Sorry for the delay on this one. I had to do some short-notice travel for work and it completely messed up my intended writing/updating schedule. Here it is now though, enjoy!
Like he’d estimated before, the trip to Gwen’s herbalist’s hut went much faster when he wasn’t holding hands with a skittish Gathering realm girl intentionally dragging her feet. The sun was high in the sky, a handful of wispy white clouds like pinches of cotton drifting across the vast blue sky, but a cool breeze blowing from the distant mountains surrounding the sect kept the summer heat from feeling oppressive. Compared to the last time he’d gone this way, the roads and streets were practically deserted. Instead, he passed fields and orchards tended to by his fellow disciples and a handful of servants, their brown and black robes standing out amidst the much more common dark blue. Some acknowledged him as he passed with waves or greetings and he nodded back to those he recognized.
When he neared Outer Village, he turned off the road entirely, running through one of the many groves of trees that ringed the village. Petals swirled around him as he wove between the trees, and he luxuriated in the familiar cacophony of colors. It felt especially welcoming after the bizarre ecology of Nine-Pine Gulch, with its sea of browns and greens. Though he’d heard stories of it all his life and seen the odd painting depicting such a thing, it was still hard to believe that outside the province most forests were not nearly so colorful as this.
Even at an easy jog, slow compared to the pace he, Lulu, and Wallis had maintained throughout their emergency mission, his shortcut meant he reached the district where Gwen lived in less than a quarter of an hour. He emerged from the trees onto an unfamiliar street lined with forge cottages, one of the housing options popular with those Outer disciples attempting to study artifact construction and refining. Most of them seem to be empty, much like the huts on the street where Gwen rented her own home, but a handful showed signs of habitation.
Beside one cottage a disciple hammered away at a bar of cherry-red metal using a large fire crystal set in a brazier beside his anvil to keep the metal hot, the formation around the building silencing the ring of metal on metal to a whisper. Each strike of his hammer released a shower of emerald sparks of interference, qi from his forging technique clashing with the power locked within the metal. Some distance further down the street, another disciple sat meditating on the ground, a sphere of water within which floated a chunk of low-quality spiritual jade suspended between her palms. Her forehead was beaded with sweat and her face twisted into an expression of intense focus as silvery points of qi swam like tiny fish through the sphere, slowly picking away at the jade’s surface.
He slowed somewhat, taking a moment to gather his bearings before continuing down the street. When he’d come this way with Gwen, they’d circled around through the outskirts of Outer Village to reach this district, while he’d cut directly through the trees. Thankfully, most of the little districts surrounding the village were laid in the exact same way, with only minor differences in what sort of houses and amenities were placed where. If he was where he thought he was, he just needed to follow this road, then take a left and a right, and he’d be in the right place.
He heard Gwen before he saw her, a soft, crooning voice drifting to him on the breeze. He almost didn’t recognize it at first, not having expected her to be the sort to sing out in the open where anyone could overhear, but as he drew closer it became unmistakable.
Gwen knelt amidst her garden, the sleeves of her robe rolled up past her elbows and its hem spread out around her like the petals of a flower. Her hands were buried in the dirt and she was leaned forward, hair pulled back into a practical ponytail from which several strands had escaped to frame her downturned face. She sang softly as she worked, tending to what Calvin thought was a patch of wandering clover, though the stalks were twice as tall as any he’d ever seen and the typically pinkie-sized pink blooms were big enough to nearly cover Gwen’s palms while she examined them for defects.
Gwen did not have a flawless singing voice like some he’d heard within the sect. She did not have the effortless melodious tones Ariadne’s yin-constitution granted her, nor the trained excellence of the performers. She sang with more heart than technique, tender and unguarded. Calvin did not recognize the song, but it was gentle and hopeful, a wish for good harvests, mild winters, and plentiful springs.
