The Outside was the game.

Is that overly dramatic? Lilijoy wondered. It’s probably overly simplistic anyway. I need more information before I make any conclusions. But why else would a corporation like Walden adopt a clan structure? Or a group like Lonestar? Peer pressure? It just makes too much sense.

She returned her attention to Anda. “There are a whole bunch of things I’m not going to know for sure until I get to Purgatory, aren’t there?” she asked.

“I’m afraid so,” he replied. “That’s one of the reasons I wanted to encourage you to slow down, on the Outside anyway. We need to get Attaboy, that’s for sure, but pushing against the clans at this point… well, it’s just too early. I’ve been part of an organization working to undermine the clans for a while now, and it’s not as simple as it seems. Even if it doesn’t seem simple.”

“So how does Renaissance fit into all of this?”

Lilijoy rarely asked Anda about the secretive organization. He was privy to many of their secrets, and she wasn’t, and she accepted that. Renaissance had had plenty of opportunities to capture her or otherwise meddle, and she was reasonably convinced of their neutrality where she was concerned.

“Well, they’re not a clan by another name, if that’s what you mean,” he replied. “They believe people can learn to think better, that there needs to be a critical mass of people who have learned to use their systems to overcome the innate biases of human thought. Otherwise, the social and political cycles that got humanity into this mess will continue to self-perpetuate.”

This was not news to Lilijoy. Renaissance seemed to share the same basic concept as Henry Choi had when he was building the Tao System, though his system had more powerful tools. Renaissance’s approach was a technology of thought, a method as much as anything, while Choi’s was more direct. More dangerous.

She was still cycling the energy of joyful anticipation in the background, and that allowed her to understand that neither approach was appropriate for her. That, in fact, the entire subject of somehow rescuing humanity from itself was not a part of her path, not now anyway. Without realizing it, she had allowed herself to feel more and more responsible for fixing things, somehow adopting Henry Choi’s legacy.

I’m not ready for that, she realized. I need to grow before I can even think about taking on that much. I need goals that match my path, that match who I am now.

Her original goal remained simple; she wanted to restore a forest, and that still resonated. Now her other goal was just as simple.

I want to follow this path, to see where it leads.

The path was the goal. While it was almost painfully clichéd, she felt a wonderful kind of movement from the concept as it applied to her, similar to the movement present in the very first paradox Anda had shown her; a path that led to itself, but moved ever forward.

Without meaning to, she dropped back into cycling the energy from her soul vortex. The feeling of excitement about following the path, her path, flowed through her as she held the concepts in her mind, and with it came insights. Movement along the path was not like movement through space, not movement within a dimension, but rather movement of a dimension.

The insight made perfect sense for the barest moment and then was devoured by the cycle, but it didn’t matter, for on its heels came another, that the way she perceived her emotions was through the lens of her emotions.

I can use my path to change the way I perceive my past, she realized. I can take negative experiences and give them a different emotional context.

She pulled forth the traumatic terror of being mauled by the mooster-beast, the wild dog that had chased her through the cutting shards of the piles, pulled it forth and twisted it, inverting it through the expanded dimension of her path. It was stubborn, a black, curdled foulness like clotted blood that clogged the cycling diamond energy.

She was more stubborn, surrounding it with context of all that had flowed from that moment. There was no joyful anticipation in the moment of shock and visceral horror, but she manipulated and reframed, stretched the moment through time to meet her present self, realized in so doing that she changed nothing, for such moments never stopped on their own. It had been with her all along, eternally happening in some dark corner of her mind, suppressed to the barest filament by her system but always waiting for a moment to reemerge and engage its vicious cycle.

A bit of her narrative self realized that this, this was the eternal truth behind all the undying enemies of fiction, the monsters that lurched back to life just when the hero breathed a sigh of relief. The emotional mind was in many ways an eternal present, a memory wormhole to the past. For just another instant she saw her soul vortex in that context, time converted to shape and intensity, and she thought she saw the edge of a greater structure emerge.

