“There’s no way,” Elder Tea murmured, looking back and forth between us. “Really?”

I shrugged.

She turned to Morning Rain. “You really got a core vi?”

My sister nodded.

Elder Tea turned to me. “She really got a core vi?”

I nodded as well.

Elder Tea turned around. “Morning Rain... took a core vi?” she asked Elder Swan, who’d just walked over the bridge of stones.

The older woman with green hair shrugged. “Can’t say, Evie. Wasn’t there.”

“Neither was I! I shouldn’t have gone to pack up when the sun rose!” Elder Tea exclaimed. She turned back around to her disciple. “Can I... take a look?”

“You still don’t believe me!” Morning frowned. “It’s not even that hard to believe, I attracted so many stupid vi plants this week...”

“But you refused to take a tier zero until the very last moment, Morning,” her master said. “I was fully prepared for you not to take one, and to turn this into some kind of lesson for you. 

“Do you remember what we repeated, over and over? In tier zero, your core vi doesn’t matter much, and you still remained so very stubborn about it... Being like this was the wrong decision, in this case — if, in the end, you’d ended up without a core vi, you would have been set back by another week.

“You must learn that there’s a fine line between patience and obstinance.”

“I get it, I get it,” my sister moaned, rubbing her temples. “I took the stupid tier zero already. I learned my lesson... I could have a whole set right now but because of my actions I only have one. Yeah, I did the big dumb. Whatever.”

“I’ll drop it for now, but I’d still like to take a look at the vi you tamed,” Elder Tea said.

“Fine,” Morning sighed, opening her aperture to let out that silvery glow of her essence ocean. 

As much as it still felt really weird to see someone opening their aperture so flagrantly, and without defensive methods... It was actually pretty safe for her to do. You know, considering that both elders were here, and besides that only me, the sister she’d already been cultivating beside.

Elder Tea put her palm over her disciple’s aperture, closing her eyes as she inspected the mystical space. “Crescent Moon Blade Vi,” the woman murmured, tilting her head. “It looks almost dead! You nearly destroyed this one, too?”

Morning scoffed. “I’m not that dumb. This is just how it was when I tamed it. What does it do?”

“It’s a relatively common offensive vi that allows you to range attack with blades shaped like crescent moons,” Elder Tea explained. “It’s a good core, especially given your cultivation method, but even without... You can make a lot of techniques with Crescent Moon Blade Vi. You know, tweaking its effect based on the situation? It’s common in higher tiers as well, so you could hold out for it in the next tier each time you’re ready to break through. Then all your techniques would come with relatively easily.”

Morning nodded, deep in thought. “That sounds like a good investment.”

For her, yeah, it did sound that way, but I’d already busied myself in consideration of whether the insights Elder Tea had shared would be valuable for my own cultivation. 

Hmm. 

Considering the rarity of Moonlight Waterfall Lotus Vi, I likely would not be able to find a tier two plant of the same type. However, because my core vi was already a tier one, that meant that I’d be able to break straight through to tier one, only needing to replace my core vi when breaking through to tier two. So I would have to replace my techniques then, theoretically? Or... maybe they could be reoriented around a new core vi, if that was possible? Was that a thing? 

I had to admit that I didn’t actually know much of anything about how techniques worked.

 

---

 

We arrived once more at Sapphire Lake, treated to a picturesque view. Shallow waves of the crystal-blue waters lapped against the white, sandy shores; a huge field of lush, green grass covering the area past.

“Stump-legged moose!” the Glowing Rivulets Vi girl at my side suddenly exclaimed, pointing excitedly across the body of water.

Turns out, this time, the lake wasn’t completely empty — today, we also got to see a rather large pack of those stump-legged moose. I wondered for a moment how dangerous they’d be to us if they were in our path — were they like the moose from my first life? Herbivores? Even if they were, did they aggressively defend their pack?

“They look kind of silly with legs like that,” I giggled.

The girl to my side agreed. “If they get attacked by, I don’t know, maybe that pack of five-horned bears we ran into... how do you think they’d run away on such stubby little legs?”

I snorted at the image. “I wonder if they sometimes lose their balance and fall over. Do you think they’d roll around like that?”

“Like sausages?” the girl suggested.

I blinked at the bizarre simile. “...Yeah. Like sausages.”

“They’d probably get stuck on stuff,” she said. “The... things, you know,” she pantomimed with both her hands splayed atop her head.

“Antlers?”

“Yeah!”

I burst into another fit of giggles. Imagining the moose... like... well, sausages, trying to roll to safety and immediately getting stuck on their own antlers... And, actually, the image was even funnier if you thought about the moose tilting its head this way and that as it rolled — some kind of vain attempt to keep the antlers out of the way.

