Jin spun around, deflecting the bamboo sword slash aimed at his torso, then he completed the movement and lashed out with the crossguard of his lance aimed at the temple of Elder Flower.
The woman, for her part, simply ducked underneath and delivered a punch to his kidney, which sent him sprawling back.
Master and pupil clashed, neither truly getting the upper hand as they exchanged blows.
All of this, Jin observed from an almost 3rd person perspective as he guided his body like a puppet, qi coursing through his veins.
Every few seconds, he would switch the style of his fighting between his own personal style and a copy, or rather, a channelling of Ornstein.
It wasn’t like the two were that different, considering Jin had learned to fight with the lance to create Ornstein back then, but the rhythm was still slightly off.
It was this deliberate switching that was keeping him in the game as Flower came at him, as always, just a step above his maximum output in terms of physical ability and technique.
Jin snapped back to fighting as himself after disorienting his sparring partner with a few rapid switches, spending no longer than a second in each state. Then he swung his lance at torso-height, aiming to cut the Elder’s stomach wide open with the sharp blade.
In that very same moment, a hard-light illusion of the armoured Dragonslayer appeared beside him, thrusting his own lance at Flower as she dodged backwards.
The woman’s eyes danced with amusement as she, for a brief moment, faced two opponents. However, even without taking things up a notch, she was accessing at least enough of her skills to evade all the attacks until Jin’s projection faded for lack of qi.
Then, in that uncomfortable second when an illusion was forcibly dispelled from running out of energy to sustain it, she jumped forward, drove a knee into Jin’s stomach and slammed an elbow into the back of his head when he bent forward in pain.
He landed on the grass with a grunt that tasted slightly of blood.
“Unluckily for you, I know the exact weak points of such techniques,” the woman said with a sigh as she turned around and walked towards the large grey rock in the middle of the clearing and jumped up to sit down, letting her hakama-clad legs dangle in the air.
“Good practice,” Jin grunted, hand to his stomach as he sat up, seeing double from the damage to his head.
“Your projection is good,” the Elder commented idly. “Make an illusion, infuse it with substance, control it through a pattern of movements ingrained in your brain from previous scenario work.”
“It’s just a puppet at this stage,” Jin complained. Anima and templating, he was now knocking on the doors of both the core combat techniques of his sect, but he wasn’t quite there yet. “It’s much more complicated than templating, five years to get to this point?” he shook his head.
“Five years is how long it generally takes other disciples to even create an illusion of that size and complexity,” Flower commented with a raised brow. “Another five is needed to learn how to infuse it with substance, and another five is needed to make the control semi-automatic through the insertion of character.”
“I have higher expectations for myself,” Jin replied bluntly with furrowed brows. He was taking a break from scenario creation ever since having finished rolling out Skyrim a week ago, and had primarily been focusing on his cultivation and his techniques.
“Of course,” Elder Flower said idly. “However, you will find it hard to progress until you finish your core. It is through the core that you can start expressing the Dao. Until then, you will always be mimicking Ornstein, instead of becoming him, creating him, rather than gaining an ally.”
Jin nodded. He’d heard it many times before. Core formation was the prerequisite to gaining access to the more metaphysical aspects of cultivation. The reason he was working on the techniques so hard was because, well, higher qi consumption was often the price paid for using a technique without having strong fundamentals in its components. If he learned how to create the hard light illusion of Ornstein and semi-automate it, then bringing out the real thing would become easier and less costly.
“Why not work on some other animas?” Elder Flower. “You have a wide array of possibilities now that you’ve figured out how to get a character to this level. Eventually, the goal is to bring out several animas at the same time anyway, might as well get started on that too.”
Jin’s head hurt just thinking about it. Simply perfecting the Ornstein anima had taken him so many years, even if he was now familiar with the process and had acquired the skills, any single character was going to take at least a year again.
Another issue he was having was that he had too many possibilities. Most other disciples weren’t nearly as prolific as him and thus didn’t have as many options to choose from. Even if he discarded Outlast and The Last of Us due to the low level combat potential of their characters, Skyrim alone offered a hundred choices.
“The best would be if you could bring out Alduin, of course,” Elder Flower mused out loud. “Until you gain your core, you’ll only be able to use him as a physical obstacle, but afterwards, you’d technically gain access to all his shouts as supplementary techniques.”
“Considering the complexity correlates with qi expenditure, I’d better pick a frostbite spider,” Jin deadpanned. “Another issue is, of course, that I didn’t make Alduin. I outsourced that part of the work to Ting.”
Flower raised her hand and waved it dismissively. “You are still aware of every minutiae of his character, physical composition and ability. Perhaps you could learn how to create an anima of a frostbite spider, a flame atronach and a dragon priest in the time you would need for Alduin, but only one of these would serve as a real trump card.”
“I don’t even think I have enough qi to make an illusion of Alduin yet, let alone a hard projection,” Jin complained.
