Chapter 100

A silver-winged fairy entered the Upper Confluence through the western flight corridor, spent less than a minute speaking with one of the Court clerks stationed near the public request boards, then flew directly toward the suspended café where I had already seen her meet three different people over the previous two weeks.

I didn't approach her.

Not yet.

Instead, I remained seated along the upper railing overlooking the social confluence location and added another connection to the increasingly complicated model [Guided] and I maintained of Lylily Tower.

Erisel.

Junior educational liaison.

Regularly interacted with two private Academies, one Court-funded scholarship body, several tower juvenile programs, and apparently the silver-haired elder presently waiting for her inside the café.

The elder's identity remained unknown.

For now.

Hundreds upon hundreds of such identities were no longer unknown.

Several months of living inside Lylily Tower had made its scale considerably less incomprehensible.

There were still entire regions I had barely visited, organizations whose internal structures I understood only in the broadest terms, and thousands upon thousands of fairies whose names held no relevance to anything I presently pursued.

But the broad strokes of the tower's web of interests had become visible.

Court offices connected to other Court offices.

Commercial circles overlapped social ones.

Old families exercised influence through relationships that appeared nowhere on formal organizational charts.

Educational programs funneled promising young fairies toward actual Academies.

Retired experts remained relevant decades after leaving their formal positions because people continued seeking what they knew.

Merchants.

Archivists.

Teachers.

Functionaries.

Patrons.

Researchers.

Mediators.

People who knew people.

And most importantly...

People who knew the people I might eventually want to know.

The mother whose twins had decided my [Cultivation] habits were appropriate entertainment had a companion receiving increasingly consequential assignments within one of the Fairy Court's diplomatic-relations courts.

Not presently important enough for me to seek out independently.

Potentially much more interesting later.

The retired Court functionary who kept spending his retirement answering my questions knew more about the practical behavior of political organizations than entire introductory political archives managed to communicate.

Edmundo's mercantile circle had expanded my useful economic contacts far beyond the handful I possessed before relocating here.

The teacher from the tower academy had indirectly put my name before educational authorities outside Lylily Tower.

Beyond them, I had identified so many others...

An elderly fairy who had spent more than a century indexing privately donated Path journals without ever becoming a serious researcher herself.

A former inheritance mediator whose usefulness came less from the disputes she had resolved than from knowing which families preserved records going back generations.

A flight-equipment designer specializing in unusual wing morphologies who knew three researchers whose work touched upon biological wing development.

A Court records clerk whose professional value seemed to consist almost entirely of knowing which office actually possessed whatever information every other office kept redirecting people toward.

A young commercial analyst whose own experience wasn't particularly remarkable, but whose elder sister worked within an organization handling significant quantities of Everwell Realm-derived biological material.

A wealthy fairy who collected first editions of books I had never heard of and seemed to invite promising children into her home simply because she enjoyed hearing what they thought about them.

A courier coordinator who knew more about the practical [Flow] of people, goods, and information between Everwell Prime's towers than any public transportation map could hope to display.

And hundreds more.

Some I knew.

Some knew me.

Some I had merely identified.

Some were only names connected to possible opportunities through three or four other relationships.

Knowing an Entity existed wasn't a relationship, after all.

Knowing what they might provide wasn't getting access either.

And access wasn't necessarily enough to make whatever they provided worth the time required to acquire it.

Still...

It was a [Foundation].

A growing one.

Below me, Erisel and the unknown elder disappeared farther into the café.

I marked the meeting.

Then returned most of my [Focus] inward.

Because observing the social confluence location was only half of what I was presently doing.

The other half was furthering my [Cultivation].

Or, more precisely...

Carrying out what I came to call a [Purpose] [Foundation] [Cultivation] session.

Not an especially active [Cultivation] session, as far as those went.

I wasn't manifesting my [Foundation] Aspect, nor was I attempting to force my still-unformed [Purpose] Aspect into existence through sheer [Comprehension] of its concept.

Instead, I had sunk into a deep state of self-[Awareness] to trace what I already possessed.

My habits.

My routines.

My Aspects.

My social structures.

My economic arrangements.

My accumulated [Knowledge].

The relationships I maintained.

The skills I had spent years turning into instinct.

Everything sufficiently established to qualify, from one perspective or another, as part of my [Foundation].

Then I asked what [Purpose] had shaped each one.

Not merely why it existed.

My flight [Foundation] existed because I had flown a lot.

My physiological [Cultivation] [Cycle] existed because it had allowed me to survive and improve.

