[Severed Divinity] 57-58

Chapter 57. Not Behind in Everything

The last time Isen had seen something so… mystical was in the Compass of Legacy, when he’d seen the story of the Sentinel of the Abyss and Legacy. Even after Teacher Conrin’s manifestation ended, he stared transfixed at the spot it had occupied.

He wondered what Ros would think about the story. He was reminded of what the beast had told him about the advancement of monsters. At the peak of each tier, a monster entered what Ros had called the beast dream, the culmination of their experiences, triumphs, and failures into a set of paths that they could walk.

Had Tsuna also had a sort of beast dream, showing her the way to the fifth tier?

On second thought, Isen didn’t think so. He didn’t fully understand what the point of the story was, just that it felt profound.

Arthum nudged Isen. “Me and Freyan have heard the story before. I’m curious what you think about it.”

“It… didn’t make much sense,” Isen confessed. “I enjoyed it, though.”

Freyan snorted. “It’s not supposed to make sense. It’s ancient philosophy. It makes so little sense people study it for thousands of years and still have no idea what it’s about.”

Arthum frowned. “Tsuna the Wise really did advance to the fifth tier. It’s not just a story.”

Freyan just shrugged.

Arthum sighed. “My parents have always said that the story is really about cultivation.” He placed a hand on his stomach. “What is a cultivator’s core? If you cut a person open, you won’t find a physical core.”

“The same goes with mages with their mystic seeds,” Freyan pointed out.

“Sure. The point remains—just because something isn’t physically present doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Cultivation, magic, ideas… dreams.” He looked at Isen. “That which is immaterial shapes reality surer than any shovel or sword.”

“Don’t let him fool you into thinking he’s smart,” Freyan said. “He’s quoting an old elf.”

“A human, actually,” Arthum said. “The tier four sage, Elias of the Southern Isles.”

Teacher Conrin interrupted the conversation and called them to arrange the pillows into a circle. When everyone had taken their seats, he launched into a series of questions that Isen had trouble following. They used many words he’d never heard, probably philosophical or archaic terms. He quickly picked up on the nature of the questions just going off the responses of the other students, which used less grandiose language.

The crux of it was the nature of advancement past the fourth tier. Isen soaked everything up like a sponge.

The fifth tier was called the nascent soul stage, and it was the same for both cultivators and mages. It marked the convergence of the two paths. Reaching the nascent soul stage required the impossible transformation of the mystic seed or the cultivator core into the soul vessel.

Much of the discussion revolved around whether Tsuna living a lifetime as a butterfly—ostensibly a divine beast, and therefore a cultivator—in the dream allowed her to make the jump to evolving her mystic seed.

Isen’s head wandered to what he’d learned about Lumina Eldrassin’s legacy—and her attempt to forge a path to the fifth tier. Nascent soul.

“Isen, do you have any thoughts?” Teacher Conrin asked.

He flinched. He wanted to say no, to be quiet, but he knew that wasn’t the best path to take. In the end, even though he didn’t think it was perfectly related, he decided to bring up the beast dream. “I wonder if, when divine core monsters advance to nascent soul, they dream of being mages.”

He didn’t miss the odd looks everyone gave him.

“It’s an interesting thought,” Conrin said. “Seeing as there have been no nascent soul monsters in historical records, it would be difficult to argue one way or the other.”

Isen frowned. None at all?

Suddenly, he understood with much greater clarity how big of a deal Lumina Eldrassin’s legacy was to a power like the Dray Anarchate, headed by a divine core monster. He’d known the fifth tier was difficult to reach, especially given the scarcity of fourth tiers, but still… After hearing the story of the end of the previous era in the Compass of Legacy, he’d assumed that, over the long march of time, the rise of many powerful mages and cultivators was an inevitability.

Isen had assumed the era he lived in was old, or at least not new. But maybe this era was younger than he’d imagined.

One thing was certain, though—class was different from what he’d experienced with Lady Jin. There were moments when he felt a rush of anxiety rising up, but for the most part, he was okay.

After the butterfly discussion, they transitioned to a different subject—mathematics. Teacher Conrin passed out sheets of exercises on clean paper, the words on all of them seemingly identical, as though stamped on.

