Nic had come to regret drinking all the energy from the Mourner’s Lantern. If he still had a full reserve, he could have at least bought Kline a few hours of peace, maybe even a few days. Time enough to teach the boy how to meditate.

As it was…

He was trying to teach a mind that was actively breaking apart. Kline wasn’t going to find inner peace, not when his own body was a hostile country to the boy.

Nic didn’t hold out much hope.

The cat-demon sat in the lotus pose, but was constantly turning and twisting, scratching his face, finding ways to fidget. It was such a constant and distracting source of motion that even Nic found himself struggling to focus, the little twitches and wriggles drawing him out of his meditative state.

“You have to stop.” Nic insisted. “Just stop. Stop everything, and keep it stopped until it’s not unnatural, it’s just how you are. You’ve got to…” His words failed and he grunted in frustration. Even he’d struggled with meditation. Now that he was trying to teach what he learned, he realized how hollow his understandings really were.

Inkspur, repeating his words, gave Nic a sideways glance. He wasn’t confident either.

Kline wasn’t listening, or if he was listening, the words couldn’t reach him. He ran his claws over his face again, scoring cuts over the fading scars already forming.

“This isn’t working. He’s simply too far gone to meditate.” Sofia stood over them both, her metal arms crossed. “Either his cultivation will collapse, killing him, or he’ll go feral and try to attack you for your Demonic Essence, killing him and making you bear the guilt.”

Nic frowned. No, Nic was already frowning- what Nic did was a rare and truly powerful grimace.

“Fine. Fine. Sofia, you can talk to other people now, right? Go get Nylea. Tell her to bring some of that tea she makes from Esperfruit…”

Sofia nodded and vanished.

Kline, pretending to meditate for a moment longer, opened his staring yellow eyes.

“I’m going to die..”

Nic didn’t have an answer for that.

“Nobody can survive being like this…”

Nic didn’t have an answer for that.

“I should just…”

Nic’s answer was to throw out his fist and knock Kline unconscious with a single quick blow.

Maybe it wasn't the most delicate method, but it would keep the boy’s mind from tearing itself apart until Nylea got here.

---

“You knocked him out?” Nylea said with an expression of horror. Luckily, she had already made her way to Winterhome. If she was still shut away in her fortress, high in the grand tree, she wouldn’t have arrived for hours.

Nic shrugged. Inkspur croaked out, “Really, it was a VERY MERCIFUL BEATING the master administered…”

“Still. It’s dangerous to make such an unstable mind retreat into dreams…” She looked down at Kline with an expression of pity, her humanoid set of hands perched on her hips. Nylea was…

Well, circumstances aside, Nic was having trouble not staring.

Her usual plain white tunic had been replaced by what could only be described as a regalia, made of golden chains and diaphanous, incredibly thin silks in the colors of black and white. Around her neck was a regal collar of diamonds, and golden threads were woven through her hair to build it into a crown of pleated midnight black.

“Luckily, I’ve been harvesting those fruits for days... “ From her own magic bag, the mantis-woman drew out a bundle of flowering stems, which filled the air with a rich fragrance. Her many-jointed green limbs bent as she lowered herself to the ground, setting out a jade teapot.

One by one she drew out ingredients. The ice-palace fruits which contained Esper, the pure essence of mind, a few scraggly and evil-looking roots, and strange dark flowers that resembled black iron bells and carried the smell of licorice.

She sighed thoughtfully as her hands passed over the lot. Streams of energy flowed from her fingertips, cutting the ingredients or even crushing them to paste, as if invisible tools were fast at work chopping, grinding, peeling…

For a moment Nylea did catch Nic staring. “This? This is only a common Ten-Thousand Instruments Technique. Simple enough even I can use it…” Although, she didn’t understand why.

Nic settled down to wait, watching as she readied the water by dropping in a rune-covered heatstone to boil the teapot from within. Ingredient after ingredient fell into the water until it had the color of jade and a rich, ancient smell that spoke of rain falling in a forest, like the aroma moss on an oak tree.

“So…” He started. “What do you think of Winterhome?”

“It’s cozy.” Realizing that didn’t sound like a compliment, she hastily continued. “I think it’s what people need. These Earthlings, well, they’re not ready for the world, for the most part. Many of them would break like this poor specimen…”

As she spoke he watched the faint, dark lines that broke her gray skin into uneven scales shift, bits of flesh flaking away in a rain. He could fix that, Nic realized. He had the Samsara trees. If she was willing to be the test subject…

But did he trust her?

There was something about Nylea that made him hold back on spilling all his secrets; maybe it was how easily she made him want to tell her.

