His answer seemed to please the elder Yosei, and she caused the follicles that were injecting mana into his core to withdraw before bringing him up out of the ground. The earth churned around them as the root ball pressed up to the surface, bursting from the soil to open like a wooden flower with Sunwhisper at its center. They were still in the peaks, as evidenced by the snow on the ground and the frost clinging to the limbs of the tree that sheltered them, but far from the site of his duel with Makoto Shishio.
When Sunwhisper stood, the roots slithered back under the soil, leaving a single dark patch of uncovered earth in an otherwise white landscape. The Snow Flower that had remained with him crawled up onto his shoulder and waved the tendrils that served at its arms, seemingly in excitement.
Hanayumi walked around him in a slow circle. “You are not recovered yet, yes? That will take time. But there is no reason why you cannot begin to learn. Open yourself to Yanagi as you did before. She is willing.”
Sunwhisper presented a finger to the Snow Flower on his shoulder and it extended its tendrils to meet it. He activated Hand of the Gentle Sage, but this time he felt no influx of anxiety or fear. The little Yosei was calm as the link was established between them. There were feelings there, but they were more complex than he was accustomed to taking on. He had always used the technique to absorb intense emotions and deep hurts, this was something else. It was the difference between the blow of a hammer and a butterfly’s kiss, but there was definitely something there, a signal, however faint.
“Why is a touch necessary to establish a link?” Hanayumi asked.
“I don’t know,” Sunwhisper said. “That is the nature of the power.”
“But once the link is made, it may extend a great distance, yes?”
“That’s correct.”
The elder Yosei nodded, a few white petals falling from her hair, and replaced in an instant. “The answer is that it isn’t necessary to touch at all with your body, if you learn to extend your will alone.”
Sunwhisper received a notification, and he scrolled through it in the corner of his vision.
<<<>>>
You have unlocked a new technique on the Path of the Kingdom of Wild Hearts!
Long Arm of the Gentle Sage: With training, you may learn to extend a spiritual link to another without physically touching them first. This technique allows you to use Hand of the Gentle Sage at a distance, while simultaneously increasing your sensitivity to the internal lives of those you connect with.
<<<>>>
Hanayumi sat on her heels just outside the circle of dark soil, regarding Sunwhisper intently. “Sever the link with Yanagi, then attempt to form a bond with me. Use your hand if you must, but do not touch me.”
Sunwhisper sat opposite her, his legs crossed and his back as straight as if he was meditating in the branch hall. Instead of using his status screen to monitor the flow of mana through his meridians, he tried to do so as other cultivators did, using cultivation sense alone. It was far less precise, but he already knew his screen didn’t display energy signatures from outside of his body, so if he was going to do this, he needed to approach it as a regular pure artist would have.
He cycled mana from his core throughout his body, then raised his arm to point at Hanayumi, willing the energy to extend from the tips of his fingers. When nothing happened, he tried simply activating Hand of the Gentle Sage, but without a recognized target, the technique failed.
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After nearly half an hour of failure, Hanayumi finally nodded.
“That’s enough,” she said. “I have seen enough. You aren’t quite ready to do it on your own. Reform your bond with Yanagi, and then try again.”
Sunwhisper did as he was instructed, again experiencing the undefinable something that the little Yosei was trying to share with him. This time, when he raised his arm and attempted to use Hand of the Gentle Sage, he felt a thin line of mana snap into existence between himself and Hanayumi. He received no sense of her at all, as if she was guarding herself from him, but the connection was clearly there.
“How is this possible?” he asked.
“It is the nature of how we communicate,” Hanayumi said, her face as unreadable as her emotions behind the link. “We open ourselves to the world, and to each other, and distance matters little. You are borrowing from Yanagi’s essence to do this, yes, but I think you can be like us on your own soon enough.”
“Her essence?” Sunwhisper severed his link to Yanagi, and the much more fragile link to Hanayumi frayed into nothing when he did so. “I do not wish to steal from her.”
Hanayumi smiled. “It is not theft. What she gives, she gives freely, and because of your ability, you do not have to tear her essence out of her to make use of it. Now try again, try a hundred times, you will have to go much further than this to call the weapon that reflects your soul.”
Sunwhisper gave her a seated bow, then touched Yanagi once more to reestablish their link. Indeed, there was no pain associated with what he was doing, and the only impressions he was receiving from her were positive ones. With her help, he found connecting to Hanayumi to be almost effortless. Though he still needed to point at her to do it, that seemed to be a mental barrier rather than a theoretical one, and he was sure he could learn to use the technique without any outward motions at all.
Many techniques did call for physical movements to help guide the flow of mana into generating a desired effect, but after a few hours of practice, Sunwhisper became sure that any technique pattern could be replicated purely internally. Long Arm of the Gentle Sage required line of sight, or at least, of sense. If he improved his ability to register the flow of mana around him, he could probably learn to make the connection with his eyes closed.
Hanayumi began making the exercise more difficult, presenting a psychic barrier which he had to force his way through, and soon after that his mana reserves were depleted. His skull ached, and so did his ribs. There had been nothing physical in the training, but he was drained nonetheless. The solar beetle had crossed the sky in the time they had spent in practice, and night was coming on.
“Channel as much as you can to recover,” Hanayumi said, rising to her feet. “We will continue your training when the sun comes again, yes?”
“What about the Heavenly School?” Sunwhisper asked. “Am I safe from them here?”
Wings of blue and green light extended from Hanayumi’s back, and she floated above the ground, looking to the south. “I do not sense any other cultivator’s coming here. Your master and the students left you for dead, and they did not see me take you. If you had been human, I think you would have been dead in truth, and beyond my ability to revive you. Your heart did not beat, and your core was as quiet as the depths of the lake. But one who never tries will know no reward, yes?”
“Thank you,” Sunwhisper said. “You have done far more for me than I was able to do for your people.”
Hanayumi shrugged. “For a thousand years, since long before they built their school in the valley beside the lake, cultivators have come here to kill us. In my youth, I could feel other communities, but I think we are the only Yosei left in this region. They have killed all the others for their essence, and now the school only comes to steal our lives when it has a new crop of students to drink of our blood. Not once in all that time did one of them stop and say, no, I will not kill them. Not once did any of them say stop, except when they thought they might have taken too many essences for us to recover. What you did, even though you lost, was worth something, yes? It was worth something to me.”
Sunwhisper did not need to use Hand of the Gentle Sage to sense the bitterness in her words, the old pain. This creature had lived long enough to become an immortal, and yet she lacked the power to protect her people on her own. He knew that the troubles of the Yosei were only one small sorrow in a wide world full of cruelties, but he wanted to help them.
He stood up. His face was level with hers now that she was off the ground.
“I swear to you,” he said, “that I will find a way to be worthy of the gift you have given me.”
“Channel well,” she replied, unspoken sorrow in her amber eyes, “tomorrow will be harder.”