CHAPTER 28
Azra'il - POV
Paul announced the Touki lesson with the naturalness of someone who had already decided it was time and saw no reason to waste explanations.
"Today I'm going to teach Touki," he said, at breakfast, in the tone of someone announcing it will rain.
Rudeus looked up from his bowl of porridge instantly. He displayed the feverish attention of someone who had already heard the term in one of Roxy's old lessons but did not yet have a physical representation of what to expect from the theory.
I, on the other hand, remained focused on my tea.
The courtyard had that typical quality of spring mornings that had not entirely made up their minds about their own thermal identity. The sun shone on the horizon, but lacked sufficient conviction to make removing one's wool coat a prudent choice. In the centre of our beaten-earth yard, Paul had positioned a boulder of considerable size. It was the kind of grey granite that clearly required honest muscular effort to transport there, signalling that the lesson would have a demonstration component of significant impact.
Rudeus positioned himself beside me, holding his training sword. He wore that expression of absolute focus he adopted whenever he concluded that a piece of environmental information deserved to be dissected and filed into his mental catalogue of magic.
Paul stood before the boulder with his steel sword in hand. His posture was that of a warrior about to execute a movement he had already repeated tens of thousands of times, but still respected enough not to perform carelessly.
"Touki is the dividing line that separates an ordinary swordsman from a true warrior," he declared, with his customary blunt simplicity. "It isn't external spell-casting. It's the mana you already have, but directed from the inside out, coating every part of your body and strengthening your physical structure." He raised his left hand and slowly closed his fist. "You feel the energy running beneath the muscles. In the bones. It's as if your physical presence becomes denser. More stable."
[The description is surprisingly accurate for an individual devoid of any technical nomenclature on meridian cultivation.]
〈It is a crude, external, and temporary application of what Corporeal Refinement achieves structurally and permanently, Eos.〉
[Precisely. The specimen has arrived at the same biomechanical conclusion via an entirely different empirical route.]
I activated the mana flow in my eyes the instant Paul assumed his combat stance.
The internal energy of his body began moving in a manner entirely different from its resting state. The mana left the storage centres of his lower abdomen and distributed itself through the muscular meridians with the fluency of a habit repeated until it became an involuntary reflex of the nervous system.
It was not refined cultivation circulation, it lacked the purifying passage through the soul's compression points, but it displayed admirable efficiency within its own pragmatic limits.
The mana coated his muscles, the tendons of his joints, and his bone structure. It functioned like an invisible, dense armour, making Paul's physical presence slightly superior to his standard biology.
Then, he delivered the strike.
The sound of the impact was the kind of dry noise that produces absolute silence immediately after it occurs. The great granite boulder split into two perfect fractions, displaying the clean cut surface of something that had collided with a force specifically designed to nullify any mineral resistance.
Rudeus stared at the cut stone with his eyes noticeably wider than usual, his mouth slightly open processing the scene.
I observed the fracture with my eyes still activated, assessing the dissipation of force, the exact angle of penetration, and the way the mana had amplified the vector of the physical movement until it produced that thermal and mechanical result.
〈Technically acceptable given the limitations of this world.〉
[By the local standards of this continent, the demonstration would be classified as extraordinary.]
〈I have witnessed cultivators who used kitchen utensils to slice through entire mountain ranges, Eos.〉
[You yourself were the cultivator responsible for one such episode in your nine-hundredth life. Entirely incomparable contexts and scales of power.]
〈Fair.〉
"Who would like to have the first attempt?" asked Paul, with the expression of a tutor who had executed the practical demonstration and awaited his pupils' response.
Rudeus stepped forward with the haste of someone who had already made the decision before the question had even been formulated.
I observed his preparatory movements.
My perverted twin brother possessed a mana reservoir of absurd proportions, a fact I had already verified and tabulated enough times to consider indisputable. However, his obstacle was of a purely structural nature: he had so much energy that calibrating it for delicate internal use represented an entirely different challenge from the simple projection of elemental spells outward from the body. It was the mechanical equivalent of trying to fill a porcelain teacup using the discharge gate of a large dam. The volume of energy was wrong for the retention capacity of the physical vessel.
He raised his wooden sword, adopting an expression of extreme concentration. He attempted to direct the mana flow into his own muscular channels, imitating Paul's verbal description.
The energy did indeed move.
