"Most young pure artists are not told the truth of what it means to advance to the third star." Yuyu lectured.

It had been a week since Kaito set to work, and the Seishin elixirs were long ready. Sunwhisper and his companions had been staying at Yuyu’s personal domicile in Poppy City, actually a compound of several houses and gardens, in addition to underground facilities. Servants were plentiful, and they saw to the needs of the guests with utmost respect and attention.

Janna and Sunwhisper were living far better than either had been in Fringe Village, surpassing even the luxuries of the First Elder, who was usually only waited on by a single servant. Neither of them was in the proper frame of mind to properly enjoy the architecture, however, or the baths, or the fine food placed before them every night on delicately bordered porcelain in a bright lit hall.

Janna’s thoughts were on her home. She was so unsettled by what they had learned from Kuei that even her first successful Ascendancy Technique passed by as an anticlimax. Yuyu’s manuals proved helpful, and silver mana poured from Janna’s hands in torrents.

She finally had the power she had always dreamed of as a little girl, something that had always seemed impossible, achieved in so little time that it seemed like nothing at all. She was stronger than her father had ever been, but it was still a small strength in the scale of the world they were now entering, and Father Jin was either dead or enslaved.

Janna chose to believe that her brother had not gone willingly into the service of the barbarians, whatever Kuei thought she had seen. Either that, or he was biding his time and playing a double game.

Her initial impulse, to rush back to Fringe and fight for its liberation, was quickly abandoned. It was a foolish idea, the fantasy of a child. Despite her sudden advancement, the First Elder had been higher, and he had been unable to stop the barbarians.

There was nothing she could do but hope that Kuei succeeded in drumming up enough interest in what was happening in Fringe to engender a response from the Middle Kingdom. Given that Fringe paid its dues to the Azai Clan, it should have gone without saying that they would be the ones to crack down on this invasion, but Yuyu seemed uninterested in the whole affair.

A team would be sent, it seemed, but they would do so in their own time. The harvest had been collected recently. In fact, the taxes were still being processed, so there was little urgency for the clan to investigate the matter. Yuyu was their representative in the region, and she had heard nothing of the barbarians while she was there.

If other villages began to fall, or the fate of the Soma fields was confirmed, then that would be a different situation. Whatever happened, it was out of Janna’s hands.

Yuyu took her to the Starfox Guild to receive a second star. For an inhabitant of Fringe Town, this would have been a momentous occasion, and there would have been a festival in the square to send her off, but in Poppy City, Janna was not the only girl that day to be given the honor. Yuyu offered no praise or encouragement, as this outcome was a given under the circumstances, and their relationship was entirely transactional.

The fact that they shared a color aspect meant nothing. Silver was a common affinity among the Azai.

Sunwhisper rededicated himself to his training, channeling day and night. Yuyu had hired personal martial arts tutors for both of them, so he spent four hours out of every afternoon practicing with another metal artist, and more time memorizing path manuals. There was nothing he could find about the Kingdom of Wild Hearts, but there was plenty still to learn about the Path of the Honing Spear.

Starscream was feeling cramped, and his complaints increased in volume and rapidity as the week wore on, but Yuyu insisted that his existence remain a secret. He stayed in place, enjoying the benefits of Sunwhisper’s channeling and working out possible array constructions in his head.

He didn’t like how much material they had been forced to leave behind in Jigoku, but they still had a few extra spears and the knowledge they had won from experimentation. Besides, their brief foray into Kaito’s lab had shown him that there were plenty of treasures and secrets in Poppy City to covet if he could only get his claws into them.

They could trust Yuyu as long as they were useful to her, but Starscream knew that the moment they had done what she wanted, or it otherwise became apparent that they couldn’t do it, she would turn on them. It made sense. He would have done the same thing. Sunwhisper seemed to have other ideas about their benefactor, but he was in for a rude awakening.

Yuyu had her own lab underground, not as well stocked or as advanced as Kaito’s, but it was clear that she had attained a respectable level of expertise in the science of cultivation on her own. She had brought Janna and Sunwhisper down at the end of the week, and shown them a stone cube of a room that looked as much like a mystical torture chamber as a meditation aid. Every block was inscribed with scripts that locked together in a pattern too complex for Sunwhisper to immediately follow. The whole created a set of concentric circles centered on a set of chains attached to a harness in the heart of the room. It looked like the kind of place where Yuyu might summon obstreperous spirits, force them to manifest physically, and then poke them with pointy sticks for her own amusement.