“Then start small and scale up when possible,” Flower said in a voice that clearly indicated she was getting annoyed.
Unfortunately for her and Jin, he was a contrarian at heart. “But isn’t Alduin the one character that everyone who has experienced Skyrim will have defeated?” he asked. “Wouldn’t it be better to focus on a more obscure one?”
Elder Flower narrowed her eyes at him and looked like she was one additional backtalk away from growling. “You’re so smart you outsmart yourself,” she critiqued. “The Dao is based on context, importance and symbolism. Alduin is the core of Skyrim; he will be the easiest to manifest fully in terms of meaning. You’ll need to build a strong core to maintain him, but learning how to maintain him will give you that stronger core, as it will force development. Creating the more minor characters of Skyrim first will just serve as a detour, keeping you from real progress. Do you think having only Ornstein and Alduin for the foreseeable future is disadvantageous? Switch your perspective already, not having Alduin as soon as possible would be the true disadvantage.” She shook her head and scoffed. “Also, in terms of combat, those who have experienced Skyrim are the ones you’re least likely to fight in the future, after all, we don’t sell to enemies.”
Jin tilted his head and thought of Kong Ching, who was currently travelling the land and distributing Skyrim Illusion Rooms amongst the masses.
Still unsure, he imagined two different scenarios in his mind. The first was him with a team of minor Skyrim enemies and Ornstein, lightning and absorption capabilities fully unlocked. The second was flying through the sky while standing on Alduin’s head alongside Ornstein as the dragon shouted and summoned a meteor storm to absolutely annihilate all their enemies. After the devastation of the meteor storm, the construct faded as the hypothetical Jin ran out of qi, thus falling to his death from high up.
“Reach for the moon but fall on the stars?” he asked with furrowed brows. If nothing else, pushing for Alduin would force him to develop his abilities and core faster.
“Do you mean, reach for the stars but land on the moon?” Elder Flower asked with a deadpan.
Jin shook his head. “No, I’m pretty sure I said it right.”
Elder Flower sighed, looked up at the sky as if seeking guidance, before standing up. “You’ve exhausted all but the minor details of inner disciplehood. Your templating and anima creation have reached the level where progress will be restricted to the fundamentals until you reach core formation. Illusion Rooms, let’s not talk about it. Other than fidelity, even core disciples could be found lacking in comparison to you.” She shook her head. “You’re close to a breakthrough,” she observed. “Finish it, and let's move on.” With those words, she disappeared from the spot and left Jin alone in the clearing.
Jin watched the empty space where she’d been before, eventually putting his hands in his pockets and leaving the clearing.
-/-
After a heavy lunch at the cantine and a day of rest, Jin found himself sitting on the roof of his small apartment building, looking at the stars and the large glowing moon seemingly suspended right above the mountain of their sect.
The foundation establishment stage of cultivation was divided into nine pillars and was meant to cleanse the body in preparation for making it a qi vessel.
The qualitative difference between having to absorb ambient qi to use it and being able to store it for later usage was immense, but despite this, Jin had been holding back on actually progressing his cultivation for a few days now, despite the fact that he’d been standing on the complete and utter precipice.
Once he finished the foundation establishment, he would be offered an advancement to the core discipline.
One relatively small step for him, albeit a large one for other cultivators, and he would move into a new environment, meet new people, and access more advanced techniques.
He would also not participate in any more tournaments or such.
The core formation stage of cultivation was fundamentally the most vulnerable part of it. Forming a core was very literal in that one carried one around physically in the chosen dantian, either lower, which was in the area of the gut, middle, which was the area of the thorax, or upper, which was in the head. It was a relatively fragile process. During foundation establishment, it was the body being changed on a molecular level; even if you cut off a part of your flesh, it would regrow with the advancement one had made. You lost the core? You lost the core. Start from scratch, albeit with more skill in creating it.
The reason why core disciples did not participate in tournaments was because it was possible to lose the core through an injury to the area where it resided. Another reason was that with the core, the disciples had access to the more abstract techniques of their sect, and thus would reveal their hand too much.
It was after one finished core formation, broke the core to envelop the soul in qi, thus forming the nascent soul, that this stage of vulnerability was surmounted.
Jin hesitated again, having brought in the qi to the upper dantian instinctually while thinking about the process.
His body and soul were craving advancement, but he wasn’t granting it.
He liked his current environment; he liked stability. He’d only spent six years in the inner ring; he didn’t want to risk losing a productive work environment for a potentially unproductive one.
From the core, destroy the possibility of being sent off to another tournament. Not from it, stay longer, help Hashimi and Francis advance.
There was nobody he could consult on this matter. Every cultivator who struggled with reaching the core formation stage would attack him from sheer anger; every cultivator who had reached it would forever doubt his character.
Jin felt lost.
This was good. Because feeling lost was pain, and it was only when experiencing pain that the body and the mind were fully motivated to avoid it.
He made a decision.