Immediately, Verus sensed Escora begin circulating her ki as she charged forward. He stepped forward to meet her, and they traded a series of quick punches. Verus could tell that she was holding back, but there was still a fair amount of power behind her blows. As usual, he had less ki than his opponent, which put him at a serious disadvantage.

Grinning confidently, Escora increased the pace. Her fist suddenly blurred and zoomed toward Verus’s face, but he was ready for it. A quick sidestep allowed him to push the strike harmlessly aside. He was relaxed and focused on the fight now, which allowed him to study Escora’s style as he defended himself. It was quite unique. Her footwork and strikes were quite different from his own or that of the other disciples he’d seen. There was a snake-like quickness to them, and they seemed designed around deception, allowing her to launch attacks from unexpected directions. However, Verus could keep up thanks to his state of mind. The shifting of her muscles betrayed her next move. It was like he just knew what she was going to do even before she did it; like he’d seen it all before.

“You’re a slippery one, I’ll give you that,” Escora said with a grunt of effort.

“Thank you,” Verus replied politely as he batted aside another flurry of blows and then struck back with a punch of his own. From experience, he knew that questioning the source of his instincts would cause them to fade, so he simply let himself flow along with them.

Esocra dodged the punch and countered with a swift kick that came up at Verus from his blindspot. It was a tricky move, but he managed to jump back away from it. The spar continued for another minute before Warin called for it to end. Neither of them had landed any good blows, but that hadn’t been the point. The spar had been about feeling each other out.

There was a satisfied expression on Escora’s face. “Hmm, I guess you’re not too bad. That wasn’t terrible practice.”

“Thank you. You’re quite skilled yourself. I look forward to working with you,” Verus replied with forced politeness.

It was obvious that she’d held back since she hadn’t used anything but human ki and basic attacks during their spar, just like he hadn’t used Vanishing Feather Step. Either she was concealing her best moves because she wanted to keep them secret, or her pride had made her want to match him without using them.

Warin said as he walked into the ring. “I think it’s my turn. I hope Verus didn’t tire you out too much.”

“As if. That was nothing but a warmup to me,” Escora replied confidently.

Verus stepped out of the ring and let his two companions have a quick round. It ended with Warin being knocked off his feet fairly quickly, but the chubby disciple just laughed it off.

“You know, judging by your looks, I’d say you have a fair amount of Telhri blood yourself,” Escora remarked as they left the ring.

“Maybe. I’m an orphan and have no memory of my family however,” Warin answered without losing his grin. “Verus here is my only brother. We grew up together at the temple.”

Escora winced and changed the subject. Apparently, she wasn’t completely insensitive to others. “Ah. Well, Telhri blood isn’t exactly rare. It’s just that most of the old tribes have integrated completely into the empire. Mine is one of the few that have managed to resist assimilation and being drowned out by the constant waves of colonists.”

“Well, the empire has offered them a much better life and they have freely chosen to partake in its riches,” Verus observed. This was something he’d been taught all his life.

Escora sighed and made a complex expression. “Er, yes. We were certainly much worse off before the arrival of the empire. All the humans on this world used to be hunted down like animals or treated like cattle by Miststalkers and other powerful demi-humans, but that doesn’t mean things couldn’t be better or that the empire is perfect. It can be brutal and unjust to anyone that dissents. In other tribes, entire families can be wiped out for even the whisper of the old worship.”

“Nothing is perfect but the endless heavens themselves. That is why we must struggle toward enlightenment,” Verus remarked.

“Which is part of the problem. My tribe doesn’t produce nearly as many powerful cultivators as it used to. We’ve grown soft and been stifled by the empire’s control while the sects grow ever more powerful.”

“We’ll all just have to become powerful immortals. That will solve everything,” Warin remarked with a laugh.

“That would be nice, for sure,” Escora replied. “So, anyway, I think we’re done training for today. When are you two planning on doing this again? I might join you, if I’m not too busy or anything.”

Her words were confident and haughty but there was an almost needy tone to her voice. A sudden realization hit Verus. Despite her bluster, Escora was feeling just as out of her depth and vulnerable as him. She just had a different way of dealing with it. She was all alone at the sect headquarters without even someone like Warin to support her.

Verus exchanged a glance with Warin and then gave Escora a reassuring smile. “We train fairly regularly, and please feel free to join us at any time.”

“Sure, I mean… I might show up occasionally if I have nothing better to do.”

After splitting up with Warin and a now noticeably happier Escora, Verus headed back to his room to cultivate. That was what he did for the rest of the night, except for a break to eat supper alone.

The rest of his classes that week were uninteresting, math, literature, and history were little more than memorization that had nothing to do with cultivation. His efforts toward channeling were also unproductive. He meditated for long hours without accomplishing anything of note.

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He did spar and train with Escora and Warin twice more, and that was the only activity that he felt was truly productive towards his goals. With practice, his movements became smoother and performing ki techniques began to feel more natural. Escora was still holding back, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t push Verus. To keep up and make sure he was ready for his next duel, Verus consumed a ki shard. He was going to need all the ki he could get to keep from falling further behind.

After meditating in his room after history class and training with his companions, Verus finally managed to get a feel for sound ki, but he wasn’t surprised to learn that he had no talent with it. He was used to failing attunements by now, and to be honest, sound ki had seemed more than little lame anyway. Thus, he simply got up and headed to the requisition office to refill the orb with a new type of ki. He’d find his attunement eventually, and then nothing would hold him back.

