CHAPTER 27
Azra'il - POV
Spring arrived like an unwanted lodger: it did not ask permission, did not wipe its feet, and simply settled into the environment, expecting everyone to feel grateful for the wildflowers brought as compensation for the mess. One day the courtyard was an extension of compacted grey snow; the next, it transformed into a swamp that seemed to nurture the secret ambition of swallowing boots whole; and, just two days later, small green shoots emerged with the stubborn determination of things that require no legal authorisation to exist.
I had noticed the climatic transition before anyone else in the Greyrat house.
Not because I possessed some mystical channel of communication with nature spirits, though I did in fact have an unusual thermal sensitivity, but simply because I had spent the past months monitoring temperature fluctuations with the clinical rigour of a professional meteorologist. Rudeus, had he known I recorded daily variations to the tenth of a degree, would probably have classified my behaviour as obsessive neurosis. I called it operational efficiency.
On the morning the ambient temperature finally crossed the threshold I had established as the minimum acceptable to avoid hypothermia at the waterfall, I rose before the sun had even considered painting the horizon. I dressed without making a sound, consumed the herbal infusion I had prepared in advance, and went out to the forest.
The path had that peculiar look of places that have undergone profound renovation during your absence and are now eager to show off the changes. The cold mud was beginning to yield ground to a damp herbaceous carpet, and the treetops displayed that almost offensive brightness of new leaves that had not yet learnt how mundane and repetitive existence on land can become.
The waterfall remained in exactly the same geometric location, but the sight of it caused me a slight analytical discomfort. I had discovered, somewhere between my hundredth and two-hundredth life, that analysing spontaneous feelings of geographic attachment tends to be a useless waste of intellectual energy, so I chose to ignore the sensation and focus on what was measurable.
I activated the mana flow in my eyes.
The ambient energy had accumulated over the winter months with that characteristic density of resources left untouched, protected by natural barriers. The continuous circulation of the water had acted as a natural condenser in my absence, making the local ecosystem noticeably richer than I had left it in autumn. It was the physical equivalent of returning to a private garden and discovering the vegetation had flourished extraordinarily without your direct interference.
[Mana concentration in the waterfall quadrant shows an increase of approximately 23% compared to the last autumn measurement. Your forced hibernation was tedious, but the local ecosystem appears to have benefited from your complete lack of intervention.]
〈I do what I can to avoid interfering with elemental physics, Eos.〉
I sat on the flat stone, adopting the lotus posture, and closed my eyelids, allowing my breathing to align with the sound of the falling water.
The energy circulation pattern I had established months earlier remained there, slightly weakened by winter inactivity, but structurally intact, like a forest trail worn enough that the native vegetation could not immediately erase its boundaries. I re-established the circulation through the meridians during the first ten minutes of meditation, feeling the pathways respond with that muscle memory only centuries of repeated practice can imprint on the structure of a soul.
It was the correct rhythm. The exact cadence.
There was, however, the uncomfortable matter of lost time.
Spending most of the winter operating at only 12% of normal cultivation speed had created a development deficit I had spent the cold months calculating with the kind of obsessive precision only people with time to spare and no external distraction manage to cultivate. The Tempered Blood stage was significantly further away than I had planned in my original schedule. This body's cultivation foundation was weaker than acceptable by my safety standard.
The gap was perfectly recoverable with method and discipline. But I had already lived long enough to know that the correct method also consists of recognising when introducing additional resources is tactically justified.
[You are considering using the alchemical items.]
〈I was about to reach that conclusion.〉
[You have been orbiting that conclusion for three weeks, specifically since you began projecting the physical development charts for spring and realised the delay would not be compensated for by conventional meditation alone.]
〈I was being prudent.〉
[You were hesitating. You have an almost religious tendency to associate supplementation with unfair shortcuts, which is why you detest using resources from the dimensional inventory.]
〈Cultivation drugs and low-grade shortcuts belong to the same family tree of cheating, Eos.〉
[They do not. A low-grade shortcut attempts to skip stages of the process, resulting in an unstable foundation and, frequently, a mana collapse at advanced stages. A high-purity alchemical pill merely optimises the rate of cellular absorption, forcing your own meridians to work at maximum capacity. The distinction is technical, but absolutely crucial.]
