Chalk dust and an unidentifiable antiseptic smell defined this place. Wooden chairs, each with a desk built into the frame, filled the room in neat rows. Upon the walls were hung paper banners like tapestries, each bearing symbols and equations and figures. Huang Jin always found ‘the classroom’ odd, because he was pretty sure he was his Master’s first student in centuries, and that she had no others now.

  Master stood at the front of the room, filling the air with the sound of chalk impacting a blackboard. When she finished, she gestured at her work. “Solve this,” she commanded.

  He squinted at the letters. Meaning piled into the back of his mind. Put it all together and… “Ah! A = π times r squared, this is a longform calculus proof for the area of a circle!” It took him all of three seconds.

  “[Cognitive Enhancement] is a go, alright. Okay, next.” The blackboard disappeared, and she drew a whole table, covered in a thin white cloth, from her sleeve. Her student didn’t blink at the surreal sight, having spent six months getting used to his Master’s eccentricities. “Now, come forward.”

  She threw the cover off with a flourish, revealing three objects: a brachiopod fossil, a chunk of amber, and a piece of chalk. “Which of these three items would produce the best qi-conductive circuit?”

  “Hmm…” He leaned forward, inspecting each. His small brow wrinkled. “The… amber.”

  “And how did you reach that conclusion?”

  “Well, qi moves best through materials containing or associated with life. A brachiopod is ancient life, but its tissues have been replaced by rock. But! According to your Foundational Law of Feng Shui, ‘symbolism informs reality in a high-qi environment.’ As swallowstone, brachiopod fossils are associated with life and beauty, so it should make for a good conductor anyway. But! Amber, ‘tiger’s blood,’ bears similar symbolism and is actually a byproduct of a living thing, so it would be empowered in two different ways.”

  “The chalk didn’t enter the equation?”

  He shook his head. “Even though it’s still made of fossils… it’s the standard, so it’s less special, so it wouldn’t be the same.”

  “Alright!” The Master clapped her hands together, and the table and blackboard disappeared. “We’ve got the technique, and we’ve got the basics. You’re ready for part two. Remember how I labeled that in the syllabus?” As she said this, she turned and led Huang Jin from the classroom.

  They wandered the disconnected doors and surreal scenery of her hidden realm as he wracked his brain for the answer. Every moment since he had mastered [Cognitive Enhancement] lived within his mind in crystal clarity… but the time before now grew distant and grey. He figured out the answer by the time his Master stopped before a drab wooden door.

  “The ‘tedious part,’ I think.”

  “Bingo! Now, behold. I have brought you to… my library!” She cut him off as he began to gasp. “Temper thy expectations, it fucking sucks, and you’re going to hate it before too long.”

  She ushered him through, into the library of an elder master of cultivation.

  A single room, with one pedestal, supporting a single flat, rectangular artifact. “Forgive me, Master. I didn’t take your warning about expectations seriously.”

  Master plucked the slab off of its base and fiddled with it. She moved a finger across the surface, and it glowed to life with symbols and images. Before long, through a complicated series of movements and inputs, she made the object display black text on a white background. With this done, she handed the artifact to Huang Jin.

  “My library. Look!” He remained silent as she walked him through the process of controlling the ‘library.’

  “Ah, that’s incredible! It reminds me of something…” Something important, once, about a library and a spirit. Something about home. He probed the fog, trying to remember what the palace library looked like, or what it felt like, or what he found there. He discovered a trail that led him to Master, he knew, but specifics eluded him.

  Master drew him back to the present. “The spirit of Yulong’s library, I assume. But it’s not like that at all, there’s no qi in this thing. Just a bunch of ones and zeros, when you get down to it.”

  The ‘library’ glowed bright in the dim room. True, he couldn’t feel any qi from it. But… “How is this possible, without magic?”

  “You should have figured out by now that there’s no such thing as magic, hon. You can measure qi, you can practically fucking eat it! It behaves in specific ways under specific conditions, and prompts predictable and repeatable changes in the systems with which it interacts. Gods, I hate that word. No, mortals pioneered this thing, all by themselves! And also, like, a lot of other wonderful shit.”

  As she spoke, she continued poking at the machine in her student’s hands, nonverbally showing him what various buttons and functions did. “You know it as ‘The Age of Mortals.’ It’s the backdrop, the assumed ‘primordial chaos’ lurking in the back of your histories. Without cultivators running around dragging folk into their bullshit, mortals crafted their own vast, complex society. I got to watch the whole thing, start to finish.”

  The little prince had plenty to do, absorbing her every gesture, preparing to copy it on his own. He found time to say, “I wonder how it came about. It’s always the powerful who run things, right?”

  “Yeah, but in a world without usable, exploitable quantities of qi, ‘power’ is just… money. That flips the equation. It was a whole thing, an evil god got frustrated and started siphoning up all the world’s free-cycling qi, so everything operated on the background level… for thousands and thousands of years. Most of the cultivators got starved out. I just happened to have a few techniques to conserve energy, so I remained conscious.”

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  She waved her hand about, carelessly. “Then the other gods at the time had enough, got together, pushed the douche out of existence and then ascended beyond even godhood, all at once. But by then, ambient qi levels had been so low for so long that nobody even noticed! Fuckin’ crazy. The qi came back, the world bounced back a little too hard, the big countries just, y’know, bathed each other in a global holocaust of nuclear fire.”

  He looked up at this revelation. “Nuclear fire? Is that a special technique…?”

  “No, a weapon. Qi levels were still pretty low when the bombs dropped. When the qi returned, people caught on quick and jingoists across the globe got paranoid about the potential for new weapons. So, they figured it was a good time to employ the weapons of mass destruction they already had to hand.”

