XJ-V followed his new furry companion to a walled off building behind the Tiger Sect Commune, strategically located in the most isolated spot of all Ramor-Tai. It was a low arched stone building with a thatched roof, the kind often seen in river villages of the Old Dynasty. The Cog was taken aback by its simplicity, and as Arha nudged open its rickety doorway with his twitching nose, he was overwhelmed by a scent entirely new to his sensory receptors: the scent of pulp and glue. The scent of the earth’s remains, processed and distilled into pages of knowledge. The scent of books.

He entered the library of Ramor-Tai with a degree of wariness. Now that he had unlocked his power to sense the QI in all things, even basic, rudimentary fonts of life brimmed with new lights. Little creatures like Arha gleamed with translucent Ley Lines of energy that flowed like water through their forms. The books that lined the grand library shelves were no different – each one of them brimmed with the Qi of the tree that had been shed to give them form.

Bookcase upon bookcase stretched out before the machine-man, and as Arha giggled to see his surprise, he noticed movement at the very end of the library’s main hall.

“Arha,” he asked, creeping forward steadily. “What…what is…that?”

He nodded at the high backed, one-eyed creature that glowered at him over its thick spectacles from a clerk’s desk, absorbed in mounds of lengthy tomes it had picked out and stacked around it. The being was far too large to be a regular human, and as XJ-V wandered closer to the thing, he saw that its face was that of an aged woman bathed in an otherworldly glowing light. Wrinkles shone within the haggard, hunchbacked form of the thing that would put even the old Masters of the Sects to shame.

“Why, XJ-V!” Arha giggled at his feet. “You look like you have seen a ghost!”

“Indeed, Cog,” the venerable creature said, raising its long, varicose neck and fixing XJ-V with dark-rimmed eyes. “Is it so unnatural for you to finally know of my existence? After all, I have been watching you with great interest all this time.”

XJ-V stepped forward till he had to shield his eyes from the shining light of the creature.

“Magnificent, am I not?” she said with a gruff chuckle, rising up on her legless body to put away two tomes on a shelf high above them all. “You might tell your drunken Brothers how impressed you are.”

Arha wriggled up to XJ-V’s shoulder.

“Y’know, it is rude to stare at a lady,” she said. “Gracious, I thought my sisters and I had already taught you that! You really are a slow learner, Mr-machine.”

“Don’t blame him, little one,” the floating entity said as she glided across the room to retrieve another dusty tome. “He is made by men. It is only fitting he has their ignorance.”

XJ-V blinked away his confusion.

“What are you, spirit?” he asked.

“HAR!” the creature spat as she swung back down to her desk. “How quaint. Is it really true that they don’t speak of me at all, out there? I swear those young men become more blind with every passing decade.”

“Open your eyes, XJ-V!” Arha whispered in her Cog’s ear. “This is the custodian! The keeper of the scrolls and tomes!”

“Fancy titles mean nothing to machines, little Arha,” the old spirit wheezed. “Just call me Gira. Pleasure to meet you, and all that.”

XJ-V confessed he didn’t quite know what to say in the moment. Here he was, a Cultivator interacting with not one, but two whole, real spirits. Only yesterday he had wondered if he was even truly alive.

“I apologize for my rudeness, Gira,” he said with a short bow. “Your kind have only just become visible to my untrained eyes.”

“’Your kind’ he says!” Gira boomed – her bassy voice totally incongruent with her frail, death-white form. “You hear that, Huli? We are cut from the same cloth.”

“Hmpf” Arha scoffed, sticking her long nose in the air. “I rather think I am a touch more ladylike than this old Guipo!”

Guipo…XJ-V pondered. Huli…words his memory banks held no information on. Spiritual classifications, maybe?

The old woman seemed to sense his returning confusion.

“Ah, well, it can’t be helped,” she said with a snort. “Ignorance is like a disease. It spreads from man to man until they do nothing but talk with their fists. But,” she added with a wave of a single, gnarled finger. “The good news is: it’s never too late to seek the cure.”

She raised her hands, taking up a row of ancient tomes with her.

“You have come seeking knowledge, have you not, man of stone?” she asked.

XJ-V stared deeply at the floating tomes, his mind racing to explain what he saw before him. After what he had seen in the past 24 hours, he knew now what his greatest limitation was: his head was fixed in the language of logic. He had slowly come to understand exactly what Master Longhua had meant when he said that one’s eyes cannot be trained to see that which they refuse to acknowledge.

So he faced this spirit’s legless body, and her floating books, and told her what he sought.

“I must know of this world,” he said. “Of Cultivation, of spirits, and of what came before – of the Sundering.”

Gira pursed her lips, frowning at his queries.

“Hmmm,” she thought aloud. “I’m betting that a Cog like you can probably read faster than the average village boy around here. Tell you what – I’ll give you three books to start you off on your journey. But know this,” she added with another wag of her finger, as though she were reprimanding some boisterous schoolboy. “These walls contain the knowledge of our world, Cog. There is much more in the heavens and earth out there than these old dusty tomes can contain.”