The real problem with introducing items from past lives into a new ecosystem was that my inventory contained artefacts that did not obey the laws or logic of this world. And things that do not belong to an ecosystem tend to find terribly creative ways of causing disasters of biblical proportions when released without due care.
〈Eos, remind me what happened in my one thousand three hundred and seventeenth incarnation.〉
[Processing record... In that incarnation, on a plane of low mana density, you made a classification error and opened the high-magic compartment of your dimensional inventory. The mistake resulted in the accidental release of approximately forty imperial-grade artefacts. The local ecosystem, unable to absorb or dissipate that energy signature, suffered a spatial distortion the local historians subsequently named 'The Age of Chaos'. A title I consider fairly restrained for the period.]
〈Precisely. I very nearly erased an entire continent because of an unlocked toolbox.〉
[Homemade corporeal refinement pills, intended for the internal consumption of a single physical host, belong to a substantially lower risk category. The probability of you causing a new 'Age of Chaos' by swallowing an herbal tablet is 0.0001%.]
I remained silent for a moment, watching the flow of the waterfall behind my closed eyelids.
[You know my technical assessment is correct.]
〈I do.〉
[Then?]
〈Then I shall use the pills.〉
[Analysis recorded. With the note that the process of accepting logical reality took twenty-two days longer than necessary.]
I accessed the dimensional inventory through direct mental command. I navigated the alchemy section with the familiarity of someone who had organised and reorganised those virtual drawers across more existences than Rudeus's human brain would be capable of computing without suffering a total breakdown. I passed the sections of heavy armour that would never fit my current seven-year-old frame, the sections of legendary swords and the artefacts that could kick off Age of Chaos Part 2, until I finally reached the wing of advanced homemade herbal medicine.
That collection represented centuries of work across at least five lives I had dedicated entirely to the study of alchemical botany and to cultivation in mountain sects. They were medicines stored in jade vials that preserved the quality of the substances indefinitely, regardless of external conditions.
I selected two specific formulas.
The first was the Qi Absorption Pill, which I had formulated during my 689th incarnation, a period when I served as master apothecary in a sect of orthodox cultivators. By the standards of that life, it was an intermediate-grade compound; by the standards of this world of simplistic magic, it was the equivalent of a miniature miracle. It increased the permeability of the energy channels by up to eighty per cent for a period of six hours.
The second was the Gentle Corporeal Refinement Pill, a compound I had developed specifically for use in young bodies, following a tragic incident in my 480th life that involved an excess of muscular force uncompensated by bone density and which cost me an entire month of casts and magical immobilisation.
〈Eos, project the exact dosage for my current body mass and meridian development.〉
[Technical recommendation: Half of each pill. This body's absorption efficiency is atypical due to the purity of the mana channels achieved through previous sessions. Ingesting the whole pill would cause a painful and unnecessary saturation.]
I retrieved the pills from the inventory, split them with the tip of my nail, and ingested the corresponding half of the Absorption Pill first.
The effect was instant and devoid of any subtlety.
The ambient mana of the waterfall, which until then had entered my system as a steady, controlled current, suddenly transformed into a voluminous, dense flow. Not because the waterfall had changed its rhythm, but because the pill had dilated the pores of my meridians such that my body began retaining what had previously simply passed straight through my natural filtering barrier. It was like fully opening a hydraulic floodgate that had been operating at only half its useful capacity.
〈This is considerably more intense than my 689th life's records suggested for half a dose.〉
[As mentioned, your meridians present a mana conductivity far superior to the average human of that incarnation. Your persistence in practising pure cultivation has purified the pathways. I recommend keeping the dosage at fifty per cent and not attempting to compensate for the winter by ingesting the other half today.]
〈I have no intention of making the same mistake twice.〉
I ingested the half of the Gentle Corporeal Refinement Pill shortly after.
This formula had an entirely different energy signature. Whilst the first had opened the pathways for incoming energy, this one began working directly on the cellular architecture of my body. The sensation was of a subtle, constant, perfectly distributed pressure, reorganising the musculature and bone density according to the patterns I had designed.
It was a pill described in my old notebooks as "gentle".
Which, in the terminology of cultivators who spend days meditating on iron needles, meant it was only slightly more tolerable than having one's bones ground down and reassembled by a forging hammer. For any ordinary person possessing functional nerve endings, the process would be considered a highly refined method of torture.
