Yi Cao used less Ki in his future attempts at touching the fabric of the universe. He never again reached the depths beyond the normal three dimensional sea, never even touched Massu’s Star in the brief exploration of the technique, at least not while they remained in the practice hall of the Firefly Sect. Yi Cao remained firmly within the station. He reached out to the technomancer ship they would attempt to steal several times to observe the forces it used to shift the pebbles of stone ripped from the planet to float in his three dimensional sea, even explored the warped field around the concourses that honeycombed the stones of Habitat’s one and three. Found the girls lounging in the shuttle and marveled at the reach and detail gradually overloading his brain.

It became too much in time, and he had to take a break to eat.

They’d spent six hours in the scripted room by the time he finally attempted manifesting the last technique he’d discovered during his breakthrough beyond the walls of Aarrppaa station. By that time he’d almost forgotten the way the experience had left him maimed, a maiming he was quickly reminded of as he moved from looking at the world in three dimensions, to trying to manipulate it using his Ki.

“Play with the bubble and your lenses first.” Zihan told him after a couple of failed attempts. “You’ve gotten too used to containing your Ki. You said this is a real movement technique, so try moving as you use it. Palm strikes are popular for a reason. I don’t need to use my hands to summon fire, but it’s convenient to manifest my will in the movement of my hand and then translate it into the Ki moving through my channels. Try doing something similar yourself.”

He had no channels in his hands though. Those channels had been ripped away when he lost them to the augments that now plugged his arms like corks sprouting from his elbows. He could barely move them by himself, let alone move Ki to follow them when there was no Ki within.

They found a new technique in the process. Yi Cao threw Ki from his elbow stumps instead of pushing it towards the hands he could not control, and it leapt into the air between him and the other wall and… expande…, was the only word for it. It pulsed, and the walls were suddenly much further apart while the air roared to fill the suddenly generated space.

Zihan laughed as his clothes flapped against his limbs and Yi Cao stumbled in the sudden maelstrom, his surprise cutting off the flow of Ki into the technique. The resulting collapse blew the air back at them while scripts along the walls chimed ominously and a few of them flashed above signs written on the walls to indicate there were flaws in the containment scripts where cracks spiderwebbed the walls.

Zihan repaired the scripts by scorching lines into the lacquer over the cracks in the walls while Yi Cao waited for his channels to fill back up with Ki.

“You have a very weird set of techniques.” The Young Master said. “I knew you’d be something special, but I have no idea how you’re going to turn this into a coherent path.” One of the damage indicators stopped flashing and Zihan nodded as he turned to the other wall and continued scripting in silence.

“You’ll want to start thinking about it as a path, if you haven’t already.” Zihan told him a moment later. “Do you know what that means?”

Yi Cao could feel the Ki rebalancing in his foundation as he focused on his breathing. He shook his head. “I thought you gave me a path.” He said. “The Pillars of Creation.”

“The Ancient Path to the Pillars of Creation.” Zihan said. “A scripture. Not a path.” He closed another loop of the script, then frowned when the diagnostic sigil didn’t go out. “A path is somewhere between a law and a scripture. It’s the aspects you cultivate, but also the way you cultivate them. The aspects of your aspects you draw on in your techniques. The way you incorporate your techniques, and the style you develop to emphasize specific strengths or cover specific weaknesses.”

Zihan searched the wall for minute cracks left by the sudden expansion of the space within, then scorched a thin line across one curling script and watched the sigil go out. He moved to the next one.

Yi Cao nodded. “I always assumed paths were just, laws, combined with techniques.”

Zihan shrugged. “That’s not wrong. It’s just incomplete. You probably have no formal training in sparring or martial combat?”

Yi Cao curled one metal hand into a fist. He studied it impassively in the room’s pale light. “No.” He said. “Mostly, I just… served.”

“Hauled water, cleaned rooms. Yes, I know how the sect treated its junior disciples.” Zihan said. “A fucking waste.” He drew a line in the wall and shook his head. “Other sects would have killed for the kinds of disciples the Hidden Heart Sect picked up. Do you have any idea how thin the Ki is in the cities? There are no natural grottos, or very few that you can survive while you cultivate them. There are no Ki infections giving children channels before they’re even ten.” He shook his head again and waited for the warning sigil to go out. It flickered and he redrew the line he’d just put in the wall until it died. “You’d have been considered a promising prodigy in one of the higher sects. Just goes to show where the elder’s priorities really were.”

Yi Cao frowned. “I don’t understand.” He said.

Zihan scripted in silence for several moments until he’d turned off the last of the remaining warning sigils. “I don’t think you hurt the integrity of the walls.” He said, turning back to Yi Cao. “Impressive that a first circle cultivator could even damage these scripts at all. I don’t know how powerful that technique will be once you have real power, but, the taste is pretty promising.”