Then the moment passed, as she engaged in a struggle between two self-perpetuating processes, as she realized that resurrecting this trauma from her past might have been a mistake, that her path was not yet developed enough. Doubt fed higher-level fear back to her soul vortex, engorging the putrid memories, and the dog prepared to bite, teeth tearing flesh now and forever.

I’ve got to shut this down! she thought in panic. She reached to her system, to activate cascades of soothing neurochemicals, to push the trauma back into its corner. It wasn’t enough to overcome the powerful meaning of the moment; trying to contain the profound significance of helplessness, of mortality and the frailty of flesh with low-level emotional input was like adding water to an oil fire. The substance spread, reaching out to other memories, other traumas, to recruit them, and she knew that soon the teeth beneath her skin would soon be grasping fingers, that the torn flesh would be her psyche ripped by Eskallia’s glyph.

She fought back with the cycle of her diamond energy, surrounding the emotional tumor, isolating it in walls of context, trying to introduce new meaning into the framework of suffering. It was the pivotal step on her journey, the pain that led to progress. It was the death of one self and the beginning of the next. It was… necessary.

But there was no joy in that context, only causality. The meaning of that moment resisted her attempts at subversion. This is what happens, it said. This is what happens when you venture into the dark. This is what you have to look forward to inevitably: pain, deformity and loss. The past is the future, and everything else a fleeting pleasure between walls of anguish. You are bounded by walls of suffering, and any space between those walls is an illusion.

A new cycle began to take root in her mind, feeding off the dark energy. This is the true meaning of existence, meaningless suffering. All statements are false: For this statement to be false, it only needs one exception, which is itself.

Her distant narrative consciousness recognized this paradox and found a thousand answers. But none of them were her answer. The wisdom of centuries of human minds was a flimsy shield from the power of her own self turned against her. She felt the temptation then. She could own this darkness, make it her own and step forward on a new path, spreading the truth of futility, that all would be consumed.

But then what?

Consumed!

But then what?

Death.

Life.

And then she understood. Her path was only meaningful in the context of the other. The opposition was real, but the struggle was not.

Feed my roots, she thought at her trauma. Feed my light, she thought at the darkness, and you will be fed in turn.

The darkness surrounded the light, and it represented… potential. Emptiness to be filled. It was a timeless truth, but it had no meaning unless invested with her own experience. Suffering had meaning in the context of living, and if she framed it just right, twisted it along the axis of meaning she had used to incorporate Rosemallow’s training, it came to define the edges of all that was good.

With a roar, her path intensified as she felt the joy inherent in her new understanding. Or was it the increased depth of her old understanding? Either way, she felt each victory feed into her anticipation of what was to come, now that she understood her traumas as the fertilizer for future joy. That the converse was true no longer bothered her, for those future traumas would only be yet more fertilizer and the cycle would continue until she existed no more.

Well, that was… something! Who knew processing one little trauma would cause all that? she thought as the crisis within herself subsided.

She opened her eyes, remembering she had been in the middle of a conversation with Anda. He was looking back at her with an expression of concern and confusion.

“Ahh… did something just happen?” he asked. “I thought I might need to get the cold packs out again for a moment. Was it something I said?”

She laughed at that and then checked her internal clock and saw that just under ten seconds had passed.

“I’m sorry for spacing out like that. I had an... insight, and it got more involved than I expected.”

“It must have been some insight! You were practically glowing for a moment.” He cocked his head. “That’s odd… my system memory didn’t quite capture what I thought I saw.” He shook himself a little. “Anyway, putting aside all that for a moment, I think I have a better way to get us to Taos.”

“I’m listening,” Lilijoy said, while doing her best to incorporate what she had just experienced. The part of her mind on the Inside had withdrawn from there almost entirely, and she put a small amount of attention back there while Anda spoke.

“I think I know how to get us an airship.”

***

On the Inside, Lilijoy strode with purpose in search of her trainer. For once, her trainer was looking for her too.

“There you are!” the Oni bellowed across the training field. “What have you done now?”

Lilijoy wasn’t sure how to respond to that, which was par for the course with many of Rosemallow’s communications. The sun was briefly eclipsed by her trainer’s enormous body as she leapt to where Lilijoy had halted. Lilijoy knew by now that if she timed her own leap right, she wouldn’t be knocked off her feet by the minor seismic event that coincided with her trainer’s landing, so she took to the air for a half second.

