Chapter 102

The seventy-third issue covering the collapse of the Eastern Transit Compact used the word "crisis" twenty-six times.

I counted.

Not deliberately.

[Guided] simply supplied the number when my [Clarity] lingered on the repetition.

The next issue used it nineteen times.

Then twelve.

Five.

Two.

And, within four months, not at all.

I turned another yellowed page.

Several months had passed since my first visit to the private archive, enough for its elderly owner to stop personally checking what I was doing whenever I arrived and for me to become intimately familiar with which shelves contained which decades of Everwell Prime's history.

Newspapers remained surprisingly practical.

Not necessarily accurate.

Definitely not complete.

Sometimes intentionally misleading.

But practical nonetheless.

Especially once I compared several publications covering the same event.

The Eastern Transit Compact provided a good example.

For more than a year, practically every portion of the organization had been redirected toward preventing the collapse of several major transit agreements.

Personnel.

Credits.

Political influence.

Negotiations.

Public communications.

Internal restructuring.

Everything.

For that period, anyone observing the Compact from an economy-minded perspective could reasonably have concluded that resolving the crisis represented its entire reason for existing.

Then the crisis ended.

And within months, the Compact resumed expanding transportation access, negotiating new corridors, maintaining existing routes, and otherwise pursuing what it had existed to do before the crisis ever began.

Simple.

The crisis had been its highest priority.

But it had never been its [Purpose].

If anything...

It had become the highest priority precisely because it obstructed that [Purpose].

I stopped turning the page.

That distinction was obvious.

Almost disappointingly so.

Yet my [Clarity] held onto it.

Priority.

[Purpose].

Related.

Not equivalent.

I leaned back against the small cushion I had long since started bringing into the archive and allowed myself some light contemplation.

My Essence had recovered enough for some development.

Not enough that I intended to turn every interesting thought arising from reading newspapers into actual [Cultivation], though.

This one didn't need that anyway.

The reasoning was as basic as it came now that I had put a finger on it.

Solving my overdevelopment disorder had been my highest priority for years.

It dictated my [Cultivation] schedule and routine.

Changed which Aspects I developed.

Limited how aggressively I could advance them.

Determined when I stopped.

Determined when I resumed.

Led me toward conceptualizing and forming my [Vitality] Aspect.

Followed by my [Flow], [Foundation], and now my still-unformed [Purpose] Aspects.

Yet...

Overcoming my Essence overdevelopment disorder had never mattered for its own sake.

I wanted to overcome it because it prevented something else.

Essence development.

Growth.

The optimized continuation of my Path.

I looked back down at the newspaper.

Highest priority.

Not deepest [Purpose].

Simple.

Another page turned.

My thoughts did not entirely move on, however.

Back when I had barely been born, distinctions like these hardly mattered.

My Path had been simpler.

Brutally so.

It was all about survival.

Almost everything served that [Purpose].

My [Exertion] Aspect's [Purpose] was to strengthen my body because weakness could kill me.

My [Cycle] Aspect's [Purpose] was to sustain me, and I drove it harder at every opportunity because otherwise I would starve.

My [Perception] Aspect's [Purpose] was to allow me to navigate the [Darkness].

My [Tempering] Aspect's [Purpose] was to allow my body to endure what my surroundings and circumstances imposed upon it.

My [Will] Aspect was similarly formed because accepting what reality had done to my body would have ended with my death, and that stood at the extreme opposite of my [Purpose].

Even my [Insight] Aspect ended up being sublimated into my [Purpose] of survival by helping me understand that ignorance carried consequences I could not afford.

Each Aspect possessed its own [Purpose].

But back then, those [Purpose]s converged so tightly around continued survival that the same [Exertion] routine could advance almost everything I possessed.

Move.

Endure.

Observe.

Adapt.

Continue.

Repeat.

I had possessed no reason to ration my Essence development either.

No safety margin.

No carefully scheduled periods during which one additional successful [Cultivation] could purchase weeks of unwanted idleness.

I developed whenever I could.

Which was nearly always.

Which was why it was no wonder my early Aspects formed and advanced at a pace that now appeared absurd.

They had been young.

Crude.

Closely aligned.

And practically every meaningful [Exertion] I undertook gave several of them something they needed.

Now...

I possessed fourteen Aspects whose relationships I had spent years deepening and harmonizing.

I could dedicate a [Cultivation] session almost entirely to [Flow]...

But my [Awareness] would still develop through observing it.

My [Comprehension] through understanding it.

My [Mastery] through reproducing what I understood and aiming to make it better.

My [Clarity] through distinguishing the relationships involved.

My [Harmony] through coordinating them.

My [Foundation] through integrating whatever deserved to remain.

