Redeeming the Broken Stars.

CHAPTER 17: THE ENFORCERS ARRIVAL.

Three days passed in a rhythm that Kaelen would not have recognized as preparation if he hadn't been on the receiving end of it.

Dawn brought Old Moth already seated at the table, the archaic scrolls open and the lantern lit, as if she'd been awake for hours or possibly hadn't slept at all.

She would speak for an hour, dense and technical, covering aspects of the Essence Devouring technique that the manual's abbreviated text hadn't captured, the precise moment of contact at which absorption initiated, the way the practitioner's soul had to relax rather than grasp, the counterintuitive truth that fighting for the essence reduced efficiency while receiving it created better results.

"You're not taking it," she'd said on the first morning, when Kaelen had visualized the technique as a kind of aggressive reaching.

"You're making yourself available to it. The distinction matters more than you can currently imagine."

Then came the physical work. Old Moth would have him practice the Soul Anchoring meditations, sitting cross-legged on the floor while she walked around him tapping his shoulders, his back, his arms, with the end of her walking stick in patterns he didn't initially understand.

"You're mapping my tension points," he realized on the second day.

"Your soul has a physical expression in this body. Where you hold tension is where absorption will be least efficient. I'm teaching you to release those points before a technique activation."

"That requires a level of calm that combat doesn't generally provide."

"Which is why we practice until the release becomes automatic rather than chosen." 

She tapped his left shoulder, which had a habit of climbing toward his ear during concentration. "Again."

The body was slowly recovering, which was to say: it ached in new and different ways each morning as broken things found their way back toward functional. 

The compound Old Moth gave him each evening tasted marginally less terrible with repetition, or perhaps he was simply losing the capacity for revulsion about it.

The broken ribs were nearly healed, the internal bleeding Zain had suffered had resolved, and the dark veins of shattered meridians had lightened slightly, from near-black to deep violet, as the compound interacted with whatever the Convergence Star fragments were doing in his soul.

He was eating for the first time, because Old Moth produced food from somewhere, plain and utilitarian and deeply uninteresting food that was nonetheless more than Zain's body had consumed in weeks.

He ate with concentration and without complaint. Energy was a resource. 

Resources were tools. Tools were survival.

The Empty Vessel stance was the hardest of the three practices. 

Understanding it intellectually was one thing.

Kaelen's nineteen years of cultivation training gave him the intellectual architecture immediately; he recognized the concept from advanced theoretical texts Typhon had made him study, texts about the relationship between soul-consciousness and physical movement.

Experiencing it in practice was something else.

The first time he attempted to push soul-knowledge through Zain's body, expressing the Celestial Dragon forms with his soul's pattern rather than conventional cultivation energy, the result was a confused, lurching movement that ended with him on the floor with his vision strobing grey at the edges.

Old Moth had looked at him without expression.

"Again," she'd said.

The second attempt was marginally less catastrophic. 

The third produced a brief half-second where his right arm moved with something approaching the speed and precision he remembered from his previous body, before the soul-body connection destabilized and he nearly toppled sideways.

"You're forcing it," Old Moth had said. 

"Your soul is trying to make this body perform like your previous one. It won't. The musculature is different.”

“The proportions are different. The years of training are absent from the body's memory.”

“Stop trying to recreate what you had. Work with what you have."

"What I have is a seventeen-year-old boy's body with broken meridians and the remnants of a severe beating."

"Correct. Now work with it." Old Moth immediately spoke out loud to him.

By the morning of the fourth day, he'd achieved something functional.

Not elegant. Not the fluid mastery he'd had at nineteen in his original form.

But something that worked: short bursts, no more than five seconds, in which Zain's body moved with precision that had nothing to do with the body's own capabilities and everything to do with the soul driving it.

Faster than an observer would expect. More controlled. The movements of someone who'd spent years learning exactly where to place his weight and how to transfer momentum.

Five seconds. He'd need to make them count.

On the morning of the fourth day, Old Moth had him practice against her.

This was not combat. She was clear about that. She stood at the room's center with her walking stick held loosely, and when Kaelen attempted to approach her, she redirected him. 

Not by striking him, but by moving in precisely the right way at precisely the right time so that his approach put him in a worse position than when he'd started. 

Over and over, until he was frustrated enough to think creatively.

"You're treating this as a problem of strength," she'd said, easily sidestepping an attempt to flank her.

"Stop. What do you know about me?" Old Moth immediately asked.

"You're blind. Your spatial awareness comes from something other than sight, probably a spiritual sense of some kind, or simply extraordinary sensitivity to movement and sound.”

“Your walking stick is both a support and a weapon. You're stronger than your appearance suggests." He circled, watching. 

"You've had this conversation before. With other students. You know where this is going."

"And?"

"And you'll redirect me until I stop coming at you as a problem of force and start coming at you as a problem of information." He stopped circling.

"So I stop."

She tilted her head.

"You can't redirect what doesn't come. If I don't approach, we stay where we are.”

“And where we are is that I have the Essence Devouring technique and you don't."

Old Moth was quiet for a moment. Then she smiled, slowly, the way a very old teacher smiles when a student finally reaches the conclusion that was waiting for them.

"There it is. The first principle of fighting from a position of disadvantage: you don't fight the opponent's game.”

“You create a new game with rules that advantage you."

"In the tournament, that means: I don't go to the strongest cultivators.”

“I let them go to each other. I take the ones who've already been weakened. I pick fights I can win, not fights that need winning."

"Until you've absorbed enough to contest the strong ones, yes." She lowered the walking stick. 

"Now you're thinking correctly boy."

And then, on the evening of the fourth day, they were sitting at the table as they did each evening, reviewing the day's work and planning the next, when a knock came at the door.

Old Moth's head turned toward it.

The moths in the room went instantly, perfectly still. Every one of them, folding their wings flat, as if sound itself had warned them.

The knock came again. Harder this time. 

The knock of someone who expected to be answered and was already impatient.

Old Moth rose from her chair with the unhurried movement of someone who'd answered doors like this before and had reached conclusions about what they generally meant. She took up her walking stick.

"Stay seated," she said quietly to Kaelen. 

"Keep your face down. You're a student. Nothing more."

"What is this?”

"Let me determine that first." She moved to the door, her stick tapping its familiar rhythm across the floor.

At the door, she p

aused with her hand on the latch. 

"Who comes to this door at this hour?" Old Moth immediately asked, her voice was laced with curiosity.