Jingyi Bo stood at the precipice to her new home. Moving house had been as simple as retrieving the handful of personal effects she owned from the shed, though that had entailed extracting them without being forced to engage in conversation with the Ru brothers. Beaming like the sun, Hizashi had offered to walk with her to the new place, a trip that crossed functionally the entire Academy.

“It is such a treat to have a new housemate!” Hizashi had practically skipped as she walked, forcing Bo to walk double-fast to keep up. “The last girl stayin’ with me was so serious that I barely even got to know ‘er name. I think ‘er name was Fuzai … ?”

It boggled Bo’s brain that anyone would get into this exclusive club of an Academy and then, barely over a month after arriving, simply turn back and leave. At the same time, it boggled Bo’s brain that there were students who had arrived and stuck to their own discipline, like many Qin - why even bother coming here if you were going to do the same thing you did at home?

Speaking of homes, and trying to keep up with Hizashi, the taller girl practically shoved Bo inside. Her pace was well beyond Bo’s - perhaps standing in the light of the sun wasn’t the best place for a girl to hide? Realising that leaving her sphere of influence wasn’t going to be a simple task, Jingyi Bo simply decided that if she had to bask in Hizashi’s rays, she was going to try and enjoy it. Besides - It might be nice to spend time with a woman around her own age.

“Care fer the grand tour?” Hizashi’s smile insisted there was no declining, and Bo was gently shepherded around the house like a stray cat being taken in. There was no doubt that this place was leaps and bounds better than the shed - in fact, it was even nicer than her lodgings at the Everchanging Way Sect. A nice little lounge area with a fireplace and two small couches looked out onto a modest garden that flourished with different plants. A sliding door to one side revealed a bedroom with two beds (Bo couldn’t help but notice how one was a tangle of pillows and sheets, while the other was made with almost military precision), while another sliding door revealed a bathroom. A formation in the roof seemed similar to Bo’s bathtub - possibly some kind of shower.

“Thank you for letting me stay here, Hizashi.” Bo gave a bow. Hizashi laughed loudly, ruffling Bo’s head.

“Y’don’t need t’be so formal with me! You can just call me Kokoro! And none’a this bowin’ stuff - You can just treat me like any ol’ lady!” Her glow was unbelievable, nearly causing Bo to miss something in that sentence - You can treat me like any ol’ lady … Is she actually a noble?! How can a noblewoman have a country bumpkin accent like that? Yamato must be a strange land indeed.

“I-If that’s so,” Bo stammered a bit, unsure of exactly how to proceed, “Then you can just call me Bo.”

“Such a cute li’l name for such a cute li’l lady! Y’don’t need to be so nervous, either! Big Sis Kokoro will keep you safe, a’right?” Frankly, Bo didn’t have the heart to correct her - nor did she have the time, as the taller woman leaned down and pulled her in for a tight hug. She had spent so much time avoiding making friends - could Bo even escape Kokoro’s friendship if she tried? I’ll just have to hope that cultivators are a bit more resistant to my curse than mortals, Bo sighed, tentatively returning the hug. One awkward little back-pat later, she squirmed free of Kokoro’s grasp.

Afterwards, the pair had a simple meal, some of Bo’s tea, and some meaningless small talk about their time at the Academy so far. Kokoro was surprisingly easy to talk to, laughing along and smiling as Jingyi Bo recapped her story up until this point. When it came to Kokoro’s turn to explain events so far, she was uncharacteristically tight-lipped. A vague insinuation that she had just been practicing martial arts without incident, a glossing-over of how she was chosen to come here … did Hizashi Kokoro have some dark past she wished to hide? That sunshine smile betrayed absolutely no sense of wrongdoing. With not much more to talk about for the time being, they decided to head to sleep.

The bed here was infinitely more comfortable than the one in the shed. In fact, Bo could feel herself slipping immediately into unconsciousness …

---

Bo was suddenly aware of a heavy presence on top of her. It was getting kind of hard to breathe - pushing with all her might, she was barely able to remove the obstruction. With her eyes open, she sat up to see what it was, only to realise she was not in her room. Extracting herself from a pile of cushions she had evidently been enveloped in, she discovered that somehow she had ended up in a study of sorts. It was at once cluttered and perfectly tidy - the kind of meticulous arrangement of hundreds of tiny things that gives the impression of a perfectionist with too much time on their hands.