They were word problems involving rates. One had a diagram showing two messengers moving between Eldrassin and Shor Mei. The objective was to calculate when the two messengers should leave to meet at the checkpoint station. Environmental factors modified the speed of each messenger.

Isen glanced at the other problems and found them similar. One was about hiring laborers to build houses, another was about cultivation speed. That was much more complex, using logarithms to model cultivation growth, and asking the problem-solver to identify which of three cultivators would reach the second tier first, when they all started cultivating at different ages. The problem was marked with the word challenge.

Isen flipped the page over and smiled at the logarithm table conveniently printed onto the back. He’d been worried for a second that elves were expected to have them memorized.

He realized he didn’t have anything to write with, so he nudged Arthum. The boy passed a featherless quill over with a solemn nod, his expression oddly bleak.

Just as Isen started to work through the first problem, Conrin started to speak. It soon became apparent that Conrin wanted them to go through the first problem together, and he walked through it in excruciating detail. It was interesting in the very beginning since Isen picked up on some notational differences between the elven math system and the human one. The elves, for instance, used a comma instead of a period for decimals, and they always wrote fractions vertically, one number on top of the other. Almost everything was the same, however—even the usage of the common alphabet for variables.

Isen began to suspect that he was further along in math than the fourth clade. It was a welcome revelation since he’d started to worry he’d be behind in everything. Goldbounty was a backwater, but Lady Jin’s knowledge of math was seemingly quite good.

Still, as the minutes ticked by and they remained on the first problem, Isen was bored out of his mind. He had never thought it fair that Lady Jin tailored all her lessons to him, but it had been nice.

Only when they finished the second example did it become time for independent work on the challenge problem.

“Raise your hand when you’re done,” Conrin instructed the class.

Isen looked around. It seemed he was the only one that had finished the challenge problem during the main lesson. He hadn’t needed very long—most of the time he’d spent learning how to use the quill, which was actually quite intuitive once he learned to click the button on the side to extend the quill point.

He had an obvious choice. He could keep his hand lowered and wait. That was his natural inclination—to not draw attention to himself in an unfamiliar environment with people he didn’t know well.

Or, he could raise his hand, and reveal that at least when it came to math, he was ahead. The sixth sense didn’t give him an easy indicator that one way was better than the other.

What made the decision easy, in the end, was his boredom. Even if it was only for a month, he didn’t want to just sit and listen to Conrin explain simple math while he stared at the ceiling. He was here to learn as much as he could.

That, and to stand out, though he figured being ahead in mathematics wouldn’t register in Welco’s eyes.

Isen raised his hand. Conrin didn’t reveal any outward expression as he walked over, though Isen noticed a few of the other children, including Arthum and Freyan, staring at him.

Conrin grabbed his sheet, his eyes sweeping over it. He nodded and handed it back. “Join me in the hall for a moment.”

Conrin sealed up the door flap behind them with a push. He spoke quietly in the empty hall. “You did well on the examples. I don’t have a handy way to assess your current level, but can you tell me what math you’ve learned?” He activated the device from earlier, manifesting a list in elvish. Isen didn’t recognize many of the words, but it seemed to be a curriculum by year.

Isen turned to him. “Can you translate these into common?”

Conrin blinked. “Honestly, not off the top of my head.” He paused. “Why don’t I show you some example problems.”

The projection shifted to show a problem with exponents. Isen nodded to him, and he kept going, showing various problems from geometry and trigonometry. It was all what Lady Jin called precalculus.

“That’s it,” Conrin finally said.

Isen just stared at him. “What about…” He wracked his brain. “Calculating rates of change? Or finding the volume of complex shapes?” He’d hated the volume problems, though Lady Jin had always liked them. He remembered her story of a wine merchant who made a fortune using vessels that had a smaller volume despite looking large, selling them for a higher price.

“Those aren’t part of the foundations,” Conrin said. “Some of the mage classes cover those topics, though. I’m surprised you learned them already.”

Isen shrugged. “Most humans don’t have magic. Instead, they have math.” It was one of Lady Jin’s sayings.

Conrin just stared at him. “We’ll figure something out.”

Chapter 58. Cultivation Assessment

Isen struggled in some of the other subjects. Reading and writing remained difficult, and he’d made a fool of himself reading aloud an elven poem, though everyone’s laughter had been good-natured rather than demeaning.