My social [Foundation] existed because relationships created access, [Knowledge], resources, opportunities, and all manner of indirect advantages.

Those answers were obvious.

I was searching beneath them.

What [Purpose] had caused me to preserve each [Foundation]?

What [Purpose] had shaped it into its present form instead of another?

Which portions still served the same [Purpose] that originally created them?

Which had outlived it?

Which now served several?

Which had begun for one reason, only to remain because something else became more important?

My relationship with the Pulse Of Eternity made for an easy example.

I had initially pursued the Pulse because of its deep [Knowledge] about [Vitality].

More specifically, because [Vitality] offered a route toward improving my body and eventually overcoming one of the limitations governing my [Cultivation].

The Pulse then became a [Foundation] for far more than that.

Healing and physiological [Knowledge].

My relationship with Xafsa.

Institutional experience.

Economic opportunities.

Access to the research that eventually led me toward the [Flow], [Foundation], and [Purpose] Aspects.

Eventually, the [Purpose] that brought me there stopped being sufficient to justify structuring my existence around it.

So I left.

Yet...

Much of what the Pulse had built into my [Foundation] remained.

The same structure appeared elsewhere.

The Fairy House.

The Faith Of The Aspects.

My original physiological [Cycle].

My economic activities.

Individual relationships.

A [Foundation] could originate from one [Purpose] without remaining chained to it forever.

Likewise, a [Purpose] could change without invalidating the [Foundation] built in pursuit of it.

Logical.

If not new.

But worth testing my [Foundation]al [Purpose]s against repeatedly.

Especially because I had recently returned to an older experiment.

Idle contemplation.

The name remained almost offensively accurate.

Relatively long ago, during the self-imposed idleness periods incurred by my Essence overdevelopment disorder, I had experimented with spending portions of that time contemplating my [Insight]s from atypical perspectives, hoping to somehow benefit my actual [Cultivation] by further specializing my Essence development.

And now, just days ago, while my Essence needed to recover, I had once again experimented with spending portions of my idle time thinking about [Flow], [Foundation], and [Purpose].

Shallowly.

Atypically.

No deliberate communion.

No manifestation.

No serious conceptual probing.

No attempts to test novel interactions between my Aspects.

No [Exertion] designed to transform whatever thought appeared into actual Essence development.

I essentially denied myself every reliable means through which I normally determined whether a conceptual idea was useful, then hoped I might nevertheless stumble across something worth remembering.

At first, attempting this Path once more hadn't seemed entirely unreasonable.

A thought didn't need to develop my Essence to become a useful future hypothesis.

I could notice a strange analogy or fragmented [Insight].

Recognize a possible avenue.

Store it.

Then test it properly once my safety margin allowed actual [Cultivation].

That even happened naturally, if very occasionally.

Yet once again, the more I repeated the process—which I had already refined years ago, as [Guided] helpfully reminded me—the harder its limitations became to ignore.

If I contemplated how [Flow] might distribute overdevelopment instability but refused to manifest my [Flow] Aspect, refused to engage deeply with my Essence, refused to test the proposed interaction, and deliberately stopped before the thought acquired enough conceptual weight to threaten additional Essence development...

What had I actually accomplished?

Produced a possibility.

Maybe.

One whose validity I had no means of determining.

The same applied to [Foundation].

And especially [Purpose].

I could construct endlessly elegant statements regarding what my Path ought to pursue, then refuse to employ the very [Comprehension], [Mastery], and active [Cultivation] capable of distinguishing an elegant statement from something that might actually prove itself to be a [Truth].

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

At best, idle contemplation gave me a guiding line for future [Cultivation].

Something to test later.

At worst, I had merely spent several hours arranging thoughts into aesthetically pleasing patterns.

My [Clarity] told me the result increasingly tilted toward the latter.

And it wasn't for lack of trying.

I had attacked the endeavor from many different angles.

Short contemplations.

Longer ones.

External analogies.

Historical examples.

Reviewing old notes.

Passive communions.

Deliberately avoiding anything that felt too close to meaningful Essence development.

Letting [Guided] retrieve existing [Knowledge] without following it into deeper extrapolation.

The answer remained approximately the same.

There was simply a point where refusing to use the tools required for further [Comprehension] stopped being about optimization and became inefficiency.

That wouldn't have mattered if the alternative were useless idleness...

But it wasn't.

I was sitting above one of Lylily Tower's busiest public meeting spaces while maintaining a working model of hundreds of socially relevant Entities.

Between spending six hours weakly contemplating whether some theoretical expression of [Foundation] might eventually help solve my disorder...

