The night before, Huang Jin and his Master sat on the roof of her cabin watching the stars. Winter had turned to Spring again; he had been training under her for over a year. The auspices aligned, indicating that the Wild flowed with resources for the gathering.

  Now, Master marched ahead of him wearing one of her signature quirky outfits. This time, she wore an off-white dome hat, short pants, and a sensible vest with lots of pockets, together with heavy boots. She’d let him come along in his usual training gi, which meant her own outfit was some obscure reference or personal joke. He didn’t usually bother asking about them, lacking the cultural context to understand the answers.

  They skirted the nearest edge of the Wild accessible to the south of Songying, near the very mountain pass he’d taken to get there from the capitol. Even now, at the outlying pickets of the true wonders, he understood why the local Sect had labelled itself ‘The Roiling Pines.’ Vast evergreens intermingled with twisted rock and cold, tumbling water to create a dynamic environment.

  As they navigated the tangle, Master kept up her usual educational banter. “Now, why bother trading with intelligent spirit beasts? What’s wrong with the conventional ‘see it, kill it, wear its skin’ philosophy?”

  The question came at an awkward time, as the pair free-climbed a sheer, grey rock face. “Because…” the prince answered, puffing. “Because of the Principle of Symbolic Transfer. If you take a piece of a creature’s body by violence, if it’s intelligent, that piece will bear a subtle curse that can transfer to the…” He took another difficult breath. “... Final product.”

  “Good. Ah, here we are!” The pair made it to the top of the wall, climbing onto a flat, grassy surface containing nothing but one large, gnarled pine tree. Its roots played host to dozens of tiny white flowers, spreading like mold. “First treasure of the day, Ivory Clover! And this old fellow will be grateful for their removal.”

  Huang Jin gave the ancient tree a respectful nod as he worked to gently pluck the clover. They came off easily, and somehow the image came to his mind of a young man sponging an elderly relative’s back in a bath.

  Once he’d completed the task, he made to clamber back down the cliff. As he turned, he found a small animal looking up at him. “Oh, look Master! A rabbit! I think it’s a spirit beast.” A lovely creature it was, with rich white fur bearing black highlights. And under its ears…

  “Ah, that’s a Thralling Pine Lop!’ I call them ‘Nasa Bunnies.’ They store up energy in the spring and summer, then release it all at once in the autumn and jump to the moon for the breeding season. Now, don’t look at its ears, whatever you do, because it uses the iridescent color of its inner ear to enact a mental- aaaaaaand he’s been got.”

  Her voice came from infinitely far away, and her words carried no meaning. Huang Jin floated amongst the stars, the Earth far below and the Moon suspended above. He beheld the sun in its naked glory, with no atmosphere to taint its light. The whole furnace of life blazed in his eyes.

  “Now, this is the part where it latches onto you and feasts upon your vital energy. Yup, any minute now.” Nothing but the glory of the celestial sphere touched him. “Funny, it’s just… staring at your face. Oh, sweet mercy, they’ve hypnotised each other!”

  “Who will win,” the disembodied noise went on, “a natural qi technique on the upper end of the Student’s Realm, or the raw charisma of this small, hapless child? The paradigm awaits collapse!”

  A little hint of the familiar intruded into the moment. The smell of pine, and with it the reminder of his own power, his own qi, his very own existence. Wood, and Metal. “I… am on a cliff, near a tree. I am not in the upper atmosphere.” He spoke the words aloud, as if to make them real, and all at once they became so. Reality reasserted itself. There was the venerable evergreen, there was the knapsack, and there before him sat the rabbit, its head cocked to the side and its eye trained on his.

  Master clapped her hands. “Charisma wins, good job. Now, no need to worry! Thralling Lops are wily, but not intelligent, therefore they’re safe to harvest. You’re at the fifth stage, now, you should be able to win in a straight fight.” She pointed to the shortsword, made by his own hand, hanging by his side.

  “I don’t think I can. I mean, I don’t think I should.” Gazing at the little beast, he couldn’t suppress his urge to smile. “It could have attacked me when I was defenseless, but it didn’t! I can’t repay mercy with harm.” Heedless of the danger, the prince reached out and pet the rabbit’s head. It revelled in the touch, pushing its head up into his hand.

  “Oh, gods, this is the part where you ask if you can keep it.”

  Unprompted, it leapt into Huang Jin’s lap. He wrapped his arms around the spirit beast as it nuzzled into his stomach, and then turned his puppy-dog eyes onto his Master. “I’m doing well with Ox!”

  She sighed, resigned. “Honestly, ‘spirit beast master’ is a respectable niche. Ox, dog, and now rabbit... you’re gonna have some trouble when you get to the dragon.”

  “Maybe I could count for the dragon?”

  “By that logic, you could count for the tiger, too. Come on, you’re not getting out of reagent-gathering just because you got a new pet.” She hurled herself over the cliff, and her student was left to clamber down himself. Fortunately, his new friend did not seem to mind being placed on top of his head while he found handholds in the rock face.

  “And before you bring it up,” Master shouted from below, “I’m not going to ask the name, I can fuckin’ guess.”

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  “That’s no fun!” he laughed back. Rabbit caused no trouble as the quest into the Wild continued, or as they camped and watched the stars and made commentary on their meaning. They returned, with a great bounty, to the comfortable cabin and an excited Dog.

  The next year was filled with practical learning. The art of gathering ingredients featured most heavily, but then came alchemy, and the practical side of using formations to create physical effects. Time passed, and the child grew more capable by the day.

