Chapter 122: Star Cultivation (2)

"Then should we push through it?"

"No."

Encrid looked at him.

"You clear it."

"What is the difference?"

"The difference is whether you are cultivating or injuring yourself."

The student lowered his hand.

Encrid returned his attention to Gus.

"You do not smash the road open. You clear it a little at a time. You cultivate, allow the body to adjust, then cultivate again. Eventually, the channel becomes wider and the Star’s energy can move through it more freely."

Gus’s arm trembled slightly.

"Enough."

The boy immediately released the energy.

The heat faded.

The room remained silent.

Encrid looked at the students.

"This is why I wanted you to see it."

He paused.

"And there is something else you should understand."

The students waited.

"I am not teaching you a sequence of movements that you must copy perfectly. I am teaching you what is happening."

He tapped the drawing on the board.

"If you understand the principle, you can adapt the method to yourself. Your body is not Gus’s body. Your Star is not his Star. The way you reach it may not be the way he reaches his."

Gus opened one eye.

"So I can do whatever I want?"

"No."

Gus closed his eye again.

Encrid continued as though he had not spoken.

"You must understand the principle first. Improvisation without understanding is simply guessing."

He looked across the room.

"Find the Star that feels familiar. Concentrate on it. Learn how it responds to you. Then work at it repeatedly."

His gaze moved from one student to the next.

"That is cultivation."

Then, after a moment, Encrid added, "And if the method I give you does not work, do not immediately assume that you are incapable of cultivating."

A few students looked up.

"Try to understand why it is not working. Change something. Find another way to achieve the same thing."

He looked toward Gus.

"Eventually, you may even find a better method than the one I taught you."

There was a short silence.

"Would you admit it?" someone asked.

Encrid considered the question.

"Because then I would have learned something."

That answer seemed to confuse them more than anything else he had said.

Encrid turned back toward the board.

"Now, everyone close your eyes."

Thirty-eight people obeyed.

"And this time, stop trying to open a Star."

He waited until the room became completely still.

"Try to find one."

While the thirty-eight students continued cultivating while closing their eyes, Encrid quietly continued another part of his work.

At the beginning of every week, he used Appraisal on every student.

He did it quickly and without making a spectacle of it, usually while walking through the room before class began or while speaking to someone individually.

He was not particularly interested in their talent anymore.

The talent grades were useful, but they had already served their purpose when he selected the original group.

What interested him now was the Condition field.

Appraisal had developed enough that Encrid could see things he had not been able to see when he first arrived at the Wall. Illness. Exhaustion. Injuries. Malnutrition. The physical consequences of poor sleep.

Sometimes it showed him things that were not strictly physical at all.

Grief.

Stress.

A body being pushed beyond what it could comfortably sustain.

During the third week, Encrid noticed something else.

Six of the students were slowly starving themselves.

Not because the Wall had stopped feeding them, and not because there was not enough food.

They were giving part of their rations away.

Some to children.

Some to parents.

Some to younger siblings.

Encrid looked at the numbers, looked at their Conditions, and understood what was happening without asking a single question.

He did not confront them.

Instead, he submitted a requisition for additional food under the school budget, adjusted the distribution of rations, and made certain that every student received enough to eat.

Nobody knew why.

That was how Encrid preferred it.

If the problem could be solved without requiring someone to admit they had one, there was little reason to embarrass them by naming it.

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Days passed, and the cultivation at the bathhouse continued.

For the first few weeks, there were no visible results. The lack of progress began to wear on the students, and some started to lose faith in the very idea of the School.

But cultivation, like most things, rewarded consistency.

The results came eventually.

In the sixth week after the School began, the first student opened a star.

It was Halla Bright.

Nobody had expected Halla.

She was twenty-six years old, had worked as a lamplighter’s assistant for nine years, and had spent most of the first month sitting quietly at the back of the bathhouse while students with far higher talent grades made visible progress in understanding the exercises.

Encrid had privately considered moving her back to the ordinary work rota.

