“Now. Show me what you know so far. Cultivate.” Elder Lita ordered.
Vath was already in a seated position, so he simply closed his eyes and focused. He hadn’t mastered adding the little voids, but he took his time doing it as perfectly as he could. Pulling a hole in his essence open over and over, sending it rushing towards his core area. He continued until she called out to the two, “Stop.”
She looked over to Wald, her face betraying nothing. “You said they only went to cultivation basics for the first time earlier today.” she said, sounding just a bit accusing.
Wald blinked at the two of them. “They did. I taught them the general method, but they could not have seen that method until this morning in class.”
“Ahh. Now that’s something we can work with, can’t we, Wald.” she almost purred, her eyes twinkling, “Starting now, you will have at least an hour a night with Wald to learn about void and train techniques if time permits. I will let you three work out the details. I will check in occasionally. Do well, children. You’ve gotten my hopes up.”
“Yes, Elder.” they replied in unison. She dismissed them, rising to hug Wald before he led them to a different courtyard. This one was smaller, and more enclosed, with actual chairs and a higher table. He stood in front of them, and a shift in his posture and face told Vath a lecture was incoming. He opened his notes, preparing to write down every scrap Wald mentioned.
“Let’s begin with what the void is. You may have some vague idea of some of this, but, to put it as simply as it can be, the void is nothing. The void exists, but it is nothing. It is the absence of things.” he began pacing, “When cultivators grow to a large enough strength, they can leave the world. Did you know this?”
The boys looked at each other. “We’d heard stories. We didn’t think they were real.” Kaser said.
“The stories themselves often aren’t, but it is possible. It’s rare; that level of strength, and a want to leave both. But it happens. What cultivators discovered out there, beyond the world, and brought back knowledge of… is the void. I know what you’re thinking. There are things out there. The sun, the stars, the moon, among other things. And you’re correct. Things exist in the void, just like our world does. But the void itself, the space between those things, is nothingness. The sun is vaster than this world by more than a million times. Yes. And yet it looks smaller than your hand in the sky. Because it is so far away from our world that it would take you thousands of years to walk there even with a road connecting you directly to it. And we can see it. Because almost all of the space between us is completely empty. Void. The stars you see? Those little pinpricks of light? The greatest cultivator known to our history, the long dead Emperor Eratu, brought back stories that they are other suns. Different sizes and colors, and some burning out like a campfire out of fuel but otherwise the same, with unimaginable distances between them. Almost all of which has nothing more than the occasional floating rock or clouds of colored gas. As near as we can tell, the void is everywhere, and our world and all others like it float in it according to laws we do not understand. This is the void. A connection to it is your birthright.” he said the last somberly, and waited for their reaction.
Vath felt like he should be overwhelmed. Wald had just dropped information in their laps that was so outside what sounded possible that he would have laughed in the face of anyone else, and he’d done it repeatedly in one speech. And yet, he didn’t doubt Wald. He had no reason to lie about this, if nothing else. And somehow, strangely, it made sense to him.
He looked up, and said, “There’s no escaping it then. It already has us. It already has everything. But it hasn’t killed us. Yet.” He felt something shift inside himself as he spoke up. Like something had unlocked and locked into place at the same time. His mouth dropped a little at the sensation, and he looked over at his brother just as he began to speak.
“It’s somewhat comforting, honestly, to realize we’re all the same in the end. From mortals to Emperor Eratu to the suns themselves. We all die, while the void continues. We’re all equal in its eyes.” he said, and then his face showed shock as he looked down at himself.
Wald looked nonplussed. “An epiphany? After one lesson on the very basics of your affinity? BOTH OF YOU?” he shook his head, muttering to himself, “Stay here. I need to tell Mother.” He moved back the way they came, and they caught snippets as he went, “Talented? Sure, but epiphanies already? Empty wolves or no, that simply isn’t fair.”
Kaser grinned, and Vath couldn’t help but feel a bit smug. He didn’t know what they’d done, but for the first time, Wald seemed almost jealous of their accomplishments. He was immensely grateful to Wald, but he couldn’t deny that felt a little good.
If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
Vath looked to Kaser, “Did that feel like-”
“Like something that was always there revealed itself and slotted into place like it belonged? Yeah.” Kaser agreed.