  -

  Huang Jin entered his Master’s study with slow, careful steps. She called it ‘the best room for waiting,’ and she did not exaggerate: the smell of a merry fire munching through hard wood, the soft draperies, and even a window looking out at a picturesque landscape that definitely wasn’t real. A warm glow lit the room from the stone fireplace, and Master sat deep-sunken in a huge easy chair next to it. Rabbit sat on her lap basking in the double warmth. Dog lay on the bearskin rug nearby. The boy had barely seen the animals in the last week.

  As he approached, Dog raised his head and rabbit’s eyes shot open, instantly zeroing in on the small bottle in his hands.

  “Master,” he said, his voice soft, almost plaintive. “I did it.” In the flickering light of the fire, there was no hiding the washed-out look in his eyes.

  She held Rabbit at bay under her arm. The little animal thrashed and squirmed, but she didn’t seem to mind at all as she reached out with her other hand to take the glass container. Her student hesitated, giving the bottle a longing look before offering it up. She held it up to the firelight, closing one eye. “Advanced-level Wood-element spirit refining pills, as ordered. No denying it now, you’re a real alchemist.”

  Rabbit broke free of her hold, but dared not challenge her for the prize. She contented herself hopping to Dog’s side, nuzzling into the larger animal’s stomach. Dog’s gaze did not leave his boy’s face.

  Master, too, shifted her gaze to her student. “Why the long face? This is fine work. Even the bottle is hand-made…”

  “I felt it. Just a little knot, in the very center and bottom of the cauldron, during the final refinement cycle… I felt the qi condense into jing.” She knew it, and he knew that she knew it, but he couldn’t get it out of his head.

  Qi served as a catch-all term for the vital energy, the very life-blood of the universe; but it had phases. ‘Qi,’ the most abundant, analogous to a gaseous state, then ‘jing,’ a condensed form closer to a liquid. ‘Shen,’ the substance of the soul, infinitely rich and incredibly dense, came last as the ‘solid.’ Condensing qi into jing within the body required a core, and this was the gulf between the Student and the Advanced Realms.

  And Huang Jin would never cross that gulf. “I’ll never experience it, inside of my body. I can create it, make it stable, feel it. But I can never have it.”

  Master again considered the bottle. “True. But there’s more, right? You knew that much going in.”

  “It’s all very irrational. The experience… pushed me to the next stage.” He’d been here with Master for two years now. Back home, they called him a genius, or he thought he remembered such a thing happening. A genius, minding herds of magnificent spirit beasts, gathering and growing spiritual herbs, even just living in a house charged with eldritch formations. [Cognitive Enhancement,] too, augmented his ability to advance his cultivation. “I’ve reached the ninth stage of the Realm of Students.”

  “Congratulations.” Her eyes shifted to his, and both let the contact linger.

  “The wall is before me. I guess I just realized… this is it. This is as strong as I’ll ever be.” There was something like defeat, there. “Maybe not as smart as I’ll ever be, but…”

  “Okay, we’re gonna need a quick lesson in perspective here, methinks.” She stowed the bottle in her sleeve, and in the same motion retrieved a small metal object. Huang Jin recognized it from a description in a book: a semiautomatic handgun, chambered in 9mm. She next drew out a long, dark tube and screwed it into the barrel. “For the animals, you know, the noise is terrible.” She raised the silenced gun and aimed it square at his chest. “Think fast, sweetie.”

  His hand was already moving when she pulled the trigger. He calculated the trajectory, and the expected speed, and the force necessary to remove the projectile from its course, all in the background of his mind. The bullet reached him before the sound of the explosion. By the time he heard the rolling ‘BOOM,’ the little prince held the hot lead harmlessly in his right hand.

  Good thing, too: if it had hit him square in the chest, it might have caused a nasty bruise.

  Dog bolted to his feet and started barking. Rabbit dashed out of the room at the noise. Master waited for the chaos to die down before speaking, “Do you know what that would have done to a mortal, Huang Jin? Instant fucking death, likely enough, a trip to a surgeon at best. And you caught it out of the air like it was nothing!”

  He couldn’t say anything in response, so she continued, putting her gun back into her sleeve and taking out the bottle. “Take this. Look at the Empire, as a whole. To the average man on the street, this little bottle of pills contains more value than he’ll ever see in his entire life. Take this to the Weeping Heath province, and you’d be a prince all over again! The Sects there are so weak, they’d kill or die to get this kind of power. Take it the Divine Arrow Sect, and they’d just shrug and keep it in stock for an initiate. And the Divine Arrow would still give you more money for it, because they have that much more money than the Weeping Heath Sects. Do you get what I’m trying to tell you, here?”

  He thought it over. “Power and value are defined by context and environment?”

  “Yeah, basically. You’d be in the upper seventy-fifth percentile in some places, you’ve exceeded the lifetime accomplishments of some shitty alchemists, etcetera. Having a low ceiling isn’t some super sad tragedy, it’s just a part of life. This,” and again she brandished the pills, “is proof that your potential extends beyond your power. Be glad, and keep moving. You’re two years into a five-year training period. You’re going to make this look like a joke, before you’re done… wait, why are you bowing again?”

  “Because, you always know what to say to make me feel better, Master. Thank you for your patience with me.”

  “Kid thanks me for shooting him with a literal gun,” she sighed, with a hand on her hip. “Now, your next assignment: enchanted smithing. We need to work on your Sword Dao, the ‘ideal form’ of the concept of ‘sword’ in your mind.” And off she went once more, guiding her student into another large project, another field of study.

  One thing at a time, all at once.