Within Calvin’s spirit, nine gates turned with the slow, steady persistence that ground grain into flour and mountains into dust. His qi flowed like the streams that ran down from the high precipices that had given the province the last word of its name, smooth and gentle on the surface but with currents fit to sweep away a grown man who misstepped, crystal clarity warping the perception of depth and shrouding ferocity. Every droplet of power moved with a unity that would have been unimaginable just a week earlier, and his spirit sang with a single pure, crystalline harmony.
It was beautiful. It was powerful. Just looking at it opened his eyes to the infinite complexities of the Nine Rotating Gates and expanded his horizons, offering profound insights into techniques he had never dared attempt and concepts he had been unable to grasp. Calvin could practically see in real time as his Foundation was refined from the inside out. It was incredible, like nothing he’d ever felt or heard of, and the level of profound spiritual insight and engineering that must have gone into designing the Nine Gates method boggled his mind.
Rough patches in his qi channels so faint that Calvin could not detect them without the Scroll’s guidance were worn smooth and reinforced without a modicum of his attention, and weak spots that formed as the channels were stretched and refined were patched as quickly as they appeared. It was like watching a stream become a river—in some places stone was worn away, while in others sediment was deposited and pressed to form a pristine riverbank.
The effect was even more apparent in the qi nodes that housed the gates themselves. As they turned, they forced qi down and out in a constant, relentless current. Each rotation simultaneously strengthened the structure around it and expanded the node’s capacity, depositing layers of barrier qi thinner than anything Calvin could have managed manually along the inner walls of the node in smooth, even layers, even as it drilled the node deeper and deeper into the fabric of his spirit.
Though the majority of his focus was dedicated to maintaining the integrity of the nine gates, thanks to his recent advancement Calvin was able to spare a fraction of his attention for the other profound wonder hidden within his otherwise unremarkable spirit––the attunement treasure that even now remained perched motionless upon his central qi node.
The phoenix had not stirred since his conversation with Yue Gwey despite a few tentative tests Calvin had conducted, but he wasn’t really willing to push it. He definitely wanted to know what sort of potential connection might exist between his attunement treasure and the freaking Imperial Family, but that seemed like a problem far beyond his current means to truly investigate and looking too closely might draw attention he really, really, really would prefer to avoid. Much better to continue keeping his head down and his eyes and ears peeled for the time being.
At the moment, Calvin was much more interested in the fiery beads of purple-gold qi that even now dripped slowly and surely into his central qi node. Though they were most numerous there, forming a sort of…mound within his qi node that he could faintly feel like a furnace smoldering in his heart, over the past several days the beads had slowly spread throughout his entire Foundation.
Calvin had found that even though he couldn’t control the beads directly, he could sort of nudge them around if he focused. They followed the flow of his qi like small stones in a strong stream, bouncing and bobbing and occasionally settling to the bottom, but inevitably moving with the current. Calvin had initially worried that they might interfere with his cultivation, obstructing the flow of his qi through his channels, but that hadn’t happened. The beads did sometimes linger in his channels, but his qi flowed easily over and around them.
It was quite the contrary in fact. Wherever his qi moved across the beads, it changed. The beads dissolved a drop at a time, their energy gradually integrating with his qi. It had only been a few days, but the difference was already clearly apparent. His qi had gained a faint purple tint and he occasionally noticed a metallic gleam, though it vanished whenever he focused on it too closely. The effect was even more apparent when he deliberately separated a bit of qi and swirled it around one of the beads until it dissolved fully. As long as he ensured that bit of qi didn’t mix with the rest of it, he could get it to a pale lavender that felt more like honey to his senses than the water that was the rest of his qi.
Though the process had only just begun and Calvin knew it would be months, years, or perhaps even decades or centuries (a span of time that still made him nervous just to contemplate, even though he could already expect to live well over a hundred years even if he never advanced another step) before his qi matched that of the treasure, Calvin couldn’t help but be delighted whenever he looked at the progress he’d made already. He still had a long way to go, but it wasn’t often these days that he saw real, tangible progress with so little time invested. His days in the Gathering realm, where every day of Cultivation felt like a great leap forward, were long behind him, and now he often went weeks of effort without seeing much of a reward, whether that was with his own senses or on the Scroll.