“If you built a fortress, a castle, a war-machine… It would poison their spirits even if it kept their bodies safe…”

Nic snapped back to reality as she continued to speak, nodding to pretend he’d been paying attention. “Actually, about that! There’s a girl with a Shard that lets her, like, smell out alchemical ingredients and how they should go together. I was hoping you could…”

“Train her?” Nylea’s spring-green eyes brightened. “I think I might even enjoy that. There have to be some useful people among these commoners, after all, and even I could teach a thing or two to people with such… lacking backgrounds…” She waved a claw dismissively. “I’ll teach whoever I can find that will learn.”

Nic grinned. Alchemy was a bedrock skill, and even if relatively few of the humans could fight…

If they could learn a skill they could contribute.

---

By the time Kline began to murmur and stir, the tea had been poured into a delicate cup of bone. The scent of herbs and ancient woods spilled forth from the dark red surface, on which a single pink flower floated.

Nic was drinking his own cup, feeling the Esper condensed within touch upon his mind with each sip. It was as if his thoughts were contracting, his focus closing in, all the distractions and mortal worries that made his thoughts like a muddy stream being swept away until what remained was a clear, narrow channel: sharp and directed.

It was a good thing to feel when you were in command of a city.

Nylea wasted no time in gripping Kline’s chin and tipping the hot tea down his throat. He spluttered, sitting up and gasping, much of the elixir pouring over his chin. She was ready with a second cup.

“If you spill this one.” She said sternly. “I’m leaving you to die.”

He drank slowly, his eyes still bleary. By the time the second cup was gone Kline could speak again, his words no longer slurred, although he still had a hoarse, cracked voice.

“I…” He looked to Nylea, clutching on to her as a thin hope. “Can you cure me? Can I not be like this? Please?”

“If you continue rejecting your body, you’ll die. That’s all there is to it.” Sofia was there suddenly, standing above him. “Relax. Close your eyes. Your mind is your own, so go there.”

Reluctantly, Kline did just that. His cat-like eyes closed and his purring breath fell into rhythm.

“Nicolas?”

“Oh. Me?” Nic glanced between Nylea and Sofia, but both only gestured for him to get on with it.

“Right…”

“Right okay…”

“Go to the center of your breath. Focus on how it feels. Block out the rest of your body, and close yourself into the deep, dark center of your chest, where your lungs are expanding…” His words took on a faint rhythm. “Follow that sensation out. Through your veins. Through your muscles. Remind yourself how good it feels to breathe. Cling to that. As long as you’re alive, you have that much….”

“It feels good to breathe. It feels good to be alive…”

“Follow that sensation out. Find the rest of your body. Find an energy flowing through every vein, every cell. Your inhalation draws it inwards. Your exhalation drives it through your veins…”

The more he talked, the less certain Nic was of what he was saying. He could describe cultivation in a hundred ways. Cultivation was the cold certainty of life or death in battle. Cultivation was the feeling of reaching your limits and managing to push just an inch beyond them. Cultivation was life, and growing upwards towards the sky…

But what was cultivation when it wasn’t any of those things?

When you hadn’t lived it and fought for it and fallen in love with it?

Cultivation was the reminder it felt good to live, and grow.

That was where it started.

Nic’s voice became a rhythmic monotone, speaking slowly between breaths. He felt himself slipping into the dark core of his body, where a hidden sun burned, sending streams of radiance down through his limbs to form an ouroboros, a serpent eating its own tail-

An eternal cycle.

His senses shut down, and Nic could barely be certain he was still speaking at all, except that he sometimes heard his voice from a great distance away. It could have been minutes. It could have been hours.

When Nic opened his eyes a mist had gathered around him, making the thin air sparkle with a thousand dewdrop points of light. That mist swirled slowly around his body, enveloping the people surrounding him.

Nylea sat nearby, and Kline. Both had slipped into a trance. In the mist things were growing, rising up, thin shoots of green pushing from the ground below. The strange and poison fruits of the garden thrived, drinking up the mist and stretching out their misshapen limbs.

“Better than I could have asked.” Sofia said from within his mind, not disturbing the other two. “A genuine moment of enlightenment. Not unexpected, after spending a week under constant pressure, but...”

“The time has come to slow down a little, Nicolas. You’ve taken great strides across this planet. But if you don’t pause and experience moments like these, you won’t reach understanding, you’ll only become better at killing.”

Nic nodded slowly as he got to his feet, turning away from Kline. Where the boy went from here would depend on his own abilities…

The best Nic could do was lay the Mourner’s Lantern at his feet. It had served Nic well, but he would find better treasures, and if all went as he hoped, Kline would become someone who could fight for Winterhome…

“Okay Sofia.” He said as he stepped out of the glade. “I’m ready to meet the town…”