Or spending those same six hours actually expanding a different [Foundation] whose long-term value I could already observe...

The choice was effortless and evident.

And anyway...

Relationships...

Wealth...

Information...

Opportunities...

Wasn't developing all of those also a way of advancing my [Foundation] Aspect?

Not through deliberately inducing Essence development.

That would defeat the entire [Purpose] of waiting for my Essence to recover.

But my [Foundation] Aspect concerned what later development rested upon.

Experience mattered to it.

Stable structures mattered.

Relationships between things mattered.

Everything integrated into my existence and made available for later development mattered.

So why would a relationship capable of eventually becoming [Knowledge], capital, access, or another relationship be categorically unrelated merely because I wasn't sitting in communion while building it?

That wasn't straightforward [Foundation] [Cultivation].

But was any meaningful [Purpose] ever as straightforward as its simplest formulation?

Questions like that were exactly what this [Purpose] [Foundation] [Cultivation] was meant to expose.

I let my self-[Awareness] deepen.

Not because that thought represented some sudden enlightenment.

It didn't.

I had already accumulated all the necessary pieces.

This [Cultivation] was simply forcing me to observe how they related.

My [Foundation] Aspect existed within my Essence as one established structure among many.

Around it was the rest of my Path.

My [Cultivation] Aspect.

My [Comprehension] Aspect.

My [Awareness] Aspect.

My [Secrecy] Aspect.

My [Will] Aspect.

My [Clarity] Aspect.

My [Harmony] Aspect.

My [Ambition] Aspect.

My [Purity] Aspect.

My [Mastery] Aspect.

My [Vitality] Aspect.

My [Flow] Aspect.

All encompassed within [Guided].

Fourteen Aspects.

Each distinct, with its own [Purpose].

Yet none of them actually operated in isolation anymore.

That had slowly become true over the years.

My [Awareness] supplied information.

[Clarity] distinguished.

[Comprehension] interpreted.

[Mastery] turned understanding into reliable command.

[Will] allowed me to impose what I intended.

[Harmony] reduced interference and exposed how separate functions could support one another.

[Purity] preserved what I considered mine and meaningful.

[Cultivation] directed everything toward development.

[Ambition] ensured development never stopped being worth pursuing merely because it became difficult.

[Vitality] expanded what my physical vessel could endure.

[Flow] increasingly shaped how change moved.

[Foundation] increasingly shaped what received and integrated it.

[Guided] integrated everything and relentlessly pushed me as I wanted to be.

Each Aspect possessed its own conceptual identity and [Purpose].

Which echoed my greater [Purpose] for my Essence to behave as a united whole rather than a collection of unrelated tools.

Or, in other words...

For all my Aspects to be in [Harmony].

That was the direction I had expected my [Harmony] Aspect to eventually follow since shortly after it advanced to Tier 1 in the wake of being bathed in Violet Radiance.

Back then, when my [Harmony] expanded from my mind into the relationship between my mind and body, I had almost immediately suspected what Tier 2 would involve.

My Aspects.

My Essence.

Harmonize their applications.

Understand how they supported one another.

Make the whole more coherent than the sum of its individually applied parts.

Simple.

Reasonable.

Apparently incomplete, however.

Because I had been doing that for two years now.

The interactions had deepened.

Synergies had become ordinary.

Some were so [Foundation]al that I barely noticed them unless a [Foundation] [Cultivation] forced me to strip my Path down and examine what every Aspect contributed.

Yet my [Harmony] Aspect remained at Tier 1.

So while my Aspects' [Harmony] mattered—because how couldn't they?—it simply wasn't enough.

Without giving this line of [Comprehension] further thought, as I already did too much, I followed the next relation.

My Essence development restrictions had always made attaining the [Ideal] [Balance] I sought aggravating.

If I developed too little or too broadly, I wasted time.

If I developed too much, I worsened the very disorder I sought to overcome.

Yet the [Truth], as brought to light by my attempts at idle contemplation, taught me that investing every idle recovery period into solving my Essence overdevelopment disorder was not optimal either.

If I dedicated every one of my many idle hours to weak anti-overdevelopment contemplation simply because solving my disorder represented my highest priority, then I sacrificed everything else my existence could become during those hours.

Money.

Relationships.

Social competence.

Institutional [Knowledge].

Opportunities.

Practical experience.

External leverage.

All so I could repeatedly stare at the same conceptual problem while refusing to use the tools necessary to properly progress it.

That wasn't dedication.

It was inefficient [Balance].

