Axiom ~ 26!

~ 26 ~

After the expedition team had left, life in the cloister fell into a very predictable daily routine. The Clerics that remained behind, while devout in their faith, settled into a more family-oriented pattern. Prayer was still daily, chants were recited and taught, but the work focus shifted over to food production and long-term stability. With so few present, the available workforce was limited to mostly Jin, Tibbins, and Tarrean.

Irene made everything operate smoothly, though Yvessa filled in when she wasn’t tending to Switch and Artorian. Switch was still unable to speak or interact with the world around her, but Artorian was doing well under their tender ministrations. The Apiary had been re-established, the apple grove was healthy, but the salt flats had been abandoned in favor of small fields which grew basic crops.

Cultivators were vastly more capable than an ordinary person, and progress requiring physical labor was incredibly easy for them. On certain days, they even had time to harvest some salt from the flats; though they all had to be careful to lock down their passive cultivation. They couldn’t afford to take any Essence from the Scar, even if it might be tempting to tap into that huge resource.

The new trader, Olgier the Northman, came once a month with additional meal options that were bartered for with salt. Luckily for Tarrean, their bedridden old fox knew all of the values and weights for proper and fair bartering. The trader–to his teeth gnashing displeasure–was unable to swindle or get overly favorable transactions. Still, he was there every month without fail.

As an additional bonus when the huge red-haired Olgier swung by, he was usually given a few parcels to deliver. One mail parcel always went to a Head Cleric in the Choir. While another was sent far, far forwards to some Academy in the mountains. Olgier didn’t particularly like to play mailman, but an extra bag of salt went a long way toward making him forgive the hassle. Rutsel–his town of origin–was well-known for its hunting grounds, and salt was needed for preservation.

To Artorian, the quiet days where he merely laid down and basked in sunlight were quite busy; not that many people knew it. His lazuli robe hung neatly on his old bow, having remained there after Artorian noticed he got better results when more of him was… exposed. He wore some warm winter pants and kept his pillows snug all about him to retain warmth. As a minor bonus, the pillow wall blocked just the tiniest bit of extra wind. For the majority of the day, sunlight poured through the open window and washed over the old man.

The earliest part of the day, where the sun just wasn’t quite in the right place to stream through the opening, was an excellent time to wrestle his way out of bed. He would mosey over to the stream to wash himself and take care of necessities. Artorian adamantly refused to let Yvessa bathe him, even if his clumsy stumbling meant that there were times he desperately needed her help to actually arrive at the stream. Though everyone else only saw the tired old man rest, eat, and talk to himself; Artorian was fully absorbed and attentive to the activity in his center for the duration of nearly each day.

It made time absolutely fly by, and even the interruptions where he was nudged for a meal were swiftly forgotten so he could bolt back into his new favorite play-zone like an impatient toddler. He wasn’t actually muttering to himself during the day, he’d found it was easier to be vocal and bicker with his Essence to keep himself focused. It helped smooth progression, and the breakthroughs he had were phenomenal, even if they came with a cost. Still, after gaining the knowledge from the Memory Stone, things were looking up.

His control of Essence wasn’t fantastic; it required great practice and patience to get things right. He tended to run out of patience, and would pause only to throw ideas at the wall. One of the few times he bothered to snap out of his fantasy was when someone needed a word, or when a flash of brilliance struck him that had to immediately find its way onto paper. His desk contained a messy pile of notes compiled on cloudy days where cultivation was going to be inadequate.

Artorian’s contributions to the Academy were in the order he figured things out, rather than a cohesive step-by-step build. Hopefully those sharp minds sitting on their tall rocks would parse the documents in the correct order. As the sun rose into the correct position, Artorian settled in his bed again for the day. However, he found Yvessa firmly seated in the bedside chair with her arms crossed.

“Yes, my dear?” He quizzed with the expectation of something being amiss.

“What are you up to, old man? You’ve been… suspicious. I can ignore all that mumbling to yourself, but I cycled Essence to my eyes yesterday to have a look at you; and frankly I have no idea what I’m seeing. Your center was a disgusting mess, it still is, but now it’s this…” She made a floppy circled hand motion of uncertainty, not knowing how to explain herself. “Mess of colored rings? I can tell it’s corruption, but nothing I know of tells me it could possibly behave like that. Did you actually make tubes of Essence? That’s horrifying! To sustain that… the sheer amount of Essence it must suck down is more than I manage to actively cultivate in a whole day!”

