The next morning, Vath awoke feeling like an entirely new person. The four companions hurried through their morning, and before long were rushing into the training yard. Elder Lita stood in the center, and behind her at the edge of the square, Wald was sitting in a chair. He still looked somewhat weak, but he smiled when the brothers called out to him and hurried over. Lita and the others gave them a moment to commiserate. Wald insisted he would be fine, and accepted their gratitude with grace. He wouldn’t be participating today, but he wanted to watch their progress. So they got back to it, standing in front of the elder and waiting to see what today had in store.
The first thing Lita mentioned was their classes. Their training and sparring teacher had apparently told Lita that he was close to passing them anyway, and he had no problem doing so if Lita and her handpicked instructors would be continuing that facet of their education. Their history teacher had been quite sad to lose such attentive and interested students, and insisted that books be given to them to go over the parts they had not covered in class yet, but acquiesced in the end. They had already finished their second class by advancing to core refinement. That wasn’t the only way to pass, but it definitely qualified you. If anything, their perfect ten layers overqualified them. The only one left was their first class of the day, which their teacher was unwilling to let go without them passing the test. It covered everything from basics in cultivation, to how various things ran in the sect and the wider world, and more. Both Lita and Ilma were confident they could pass it, but Ilma wanted to be sure. So she would be coming by with the test later.
In the meantime, Lita laid out what they would be working on. They needed to learn how to progress in core refinement, pick some new techniques to master, learn how to use more than one technique at once, continue their martial training, and, finally, Lita indicated that it was far past time for them to work on controlling their essence more directly. Their void color had been red for far too long, but they had plenty of other things occupying their attention, which is the only reason she hadn’t brought this up earlier.
She started with core refinement. Core refinement had two parts, and generally a third goal on top of them. The tertiary goal was to use an affinity attuned cultivation method to refine your core and thus work on your affinity drastically faster than what most could manage in the integration stage. Both brothers were already above ninety percent affinity, however, and were already going to be using an affinity attuned method, so this could safely be ignored. Of the other two pieces, the hardest and longest one was actually to fill in the rest of the ten layers that a cultivator hadn’t managed during their advancement. This was also something they didn’t have to worry about. The final thing, which they couldn’t skip, was to refine the layers that are there.
Pulling in that much essence and simply forcing it into place via pressure did create a core, but it also left imperfections in the underlying structure. Core refinement was to cycle your method through the core with slight twists, targeting those imperfections and slowly correcting them until you had a fully stabilized core. It took only minutes for the brothers to learn the slight changes they needed in their method to accommodate this and use it continuously as they went about their day just like with normal cultivation.
It was also during this discussion that Emara and Dornah first heard that the brothers had both accomplished ten layers, and were appropriately amazed and congratulatory. This made the two realize that they had forgotten to tell them, and embarrassed that they hadn’t thought to ask the others how well they’d done either. It turned out that Emara had made a notable six layers, and Dornah an impressive seven on their first tries. They’d even both made another in the time since they’d advanced and made progress past that. With them only a few layers behind, but ahead of the brothers in the refinement itself, hopefully they wouldn’t lose ground too much. With less than two and three layers to go respectively, it shouldn’t take too long at the pace they had so far.
The next topic was how to control their essence. According to Lita, there was something of a personal angle to this, but the fundamentals were always the same. Your affinity and specific epiphanies and understanding of it could greatly influence your control, but not because it raised your possible control. Such things acted as a guide. Whispering to your mind that you were gripping too tightly, or in the wrong place, or a hundred other such things, like a highly specific intuition. But at its core, control was just what it sounded like. The more nuanced control you had of your essence, the more power you could squeeze out of techniques, the less would be wasted by escaping into the environment instead of being used, and so on.
She started them off by having them release some essence into the air above the palm of their hands, but holding onto it and not letting it dissipate. Then she led them through exercises, trying to grip it and condense it, shaping it, moving it, and many more. Vath asked about techniques, such as his void strike, and Lita told him that using them for this was possible, but the worst way to do it. You could only really make progress with external techniques, so Kaser’s internal speed boost wouldn’t be of any use, and the essence was already mostly structured by the technique itself, so the amount you could learn was vastly reduced. It was better to start with this harder version, and once you had a degree of mastery with it, then move to improving techniques you had with what you had learned. It made sense to him, so he continued with the rest.
