Chapter 109

Two months after my [Foundation] and [Cultivation] Aspects advanced, I had acquired a thoroughly irritating answer to whether the former would help my Essence overdevelopment disorder.

It did.

Slightly.

My Tier 1 [Foundation] Aspect had introduced a subtle stability that hadn't existed before.

Minor irregularities settled faster.

Changes integrated more cleanly into the rest of my Essence.

My overdevelopment safety margin recovered with fewer fluctuations, and [Guided]'s warnings against further Essence development arrived somewhat later than my previous models predicted.

All excellent developments.

In theory, that should have allowed me to spend more time on actual [Cultivation], even if only slightly more.

In practice...

My [Cultivation] Aspect had advanced to Tier 3 at almost exactly the same time.

And while [Foundation] made my Essence marginally better at enduring development, Tier 3 [Cultivation] made me considerably better at causing it.

The result was predictable.

My [Cultivation] routine became shorter.

Again.

At least the advancement hadn't merely increased how much Essence development I could produce in a given amount of time.

Tier 3 had also made one of the realizations accompanying its advancement increasingly practical.

There was no singular optimal form of [Cultivation].

There were branches.

Alternatives.

Different ways of pursuing "better" depending on what, exactly, I wanted to improve.

My present priorities benefited disproportionately.

[Flow].

[Foundation].

[Purpose].

I could structure individual [Cultivation] sessions much more narrowly around one of them than before.

A [Flow]-oriented [Cultivation] session could remain centered upon recognizing, manipulating, and integrating [Flow] instead of producing quite as much irrelevant development elsewhere.

My [Foundation] [Cultivation] could emphasize whatever needed settling, integration, or strengthening so future development had something sturdier to build upon.

And my [Purpose] could be cultivated through decisions where several valid improvements existed, and the important question was which one actually better served my Path.

It wasn't on the level of perfect isolation.

That would have been nonsensical for a Path whose Aspects increasingly depended upon one another.

But it was cleaner.

More direct.

More efficient.

Which, naturally...

Made each hour spent carrying out my [Cultivation] routine yet more dangerous to my overdevelopment safety margin.

It was like a repeat of the time I first had to restrict my Essence development by increasingly pursuing specialization, except that by now I had to perform such specialization [Focus] thrice over, restricting the breadth of my [Cultivation], its time span, and its [Comprehension] aftermath.

Unfortunately, time had never been a scarce resource.

Safe Essence development was.

So I adapted.

Again.

What's more, a most annoying discovery came afterward.

Because the distinction I had spent years maintaining between my [Cultivation] routine and everything else had become increasingly...

Optimistic.

Not wrong.

There remained a vast difference between carrying out deliberate [Cultivation] to develop my Essence and attending a commercial gathering.

But my Tier 1 [Foundation] Aspect didn't particularly care where something useful came from.

Neither did my Tier 3 [Cultivation] Aspect.

If I learned something that changed how I approached the next attempt...

That mattered.

If a relationship became established enough to alter the circumstances under which my future Path developed...

That mattered.

If an economic decision gave me resources that would later improve my [Cultivation]...

That mattered.

And if I found a better way to manage any of those things...

That definitely mattered.

Not enough for every meaningless conversation to become meaningful Essence development.

Thankfully.

But enough that activities I considered safe had developed a habit of becoming less non-Essence-development-inducing whenever I pursued one too deeply.

As if in prescience, my visits to Esme Academy's library had preemptively taught me that lesson.

Now, almost everything else was beginning to embody it.

Studied one subject too intensively?

My [Comprehension] followed.

Refined one process too aggressively?

My [Cultivation] ensued.

Built one relationship deeply enough that it became a stable part of my circumstances?

My [Foundation] made itself noticed.

Analyzed some decision until I genuinely altered what "better" meant?

My [Purpose] trailed soon after.

I had become so good at finding development opportunities that the opportunities themselves were becoming inconvenient.

A problem I would have found hilarious if someone else suffered from it.