My [Will] through the sole act of maintaining such a demanding [Cultivation] routine and never relenting on keeping to it.

My [Ambition], [Purity]...

Specialization might reduce incidental Essence development, but under no circumstances could it completely remove it.

Which was as aggravating as it was natural and expected.

After all, I had deliberately spent years making my Aspects [Purpose]ly support one another.

And I had done so under the quasi-absolute assumption that a Path whose every component remained so isolated that developing one did nothing for anything else would almost impossibly give rise to a Path [Worthy] of making the one who designed, developed, and walked it become an actual powerhouse...

And that, regardless of how deep and intense the [Ambition] of the Entity who brought it into existence.

As such, comparatively speaking, the Path of any who ventured away from this facet of [Harmony]...

Should reasonably be worse.

Or better...

Depending on the middling and frankly pitiable perspectives adopted by those who did not seek the peak.

On my part...

Centuries of development roughly planned beforehand.

Aspects refined into deeply interdependent structures.

Techniques supported by other techniques.

One development becoming the [Foundation] for ten more.

Compared to such [Ideal]s...

Even if one's Essence could endure so much more than mine, I couldn't imagine their Paths amounting to much.

If anything, my increasing inability to develop only what I intended might be evidence that my Path itself was becoming more like what I wanted it to become.

Interconnected.

Coherent.

Deeply synergistic.

Not that it did anything to make the overdevelopment consequences less aggravating...

Yet.

I turned another page.

What I targeted.

What developed.

What I prioritized.

What it served.

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What was presently necessary.

What was fundamental.

Different questions.

And my [Clarity] had become increasingly good at refusing to let me answer one with another, while my [Harmony] made me clearly aware of the whispers of contradictions there were to be had.

As I thought this over and over, I nearly felt like something shifted within my Essence.

The sensation was too subtle to be that, though...

Or so I believed until I [Focus]ed my [Awareness] inward and communed with my Essence, revealing a faint swirl surrounding one of my Aspects.

A familiar enough sign that my mind entered a dazed state for the better part of what felt like several seconds.

How?

Why?

I closed the newspaper to [Focus] my entire [Clarity] on puzzling out what had just occurred.

A [Clarity] that was slowly leaving me as I beheld its very source rippling inward.

The answer was evident enough.

My [Clarity] Aspect had somehow started advancing to Tier 2.

Not because I had suddenly discovered some revolutionary [Insight].

I clearly hadn't.

The distinction between priority and [Purpose] barely deserved to be called difficult.

But perhaps...

That was precisely why I noticed what was happening so quickly.

Over the previous months, my [Clarity] had been doing the same thing everywhere.

Separating a useful relationship from one merely available to me.

Distinguishing social presentation from what actually existed beneath it.

Separating targeted Essence development from the incidental development surrounding it.

Distinguishing [Flow] from what [Flow]ed.

Separating what belonged to my [Foundation] from what happened to be presently useful.

Distinguishing what was better from what was merely more suitable for one particular [Purpose].

The dust-filled archive completely faded from my [Awareness], leaving behind nothing but what I knew to be my truest expression of self, expressed through indescribable feelings made up of fragmented concepts that drifted in unpredictable ways yet always ended up [Flow]ing back to the Aspects that birthed them.

That remained the simplest way to describe it, though my [Harmony] rendered that interpretation somewhat inadequate.

Because none of those fragmented concepts truly existed alone.

They overlapped.

Interacted.

Supported and altered one another in ways that had only grown more intricate as my Path developed.

And as the conceptual pressure surrounding my advancing [Clarity] Aspect steadily deepened, those interactions did not become any less complex.

I simply became better able to distinguish what composed them.

Where one Aspect's expression ended and another's began.

Which part of an interaction belonged to either.

Which belonged to the relationship existing between them.

Not separation.

[Clarity].

The relationships between them didn't disappear merely because their boundaries became clearer.

One thing could cause another without becoming its consequence.

A [Foundation] could support something without sharing its [Purpose].

One Aspect could contribute to another's expression without either losing what made it distinct.

The same applied beyond my Aspects.

Something could become indispensable to pursuing a [Purpose] without becoming that [Purpose] itself.

A means could become overwhelmingly important without becoming the end it was [Purpose]d to serve.

A temporary priority could consume nearly everything I possessed without becoming the reason I possessed it.

Something—my Essence overdevelopment disorder—could presently define the structure of my entire [Cultivation] routine while remaining only one obstacle encountered by the greater Path that had produced that routine to begin with.

The advancement continued.

I observed.

Not much else needed doing.

My [Comprehension] naturally followed some of the distinctions my changing [Clarity] exposed, while [Guided] quietly ensured I didn't become so fascinated with one expression of the advancement that I neglected the rest.