Then, on an ordinary Tuesday morning, Halla stopped breathing normally.

Encrid was halfway through explaining the relationship between concentration and physical rhythm when he noticed.

He stopped speaking.

"Everyone be quiet."

Thirty-eight people immediately froze.

"Nobody move. Nobody touch her."

Halla sat with her eyes closed.

There was no flash of light.

There was no thunder.

Nothing dramatic happened at all.

Her breathing simply grew deeper.

And slower.

The loose strands of hair around her face lifted slightly, despite there being no wind inside the bathhouse, and for several seconds the entire room seemed to become strangely still.

Then the temperature dropped.

Only by a degree or two, but everyone felt it.

A moment later, it returned.

Halla opened her eyes.

She stared at Encrid.

Then she started crying.

Encrid crouched in front of her.

"Which Star?"

"I don’t know."

Encrid nodded. He did not blame her. Most people who opened a Star for the first time had no idea what they had done.

"Where?"

Halla pressed a hand against her stomach.

"Here."

Encrid smiled.

"You have quite the talent. A Celestial Star."

The Star behind the navel, associated with light, size, and gravity.

She wiped at her face.

"I changed my breathing in the middle of your explanation. I thought I was doing it wrong, but it felt strangely familiar, so I continued."

Encrid laughed.

"You did well. Not doing exactly what I told you isn’t wrong. It’s just different."

Halla looked at him uncertainly.

"How were you doing it?"

She explained.

It took less than a minute, and Encrid listened to her carefully.

Then he understood.

For nine years, Halla Bright had unconsciously followed the rhythm of the Wall’s lamp masts.

Every evening, she moved from mast to mast, lighting them in sequence, and over thousands of nights the pattern had become part of her body. She had unconsciously begun counting her breaths according to that rhythm rather than according to the beat of her own heart, exactly as Encrid had instructed.

She had assumed she was simply failing to follow the method correctly.

Encrid stood.

He looked at Halla.

Then he looked at the rest of the class.

"Write that down."

Thirty-seven hands reached for paper.

"Cultivation is all about improvisation," Encrid said. "Understand the principle behind what I tell you, then relate it to something you already understand. If counting your breaths against your heartbeat does not work, find another rhythm. If one method makes it easier for you to concentrate, use it."

He pointed toward Halla.

"She did not fail because she ignored my instructions. She succeeded because she understood what the instructions were trying to accomplish and found a method that worked for her."

He paused.

"You are not trying to imitate me. You are trying to understand yourselves."

The room had gone very quiet.

"Find the Star that feels familiar. Find the thing that helps you reach it. Then repeat it. Again and again and again. Hammer at the Star until something gives."

Halla looked down at her hands.

Encrid smiled.

"And if you discover a better method than mine, tell me."

That was perhaps the most important lesson he had taught them.

Not how to cultivate.

How to learn.

Three more students opened Stars before the end of the week.

Then another.

The stable boy was one of them.

His reaction was considerably less dignified than Halla’s. He shouted so loudly when he felt the Star that the man cleaning the corridor outside came running into the room convinced that somebody had been injured.

Encrid had to spend several minutes explaining that nobody was dying.

That was five people who had opened Stars by the seventh week.

Five out of forty-four.

A little over twelve percent.

Encrid stared at the numbers in his ledger that evening.

Twelve percent from a group of people who had received almost no cultivation knowledge before entering the school.

If he could increase the number of cultivators on the Wall by another hundred, perhaps two hundred, it would change things.

Not immediately.

Not enough to turn ordinary soldiers into Grandmasters.

But enough to create a pool of people who could become stronger than they otherwise would have been, enough that the next generation would not have to begin from ignorance, enough that the Wall might eventually have hundreds of people who understood cultivation instead of the handful who had stumbled into it by accident.

It was a small beginning.

But it was a beginning.

The thought had barely formed when the familiar blue window appeared before his eyes.

[ Hidden Quest Triggered: THE ONE WHO LIGHTS THE WAY ]

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