It would only get harder from here of course. The process of attuning yourself to a specific type of qi was as simple as it was time consuming, and one that could very well continue throughout a cultivator’s life. First you attuned your current qi as much as you could to your chosen aspect, whatever it might be, and then you integrated that qi back into your Foundation until you naturally began to produce that sort of qi. Then you could repeat the process, potentially ad infinitum, slowly moving your qi closer and closer to your ideal aspect.
He estimated that in another week or two it would be time to integrate his altered qi back into his Foundation for the first time. For the moment, his qi was attuning to the beads faster than he regenerated unattuned qi, but he was certain that would change once it became saturated up to a certain point. Certainly some cultivators were able to fully integrate their attunement in only a single step, but that was only with extremely weak attunements. You could only change your own qi so much without reintegrating it into your Foundation before it stopped being your qi. Calvin had no idea how many iterations it would take to transform his qi into the blazing purple-gold fire that radiated off the phoenix, but he could guess that the answer was a lot.
A sudden ping from the formation around his villa distracted him and the rotating gate in his left foot fractured without his full attention reinforcing it. He scrambled to repair it, but it was a patch job at best. The effect rippled through his nodes and, with so much of his focus on repairing the damaged gate, three more gates cracked and then dissolved back into qi before he even had a chance to react. He frantically released his hold on the gate he’d just repaired, trying to preserve the rest of the system, but it was too late. The disruption propagated through his channels, not harming him but knocking the smoothly flowing system out of rhythm. Five more gates, including the one he’d just patched, shattered within moments of each other, leaving him with just the gate in his heart––the one he had the most practice maintaining––slowly turning away as though nothing had happened.
Calvin opened his eyes and swore loudly, his voice echoing off the walls of his meditation room. He’d managed to hold all nine gates for nearly fifteen minutes that time, a new personal record without all the preparations he usually took before a breakthrough, but he’d really been hoping for longer. Just forming the gates had taken three times that. How could he expect to use the gates in combat before his breakthrough to the Core realm if they took so long to forge and shattered the moment his attention slipped?
Perhaps he was approaching this from the wrong direction. After all, the gate in his heart had stayed in place while all the others had broken. Perhaps instead of trying to use them all at once while meditating, it would be better to slowly add one gate at a time, each time focusing on really integrating the gate with his qi node and the channels around it? It would be less efficient in the short term––the difference between cultivating with one or two gates and all nine was truly night and day––but in the long run…
The idea bore further consideration.
Sighing, Calvin slumped forward and braced his elbows against his knees. Now then, what had distracted him? He hadn’t fully silenced the formation around his villa like he did during a breakthrough, but there were only so many things it could be warning him about in the middle of the night.
Reaching out to the formation around the villa, he was surprised to find two cultivators somewhere in the high Foundation realm approaching his home. They’d paused briefly at the gate then continued up the path towards his front door. That was somewhat unusual, especially at this time of night. While it was true that even a Gathering realm cultivator didn’t need nearly as much sleep as a mortal and could potentially work through the night one day in three without any adverse effects, most of the time disciples were encouraged to spend their nights in their homes focusing on their cultivation. Well, that or in one of the sect’s many, many entertainment venues that were typically open into the early hours of the morning burning through their hard-earned points.
Calvin tended to think that it was more the latter than the former.
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He wasn’t sure who would be coming to see him this late into the night, Mai and Jane sometimes came by to tend to herbs with particularly strict care requirements, but he didn’t think they had anything like that growing right now. Not since they’d harvested the last of the dew-drinker violets. Plus neither of them were anywhere close to the high end of the Foundation realm. Mei barely registered as in the Foundation realm on a good day, and Jane wasn’t all that much stronger.
That didn’t leave too many other options.
