The next morning was much like the day before, at least to begin with. They rose, ate, and busied themselves until Wald announced his arrival.
“How was the rest of your day, boys? Did you have any other problems?” he asked them as soon as the door opened.
“There were no other issues. The other teachers were much more polite and helpful. I look forward to their classes.” Vath answered him.
“What he said, only with more excitement.” Kaser said with a grin. Vath just snorted.
“Good. I found a teacher for your first two classes that I think will work out much better for you two. I’ve spoken to her personally, and there should be no issues. You know where to go, so you should be able to handle classes today. When you finish for the day, hurry home and wash up. I have someone I want you to meet.” he waved them to follow, but refused to answer any questions about the meeting, claiming it was a surprise.
When they walked into their new class, they realized that Wald had gone out of his way to find as close to the opposite of their previous teacher as he could. The man the day before had scowled at entering disciples. The history teacher had smiled brightly. This woman was beaming. She looked almost proud of every student for finding their way to her classroom. If it hadn’t been so painfully genuine, it would have felt condescending. Vath felt uncomfortable, but this was still a massive improvement, so he wouldn’t complain. Kaser matched her smile and waved at her. A gesture she returned with so much enthusiasm Vath almost rolled his eyes.
“Good morning, class!” she said when everyone had sat down, “We have some new arrivals, so I’ll cover the basics again. My name is Ilma. I will not be offended if you call me ‘teacher’ or somesuch, but I prefer Ilma if you are comfortable with it. We’ll get into more advanced things in a bit, but just to make sure everyone is on the same page, let’s refresh the values that our catalogers, well, catalog! Salen! WIll you please go over the six attributes for me?"
Salen stood and answered, “Of course, Miss Ilma. Strength is how much pure weight you could lift or how much power behind a proper blow, but it also covers the stamina needed to use your strength over long periods without wearing out your body. Speed covers physical speed such as running speed, but also reflex speed, as well as breathing and similar things when moving or acting quickly. There is overlap between these tertiary advantages and the stamina the strength attribute provides, but cultivators who focus on one attribute versus the other will notice a difference as the numbers grow, compared to those who more closely balance the two. Durability is both the body’s ability to withstand damage and to recover from it. This includes physical damage, poisons, and diseases. The recovery aspect also overlaps with the tertiary effects of strength and speed, but is focused on recovering stamina and breath, rather than having a larger starting amount. At higher levels, the results may be similar, but the cause is different. Together, the three form the bodily attributes, all of which feed into the others despite their specialities. Potency is the strength of your essence. This includes how much raw damage an essence attack might do, how likely it is to overcome other essence it encounters (although this is difficult to gauge without knowing the opponent’s potency, affinity, and specific technique), and may slightly relate to how likely it is to be overwhelmed by your opponent’s essence by contrast (though, again, other factors go into this). Flow represents how easily your essence moves between your channels - and a core once one is formed. It also affects how quickly and easily you can manipulate your essence outside your body. Resilience is perhaps the most complicated. It affects the resilience of your essence channels primarily, hence the name, which makes them able to take more essence at once or over a sustained period without straining or breaking. But it also plays a part in how much damage your body will take from an essence attack or essence based poison or disease. It is debated whether resilience does the heavy lifting with essence based damage with durability dealing with mundane effects, or if resilience acts more as a modifier to durability’s effectiveness specifically for essence based damage, but all agree it contributes to defense against such damage. Lastly, it affects how resilient external essence is to being destroyed or disrupted by opposing essence, and may slightly affect how much your essence can disrupt opposing essence. It’s important to note that potency raising the ability of external essence to resist opposing essence, and resilience raising the ability of external essence to overcome opposing essence is debated. There is ample evidence of cultivators heavily focusing on one attribute well above the other and demonstrating the effects mentioned, but on those two last points, some claim that it goes against the whole idea of those attributes and those effects should belong solely to the attributes you would expect. They claim that any excess beyond what the individual’s attributes should explain can be covered by their affinities, as those who claim those effects tend to have affinities that are both potent and resilient.”
“Very good, Salen! An excellent and thorough answer! And the modifiers? Can you explain those?”
“Oh, right. The numbers in parentheses are always rounded to the nearest whole numbers, and are amounts already included in the total to the left. They indicate the amounts added to your total by your cultivation, affinities, bloodlines, and other sources. As with many other parts of the display, the values can be removed from a cataloger, added back, displayed differently, and other similar things with a proper mental direction. If we struggle with that, we are to ask you or the quartermaster.” he finished.
