The Stargazer's War - Chapter 29

Chapter 29: Trying it Out

I slammed my head into the sitting area table. The reinforced resin against my forehead made a rather satisfying thud, even as I let out a groan. “It’s not working.”

“Then try again,” Charlotte repeated for the umpteenth time. “You know how this works, Cal. You do it over and over again until you figure it out.”

With a well-executed—if I do say so myself—overdramatic sigh, I pushed off against the edge of the table to bring my head up and send me collapsing into the booth’s plush backrest. The housing D lobby was fairly busy at the late afternoon hour, but Arthur had been kind enough to snag us a table while I was still in class. Xavier and Charlotte both had made the trek over from B-block, sparing us all the attention my presence would accrue somewhere the neighbors hadn’t already gotten bored of me.

“Yes, ma’am, Senior Cadet, ma’am.” I doubled up on the honorifics as I referred to Charlotte as my favorite thing to call her in the two months since she’d made copper. It hadn’t gotten a rise out of her then, and it certainly didn’t now, but that’s showbiz, baby.

I forcibly unclenched my jaw and shut my eyes, ignoring the vision of my core that sprang to view to focus instead on the world beyond my skin. I thankfully didn’t have to peer far enough to be blinded by Xavier or Charlotte’s blazing cores, but the ambient qi of Fyrion still shone an unwelcome distraction into my mind’s eye. I ignored it too.

Next, I visualized the sigil for force palm, a fairly simple shape of two loops and a pair of skewed crossing lines. I’d long memorized the form to ridiculous precision, well aware how even the slightest inaccuracy could severely alter the technique’s effects if not ruin it entirely. I wagered that’s where Charlotte imagined my failure.

But I never even got that far.

With the sigil locked firmly in position just above my upturned right palm, I pulled a thread of qi off my core, ran it along my tendon meridian to get it to my hand, and pushed.

It didn’t make it to the sigil. Well, some of it did, in exactly the same way that if you exhale in the same room as a ballon, some of your breath will wind up inside, but you could be damn sure that ballon wasn’t inflating any time soon.

Instead of flowing directly from my body into the technique, my qi dispersed the moment it left my body, spilling out in all directions like a gas line with no pressure behind it. It was like trying to throw confetti at someone. No amount of effort was going to make it go very far.

Still I tried and still I failed, pouring out more and more qi with every attempt only for it to dissipate and drift away into the infinite sea without actually doing anything.

Can you believe that? All this time spent building up to the point where I could do magic, and it didn’t even work. That was some bullshit.

“It’s okay, Cal.” Xavier reached across the table to put a hand on my shoulder. “It took me almost a year before I mastered my first technique. Keep at it, and I know you’ll get there.”

“No, no, it’s not mastery that’s the problem.” I shook my head. “It just doesn’t work. Here, show it to me again.”

Xavier shrugged and held out his hand, emulating the force palm as I watched, wincing, through my spiritual senses. Sure enough, the qi sprang straight from his hand into the sigil, completing its motion and dissipating into the atmosphere alongside the tiny burst of dark qi all techniques seemed to generate.

I sighed. “Okay, so, it looks like the problem is my qi. Your qi wants to do things. It practically jumps from your body into the sigil, races around, and dissipates. Mine just wants to sit. It’s like trying to push a wave onto shore. It doesn’t matter how well I visualize the technique if qi won’t even go in.”

“Then find a way to make it,” Charlotte said as if it were that easy. “Sticking to your wave analogy, manipulate the tides, lower the shoreline, dig a canal.”

“Okay, the analogy isn’t perfect,” I admitted, “but you get the point.” I looked down at the sigil, still drawn up on my holopad. “Maybe it’s this technique. Maybe I need something better suited to my qi.”

“Ah, yes, it’s the technique’s fault.” Charlotte laughed. “Cal, if I had a credit for every cultivator who’s said that, I wouldn’t be bargaining for favors.”

Xavier scratched his head. “Maybe he’s right. Cal’s qi has never worked the same as ours. Why would it work with the same techniques?”

“Sure, that’s possible,” Charlotte countered, “but that’d mean Cal has to come up with his own sigils for everything. Without even a rudimentary understanding of what would work with Cal’s qi, we’re either flailing in the dark or sitting around waiting for divine inspiration.”

“Divine inspiration?” I jumped on the curious phrase. “What’s divine inspiration?”

Charlotte exhaled. “It’s where most techniques originally came from. If you pay sharp attention to the world around you and meditate on and on over whatever little detail catches your eye, sometimes a technique can just… come to you.”

I snapped my fingers. “Just like that?”

“Just like that.” Charlotte didn’t echo the gesture. “On the face of it, it’s far and away the best way to learn a technique. You can reach a level of mastery that usually takes years of training in a matter of moments, and you’ll understand the technique way better than anyone who just memorizes the sigil, but it’s not remotely consistent. There are stories of cultivators spending decades of their lives watching the way rabbits hop or something equally stupid and never getting a technique out of it. There are also stories of inspiration striking out of nowhere and cultivators generating techniques from from the most trivial observations.”

