With considerably less screaming the next morning, I woke up and performed my morning ablutions. I toyed with the idea of not bleeding off any ki and operating with the full weight, but just this morning routine left me panting heavily. This was perhaps an improvement, as I was barely even able to move before, but it was ultimately not to be a successful training technique. I bled my ki back down to double my weight, then got out the apartment early to run the errands which should have been taken care of yesterday. I still had only meat in the apartment, so after breaking my fast with a meat pastry from a street vendor—this one was spiced Raptor—I promptly found the nearest grocer.

It was of course still March, so there were no new crops coming in from the fields. Still, there was some of the old crops still in decent shape—potatoes, yams, apples, pears, firm cabbage, carrots, onions, and winter squash. The old man manning the store said that there had been some bad crops at the end of last year, so his storage cellars were already clear of radishes, turnips, parsnips, and celeriac, but that was fine by me. While I had learned to appreciate produce over many decades of spiritualist practice, I had also long experience with roughing it.

The grocer also mentioned that if I wanted something greener, a gatherer had selling him a sack of fresh shoots and other wild-harvested greens at evening bell, but they were always sold out by dusk bell. I thanked him for that information and loaded up with a week’s worth of produce in a sack. Popping into a nearby bakery, I picked up another loaf of bread, a pastry filled with an apple jelly, and directions to my next destination.

It turned out that while cookware and servingware were sold together in the same store, such stores would only sell either metal or stone versions of each. Not keen on limiting myself to only one material, I checked in on both stores. In the metalware store, I sought both serving and eating utensils, and promptly left when I rediscovered all the dishes one could cook with a spatula and that eating with my fingers or my lone fork was acceptable in my social circles: it had nothing to do with the high prices. On an unrelated note, I had to question whether that smith gave me a good deal or whether that hunting knife was complete crap. Heading into the stoneware store, I picked up additional cups, a few serving bowls, a mixing bowl, and a ladle.

With those in hand, I headed towards my last stop of the morning: the spice shop. There, I picked up a kilogram of salt, and a garlic braid, both of which were cheap. Every other spice was considerably more expensive per unit and after careful consideration, I purchased a small quantity of two of the cheaper spices in the store: coriander seed and dried chili. The dried chili seemed rather expensive, considering I knew chilies could grow in Dorflich’s climate, however cool. But ultimately a mystery of botany and economics was not something I needed to concern myself with.

It was there and then that I belated remembered that there was no coffee in Dorflich. It was simply too cool year-round this far south to grow and Dorflich’s isolation from other human cities made regular trade too infrequent for anything but luxury goods for the upper classes. The local equivalent for bitter morning brew—for it seemed that all humans were inclined to one type or another—was the bark of a local tree dried in the sun and roasted within a sealed container without air. So processed, the bark was called blackstrap, and to prepare the beverage of the same name, the bark would simply be ground and brewed with hot water until the ground bark sunk to the bottom. I very distinctly recall disliking blackstrap in my past life, but I doubted that my prior youth would have liked coffee either, something which I later developed an appreciation for same. Circling back to the proprietor, I purchased a small chunk of blackstrap—perhaps enough for a week—and headed back to my apartment.

Unpacking my purchases and preparing lunch took long enough that it was nearly morning bell by the time I got to the West Gate. With my eye fixed upon the patch of forest where my training glade was located, I started out at a brisk run over the grasslands.

An half bell later—and only three rests, I might add—I reached the edge of the forest, and made my way inside. As I hadn’t actually headed into the glade from the City before, I got lost and what should have only been a few minutes’ trip from the forest’s edge became an half bell long trip which resulted in my entering the glade on the far side of the City, rather than the near side. Belatedly, it occurred to me that I should have located where the stream exited the forest, and then moved upstream.

Having rested (relatively) during my unexpected sylvan sojourn, I set my belongings down at the stream-side oak, and began running through a simplified version of the body weight exercises I had been trained in when I first learned about fully weighted training. Each segment would consist of three exercises which worked different parts of the body; each exercise would be repeated until exhaustion, then progress immediately to the next exercise. When the third exercise was completed, that was a single set, and three sets would be repeated before a two hundred meter sprint, and a short rest period. Thus, for example, my first segment consisted of vertical jumps, pull ups from a nearby branch, and planking. I then ran a loop around the edge of the glade, before stopping at the oak tree for a drink from the stream and a five minute rest.