  “Mortals destroying the world… it’s hard to picture,” said the prince, shaking his head without turning his eyes from the ‘library.’

  Master shrugged. “Yeah. Those maniacs, they blew it all up. Gods damn them all to hell and all that. What followed was a bad couple of centuries. You can read all about it in a few of these textbooks I’ve prepared!” With this, she finished the visual lesson on the artifact’s use. “By the end of the book learning part, you should know exactly how the tablet works, too.”

  Retracing her actions, Huang Jin accessed the ‘books’ portion of the artifact. “Oh. Ooooh.”

  “Yeah. Don’t bother counting all the titles now, there’s a lot, arranged in the order you’ll be tackling them. Three thousand, five hundred and seven, to be exact. You’re going to read all of those in six months.”

  He couldn’t prevent his mind from running the calculation. He could do it. He could actually do it. With [Cognitive Enhancement], he could memorize a page in two seconds. Two seconds per page, an average of five hundred pages per book… If he read eight hours a day, six days a week, he could easily do three thousand in six months. “I’m suddenly worried for my head. Can I… fit all of this?”

  “Yes. Look, it’s going to be horrible, but take heart. I’ll have you working the spirit herb fields, and managing a few of the spirit beasts on the farm, too, and that’ll keep you balanced. By the time you’ve got your book learning done, you should have a good stock of plants and catalysts to practice alchemy on. One thing at a time, all at once, that’s the way.”

  “One thing at a time, all at once.” He committed it to heart, and readied himself for the hardest task yet.

  -

  A single enormous, glowing formation served as the ‘sun’ in Master’s ‘ranch.’ Anyone else would call it a ‘spirit farm,’ but Master insisted on ‘ranch.’ The space stretched into a vast open prairie, bordered by patches of farmland and it even included a running river. Here, Huang Jin got to grow his own little cluster of spiritual plants, and he was given the privilege of caring for the spirit beasts Master bred for ingredients.

  He sang one of Master’s favorite songs as he rode on the back of the largest bull. The ox heeded his directions, and the herd followed, cavorting and mooing at every held note. Funny, the song was all about driving cattle to slaughter and processing, while pining for a lover… but the Ironhorn Oxen seemed to love it, anyway.

  Dog kept pace with the herd at a respectful distance. The smart animal didn’t need experience to know he should avoid the huge beasts and their stamping, lethal hooves.

  By the time the song finished, the whole herd crossed the river. Huang Jin belted the last verse, and Ox lifted his head and bellowed in harmony. “Well, Ox, thank you for the duet! I’ll see you again next week,” the prince said, patting his mount before leaping off. His chores for the day ended with the driving, and it would be a long walk back to the cabin. The ‘library’ awaited once again.

  Long before he made it back, he felt the presence of his Master by his side. Sure enough, when he turned around she appeared out of nowhere, wearing blue overalls and her ‘cowboy hat,’ as she called it.

  She matched his walking speed as she spoke. “That isn’t fair. You know, I have to use main physical force or mind control to get the big one moving. Animal handling is supposed to be a wisdom check, not charisma!”

  After nine months training under her, he no longer bothered being confused by her non-sequiturs. He was pretty sure most of these came from a specific century she called ‘the Golden Age of Mass Media.’ “Do you mean that I’m charismatic, but not yet wise?”

  “Oh, honey. Your charisma is maxed out, your intelligence is getting there… constitution and wisdom are your dump stats.” She reached down and ruffled his golden hair. “You obtain intelligence by study, wisdom comes only through experience.”

  “Constitution is a lost cause?”

  “Yeah, basically. And that’s okay.”

  They went on in companionable silence for some time. “Master, I have a question.”

  “Yes?”

  “Can you be… wrong about some things?” He asked with his face turned up toward hers, eyelashes fluttering.

  “Put those things away!” she laughed, and put a hand over his eyes. “Yes! Yes, a thousand times yes. Fuck, I can Ascend anytime I want, I only stick around because the world contains secrets even I have yet to learn. Any time you learn anything, you find out you were wrong about something else. That process is the very core of my dao.”

  He struggled fruitlessly against her hand, laughing all the while, until she let go. “Then, I have something for you, because you told me that the book learning would be miserable. But, I think it’s wonderful!”

  “Ye gods, even after three months?”

  “Yeah. It’s… it’s like scratching an itch I didn’t know I had. Like the world keeps getting bigger, every time I look at it.”

  “From your perspective, it must look big indeed.” She turned around in a full circle without losing the pace. “Then, you won’t need field work anymore? The whole point was to give you a break from studying!”

  “Oh, but I’m learning this way, too! Also, if you’re really going to give Ox to me for keeping to the schedule, I want him to know me well.” That promise had been made on the very first day of his field work, and he did not know his Master to go back on a promise.

  “He already likes you better than me, and I bred his parents and so on for nine generations. The ingrate! But, any animal is inscrutable.” Dog barked from behind, as if in protest.

  They made it home before very long, and the prince returned to his inevitable studies. Every tome of learning and lore tore new holes into his understanding of reality, each demanding to be filled. The ‘Starving Mind,’ his Master had called herself, and slowly he came to understand what that meant.

  Three more months passed by as though time stood still. His knowledge base advanced, his cultivation grew by leaps and bounds. Master administered tests, he passed them, and she cleared him for the next stage of his training. “But… I feel that I still know so little,” he said, as she placed a strange black cap on top of his head and handed him a mysterious roll of parchment.

  “Good. If you think you know everything there is to know about anything, you don’t know enough about it. But you know enough now, to put things into context. From here on out, you learn by doing.”