Over the coming days, I settled into a comfortable routine, which only involved getting lost on my way to the glade once. Waking in the morning, I would prepare for the day and break my fast at home. Despite my prior youth’s disdain for blackstrap, my later days of coffee drinking did indeed appear to translate to a taste for blackstrap, and I found that what had been a week’s worth of blackstrap only lasted a few days. Satisfied, I would handle any shopping as needed first thing in the morning—usually to the baker—then return home to prepare lunch. Packed up, I would warm up with a run to my training glade, train all morning, and break for lunch. Then I would train in the afternoon, rinse off in the stream, then return home to note my progress and eat dinner. One day, after freshly killing a G-ranked Rabbit which wandered into my glade, I decided to work butchery into my evening schedules, remembering belatedly that I had three Squirrels in the ice box. And with that, my days ended with sleep.

I had mostly stopped waking up screaming.

Indeed, on the sixth day of my training routine, there was no screaming. Instead, there was significant bewilderment. As I got dressed, I casually rubbed my hands over my limbs and thought I noticed significant muscle growth. It’d been a while since I was 16 years old, but the muscle growth was not entirely unexpected, and so I let the matter drop without second thoughts.

On the morning of the tenth day, the muscle growth was not so easily ignored. Frowning in consternation, I sat on the floor and began meditating before calling upon a skill I had not used in a very long time.

The technique—which was unnamed as far as I knew—was essentially a form of spiritual perception reflected upon oneself, but combined with aspects of a similar technique used to diagnose and treat the wounded. The difficulty with the technique was twofold. First, the body’s own gray ki was rather adept at ignoring your own body. And second, the technique caused an out of body experience, which could be rather disorienting. Nonetheless, it was highly effective when addressing one’s own spiritual development.

Invoking the first stage of the technique, I found myself looking at the representation of my own ki as others would conceivably see it. While such a representation was usually rather formless, I could see that my ki had apparently concentrated rather definitively there in the shape of several of my major muscle groups. Pondering this, I tried to peer closer to see if my ki was concentrating on any other parts of my body. But, while my control had increased significantly—I was up to four pebbles—I still lacked the fine control needed to reach that sort of resolution with my perception.

With an approximation of an internal sigh, I invoked the second stage of the technique, where I would use my own gray ki to probe the inner workings of my physical body. For once since my return to the past, my ki control was adequate enough to do what I wanted. I began by focusing on my left bicep.

What I found was both astonishing and mildly incomprehensible. As far as I could tell, my glut of ki appeared to have greatly increased the rate at which my muscles were recovering and strengthening. No matter the regimen I had been putting myself through, muscular strength could not grow this quickly. And yet, I could perceive that my muscles had grown in volume and density, and my ki was accelerating the process by which sore muscles were recovering and strengthening. I quickly worked my way through my other major muscle groups finding the same process, and then checked several minor muscles and important organs—heart and lungs particularly—only to find the same or a similar process occurring.

I snapped out of my reverie dazed and confused.

This was impossible as far as I knew. Ki could of course be used to heal, not only combat injuries, but also training injuries, such as a torn tendon or sprained muscle. And such healing techniques could be directed either on oneself or on others. And yet it had been definitively established centuries ago that such techniques could not be used to accelerate physical training. All attempts to do so had ended worse than failure: the nature of such healing—whether personal or by another—always reverted the muscle to the prior state, thus preventing any strengthening from occurring.

Yet, such a hoped-for process appeared to have started on its own within my body. It was not a healing technique—I wasn’t invoking it consciously and the flow of ki in such a matter was subtly different—yet I was stumped as to what it was. I was unaware of any process whereby ki would automatically act upon and affect the body without conscious input.

Then again, I was in an unprecedented position. Disregarding the return to the past problem, for which I had no conceptual framework to consider, I had been inundated with a surplus of ki far beyond what this body should have had. The disconnect between the well-studied relationships between ki and body was unusual to the extreme. And yet, while my ki control still left something to be desired, the ki had not gone on to ravage my body as might have been expected.

It was, I had to say, deeply unsettling. Even more so that I had no satisfactory explanation other than a fluke of nature. Dumb luck. And yet, there seemed to be nothing I could do about it and, as far as I could tell, it was wholly beneficial to me. Indeed, the benefits were now two-fold, as my ki excess had already proved to be a superior form of weighted training. Forcing down any feelings of unearned accomplishment, I refused to look at the edge of a gift sword and got up to move about my day.

It was time to see how far I could push this.