“So I just have to meditate? That sounds easy enough.”

Charlotte threw her had back in frustration. “Cal, stop it. Chasing inspiration is a fool’s errand. You’ll end up wasting half your life contemplating something silly just for the chance at maybe getting a technique out of it, a technique you can neither choose nor predict. That guy who watched rabbits hop? Thirty years later he discovered a technique for making your hair softer.”

“That exists?” I ran a hand through my hair. “That exists and we’re starting with force palm? I want the fuzziness sigil!”

Charlotte let out a noise somewhere between an exasperated groan and a scream into the abyss, complete with forward collapse onto the table. Even worse, her forehead landed softly on her arm, denying us all of that satisfying thud sound I’d come to appreciate. Her and those damn glasses.

I chuckled. “Seriously, though, divine inspiration may be my best bet. I have no idea why this isn’t working, which means nowhere to begin figuring out what could work. If I could manifest a new technique, at least I’d have something to go off of.”

“Just don’t waste too much time on it,” Charlotte said. “You have more important things to worry about. There are four months left before Lopez’s deadline, which means four months before you need to either fight Long or leave the sect.”

“I’m not leaving. We’ve been over this.”

Charlotte nodded. “In which case, you need to focus on two things: sparring Xavier, and advancing to copper. Any duel with Long is going to be unscheduled, which means no qi attacks allowed anyway. What will be allowed is his superior mastery of the Dragon’s Fang, and his superior everything else if he’s a stage higher than you.”

“But I want to do magic.”

“It’s not magic,” Xavier corrected. “It’s a practiced externalization of your qi.”

“C’mon. I worked so hard to get this far. I can’t just give up on learning godsdamned magic.”

Charlotte scowled at me, though whether for the content of my comment or the foul language within, I couldn’t guess. “An external qi technique isn’t going to help you fight Long. You’re going to have a hard enough time preparing if you don’t waste precious hours praying for inspiration.”

“But what if it does help me fight him?”

“Cal, external qi attacks are banned outside of dueling day,” Xavier reminded me. “If you try and use one…”

“The sensors won’t pick it up,” Charlotte finished as realization dawned. “You can’t get caught because nobody can sense your qi anyway.”

“Well, Nick’s working on that but I don’t fancy his odds.”

Xavier leaned in and lowered his voice, speaking in a whisper sharp enough to shave with. “Cal, that’s cheating. You can’t cheat in an official duel.”

“He’s abusing his power to get me kicked out of the sect! How is he not already cheating?”

“That doesn’t make it okay.”

“Actually, I’d say it does,” Charlotte leapt to my defense. “It’s not about rank. It’s not about winning resources from other members unfairly. It’s about staying in the sect at all. Cal should win, and he should do so by any means necessary.”

“No,” Xavier said flatly. “It’s not happening.”

“Every edge, Xavier. Every edge.”

“Cal will win fairly or not at all.”

“Guys, guys,” I intervened in an attempt to stop the argument before it could pick up too much momentum. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t actually have any functional techniques, remember?”

“I can’t believe you’re this stuck on it.” Charlotte kept on arguing. “You’d rather let Long win than break the rules he’s been abusing this entire time?”

“Why are losing or cheating the only options? Caliban has a warrior’s spirit, and I know he can do this. I believe in him.”

“Except there isn’t a reason to take that risk! All I’m saying is that if, by some miracle, inspiration strikes and Cal comes up with a relevant technique, he should use it to secure his place here—a place he deserves.”

“He should use it to cheat. That’s what you just said. That he should cheat.”

“Because in this instance, it’s justified.”

“Cheating begets cheating. It erodes one’s character, it makes a mockery of the systems on which we base our lives, and it is never, ever justified.” Xavier pushed himself to his feet. “That’s it. I’m done.” He stormed out of the lobby, nearly knocking some poor housing D-er on his face in his anger.

Charlotte just watched him go.

I blinked, eyes darting back and forth between the hall to the transport platform and Charlotte sitting across from me. “Is… um… is everything alright?”

“Yeah. He’ll be fine by this evening. He’s just…” Charlotte sighed. “Xavier. You never really know what silly hill he’s going to die on next.”

“Really? That seemed… pretty predictable to me. He romanticizes dueling and hates things that undermine it. Threads, I could see that fight coming the moment you stepped in to defend the idea.”

“Every edge, Cal,” Charlotte repeated. “I get why he wouldn’t like cheating, but you’d think he’d see reason.”

“Xavier has his own reasoning. You know that. What I don’t get is why you aren’t listening to it.”

“He’s the one who isn’t listening to—”

“If either of you were listening to the other, nobody would’ve stormed off,” I interrupted.

“It’s just so stupid.” Charlotte planted her head in her hands. “It’s a pointless argument about what to do in the case of divine inspiration. Do you have any idea how absurd that sounds?”