“The boys are late,” Elder Swan finally sighed, pulling us from our silly chat.

“Somehow I’m not surprised,” Elder Tea snarked back. “Is this common?”

The older woman nodded. “Just about every year. Elder Flame isn’t the most punctual of gentlemen. Anyway, we’ll do as we do most years...” She spoke up, addressing all of us. “Girls, gather ‘round.”

My friend, my sister, and I were all close to the elders, but the other two were not. Leaf Bushman had been a short distance away investigating something she’d found on the ground, and Azure Cloud had moved a distance away and already begun meditating. The two reluctantly rejoined the group — Azure Cloud as expressionless as ever, Leaf Bushman all smiles. “I found a cool rock,” she said.

“How much do you all know about sparring?” Elder Swan asked. “Can anybody tell me about it?”

Morning Rain’s face lit up, and she raised her hand wildly. Yeah, of course she would... she’d always loved when our father had made us spar...

The elder gestured to Morning, who immediately launched into a detailed description: “In its most common form, a spar’s a duel between two vi masters. The vi masters can decide to set rules and restrictions before the spar, but in general there are three main rules:

“1. No killing.

“2. No leaving the battle stage.

“And then 3. No attacks after a victor is decided.

“If you break any of the rules — or any additional rules set before the match — you’re disqualified and the victory goes to your opponent. In the case of both vi masters breaking the rules, it’s a draw.

“The main thing, though... it’s just a fight. Make your opponent surrender, or knock them unconscious, whatever. That’s how you get victory!”

Morning smiled widely, quite obviously enjoying the idea of reliving her glory days. You know, the glory days she spent pummeling me every time our father made us fight. And, actually... thinking about it, with that context... it was hard to imagine why our father hadn’t switched his favourite sooner. The whole time, she’d been so obviously more capable at this stuff than I was...

“Thanks for that explanation, Morning Rain,” Elder Swan smiled back. “Yep, that’s what we’re going to do — and, being at Sapphire Lake, the site of the Tri-annual Village Tournament... we have the perfect stage to do so!”

 

---

 

“What do you mean I can’t spar?” Morning Rain was not happy.

“Are you trying to kill your core vi so soon?” her master raised an eyebrow.

“No... but... that’s not fair! I want to spar!” she shouted.

“You shouldn’t have waited until the last second to take a core vi, then!” the woman shouted right back.

“How was I supposed to know it was going to be all messed up?!” Morning Rain growled. “Don’t you have a way to fix it?”

Elder Tea breathed an exasperated sigh. “Healing a damaged vi plant is not as easy as it sounds. It’s by far the easiest to let the plant recover on its own. If you interrupt that natural recovery, though...”

My sister grumbled, stomping off to aimlessly kick at tufts of grass and eventually flop down into a miserable heap. 

“Pass,” Azure Cloud said, returning to the spot where she was meditating just a bit before.

Elder Swan pursed her lips at Azure Cloud, before turning back to the rest of us. “That leaves you three? You’re all going to spar?”

I nodded as the other two said “Yes!” and “Yup.”

“I suppose you’ll have to take turns, then, unless you want to do a free-for-all?”

“I vote for a free-for-all,” Leaf Bushman spoke up.

“That’s fine,” I shrugged. I didn’t really know what I was doing, after all, so it wasn’t really a big deal how this went, exactly. I was sure I’d be learning stuff no matter what I did.

Elder Swan proceeded to lead us to a stage marked out by a bright pink line in the grass. The stage was circular, and relatively small, but that was probably fine considering that we were new and most of our fight would probably be spent with us fighting in close-range.

“And... start!”

Wait, what did my vi even do?

 

---

 

Since the other girls didn’t seem to be going on the offensive immediately, I decided to look through my vi plants and experiment with them. Currently, I had: Cooling Aloe Vi, Frost Touch Vi, Formless Flow Vi, Moonwalk Vi, Rose Solution Vi, and Moonlight Waterfall Lotus Vi. 

The first one, Cooling Aloe Vi — which, being a succulent, was the one that looked the most threatening of all my vi plants — was actually a healing vi plant. I wasn’t currently injured, so I had no reason to try it yet. 

Next up was Frost Touch Vi, which looked like a very small, squat, sky-blue bush. I started activating that one pretty quick, and as I did, it began to glow and release little blue sparkles. It didn’t take long before I was shivering — I realised pretty quick that the vi plant didn’t do anything about my cold tolerance, which seemed to have returned to normal soon after my time spent cultivating in the freezer.