Still, Isen didn’t like being inadequate, even if Conrin acknowledged reading elven poetry aloud was particularly difficult because of the ambiguity and wordplay made possible by the language’s lack of written plurals and verb conjugation.

History, too, was a total wash—Isen hadn’t known anything, or at least it had felt that way. So many names, places, and events that he hadn’t recognized. So many new words, and his understanding of the writing system was only rudimentary. With common, he could look at the words and his brain just… understood them. With the elven script, he had to painstakingly sound out most words.

He could think better, faster, since cultivating, but that wasn’t a panacea.

What surprised him the most were the two classes on the arts—art and music. They’d taken an hour-long break for lunch, then reconvened outside. The weather was brisk, but comfortable. They started with music.

The guard at the clan’s front gates let Conrin through as he led them out of the sect, off the elevated path. They walked through the tall grass and through beds of flowers, stopping when they reached a small grove with many stones to sit on. The projector device Conrin used could also produce sound, so he pulled it out and introduced today’s subject.

“About fifty years ago, when I was traveling in the Highlands of Erakai, I had the privilege of listening to a performance of Dianona's Windswept on local folk instruments. This is my recollection.”

The other pupils made themselves comfortable. Some closed their eyes. Isen watched intently as Conrin activated the projection device.

Mere seconds in, he knew that he’d never heard anything like this before.

He’d heard wandering bards, minstrels—people who told stories through music for coin. He’d enjoyed such music as much as anyone else. It was entertainment.

This music didn’t have any words, nor did it have a repeating melodic line. The tempo shifted, sometimes hurried, sometimes slow. The instruments were unfamiliar to him, lots of flutes and a single stringed instrument played by two people. Conrin wasn’t showing every motion of the musicians—the projected picture shifted every half minute or so.

When it came to a close, Conrin went around the circle and asked the cultivators to describe what they thought. The responses could be anything. One half elf boy said he’d almost fallen asleep, eliciting Conrin’s laughter. Another had started discussing the instruments and skill of the performers.

But many of them talked about what the music made them feel.

“I feel anxious,” Freyan said, “like I’m being whisked away off a cliff, plunged into the unknown!”

Some shared Freyan’s opinion, while others thought the song was upbeat, about a new beginning.

Isen didn’t know what he thought. It was just so different.

He wanted to hear more.

They stayed in the same place when they transitioned to art class. Conrin passed out thin sheets of metal and instructed them to etch a flower of their choosing into it.

Isen didn’t understand, so he watched the others for an example. Arthum barely moved from his starting position. He bent down and ran his finger over the small petals of a dandelion, then used his quill to etch the metal, warping it out to capture the three-dimensional flower. It was almost like sculpting.

Isen walked through the meadow, absorbing the beauty all around him, so unlike the barren plains in Goldbounty and the rugged forests of greater Eldrassin, not to mention the depths. He had never seen so many flowers in a single place in his entire life.

His feet took him to a small bush covered in red flowers. Isen didn’t recognize most flowers, though he knew these from one of Lady Jin’s books. Roses.

He lay down on his stomach and etched one of the half-open buds. He was so focused on his task he didn’t notice Conrin until the half elf cast him in shadow. The teacher knelt down and peered at Isen’s metal square.

“How did you decide to etch from this angle?” the half elf asked.

Isen blinked. “I didn’t really think about it.”

Conrin hovered his pointer finger over the rose stem. “In your etching, the stem and thorns are close to the viewer—that’s us—and the bloom extends away.”

“Should I have done it the other way?”

Conrin shook his head. “You captured the thorns well. I like how they stick up sharply from the stem.”

Isen lost track of time. When Conrin called them back, he was proud of his rendition of the rose bud. When Isen glimpsed the creations of the others, however, he realized his was a bit… rough. His etching strokes were visible and harsh, while most of theirs were smoothed out.

Still, he thought he’d done well for his first time ever doing real art.

And the next time, he’d do even better.

Conrin took them back to Clan Femera. When they reached the gate, he waved them off.

“What now?” Isen asked Arthum.

“Cultivation; did you forget?”