As it stood...

I changed methods.

Depth was dangerous.

Breadth remained considerably safer.

So I widened.

More relationships.

More organizations.

More peripheral economic interests.

More names.

More introductions.

More places.

Less time digging continuously into any single one.

And eventually...

One project I had postponed for many reasons became an increasingly obvious use of all that breadth.

Finding my chosen.

Finding them was probably the most time-intensive [Exertion] I had ever planned to carry out without intending for the process itself to turn into intensive Essence development.

Which made it nearly perfect.

Nearly.

Long ago, I had already determined that the first generation of chosen for my future [Faith] shouldn't consist of whoever happened to encounter my autobiography and decide I was worth believing in.

I wanted selection.

People whose Paths warranted my personal investment.

Potential.

[Will].

Compatibility.

Unusual capabilities.

Circumstances where my involvement could produce disproportionately large results.

People I could develop.

Guide.

Learn from.

And eventually give sufficient reason to place their [Faith] in me.

Chosen ones.

I had designed and perpetually refined this conceptual plan for months upon months.

By now, the difficulty no longer lay in deciding what I wanted from them.

It lay in finding them.

Civilization contained far too many people.

Fortunately, I had already found two imperfect filters.

The [Worthy] Aspect.

And the [Fate] Aspect.

The Creed Of Nonexistence possessed people capable of evaluating the former.

The Fate Conclave possessed people capable of reading the latter.

Both organizations had responded to my revised inquiries within Everwell Prime.

Both had found people willing to accept the work.

And both had charged enough that hiring them back when I first received their offers would have been a remarkably efficient way to turn most of my credits into nothing.

My circumstances had changed since then.

Not enough to make their prices pleasant.

Enough to make them somewhat worthwhile.

So I paid.

Twice.

One contract went to an Entity from the Creed Of Nonexistence whose [Worthy] Aspect was developed enough to evaluate prospective chosen according to criteria I had spent an excessive amount of time defining.

The other went to a Fate Conclave reader whose [Fate] Aspect could search for unusually significant future intersections involving me, my [Faith], and the people we encountered.

I didn't particularly care that the Creed and Fate Conclave disliked one another.

They did.

Very much.

That became obvious approximately thirty seconds after our first meeting.

Tovan, my contracted [Worthy] evaluator, looked at the Conclave insignia worn by the Entity opposite him before turning toward me.

"You neglected to mention a Fate reader would be involved."

"I didn't neglect it. It wasn't relevant to whether you could perform the work I requested."

Ilyra, the Fate reader in question, regarded him with considerably more amusement.

"And you neglected to mention the Creed."

"Same answer."

Tovan's expression remained flat.

I continued before either could transform ideological disagreement into something I had paid to watch.

"You assess whether people are [Worthy] according to the criteria we established. Ilyra determines whether their [Fate] meaningfully intersects mine. Agreement is useful. Disagreement is also useful. I don't require you to like one another."

Ilyra smiled.

"That may be the most Creed-like thing I've heard someone say while hiring the Fate Conclave."

Tovan didn't react.

"She's wrong."

"Probably. Shall we begin?"

We did.

Before that, though, I hired one more person.

For protection.

Not because I expected to need much in that department.

It was a fact, however, that expectation wasn't the relevant standard.

The itinerary I had designed deliberately passed through portions of Everwell Prime and its peripheral districts where relying exclusively upon expectation would have been...

Unwise.

So I contracted an Order Escort from the Pillar Of Order.

The Pillar was Civilization's foremost organization dedicated to preserving Order and suppressing Chaos and Evil.

Not by enforcing some universal body of law.

Civilization possessed no such thing.

Instead, its Order Patrols, Inspectors, Judges, Escorts, and innumerable other specialized roles intervened wherever local authorities, customs, [Contract]s, and the generally chaotic moral compass of Civilization failed badly enough that someone needed to decide what remained tolerable.

For my [Purpose], however, I only required one of them to keep me alive.