However, I could still handle more of the cold before it was too much, so I kept activating it. Eventually, in the area close around the ground I was standing on, the grass began to freeze, my robes starting to frost over.

Then, trying to get a better look at what the Frost Touch Vi had done to the ground, I took a step back, only to slip and fall on my bottom. Seriously... what was it about cold surfaces that made me so clumsy? Yeah, they were slippery, but... Like, this was a little ridiculous. I... I couldn’t be trusted with a vi plant like this. It was way too dangerous.

I quickly stopped activating the little blue blush, and it stopped consuming my essence. Luckily, it seemed like its expenditure was rather low. To note: in the past week, I’d gotten my aperture to about a fifteen metre diameter, managing to refine my essence to a much higher quality, as well. So take the rest of this with that grain of salt, but... In the entire two minutes I’d spent activating Frost Touch, it had used about 5% of the essence I’d had stored away. Extrapolating, if I multiplied those two minutes by ten... in twenty minutes, I’d finally run out of essence. If I’d been at maximum capacity of essence, rather than at 50% as my manual suggested, I’d have been able to activate it for forty minutes straight. 

Granted, that low expenditure was paired with the fact that Frost Touch’s effect was not spectacular on its own. The small spot of grass I’d frosted over was already recovering, my clothes getting warm as the seconds ticked by.

I realised, probably way too late, that I’d been ignoring my opponents for a long time. We were supposed to be sparring, but when I looked up, I saw that the other two were busy testing their vi plants, too. The friend I’d gained this week was surrounded by little, translucent bubbles — was that the effect of Pain Bubble Vi? Meanwhile, Leaf Bushman was holding her hand out, an expression of fierce concentration on her face, as... a bush slowly materialised in it. 

...Impressive?

Anyway... None of us had tried our vi before now? It wasn’t just me? In a way, I supposed that made sense... the past week, all of us had kept busy cultivating to attract more. None of us’d had time to test out their effects.

Glancing towards Elder Swan, I saw that she was smiling as she watched. Yeah, this is exactly what she’d intended for.

That in mind, I continued through the rest of my vi.

Standing up once more, I began activating Formless Flow — a small willow tree — quickly noticing that its essence expenditure was twice that of Frost Touch. That meant, to continuously activate the vi, I’d run out in only ten minutes. Was its effect worth it, though?

I had absolutely no idea. I couldn’t even tell what it did — if I walked around, it was like normal. If it was supposed to help me avoid attacks, maybe I needed to get attacked first to tell what it did.

Quickly stopping the activation of the vi plant, I moved on to the next — Moonwalk Vi.

Moonwalk Vi was a vine with small, round, silvery orbs growing on it. As I activated it, the vine began to glow, only expending a slight bit of essence... but then as I began to walk backwards, the orbs began to burst, each step draining about a percentage of my remaining essence. Good lord, that meant at my maximum capacity Moonwalk Vi would only work for a hundred steps...

But how was its effect? I looked down, but there was nothing of interest. Just the same grass as before...

Hmm. Maybe it only had any kind of special effect on  the plants that needed moonlight energy.

I had one last vi plant after that — Rose Solution. This vi plant, rather than a rose, or a rose bush, was actually a bouquet of rose petals, which all began to spiral around my aperture as I tried to activate it.

And then, just like that, something snapped, and the activation forcibly stopped. I choked on the air I was breathing, my essence instantly being reduced by another 20% down to 17% remaining. Taking a few deep breaths, and coughing into my elbow a couple times — oh, those are specks of blood — I looked in my aperture. About half of the rose petals had wilted away, the rest collecting back into a noticeably smaller bouquet. So the vi plant had been damaged by that, too...

Why in the world did that happen? Why did activating Rose Solution cause a backlash?

It took me a minute to figure out the most likely cause — I probably actually needed to be submerged in water. If there wasn’t water for Rose Solution to effect, it would burn itself out like an electric motor with no resistance.

My lungs burned now, though... maybe a good opportunity to try out Cooling Aloe Vi? Hesitantly, I began to activate it, and just like that, the burning sensation in my lungs faded, replaced by a nice... well, cool numbness. I ended the activation only fifteen seconds or so later, but in that time I’d lost another 10% of my essence.

Next was the Moonlight Waterfall Lotus Vi, but I didn’t bother activating that one since I wasn’t around yin energy to cultivate. Given my experience with Rose Solution, I was pretty aware how important it was not to activate vi rashly. Ideally I wanted others to be spitting blood... not me.

