Lindon leaned forward, eager. “Can you teach me?”
In the Wei clan, most sacred artists reached the Iron stage in their twenty-first or twenty-second year. For Kelsa to have reached the barrier between Copper and Iron at the age of sixteen meant that she was more than merely talented; she had the discipline and skill to match.
Abruptly, Kelsa rose to her feet. “That’s up to you. I have some ideas, but I need a living target with a functioning core if I want to try them out. That means you.”
“You can disable my spirit, but it won’t do much. I can hardly defend myself to begin with.”
Kelsa stretched first one arm, then the other. “That’s not what I mean. The manual mentions that he had to achieve purity for the technique to work. We don’t have time for that, so I’ll be pushing my madra into your core until I get a feel for the technique.”
As a sacred artist on the Path of the White Fox, Kelsa cultivated aspects of dreams and light, bent toward the purposes of deceiving enemies. Accepting it directly into his core meant…
“I have another idea,” Lindon said, with a half-step back. “I could try on you first, and we could work from there.”
“I need to understand the theory myself,” Kelsa said, dropping into a balanced stance on the balls of her feet. Her left hand was extended, her right held back, her whole body angled sideways. “First trial.”
Lindon tried to protest again, but Kelsa unfolded in a deceptively quick movement that left the heel of her palm against his core, just below the navel. She’d used hardly any force, and the strike came with no pain; it felt like a light slap, if anything.
But the world went mad.
The soft blue cloudbell flowers at his feet took flight, flapping around his eyes. Shadows in the bushes flickered and giggled, while the clouds zoomed around like zealous fish in the ocean of the sky. Grass tickled his feet through his shoes, and he tiptoed around to avoid it. The ground must not have liked that, because it finally had enough and slapped him in the back of the head.
He came to in a wrench of returning sensation, lying flat on his back in the garden and staring up into the sky. His arm had begun to ache again.
Over him, Kelsa was flexing her palm. “Too slow. The motion has to carry the madra, you can’t rely on transmission through contact. Stand up, I need to try again.”
Lindon crawled to his feet, still dizzy. “Wait. I think it’s worse on me, because I can’t—”
She hit him again.
After the garden stopped partying without him, he spoke from the ground. “I’m not standing up again. I’m not.”
Kelsa was moving at half-speed, stepping forward into a slow palm thrust. She repeated the first step a few times, working something out in her head. “Then you’ll be worthless for the rest of your life,” she said casually, but the words were like a spear to the ribs. “You don’t want to shame the family? Stand up.” She didn’t so much as glance at him, as though she didn’t care whether he stood or not. “I’ve almost worked it out…it has to transmit all at once. Not like a stream, but a gust of wind.”
Lindon stood up again. And again.
Eleven more times.
By the end, the earth never stopped spinning, even when the effects wore off. He tried to rise again, but up and sideways seemed to have swapped places, and he stumbled into the cloudbells. Their stalks were sharper than they looked.
Kelsa reached in and hauled him out with ease, steadying him with a grip on his shoulder. Ten breaths passed before he could take a step without swaying.
“Rally yourself,” she said. “Step forward and shove in one motion, focusing madra in your palm. Release it in one breath like a gust of wind, being sure to exhale and cycle to the rest of your body for stability. Understood?”
Lindon was trying to determine if his senses were back under control. Was that flickering shadow a sign of lingering madness, or a leaf blowing in the wind? “Please, I need…I need a moment.”
Kelsa rarely had the patience to wait around, and though she allowed him his rest, she did so reluctantly. She paced in the garden, studying Heart of Twin Stars as she did. “Let’s return to an earlier subject,” she said, without looking up from the book. “The fruit. Have you finished cycling it?”
“Almost all,” he said, sensing the tingling sparks that lingered in his core. “I haven’t noticed much of a change.”
She squinted at the page. “I can’t see clearly. Bring out your light.”
Lindon looked around at the bright morning light. “Do you need me to find a healer?”
She used the manual to point at his robes. “You’re my disciple for the day. Pull out your light.”
To his sister, Lindon would have protested. To his master, Lindon would have obeyed without a word. He spent a few seconds deciding which she was, and eventually reached into his pack to produce a palm-sized board.
The board was covered with an intricate three-layered script circle, and when he fed his madra into it, it burst into white light. The runelight was much stronger than from an ordinary script, and remarkably steady. That was this script’s only purpose: to produce light on command. It would last as long as the user’s spirit did.
Lindon held the board over the book with the shining script down, though it made no discernible difference among the bright sunlight.
Kelsa didn’t thank him, but spoke as she read. “I finished processing the orus last night. It was quite the experience. Did it feel as though you’d swallowed a thunderbolt? Mine did. But as I continued cycling, I didn’t feel much else. It was as though the fruit vanished. I wondered if Mother was mistaken, and this wasn’t the miraculous spirit-fruit she thought.”
She looked at him but kept her book open, so he didn’t remove the light. “It wasn’t until early this morning that I noticed the changes. Tell me, does your light seem brighter than usual to you?”
Lindon flipped the light over and examined it himself. It was almost impossible to tell how bright it was, especially compared to a memory. “Perhaps a little?”
“Keep watching until you can see a difference.”
Lindon knew his sister was headed somewhere with this, and he would exhaust himself eventually. He kept the light ignited, staring into it, looking for the slightest difference in illumination. He noticed nothing.
Finally, she told him he could stop. “How do you feel?” she asked him.
“Absolutely ordinary.”
“Yet you burned the light for fifty-two seconds, and you could have kept going. How long could you do it before?”
Unlike the brightness question, he could answer this one. “Thirty seconds, at most.” He had used this board to light his way while diving in the river, so he knew exactly how long he could keep it lit. But he must be wrong. When he sensed his core, he didn’t feel any stronger. “Are you sure you counted properly?”
She snapped the technique manual closed, wearing a pleased look. “The fruit’s madra integrates so smoothly with our own that we don’t notice. Yesterday I was Copper, and today I’m on the verge of condensing Iron, but I don’t feel any different. And yesterday, you wouldn’t be able to use the Empty Palm more than once without passing out.”
Lindon’s breaths were coming more quickly, and the flowers in the garden suddenly smelled almost painfully sweet. “What about now?”
She adopted a low stance, balanced and firmly planted, prepared to be hit. “How should I know? Now, disciple, Empty Palm!”
This time, Lindon snapped into action as he would for a real sacred arts master. He stepped forward and pivoted at the hips, launching a palm strike at his sister’s stomach. Synced with his madra, it should have driven energy through her core like a steel spike, but it splashed like a cup of water instead.