***

After two weeks of constant training—my accelerated recovery meant that rest days were not required—I finally began to add swordwork to my training routine. Since my return, I had been anxious about picking up a sword for any reason other than to strap it onto my back.

And so, my sword had not left its sheath since my purchase from the blacksmith. To the extent that any G-ranked beasts bothered me—which was surprisingly few—I dispatched them unarmed or with ki attacks.

I had in my past life been rather adept with the sword and had reached two of the three Pillars of the Sword. It was a point of pride, as few as those were, and I was wary of how far I had fallen.

Nonetheless, I had no genuine excuse and eventually recognized such. And so, standing in the middle of the glade, I drew my sword. I went to casually swing it, to test its weight and feel, when I realized that for all my growth these two weeks, this was a weapon I would need two hands for the foreseeable future. Sighing, I wrapped my second hand around the hilt, and took a standard position for a two handed sword, a technique I hadn’t used in decades. I took a step and a short swing.

I would have liked to say the sword singed, but that would be overly generous. The sword was not well balanced, the grip was too narrow, and I still hadn’t purchased the whetstones I needed to maintain the edge. It was a quack.

And yet, for all that I had lost perfect control over my body, and for all that this body did not know a sword from a hoe, my spirit did and it instantly complained not only about the sword, but everything my body had done wrong, from pulling the sword from its sheath to the end of the arc of the swing.

And yet for all the faults that my spirit had to lay at my feet, it was secretly pleased to have a sword in hand again. You could even say that it hummed.

***

Three weeks in, and I was down to under a hundred marks. For all that I had carefully budgeted, I had forgotten how much a teenager ate. And while I had supplemental meat and a trickle of marks from the few G-ranked beasts that came across my training, I was quickly eating myself through my purse. Plus, I needed 300 marks at the end of the week to pay for rent. So as much as it pained me to do so, I needed to make money. With that in mind, I spent one evening pouring over my options to do so.

I immediately discarded any mundane job as both too time intensive and unlikely to provide me with the marks I needed in the short term and whatever I planned for the long term.

Likewise, I discarded any option approaching a spiritualist job as too time intensive, and too limiting in my freedom.

That then, brought me to get rich quick schemes. With one notable exception which he was always apt to bring up, Lennie had attempted and failed many of these in my prior lifetime. I immediately discarded anything that fell in that category.

That left me to leveraging the advantages I currently had. The most notable of these was preparing either a spiritual manual, or a single discrete spiritual technique. The problem with the former was that it would cost a small fortune in stationery and take me days to create. Additionally, only the greenest of spiritualists failed to recognize that every spiritualist manual in the City was nine-tenths junk. Which meant either I wrote a piece of junk, and sold it for near nothing, or I wrote a legitimate manual, faced an uphill battle convincing the buyer it was so, and then facing unwanted attention when a legitimate manual by a teenager started circulating.

While it took a little more thought, I ultimately discarded the idea of selling a spiritual technique, even though that would be less conspicuous. The problems were threefold.

First, if the technique was too basic, I would not be able to sell it for much, notwithstanding the novelty of the technique.

Second, if the technique was too advanced, I would face scathing scrutiny.

The third and last point was something rather peculiar to Dorflich. The spiritualists of Dorflich had lost all knowledge of how spiritual techniques were actually created, and the City had never been rich enough to commit to researching how to rediscover this lost knowledge. As such, the only new techniques created in Dorflich were those created by trial and error, a still time expensive process which only the Big Four and the Royal Family could indulge in. On the other hand, as a spiritualist rose in ranking, even within the Big Four, they correspondingly lost the time needed to dedicate to such an endeavor. As such, unless the new technique was F-ranked, such new techniques tended to be jealously guarded by the creator and their family. Because of this ramshackle approach to creation, as far as popular opinion was concerned, to create a spiritual technique of a certain level, the creator had to be one rank higher. As such—as far as anyone knew—there were no techniques in Dorflich C-ranked or higher because that would have required a B-ranked spiritualist, a rank which was largely considered mythical within the City. Altogether, these factors meant that spiritual techniques higher than E-ranked—which I could easily create—could be sold for a small fortune.

The fault with this was that, with my age and appearance, there was no way I could pass myself off as higher than E-rank, which meant I was stuck with creating F-ranked techniques, which simply wouldn’t see enough to be cost effective. And trying to pass off the technique as a family heirloom would have raised all sorts of questions, which ultimately would have been more trouble that it was worth.

Accordingly, I ended up falling back to the lesson that we had all learned from Lennie’s mostly-failed efforts: the best way for a spiritualist to make marks was to hunt beasts.