Anyway, that meant I’d officially finished experimenting with all the vi plants in my possession. There was one theme I’d noticed throughout my experimentation — activating the vi plants drained my essence like crazy. If I needed to keep the effects of Formless Flow and Cooling Aloe active during a fight, in addition to using other vi... I’d run out of essence in less than ten minutes, most likely! That was not good stamina... In fact, it was horrendous! Did other vi masters have it this bad?

The answer was obvious... no. No vi master had an aperture as small as mine. In fact, as far as I was aware, all other vi masters had apertures 7-8x bigger in diameter. Taking into account the fact that the relation between the diameter and volume of a sphere was exponential... Most people were nowhere near this pathetic.

And that was rather worrying.

 

---

 

When we actually ended up sparring, it was Pain Bubble Vi that ended the fight. The girl I still didn’t know the name of had spent the experimentation period collecting a lot of bubbles, and they swarmed around her in an impenetrable barrier. They were just bubbles, though, right? We could just pop them? 

Nope. Any bubble that Leaf Bushman or I touched — even with our clothes — it hurt... Not in an actual physical sensation, but... internally? If that made sense? Suffice to say that neither of us wanted to pop enough bubbles to make the girl surrender.

And that conclusion to the spar happened right as the boys finally appeared from the western treeline, walking along the path towards our location. Elder Flame was leading them, walking backwards and looking especially jovial as he waved his arms around wildly.

When they neared, though, I quickly realised that something was wrong. With the boys. 

Each of them looked different.

The first boy, Morning’s lackey, was glowing. Not like, glowing in happiness, or whatever, but, like, literally glowing. His skin was lit up in yellow-lime, highlighting very dark bags under his eyes.

And the rest of the boys were worse off than him...

One was completely covered in soot and ash, even his robes and hair caked in the stuff. If I didn’t know any better, I’d have said that he literally was made out of soot and ash, but I’d seen him just a week before and he’d been a perfectly normal boy then. I suspected he still was normal, he’d just gotten into a bit of an accident...

In fact, all four of them looked like they’d gotten into accidents. Four different accidents. Had their cultivation methods gone wrong, or something?

Anyway, the next one had totally tattered robes — I could see a lot more skin there than I was comfortable seeing — and he’d also somehow managed to grow a long, thick, scraggly black beard.

Then came the last one, who was walking extremely stiffly, as if he’d lost his elbows and knees, or something. Every movement of his was like that... and then I realised that his skin looked off, too, like... sandpaper? And he might have gotten more pale, too.

What in the world had happened here?

All of us just stared at the boys, various levels of shock and amusement on our faces. Elder Swan sighed. “You’re finally here! Elder Flame, you wouldn’t mind scouting a bit ahead, would you?”

“Why, of course,” he said, bowing. “It would be my pleasure.” The man then sauntered off, only stumbling a single time before disappearing into the treeline.

Elder Swan turned to the boys. “What did you all learn?”

All four of them responded, deadpan and in sync, “Don’t blindly trust every elder’s advice.”

Elder Tea murmured. “Is this normal?”

Elder Swan nodded. “Yep. I told you he wouldn’t let them die.”

 

---

 

The trip back to the academy was a bit longer than the trip to Sapphire Lake had been, probably courtesy of the four boys who’d been... well, damaged. “It’s okay,” Elder Swan had assured them. “Elder Mint will be there when we get back, and she can fix you all right up.”

We got back at sunset; an orange glow on Sweeping Rain Academy; strange, long shadows cast by the buildings and plants. Since it was late, and it was allowance day, we headed to Treasure Hall as a group to collect our very first Spirit Stones. 

Bags of... well, mystical rocks collected, Elder Swan took the boys to the Medicine Hall, the rest of us splitting up. Azure Cloud, Leaf Bushman, and the friend I still didn’t have the name of all went to have dinner, and Morning and I headed back to the tier zero residence hall.

My relationship to my sister was rather weird now, and both of us knew it. I was pretty sure she felt like she owed me now, and I had no idea what to do about it. I just wanted her to treat me like a person. Like her sister, ideally. And I hadn’t even done what I’d done to forward that goal... I’d just wanted her to not be hurting. I knew what it felt like, and, well... I couldn’t not care, if that made sense?

But anyway, that’s why I wasn’t surprised when my sister stopped me at my doorway. “Wait,” she said. 

“What’s up?” I asked.

“I... Make a promise with me, okay?” she said, gruffly, as she looked down at her feet.

“A promise for what?”

“Tomorrow... My, uh... my master says my Crescent Moon Blade Vi should be healed by then... Enough to use, at least.”

“Yeah?” I prodded.

“Tomorrow, when my vi is healed... spar with me,” she said, then huffed and stormed off.