He found himself coming to a stop still a few yards away from the fence around Gwen’s garden, silently watching her work. Her hands moved with graceful confidence, checking each plant one at a time. She carried a small knife in one hand, occasionally using it to harvest a stem, cut away a discolored leaf, or dig up a barely-sprouted weed with a single smooth movement. It was nothing he hadn’t seen before, or done himself for that matter, but the confidence with which she worked belied the hesitant, quiet face she’d shown during their previous meeting.
Soon enough, she finished with the patch of clover. The small fraction of the plants she’d harvested went onto a silk cloth laid out at her side and she carefully wrapped the bundle into a bouquet, tying it gently closed with a ribbon such that the flowers stuck out from one end and the stems were not crushed together. That done, she set the bouquet in a basket Calvin had not immediately noticed, already half-filled with small quantities of carefully harvested and stored spiritual herbs.
Her song trailed off and she stood up, stepping out of the raised garden bed to avoid stepping on any of the surrounding plants. Back to him, she raised her hands up towards the sky, interlacing her fingers and rising to the tips of her toes as she stretched her back. She groaned in satisfaction, then let her hands drop to her sides, rolling her shoulders and brushing her fingers free of dirt on the sides of her sect robe.
She continued to stretch, bending forward to press her palms flat against the ground while her knees remained straight, then rolling her neck. Straightening up, she extended her hands to either side of her body and twisted her shoulders, only to freeze like a mortal caught in an elder’s aura when she came face to face with him.
She didn’t move for several long seconds, then her eyes grew very wide and her cheeks flushed scarlet. “Senior brother, you’re back!” she squeaked, sounding one part excited and ten parts mortified. She turned fully to face him, ducking her head. “I didn’t think––I mean, I didn’t realize, anyone, I mean you, was um––“
Calvin cut her off before she could devolve into total incoherence. “Good afternoon, Gwen. I’m sorry for vanishing on you so abruptly. I hope you received my note?”
She stammered something, then took a deep breath and did her best to pull herself together. “Uh, that’s alright, senior brother. I understand. Thank you for thinking of me before you departed the sect.” She nervously smoothed the front of her robe and the shirt beneath it.
Calvin smiled at her warmly. “Of course, Gwen. I wish I could have come to let you know myself, but there was no time to waste. Have you been doing the exercises I showed you?”
Gwen smiled shyly. “Yes, senior brother. Thank you again for your guidance.” She flared her qi and Calvin could feel the difference. Her aura had not grown significantly in strength, but it had gained a depth and solidity it had previously lacked.
She retracted it after only a moment and Calvin smiled back at her. “I’m glad to see you’ve taken my lessons to heart. You’ve made a great deal of progress in only a handful of weeks.”
“Thank you, senior brother,” she repeated. “I could not have done so without your guidance. I thought that I was nearly prepared to breakthrough, but there is still so much more work for me to do.”
Calvin hummed thoughtfully. “Not as much as you might think. Even with the exercises I showed you, you’re going to hit a point of diminishing returns again quite soon. Somewhere between a few weeks and perhaps two months. After that you can still keep progressing further towards the true peak of Gathering, but it’s more practical to simply advance. You can continue to refine your qi––Dantian once you stabilize your Foundation, and the utility of naturally regenerating qi is worth more in the long term than whatever additional refinement you can manage before advancing.”
Gwen frowned. “Uh…” she began, then fell silent.
“Yes, junior sister?” he prompted.
Hesitantly, she licked her lips, then asked, “…then why did you say I needed to spend some more time refining my Dantian before I advanced if it isn’t important?”
Ah, a good question! Gwen had been under the impression that it was best to advance as soon as one was able to do so (and Calvin suspected he knew who’d told her that little bit of extremely dangerous misinformation), but he’d instructed her otherwise during their meeting. Now it sounded to her as though he was going back on his own words. “Ah, I see there has been a bit of a misunderstanding. Let me explain.” He paused, looking at the fence that still separated them. “Though perhaps this is not the best place to discuss such matters?”
