Chapter 58: A Divine Beast and a Fool
"In other words, stop asking questions and start cultivating."
We reached the edge of the sect.
The gate was unmanned at this hour.
I went through it and Zhen walked beside me and the two guards who were supposed to be at the gate were both asleep against the wall.
Tsk.
Nobody noticed me come back.
Nobody noticed Zhen at all.
"Can other people see you,"
"If I choose to be seen,"
"That sounds dangerous."
"Why?"
"Because you can become invisible."
"Correct."
"That means you can spy on people."
"Technically."
"Zhen."
"Yes."
"Have you done that?"
"Frequently."
"You are invisible by choice."
"My visibility is a setting I control,"
"Zhen,"
"Yes."
"Would you like to be my cultivation partner?"
She stopped walking.
"I am not marrying you."
"What?"
That is what humans usually mean when they ask questions like that."
"I meant training partner."
"Well, You are asking a divine beast who has been in a cave for three hundred years to be the cultivation partner of a human girl with no core who has been in this world for four days."
"Yes,"
"That is an extremely audacious request."
"Is the answer no."
She was quiet.
"The answer is that I find you considerably less annoying than I expected to find you, which is a high bar given my expectations."
"Is that a yes?"
"It is not a no,"
I decided to take it.
I got back to my room before the morning bell.
I changed into a clean uniform,
Which involved discovering that my locker had been rifled through while I was in the cave because the lock had been broken before I arrived and had apparently continued to be an invitation.
Three of my spare uniforms were missing and the rest had been disarranged in the way things were disarranged when someone had gone through them quickly and not bothered to put them back.
The girl.
I thought about her voice the other day and the particular quality of cruelty that came with it.
I straightened the remaining uniforms and closed the locker.
Not now. Core first.
I sat on my broken bed and opened the Core Fundamentals in my skill tab and started reading.
***
Forty eight hours,
The actual time was closer to thirty.
The theory was dense but not complicated once the framework was established.
The key distinction, as Ancestor Shen had started to explain before the system cut him off, was the structural difference between building a pure root core and the mixed-root method most cultivation manuals described.
The pure root method built the container with absolute uniformity, same material, same thickness, same capacity throughout.
No branching, no compromise, maximum efficiency in exchange for maximum up-front difficulty.
Most pure root cultivators who tried the standard method ended up with structural faults in their cores that expressed themselves as bottlenecks at higher cultivation stages.
The faults were not detectable early.
They were detectable when everything was already very difficult to fix.
Wei Xue had been heading toward those faults.
I was going to build it correctly instead.
I set the skill tab to background and closed my eyes and found the space two inches below my sternum and did what Ancestor Shen had started teaching me before the system intervened.
***
The morning bell rang.
I ignored it.
"Rin Yan."
Leo’s voice. I opened my eyes.
He was knocking.
I sat cross-legged on my broken bed with my eyes closed and my hands on my knees in the posture of someone doing something that looked like cultivation.
"Where were you last night,".
"I was restless, so I walked."
"You walked."
"Yes."
"All night."
"The grounds are large, so big, isn’t it?"
He looked at me for a long moment.
Then at my hands, which had minor abrasions on the palms from the rock edge I had pulled myself over.
"The grounds are not large enough to produce those," he said.
I looked at my hands.
"I fell,"
"You fell."
"Several times. I am not graceful at night."
He looked at me. The look of someone deciding whether to push further or not .
"Morning training," he said. "You have twenty-five minutes."
He left after that.
I looked at the wall where Zhen was invisible.
You are a terrible liar, her voice said, from the direction of the window.
"He believed it,
He chose to believe it. Those are different things.
"The outcome is the same."
You sound stupid you know that?
Morning training was the same as yesterday.
Leo, the training ground, the bald head collecting sunlight with scientific consistency.
I stood in my place in the line and did the exercises and did not fall over, which was an improvement on yesterday’s metrics.
The girl was three people to my left. She did not look at me. She was executing the forms with the practiced ease of someone who had been doing them for a long time.
Her cultivation was Foundation Core..
She was stronger than me.
I thought about the Core Fundamentals reading
Building a container was not the same as filling it.
The filling came after.
I did the exercises and waited.
***
After training, there was a theory class.
The theory instructor was a woman with the quality of someone who genuinely loved her subject.
She talked about cultivation stages.
Foundation Core to Spirit Core transition.
The requirements, the structural changes in the core as it evolved, the theoretical framework for understanding why some cultivators advanced quickly and others plateaued.
I listened while writing notes.
I stared at my notes.
None of this made sense.
Was I stupid? I can’t understand a shit.
After theory, combat fundamentals. Leo again.
This class was for people with established cores and involved sparring in pairs,
Which meant I stood at the side and watched because I had no core and therefore no mana to reinforce my body and therefore no business being in a sparring match with anyone who did.
Leo was good at watching. I had noticed that.
The bald exterior communicated blunt force but his eyes were doing something more careful than blunt force.
At one point during the session he looked at me.
At me standing at the side watching the sparring.
I did not change my expression.
He looked away.
***
Lunch time.
I found a corner of the hall that was unclaimed and sat with my food and opened the cultivation framework again in the background of my awareness and ate and worked simultaneously.
This is called multi-tasking.
"You are doing something," Zhen’s voice said.
"Eating."
"Everyone looks so tasty here. Can I eat some?"
"Nope"
"You are meanie."
"Help me with this."
"Building the container," I said, quietly.
"I can feel it, You have made progress since this morning."
"How much."
Hehehe
"It’s like an ant building a castle for humans."
"When the container reaches sufficient structural integrity to hold ambient mana passively," she said.
"At that point it will begin absorbing on its own. The absorption will be visible as a mild atmospheric disturbance to anyone looking for it."
"And that is when it becomes a problem."
"That is when the ripples begin," she said. "Yes."
I ate.
I thought about Ren in a chair for ten years.
The things that stayed.
"Zhen," I said.
"Yes."
"Did you have people? Before the cave."
A pause.
"I had a master," she said.
"The one who built the cave. He put me there to keep me safe during a conflict he was not certain he would survive."
"Did he survive?"
"Don’t know," she said.
"He has not come back. But three hundred years is not necessarily long enough to conclude that someone is dead, depending on what they are."
"You think he might still be alive."
"I think it is possible," she said.
"That’s a difficult situation."
"Yes, It is."
I thought about Ren.
"When I go back," I said, "my brother will be there."
"Oh,"
"He does not know I am here."
"He has been going every day."
I ate the last of my food.
"I am going to come back,"