Kesra reviewed my proposed itinerary twice.

Then she reviewed me.

I was wearing Stavros' combat weave.

It remained functional.

Comfortable—not that it mattered.

Extremely protective.

And perfectly adapted to my morphology and needs.

Replacing it merely because I could now afford something newer would have accomplished little.

My four needle swords rested where they belonged.

Kesra's eyes lingered on them for a moment before returning to the itinerary.

"If you were an ordinary child, I'd reject half of this outright."

The author's published chapter was copied here without consent; its official posting remains a way to support the writer.

"I'm not."

"I know. That's why we're still discussing it."

She highlighted several destinations.

"These are the ones I wouldn't take you into without your combat record and [Vitality] Aspect."

I examined them.

"Those were already among the places I expected to be most dangerous."

"Good. Then we're in agreement."

I left them on the itinerary.

Kesra noticed.

"That wasn't a recommendation to keep them."

"I know. It was a useful confirmation of their risk."

She stared at me for several seconds.

Then sighed.

"You're going to make this contract irritating."

"Probably."

And with that...

My search began.

◇ ◈ ◈ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◈ ◈ ◇

I didn't wander through Everwell Prime and its peripheral districts hoping [Fate] would conveniently throw a future chosen into my face.

That would have defeated most of the [Purpose] behind hiring "specialists".

Instead, I designed routes.

Orphanages.

Shelters.

Low-income residential zones.

Communities built around Entities whose disabilities, injuries, or morphologies made ordinary infrastructure expensive or actively hostile.

Temporary housing areas.

Peripheral commercial regions.

Areas with disproportionate Pillar Of Order interventions.

Places where charities concentrated.

Places where charities had stopped trying.

The oldest inhabited portions of some towers.

Newer expansions whose development had stalled halfway through construction.

Peripheral districts where cheap housing existed because nobody with better options particularly wanted to live there.

My first plan for developing my [Faith] had once involved spreading "The Nascence Of Solaena" throughout orphanages, slums, prisons, and other environments where people might desperately want something greater than their present circumstances.

I had discarded that approach.

Desperation didn't make someone [Worthy].

Neither did poverty.

Neither did suffering.

If anything, choosing people because they were sufficiently miserable to appreciate my intervention risked producing exactly the sort of dependence I wanted my chosen to avoid.

My newer plan was different.

It consisted of finding people worth investing in regardless of their circumstances.

Yet...

That fascinatingly didn't make the old idea entirely useless.

Quite the opposite.

If a truly [Worthy] person had already been born into wealth, excellent health, a powerful family, extensive education, and every structural advantage Civilization could provide...

What exactly was I adding?

Potentially a great deal.

But I would be competing with an already excellent [Foundation].

Someone else had found them first.

Educated them.

Protected them.

Connected them.

Created opportunities around them.

Finding a comparably [Worthy] Entity somewhere almost nobody expected one to exist?

Someone whose Path had developed despite terrible circumstances rather than because of excellent ones?

That was different.

That was an opportunity.

If Tovan genuinely considered someone [Worthy] while Ilyra simultaneously found their [Fate] intersecting mine strongly enough to matter...

And they happened to be trapped in circumstances preventing them from realizing most of their potential...

Then I would have found the best result both versions of my plan could offer.

Someone selected for what they could become.

And someone for whom my intervention could matter enormously.

So we started from the bottom.

The first journey, predictably, accomplished nothing.

The second accomplished considerably more...

Just not what I had intended.

By the third, I had learned that the Everwell Sector's lowest peripheral districts resembled Red Sand Rift City substantially more than they initially appeared to.

Not physically.

Nothing here resembled it physically.

Even poorly maintained Everwell infrastructure possessed things Red Sand Rift City would have considered miraculous.

Clean water.

Reliable air.

Transportation access.

Lighting.

Medical stations.

Waste removal.

Distributed [Ether] systems.

The material difference between poverty here and poverty in the Red Sand Sector remained ridiculous.