Gwen startled, seeming to notice for the first time that he wasn’t actually in her garden, but standing outside it. “Oh I’m so sorry, senior brother, please, come in, come in. Would you like some tea? Water? I have some leftover––“
“Some tea would be lovely, Gwen, thank you.” He let himself into her garden, then followed her as she scooped up her half-filled basket and led him up the path towards her hut. Noticing the simple pill furnace sitting on a wooden stand just outside the door, he remembered another question he wanted to ask her. “Has Cao Yunfei given you any trouble in my absence?”
Hopefully he would have known better than to do so, but Calvin didn’t have a particularly high opinion of his fellow disciple. The man had stumbled onto a hidden gem and done his level best to crack it. That was like harvesting a Nine-Petal Lotus before it had fully grown its ninth petal––a waste of astronomical proportions.
“Ah, not so much, senior brother. He came by several times, but he hasn’t returned since senior sister Ariadne chased him off.” She fiddled awkwardly with her hands. “Thank you for looking out for me. It couldn’t have been simple to get someone like her to check up on me.”
Calvin didn’t let his surprise show on his face. “I hope she’s been taking good care of you?” he asked mildly. Admittedly he had mentioned Gwen in his missive to Ariadne before he’d gone on the emergency mission, but he hadn’t asked nor expected her to actually do anything.
Gwen bobbed her head. “Yes, senior brother. She’s come by a few times.” A hint of wistfulness slipped into her voice. “I hope someday to be half the cultivator she is.”
Calvin rolled his eyes. “Give it a few years. You’ll get there.” Ariadne certainly had her advantages, but as far as he could tell she’d made minimal progress since he’d first met her years ago. If Gwen applied herself properly, she really would catch up in no time.
He really did mean it, but Gwen clearly took it as empty praise. She looked down at herself and mumbled a hollow thank you into her chin before scurrying off to prepare tea while Calvin took a seat at the small table set against the wall not far from the door and looked around.
The only real difference between a herbalist’s hut and the regular ones provided to all disciples was the garden outside. Inside, the structure was nearly identical to the first place he’d been able to call home since he’d first left Six-Swan Pond what felt like a dozen lifetimes ago. The blocky, square hut was divided into three rooms, a larger combined entryway, kitchen, and living space that took up half the total space, a tiny bedroom separated from the first room by a heavy curtain, and a meditation room with a solid wooden door carved with a rudimentary qi-filtering formation.
The interior and furnishings were plain, but more finely made than their appearance suggested. The walls and floor were bare wood, but it was smooth and free of splinters. There was no attic or closed off truss roof, leaving the rafters exposed, but the tiles were hidden by a layer of dark orange silk and he’d never heard of anyone with a leaky or drafty roof. Instead of glass, sturdy wooden shutters covered the windows, fit so tightly when closed that not even the icy winds that occasionally blew from the mountains in winter could penetrate. The furniture too was simple rainbow wood, with no flourishes or adornments, but the table was sturdy, the chairs comfortable, and there were plentiful cabinets in the kitchen area, as well as a stove heated by a small fire crystal rather than wood or coals.
It was altogether rather nostalgic. Gwen had put her own touches on the place––strings of drying herbs hanging from the rafters, a somewhat messy alchemical station, several small vases of wholly mundane flowers––but Calvin couldn’t help but be reminded of his first few years at the sect, still trying his best to learn how to fit in.
It took Gwen only a few minutes to prepare the tea which she poured into a pair of mismatched clay cups before perching awkwardly across from him on the hut’s single other chair. Calvin picked up his cup and raised it to his lips, inhaling deeply. It smelled positively divine, herbaly fragrant with notes of spring flowers and sweet fruits, and the faint but potent wisps of qi rising from it made him suspect Gwen had a hand in growing some of what she’d used to brew it.
He took a small sip and sighed in appreciation. It was delicious. He raised the cup towards Gwen, “This is excellent tea, thank you Gwen.”