Hence, while my anti-overdevelopment [Cultivation]—advancing my [Flow] Aspect, advancing my [Foundation] Aspect, and forming my [Purpose] Aspect—ought to come first above everything else whenever my Essence could safely develop...

Once my Essence entered a state of recovery, other developments, such as the development of my resources, my relationships, my non-Aspect competence, or my opportunities, plainly became more valuable.

It was all development that might even indirectly deepen the [Foundation] from which my future Essence development proceeded, after all, without me deliberately forcing the Aspect forward when I shouldn't.

Internal and external development did not need to compete every moment.

They could exist in [Harmony].

Not that it implied an equal allocation, though.

That would have been an absurd interpretation of the kind of [Harmony] my Path found in [Balance].

It required suitable allocation according to what I was actually trying to achieve.

Sometimes nearly everything went inward.

Sometimes almost nothing safely could.

The allocation changed.

My overarching [Purpose] did not.

While I reflected on all these elusive [Purpose]s and how they related to my [Foundation], the social confluence location below remained lively.

Erisel eventually emerged from the café with the unknown elder.

This time, I caught enough of the elder's face for [Guided] to connect it to a public record I had encountered almost two months earlier.

Soraila.

Former instructor.

Specialized in historical Path analysis.

Had taught at two Academies.

Retired.

Still occasionally lectured.

Interesting enough.

I marked her.

A few minutes later, someone landed beside me.

One of the twins.

I hadn't seen her mother, but their social station was sufficiently high that I didn't even need to guess that someone must be watching over her.

"Are you cultivating?"

"Yes."

She immediately lowered her voice.

Her mother had evidently taught her something.

"Can I watch?"

"You already are."

That occupied her for several seconds.

Then she sat down along the railing.

I returned my [Focus] inward.

My [Cultivation] routine itself provided a third connection.

I had now spent years designing routines around my Essence development priorities.

Physiological [Cultivation] routine.

Exhaustion resistance [Cultivation] routine.

[Will] [Cultivation] routine.

[Clarity] [Cultivation] routine.

I had even already developed a rough [Vitality] [Cultivation] routine despite my [Focus] having shifted away from my [Vitality] Aspect mere days after I formed it.

Which only further exemplified what my [Cultivation] routine was about.

Whatever mattered most received the largest share of safe development.

That principle hadn't changed.

Only my present [Cultivation] routine had.

[Flow].

[Foundation].

[Purpose].

Three answers to one problem.

Not three unrelated objectives merely competing for the same limited Essence development quota.

My [Flow] Aspect would address how instability and change moved.

My [Foundation] Aspect would address what received, integrated, and supported development.

And my [Purpose] Aspect would address what successful recovery ought to accomplish.

Increasingly, I couldn't meaningfully carry out my [Cultivation] of one without encountering the others.

A [Flow] that distributed instability required a [Foundation] capable of receiving it.

A [Foundation] integrating change required some criterion for which resulting state ought to be favored.

A [Purpose] without sufficient [Flow] and [Foundation] would amount to knowing where I wanted to go while lacking the mechanisms necessary to get there.

Even when one session emphasized a single concept, the other two defined the context surrounding it.

Therefore, my [Cultivation] routine had adjusted accordingly.

One overarching [Cultivation].

Three fronts.

I separated where separation remained worthwhile.

Integrated where integration produced better [Comprehension].

I hadn't designed my current [Cultivation] routine for the sake of pursuing [Harmony].

It had simply become the most suitable routine for the problem.

Suitable.

Not better.

For better was relative to [Purpose].

A routine optimized for maximum Essence development would have been catastrophic for me.

A routine optimized for minimizing overdevelopment would have involved doing almost nothing.

A routine optimized exclusively for forming my [Purpose] Aspect as quickly as possible might have justified neglecting my [Flow] and [Foundation] Aspects.

None were objectively better, though.

My current one was simply suitable for what I actually wanted.

And what had emerged was a harmonious [Cultivation] routine, because the three answers needed to advance together.

That was the third piece.

The twin beside me shifted along the railing, evidently becoming bored.

I barely noticed.

There was one relation left.

[Purpose].

Not the Aspect.

The concept.

I knew what I was doing.

With the same [Clarity] that had carried me through every major restructuring of my Path.

Not every detail.

Not every outcome.

Not whether my present anti-overdevelopment approach would ultimately work exactly as I imagined.

But the direction?

Mine.

The reasons?

Mine.

The Path?

Mine.

I wanted to overcome the overdevelopment disorder restricting my development.

I wanted to keep developing while doing so.

I wanted every restriction converted into another problem I could eventually understand, master, and remove.