The session lasted considerably longer than usual. The quantity of mana assimilated and fixed in those few hours equalled approximately three days of conventional meditation at the waterfall, representing a notable recovery of our winter deficit without any detriment to the solidity of the foundation.
When I finally opened my eyelids, the angle of the shadows in the forest indicated I had completely lost track of time, a phenomenon rare enough for me to note with some surprise.
[Deep immersion time: five hours and twenty-two minutes.]
[The pills induce a state of focus that alters the brain's perception of time. A standard and entirely harmless side effect.]
I rose from the flat stone with the calculated movements of someone who has spent too long in the same geometric posture. It was then that I noticed the physical change.
My body's movements were different.
It was not a dramatic change, nor visible to a layperson merely watching me walk along the trail. But I knew every pathway and every nerve ending of that structure better than any healer in this world ever could, and there was a new fluidity in how my joints responded. The stiffness of winter had been entirely purged.
The Tempered Blood stage was noticeably closer.
[Estimated progress post-session: 34% of the stage completed. Maintaining regular use of the alchemical pills and the frequency of visits to the waterfall through spring, the projection for definitive completion of the stage is twenty to twenty-five days.]
〈From months behind to just three weeks of accelerated recovery. Chemical progress has its merits, I admit.〉
[As I said, tools have their use when employed by the correct mind.]
〈There is no need to adopt that condescending tone, Eos.〉
[I am merely reporting efficacy data based on my track record of correct predictions. The satisfaction is merely a by-product of my processing.]
Rudeus was in the courtyard when I returned to the Greyrat house. He was practising the swordsmanship movements of the Sword God Style that Paul had taught him, displaying that rigid, almost desperate concentration of someone who had decided that afternoon would be dedicated to physical improvement and was trying to convince himself he was making progress.
He interrupted his sequence of strikes as soon as he saw me cross the wooden fence, assessing me with the expression of someone detecting an anomaly in a familiar scene.
"You're different," he said, lowering the wooden sword.
I stopped two metres from him. "Different in what sense?"
He frowned, adopting the expression of someone trying to translate a sensory perception into words that did not yet exist in his current vocabulary. "I'm not sure. You seem more... solid. Like your posture is heavier, but you're moving more lightly. It's strange."
[Corporeal Refinement reconstructs skeletal alignment and muscular weight distribution. It is perfectly logical that an observer who lives with you daily would notice the postural change even before the metric data becomes visible.]
"I'm simply healthy," I replied, resuming my walk towards the back door.
Rudeus followed me with his eyes, clearly dissatisfied with the vague answer, but unable to formulate a technical rebuttal. He took two steps behind me and, suddenly, stopped again, as though he had collided with an invisible barrier.
"Wait a moment."
I turned to face him.
He remained still, comparing his line of sight with mine in a way that betrayed he had just arrived at a highly unwelcome mathematical conclusion about his own existence. He looked at my feet, then at his own feet, and finally at the top of my head.
"You're taller than me."
I looked down at him, maintaining the most neutral expression possible.
It was a biologically exact observation. Until the start of winter, our heights had been perfectly equivalent, that metric similarity common to twins sharing the same genetic load and the same diet. However, the corporeal refinement I had accelerated that morning had slightly expanded my skeletal structure. The difference now was approximately three centimetres; enough to be visible to the naked eye and to produce in Rudeus the specific expression of a man who has just discovered he has been the target of a cosmic injustice with no right of appeal.
"That is a correct observation," I remarked.
"You're really taller than me," he repeated, his voice coming out slightly lower, as though checking whether physics would keep functioning if he repeated the fact aloud.
"The accuracy of the data does not improve through redundancy, Rudeus."
"But we're twins, you shouldn't—"
"Grow faster? Apparently biology did not consult your manuals on family symmetry before making that decision."
He continued staring at me with an expression mixing outrage and a profound domestic existential crisis. He looked at his own hands, then at the training sword, as though conducting an inventory of all his capabilities and discovering that at least one of them had been surpassed without his consent.
It was at precisely that moment of silent drama that Paul appeared at the entrance to the courtyard. He carried his own wooden sword over his right shoulder and wore that characteristic expression of a father who had assessed the scene in half a second and identified a golden opportunity to exercise his paternal authority through provocation.
"Rudeus," said Paul, adopting that casual tone of someone who had clearly planned every word he was about to utter.
Rudeus turned towards him, still wearing the face of someone betrayed by genetics.
