pressure through the connection, Hanayumi was capable of expressing herself as clearly as if they had been holding a conversation.

What she shared with him was not words, but impressions. She was old, older than he had guessed, but even that age was a small thing compared to the tradition she had inherited, the ancestral memories of the Yosei, which extended into the immemorial past.

Cultivators had lived, and perhaps still lived, who had been so in tune with the soul of the world that their desires had been imprinted on the very fabric of existence. Because they had been warriors, their weapons and their armor had constituted a significant portion of their identities, and the world remembered those objects even after the ones who had wielded them had passed on.

In order to use the Shining Soul techniques, a cultivator had to forge a connection with a treasure he had never seen, but whose power had been great enough to be imprinted in the record of the world. Forging an original creation required the skill and force of will of a master, but mimicking the form a master had already forged was a much smaller mountain to climb.

Every recorded path had originated from a sage, a cultivator of the highest levels of advancement, and each of those paths was associated with a particular weapon. The Path of the Honing Edge was associated with a sword, a katana named Kanpeki, the noblest of blades. Sunwhisper did not know whether this knowledge was imparted to him by Hanayumi, or if he had gleaned it himself from the memory of the world, but he knew that Kanpeki was not his weapon. The Path of the Honing Edge was not his path, it was a diversion.

Hanayumi was drawing his awareness up and up, into a realm of pure forms and ideas. He couldn’t visualize it clearly, but he knew that the invisible realms were at least as vast as those that could be seen with his eyes.

He received a notification.

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The Shining Soul Blade and Shining Soul Shield techniques generate mana-forged weapons and armor associated with a cultivator’s dao. No known weapons or armor exist associated with your chosen dao, the Path of the Kingdom of Wild Hearts.

Do you wish to generate a new category impression?

Y/N?

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