Chapter 32
The next day, the children were introduced to their individual masters. Tan knew Zenith already, obviously, but Won met Pyter, who congradulated him earnestly on his breakthrough, both in the advancement in his cultivation level and the leap in understanding of his Dao which had allowed it. Pao was introduced to Nora, whose beauty made him blush. When she realized this, she took great pleasure in teasing him about it. Ko met Rainard, who was more solemn than the other teachers, but he had come to the decision to cooperate in this endeavor – if only so that the other masters couldn’t say that he refused the opportunity to pay back a debt – and so cooperate he would.
“What is the strength of the wind?” Zenith asked Tan, and Tan promptly bragged about his insight into how the wind was able to break down the earth.
Zenith allowed the boy to explain the process of erosion in his own words before giving him the technical term for it. Tan was surprisingly disappointed to learn that their was a word for it, he had been proud of his insight and thought that it was too profound to quantify like that.
“Erosion is a strength of both water and air,” Zenith informed the boy. “It is indeed a powerful effect, but the truth is that water does it better. You have been using this insight in your duels with the oldest boy in your group, I am assuming?”
“Yeah. He was beating me for a while, but once I figured ‘erosion’ out then he couldn’t win against me anymore,” Tan bragged.
“What will you do when he understands how to resist your attacks once more?” Zenith asked him.
“That won’t happen,” Tan said.
“It almost certainly will,” Zenith said. “I hesitate to say that earth is stronger than wind, but it is more steadfast. Wind is not steadfast, it is everchanging and flexible. I’m quite certain that, as you continue to duel with your older brother, he will eventually gain an insight which will allow him to counter your own insight into the nature of erosion. What then? How will the wind prevail against the earth when it cannot break it down?”
Tan frowned, and he thought, and he could not come up with an answer.
“I have a lesson for you. It’s a very simple lesson, but I will show you the strength of the wind,” Zenith said, and he gave the boy a bedsheet.
“Hold it like this,” the air expert instructed, showing the boy how to hold it so that it was out in front of his body with the most surface area exposed. Then the man stirred the air with his own Qi, directing a strong gust, which caught in the bedsheet and pulled the boy off of his feet like a sail pulls a boat.
Tan gasped in surprise and laughed. They spoke at length about how the force of the air could be harnessed and utilized to move things, including both earth and water.
In the Chamber of Ash, Pyter and Won spoke at length about the boy’s evolving understanding of fire. While the understanding that fire was the process of becoming was a profound insight, Pyter quickly deduced that Won was in fact on the edge of several others. The boy told him about the everburning flame atop the cultivation hill on the farm, and the man nodded in understanding.
“Now that you understand your dao a little better, spend some time meditating on the mystery of that brazier,” Pyter suggested. “I will not spoil your growth by revealing the answer to you. If you can arrive at the answer on your own, you may have another spurt of insight into your Dao which might lead to yet another breakthrough.”
Won pouted that he wasn’t being given any insight that he hadn’t already come to on his own, but the encouragement that he was close to something major drove him to contemplate the mystery of the undying flame with his new understanding of fire.
Despite her teasing of the teenage earth cultivator, Nora was very pleased to have such an intelligent and thoughtful student. He explained without hesitation the insights he’d had recently into the nature of earth and they talked about the trouble he was having in facing Tan in their sparring matches. She nodded when she recognized the issue.
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She excused herself, returning an hour later and handing him a stone. One half of the stone was rough, and the other half was smooth. She explained to him that the stone had been part of a larger rock that was exposed in a stream bed. The smooth part of the rock had gradually been polished by the water, and while the rough half was the result of the stone being struck at the wrong angle and breaking into shards.
“Earth is a mighty element, but it is not almighty. It has its weaknesses. It has its strengths. Just as the others do. You must meet the strength of the other elements with the strength of earth, and also meet their weaknesses with your strength. But you must never forget your weaknesses, or you will shatter like this rock was shattered,” she informed him.
“But erosion is not a weakness of Earth. For thousands of years this stone was part of a river. It was part of the greater world, changing as all things changed as it was eroded. That was not its weakness. Its weakness was a flaw that allowed it to crack when it was struck from the wrong angle. Spend the rest of the day meditating on this stone, and keep it with you to ponder in the days to come.”
She left Pao to contemplate her wisdom, and her beauty, in solitude. She grinned. Boys at that age were so funny, she thought to herself. Stammering over themselves as though they’d never before seen a pair of breasts.
Ko’s instructor, though glum to be reduced to such a task as the edification of the next generation, likewise imparted his understanding of his element.
When she explained that she was having trouble understanding how the mystery of the strangled flame applied to water, he nodded and went to the kitchen. He returned with a number of bottles of cheap wine, and one bottle of very fine wine which he began drinking from.
He uncorked them all and lit one of them on fire. Then he instructed her to draw the water out of the other corks, and once she had done so, she was to light it on fire. The difference between the two flames was obvious. As was the difference when he instructed her to increase the water content in one of the corks.
They repeated the experiment with the wine itself, as she distilled the wine until it would qualify as a liquor and became combustible.
When they’d been at the process for a while, she frowned.
“Okay, so of course the amount of water in something changes how it will burn,” she said. “I mean, I hadn’t thought of it like that before but I don’t see what the big deal is. It’s not that great of a secret.”
“No, it’s fairly obvious when its pointed out,” Rainard agreed. He drank some of the unburnt concentrated wine that she had made and sighed. “Let us repeate the lesson of yesterday. I want you to pay very close attention to the concentrations of Qi inside the glass dome as they change. Perhaps observing that will trigger some understanding.”
So they retrieved the setup that Zenith had used to demonstrate the lesson from the day before, and they repeated the experiment with a simple candle.
It took several repetitions for Ko to notice.
The difference was minor, but when the flame burnt out, there was more water Qi under the dome than their had been when the system was sealed. She frowned, wondering why that was. Where had it come from?
There had been some water Qi in the wax, that much she knew, but what had caused the amount of water to increase? Shouldn’t everything have remained constant once the dome had been placed? That was the point, right? The fire went out because there was no air to burn. But where had the water come from? There was only…
Only the flame, she realized.
She remembered her brother’s insight into the nature of fire which he had shared with the others, and she suddenly understood. The water Qi appeared because the fire changed the earth and the air into water. Without the balance of air, the fire went out, and the earth and air stopped becoming water.
She abruptly ran to the center of the Water Gardens and sat, ignoring the children playing around her as she meditated on this insight.
Within an hour, she caught up to her twin brother once more.
Rainard watched the girl break through into the sixth stage of the initiate’s realm, which was often called the first stage of some other realm depending on who was teaching the student. Rainard was of the mind that the sixth stage of the initiate’s realm was the first stage of becoming a novice. His lips curled up into a small smile as he allowed himself to feel a smidgen of pride, then he took another sip of the fine wine that he had stolen from the palace’s kitchen.