"Young artists are told that the process of cultivation is a long one," she said, "and that a pure artist's physical body is gradually and naturally infused with mana by the very act of channeling. This is a half-truth."

(Let me out.)

Sunwhisper raised his hand. "My passenger requests freedom of movement. He would like to examine your wards."

Yuyu’s face was blank, and she didn’t reveal any sign of annoyance at being interrupted, but without the Blinding Scarf to disguise her emotions, she was an open book to Sunwhisper.

"Fine," she said, and she truly wasn’t annoyed. Most events simply passed below her level of notice, even to the point of what other cultivators would consider slights to their honor. She vacillated between a blank numbness and rage so pure that it was a wonder she didn’t kill with looks alone. The first night they met, they had been discussing Makoto Shishio, and she had radiated killing intent like a furnace radiated heat. Now though, she just seemed tired.

Starscream let himself out. It wasn’t as if Sunwhisper could lock him in his chest compartment, but the former Red Spider had a good sense of how far he could push with this woman, and he was content to follow her rules for the moment. He didn’t disengage his tail, so they still shared their cores, but with the extension they had fashioned in Jigoku he had an almost twenty foot range of motion, more than enough to get a closer look at the scripts.

Yuyu ignored the crimson mechanical hand that was sniffing around her work, and continued. "A half-truth, because cultivators do become more physically tough as they train, and the Ascendancy techniques do infuse their flesh with mana, but that is a temporary change. In order to become a three-star cultivator, with flesh that is permanently infused with spirit energy, one would have to meditate for centuries, and two-stars generally don’t live that long."

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

This was new information. From what Sunwhisper had read, there was a big gap in the numbers of people who advanced from one star ranking to the next, as big as an order of magnitude. But he had never heard of any hard limits as to why that was the case apart from differences in natural talent, dedication, and the availability of mana dense foods and supplements. It didn’t matter how dedicated or talented a cultivator was if they lived in a mana desert, as the kingdom of Goth was said to be. And similarly, there were unfortunate souls who could drink as many elixirs as they liked, and it would only make them sick.

"Before the founding of the Middle Kingdom, cultivators almost never achieved a mana body. Those who did were kings among dogs, or they were ancient sages, divorced from the foolishness of men. There are few records of the era before the empire began, but we know that the first emperor was Akira Tomoe, and it is still his heirs that rule in the city of jade, thousands of years later. He discovered a means of accelerating advancement, developing his mana body in his thirties, which at that time was unheard of, before bonding with a sky dragon and uniting the people of the Land under his rule. The method he used has been refined over the millennia, but what initiates are rarely told is that the process is itself a deviation."

"A deviation?" Janna stopped her. "How can advancement be considered a deviation?"

Yuyu touched one thin hand to a spot just below the center of Janna’s ribcage. "Your dao organ, your core, must be ruptured in order to release mana into your body. It is a deadly and dangerous deviation, as mana can be toxic when it is not properly channeled and absorbed, but if the process is finely controlled, that absorption can be forced."

Janna stepped away from her, horror plain on her face. "The First Elder, did he do this?" It was one thing for a deviation to occur as an accident, that was a tragic, if all too inevitable consequence of the rigors of cultivation. All her life, she had been taught that her core was sacred, the only human means of being at one with the soul of the world. Though human cores and beast cores were physically very similar, one would never harvest a human core as they would the core of a beast. To do so would be sacrilege. For the same reason, deliberately damaging one’s own core, or that of an opponent, was taboo.

In Fringe Town, the dead were sometimes given to the fields, but that was part of a righteous and natural cycle. This went against everything she had learned since she was a child.

Yuyu shrugged. "One can assume. I don’t know him well, but he isn’t talented enough to have advanced on his own. After he reached the limits of his second star, he must have traveled into the Middle Kingdom to undergo the procedure. What does it matter?"

"To purposefully cause a deviation…" Janna struggled to find the words, "that is a family poisoning the well of their own shrine."

"If it leads to power," Yuyu said, "they would do it."

Ise Ebi clacked his claws to get their attention. "This is the tradition, girl, and it is not for the uninitiated. Be grateful that your mistress honors you with the truth. Many young artists enter into this process without fully understanding what it is, or the risks it carries."