Yi Cao glared at Zihan. “What did you mean?” He asked. “About the sect?”

Zihan waved a hand. “It doesn’t matter.” He said without meeting Yi Cao’s eyes. “The point of all this is about your path.”

He looked back up and met the glass disks in Yi Cao’s face. “It’s like a fighting style, except one that takes into account your aspect’s capabilities, and your developing law. Right now, while you’re still building your foundation, you could theoretically pick up any source and start manifesting its abilities, fire, for example, or that whirlpool source, all without any real serious side effects. The Ki gets into your channels, but it will get burnt out again when you start cutting more channels. Once you start forming your nodes, however, you’re going to have to start locking in not just the aspect you use, but also the way you use them into specific techniques.”

“Why would I have to do that?” Yi Cao asked.

“Ki is responsive.” Zihan replied. He manifested a spark that flared and died, flared and died, as it floated slowly towards the ground in front of him. “In theory, I can do anything that fire can do, but the reality is that the more I command my Ki to act in a particular way, the more quickly and powerfully it will do so later. It’s like muscle memory for your spirit, and the immortals figured out a long time ago that specializing the Ki from each node into a particular technique makes your mastery of that technique a lot stronger. Impromptu tricks, like this one,” he gestured to the spark floating towards the floor, “are never going to be much stronger than anything you can do now in your first circle.”

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The spark died, and Zihan looked up at Yi Cao. “Draw exclusively from a specific node for a specific technique, and that technique grows more powerful every time you use it.”

“So your path is, what?” Yi Cao asked. “Eight techniques?”

“Seven.” Zihan replied. “And usually some kind of idea of the synergies between them, usually as a result of the law you’ll make your own when you form your core and start the process of ascension.”

“If.” Yi Cao replied, despite the rapid pumping of his heart.

Zihan smiled. “If.” He agreed.

Yi Cao thought about it for a moment. “Don’t you have eight nodes though?”

Zihan sighed and gave him a look. “Did they tell you nothing beyond the first testing?”

Yi Cao shrugged. “Mostly.”

“Eight nodes. Yes.” Zihan replied. “But the eighth becomes your core, and the whole point of the core is to reload your nodes while you’re at the start of the ascension, and serve as a door to your inner world once you’ve made it.”

Yi Cao flexed his hands. “I have four techniques now.”

“So far.” Zihan replied. “You’re super early in the first circle right now. You’ll develop more as time goes on, and you’ll want to pick effects that synergize well together and close off weaknesses.” He waved a hand dismissively. “This shit is all just stuff to keep in mind. You still need to survive the second and third circle before you can even start forming nodes. Plenty of time to play around and experiment.”

Yi Cao nodded. “I’m going to try and do the jump.” He said. “Again.”

“Go ahead.” Zihan replied, crossing his arms. “Just don’t break the room this time, will you?”

Yi Cao nodded, and started moving the Ki within his channels.

He’d seen footage of the moment he made the jump. There were mechanical eyes in the station, all over it, if the information broker they’d visited before they rented the shuttle were to be believed. For a small fee he’d passed them a panel of glass like a miniature mesmeric stone, and they’d watched a “news clip” of the moment the bubble over the ancient immortal’s estate cracked, then shattered in a wash of evacuating air that tore the trees from the ground, and hurled tiny human shapes into the void.

“You’re lucky.” Zihan had told him after they’d watched the disaster a dozen times from half a dozen different angles. Each time the disaster lasted mere seconds before some technomancer technique snapped a force field over the entire dome. By then dozens had already been killed and hundreds injured as badly as Yi Cao, but he’d been among the first pulled out by the piss-bots sent in to rescue those slowly dying of exposure. Technomancer script running the bottom of the plate of glass called the disaster a “structural failure” and blamed mismanagement of the maintenance teams on the part of the Governor.

In the lobby of the information broker Yi Cao had clacked the fingers of his hands together and remembered waking up to incomparable pain while he watched the air explode from the shattered dome one more time. “Lucky.” He agreed. “Fate must love me.”

Zihan nodded and flipped the control that turned off the mesmeric plate. “We won’t count on luck again.”

Replicating the technique that shattered the dome proved more complicated than simply replicating the desperate will to move that tossed him through the glass. He’d made a sort of instinctive palm strike when he manifested the technique the first time, and he fixated on the fact of his missing hands for the first half dozen attempts before he remembered the way he’d seen the bubble in the first place.

He’d been blind at the time, and yet, able to see.

The technique, he found, required that he step half way into that hidden view of the universe in all of its dimensions, then reach with his Ki for some point beyond, like throwing a rope and then willing it to pull him along it.