“Thank you,” she told him quietly, taking a drink of her own. She’d used her time preparing the tea to clean up slightly, tidying up her wind-blown ponytail, fixing the sleeves of her robes, and washing away the streaks of dirt on her hands and cheek. She still look rather rumpled, there were grass stains on the knees of her work pants and the hems of her robe and she had wholly missed a bit of dirt on her neck from an errant finger, but in all honesty she looked much more natural like this than she had in her yellow dress. A blossom in a field of flowers rather than a carefully curated bouquet.
Calvin took another drink of tea, then set his cup down on the table, focusing his thoughts. “Right, so. Dantian.” He paused for a moment, tapping his finger against the table. “Actually, how much do you know about the advancement from Gathering to Foundation?”
Gwen stilled, staring down into her teacup, then recited. “The second step is a transformation of the self; one becomes two, bound by a river of qi carved through the bedrock of spirit. Choose––“
“In your own words, please,” Calvin chided her mildly. Venerable Shendong’s writings were enlightening, but there was a reason the imperial ministries and sects allowed them to be widely circulated. They weren’t wrong, but neither were they particularly detailed about the actual process of advancement. Plus, the Scroll had confidently informed him that all but the first volume were heavily redacted, even the versions in the Outer Sect archive.
“Um…” Gwen took another sip of tea, visibly gathering her thoughts. “It’s supposed to be pretty simple, I think? You pick a spot and then you open a meridian from your first dantian to that spot and then you open a second dantian there. If it works, that means you’re in the Foundation realm.”
Rudimentary, but fundamentally correct. “Very good,” he praised. “And what are the most common points of failure?”
This one Gwen clearly knew. “Not enough qi are crippling self-inflicted spiritual damage,” she rattled off quickly.
“Precisely.”
“But doesn’t that mean I should keep working on my dantian for as long as I can? That should both strengthen my spirit and increase my qi reserves, right?”
Calvin smiled. “That is indeed the case, though it’s a little bit more complicated than that. It's not always easy to tell, but I’m pretty sure you had enough qi to advance successfully when we met several weeks ago, and strengthening your spirit too much can actually be a bad thing in the Gather realm. After all, if your own qi is too weak to damage your own spirit, how can you expect to advance?”
Gwen’s eyes widened, but he raised a finger to cut her off before she could say anything. “Let me finish, junior sister. What do you know of what comes after advancement? Of progressing through the Foundation realm.”
“Um, not much? It’s just, uh. More of the same, right? You keep opening dantian and meridians until you’re strong enough to advance?”
Calvin laughed softly. “Fundamentally yes, but that's not quite right. What you’re missing is that it’s not enough to just keep opening new dantian and meridians, the important part is that you must also achieve a stable Foundation. That’s what people mean when they say that someone is at the peak of the Foundation realm––they have a stable Foundation theoretically sufficient for advancing to the Core realm.”
He took another sip of tea, nearly draining the cup. It really was very, very good. “What’s important now however is something very few people are going to tell you. That is that attempting to refine an unstable Foundation is extremely difficult. And crucially, a two dantian one meridian Foundation is fundamentally unstable. The simplest truly stable Foundation requires a minimum of three dantian and three meridians that form a complete cycle. Do you see the issue?”
Gwen was silent for more than a minute, staring down into her half-full teacup. Calvin helped himself to another cup while he waited, watching Gwen’s face closely.
She began slowly, hesitantly. “Opening new dantian and meridians strengthens your spirit, right?”
Calvin nodded. “That is indeed the case.”
“And a stronger spirit makes it harder to open more of them?”
She was getting there. “Most certainly.”
“Then if you advance but your qi isn’t strong enough or you don’t have deep enough reserves…” Calvin gestured for her to continue, and she raised her head to stare at him. “…you can get stuck?”