But not in a coordinated fashion. Rather than spreading evenly and subtly through the limbs' meridians to create Touki's protective film, the mana accumulated chaotically in his storage core, with his nervous system having no idea how to distribute it in fractions. Rudeus's physical body simply did not recognise that circulation pattern, as it had never been trained to operate under internal compression.
He delivered the strike against the boulder.
The training sword struck the mineral surface, encountered a resistance for which the sword's structure had not been remotely prepared, and slipped from Rudeus's grip owing to the laws of collision, which tend to severely punish anyone lacking the muscular rigidity to stabilise the recoil.
The sword flew in an awkward parabola and fell onto the damp earth.
Rudeus remained still, staring at his own palm, then at the fallen sword, and finally at the grey boulder, perfectly intact.
Paul displayed no expression of disappointment or censure. There was in his face, instead, a glimmer of honest recognition.
"It took me years of continuous effort to master this skill," Paul remarked, with the calm of someone reporting a geographical fact. "Years of daily repetition until my muscles learnt to retain the energy involuntarily. It isn't a concept you absorb on the first strike."
Rudeus retrieved the training sword from the ground with the gravity of someone filing the failure away as a statistic for future use, rather than treating it as a personal humiliation.
It was, in my assessment, real growth.
Paul then turned his gaze towards me.
There was in those eyes the same expression I had been registering since the end of winter: the hesitant expression of a father who wished to re-establish a bridge of dialogue, but who did not quite know where to begin the crossing, aware that the old foundations of our relationship no longer existed.
"Azra'il," he called. "Would you like to attempt the test?"
I answered before even bothering to calculate whether that exposure was tactically convenient. "Yes."
I approached the wooden fence, picked up the training sword leaning against the beams, and walked to the centre of the earthen yard.
〈Eos, run the functional comparison between local Touki and my current stage of corporeal refinement.〉
[Touki is external, temporary reinforcement. Efficient, but dependent on continuous maintenance and active mana consumption. Corporeal refinement is internal, permanent reinforcement. Slower to establish, but requires no active maintenance once consolidated. There is, however, an application Paul probably does not know or did not explain: the same principle of internal mana circulation can be extended to objects in contact with the body. It is not widespread because it requires sufficiently precise control to work with the structure of an inanimate object.]
〈Which is, by definition, the basic control principle that energy cultivation develops.〉
[Precisely. You possess the appropriate infrastructure to carry out the test.]
I looked at the training sword in my hands.
It was made of ordinary oak. It had no cutting edge. It had been specifically designed to simulate non-lethal impacts. Under any engineering analysis or practical common sense, it was the worst instrument available for the task of splitting granite in two.
I began with the internal circulation, the pattern that had become automatic enough not to require full conscious attention. The mana in the meridians moving with the rhythm established by cultivation, more fluid than it had been in winter, denser than it had been before the pills.
Next, I applied the flow extension.
I directed the energy not outward from my body, as this world's mages did when firing spells, but downward, channelling it through the palms of my hands and inserting it directly into the wood fibres of the training sword. I treated the inanimate oak structure as though it possessed its own artificial meridians, filling the molecular gaps of the material with the density of my own energy.
The mana stabilised within the training blade.
〈Eos, structural integrity of the weapon.〉
[Material density expanded by approximately 340%. The mana edge projected on the outer end of the wood presents a cutting rigidity equivalent to well-tempered carbon steel. Estimated autonomy under current consumption: one hundred and twenty seconds.]
〈Time margin more than sufficient for a single strike.〉
I assumed the combat stance. I simultaneously activated my corporeal refinement, the cultivation version of Paul's coating, considerably cleaner and more focused than conventional Touki, but operating under the same physical premise of muscular stabilisation.
I delivered the downward strike.
The sound was different from Paul's. Less coarse. The wood passing through the stone with the quality of something specifically designed for that encounter and having found exactly the resistance expected.
The boulder split into two perfectly symmetrical halves.
The courtyard fell into absolute silence.
On the other side of the yard, by the washing line, came the muffled sound of a wicker basket colliding with the ground.
Lilia stood frozen, her arms still extended in the position where she had been holding the basket of sheets, her eyes fixed on the split stone as though trying to determine whether her vision had been the victim of some optical illusion caused by the morning light.
Rudeus stared at me with his mouth inelegantly open, his eyes displaying that analytical quality of someone who had received an entirely unexpected volume of data and was, at that instant, being forced to recalibrate all his models of physics and magic simultaneously.