I wanted the periods where my Essence forced me to stop developing inwardly to still improve everything surrounding that development.

More [Knowledge].

More leverage.

More relationships.

More opportunities.

More of everything that might support the next step of my Path.

Those [Purpose]s didn't oppose one another.

They nested.

Qualified.

Supported.

Balanced.

Harmonized.

If that wasn't [Harmony] in [Purpose]...

What was?

Something within my Essence shifted.

I noticed immediately.

Nothing exploded.

No revelation tore through my thoughts.

No sudden [Insight] appeared from nowhere and forced my [Harmony] Aspect beyond its limits.

There was only a subtle conceptual pressure around the Aspect that rippled calmly through my Essence, carrying with it my accumulated [Comprehension] and [Mastery] of what could be broadly defined as my inner [Harmony].

I smoothly redirected my inner [Awareness] toward what was obviously an unfolding advancement phenomenon without ending the [Purpose] [Foundation] [Cultivation] that had brought it into being.

The twin noticed nothing.

Fairies below continued eating, arguing, meeting, arriving, and leaving.

Somewhere across the social confluence location, a group erupted into laughter.

And while the external world continued none the wiser, within my Essence, my [Harmony] Aspect steadily pressed outward.

As ever, I settled for observing, lacking the tools—Aspects—required to do anything more than discern every slightest ripple, echo, and fine sign that such an advancement phenomenon manifested through my Essence.

Beyond that, I reflected on the various [Comprehension]s that had ushered my [Harmony] Aspect into its Tier 2 advancement.

Essence [Harmony].

[Harmony] in [Balance].

[Harmony] within my present [Cultivation] routine.

[Harmony] in [Purpose].

None had heralded the advancement by itself.

They were simply the major parts of my accumulated [Comprehension]s whose repeated application had become sufficiently mastered that, together, they now described something broader than what my Tier 1 [Harmony] Aspect had embodied.

The twin eventually became bored and left.

Her mother arrived perhaps half an hour later, apologized for an interruption that hadn't occurred, then asked whether I would mind explaining one of the safer wing-endurance exercises I had once mentioned to her children.

I explained the exercise, why it was appropriate, and the signs indicating they should stop.

She thanked me.

Then mentioned, through seeming small talk, that her companion had recently been assigned to assist with an intertower diplomatic delegation.

I stored the information.

Another addition to my external [Foundation].

Then she left.

An hour later, one of the tower keepers I recognized stopped by long enough to tell me that a flight corridor I regularly used would be partially closed during the next maintenance period.

I thanked him.

He complained that I had somehow learned about the previous closure before his patrol post had.

"I asked maintenance," I explained.

"Of course you did."

He rolled his eyes, then flew away.

My [Harmony] Aspect continued advancing.

Edmundo passed sometime later with two merchants I knew and one I didn't.

He invited me to accompany them to a newly opened establishment several floors below.

"I'm busy."

He glanced at me for several seconds.

"Aspect advancement?"

"[Harmony]."

"Congratulations. Later, then."

"Probably."

That was enough.

No crowd formed.

No senior Court official appeared to witness the advancement of a six-year-old fairy's Path.

The social confluence location went on as usual.

People had their own lives, with their own [Purpose], [Ambition], and [Will] to see them through, even if I considered most of them deplorably inadequate.

I spent the next several hours maintaining enough self-[Awareness] to observe the process without interfering with it.

My [Harmony] Aspect expanded gradually through the same Essence it had spent years helping keep coherent.

Its conceptual reach settled farther through relationships that already existed.

Aspect to Aspect.

Mind to body.

Internal development to external development.

Objective to routine.

[Purpose] to [Foundation].

[Flow] to what received it.

[Clarity] to what [Purpose] I chose to pursue.

No single relationship became dominant.

My Essence was simply elevated to become a more united whole.

Around the fifth hour, the advancement began slowing.

By then, the people occupying the social confluence location below had changed almost entirely.

Different merchants occupied the tables.

The request boards had been refreshed.

Children who had filled one section earlier were gone, replaced by adults gathering around some scheduled public discussion.

Soraila had long since departed.

Erisel remained.

I added that to what I knew about her schedule.

A little past the sixth hour, the remaining conceptual pressure faded, and before long...

Aspect Advanced: [Harmony] (Tier 1) ➞ [Harmony] (Tier 2)

My [Harmony] Aspect settled.

Tier 2.

And by the look of it, I was looking at two weeks' worth of idle time to recover my overdevelopment safety margin back to where it should be.

Oh well.