To procure another shard, Verus challenged another disciple on the rest day. His opponent was an arrogant young man named Lorem whose father was a minor cultivator that worked in the imperial bureaucracy. That didn’t stop him from being incredibly arrogant though. He refused to be intimidated by a temple ward, and Verus promptly took him apart in the ring. He didn’t even have a chance to use any fancy moves. Verus simply charged in and danced around while striking at his foe’s weak spots. It was obvious the other disciple was unused to real fighting and had skimped out on his training.

On the holy day, Verus went to the devotary once again and listened from the pews alongside his fellow disciples as the Lightbringer preached. As usual, the sermon made him feel better, so he then spent the rest of the day meditating and absorbing the shard he’d won to fuel his cultivation. He’d just refilled his orb, so it was unlikely he’d need to do again soon, and he couldn’t spend all his shards on channeling. Thus, his second week at the temple came to an end.

The next few days of the third week also went by quickly as Verus settled into a routine. In cultivation theory class the lecturer discussed the types of ki techniques.

“Ki can be used in countless ways, but the most fit into several broad categories,” Elder Ling explained from the podium in the lecture hall. “The first is the most natural and many people and animals do It subconsciously. Cycling ki through your body to strengthen yourself is called reinforcement. When you use ki to produce energy such as heat or attack directly with the ki itself, this is an emission technique. Control techniques use ki to move and command the physical world, such as when the air-attuned rotate air to create cyclones. The last basic technique type is conjuring, which is when a cultivator condenses ki into essence. This is usually used to create armor or weapons.”

This was very basic information and Verus was sure everyone here knew it already. Thankfully, Elder Ling didn’t stop there.

“There are several more advanced functions of ki, but they usually require a cultivator to be at a higher Realm than any of you are currently at. Sealing, creating domains, and summoning entail connecting to the endless heavens and the spiritual plane of existence.

Verus was very curious about sealing and summoning techniques, but Elder Ling didn’t mention them again. He could guess what they were about though. Plenty of stories mentioned both the summoning of spirits and sealing them away.

As he left the class, Verus felt several hostile gazes and saw some of his fellow disciples glaring at him. It was a good thing that none of them were among the strongest in the outer temple. It seemed like mostly the weaker family scions were angry at him for beating some of their fellows. That could be a problem, but Verus had no idea how to deal with it, so he just ignored them. He was certain they wouldn’t reduce themselves to ambushing him on the temple grounds.

Over the next few days, Verus worked his new channeling technique. Darkness had both a bad reputation and was supposed to be hard to learn, so he’d avoided it at first. Thieves and assassins were famed for using it. It was also a negative ki type, meaning it cancelled out energy instead of creating it. All the ki types Verus had tried so far had been positive, which meant he had no experience channeling negative energy.

Darkness ki turned out to be as difficult for Verus to work with as the writing suggested. It took him several days to even sense the elusive energy, even though he had an orb full of it in front of him. It would have been easier if he could see raw ki, but that wasn’t an ability cultivators at his Realm had, so he had to rely on his ability to sense it flowing around him. That was hard because the dark ki didn’t announce itself to the world in the same way positive ki did. It wasn’t until he had an epiphany in the middle of his afternoon meditation that he figured out how to sense what wasn’t there. Doing such a thing sounded simple, but actually using his ki senses that way was extremely difficult.

The darkness ki swirled within the orb, devouring all the light it could. If it hadn’t been trapped within the orb, the ki would have naturally diffused into nothing as it expanded itself in a futile attempt to cancel out all the light in Verus’s room. It was very different from fire or even poison ki. Struck by a sudden thought, Verus stood up and walked outside. Once out there, he opened his senses to the ki of the temple around him and concentrated.

His suspicions were almost immediately proven correct. All around him he sensed faint traces of a now familiar type of ki among the strong gusts of wind ki that filled the temple.

“Huh, that’s creepy,” Verus muttered to himself as he studied one aura coming from a shadowy building off in the distance that he’d never noticed before. It loomed in his imagination now, the dark ki giving it a hungry feeling and making its shadowy windows seem menacing.

Darkness ki had been around Verus his entire life, and he’d simply never known it. That was probably true for most other negative types of ki as well. It seemed like they were much harder to sense than positive ki unless you knew exactly what you were looking for. No wonder darkness users had such a reputation for being criminals.

What else was Verus completely ignorant of? Were there other invisible forces around him right now? The mental shift that had allowed Verus to sense darkness ki had been like a minor enlightenment, even though it had been more than little eerie as well. He’d become more in tune with the world and the heavens as he’d perceived a greater part of reality, a darker fragment of it. That was progress, even if it chilled his spirit…

Despite the nervous flutter in his stomach, Verus smiled to himself. There was nothing that he enjoyed more than gaining new understanding of himself and the world. Everything simply made sense when he meditated and advanced. It made the vast chaotic world seem more manageable. That was why he wanted to be an elder so badly. Maybe at higher levels of ascension he’d feel more comfortable in his own skin…

Sensing darkness ki was simply the first step though. Actually, performing the channeling technique would require more effort and time. He still had lots of work to do, so Verus put the minor revelation out of mind and went back to his room.

However, as he entered the dormitory, he noticed another disciple hanging outside his door. With his short brown hair and muscular build, he looked vaguely familiar, like one of the young cultivators that had been giving him nasty looks lately.

“Greetings, may I help you?” Verus asked.

The muscular disciple glared at Verus. “Yes, you may. My name is Tellus Montem and I’m here to challenge you to a duel and avenge the defeat of my cousin Lorem. If you’re not a conniving coward, you will accept, little temple ward.”

Caught off guard, Verus stared. It was possible that he'd made a serious mistake.