Paul kept his gaze fixed on the training sword in my hands, then on the split boulder, and finally on my face. His expression was that of a veteran swordsman who had dedicated years of his life to mastering the technique of bodily coating and who had just witnessed a six-year-old achieve the same feat using a wooden sword.
"How... did you do that?" he asked.
It was not exactly a question. It was the kind of sound that comes out when language is not keeping pace with processing.
"Touki is the correct principle," I said, with the neutrality of someone making a technical assessment. "Internal mana reinforcing the body. But most people stop there." I looked at the wooden sword still in my hands. "The same principle works for any object in contact with the body. Mana can enter the structure of an inanimate object if the control is precise enough. What the wooden sword lost in material it gained in momentary structural density." I placed the sword back against the fence. "The limitation is time and precision control. Not any intrinsic property of the object."
Paul continued observing me for a few seconds, in silence.
"You understood and executed all of that... today?" he asked, his voice subtly hesitant.
"I learnt the application today," I said. "The principle was already familiar."
There was in Paul that expression I had learnt to recognise as the particular mixture of paternal pride and genuine confusion that occurred when I did something he could not entirely categorise.
Rudeus stepped forward, displaying the expression of someone who had analysed the physics of my strike and arrived at a very clear moral conclusion on the matter.
"That's cheating!" he exclaimed, pointing at the wooden sword. "You used density-altering magic on the sword! Father explained that Touki consists of coating the body's musculature to increase physical strength, not turning a piece of wood into a cutting weapon!"
I turned my body slowly towards him, crossing my arms over my chest.
"It's called resource optimisation and structural adaptation, you chubby little pervert," I replied, narrowing my eyes. "If you paid more attention to your training and less to Lilia's backside, perhaps your sword wouldn't have flown out of your hand on the first impact."
Rudeus opened his mouth to formulate an indignant objection about his own dignity, the relevance of Lilia's backside to that discussion, and probably some very elaborate technical explanation for why looking did not compromise his combat performance.
None of it came out.
"The objective was to cut the stone," I replied, before he could formulate anything. "The objective was met. The methodology is secondary to the result."
Rudeus kept his mouth open for another moment, but his expression betrayed that he had run out of arguments to counter with.
Paul, to Rudeus's evident surprise, nodded slowly, crossing his arms.
"She's right," said Paul. "A good swordsman uses what he has available. Method matters for development. Result matters for combat."
Rudeus looked at Paul with a look of deep betrayal. Then, he looked at me and turned his gaze back to Paul, appearing indignant upon realising that his expectation of family alliance had resulted in unanimity against his position.
"You're both against me," he replied.
"It isn't against you," I said. "It's the correct assessment of the situation."
"Those are the same thing from where I'm standing."
Lilia retrieved the wicker basket from the ground with her customary silent discretion. She resumed her path towards the washing line with her usual measured steps, but retained that residual attentiveness of someone who had registered the event and was filing the information into her mental folder of "incomprehensible Greyrat twin behaviours".
Paul remained still in the centre of the yard for a few more moments, whilst Rudeus walked to the corner of the garden to retrieve his fallen training sword. My brother soon resumed his training position before the wooden practice post, delivering basic strikes with a determination visibly renewed by the frustration of having been outdone.
"Azra'il," called Paul, as I was already preparing to climb the steps to the back entrance.
I turned to face him.
There was in him that hesitant expression I had already learnt to identify over the past weeks, the prelude to a declaration he would like to make, but for which he lacked the maturity or the appropriate vocabulary to conclude satisfactorily.
"You're..." he paused briefly, cleared his throat, and readjusted the posture of his shoulders. "You're showing excellent physical progress."
"Obviously," I replied, maintaining my customary analytical composure.
The silence that followed had the particular texture of conversations that were planned to be longer and became shorter because the path between the start and the destination was no longer where it had been.
Paul held my gaze for one more second, nodded soberly, and turned back to supervise Rudeus's movements, appearing relieved to have concluded his daily quota of interaction with me.
I returned to the kitchen with the aim of preparing a fresh hot infusion of tea.
From the courtyard, the cadenced sound of Rudeus's sword striking the training post continued echoing through the morning air. He struck with the stubborn consistency of someone who had made a firm decision about his own biological priorities and intended to honour that choice, one impact at a time.
Spring continued advancing through the village with the typical indifference of the seasons, entirely oblivious to the small disputes and lessons in power taking place within the fences of our little house in Vila Buena.