“The first great bottleneck,” Calvin confirmed. Just enough qi to advance, but only that. And then you were stuck, barely able to regenerate qi with your singular qi channel and every scrap of progress on refining your Foundation requiring at least ten times more effort than it should have. “Not technically crippling, especially for a skilled herbalist or alchemist, but very costly. And trying to force a new meridian or dantian open when you aren’t truly ready for it? That is crippling.”
Gwen looked vaguely ill for a moment. “Then shouldn’t I try to refine my dantian as far as I can before I advance?”
Calvin shrugged. “If you truly wish to. But if you really have been doing the exercises I taught you, you’ll have enough qi to reach the first stable Foundation––a cycle of three and three––at which point you’ll progress several times faster than you’re capable of doing while in the Gathering realm. After all, you’ll be refining three dantian and three meridians, not just a single one.”
“Oh.” Gwen silently finished her own tea and finally set the cup down, pressing her hands against her belly. “So if I’d advanced before our d–when we had tea…”
Calvin tilted his head to the side in consideration. “You might have been alright, especially if the sect happened to give you the right pills at the right time. But odds are good you’d have gotten stuck with three dantian and two meridians, which is not a good place to be if you ever hope to progress beyond the Foundation realm.”
“…thank you, senior brother.”
Calvin smiled softly. “How many times have I asked you to call me by my name, Gwen.”
She wet her lips with the tip of her tongue. “…thank you, Calvin.”
“Much better.”
Calvin took another drink, then suddenly remembered the scroll case now hidden in his villa along with some of the other treasures he’d received from the Scroll over the years. “The first dantian you opened is your heart, yes?” He remembered her saying something to that end back in Contribution Hall.
“Yes, senior brother?”
“What were you planning to try next? For your advancement, I mean.”
She raised her right hand, setting it down on the table. “My hand. Master Cao––I mean my former alchemy teacher said that would help me when I was ready to start learning Foundation realm alchemical techniques.”
Calvin wrinkled his nose. The hand wasn’t a bad place for a qi node––it was one of the ones the Nine Gates used, after all––but to start with it? He wasn’t sure what was worse; the idea that Yunfei was intentionally trying to sabotage Gwen’s progress or that he was incompetent enough to truly think that was a good idea in the first place.
He shook his head emphatically. “No, no, definitely not.” He hummed, remembering something else she’d told him. “You’ve already begun laying the foundation for the meridian?”
“…yes?”
“No matter, I’ll show you a trick to help your spirit heal. I have a few pills for it too, I’ll bring those over next time I see you.” He hummed thoughtfully. “Go with…either the stomach or––“ he reached out and snatched her hand from the table, turning it over and pressing two fingers against her palm. “Expel some qi through your palm,” he ordered. “Just a wisp will do.”
She squeaked in surprise but complied, and Calvin carefully drew the wisp into his own spirit, examining it closely before releasing it back into the air. Her innate yin alignment wasn’t nearly as heavily skewed as Ariadne’s, but it was still significant enough to be notable, and there was a strong undercurrent of wood. She wasn’t truly aligned with either element, but simply had a natural propensity for them.
“Genitals,” he corrected. “Be very careful when you open it, but it will serve you better as your second dantian.” And that way she’d be able to form a qi node in her tongue next and have a stable intermediary Foundation on her way to building out the full seven nodes of the All-Seeing Pillar.
“Okay!” she agreed quickly, voice somewhat higher pitched than before.
Calvin gently placed his other hand over his first, completely covering her small hand with his own. Her eyes widened to the size of dinner plates, and he smiled at her warmly. “I really am sorry for leaving so soon after our last meeting. Could I make it up to you with dinner? Perhaps tonight?” She stammered out what could plausibly be construed as a yes, and he continued. “Wonderful, I’ll make the arrangements. First though, how have you been? Have you made any progress growing those seeds you purchased a few weeks ago?”
For a few minutes, Calvin allowed himself to forget the events of the past few weeks and the mountain of tasks waiting for him in the coming days. Gwen really was far too cute when she blushed.