Boneroot felt little more than a gust of wind and suddenly he, Venh, and Kuroki were in the middle of a clearing. Looking around, he saw the familiar surroundings of the Sentoru Forest, but he couldn’t tell where they were within it. He was interrupted by Venh’s voice.

“Ah, wait here. I forgot something.”

Again, the man disappeared in an instant. He was back a minute later, carrying a grey sack bound with string over one shoulder. Boneroot found the bag tossed into his own hands a moment later.

“Change into those. If you show up to the sect looking like that, we won’t be allowed in.”

Venh pointed a finger at Boneroot’s poor excuse for attire. He was still wearing the clothes he’d had on the day of his village vanished, just a pair of ragged short pants. They’d been ripped and repaired numerous times and it showed.

Still, he didn’t want to lose the last remaining memento of his village, so he resolved to have them fixed up at some point in the future. Apparently, cultivators were swimming in this ‘gold’ he’d heard so much about, so it wouldn’t be difficult.

Satisfied, Boneroot stripped down and opened the bag, while Venh let out a quick, garbled cry and turned around. He laughed at having thrown off the ever-relaxed man before inspecting the clothes within the bag. There appeared to be two identical sets of robes.

They were a soft, comfortable fabric that he had never felt before, colored primarily white, with powder blue detailing. When he tried them on, he was simultaneously pleased and disappointed. On the one hand, they were phenomenally comfortable. On the other, the billowing sleeves, wide hem, and general excess cloth felt stifling.

Boneroot cycled qi to his legs and dashed around the clearing briefly. He flickered to its edges, up into the trees, and back. In doing so, he found the robes were actually quite conducive to movement. Their appearance belied their maneuverability, a virtue Boneroot was quick to appreciate. Though he was still skeptical of their stealth capabilities, he was happy with his fancy new clothes.

“Technically,” Venh interrupted. “You’re not supposed to have these before arriving at the sect. Given the circumstances, we were magnanimously afforded an early set.” He finished the sentence with an exaggerated flourish of his hands.

Kuroki, who had previously been inspecting their new environment for potential enemies, or interesting insects, jumped into the conversation.

“Venh, where are we going to adventure? I don’t know this place.”

“Ah, a great question from a great warrior!” Kuroki swelled at the praise. “We are near the edge of the forest. So close, in fact, that we can have a race.”

Boneroot had a hard time getting as excited as his companions, due to the stark difference in their abilities, but he couldn’t resist the chance to have some real fun for the first time in... years, really.

Venh pointed them in the direction of the forest’s edge after promising not to teleport, fly, or do anything else that Kuroki deemed cheating. Meanwhile, as Boneroot scratched a starting line into the dirt, he gave the tsovar a mental poke before saying,

“We should attack Venh before he can get ahead of us.”

“That’s cheating!” Kuroki tried to hide any sign of the conversation taking place nonverbally.

“It’s not cheating because Venh is a cheater. You’re allowed to cheat against cheaters.”

Boneroot saw the gears spinning in the cat’s head, before a grin broke out on his furry face.

As the three cultivators set their toes at the line in the dirt, Kuroki and Boneroot conspired over their mental connection. The plan was simple: as soon as the race began, they would attack Venh from both sides. The flaw in the plan was also simple: they attacked Venh from both sides.

The moment their elder signalled the start of their race, the two conspirators on either side of him struck out with qi in their respective fists and paws. By the time the attacks would have landed, the man was gone. In his wake, two young cultivators hit each other at full force.

As the weaker of the two, Boneroot took the worst of the impact. Kuroki gave a sympathetic look at the crumpled form clutching its hand on the ground before racing forward to take second place.

It only took a ten minutes of cultivation for Boneroot to heal the damage to his hand, minor as it was. Grumbling, he started to run in the direction the others went. Though he wasn’t looking forward to Kuroki’s boasting, the results were already decided. So, he chose to take his time.

The forest around him looked quite similar to the areas he had spent most of his time in before moving into the grove. The foliage was dense and vibrant and every inch teemed with life. He had expected there to be some sort of difference, even if it wasn’t as stark as moving toward the heart of Felindei’s grove.

A few minutes of running took Boneroot to the edge of the forest. When he was a hundred feet away, he could see through the thicket light shining from the Empire he’d only just learned of.

Emerging from the ring of trees that marked the end of the Sentoru forest, the boy found Kuroki and Venh waiting with comically exaggerated expressions of impatience. He ignored them and turned around to see the true scope of his long-time home.

He reinforced his legs and jumped up as high as he could manage. The only sign of the forest ever ending was the backdrop of the Bamda Mountains in the distance. Both the mountains and the inner forest looked enormous even at a distance and Boneroot remembered what Kroshieshi had said about the Empire fitting up to fifty of them. A long-stilted sense of wonder stirred as he confirmed, with his own eyes, the truth of his mother’s words. There really was a whole world outside of the forest. It was about time he saw some of it.