Isen laughed. “Of course not.” He’d been waiting all day for this, it felt like, though classes had gone by much quicker than he’d expected. They hadn’t felt like classes as much as… invitations to discuss and think. Even in history, Conrin hadn’t lectured, instead recounting history like it was a story. He’d led the class through the early days of Shor Mei’s founding, calling the students to investigate why the city had been founded on the upper coastline of the Gulf of Onyssia.

The fourth clade gathered in the main ring where two instructors were waiting. One of them he recognized immediately: Jorin. The other was a tan woman with warm brown eyes and dry, gray hair. She was old, like old old. Isen had never seen such an old cultivator. Despite her age, she stood straight, and her arms looked strong. When she smiled, she still had all her teeth.

“Fourth clade!” Jorin called out.

The kids gathered around him and the old woman, expressions eager but serious. “We’re ready to learn, honored instructors,” Arthum said. He stood at the center of the group, representing the clade.

A smile broke Jorin’s stoic expression. “You’d better be.” The smile disappeared as quickly as it came. “Spread out.”

Everyone scattered, keeping at least ten feet away from everyone else.

“Cycle for twenty breaths. When you’re done, tier ones to Meridia, tier twos to me.”

Everyone remained standing to cycle, so Isen followed suit. He closed his eyes and breathed as deeply as he could, falling into a half-trance. As the twentieth breath left him, he opened his eyes.

He was the last one standing on his own.

He knew, mentally, that he was supposed to stand out… but he hated it. Once, when hunting on the way to Eldrassin City, he’d finally found a deer. He’d lined up the shot, and just when he’d been ready to let the arrow fly, the animal had sensed him, its eyes wide, spooked. He’d just stared at it, and it at him, frozen.

That’s how he felt now as Freyan and Arthum leveled gazes filled with barely concealed envy. It was funny how jealousy worked in people, humans and elves alike. They’d beaten him yesterday in spars, but that was quickly forgotten between him cultivating in the D-ranked chamber and now breathing longer, as if that really carried some kind of grand significance.

Isen joined the other tier twos with Jorin off to the edge of the ring, away from the other clade members, who sat on the ground in front of Meridia.

“Keep practicing that exercise,” Jorin said, turning from Freyan and Arthum to Isen. “First, I need to assess your fundamentals.”

“What do you need me to do?”

“I’m going to use assessment gloves,” he said, pulling a pair of innocuous gloves made of deep blue patterned cloth from a pocket. “And specs.”

Isen hadn’t seen a single person with glasses or even a monocle in Eldrassin, where almost every half elf was at least partially through the hollow formation stage, and all elves were born with superior physiques. These glasses were clearly abnormal, with a reflective green coating.

Jorin approached Isen. “While you cycle, I’ll need to place my hands on you. Ignore it as best you can.”

“Okay.” He breathed in, holding the energy in his hollow core, where it flowed through his rings. Jorin placed a hand on his back and on his stomach, just beneath his ribs. As Isen cycled, Jorin adjusted his hands, moving them over Isen’s body.

Isen drew the energy out of his core and through his meridians, flushing them with power. He normally didn’t keep his whole body full of energy like this, since it was hard to control and fatiguing, but he could maintain it for a few minutes at least.

When Jorin removed his hands and stood back, Isen exhaled and vented the energy from his fingers, forming an energy ball in his hands and—

Isen’s eyes snapped open.

Jorin stared at the swirling ball of air between Isen’s hands. “Face away from the others,” he said slowly, voice level, “then expel the energy into the ground.”

Isen turned away and sent the energy ball toward the edge of the ring. It was a small one—it barely made a dust cloud.

Isen spun back to Jorin. They locked eyes, and Isen wondered what the older man was thinking. His face revealed nothing of his thoughts. Isen didn’t think anybody else had seen, otherwise there’d be more of a commotion.

“Did a tier three teach you that?” Jorin finally asked.

“Yes. My master.”

“Your—?”

“Clan Head Welco was generous enough to bring me into the sect to receive more… formal instruction while my master lingers in a forbidden zone.”

Jorin massaged his temples. “Is there anything else I should know about?”

Too many things to count. Isen just shook his head.

Jorin sighed and removed the glasses and gloves, then withdrew what looked like a thin pane of cloudy glass from a fold within his tunic. Strings of energy connected to it from the assessment gear. As Jorin held it out, the strings snapped, and a rainbow sheen flickered across the pane.

“This,” he began, “is your assessment.”