“The word ‘absurd’ lost all meaning to me a while ago. Let’s just assume that anything can happen, up to and including divine inspiration, divine motivation, divine experimentation, and, because why the hell not, divine hydration. Even the gods have gotta get thirsty sometimes, right?”

Charlotte just stared at me.

“What? That was funny. I’m funny.”

“Assuming you don’t pull a technique out of nowhere in a matter of months, we really should talk about other steps. You’re making good progress with incorporating Cedric’s steps, but none of that’s going to matter if you can’t make copper in time, ideally with a week’s leeway to practice at the higher stage.”

“Okay, but copper’s easy right?”

Charlotte twitched, like, actually twitched. Her left eye and the corner of her mouth both jerked ever so slightly towards an expression of abject rage before returning to neutral, all in under a second.

“Easy for you, maybe.” She masterfully suppressed any trace of anger in her voice. “For most of us, it’s one of the hardest.”

“Right, right, but it’s also the simplest. I don’t need to craft a focus or reforge my body or replace all my blood with apple juice or whatever. I just have to whip up enough qi and go to town.”

Charlotte’s hand returned rather firmly to her forehead. “Please refrain from referring to core advancement as going to town. Yes, copper is the only stage that gated exclusively by qi access, and yes, in your case that makes it easier than any of the others, but it’s not that simple.”

“Why not? It seems pretty simple.”

“Because it can’t be! It takes years of preparation, hours and hours of focus room time, of scrimping and scraping and fighting for every scrap you can get, every pill, every natural treasure, every edge. And then you’ll be…” She trailed off as her brain caught up with her mouth. “Gods damnit. You could do it today, couldn’t you?”

“Language.” I aped Lucy’s tone of voice, flashing my best shit-eating as I enjoyed my hypocrisy. “And should I? Do you think that’d make learning a technique easier?”

Charlotte exhaled and rubbed at her temples. “I hate you. Just… know that I hate you.”

I grinned. “Noted. Actually, though. Do you think hitting copper would help get divine inspiration?”

“You’re not getting divine inspiration. Give it up,” Charlotte chided. “And I wouldn’t push it. I guess if you…” She paused in clear thought. “Sorry, this isn’t something I’ve had to consider before. Most people can’t just immediately jump to copper the day after they make tin.”

“But I could.”

“I’d hold off. Wait a week, maybe a bit more. Your body’s probably still undergoing changes from forming your core. It’s probably best you let it, give yourself a chance to get used to it before you push forward again.”

I nodded. “I can do that.” I looked down at my hand, clenching and unclenching it as I watched. “It kind of already feels normal. Like, I know I’m stronger, faster, tougher, all that stuff even before I start cycling, but it still feels like me.”

“Good,” Charlotte said. “With any luck, it’ll never stop feeling like you. Waiting a few days to hit copper isn’t going to kill you.”

“Alright, alright. I’ll wait until my next day off. In the meantime, I think we should revisit my graduation schedule.”

Charlotte narrowed her eyes at me. “How do you mean?”

“I just need to fake two more meridians before I can test out of cycling, and I’m pretty sure I could pass meditation now if I pushed it. Yeah, people will think I’m a prodigy if I graduate that fast, but that might work in my favor. If-slash-when I beat Long, it’ll be better if I already have a reputation as some kind of genius. The alternative is…”

“They accuse you of cheating,” Charlotte finished. “Another point in Xavier’s column.” She shook her head. “It’ll look fishy either way, and I guarantee Long isn’t going to take the loss well, but you may be right. You’ll even have more time to train if you’re not stuck in class all morning.”

“Exactly! So let’s see… I’m waiting a week or so to push for copper, setting aside my next three focus room hours to fake opening two meridians and forming my core, and practicing for the meditation two exam.”

“And working on force palm,” Charlotte added. “Like it or not, figuring it out is still your best chance at ever learning a technique. Mess with it. Experiment. I know trial and error isn’t very exciting, but it’s the only way you’re going to figure out what isn’t working.”

“Yep, yep,” I said, pantomiming typing notes into my holopad as I spoke. “Trial and error my way through the problem. I’ll get right on that.” I lowered my holopad to look directly at her. “In the meantime, could you clarify something for me?”

“Of course.” Charlotte straightened in her seat. “That’s what I’m here for. What’s unclear? The qi regulation into the sigil? The classifications of different types of techniques? The synergies inherent in a well rounded arsenal?”

“Yes, well, I was wondering…” I leaned in, resting my elbows on the table and clasping my hands together with my fingers intertwined. “What would be the best thing to meditate on for divine inspiration?”

Charlotte groaned.

I smiled back at her.

Xavier may’ve stormed off, and Nick may’ve hidden away nowhere to be seen, and my first attempts at magic may’ve fallen painfully flat, but none of that felt insurmountable. Charlotte and Xavier would inevitably patch things up before the day was out, Nick finally had a use for me now that I could externalize my qi, and as for the magic, well, apparently I just needed to find the right inspiration.

How hard could that be?

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