Time passed.

The conceptual pressure deepened.

Then gradually settled.

Until, over twelve hours later, one final change propagated through the Essence [Flow]s surrounding my [Clarity] Aspect, then...

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

My [Clarity] Aspect finally advanced to Tier 2.

I remained in communion for a while longer, not to immediately pursue some new [Cultivation], but simply to experience the result.

My Tier 1 [Clarity] Aspect had already made it easier to trace conclusions toward the observations, assumptions, and [Comprehension]s supporting them.

Now...

The distinctions themselves held more cleanly.

Priority.

Necessity.

[Purpose].

Three ideas capable of overlapping completely in one circumstance without becoming equivalent.

A thing could be necessary without being desirable.

Desirable without being fundamental.

Fundamental without presently being urgent.

Nothing radical.

Just clearer.

Cleaner.

A [Clarity] that made it more difficult for me to accidentally collapse them into a single judgment merely because all three happened to point toward the same action.

I surfaced from communion.

The archive returned to my [Awareness].

My newspapers remained where I had left them.

What had changed was that my overdevelopment safety margin was now even worse off than before, when it had already been unable to sustain a [Cultivation] session.

So...

I didn't.

I reopened the Eastern Transit Compact issue.

Read.

Turned the page.

Read another article.

Then another.

A Court infrastructure dispute.

An old commercial acquisition.

A district-wide reconstruction effort following damage from some incident whose details had apparently been common [Knowledge] at the time and were therefore infuriatingly omitted by every article I possessed.

I made a note to find earlier issues.

Then kept reading.

The Compact crisis returned to mind whenever some organization temporarily reorganized around an emergency.

Again, the distinction remained clean.

Immediate objective.

Organizational [Purpose].

What had to happen now.

What made accomplishing it matter.

Eventually, while reading about an industrial association that had spent three years aggressively securing access to one critical resource before almost immediately redirecting its attention elsewhere once that access became stable...

I stopped.

Not because of the association.

Because I had been doing exactly the same thing to myself.

Overcoming my Essence overdevelopment disorder...

My highest priority.

Not my deepest [Purpose].

That much had become obvious.

The question beneath it was the one I had spent months repeatedly approaching from different directions without ever finding a sufficiently complete answer.

Why?

Why did I need to overcome it?

Because it prevented my Essence from developing as I wanted.

Why did Essence development matter?

Because I wanted my Path to continue growing.

Higher Order Aspect.

More advanced Aspects.

Deeper [Comprehension].

Greater [Mastery].

An even more profuse [Will].

A stronger Essence.

More.

Growth.

I almost accepted the answer.

Almost.

My new [Clarity] didn't.

Growth was not a destination.

My own fundamental [Truth] of [Cultivation] made that contradiction almost innate.

How did I make my next [Cultivation] attempt better?

The question had defined my [Cultivation] since before I possessed the Aspect carrying its conceptual name.

There had never been a "final" better.

Every improvement became the starting point of my next attempt.

Every success became my new [Foundation].

Growth did not carry me toward some eventual state where I intended to stop growing.

Growth changed the state from which I took the next step of my Path.

Before [Cultivation]...

There had been [Exertion].

Before language.

Before Civilization.

Before I understood what an Aspect was.

Before I had even been born.

Inside the womb of my nameless and surely long-dead mother...

Through [Warmth].

Through [Cold].

Through pressure.

Through strain.

Through exhaustion.

Through pain.

Through hunger.

My first [Comprehension] of existence had been built through [Exertion].

Not philosophically.

I hadn't possessed the words required for anything so elaborate.

Something happened.

I endured it.

It changed me.

Then the next thing happened, and I was slightly more capable of enduring it.

Again.

Again.

And again.

That had been enough.

Later, my fundamental [Truth] of [Exertion] became my fundamental [Truth] of [Cultivation].

The concept deepened.

The direction didn't.

Growth had never been something I pursued merely so that, one day, I could finally "possess" enough of it.

Growth was how I constructed every version of myself capable of pursuing anything at all.

My [Will] rested upon it.

Without growth, refusal merely preserved what already existed.

My [Ambition] rested upon it.

Without growth, wanting more became desire without a Path toward attaining it.

My [Cultivation] embodied it.

My [Foundation] accumulated its consequences.

And [Guided]...

[Guided] had never once guided me toward remaining what I was.

I stared at the newspaper without reading it.

What did I actually want?

Not freedom from overdevelopment.

That was necessary because the disorder interfered with something deeper.

Not power.

Power expanded what I could do.

Not [Knowledge].

I wanted absurd amounts of it, but I had abandoned interesting research enough times to know it remained subordinate to the development of my Path.

Not even growth as an objective.