There were shelves upon shelves filled with little vials, all labelled, some containing various materials, some empty. If Bo had to guess, she would say about three quarters of the vials had anything in them.

Not sure why that is what I’m noticing about this situation. Walking further in, she was astonished to see it was a much larger room than expected. It reminded her of a library, except without the books. A library typically has a librarian, and if my sense of narrative timing is any guess I’ll meet them right about …

“So good of you to finally join me.” Now. Bo turned to see a door that she was certain hadn’t been there open up. An old woman smiled over at her. She had short white hair, and plain white robes with an exceedingly subtle, intricate pattern woven into them.

“U-Um, hello? Where am I?” A little concerned, Bo tried to reach out with her mana sense … only to realise it wasn’t there. In fact, she felt surprisingly powerless.

“Feeling a little powerless? That’s because this is just a dream! Nothing more, nothing less. You’re asleep right now, safe in your bed - you’re here because you feel extra safe right now.” The woman had such a pleasant, soothing voice. Bo felt her usual guard lowering instinctively - there was just something here that said she could be trusted. Her face was surprisingly familiar, too.

The old woman beckoned Bo into the next room, an elegant, vaguely foreign sitting room. A flower-patterned teapot of brilliant, fragrant tea sat next to two odd teacups. A little plate of curious biscuits, an ornate but unusual fireplace, a tasteful if unfamiliar rug … everything in here was just a bit unusual. That’s just dreams, I suppose. Bo sat down across from the old lady and sipped at the tea - pleasant, but foreign, just like everything else.

“You never really answered my question,” Bo helped herself to a surprisingly sweet biscuit, “Where exactly am I? While we’re at it, who are you?”

The woman laughed and took an indelicate slurp of her tea. “The answer to both of your questions is your soul. Well, in a manner of speaking. I’m part of you that has become … distinct.”

“I don’t suppose you’re going to give a clear and concise answer as to what that means?”

“Hah! Of course not. What sort of vague, prophetic vision of a dream would this be if I simply told you everything? I know we like to guess at things, so I wouldn’t mind quietly nodding or shaking my head at a few good suppositions.”

Bo thought for a moment, mostly about how nice this tea was, or what exactly these biscuits had in them, before settling on some more tangible guesses.

“Are you me?” The old lady nodded, but thought for a moment and shook her head.

“I am, and I’m not-- Oops! Not meant to be answering. Just nodding and shaking!”

“You really are me …” Bo couldn’t help but groan. “Are things like this because of that thing in my dantian?”

A nod. “I am allowed to tell you what it’s called, though. It’s called a world index. An object as phenomenally mysterious as it is useless. Though I suppose it must have some use …”

“We really can’t stick to the nodding thing, can we? I’m also going to guess you really don’t know, yourself.”

“All I know is, it’s collecting a little bit of everything. It’s been doing it for a long time. Apart from that … I haven’t the faintest clue!”

The older Jingyi laughed. The younger Jingyi sighed. “But why did you get pulled away from me? Are you tending this place? Is it bad to have a piece of me pulled away like this? Will I be able to put you - me, uh, us back together?”

“Sorry! Told you all I can. Say, you like the decor? It was like this when I got here!” The older Jingyi gestured around. There was a portrait in a foreign style, and an animal’s head stuffed and mounted on the wall that Bo didn’t recognise. What a strange land it all must have hailed from!

“I’m … not really interested in the decorations inside my soul,” Bo partially lied, “But I do want to, um … well, skip to the part where this weird prophetic dream pays out.”

“Right! Right. Nearly forgot. Here you go. Nicked this one right off the shelf - just felt right, right?” The older Jingyi reached into a sleeve and handed over a vial of green-white powder. The label read simply ‘Jade’. As soon as Bo took it, it vanished. “You should be able to use that to replace the stone slip.”

“Replace? I can only transform and reshape things.”

“Ah, yes. I suppose I better show you this trick I picked up …”

For the next several minutes, the older Jingyi demonstrated a curious little trick that could be done with the Endless Steps. Instead of slowly stepping through elemental states, one could instead swap out matter for other things, either by forcing two objects to swap materials, or by using a supply within one’s meridians to take its place. The latter was costly, if only because there was an extremely limited space within Bo’s soul to store actual matter. If she was to do that, she would have to pick and choose what she carried within carefully.

