PSTH: Chapter Twenty-Seven

Why do eyes start glowing when a person gathers enough essence into their body to ignite it and actually form the right mix of ousia, anima, and pneuma that we call essence, rather than the tiny pools modern people are born with? The answer is a lot more complex than you might expect, but it essentially boils down to this: humans have ousia, but we aren’t entirely constructed from it in the same way that Primals are. But there are a few spots where our ousia shines through and fundamentally alters our biology. The first and most obvious is the eyes…

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A lecture on essence-biology interactions, V.F. Stein, 411 Modern-Era

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As I started to work on the second video, the blankets around the table lifted, and I flinched back, blinking rapidly at the sterile white overhead light. Hex hissed at the light, crawling deeper into the shadows, and Scales’ tail wagged for a moment. 

“It’s dinner. You can reasonably skip lunch, but the baseline caloric intake needed for a healthy human body makes it unwise to skip two meals in one day,” Gawain said, his voice still the calm, confident, neutral tone that he seemed to default to. It was as if he didn’t even realize how incredibly strange the way he’d phrased what he just said was. 

I stared at him dumbly for a second before blinking and nodding. I started to rise, bumped my head on the top of the table, then grunted, rubbed my head, and crawled out from the table. Gawain seized my arm and helped pull me to my feet with surprising strength. 

“Thanks,” I muttered, then smiled at Gawain. “And for remembering dinner.” 

“I was just cultivating,” Gawain said. “It was simple to keep track of time while I did that.” 

I wasn’t so sure about it being easy, but maybe he’d trained himself to duck in and out of his cultivation, so he wouldn’t be caught entirely off guard if something happened while he gathered essence. But his comment had reminded me of something else entirely. 

“I need to work on active cultivation. Moving cultivation. Whatever it’s called?” 

“You can’t do it?” Gawain asked, frowning. The way he said it was judgemental, and it made me bristle. 

“I only learned about it recently,” I snapped. “It’s not that I’m incompetent. I’ve just never practiced.” 

“My mother made me read and master the content from Deluike’s Seven Principles of Cultivation as soon as I awakened,” Gawain said idly as we started to walk through the halls of the hostel. “It took a while, but she said that a firm foundation and early mastery would do more to help me advance rapidly than rushing my advancement and running into issues.” 

I made a mental note of the book, though I wouldn’t tell Gawain that I’d do that. He still seemed to be disapproving, as if I’d chosen to rush headfirst into things without reading. 

“I studied one of the highest rated open source modules for essence control and awakening, and taught myself the Bond Primal spell,” I said. “It’s not like I’m rushing into things without working. I just hadn’t really experienced moving cultivation.” 

“Oh,” Gawain said, before going silent again. We walked down the stairs and toward the small dining area, where I paused for a moment to check the allergens, before heading in. 

“It’s really not about breaking off a part of your brain,” Gawain said as he began moving in line. Tonight they’d put out lots of corn, some green beans, a soup made from pumpkin, acorn, and butternut squash, a spiced tofu curry, brown rice, and some loaves of bread – the harvest was coming in, after all. As a result, the dining hall was packed with people who were either here to stay the night, were in need of a free meal, or simply here for their own reasons. 

“What’s not?” I asked as I ladled some soup into a bowl. 

“Moving cultivation, or any sort of ‘do something else while cultivating’ technique in general,” Gawain said. “It’s not about breaking off a part of your mind. People talk about compartmentalizing, but fundamentally, that isn’t how raisins work.” 

“How raisins work?” I asked with a chuckle of amusement. He’d been spooning out some raisins to put on his soup – a weird combination, but not one that I was going to judge him for, at least not until I tried it. 

“Perfect example, actually. The brain doesn’t have the ability to multitask, we just flip back and forth between tasks rapidly. You can’t split your focus, not really. You just flipper quickly.” 

“I’m pretty sure I can split my focus,” I said, frowning. “I focus better when I’m doing something else.”

“That’s different, sort of. But what I mean is really focusing. Not fiddling or pacing or listening to something. Actually focusing on two things at once. It doesn't work.” 

“I don’t know…” 

“If you think you can, then prove it,” he challenged.

“How?” I asked, genuinely curious now. 

“Count to twenty six. Say the alphabet. Then flipper between them. If you can really multitask, you should be able to run the alphabet and the numbers at the same time – one, B, three, D, five, F…” 

I did as he said, only to stumble pretty quickly – I got to one, B, three, but then I said C, rather than D, as my brain tried to just add one to B, instead of two. I tried again and got further, then a third time, getting further still. Gawain was giving me a triumphant grin as he nodded at me.

“Exactly. That’s moving cultivation.” 

I paused my repetition, and Gawian explained. 