He accepted the books with a gracious bow and turned to find a corner of the old hall to study them. He knew now how he would spend his night.

“Such a nerd!” his companion cried. “Why can’t you just be like the other Disciples?”

“I thought my strangeness was exactly why you attached yourself to me, Arha?” he replied with a smirk. Then, ignoring the fox’s pouting face, he sat cross legged beside an old bookshelf and got to work.

…

After five hours of intense study, XJ-V made an important realization:

His Creator had told him nothing.

His memory banks contained only rudimentary knowledge to help lead him from Hensha to Ramor-Tai. Routes. Fauna descriptions. Basic directives and textbook sections coupled with snippets of philosophy that would impress the Cultivators and allow him to ingratiate himself within their ranks.

But it did not tell him of the world he was now a part of.

“To master the ranks of Corporeal Tempering,” he read aloud while Arha yawned beside him. “One must develop an acute awareness of the world and their place within it. Body Tempering trains not only the physical self, but also one’s sense of general physical awareness. One must first know the Qi of their own body, then the Qi of the world, and finally, at the ninth rank, come to understand how their Qi flow interacts with the world and the Universal Dao beyond it.”

The books he scoured through gave him only glimpses into how this was done. Master Longhua had not told him yet how to unlock the secrets of the Qi that ran within his heart. But he did see that his Anima Core number was, as the Master had said, slightly above the average of 85. He read:

“Anima Cores are a measurement of Qi points within one’s open Chakras – the hidden vessels within mortal bodies that can be opened to receive and direct the flow of Qi at the soul’s command. Mastering basic Earth Level techniques requires that one understands how to redirect the flow of Qi within them – that they can sup on the life force provided by the Universal Dao and channel it’s energy into elemental and spiritual effects. In this way, one’s will can become manifest. One’s Animus becomes projected into physical reality.”

He lay the book down. Much of the Cultivation text assumed the reader had knowledge beyond that which his banks afforded him, but he understood a little of what it meant when it talked about Body Tempering and Earth-Level martial techniques side by side – Corproreal Tempering was a Disciple’s way to learn how to channel the Qi into their body through understanding both their own physical self and the world their mortal shell they existed in. Thus, the attainment of greater ranks in Body Tempering ensured one would be better poised to grasp Earth-Level techniques. It made sense to train them side-by-side, which was exactly what XJ-V had seen in the training regimens of the Monastery.

He put the book down, gave Arha a small stroke on her soft head, and picked up the next book – one bound in webbing that could not be removed from its cover. The swarthy, leather-bound text was labeled: Spiritual Bestiary of the Eastern Rim. Exactly the kind of book that would serve the spiritually-challenged. Within this tome he was afforded sketches of various kinds of benevolent and malicious spirits native to lands around the monastery – including some he was becoming all too familiar with.

“The Guipo,” he read aloud. “Is a manifestation of a kindly old woman often closely associated with a particular location. Guipo are known as the ‘housekeeping spirit’ due to their penchant for remaining bound to specific rooms, buildings, or areas of import to academic or domestic institutions, often taking on a supervisory or custodian role over these areas and any duties associated with them. For obvious reasons, this means they are spirits who are actively involved in earthly affairs, though often their work ethic takes precedence over their desire to help or hinder mortal beings.”

That checks out, XJ-V thought, chancing a look at the eternally busy old library caretaker.

Other colorless pages showed him intricate sketchings of other spirits big and small, and managed to stir even his often dull imagination. He couldn’t imagine why Feng-Lung had not shown him this book before. Then again, the way Gira spoke about the other Disciples, he got the sense that they were barely welcome in this space which, like it or not, this spirit had taken ownership of.

He stopped at one interesting page, bearing the image of a lustrous, nine-tailed fox.

“Often spotted frequenting streams and verdant forests are the Huli or ‘fox-spirit’,” he read. “Nigh on impossible to catch, the Huli are one of the most mysterious spirits to grace our earth in the wake of the Sundering. They are mischievous by nature, delighting in confusing or aiding adventurers on their travels seemingly on a whim. Usually traveling as part of a pack, there have been rare instances of Huli attaching themselves to a human in the capacity of a spirit guide. For reasons unknown, other spirits are far more amenable to conversing with humans who have a Huli companion. There have been no successful attempts at prompting such Huli companionship, nor is the rationale behind which mortal they choose to accompany known.”

XJ-V didn’t consider Arha’s rationale for accompanying him particularly challenging to understand.

“You just wish to annoy me, don’t you?”

Sound asleep, the spirit simply wriggled under his hand.

He put the book down and examined the darkest tome Gira had gifted to him – one blackened with age and, it could be assumed, exposure to both the elements and the eyes of others. He picked it up and glanced at the cover, seeing nothing but a simple title glaring back at him:

The Lamentable History of The Sundering.

He looked about him, as though he were about to embark on an unspeakable journey. Then, without thinking about it more, he opened the first page.

###

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