Her gaze sharpened. “Explain.”

Artorian rolled his eyes. He could pretend to be all innocent and know nothing, but he was more than aware that she read his mail. Yvessa was capable of looking at his Essence flows anytime, so trying to be stealthy while making progress was not happening either. “Shall I explain from the beginning, then?”

Yvessa leered at him with demanding expectations. “Of course, from the start!”

“Fifty years ago, I was born. From there–ow! Rude! Not the beginning then… so, Essence. As discovered, there are two draw methods: passively taking it in, or actively taking it in. If I consider a drop of Essence to be a drop of water, then my center is a bucket and my body is a well. Both can only hold so much. Corruption comes along with Essence, and for every one drop of Essence, you have roughly two drops of corruption.”

Artorian paused to make sure she was following, “A normal person likely isn’t bothered by this intake until they’re about my age, at which point the body starts to break down. Really, it’s just corruption being a nuisance. Once you get to the entry stage of cultivating, one’s ability to actively draw Essence in speeds up the process of dying if you are not careful. So, preventing corruption intake becomes paramount. The technique you have allows you separate the drop of Essence from the whole and mostly reject the corruption from entering your bucket. I noticed you all have a little celestial glow that shows the main bias in your Essences, so your technique is not flawless.”

“For every ten to twelve hands of time, I would say you passively gain what I consider a single unit of Essence. It’s not an exact measurement, but there’s an average I can deduce after having watched you all so long. For ease of understanding, twelve hands is an hour, as one hand is five minutes. Even if you would gain a unit in ten hands, I’ll call it twelve so you can follow this next section.” Yvessa nodded to show that she was following, and the resting man went on.

“This part will differ slightly for everyone. The reason why I round it out is for convenience. See, I heard something interesting from Jiivra. Adding too much Essence into muscles causes ‘backfire’. Also, never add corruption to your body if you can help it. Sweet mercy, what a day that was. I lost weeks of progress cleaning that up.” Artorian sighed and rubbed his forehead, taking a good drink of water while his caretaker smirked.

“When you actively cultivate, the rate at which you draw in natural energy increases threefold. Three and a bit. That’s the basic spiral, which is rather good even with its limitations. Tarrean draws in three times as much as that, so his technique is a vast improvement over the basic one. He somehow broke up his spiral into two additional spirals. Reminded me of a diagram from my Academy days. It seemed to be the beginning of a fractal? The shape was a… triskelion? Yes, that.”

Yvessa laid a hand on Artorian to pause his words, her smirk now a frown. “You can cycle Essence to your eyes and study someone’s cultivation base? How? Who taught you that?”

Artorian scoffed, but dodged explaining that secret for now. “Not exactly difficult once you figure the basics of Essence out. Now, back to the lesson! For every drop of Essence you gain when actively cultivating, Tarrean gains three. Just to give you an idea of how useful it would be to enter the D-ranks. Now, that is only counting a single affinity channel. So long as nothing is interfering, you get one drop per affinity channel, of every affinity, so long as you are somewhere they can be gathered.”

Her voice cut his off lecture, “Interfering?”

Artorian derailed for a moment before finding his thoughts once more. “Oh, yes. Say that you for some reason could not cultivate, nor passively pull Essence. You would be stuck with the Essence you had in you to sustain yourself. I’m sure you’d be fine for years, but it is possible to be cut off from replenishment and that would be an awful fate indeed. Say that you had a water affinity. If you went somewhere, say a desert that held absolutely no water. You’d wither not just from the environment, but internally as well.”

“You have one affinity channel. Passively, you pull in one drop. Tarrean has two affinity channels. Passively, he gains two drops. I have four.” He could see her fingers drumming on her arm, more lecture was needed. “When I actively cultivate, I do not get three times the intake. I only get two. I am not using the spiral from the Memory Stone; it didn’t suit what I needed and would most likely have just killed me.”

Yvessa cycled Essence to her eyes, determined to have a good look at his center and whatever idiocy he was concocting. To her surprise, she could see details that normally eluded her, like a veil had been moved out of the way and she was looking at something she was holding in her hand. “Just. Just walk me through… this.”