That still treated growth as something I pursued.

Something I might eventually possess enough of.

No.

What I wanted was to see what happened when growth stopped being the goal of a Path...

And became the [Foundation] upon which my Path was built.

When every advancement ceased being a destination and instead expanded what could be attempted next.

When every newly broken limit exposed another one farther ahead.

When becoming more capable didn't satisfy my [Ambition], but merely gave it more to work with.

How far could such a Path go?

How far could my Path go?

There.

The question required nothing else.

I closed the newspaper again.

This time, my [Clarity] distinguished the answer from every temporary objective surrounding it.

Overdevelopment.

[Flow].

[Foundation].

Social development.

Economic development.

My [Faith].

Individual Aspect advancements.

All mattered.

None answered the question.

My [Comprehension] settled around what did.

My [Harmony] exposed no contradiction.

My [Purity] found nothing foreign.

My [Will] had spent my entire existence refusing to accept stopping as necessary.

My [Ambition] had never possessed an upper boundary beyond that of its Aspect.

And my [Cultivation] had been building upon yesterday's growth since before I knew what the word meant.

I understood.

My [Purpose] was to see how far my Path could go when growth itself became the [Foundation] from which every next step began.

My Essence answered this [Comprehension].

The reaction spread far more broadly than the unforeseen advancement of my [Clarity] Aspect before it.

Through [Will].

[Ambition].

[Cultivation].

[Foundation].

[Flow].

[Harmony].

Through relationships I didn't need to consciously enumerate because they already formed part of what my Path was.

And beneath all of them...

[Guided].

My Origin Aspect quietly encompassed the unfolding change as it had encompassed every step since my conception.

The whole of my Essence aligned around one direction.

Not toward a destination.

Toward continuing.

A new conceptual structure began forming among the Aspects composing my Path.

I did not interfere.

There was nothing left to force.

The [Purpose] already existed.

My Essence merely had to recognize what I had finally acquired enough [Clarity] and [Comprehension] to define.

The structure settled.

Aspect Formed: [Purpose] (Tier 0)

And fifteen Aspects now rippled both chaotically and orderly within my Essence.

[Guided] (Origin)

[Cultivation] (Tier 2)

[Comprehension] (Tier 1)

[Awareness] (Tier 3)

[Secrecy] (Tier 0)

[Will] (Tier 4)

[Clarity] (Tier 2)

[Harmony] (Tier 2)

[Ambition] (Tier 1)

[Purity] (Tier 1)

[Mastery] (Tier 1)

[Vitality] (Tier 0)

[Flow] (Tier 1)

[Foundation] (Tier 0)

[Purpose] (Tier 0)

Finally.

That my [Purpose] Aspect formation had also consumed another portion of my overdevelopment safety margin, enough that whatever limited Essence development remained available before would now be replaced with an irritating period of recovery, was irrelevant in the grand scheme that was my Path.

More importantly...

[Flow].

[Foundation].

[Purpose].

I had now formed all three Aspects I had chosen for overcoming my Essence overdevelopment disorder.

If I could feel something like regret, then it was now too late to feel any, for the next step was to transition from a theoretical plan to practical [Cultivation].

As for my new Aspect...

Its most direct effects were as rousing as they were compatible with my Path.

Its existence didn't tell me what to do next.

Which was good, because I already possessed enough methods for deciding that.

It did something simpler.

Instead, it gave everything I did a more definite criterion against which to be measured.

My [Cultivation] could produce a thousand possible improvements.

My [Flow] could eventually carry development through countless possible routes.

My [Foundation] could receive, preserve, and integrate countless resulting changes.

But none of those concepts, by themselves, determined which possible result was actually the one I wanted.

[Purpose] did.

Not by supplying an answer before I possessed the [Knowledge] or [Comprehension] required to find one.

It simply gave every answer something deeper to remain aligned with.

What was worth preserving.

What was worth changing.

Which improvement was actually an improvement.

Which direction a [Flow] should ultimately favor once several remained equally possible.

Which future state deserved to become the [Foundation] of whatever came after it.

Direction.

Not where I had to go.

Why going anywhere mattered.

My highest priority remained unchanged.

Overcoming my Essence overdevelopment disorder.

Now, however, the distinction was perfectly clear.

Solving my Essence overdevelopment disorder did not define my [Purpose].

It obstructed it.

And anything obstructing my Path...

Needed to be removed.

I surfaced.

Old paper.

Dry air.

Shelves packed with decades of people treating whatever crisis occupied them at the time as though nothing else could possibly matter more.

The Eastern Transit Compact issue remained closed in front of me.

I reopened it.

My Essence needed to recover for at least a month now.

And I still had several decades of Everwell Prime left to read.