The technique didn’t teleport him to his destination. He wasn’t moved, and he didn’t step through some unseen elemental gate like the one he’d been thrown through by Muchen on Elleppu station.

In one moment, space separated him from his destination, then that space ceased to exist.

The walls chimed as Yi Cao slammed into the opposite wall and rebounded. His ears popped and the air in the room boomed as it fled the non-existent space an instant before that space snapped back into being and it rushed to refill it. Yi Cao fell on his ass then clapped his hands over his ears to stop their ringing while Zihan laughed.

After a moment, the Young Master offered Yi Cao a hand and hauled him to his feet.

He dusted Yi Cao off then straightened the silver technomancer’s robes he wore and looked Yi Cao up and down with a grin. “How did it feel?”

Yi Cao could still feel the world in three dimensions. The sensation of being those three dimensions made it hard to feel his own flesh or focus on the things within his immediate vicinity. He rubbed his head with both metal hands and wished for the thousandth time that he could close his eyes or turn them off properly. “It hurts.” He said. “It hurts a lot.”

Zihan slapped his shoulder. “Sensory techniques are always like that at first.” He said. “You get used to it, and they unlock a lot of potential you miss out on if you don’t learn to see the world with your Ki.” He stepped back and gestured towards the opposite wall. “Want to try again?”

Yi Cao regarded the opposite wall, then looked at the glowing warning script in the wall behind him. He shook his head and shifted the source off the key scripture in his chest. “I don’t think I should.” He said. He felt nauseous.

The Ki in his channels slowed while his view of the universe collapsed back into just what his eyes, augmented as they were, could see.

The descent left him with a splitting headache and a muted version of the ravenous spiritual hunger he’d experienced on waking up from his breakthrough.

Zihan nodded.

“You did well.” He said. He stepped to the broken wall and scrawled new lines across the broken scripts again.

“For your first time really playing with your source, you did well. Five techniques gives you something to work with, and you have a long ways to go before you get to start locking in your path anyways.”

The warning script went out and Zihan turned to Yi Cao. “This also gives you options.” He went on. “And that makes you marginally more useful if I ever need to call on you as more than just a mortal servant.” Fire Ki sparked in the Young Master’s eyes. He didn’t smile as he met Yi Cao’s glass gaze.

Yi Cao grimaced and looked away. “I’m so glad.” He said.

Zihan crossed his arms. “You should be.” He replied. “I’d expect you to be fucking ecstatic. Were you going to make this kind of progress back at the sect? On your own?”

Yi Cao looked at the floor and idly rubbed at his chest where the key scripture lay hidden just beneath the skin. “No.” He replied.

Zihan snorted and pushed past him towards the door. “Then be grateful.” He replied. “You could be dead, not just crippled. You need to move past it.”

He stopped at the door when Yi Cao did not move to follow and turned back.

Yi Cao looked up to find the Young Master waiting for him. He studied the his impetuous master for a long moment. “I am grateful.” Yi Cao said after a moment. He turned away. “I heard what the surgeon wanted to do with me.”

Zihan snorted again with a scowl.

“Thank you. For stopping him.”

Zihan shuffled his feet in silence before he replied. “Balance demanded it.”

Yi Cao looked at him. “You’d saved my life once already.”

“Did I?” Zihan pursed his lips. “I saved your life on Elleppu station so I could take it from you, just in a different way.” He said. He tilted his head with a sour look. “If you’d died in my service, that would be on my back. My oath.”

“And if I’d been planning on leaving?” Yi Cao asked him.

Zihan studied him for a moment. “Are you planning on leaving?”

Yi Cao looked at his hand then shook his head. “This Yi Cao is yours to command.” He said. He looked up and found Zihan with the sour expression once more on his face. “You saved my life. I won’t abandon you.”

Zihan shook his head. “I hate that shit. If you want to serve me, serve me. Don’t make a production of it.”

Yi Cao thought about it, then nodded. He flexed his metal hands and turned fully to Zihan. “You saved my life.” He said again. “I might… hate… that I’m a monster, but I’m glad that I’m not dead. Again. I will do my best to repay you.”

Zihan sucked his teeth and considered Yi Cao with a frown. He looked away, then turned and opened the door. “It’s all just balance.” Zihan replied. “If you ever think I’m going to die, you do the same for me. I won’t ask anything more.”

He paused, with one hand on the doorframe, head bowed, silhouetted by the technomancer’s lights beyond the scripted room. “There are a lot of adventures ahead of us.” He said. “Who knows what could happen along the way.” He tapped the frame uncertainly, then looked back with a crooked grin that didn’t touch his eyes. “You’ll need more power, if you ever want to repay me though.”