A veil of sorts did indeed protect the internal secrets of powerful cultivators. Normal folk were free game, having no protections; and some of the Initiates only had a wavering tarp. When Artorian had checked, he found that Tarrean and Irene possessed vast, thick veils. Yet, those protections diminished as people slept. Equally, they also strengthened when Irene had noticed she was being observed. He didn’t know how she’d known, but the veil had thickened in the span of a thought.

His assumption was that she’d purposefully not desired her inner workings to be seen. That had made him wonder: could that mean the opposite would hold true as well? Her clear gaze gave him hope that his test was succeeding. “How many rings do you count?”

Yvessa counted on her fingers. “Five, six… nine?”

Artorian clapped softly with one hand on the palm of the other, pleased that she was able to see so deeply. Check-mark one success off on the list. Wanting your method to be seen was sufficient for his entry-level abilities. “Correct, I’m currently at nine.”

Her distressed voice snapped at him, “Currently! More of these things are going to be added?”

Artorian settled back into his pillows, quite pleased with himself. “Oh yes. Allow me to give you a tour of Boday de` Artorian! They’re only circles when you’re looking at them straight down, as you are. In truth, they’re as you guessed. Essence tubes, formed as circles. I’ve spent a grand amount of time spinning my Essence in all manners of woven varieties. I have found that not only does the corruption separate, but Essence does as well. Every circle going outwards from the center holds a denser type of energy. From inner to outer, the separations are as follows: the purest Essence I’m able to get refined to that quality-”

He was interrupted right away. Yvessa surprised him with her observation, but it only made him proud. “Is that inner circle going the complete opposite way of all the others?”

“Indeed! That is the only circle I have pulling inwards, while the rest push outwards. The interactions of the spin are a little complex. I’m not merely going around in a circle, but inside to out as well, and there’s some additional direction that makes all but the innermost circle spin from its center outwards.”

He got back on track; he loved the cleverness of this next part, and hoped his caretaker would as well. “So, the innermost circle is the purest Essence. Then, in order: celestial, air, fire, and water Essence. Followed by circles of corruption, in the same order. Water is always the densest and it pushes away the furthest. Yet, even the thickest of water Essence will always be less dense than the lightest celestial corruption! I am spending all this Essence on the circles, because it is paramount that I keep everything moving. If anything settles, that’s it. I’m dead.”

“My survival thus far, while painful, was dependent on my body receiving large amounts of Essence to keep it functioning. While the corruption was fighting amongst itself, as they each attempted to force their identities on the other in an ugly mix, separating them has allowed some insight on their interactions.”

He needed another drink of water from speaking so much, and he was excited to keep teaching. “So as Essence and corruption flows into me in its raw state, like is pulled to like. The greater the speed at which I have things moving, the less difficult it is to refine something, and the more it ejects unsuited components to the next circle. I found some tricks to keep the density filters without sacrificing speed, though I’m going to need to disassemble more baskets to get a grasp of it.”

“When some celestial Essence enters my inner circle, it gets refined. The purified Essence moves inwards, and the separated corruption shunts outwards, where it is entrapped and slowly refines further to release additional Essence. The corruption is launched out of circles it doesn’t belong in, then bounces further and further until it gets trapped in ‘its’ tube.”

“Again, when the celestial Essence refines to a greater purity, it loses density and sinks back to my inner circle. It’s like this for all the Essence types I have. I refine them all individually, yet at the same time. The purest Essence is what I use to sustain the circle-tubes that hold everything together. It’s a poor technique… in that it’s horrendously wasteful.”

“On a happier note, I am slowly making adjustments to the design, hopefully into something more permanent and stable. It takes extra Essence to ‘basket weave’, but efficiency rises. I save an extra little bit of Essence from then on. Progress is incremental, but by the celestial I’m getting the hang of it!”

“What is particularly entertaining is when some water corruption enters the weaved tube that holds the fire corruption. It’s as if there’s a brawl! A fiery warrior jumps from his seat, ruthlessly barrels forth, and slams his fist into the water corruption’s face to send it launching back out of a rowdy tavern. They do not at all play nice, and any interactions are violent.” Artorian was beaming sagely, still amused at the memories of the complicated interplays in his center.

Yvessa nudged him in the arm. “Sounds like you’re not as bored as you seem, Mr. sleeps-all-day. I think you’re trying to hide letting slip that you’re going to add even more circles. How would that help?”

Artorian had his hands back up defensively. “Well, right now I am on the verge of… *ahem*… exploding into large, meaty chunks.”