Immortal Ascension: Rise of The Forgotten Vessel

Chapter 7

The main problem, as Ethan saw it, was that he had no idea what he was doing and nowhere private to figure it out.

The slip had given him one principle so far. Before qi, there was silence. Before silence, there was void. He had read those words enough times that he could recite them without looking, but understanding them as instructions was a different matter entirely. Every cultivation manual he had ever read described the first stage of practice as drawing qi inward along a defined meridian pathway — a physical process, directed and measurable, the kind of thing you could feel going wrong and correct. The Sutra wasn't describing anything like that. It wasn't telling him to draw something in. It seemed to be telling him to empty something out, which was harder to visualise and considerably harder to do on purpose.

He needed time and quiet to work at it, and both of those were difficult to come by at Skyward Academy when you lived in a bunkroom with five other people and your working hours ran from before sunrise to well past dinner.

He spent a few days thinking about it while he went through his tasks, and eventually settled on a practical approach: he needed somewhere he could sit undisturbed for an hour or two in the evenings, somewhere no one would think to look for a servant who was supposed to be in the bunkroom sleeping. The upper meditation courts were out — disciples used those at all hours. The storage rooms were checked by Hobb on a rotating schedule. The pine corridor behind the elder residences was too exposed, particularly now.

What he kept coming back to was the waste pit.

It was at the far eastern edge of the Academy's grounds, past the outer wall and down a steep path that most people avoided because there was no reason to go there. Technically it was a qi waste disposal site — a deep natural depression in the rock where the Academy had been channelling used and unstable spiritual energy for generations. Cultivation practice produced a lot of byproduct, especially at the outer disciple level where people were still learning control, and the waste pit collected all of it: scattered, incompatible fragments of spent qi that pooled in the depression and slowly dissipated over time. It smelled faintly of burned stone, it was cold even in summer, and the ambient energy inside it was erratic enough that spending time there made most cultivators uncomfortable. They described it as disorienting, like trying to think clearly in a room where all the furniture was at slightly wrong angles.

None of that was a problem for someone who had no elemental root to disrupt.

He went to look at it on a Wednesday evening after his work was done, telling Mia he was going for a walk, which was not entirely untrue. The path down to it was overgrown and unlit, and he went slowly in the last of the evening light, watching his footing on the loose stone. The outer wall gate at the eastern edge was supposed to be locked, but the groundskeeping staff had a master key for all the perimeter gates, and Hobb had trusted him with a copy two years ago for supply access.

The pit itself was about the size of a large courtyard, sunk maybe four metres below the level of the surrounding ground, with rough stone walls and a flat base scattered with old debris — broken practice talismans, worn-out cultivation tools, other things that had been discarded and forgotten over the years. It was dim and cold and it smelled of ozone and old ash, and there was an odd quality to the air inside it that he noticed immediately: a faint but constant low hum, the same way power lines hum when you stand near them, except that this was less a sound than a vibration at the back of the teeth.

He climbed down the stone steps cut into the pit wall and stood at the bottom and looked around. Nobody had been down here recently — there were no fresh footprints in the thin layer of grit on the floor, and the debris around the edges hadn't been moved in what looked like years. The Academy staff dumped waste energy into it from above via a sealed pipe outlet on the south wall. There was no reason for anyone to actually come down into it.

He sat down on a flat section of stone near the centre, away from the debris, and took out the slip.

It responded immediately. The veins lit up more clearly than they ever had above ground, the shifting colours moving through the pale green in slow steady waves, and two new lines of text rose up beneath the first principle he had already read.

To find the void, do not reach. Reaching is the act of someone who believes they are separate from the thing they seek. You are not separate from it. You were made of it. Be still. Not the stillness of waiting, but the stillness of already being where you need to be.

He read it twice. Then he looked around at the cold, ugly, faintly humming pit he was sitting in and thought that if this was where he was going to figure out how to be a cultivator, it was probably fitting. The Academy had been throwing away what it considered useless down here for generations. It seemed reasonable to start from the same place.

He stayed until it got too dark to see without a lamp, then climbed back out and locked the gate behind him and walked back to the servants' wing. He had not managed to do anything useful yet, but he knew where he was going to try, and after years of having no direction at all, that felt like enough for one evening.