***

The next day, I set off early on a little hunting trip. In addition to my usual personal effects, I packed two small canvas sacks, some leather string, a rope, and my hatchet. I decided to start at my training glade, then work my way towards the mountains, and then west.

My target today was an E-rank beast. I had handled the Boar, an F-ranked beast, easily enough on the first day when I lacked a proper weapon and my ki was wildly unstable. Now, I had a sword and three solid weeks of training, both yielding me greater strength and ki control. As such, I felt comfortable classifying myself as at least E-ranked, and thus that such a hunt could be handled safely. The ten thousand mark value of an E-ranked core was nothing to laugh at either, and at my current spend rate could easily last a few years. Though, if my past life was any indication, I would quickly find my expenses rising to match my income.

On the other hand, if I had to settle for a handful of F-ranked beasts today, that would be fine too: Enough marks for rent and living expenses, and a bounty of free meat. With my spiritual sense, I could sense a G-ranked beast from twenty meters, an F-ranked beast from sixty meters, and an E-ranked beast from 180 meters. I thought it unlikely I would run across a D-ranked beast or higher, but because I could sense such a powerful beast from nearly a half kilometer away, I would be able to easily avoid it.

Setting off from my training glade, I headed north northwest towards the mountain, keeping my perception open. Despite my limited range at sensing the weaker beasts, I came across a fair number of G-ranked beasts. Where these beasts had been hiding on my initial foray through the forest, I did not know nor particularly care. As it was, hunting them now was less than ideal given the low values of cores and bodies, and the difficulty of butchering them myself. In the interest of saving time, I scared them all off with a quick flare of killing intent.

By morning bell, I had reached the foot of the slope. Although I had bled off my ki this morning to a manageable weight, moving through the forest was still a hard slog. The trees thinned out a bit in a line along the foot of the slope, and I was hoping to move along that line quickly towards the west. Passing through the forest, I had picked up on at least 3 F-ranked beasts, but not a glimmer of an E-ranker just yet. So, while only half my spiritual sense would cover the forest, the other half would cover a portion of the mountain slope, and I was hoping I might find a Mountain Goat in the area. That said, I didn’t want to spend more than a single day hunting, so I resolved for myself that if I didn’t come across anything by the end of lunch, I would return to the City through the forest hunting the F-ranked beasts.

For the next half bell, I moved west, though I only sensed F-ranked beasts the entire time. The mountain to my right had continued to slope downward and grow more craggy as I moved west, while the foot of the slope became steeper until it was a sheer cliff. The crest of the mountain reached downward until met the rising height of the cliff, revealing the cliff to be a plateau.

A half kilometer past that, I paused before jumping over a creek flowing out from a crack in the cliffs. It seemed like an awful lot of water to be coming off of the two mountains on either side of the plateau. Something about it was tickling the back of my mind, so I walked upflow along the creek until I reached the crack in the cliff.

Altogether, it was rather unassuming looking. The crack, it had to be said, was actually a narrow gorge, ranging from one to three meters across. The creek covered about 80% of the floor, though it varied, and there were stretches where there was no dry land at all. The walls were sheer and given their distance from each other, likely impossible to climb at my current strength.

Nonetheless, my curiosity was piqued. Having walked along the creek a fair distance, I was even more sure that this amount of water could not be coming off of just two mountains, even with the spring snowmelt. But, I couldn’t see more than 150 meters into the gorge, and I found myself wondering what lay further upcreek.

Steeling myself, I began to make my way into the gorge. For the first length—what I could see from the entrance, I was able to walk most of the way, with a few spots where I had to jump or even take a running leap. At one point, I had to duck under and squeeze my way past a part of the wall that jutted out over the water. By then, I couldn’t see the entrance at all. This far in, there was even less dry ground than before, and I could hardly go five meters without the need to jump or leap.

Finally, nearly 300 meters in, all semblance of a trail disappeared. And I found myself stumped. The urge to continue was nearly irrepressible, though how to do so was troubling. Potentially, I could make my way out, and find a way up onto the plateau. That though could take a full bell or longer. Climbing up the walls barehanded was not likely. A complex working of ki could be used to carve hand and footholders, but I had used very little attuned ki up to this point and the process I was describing was difficult. An easier invocation of ki would be to create ice handholds which would affix themselves to the rock. While the relatively cold rock wouldn’t melt their grip immediately, it probably wouldn’t last more than a minute.