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Ilma finally arrived, and the testing began. Emara and Dornah had already finished their classes, as they’d been at the sect longer, so they continued their practice. Seeing that, Lita seemed to have an idea, and told the boys to continue the exercises in their off-hand while taking the test. Focusing on both was significantly harder, but Vath supposed that was the point. It took him longer than it should have, and he missed a few questions he should’ve known the answer to because he was distracted by his other task, but he passed the test. Kaser, of course, got a perfect score and had made the control exercises look easy at the same time. At least, until Vath looked closer and realized his brother was slightly sweating from the effort.
Ilma congratulated them, and said she’d miss them before leaving. What followed was torture, albeit useful torture. Lita gave them exercises with quotas to finish, but they had to keep their control the whole time. If they lost it, they had to start over. The running was bad, with extra lap after extra lap. The push-ups, where their hands were occupied, and they had to exert their control to have it hovering next to their hands on the ground on top of the other movements and the exercise itself? That was brutal.
Emara in particular was having a difficult time. When sitting perfectly still and focused only on her essence, she had amazing control, rivaling Kaser and perhaps passing him by the slimmest margin. But while splitting her focus? She slid down below Vath before you even counted that she was the least physically fit of the four, and so the exercise in particular threw her control way off. During the no hands exercises, even Dornah eclipsed her. This isn’t to say that she was in any way weak or outright bad at control while multitasking, but the brother’s had good control and were in excellent shape. And Dornah was… well, Dornah. The only exercises that even slightly fazed the giant were things like running that depended a lot on breath, and he was not too bad at those either, since he had worked on them a lot at the sect after noticing the weakness early on in his training class. So, of course, Lita made him do as many breath based exercises as she could think of. Wald shouted encouragement from the side, and none of the companions could decide if they should be happy he was rooting for them, or annoyed that he was rubbing it in while sitting in a chair.
This lasted until lunch, and all four collapsed straight to the ground when Lita announced it. She forced them to all go bathe, insisting she wouldn’t eat while sitting across from that much sweat. The bath felt amazing to Vath’s tired body, but he cleaned quickly, as his stomach was rather annoyed with him.
The four of them ate so much that Lita started to become concerned, but it was delicious. After the meal, she had them sit and focus only on their refinement and their essence control while she spoke to them about techniques. Emara and Dornah had apparently already picked up a second technique each, so they would be working on those and using their techniques simultaneously. The brothers, however, needed to decide what to focus on next. They’d already discussed with Wald which direction they wanted to develop the techniques they had, and Lita had procured the information they needed to do so, but they hadn’t yet decided on what to add to their repertoire.
She discussed their various options and the pros, cons, and synergies they would have. Kaser would be developing his speed technique into helping him with balance, dexterity, and overall body control; so he wanted something that would help add to his power. Avoiding hits and positioning yourself to strike were all well and good, but he didn’t have enough power to capitalize on it yet. He ended up on a specialized variant of void strike that didn’t just increase the power of the strike, but instead would cover his fingers in razor sharp void resembling claws. The idea was to use his maneuverability to get in quick strikes that would slowly wear down his opponent, since overwhelming force would never be his forte. The claws would make sure that even light hits could do some damage, so no hit was ever wasted.
Vath took a while to decide. He’d chosen to develop his void strike technique into something called void form. It would coat his entire body in essence rather than just the limb he was attacking with, and would help in numerous ways. It would power his strikes even further, raise his durability, and even increase his speed a notch, though to a much lower extent than Kaser’s technique. But that left him wondering what else he needed besides pushing this technique to its absolute limits.
After much discussion with Lita, he decided on a ranged technique called void beam. He wasn’t slow, but he was never going to match his brother, and he’d eventually face opponents he couldn’t catch. So he needed an equalizer for when his fists and feet couldn’t reach.
Their new techniques wouldn’t be available until the next day, so she started them on the changes to their existing techniques. Neither required too much adjustment to start working on the new effects, but both were obviously far from stable, let alone mastered. As soon as they had that, though, Lita threw them all into the deep end. She told them to spar, and made the requirements that they use their new or improved techniques, hold their refinement cycling method, and also do control practice while fighting. The first to lose control of one or more aspects lost, and would be pulled to perform an exercise of her choosing while the others continued sparring. They all nearly groaned at that, until she further proclaimed that they would master all four of those items to her satisfaction before they were ever allowed outside the sect again. The call of that freedom lit a fire under them all. It was good to have a goal.