I had initially planned to continue until noon bell and lunch, but this first day of training represented the old adage of a willing spirit, and a weak body. After only a half bell, I could hardly remain on my feet, and my breath was ragged. I internally cursed myself for a while before remembering it was only the third day back and my body was truly a novice.

I perhaps had been expecting too much to just happen easily. Yes, my experience and knowledge would lend great strides to my growth, but time was an irreplaceable, absolute factor. Patience, it had to be said, was required.

Having satisfied myself that some balance was still required, I sat up into a meditation position, and calmed my breathing to a familiar pace. I unconsciously immediately attempted to invoke a domain, but my ki immediately rebelled against such control. Startling myself out of my trance, I rested my chin on my fist as I dug back through my memories as to appropriately novice control exercises for meditation.

After a few moments of unearthing, and a grunt later, I recalled that floating exercises were the earliest spirit control exercises used by spiritualists. At an initial level, the exercise would consist solely of attempting to float a single pebble using only gray ki. Traditionally, this was usually done over one’s palm, but that was not strictly necessary, and was useful only in so much as it assisted low-ranked spiritualists in visualizing the implementation of their ki. It was however not a habit that should be formed, least the time taken to move one’s hand slow your ki invocation in battle. Given the sheer lack of control I had at the moment, I felt obliged to at least start my exercises using my hands, but I expected to graduate out of such movements soon enough. Indeed, I had spent over a decade comfortably invoking my ki without any movement for bells on end during some of the greater hordes.

Picking up a nearby river stone, I rested it on my right palm, and invoked by gray ki to lift it up.

Or, rather, that was what attempted to do. When I reached for my ki, I found that it was still wild and that it would not allow me to separate out a small portion. My ki was, for lack of a better description, tacky and would not allow the fine separation that I needed. When I finally separated a piece, the amount that came was much larger than needed, and the river stone shot out at an angle into the forest.

I watched it sail away, whistling through the trees, before sighing and moving over to the streambed to grab more stones. This was going to be a long day.

***

After lunch, I continued to alternate physical training with meditation and ki control exercises. By the end of my training at evening bell, I had managed to get a single pebble to float above my palm, though it wobbled a fair bit and tended to fall after about five minutes. I had clearly fallen from grace. The shame though was mixed with pride and hope. For all that I was embarrassed, floating a pebble for even a minute could easily take a teenaged spiritualist over a year of training to accomplish. My data points were completely singular, but I could feel the unruly nature of my ki had improved appreciably. I suspected I would have something functionally effective within a few weeks or months at most.

I had stripped out of my clothing and was resting in the calm pool of the stream near the oak. The water was frigid—it was an alpine March after all—but my body was radiating heat from such a long day of intense exercise. As the cold water soothed my sore body, I gave some thought to my physical training.

The gains of such training would, of course, be much more difficult to ascertain than my spiritual training. Yesterday’s run and hike, while invigorating, were difficult to compare to the physical exercise of today. And, in any event, I only had a single data point of my normal training regimen. Yet, because physical improvements were naturally much slower to occur, and could not be sensed in real time by human senses, including spiritual perception, this did not really matter much right now.

The only reliable method I knew of would be to record my performance with specific exercises, together with the approximate weight of my ki pool, and compare that over a long period of time. Regretfully, I owned neither writing implements nor anything to write on, neither of which were cheap, and my funds had never been high. Nonetheless, mulling over the value of such data, the thought of such a purchase struck me as one of the more important decisions I could invest in.

And so, having cleaned up, I got dressed into my spare outfit and headed back to the City to find a stationer. From her, I purchased a few sheets of her cheapest parchment and a pencil, which altogether became the single most expensive purchase I had made since coming back. With my latest acquisition in hand, I returned to my apartment, dropping off my dirty laundry with Lily for cleaning. Standing at the kitchenette, I made note of what I had accomplished today on the parchment, while dinner was cooking. The parchment really was quite low quality, but I didn’t have the funds to spare for something nicer. Once I did, I resolved to purchase a bound journal and transfer all of these notes into there, preferably with quill and ink, rather than pencil.

After eating my fill of dinner, I laid in bed thinking about tomorrow until I dozed off.