Wald was back with the Elder in moments. “Did you really just both have epiphanies after a few minutes of explanation?” When they answered that they didn’t know what that meant, she gave Wald a flat look, and he had the decency to look a bit sheepish. After all, he hadn’t bothered explaining even a little before he left. “Explain what happened in your own terms.” she commanded, and listened to Kaser repeat his explanation. “That was always there? That explains it, I believe, which is both comforting and slightly disappointing.”
At their questioning glances, Wald took pity on them and clarified, “An affinity grows in strength through a few different ways. The most common is cultivating. Whether in an area filled with the proper affinity, or a method that focuses on that affinity, that will push you through a large amount of affinity mastery. There are also various natural treasures or pills that can push you further, though they commonly come with risks or side effects. A bloodline related to the affinity can push forward affinity on its own, and make the other two safer and more effective. Especially as it is developed further. The last way is epiphanies. They are different than the others in a few key ways. For one they are harder to acquire. For another, they are the only one that is strictly required. All the others can push you far, but you will never master any affinity without at least one epiphany, because they are about understanding the affinity in question. The rest immerse you in it, or make it intrinsically part of you, but to wield it at its peak, some comprehension is required. You could even theoretically fully master an affinity with just them, although I have never heard of such a thing. Most use the others to push themselves as far as they can, and use those experiences, as well as life experience, to try to trigger epiphanies to finish. I believe what Mother deduced is that some combination of life experience and bloodline left you with partial or completed epiphanies that hadn’t fully integrated because you didn’t understand them.”
“Correct,” she said, “As I said, this is slightly disappointing, as it means there are unlikely to be more, and you’re not geniuses on a level that set my pulse racing for a moment; but it is also comforting, because you’re already quite talented enough, and if you had turned out to pump out epiphanies like water from a well on top of the rest I quite frankly would have no idea what to do with you.”
Kaser just laughed and shrugged, but Vath agreed with her. He was disappointed that he wasn’t endowed with even more gifts that would make his life easier, but he already worried about the attention they’d start to draw someday soon. This would have made things much worse if Wald’s information wasn’t overstating things. And, knowing him, the opposite was more likely. Well, it didn’t change anything at the moment, he supposed. They said more was unlikely anytime soon, so they’d just have to continue.
“This is a good sign though,” she continued, “You both had rather high affinities already, mostly due to your bloodline. With your new cultivation method, and tonight, I doubt you will master your affinity, but you should get farther than you have any right to. And while a new epiphany shouldn’t be easy, having one already is a large step towards one in the future if you need it.”
With that she left them, and Wald continued his lesson. He’d told them previously that void was colorless and that the flashes of void being used were the world reacting to its use; now he went into more detail. He used a triangular glass bauble to demonstrate that light was naturally split into different colors, and that void followed those colors from the least to the highest and beyond. Your essence had to reach a certain potency to be able to show the next color in the list, and you had to have more control at each level to turn random flashes or hints of the color into the next stage, where your void took on that color completely every time you used it. He claimed there were ten stages, though he admitted there was only proof for nine. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, glow, and bonelight made up the nine. The last two were special, as they weren’t colors visible to the naked eye outside of void use. The hypothesis was that they were just the next in the list and human eyes simply couldn’t perceive them, since all the previous colors followed an obvious pattern and were visible, but no one could prove the idea. When used, glow caused certain items and parts of people to glow under its temporary light that seemed even more violet, and yet not, and bonelight was even stranger and more intimidating. When bonelight flashed, depending on the strength of the flash, a certain radius around it would have things become mostly see through unless they were dense objects. In the case of a human, most would seem to disappear besides their bones, hence the name, and its terrifying reputation. Only the greatest masters reached bonelight stage void, and if they were slinging techniques around, it was likely that bones would very quickly be all that was left, if that.
The tenth theoretical “color” was no color at all. Void itself had none, and it was thought by many that if you truly mastered void, there should be no flash at all. But if any had reached that stage of mastery, they were keeping it to themselves. Violet was the most common color associated with void because it was the strongest stage that could still be definitively stated to be a color. And because no one had glowing dye in the quantities purple was used, let alone a way to mimic bonelight.
Their notes and minds were full, but both boys were quite satisfied with their progress tonight. Vath felt like he’d taken the first real steps on his path of void. And so the lesson ended, and Wald sent them home to rest. Tomorrow was a new day to progress, and more than ever Vath was confident they would. The void was endless, but that should frighten those who fought it. He was made from it. He would wield it. One day at a time.