While pondering the practicalities of the latter, I came across another idea, what if I instead used ice to create footholds and walk my way forward, rather than upwards? While falling into the creek would be remarkably unpleasant, it would be better to do so from down here rather than from up there. Moreover, the water of the creek was already cold and I could conserve a lot of ki by drawing upon the creek using the Third Stage of Spiritualism.

My mind made up, I stretched out my arms and invoked ki to create the first step. I grew a large prong of ice out of the side of the wall, and shaped the top of it into a 30 centimeter ovoid. I tested my weight on the first one, and was pleased with the result, particularly when I jumped on it as a test. I creating the second a meter along, and took a large step onto it. And then a third, and a fourth. On the fifth, I heard the ice crack behind me and the first foothold fell into the creek. Whatever was on the other side, I’d need to find an easier way through in the future.

But for now, the footholds came easier to me, and I was now making them as fast as I could walk. After the 27th foothold, I stepped onto a rocky trail and continued ahead. For another 200 meters or so I went ahead, and while there were a few gaps to leap, there was nothing so difficult as the one requiring icy footholds.

Finally, turning a small bend, I saw a crack of light only ten meters ahead. As I approached, I realized it was the end of the gorge and I exited into a large valley.

The valley was an oval about three hundred meters wide and five hundred long. The valley had sheer cliffs on all sides, and was surrounded by six mountains. From the four mountains not facing the City flowed at least half a dozen brooks, which fell into the valley and congregated on a centerline, and then became the creek I had been following. The gorge was at the lowest edge of the valley, and was where the creek exited the valley. There were two significant copses of trees. A smaller one just off center and to the left of where most of the brooks came together into the creek. And then a larger copse against the valley walls at the far end of the valley. The rest of the valley consisted of short grasslands, though there were a handful of other sprigs of vegetation scattered throughout.

It was idyllic. And, while I had no current plans that required—

“BAAAA!”

A screech interrupted my thoughts. I whipped my ahead around and up towards the source of the noise: A solitary Mountain Goat standing at the top of the valley wall.

Perfect.

I dropped my bag and had begun to unsheathe my sword when the beast suddenly leaped at me and into a twenty meter drop. I hastily rolled away, and fired a shard of ice back to where I had just left. The shard impacted the Mountain Goat just as it landed, though it was far duller than a “shard” should have been. Really need to work on my ki attacks. The Goat bleated and then, leaped at me again, though now on even ground, I side stepped the creature and swung at its rear flank, but only drew a thin line of blood. The Goat on the other hand, pivoted and one hoof caught me in the chest, knocking me back two meters. Though my aura had blocked most of it, it was a hard hit and I suddenly found myself gasping for breath. Looking for some literal breathing room, I swung my sword, invoking a ki technique to form a dome of ice around the creature.

The Goat continued to bleat and ram its horns into the dome, which immediately cracked. I took a step back, and for the first time this fight assumed a proper weaponstance. When the Goat’s next ram busted it through the dome, it landed right in front of me where I was already mid-slash. While it was a clean strike into its chest, it did little more than shallowly cut into its chest muscles, and the Goat leapt away three times to gain its own distance from me. I only recalled belatedly that I had yet to acquire those whetstones and the cutting edge of the sword was rather dull. The beast—having decided my hesitation was fear—took two steps and then a bounding leap into the air, intending to land on me with its hooves. Disappointed, I absently adhered my feet to the ground in ice and two-handedly thrust the point of my sword into the beast’s arc. The Goat kabobed itself on my sword—instantly dead—and I dropped both beast and sword on the ground.

I cursed myself out for a solid minute, before unfreezing my feet, and flopping onto dry grass.

As I rested after my victory, I looked up from where the Mountain Goat had come from. From the City side of the gorge, it had seemed likely that a path across the plateau could be found. But from within the valley, it became clear that a path across the top of the plateau would be inordinately difficult for all but the strongest spiritualist. Bypassing the gorge by going up would likely require a very rugged climb directly over the mountains.

Pleased at the exceptionally well-hidden nature of this valley, I turned to the Mountain Goat in question. After extracting and pocketing the E-ranked core, I field dressed the beast, discarding all of its organs except for the liver, which I kept for use in a particularly nutritious meal I knew of involving lots of onions. Given that I was going to attempt to carry the thing back to the City, I also removed its head and the lower portions of each limb, which would be little more than bone and cartilage. Fortunately, the beast itself was a little on the small side—about 90 kg—and, now dressed, was down to only 50 kilograms or so. Fortunately, the battle had burned up a lot of ki, so I was feeling light on my feet. Tying what remained of the legs together, I slung it over my shoulders, and started my way back.