The social structure, though...

That was more familiar.

Someone always possessed more [Power].

A building might "technically" belong to one organization.

Its residents owed services to another.

A third controlled the nearest freight access.

A fourth supplied security.

And eventually, some individual or faction influential enough among all four became the person everyone actually listened to.

Overlords.

Not usually called that.

The term sounded crude.

Everwell preferred cleaner descriptions.

Local coordinators.

Community guarantors.

Security providers.

Property intermediaries.

Association leaders.

Independent administrators.

The names changed.

The relationship didn't.

One Entity possessed enough [Power] that ignoring them carried consequences.

Everyone else adapted around that [Truth].

Some arrangements were benign.

A few were genuinely useful.

Others...

Not so much.

On our fifth journey, we entered a residential area where everyone crossing between two sections was expected to make a "security contribution."

I read the posted conditions twice.

Then looked toward Kesra, who I knew was a member of the Pillar Of Order, presenting me with a perfect opportunity to delve into the mindset and perspective of its members regarding their approach to maintaining [Order].

"This is a toll."

"Essentially."

"The route is public."

"Mostly."

"Then why are they allowed to charge one?"

Kesra continued walking.

"Probably because they maintain nearby access points, provide emergency response faster than the tower administration does, and enough residents prefer the arrangement that removing them would create more dis[Order] than leaving them."

I looked toward the two heavily armed Entities collecting payments.

"And if someone doesn't pay?"

"They lose access to several services."

"That sounds remarkably similar to coercion."

"It sometimes is."

I waited.

Kesra glanced toward me and shrugged.

"The Pillar Of Order isn't the Pillar Of Justice."

I had read about that.

"What determines when you intervene?"

"Context."

"That's horribly imprecise."

"Yes."

She didn't sound bothered.

I looked back at the collectors.

Kesra continued.

"Local agreements. Harm. Intent. Precedent."

"Whether someone can reasonably leave."

"Whether a [Contract] is coercive enough to stop being meaningfully voluntary."

"Whether violence is proportionate."

"Whether an arrangement produces more [Order] than [Chaos]."

"Whether someone is exploiting an accepted freedom in a way nearly everyone with functioning judgment considers [Evil]... pick your context and live with it."

I didn't answer, satisfying myself with internalizing this perspective.

Civilization had no common rules or law that everyone obeyed, after all.

It only had an enormous, overlapping, frequently contradictory moral compass and enough powerful organizations willing to enforce portions of it whenever something became sufficiently intolerable.

That's what [Order] stood for.

Apparently.

I paid the toll.

It cost less than spending twenty minutes arguing.

Tovan silently judged me.

Not with [Worthy].

Probably.

I ignored him.

That journey produced no shadow of a chosen.

Neither did the next.

Or the three after that.

We visited a community built around survivors of an industrial disaster from decades ago.

Many possessed bodies ordinary [Vitality] healing failed to fully restore.

Some simply couldn't be restored.

Others had adapted so thoroughly that describing them as damaged felt increasingly inaccurate the longer I observed them through my [Awareness].

The district's infrastructure had been rebuilt around them.

Controls positioned differently.

Different transportation arrangements.

Different work.

Mutual assistance networks.

One Entity Tovan considered moderately interesting had spent thirty years organizing access to specialized equipment.

Ilyra found nothing unusual connecting them to me.

I recorded their name anyway.

They weren't a chosen candidate, but that didn't make knowing them useless.

Another route brought us through a peripheral district whose lower levels had slowly emptied after several major employers relocated.

Cheap residences remained.

So did the people too poor, too attached, too old, too politically inconvenient, or simply too stubborn to follow.

A local organization effectively governed three entire blocks.

Another governed the fourth.

Their members watched us continuously.

They watched Kesra most.

Pillar insignia did that.

I approved of them not looking at me.

Nobody interfered.

The next district was worse.

Old industrial infrastructure.

Poor visibility.