"Risks?" Sunwhisper said. He was watching Starscream scuttle around the room, completely absorbed in the study of the scripts, and listening to the conversation with only half his mind. "What will happen if there is a mistake? We lose our ability to channel? We die? When I was pretending to be a Makoto with a broken core, is this the kind of ritual that would have caused that deviation if something went wrong?"

Yuyu was becoming bored with their concerns.

"You have already agreed to this, whether you realized it or not. If you will not go through with the procedure, you will not advance, and you will be of no use to me. An artist cannot enter the Heavenly Academy without a mana body, and it’s time that you were prepared. Object now, and save me from wasting any elixirs on you."

Janna looked down at the floor, her face reddening, refusing to look Yuyu in the eyes. She did not like this, but she wasn’t in a position to refuse.

"I apologize," she said, swallowing her pride, though it formed a pit in her stomach to do so, "for not understanding. I will do what I must."

"Agreed," Sunwhisper said. Working with Yuyu and entering the academy seemed like the fastest possible means of advancement available to him, and he needed to advance if he was ever going to take a piece of the Quintessence for himself to save his world. The possibility that the Spiral Dragon had come to Hollow only increased the urgency of his task.

"But I have several questions about the process."

Yuyu’s eyes narrowed. "Such as?"

This would be a turning point in his development, and it was possible that the change would be different for him than for a normal cultivator because of his reliance on the System. When his Dao Rating started shooting up, he was going to be able to choose between advancing his physical and mental statistics. Did it matter how strong his body was before it was remade, or only the strength of his mind?

"When one attains a mana body, does it matter what our bodies were like before? Will a strong man be stronger than a weak one after the change, or is the power of the mana body predicated on the power of our core alone? Would delaying your advancement until you had improved your body or your spirit give a better result? I can see how there would be a tradeoff there between early advancement and a better body, and I understand we are on a schedule, but it is still worth considering."

Yuyu was significantly shorter than Sunwhisper, but she did not ever give the impression of looking up at him. Instead, she tilted her head back and cast her eyes down, unwilling to give him that advantage. "It is true, all pure artists are not built equally. But physical training becomes obsolete after the transformation, except for the practice of martial arts. The main difference is that larger bodies require more spirit energy to be fully infused so the advancement can take place. Younger, smaller; candidates are cheaper, and therefore preferred. Lifting heavy weights and doing push-ups is something for mortals and one-stars to worry about. Only the strength of your spirit matters."

She made a gesture that included the room and its arcane preparations. "All of this is a tool, an aid. Ultimately, it is the will of the pure artist that decides the success or failure of the transformation, and the quality of the form that results."

Sunwhisper had been drawn in by her gaze, but he glanced back at his companion. Starscream’s core had lost some functionality when he had transferred it into the body he occupied. He was little more than an oversized, feature rich hand with a long plug and his consciousness tucked inside. That he functioned at all was a miracle, but Starscream had not been a child born on the mission, he had been a fully trained explorer and engineer. When he’d faced death at the hands of two old cultivators, he had gutted his own body, taking only what was necessary for survival, and escaped.

Sunwhisper knew he didn’t have the skills to do the same, if it came to that. But he had something else. "Strength of spirit" sounded like Ego, and before he underwent any procedure, he planned on dumping every floating rank he had into raising it.

"How soon can we be prepared?"

Yuyu shrugged. "The Seishin elixirs will get you most of the way. Both your cores are underdeveloped, but we should have just enough time to ready you before enrollment." She glanced at Starscream. "That one as well."

Sunwhisper bowed, mimicking the speech of the servants. "I am eternally grateful, Mistress Makoto. But there is something else that could benefit from your attention."

"Out with it."

Sunwhisper told her about Kuei, about the fall of Fringe Town, and everything that it could mean. He didn't delve deeply into the nature of the Spiral Dragon or his home world, Yuyu wouldn't have had the interest or the patience for tales of another universe, but he emphasized the potential for threat it represented to the Blessed Lands. Janna added her own take, how unheard of it was for barbarians of Goth to challenge cultivators, let alone succeed. They both wanted Yuyu to understand that what was happening to the south was not business as usual for the Blessed Lands, as violent as they could be. Because she was the representative of the Azai in Fringe Town, it would be considered part of her duty to see that something was done. After all, the loss of the town was the loss of the Soma crop.

Her face hardened as they went on, and she cut them off with a curt reply.

"I don't care."