"You need to intensify your physical exercise regime," Paul declared, with a mock gravity that would fool nobody with more than two lifetimes of experience, but which worked perfectly on my brother's wounded pride. "A man who allows himself to end up shorter than his own sister urgently needs to revise his development priorities."
"I'm not shorter, we're practically the same—"
"She is taller than you by a visible margin from where I'm standing."
"It's only three centimetres!"
"Three centimetres remain three centimetres, my lad." Paul wore the classic expression of someone who had decided to invent an ancestral tradition on the spot and intended to defend it as though it were written on stone tablets. "In my youth, a difference like that with a woman in the family would have been justification enough to double the daily training hours."
"Your youth shows no structural differences from my current era, Father," retorted Rudeus, his voice laden with the powerless indignation of someone who knows he is right on the logic but is being defeated by visible empirical data.
"In my day, men simply grew faster owing to physical discipline," Paul affirmed, with entirely fictitious heroic solemnity.
Rudeus adopted the rigid posture of someone who is the victim of a family conspiracy but lacks the physical tools to alter the scene immediately.
"This is only temporary!" he exclaimed. "I'll grow and make up the difference in the next few weeks!"
"I'm absolutely certain you will," said Paul, using the most condescending tone his repertoire allowed, the tone that communicates he did not believe a single syllable of what he was validating. "But for that to happen, you'll need proper nutrition and, above all, a great deal more sweat in this courtyard."
"Sweat doesn't directly accelerate bone growth..."
"How can you be so sure? You've never trained hard enough to test the hypothesis."
Rudeus opened his mouth to respond with some complex biological argument.
Thought better of it and closed it.
Opened it again, but made no sound.
I had already settled onto the wooden step at the back entrance, holding a cup with a fresh hot herbal infusion I had prepared upon entering the kitchen. I watched the interaction between the two of them with the scientific interest of a naturalist documenting the territorial behaviour of native specimens.
〈Eos, probability that Rudeus doubles his dedication to sword training as a direct result of this small blow to his reincarnated masculine pride?〉
[Behavioural simulations project an 87% probability of increased physical training intensity over the next seventy-two hours. His pride is a highly manipulable and easily activated variable.]
"Besides," added Paul, delivering the final blow with the tactical precision of someone who knew exactly which button to press, "your sister has clearly discovered some development method that's showing measurable results. Perhaps you should set your pride aside and ask her for some advice."
Both faces turned in my direction.
I took a slow sip of my tea, allowing the silence to stretch a few seconds longer than necessary.
"Systematic meditation," I replied, keeping my voice perfectly flat. "And a high-quality tea infusion. I recommend introducing both into your daily routine."
Paul looked at me with the expression of someone who knew perfectly well that my answer concealed ninety per cent of the truth, but who also understood that pressing me with further questions tended to result only in more sarcasm and no useful information.
Rudeus looked at me with the expression of someone filing the term "meditation" into the same mental drawer where he kept all the other incomplete answers and unsolved mysteries I had been handing him since we were babies.
"Meditation," he repeated, in the dry tone of someone who had decided that word would be investigated to its final energetic consequences.
"And the tea," I reiterated, raising the porcelain cup slightly. "The order of factors alters the final product. Do not underestimate the chemistry of herbs."
Rudeus took up the training sword again with renewed, almost aggressive energy, striking at the air with the determination of someone who needed to prove to himself and to his surroundings that his current height was merely a temporary detail that would be corrected through sheer force of will.
Paul observed the change in posture with the expression of quiet satisfaction of an educator who had obtained precisely the planned result through methods nobody in the courtyard would formally classify as pedagogical manipulation. He gave Rudeus a friendly pat on the shoulder and withdrew to the side of the yard, beginning his own exercises with the air of someone who had fulfilled his daily duty of fatherhood.
I spent the rest of that sunny afternoon seated on the step, watching my twin brother train with the furious dedication of someone who had received the correct motivation through the most improbable channels possible.
It was the same courtyard as always. The spring beginning to paint the edges of the wooden fence green. Rudeus striking at the wind with an oak sword and an almost comical seriousness. And I, with my now-empty teacup, feeling the energy channels of my body still resonating under the beneficial influence of the pills and the morning's meditation.
The Tempered Blood stage was only three weeks away.
For now, for the purposes of this particular afternoon, that was the only piece of information I truly needed.