Dozens of access routes missing from modern public maps.

Kesra stopped us before the first descent.

"This is one of the areas I marked."

I nodded.

"I remember."

Kesra's expression suggested she wanted to say more, but I cut her off and led the way as we descended.

The air smelled different farther down.

Not dirty.

Everwell Prime's environmental infrastructure saw to that.

Old.

Metallic.

Chemical traces embedded so deeply into sealed materials that centuries of filtration had apparently failed to remove them.

Lighting became intermittent.

Some routes narrowed.

Others widened into enormous abandoned production spaces whose machinery had been removed so long ago that only foundation scars remained.

People lived there anyway.

Temporary walls divided larger chambers.

Private cables crossed public infrastructure.

Shops occupied old maintenance rooms.

Children slipped through passages too narrow for some adults around them.

Groups gathered where sightlines were good.

The whole place possessed an atmosphere I remembered.

That of the lower floors of Red Sand Rift City.

Not the rust.

Not the hunger.

Not the constant pressure of surviving somewhere poor enough that basic resources became daily concerns.

The hierarchy.

The sense that official structures existed somewhere above...

But the person most relevant to your immediate life was whoever controlled the corridor in front of you.

We passed one gathering where everyone became silent when Kesra appeared.

Another where nobody cared.

At a third, an Entity wearing enough visible weapons to arm a small group examined us before giving us a slight nod.

I returned it.

No issue.

Efficient.

Our two evaluators worked very differently.

Tovan mostly observed.

His [Worthy] Aspect rarely produced anything dramatic enough for my [Awareness] to identify.

He asked questions when someone interested him.

Sometimes requested that we remain somewhere longer.

Twice, he dismissed someone I had privately found promising within minutes.

The second time, I disagreed enough to ask why.

"Strong [Will]," he told me. "Poor direction. They could become impressive. That doesn't make them [Worthy] of what you're offering."

Ilyra was...

Stranger.

Her [Fate] Aspect rarely manifested in ways I could interpret.

Occasionally, she stopped.

Looked down some side route.

Then requested we deviate from the itinerary.

Most deviations found nothing.

One led us to an unemployed transport coordinator whose future apparently possessed an unusually strong possibility of intersecting one of my commercial relationships.

Not my [Faith].

Still useful.

I introduced them to someone several days later.

Another deviation brought us to a child.

For approximately fifteen seconds, I thought the search might already be over.

Then Ilyra shook her head.

"Strong intersection."

"With my [Faith]?"

"No."

"What, then?"

She stared at me for several seconds.

"I don't know yet."

That was an aggravating answer.

Three weeks later, the child's older sister became involved in an organization one of my investments depended upon.

Apparently, [Fate] considered that worthy of several hours of my time.

I adjusted my expectations.

Again.

One journey became another.

An orphan residence.

Nothing.

A public shelter.

Nothing.

A rehabilitation community.

Several interesting people.

No chosen candidates.

A neighborhood built around cheap, densely subdivided housing.

One weak [Fate] reaction.

No [Worthy] one.

A local education center.

Three potential candidates, according to me.

None according to Tovan.

A charity-operated dormitory.

Tovan found one person interesting enough to investigate.

Ilyra found no meaningful intersection.

Rejected.

I didn't lower my standards.

That would have defeated the [Purpose] of the entire project.

If finding someone suitable required months...

Then it required months.

If it required years...

It would take years.

My Essence overdevelopment disorder certainly ensured I had the idle time for it.

And in the meantime...

I learned about the Everwell Sector in new ways.

Not the version Esme Academy taught.

Not the one visible from Lylily Tower.

Not the one glimpsed from peripheral districts whose architecture contained enough precious and rare materials to make wasting space look tasteful.

This was another Everwell Sector.

Still wealthy by the standards I had once known.

Still incomprehensibly developed.

Still occupied by Civilization.

But thin enough at the edges that its underlying rules became easier to see.

Power.

Reputation.

Violence.