Calvin frowned and stood up, quickly climbing out of his meditation chamber and approaching one of the villa’s windows. Though it was dark outside, the moon and stars hidden by thick clouds, he was a cultivator. His eyes adjusted quickly to the gloom, the distant light of the road enough to make out the general shape of what lay beyond the glass. He could see the herbs growing in their plots and garden boxes, the fence separating his land from the public road beyond, and the dark ribbon of paving stones that led up to his door, but no people. The angle was all wrong, the front door hidden from view by the shape of the garden villa.
Someone knocked on the door, three quick raps, a pause, then two hard knocks, and Calvin relaxed. A moment later, a familiar voice called out, muffled but clearly recognizable. “Calvin! Are you awake in there?”
Pitching his voice to carry, Calvin called back, “I was just meditating. One second, Lulu. Is Wallis with you?”
“Told you he’d be awake,” Lulu chirped quietly, her voice barely audible through the door.
There was a muffled scuffle and a moment later Wallis made himself known as well. “Yup, I’m here. Sorry to disturb you, but it’s urgent.”
Calvin glanced down at himself. He was barefoot and bare chested, dressed only in a pair of well-worn baggy pants. He’d never consider going out in public like this, but it was just Lulu and Wallis. They’d spent enough time around one another to have seen way worse. Well, mostly he’d seen way worse, but spirit beast blood and acid was not kind to the cheap kind of clothing he wore regularly. And Wallis did say it was urgent.
He walked briskly to the door, pausing only to brush a finger against the carved symbol by the entryway that controlled the villa’s lighting formation. A tiny pulse of qi was enough to activate it, and with only a moment’s delay the room filled with a soft, steady glow that never failed to amaze Calvin after a childhood of candles and oil-filled lanterns.
He opened the door and blinked in surprise when he saw the duo. They weren’t wearing their usual plain disciples robes. Instead, these were noticeably finer and bore the sigil of the Eight Peaks sect on the breast and back. Both had their jade sect tokens on display, Lulu’s hanging from a beaded choker and Wallis’s usual bracelet had been adjusted so it sat around his wrist rather than his forearm like he typically wore it.
Calvin’s gaze flicked from the outfits to the pack Wallis was wearing on his back and then to the two spears sticking out over Lulu’s shoulders. Both bore serious expressions––well, as serious as Lulu ever looked––and conspicuously, Lulu wasn’t clinging to her partner.
He stepped away from the door, gesturing for the duo to come inside. “Emergency mission?” he guessed.
Wallis nodded, the two of them wiping their feet on the mat outside before stepping inside. Surprisingly it was Lulu who spoke up first, completely unprompted. “Sorry about the other day. I was upset and I went too far.”
Calvin waved dismissively. “It’s alright. Everyone has good days and bad days.”
Lulu’s smile was tight and didn’t reach her eyes. “Yeah. Yeah. Good and bad days.”
Wallis stepped forward, brushing a hand against Lulu’s shoulder before pulling it away. “We were hoping you were still interested in going on a mission outside the sect. We can try to find a different third if you’re––“
Calvin cut him off. “Of course I’m interested. What’s the mission?” Mentally he began to run down the list. Did he have everything he needed ready to go? It had been some time since his last mission outside the sect and he’d mostly unpacked–-or in some cases used up––his usual supplies. Did he need to go buy anything before they could leave?
Wallis looked relieved, though Calvin wasn’t sure why. He’d told them he was ready to take another mission with them, though the turnaround was a little faster than he’d been expecting. Wallis could be picky when it came to what kind of missions he liked to take. “Fantastic. It’s a suppression mission. Some kind of spirit beast wiped out most of a village near Nine-Pine Gulch, the posting didn’t have too much information. They put the mission up while I was at Mission Hall and it needs three or more high-Foundation realm cultivators.”
Calvin nodded slowly, amending his packing list. He was pretty sure he still had some medicinal pills appropriate for mortals lying around somewhere. Those would be good to have on hand just in case. “Scroll?” he requested.
Wallis pulled a leather scroll case embossed with the sect’s eight-mountain emblem from his robes and opened it, passing Calvin the scroll within. It was so fresh he could still smell the ink, and he headed deeper into his home even as he unrolled it, his unexpected guests trailing after him. “Sit wherever,” he told them distractedly, rapidly scanning the mission scroll.
