Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 528: Chapter 523: Harder Than They Went In

Location:Obsidian Academy — The Lower Hall

Date/Time:2 Ashwhisper, 9942 AZI — Continuous

Realm:Lower Realm

Nobody moved for a while after that, and the folded copies stayed open on the table in front of people who had stopped reading them.

Shenwei looked up.

”How solid is the seventy?” he asked.

”Solid enough to build on. Not solid enough to bet a life on, and I am building for sooner.” She had the answer ready and had had it for weeks. ”It is a band and not a date. You have just read where it comes from and you have read what it came down through. Treat it the way you would treat a bridge somebody built ten thousand years ago, and nobody has inspected since — you can cross it. You do not park a column on it.”

”So it could be fifty.”

”It could be fifty. It could be ninety. If it is ninety I will have wasted nothing, because everything I am building is worth building anyway, and that is not an accident.”

”And the number you do trust,” Meifen said.

”The cull. Fifty years exactly, and the next one falls in the year nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-two, and that one I would put in writing and sign.”

Bai Shu did the arithmetic before anyone else, which was worth knowing.

”That’s another Harrowing,” she said. ”One more. Before any of the rest of it.”

”One more before the gate, and a great many after it.”

”With children.”

”With Grade 4s and Grade 5s, which are somebody’s children, yes.” Jayde met her eyes and did not look away from what was in them. ”And it will always be children, and that is the part I cannot change, and I want to say that first because everything after it sounds better than it is.”

Bai Shu’s face changed.

”All of it,” Meifen said. ”Because she heard always, and so did I.”

”Then hear it properly, and I am not going to let anybody walk out of this room with the comfortable version.” Jayde put her hand flat. ”That mountain gets cleared every fifty years. Not because it is a tradition and not because anybody decided it — because the thing under it does not stop, and if it is not cleared it comes up. There is no future in which the Harrowing ends. Not in fifty years, not in five hundred, not when I am dead. Anybody who tells this force otherwise is lying or has not read the ground.”

”And it cannot be done by professionals,” Zhong said.

Everybody looked at him.

”You tell them,” Jayde said. ”From you, it is not an excuse.”

”Because of what the strong ones bring with them,” Zhong said it flatly, the way he said everything. ”It is not a rule anybody wrote down as a rule. It is a practice, and the practice is a hundred cohorts of dead men, and every instructor on this mountain knows it, and none of us has ever been told why it is true.”

”How much more?”

”The higher the cultivation, the more of them come. Not a little more. They come from further, and they come faster, and they keep coming.” He turned his hand over. ”Your Grade 4s and 5s run from mid Sparkforged to peak Flamewrought. That is quiet. That is a lamp in a field. Put one Inferno-tempered instructor in the same valley, and you have lit a beacon, and everything within a day’s travel that can smell it starts walking.”

Ruifen turned her copy face down on the table.

”Base Three,” she said.

”Base Three.” Zhong did not look at her when he said it. ”I stood on that wall for four hours, and I did not throw one technique, because the moment I did, the numbers coming at us doubled and I could watch it happen.” He turned his hand over. ”Ten of us went down last year. Ten, for two and a half thousand students, across six bases — and we were entered on the roll as observers, which is the only honest word in the whole document, because there were never enough of us to be anything else. Not because ten was thought sufficient. Because ten was what the Academy dared send, and there are three hundred instructors on this mountain who would have gone.”

Meifen said, ”So the best of them stayed home to keep the rest of us alive.”

”The best of them stayed home because a Blazecrowned in that mountain would have killed everybody in it inside a month,” Zhong said, ”and would have died last, and would never have understood what he had done.”

***

Jayde let that sit for a moment, and then turned it over.

”Then say the conclusion out loud, because it is sitting on this table and nobody has picked it up.” She looked around at them. ”Down there, cultivation is not merely useless. It is a liability. Every one of you spent a year with the single thing this continent has taught you to value, being the thing most likely to get you killed.”

Nobody argued.

”Which is why the next cohort is trained to shut it off,” Jayde said it evenly. ”Suppression, from the first month. Go quiet, stay quiet, and do the work with the crossbow and the shield wall and the lance on the emplacement behind them — and the moment a man’s essence flares because he panicked, that is a fault, and it is marked, exactly the way a dropped weapon is marked.”

”With what equipment?” Feng Lian asked. ”Because I have been down there and we went in with what we owned.”

”With all of it. Every one of them kitted, from the boots up, identical, out of a store — armor, weapons, medical, shelter, water he can drink without it killing him.” She put her palm flat on the table. ”You will see the whole of it in a few days, piece by piece, on a bench, and I expect every one of you to argue with me about all of it. What matters tonight is the principle, and the principle is that not one person goes into that mountain again carrying what his family could afford.”

Shenwei made a sound.

”You are going to take four years training them, and put a store’s worth of equipment on every one of them,” he said, ”and then send them down there under orders not to use the one thing this continent has ever taught anybody to value.”

”Yes.”

”That is the strangest thing anybody has ever asked of a cultivator on this world.”

”It is also the only instruction that has ever been supported by the evidence.” She said it without any heat at all. ”I am not teaching them not to cultivate. I am teaching them to choose — because there is one thing a high tier gives you down there, and it is not a technique. It is the body itself, and you keep that whether you are burning or not.” She looked at Zhong. ”You do not have to be loud to be strong. Nobody on this continent has ever had a reason to learn the difference, and every one of you spent a year finding it out the expensive way.”