---

At some point, Bo blinked in her dream and woke up in reality. The sun was beginning to peek through the window, shining into her eyes. Looking across the room, Bo thought that Kokoro had left already, but realised with a start that she was lying flat on her back on the floor in between their beds, soundly asleep. Her sleeping robe was a little loose, and her pose was extremely unladylike. In fact, if Bo just sat up a bit more, she might be able to see--

“Huh?” As Jingyi Bo moved, she realised she was clutching something in her hand. Holding it up to the light, it was a small vial of powdered jade - the exact one from her dream. Chalking it up to strange cultivator things, she was nevertheless not going to deny what she had gained. Carefully stepping over the sleeping Kokoro, making sure not to let her eyes wander (or to let her head wonder why she was there), Bo came out to the lounge area and opened the box she had received from the tiger-beast.

Recalling the lessons she had received in the dream, ignoring that they were from a weird, foreign, older version of herself, Bo pulled the stopper off the vial and poured the powder into a cupped hand. Grabbing the stone slip in the other, she closed her eyes and concentrated. The technique required a lot more focus than transforming or shaping matter, requiring the grace of a master thief to effectively replace a mote of stone with jade before the matter could realise what had been done. A lazy stream of stone and jade passed in through her hands and through her meridians, changing places at a glacial pace until she held a fine grit of stone in one hand, and a jade slip in the other.

Unsure really what to do with the stone, she crushed it into a lump and transformed it together, forming a lump. Bo turned her attention back to the jade slip, channeling her qi into it and letting its lessons wash over her. The information was oddly vague, as so many things in the Endless Steps of Transformation tended to be. There were some tips on improving the range at which one could transform elements that were largely superseded by her mana awakening, but the rest of it seemed to be ways to efficiently practice, as well as further improvements to the Endless Steps. These came in the form of supplementary techniques that would inscribe new formations on her meridians. Most of them seemed beyond her for now, but one stood out.

The Unending Sprint of Transformation was a technique designed to work in tandem with the Endless Steps. It was simple to internalise, but improved the speed at which she could transform elements greatly at the cost of precision. Immediately, Bo’s mind was drawn to the possibilities - her most offensive use of the Endless Steps so far had been turning earth or stone to mud under a foe’s heel and causing them to slip. With this, she could create a whole puddle!

Wait, when I say it like that, it all sounds awfully useless.

--

After a quick breakfast with Kokoro, through which Bo spent most of it staring directly into her bowl of rice to avoid her housemate’s rather shameless policy on places to change robes, she headed outside. There was no lesson today, though Kokoro was off to do her own thing. Wondering what to do, Bo stood by her front gate, contemplating life. As though from nowhere, a presence appeared beside her.

“Hello--”

“ARGH!”

A sweet giggling blew right through Bo’s shock: Izumi had snuck up on her. She looked especially happy today. Did something nice happen? Such a strange girl.

“G-Good morning, Izumi.”

“Sleep well?” There was a look on her face that said she knew something. There’s no way a martial artist could look into my dreams, is there? Is there a martial art for that? Bo attempted to collect herself - everything Izumi said threw her off just a little. Maybe it’s the way she keeps smiling at me like that when I get stuck in my own head …

“I. Yes. I slept very well.”

“It certainly seemed like it, judging by your tussling about in there …” Bo didn’t really have any clue what she meant. Had something happened while she was dreaming? “Your choice of pillows aside, are you doing anything today? I was hoping to practice my martial arts, and thought we might do a proper spar for once.”

Pillows?! How could she know about that? Maybe she can read my mind. Hello? Hello?!

“I can’t read your mind.” Izumi sighed.

“How did you-- oh.” I forgot to answer her. “Um, yeah, I’m free. I’ve made a bit of progress with my spiritual technique, so it might be a fine time to practice. Shall we head down to the pitch?”

“Just the two of us. Interesting …” Bo watched as she pulled a small notebook out of a sleeve, scratching down some small note. She wished she had been quick enough to read any of it, but Izumi was much faster than her. One thing she had managed to catch was the title at the top of a page of scrawled notes and diagrams.

It said, simply, Jingyi Bo.