It was much like Wallis had said, though the information on the scroll somewhat spottier than Calvin would have preferred. A spirit beast of some sort––the survivor who’d reported it, a young girl whose mother had put her on a horse and told her to get help, had not been more detailed than big teeth, fur, and red eyes, which could mean a lot of things––had attacked a nameless village near Nine-Pine Gulch, which was on the border of the territory of the Eight Peaks Sect. A group of guards from the nearest town had investigated and found traces of Foundation realm level qi, withdrawing immediately and sending a message to alert the Eight Peaks sect. The goal of the mission was to identify the threat and deal with it before any more villages that paid taxes to the sect got massacred.
Altogether not an unusual mission, though not of the sort Calvin had ever undertaken himself. It was a minor miracle there had been any survivors. Most missions like this one weren’t marked as emergencies because by the time anyone realized a tiny village or farmstead was gone, the culprit was long gone.
He glanced down at the listed reward and his eyebrows rose. He’d heard that the sect paid particularly well for emergency missions, but that was a good chunk of points even after splitting it three ways. Enough to cover two quarters worth of dues with a little something left over. No wonder some groups always had someone hanging around Mission Hall keeping an eye out for emergency requests. He wondered if that was what they’d been doing, or if they’d just gotten lucky with their timing.
He rolled up the scroll and tossed it lightly back to Wallis, who’d taken a seat on one of his dining room chairs while Lulu perched on the table beside him. “I wish we knew more than just teeth, fur, and red eyes, but I guess we’re lucky to get even that much.”
Wallis returned the scroll to its case and stowed it away. “So you’re in?” he asked hopefully.
Calvin nodded. “I’m in.” It wasn’t exactly the kind of mission he would have preferred––there was only so much treasure you could justify stumbling across within just few days travel of the sect’s core territory––but it was a mission that needed doing and he’d rather he be there with Lulu and Wallis than some random third they managed to rope in. There were already few enough people he enjoyed spending time with within the sect as it was.
“I should be ready to go in…call it twenty minutes.” He needed to get dressed and pack, neither of which would take long, but he also needed to write a note to Ariadne apologizing in advance for missing their planned luncheon. He was pretty sure he could pitch it in such a way that she shouldn’t be too mad––she seemed to like it when he was being properly ‘heroic’ and he was pretty sure this qualified––but that would take some time to compose.
And he should probably let Gwen know he was leaving too.
“Do you think you could carry a message for me while I pack?”
Lulu grinned and waggled her eyebrows. “Why, you and Miss Ladyness have another little romantic get-together planned?”
Calvin rolled his eyes. Lulu had always been unreasonably delighted by his relationship with Ariadne, making up all sorts of baseless stories and scenarios. “Her too, but I can drop that one off myself on our way out.” Ariadne lived in one of the fine mansions in the center of Outer Village, only a little out of the way from the most direct route out of the Sect. “I was thinking of someone else.”
Lulu leaned forward, resting her chin on her fist. “Oh? Is it a girl?”
“Yes, actually,” Calvin admitted, turning his back to the table as he searched through the kitchen cupboards.
Lulu swore loudly. “Seriously? Did one of Ariadne’s matches actually work out?”
“No, no, it’s nothing like that.” Calvin paused, staring blankly at his selection of pre-portioned tea. The image of Gwen’s blushing face flashed behind his eyes. “Okay, it’s sort of like that, but Ariadne had nothing to do with it. She was one of the new disciples I showed around the sect the one time they let me take that job. We had tea together yesterday, it went well enough.”
“Well I’ll be damned.” In the reflection of the window, Calvin saw Lulu shake her head ruefully. “Little Calvin’s all grown up.”
Wallis put a hand on Lulu’s bare thigh where her robe had ridden up. “What she means is that she’d be happy to carry a message.”
Lulu sputtered something incomprehensible, but Wallis’s words were good enough for Calvin. “Perfect. Let me quickly scribble something out. She lives in one of the herbalist’s huts in the ninth district, right around the corner from sparring ground fourteen-twenty-one. Hers is the one growing actual spiritual herbs, you can’t miss it.”
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