“Thank you, Salen. You can sit back down. Does anyone have any questions about any of that? No? Ok, let’s move on then.” she said. She launched into a lesson, and Vath kicked himself for not having picked up a way to take notes yet. Wait. Perhaps he had. Salen had indicated that the catalogers could be changed with thought, and Wald had mentioned using it to keep track of things ages ago, though he’d forgotten since. He concentrated, thinking only of having a place to record things, and directed that thought towards his cataloger. To his complete surprise, it worked. He was able to pull up a screen that looked much like the other, but this one was blank until he directed a thought to write something down. He leaned over to whisper his discovery to Kaser, whose eyes lit up. He figured it out as quickly as Vath had, and just like that, they were taking notes more quickly than everyone in class. Thoughts were much faster than hands after all.
The lesson covered many different topics lightly, from how to sign up for elective classes, to how to get missions on their days without classes, and how they could use contribution points, amongst many other things. When it drew to an end, he had written so much on the screen Vath had to raise an eyebrow. It was all useful information to reference later, but this was one day’s notes. If it continued like this, he’d need to find a way to organize or search through this more easily. Pages filled with random notes of things he might need later in no particular order were not going to be very helpful.
Vath stayed right where he was waiting for the next class, while Kaser mingled around, not sticking to any established groups, but introducing himself to many. Vath even watched him chat with the teacher for a moment, who laughed at something he said before he moved on. He didn’t understand how his brother did that, but it didn’t bother him. He was who he was and his brother was his brother. If anything, it was good they weren’t the same. Kept things from getting boring, and they could help each other in areas they struggled.
Kaser made his way back, and the second class started. Ilma had the other students start practicing their cultivation or non combat techniques, and walked over to them holding two identical scrolls. “Hello Vath, Kaser. I hope you’re enjoying the class! I told Kaser this already, Vath, but I’m sorry you had to deal with that… man… yesterday. He should’ve lost his position long ago, in my opinion, and I made sure your sponsor would report him. I’ve brought you two something I hope will make up for it! Disciple Wald mentioned you were both using the sect’s general method?” at their answering nods, she continued, “Well, everyone gets two free techniques in this class. First is a cultivating technique if they don’t already have one that fits them, and then once they’ve mastered that, a non-combat technique to practice. I went through our void based cultivation methods and selected this for you personally! It’s rumored to be from near the founding of the sect, and it’s not that different from the sect general method, but it’s specialized for void affinity. I was told you were both very balanced, so unless you decide to change that, this should serve you well for a long time.”
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She handed them the scrolls, and Vath responded, “Thank you, tea-. Ilma.”
Kaser grinned at his slip, but Ilma smiled at Vath like he’d made her day by remembering her name. Who knew, maybe he had. She moved on to check on the other students, correcting minor things with a smile and kind word as she went, and the brothers took a look at their new methods. She was right; it wasn’t that different from the methods they knew already. In fact, it was almost identical to the sect method they knew. But the difference that was there? “How do we even do this?” he asked Kaser. His brother didn’t have an answer. The pattern, flow, and speed matched the sect's general method. The only change was odd… holes in every line in the diagram. At first he’d thought them mistakes, but they were too uniform. Equidistant and obviously colored in rather than missed when creating the line, given the holes were black in the red line, whereas the page itself was brown. It was like little dots of nothingness in the flow of essence.
Vath’s eyes widened. It couldn’t be that simple, could it? “Void…” he whispered while looking over at his brother. Kaser’s face matched his as he reached the same conclusion.
“That makes far too much sense not to be the right track, but how do we actually make the voids?” Kaser wondered.
Vath’s brow furrowed as he considered the problem. He began to cultivate the way he knew, and focused on the sensation of the essence entering his body. Theoretically he could control essence in the air, but if it wasn’t your essence you’d expelled that was much harder, and he hadn’t been trained how yet. Besides, essence was easier to control inside your body, and this was obviously a method for beginners. So he watched the essence as it entered, and then he nudged it. Played with it, turning it into various shapes. He had to start over several times as he lost control completely from the turbulence he created, but eventually he managed to create a hole in the essence just as it entered him. He was shocked at the result. He didn’t know what he’d expected to happen from the holes, but he certainly hadn’t expected the hole, and the essence in front and behind to rush into his core area. It was like the void had pushed all the essence in front of itself, and pulled the essence behind. Or maybe it was something else. The hole did not change shape or position at all once he placed it until it reached his core area, where it dissipated harmlessly. If it couldn’t change shape, couldn’t grow, maybe the essence behind had to follow to prevent it from becoming larger? His head hurt thinking about it, but it worked regardless. It had taken time to form even one, but now that he knew the trick, he quickly started making them in succession, to confirm that it worked, and then shared what he’d learned with Kaser.
Predictably, Kaser produced the first tiny void almost immediately after Vath’s explanation. Minutes later, while both were still improving, Kaser was much further along at keeping the voids even and coming consistently. Ilma stepped in front of them, her eyes shining, literally for a moment as she used some technique to see their essence, and congratulated them. She asked who had figured it out, and when Kaser indicated Vath, her smile turned knowing.