“Don’t you go flying away from me!” Rosemallow yelled, grabbing her out of the air with a giant taloned hand. “Have you been forgetting to check your notifications?”

Her grasp was just loose enough for Lilijoy to squeeze out a reply. “No... I mean yes.. I like to save them up. It’s... more fun that way.”

“Well it’s more of an ass-pain for me! I’m beginning to regret helping you with your experience. Do you know what a headache it is to be hit with that much all at once? Well?”

I swear, she’s trained my patience at least as much as my muscles, Lilijoy thought.

“No?” is what she said out loud.

Rosemallow let loose a huge sigh. “I don’t suppose you would. Let me look at you.”

While Lilijoy squeezed her eyes shut to escape the red glare of Rosemallow’s inspection, she quickly rifled through her notifications, as it seemed the prudent thing to do.

You have learned a skill!

Pottery: Natural Novice

That one was from a couple days ago.

You have raised a skill!

Paper Making raised to Natural Apprentice.

Well that one was easy! Must have been the paper for the giant kites.

You have raised a skill!

Gliding/Flight raised to Upgraded Apprentice

Looks like jumping off the Academy finally paid off! she thought.

You have raised a skill!

Disguise raised to Natural Initiate

Why did that one go up? she wondered. Then she saw the next one. Ah, here we go...

The Next Step

You have placed another foot upon a path

Which was immediately followed by...

Your Journey Begins

You walk, cycling essence with each step

“What the hell have you been doing?” Rosemallow shrieked in a voice entirely less dignified than her usual bellow. “It’s too soon for you to be cycling your path! It’s too soon for you to even be on a path! One foot on your Path, fine. Lots of folks do that. But this? In the Garden?.” She shook her head. “I’ve never seen it.”

“Maybe,” Lilijoy said, feeling a little disgruntled, “it would help if someone, I don’t know, actually told me anything? It’s bad enough I need to figure out everything by myself on the Outside.”

Rosemallow took a deep breath. “Every student feels that way, at times. Struggle leads to strength, and foundation is built with the bricks of hard won insight.” She put Lilijoy down. “That said, the situation you find yourself in is not of your own making. You were forced to grow before your time by Eskallia’s meddling, and my own efforts to control your advancement have backfired. The Garden is supposed to be a place to learn and grow in relative safety. Its system of numbers, levels, stats and so forth, is arbitrary, though it does loosely correspond to real growth. The experience awarded, the points spent, all of that, is an effect, a measure of the true growth that will be valuable… later. But it’s not a perfect measure by any means, particularly for Outsiders.”

“But I’m guessing the imperfections typically work the opposite way than they have for me, right?” Lilijoy asked. “Outsiders don’t… deserve the powers they get in the Garden?”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Rosemallow answered. “After all, it takes most Outsiders years, decades even, to achieve the growth they need to move on to Purgatory. Some are truly talented and insightful. They progress smoothly. Others may never get past level thirty. Their experience stagnates. The Garden acts as a filter, passing through those who can truly contribute.”

Guess some alien awarenesses are more fruitful than others.

“So what does this all mean for me, now?”

“Well, it means we’ve got to try something different. Typically, someone wouldn’t find their path until well after their foundation was established. Only a tiny portion of Outsiders find a path at all. You seem to be playing by a different set of rules entirely; you don’t have a strong foundation, and yet you are already well along your path. I’m still thinking about how to help you, but it’s certainly useless to keep doing what I’ve been doing. I can’t keep holding back experience from you, that’s for sure. Even if I wanted to, it’s taxing my abilities, getting downright uncomfortable.”

“Will this be like what you did in Averdale?”

“Well, that’s the problem. You see, there’s value in being able to connect actions to results. Under level twenty, it doesn’t matter much, but I’m holding far more than that for you. So what we’ll do moving forward is release it a bit at a time. Every time you earn experience for something, I’ll match it with an equal amount. How’s that sound?”

Wait… did she just ask me my opinion?

“That sounds fantastic.” Lilijoy replied.