Organizations whose authority ended three corridors away.

Protection that became extortion depending on who described it.

[Contract]s people technically accepted because every alternative was worse.

Pillar Of Order patrols trying to determine which ugly arrangements remained merely ugly...

And which crossed some shifting boundary into [Evil].

It was fascinating.

Also increasingly difficult to classify.

So I kept observing.

There would be time to decide what I thought of it later.

For now...

I had chosen ones to find.

◇ ◈ ◈ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◈ ◈ ◇

By what I had long since stopped bothering to count as our umpteenth expedition, everyone involved had learned enough about my scheduling preferences that our itineraries had become predictably unreasonable.

Not unsafe.

Kesra had successfully prevented that, mostly by proposing better alternatives whenever she objected instead of wasting time on disagreements that led nowhere.

This particular itinerary covered seven locations, with transit minimized through overlapping routes and breaks arranged around the actual limits of Tovan and Ilyra rather than conventional meal schedules.

One destination had been removed after I discovered most of its population had relocated, while another had been added because Ilyra noticed an unexpected [Fate] irregularity in a neighboring district during our previous journey.

By now, Tovan had stopped asking whether I intended to slow down.

Ilyra had started bringing reading material.

And Kesra mostly limited herself to checking that I remained within sight whenever I flew ahead.

Progress.

The final destination before we took a break was an orphanage.

It wasn't particularly famous or notoriously bad, which was partly why I had selected it.

The institution occupied several repurposed floors near the edge of a residential tower located in an area whose economic decline had stabilized decades ago without ever truly reversing.

Its public records were similarly unremarkable.

Inconsistent donations.

Regular staff turnover.

Repeated minor requests for emergency funding.

Nothing dramatic enough to attract serious outside attention.

Exactly the sort of place where thousands of lives could pass without anyone important ever having reason to look closely.

We arrived after the rest of the itinerary had already consumed most of the day.

Not late according to the local clock, and certainly not late by my own waking period—I still had around thirty-two hours before I needed to succumb to the call of sleep—but late enough that this was unquestionably the final destination before we returned.

Kesra entered first.

I followed, with Tovan and Ilyra behind us.

The entrance was disappointingly ordinary.

The flooring was old but clean enough, while the walls had clearly been repaired repeatedly instead of replaced.

Furniture designed to accommodate several common morphologies filled the reception area, achieving the predictable result of being perfectly comfortable for almost none of them.

The reception station itself stood unattended.

I let my [Awareness] [Flow].

Dozens of children were scattered throughout the building.

Some slept.

Others spoke quietly.

Several moved through adjoining rooms and corridors.

Five adults were within range.

Then...

Impact.

Sharp enough to immediately stand apart from the building's ordinary sounds.

Not construction.

Not something falling.

Something flexible striking flesh.

My flight stopped.

Kesra reacted at almost the same instant, her posture changing as another impact carried through the corridor.

Then came a muffled sound.

Crying.

No.

Someone trying not to cry.

We moved without needing to discuss it.

The sound led us down one corridor, past a communal room, and around a closed partition.

As we approached, it became easier to distinguish an angry adult voice between the impacts.

Then another strike landed.

My [Awareness] reached the room before I did.

Seven children.

Three adults.

Four of the children were kneeling against a wall, while another had already collapsed onto the floor.

Bruising.

Minor bleeding.

Nothing immediately life-threatening.

One adult held some manner of flexible disciplinary rod.

Another stood beside the door, while the third simply watched.

Eventually, I rounded the corner, and the room entered my sight.

One of the kneeling children had positioned themself half a step ahead of the others.

Not submissively.

Protectively.

Their head remained lowered, and their body was already covered in bruises, but their eyes weren't fixed on the adult holding the rod.

They were moving.

Across the room.

Toward the door.

Between the adults.

Across the available exits.

Then toward us.

Calculation.

The rod rose again.

Beside me, Tovan abruptly stopped.

At exactly the same moment...

So did Ilyra.