“Figuring out a void based method in less than one class hour, and according to your brother, also discovering how to record into your cataloger just so you could take notes in class, both in the same day. And your brother seems to master things even faster than you do, once you learn the trick to them. You compliment each other well, don’t you?” she said kindly.
“Vath spends so much time in his head while I’m interacting with the world around me, he’s bound to figure some things out first, but I master them first ‘cause I’m better.” Kaser said with a cheeky grin.
Vath snorted, “Stop talking so often and prove it, then.”
Ilma laughed, shook her head fondly, and then told them to keep practicing until class ended. They got closer to making it even, but even Kaser didn’t perfect it on the first day. That was ok; it was already helping, and it wouldn’t take them long. They went about the rest of their day just like the day before, with no major changes besides those first classes, and ended back up at home covered in dry sweat, but feeling rather good about themselves. They cleaned themselves and put on clean robes, deciding to practice their void method while they waited for Wald.
They made minor improvements before the chime sounded, and both hurried to the door, more than curious where they were going. Wald led them off with a smile, still refusing to tell them anything. He led them further inwards, towards the inner disciple quarter, making them wonder if he was introducing them to a fellow disciple or classmate, but they passed through the inner quarter and continued towards the Elder quarter. Were they going to meet the Elder who was Wald’s master?
They arrived at an Elder’s residence, though, given the size of the typical Elder residence, it could be more accurately called an estate. A caretaker met them at the door, greeting Wald with a familiar smile and a bow, “Good evening, Disciple. The Elder is waiting for you in the southern courtyard.”
“Thank you, Vela. I’ll get you to use my name one of these days.” he replied while repeating her bow.
She laughed and tousled his hair while he was still bent, adding, “Never.” before moving off to whatever duty she was about. Wald smiled fondly after her, and then led them in, moving quickly towards their destination. He was obviously very familiar with the place. Upon entering the courtyard, they noticed it was mostly empty. It was ringed with beautiful plants, mostly purples but some in all colors of the rainbow. There was a single low table in the center, with four large pillows around it. Two on one side for the brothers, one to the left of them for Wald to sit somewhat facing them, and on the last pillow facing them directly, a woman in the silver robes with black edges that Elders wore.
She was statuesque, but young looking, in the way most cultivators were if they advanced far enough. There was always something that gave it away. The facial expressions, how they held themselves, even just something in the eyes. A high stage cultivator could pass as young at a glance, but anyone who looked closely knew. This woman was powerful, although being an Elder in a sect made that clear from the beginning.
“Wald,” she said in a loving tone, before her expression turned almost mischievous looking over at them, “and Vath and Kaser. Such interesting little boys. I can’t wait to see what you’ll remove.”
“Remove?” they asked at nearly the same time. She just gestured for Wald to explain.
“Hello, mother.” he said in a similar tone, shocking the boys before continuing like he had said nothing, “Void is the absence of things. As with any other affinity this can be understood in many different ways, and manifested to do many different things. One thing that is constant is that void and the world cannot exist in the same place at the same time. Absence and presence cannot coexist. As such, when void is introduced where things already exist, those things must be dealt with. Some void techniques focus on moving them somewhere, but mother’s focus is on erasing things in the spot her void should occupy. She is quite enthusiastic about removing obstacles.”
Vath dialed up how dangerous this woman was, not that it made any difference should something go wrong, and Kaser exclaimed, “She’s your mother?!”
Wald smiled sadly. “My birth parents were wonderful people, and gave everything to get me into this sect, but they died less than a year after I arrived here. I was young, alone, and missing them dearly; and Elder Lita was very kind to me during that time. She taught me much, and she was patient with my pain. We grew close, and eventually, she adopted me. I have never regretted agreeing to it.” he said with warmth.
“Wald is a better son than any I could have made,” she cut in, before turning back to them, “and I have high hopes for you, but I don’t know you very well yet. This meeting is partially to fix that, and partially to set your course for your studies into the void. Wald will handle most direct void training until you advance further. Ideally, you will come to see him as a big brother or an uncle in cultivation if not in reality, but I don’t accept just anyone into my circle. You will need to prove yourselves capable and diligent. Wald assures me you are, but I like to verify myself.”
Kaser opened his mouth then, and said something that Vath couldn’t believe. “If he is our uncle, would that make you our grandmother?” he asked.
Her eyes narrowed at him, and Vath felt danger in the air. “Are you calling me old, boy?” she challenged him quietly.
Kaser, either oblivious or uncaring, replied with a grin to match her mischievous look earlier, “You cannot possibly have reached the status of Elder at the young age you look, could you?”
A smile ghosted her lips, but her intent stare remained. “Well played, boy. But call me a grandmother again, and I will erase one of your toes.” she promised him.
His face dropped from playful to serious in an instant. “...Noted.” he said.