Chapter 40
The spring came. Birthdays happened. Everyone and everything got just a little bit older as time continued its eternal march forward. Safron turned five during the winter. In the spring, Tan turned eleven, and the twins turned thirteen. It was a little while before Pao’s fifteenth birthday when it happened.
It was a normal cultivation session, with the four children atop their little cultivation hill, when suddenly the wind changed. The other children all looked at Tan, who was deep in contemplation. He hadn’t had a breakthrough in the dao, but he was having a breakthrough all the same. The Qi in the air and in the other elements went crazy as Tan pulled and pulled and pulled, reaching a new height in his internal power.
And the children all held their noses as he began to sweat black sweat once more. They all ran off to tell the adults what was happening, and Wensho quietly prepared a bath and a change of clothes for her son while Tren went to congratulate him on the benchmark.
Tan was startled when he came out of his trance to realize that he stank and his father was standing over him with a proud grin. “Good job, son. I’m proud of you. You’ve reached the foundation realm,” Tren said.
“Oh, that’s great,” Tan said. “I think I need a bath.”
The family celebrated Tan’s success with a meal of honeyed cakes, once the boy had cleansed his skin of the impurities that he’d sweated out and changed into fresh clothes. They were sitting around the table when Tan asked what came next.
“Well, the truth is that not much changes at this point for you, Tan,” his father explained. “You’ll continue to grow stronger physically and magically, of course. But transitioning from the Initiate’s Realm into the Foundation Realm, while a great accomplishment, doesn’t require that you start doing anything differently. It’s only once you’ve reached the end of the foundation realm and are ready to form a core that you need to change how you cultivate.”
“And when will that be?” Tan asked.
“When you can’t progress any further,” Tren explained. “The formation of the Core means that you have reached the end of how far your spirit and you can travel together. When you form a core, you begin growing stronger, while your spirit stays the same unless you feed it directly. It is a consolidation of your power. A beginning and an end at the same time. The Core that you form is all you, and not your spirit. At the same time, it will draw you closer to Zephyr than ever before, as you learn to communicate on a level that isn’t possible until you’ve formed your Core.”
“So I keep doing what I have been until I stop getting stronger?” Tan asked.
“Yes.”
“Okay. And how do I form a core?”
“I think that it’s best that we don’t tell you until you’re ready,” Wensho said. “If you form a core before you reach the end of the foundation realm, then you’ll be stunting your growth. At the same time, there are bottlenecks and blocks in the foundation realm which some people mistake for being the end of that road. If you think that you’re ready to form a core, then ask me, your father, your uncle, or perhaps Zenith. We’ll teach you the next steps, but only if you’re really ready.”
“Okay,” Tan agreed.
And that was the end of the conversation.
Little did the children realize, at the time, just how strange the advice the adults had given Tan truly was.
~~~~~~
Toh Zang read the invitation for the third time, her mind reeling with the implications. She called for the servants to bring the family together, including her husband, Mahn, her brother Sean, and her daughter Kora, as well as her own mother Shoa and her brother’s wife Rayeh.
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She gave her mother the letter to read for them all, and the old woman’s eyes quickly scanned it before she began. She shot a surprised look at her daughter, then began to read.
“To the illustrious Zang family. Your daughter, Kora Zang, has caught the interest of his imperial majesty. You are instructed to appear in court on the fourteenth day of the fifth month of this year for an audience. You will be weighed and measured to determine whether your family is worth cultivating for the good of the empire. Be prepared for such an opportunity, both for the benefits that you might win for yourself and the dangers that the elevation of your station might bring.
“Might you be found worthy,
“Servant of the Blue Dragon Empire,
“Renton Shen.”
When Shoa finished speaking, the meeting room was silent for a moment, before everyone began shouting at once. It took some time for them to settle down, at which point the adults of the room began scheming.
“What does his imperial majesty want with Kora?” Mahn asked.
“Perhaps he has fallen in love with her from afar?” Shoa inquired.
“Don’t be ridiculous. His majesty doesn’t have that sort of reputation,” Toh said harshly. She took the letter back from her mother and reread it quickly. “Who is Renton Shen? That is the important question. It says that he is a servant of the emperor, but I have never heard of him.”
“The Shen family appears once more,” Mahn said. “First they snatch Onmigosha from us, and now they earn us an imperial audience with the emperor himself. Is this perhaps a trap that they have laid to get out of the marriage between their son and our daughter?”
“There is no formal agreement on the matter of whether Kora and Tan will be wed. They have only agreed to arrange another meeting in the summer of this year, that is all. If they really wanted to avoid it, they could find simpler ways of doing it than causing us to embarrass ourselves before the emperor,” Toh said.
“Then what does the emperor want with us?” Shoa said.
Sean cleared his throat. “This comes mere months after we were confronted by the head of the imperial guard of the Red Tiger Empire,” he reminded them. “And the Shen family was involved in that as well. Whatever game they are playing, I believe that we have been underestimating the influence of the Shens. I think that it is likely we have it backwards. Instead of them benefiting from the marriage by gaining our political strings, it might be us who are poised to benefit.”
“But we have never heard of them before we stumbled upon their Qi oasis in Misikio province,” Mahn objected.
“Exactly. How powerful do you have to be before you can buy that sort of privacy?” Sean asked. “When you look at it, at every step of the way their replies have asked us for our discretion and secrecy. We thought that was to maintain the secrecy of their Qi oasis, but what if they are operating on a completely different level from us? What if this ‘Renton Shen’ is more influential in the government than a mere servant of the emperor, but someone who has the emperor’s ear?”
Toh frowned as she thought. “If that is the case, then who exactly is Tren Shen, and what does that mean for us?”
The Zang family discussed the matter well into the night, with Kora standing by contributing nothing to the conversation but listening with a nervous ear as her future was discussed before her.
She thought back to the little boy who had fixed her unstable bond with her fire spirit. How much had he grown, she wondered. He’d be eleven years old now, she reflected, while she was about to turn fifteen. It wasn’t too big of a difference, they could make the relationship work, she thought. She, and her family, had been looking forward to the match simply because it was obvious that the boy was a genius of cultivation.
But if he was politically important as well…
She clenched her fists. She would make a good impression on the emperor, and then she would secure for the family whatever resources she could leverage from that encounter. From there … she would marry Tan, she vowed. For the good of her family. Even if he hated her, she would find a way to trick him into … she didn’t know. She’d figure it out as she went.
But she would marry him.