“You can switch tasks fairly well. Probably better than I could when I started. Both moving cultivation is about learning to switch between the two tasks, and making the task of cultivating easier. One of the most common points of failure for people who attempt to learn to cultivate while sprinting or something of that sort is to attempt to delegate their task to a smaller and smaller part of the brain until it becomes subconscious. Better to learn to do it with less focus, not a smaller part of the brain.” 

“I suppose I can see that,” I acquiesced. “Thanks for the tip.” 

“Eh. It’s really more about your Primals. They shouldn’t be slowed down because you failed to educate yourself well.” 

I closed my eyes and took a breath, trying to calm the spike of annoyance that I felt. It was like every time that Gawain did something that seemed halfway to reasonable, he had to turn around and say something like that. 

It was so much worse than if he were just one or the other. If he was constantly being rude and talking down, then I’d be able to completely write him off. If he had been constantly nice, then I’d probably try to befriend him. Instead it was this constant hot and cold tug-of-war between being surprisingly kind, thoughtful, and gentle, and being a rich prick who was starting to get the same sort of ideas that the Obsidian Kings had held.

We ate dinner in silence, and I checked messages on my augpad. Rane was busy tonight, caught up with a school project – disappointing, but I couldn’t exactly blame her. River and Laurel had responded with an image of their booked tickets for the tour, which was currently half-filled. I reacted to it with a heart, and felt myself lighten some – it was actually rather good to know that even after I left Tourmaline, I wasn’t going to be left alone. I didn’t mind being alone – it meant I didn’t need to rely on anyone else, for one – but it was always nice to know that I’d be with friends. 

“I want to fight you,” Gawain said, pulling me out of my thoughts. I blinked and looked up, only to see his lavender gaze fixed steadily and firmly on me. 

“I want to fight you,” he repeated. “An official duel between us, recorded and posted. It would make a good follow up video to our duels against Cruz.” 

At the prospect, Scales and Hex both perked up,

“I… yeah, it actually would make a good follow up,” I admitted. “I’m not busy tonight, do you want to do it after dinner?” 

“The lighting would be better tomorrow,” Gawain said, shaking his head. I sighed and nodded, accepting that he was probably right – there would be lights on in any place that was open to Primal battling, but it was late in the evening, and natural light was probably better. 

I left the dining area not much later, and spent some more time in the evening recording lines and editing together the longer video, putting things in order. I didn’t finish that night before I went to sleep – I kept better track of time, since I was pretty sure that I would die of embarrassment if Gawain had to help me to remember to go to bed on time. 

The following morning, Gawain was gone, and Rane was in classes, so I returned to editing everything together for my video on the full challenge against Councillor Cruz. Once it was finished, I set it up to be ready to post as soon as this time period of his tests were complete, then spent a while actually reading into the modules I’d downloaded on moving cultivation. 

It was both simpler and harder than I expected. On the cultivation side of things, it was extremely simple, little better than reaching out to the essence around you and slipping it into your spirit. Sure, you had to work on the connection between your ousia and your body, which was difficult initially as it wasn’t something that I’d done before, but once I figured out how to feel that connection, forming the whirlpool to pull in essence was easy. 

Within half an hour, I was able to maintain a steady vortex shape within my spirit to pull in the ambient essence. It was almost completely ineffective, but easy, so I could move onto the next portion of the task: actually trying to do other things. Namely, the moving that gave this its name, as muscle movements shifted a person’s ousia, and allowed new essence to slip into the tiny gaps. 

As soon as I stood up, my ousia shifted, and I lost command over the whirlpool. It spin slower as I failed to make the adjustments on the fly that were needed in order to keep it matched exactly to my now differently shaped ousia. Learning to adjust it wasn’t hard, exactly, but it did take some focus. Before long, I was able to walk, but walking wasn’t all that known for taking up mental space. It also didn’t actually provide a ton of essence – less than I could have gathered with my standard, focused cultivation method.

What if I tried something else? I started trying to do sit ups, and immediately almost lost it again. I wrestled it back into place, and then started working. This was harder, causing my weave to shift more, and in ways that it wasn’t quite as used to. That, in turn, made the vortex harder to maintain, but also let it deliver much more essence into the shifting ousia. To my chagrin, Gawain’s advice to focus on switching was actually fairly helpful. The whirlpool could hold on for a few moments on its own, letting me sit up, focus on stabilizing it, then lay down, stabilize again, sit up, and so on and so forth.

I was getting into the rhythm, and could tell I’d worked up something of a sweat when a familiar, overly-confident voice, this time laced with traces of syrupy, sarcastic amusement, called out. It instantly snapped me out of my dual focus on situps and cultivation.

“Should I come back later?”