When he landed, he saw Kuroki doing the same thing, but to much greater effect. The tsovar let out a thrilled shriek as he plummeted back down to the ground.

“If you’re done,” Venh stretched his back as he spoke. “We should get moving.”

At that, he took off at a jog. Venh’s jog, however, was almost too fast for the boy to keep up with. Kuroki had an easier time, but Boneroot had to expend quite a bit of qi to keep pace.

He called out from a dozen paces behind the other two, “I thought we were going to teleport!”

Trotting backwards now, the average-looking man responded in a level voice with no trace of exertion, “You thought wrong. We need to get to Lake Aobu by nightfall to make camp. We’ll leave for the sect early tomorrow morning. It’ll be up to you if we can reach it by sundown. At this pace, though? I doubt it.”

The serene smile never left his face as he gave Boneroot the grim information. The recipient of that news, however, was accustomed to this sort of training from Kroshieshi. When Venh began to speak again, his words fell on deaf ears.

Boneroot recognized the implicit instructions in the Black realm cultivator’s warning. He knew he would have to concentrate on running with the same intensity as he did fighting with the older hellecat back at the grove.

In fact, he had suspected that meditation would be possible in motion, but he’d never bothered to ask Kroshieshi. There was never a need. The first few attempts to do so all failed, which meant Boneroot stumbled, or lagged behind considerably each time.

The process was a complex balancing act. He needed to circulate his energies, while using his qi to bolster his running and still bring in new essence to supplement his reserves. In a way, it was similar to the training he’d done with his tsovar mentor, meditating under duress. This ordeal, however, was much harder. After only twenty minutes, his breath came in ragged gasps and sweat poured off his brow. Still, he kept at it. Once he got the hang of it, the exhaustion would be much less of an issue.

After another fifteen minutes, though, the situation was bleak. Boneroot had no confidence in his ability to keep going. His pace had continued to slow down as he failed time and time again to sync all the necessary processes. Suddenly, he hit a wall.

In this case, almost literally. Boneroot looked up from the ground to see Venh barring his way. Without a word, he took off in his relaxed backwards jog. Muttering confused condemnations under his breath, Boneroot started his meditative exercises before breaking into a run. To his surprise, it was actually working.

The boy stopped. Immediately, he realized what Venh had done and was rather embarrassed it had even needed doing. Now at a standstill, Boneroot circulated qi around his body. Then, he added his ki to the cycle. Then, natural essence. Finally, he stepped forward. Though the cycle wavered, it ultimately held. And it continued to hold steady at the next step and each step after that. When he picked up the pace, it collapsed.

Boneroot needed a dozen tries before he was able to maintain a light jog. Each time he made a mistake, he went through the entire process over again, step by step. He belatedly realized the error in his first attempts. Just like Kroshieshi had taught him almost a year prior, cultivation was a conscious effort. Each aspect had to be meticulously and consciously directed until it was perfect.

The energy he was taking in from his cultivation was significantly lower than it would be if he meditated in his usual seated position, but it was enough to keep him from collapsing of exhaustion. It was with a single-minded focus on not collapsing that Boneroot trudged on from one hour to the next.

Eventually, his jog turned into a run and that run turned into a sprint. From there, he focused on his posture. Slowly, he adjusted the position of his arms, the tilt of his head, and the arch in his spine until he was in proper running form, just like his father had shown him. Only then did he dare to open his eyes. He immediately planted his face into the dirt.

The next time he got up to speed, he opted to keep his eyes closed and direct himself by the faint traces of Light ki Venh was graciously leaving behind. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but he could improve later. For now, he needed to catch up to the other two cultivators.

Boneroot finally reached their small campsite on the edge of Lake Aobu at what he guessed to be midnight. Though his body was drenched in sweat and grime, his robes were pristine. He was too tired to question how.

As he slowed to a stop in front of the camp, his body began to give in to the accumulated exhaustion. Shakily, he lowered himself onto a log before the campfire, using all his energy to stay sitting up. Venh was sitting on the other side, observing him with an unflinching air of nonchalance.

The campfire discharged sparks into the night sky and Kuroki slipped into Boneroot’s shadow to sleep for the night. As he did so, he drowsily mumbled something about waiting forever. When the boy sensed the little cat was asleep, he turned to Venh. Despite the weariness settling in, he recognized the opportunity he’d been waiting for and knew the time had come. His hands shook, but not for exhaustion, as he asked,

“Do you know what happened to my village?”

The man opposite him considered the question. For a moment, Boneroot expected the worst. He knew that he was powerless to do anything regardless of the answer, but he had to find out all the same.

The orange of the flames flickered in the reflection of Venh’s eyes. They drooped slightly. A corner of his lips was pulled in. He replied,

“I don’t. Sorry Boneroot. Really.”

The younger traveler broke eye contact, his gaze finding his own footprints in the dirt. He said nothing and turned away to find a place to sleep. He walked past that place, collapsed into the dirt, and began to cultivate.