***

Eden put her paper down.

”Then I want to say the thing I have been holding since the ninth day,” she said, ”because it belongs exactly here and I have not had a room to put it in.”

”Go on.”

”Every one of you is stronger than you should be,” Eden said it in the flat voice she used for numbers. ”Not cultivation — I can read your cultivation and none of it has moved. Physique. Bone density, muscle response, how fast a cut closes, how hard you have to be hit before a rib goes.”

”How would you know that?” Meifen asked. It was not a challenge. ”Nobody measures a body. There is no such thing. You are told a tier, and everybody takes the word for it, and if a man says he is stronger than he was, the only proof anybody has ever asked for is whether he can lift the thing.”

”Which is exactly the hole I have been standing in for three weeks.” Eden turned a page over without reading it. ”There is no instrument, no baseline and no table, anywhere on this world, and as far as I can establish, there never has been. What there is, is me. I treated every one of you at some point in that year — most of you more than once, several of you a great many times — and I write down what I find, every time, whether it matters or not, because a note you did not need is cheaper than one you did not take.”

Ruifen said, ”You are talking about the field book.”

”Three of them, and they are the reason I have not slept properly since Frostforge.” Eden’s mouth did something that was not quite a smile. ”Three weeks ago I went back through the whole of that year looking for something else entirely — the water, as it happens — and I found a trend instead, in my own handwriting, that I had walked past two hundred times while it was happening.”

”How much stronger?” Meifen asked.

”That is the part I cannot give you, and I want to be exact about why.” Eden put both hands flat. ”I have a direction, and I do not have a figure. Cuts closing at a speed that belongs two tiers up. Fractures knitting in days. Bruising that should have taken two weeks and took four days. Forty-odd separate observations that all point the same way — and not one of them is a measurement, because I was setting bones in a tunnel by lamplight and I was not conducting a study.”

”Then measure us,” Ruifen said.

”I intend to, all fourteen hundred and three of you, properly, and it will take months, and I have already written the protocol.” Eden looked around at them. ”And here is the part that makes it possible, and it is the only genuinely useful thing I have done since I came up. I have hundreds of case notes from before — village work, Academy work, years of it, people of every tier from Ashborn to Blazecrowned. So I have spent the last three weeks building a matrix out of them. What a body ought to be at each tier. Bone, blood, healing rate, force to fracture, all of it, tier by tier.”

Shenwei’s head came up very slowly.

”That does not exist,” he said.

”It did not exist. It exists now, in a book, in my hand, and it is thin at the top because I have exactly one full set above Inferno-tempered, and I am not going to tell any of you whose it is.” Eden shrugged very slightly. ”It is the first standard of the human body anybody on this continent has ever written down, and I built it in three weeks by accident, out of notes I kept for a completely different reason. That should tell every person in this room something about what has not been done here in ten thousand years.”

The hall had gone completely silent.

”And?”

”I think it is what you ate.”

Bai Shu’s hand went flat on the table.

”The food ran out at different times in different places,” Eden went on. ”You know what you ate after it did, and I am not going to be delicate about it, because delicacy is how a thing this size gets lost. You ate Charling. All of you. Four months for the luckiest of you and eight for the rest, and some of you longer than that, and would rather not say so in a room.” She looked around at them. ”And the ones who ate it longest are the ones my notes are strangest about. That is not proof. It is not even a measurement yet. It is a pattern in a field book kept by a tired woman in a tunnel, and I want fourteen hundred proper workups before I let anybody in this room use the word cause.”

Ruifen had both hands on the edge of the table.

”I thought I was imagining it,” she said.

”So did I,” said Zhong.

Everybody looked at him.

”I have been at Entry Inferno-tempered for nine years, and I know exactly what my body does.” He said it without any expression at all. ”Since Frostforge, I have been able to do things with it that I could not do in Cinderfall. I put it down to the year — a man does a great deal of hard work in a year.” He turned his hand over. ”And Meifen has just said the rest of it for me. There was nothing to check it against. So I decided I was flattering myself, and stopped thinking about it, and I have been quietly pleased with myself for a month like a boy.”

”There is now,” Eden said. ”There is me.”

***

Feng Lian was the first to laugh, and she covered it, and did not entirely manage.

”Thirteen hundred people,” she said. ”Every one of them a tier stronger in the body and none of them knowing it.”

”Fourteen hundred and three, measured properly, inside a year, and written down in the same book as the matrix — because if I am right, this is the most valuable thing that came out of that mountain, and it left it in fourteen hundred bodies that nobody has ever thought to look at.” Eden picked her paper back up. ”And if I am wrong, I want that written down too, in the same book, on the same page.”

Ryo had not said anything for a while.

”Kiran and I were not down there,” he said.

”No,” Eden agreed. ”You were not.”

”Then that is a line through this force as well,” Ryo said, ”in about four years, when it stops being a secret. Fourteen hundred people who came out of a hole harder than they went in, and everybody else.”

Jayde looked at him for a moment.

”Write that down as well,” she said. ”You are the second person tonight to find a line I had not looked for, and I would rather have both of them on paper than in a barracks in year six.”

”So it is the young,” Ruifen said slowly. ”It is always going to be the young.”

”It is always going to be the young, because they are the only ones the mountain will take.” Jayde let that sit exactly as long as it deserved. ”Which is why I am not going to stand here and offer you an ending. What I am offering is a change in who they are when they go in.”