Tian stood in the garden facing Daoist Steelshimmer. Her beauty remained a puzzle that he picked at. It wasn’t an illusion, therefore what she was doing was in her presentation. The answer felt unsatisfying. There had to be more to it than her hair.
“I see why Daoist Feng called you her problem child.” Her voice was sweet, every word and tone carrying its own ripple of meaning. You wanted to listen carefully, to make sure you didn’t miss the slightest bit of that sweetness.
Tian didn’t know Daoist Feng thought he was a problem child. Was he still a child? Probably. Fifteen didn’t feel childish, but to someone who measured their age in centuries, perhaps he was.
The night breeze ruffled the leaves, making the tree tops dance in the sky. A little cooler than he was used to, but very comfortable. A lovely night.
“Did you know I can feel your thoughts? I’m not reading your mind, but I can feel the weight of your attention.” She smiled, and he could hear the dimples in her voice even if he couldn’t see them on her cheeks. “A useful skill to cultivate for a variety of reasons, not least of which is your relationship with that Snow Grace Crane you are fostering.”
Tian did not know someone could do that. It sounded very useful.
“This is the point at which you start asking me questions, Junior Tian.”
Was it? But she hadn’t asked him any questions, and she was a strange elder. He would prefer not to be killed for accidentally saying the wrong thing. Silence was the best policy. Probably.
“You… aren’t going to participate in this conversation unless I give you explicit permission to and a clear set of directions to follow regarding the flow of the conversation. That’s a bit exhausting. Junior, don’t you think you could loosen up some? It is a lovely night. Enjoy it.”
It was a lovely night. Tian entirely agreed with that. And it was a bit of a relief to talk with someone who understood how to talk with him. Although she did seem reluctant to follow her own instructions. Which was weird.
“Haaah. Alright.” Daoist Steelshimmer collected herself. “Any sect will be concerned about the strength of its younger generation. Daoist Feng tells me you have latched onto the term “servant disciple,” and there is some truth to that, but only some. I’d only tag someone with such a label if they no longer had the potential to rise. While you are still young, while any of you are still young, you remain a mass of potential. The better the potential, the higher your future rise, the better the sect’s future rise. Theoretically.”
Tian nodded along.
“Your job at the Five Elements Courtyard will be to ruthlessly crush their younger generation. Your job, and you know that your elder is listening in as I say this, your job is only and exclusively to move the proud sons and daughters of the Courtyard from the status of future heirs of the sect, to servant disciples.”
Tian immediately thought of the Saintess, but kept his mouth shut. The Six Turns Cavern were sect secrets, after all. Still. It was an ugly thing. Steelshimmer read it on his face and explained.
“The weaker they perceive their future generations to be, and the stronger they perceive the Ancient Crane Mountains’ to be, the more amenable they will be to cutting a deal. They will want to maximize the benefits they can get now, while they are still strong, rather than wanting to wait for an even better advantage. So it is vital for your sect that you not just meet every challenge, you dominate them. Now is not the time to worry about preserving their face, or maintaining any kind of good relations. That’s for your Elder and I to worry about. You just crush them.”
Tian reluctantly nodded. She was certainly clear enough. It looked like she was waiting for a question or comment, but he had been burned on the conversation thing before. Silence. Silence was golden. Her face twitched, but she continued on smoothly.
“You can understand this as an attack on their mind and will. You should also, therefore, know how to defend your mind and will. You will learn how to deal with illusions.” She smiled.
Daoist Steelshimmer had a lovely smile, Tian thought. The dark luster of her long hair made the porcelain white of her skin and the blush of her cheeks incredibly vivid. The red on her lips was nearly hypnotic. He really had to focus to hear what she was saying. But he had always been good about listening to his seniors.
“To that end, Junior Tian, I am going to teach you a very, very little bit about a part of your qi that you can’t directly control just yet. Don’t worry about what it’s called. Tonight we will call it ‘brainpower.’ Not its actual name, but since you shouldn’t be learning anything at all about it until the Heavenly Person Level, the less you know the better.”
Tian nodded to show he was paying attention.
“The Five Element Courtyard loves working with illusions. Illusion magic works in two main ways. The first is making something that acts on the senses- a spell that produces light, sound or smell for example. You would generally do this with qi. It is also why you don’t see Earthly Realm people using illusion arts. These can be ignored once identified, and aren’t worth spending too much time on.”
Tian nodded again. That made sense.
“The second way, and what we are going to be focusing on, are spells that attack your mind directly. Sometimes the effect isn’t obvious, sometimes it is. For example, you completely failed to notice the tiger I set loose in the garden.”
“WAO!” The tiger screamed and pounced from directly behind him. Tian was in motion the second he heard the sound, his rope dart slashing out and drilling towards the tiger’s eye. Then his brian caught up with his hands and he recalled the dart to his sleeve.
“Quick reaction time. Quicker to calm down, or so you would like me to believe. I can hear that heart of yours hammering.”
A giant tiger had appeared behind him. Tian felt some surprise was completely justified. The illusion yawned and lay down on the flagstones. Big beast, heavy muscles, thick fur and stinking breath. He would swear it was real. He wondered if he would feel it if he pet it. Tian stretched out his hand to try. His fingers buried themselves in the coarse fur. The tiger was very warm.
“Good thinking, but remember, this isn’t some creation of light. I’m affecting your mind directly.” Her voice sounded like a whisper in his ear, even though she was standing a few feet away.
Tian nodded. The tiger didn’t have the elements circulating in it. Any natural creature would. It could fool the rest of his senses, but his qi sense was not so easily deceived.
“Of course, this is the most basic sort of mind effecting illusion. This is one step up.”
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The illusory tiger came to life. Tian didn’t have any other word for it. He could feel the elements churning as its vital energy fed its muscles with brutal power. It was gathering itself to pounce!
Tian started moving again, his body acting without thought. Then he forced himself to stop. It was an illusion. He knew it was an illusion. He just needed to overrule every sense that he had which was telling him a very real tiger was about to kill him. Simple.
He could feel the vital energy churning. He could smell the tiger. The sheer weight of its presence pushed down on him.
Something about that…
He frowned. The elder said she could feel the weight of his attention. Could this be the same thing? Could the sensation of the tiger be the weight of the senior’s attention? Cultivated and refined through various arts, skillfully deployed to make his mind believe that what he was seeing was in front of him?
Brainpower. Her brain, overpowering parts of his. Not enough to snap his intellect, but enough to fatally trick him. If she could make him believe a fake tiger was real, she could make him ignore a real tiger. Which was scary. But this was the first he was hearing of it. He hadn’t seen it used in the wasteland, and he had been around quite a few Heavenly People killing each other. So it either was much harder to do than it seemed, or there was a fatal flaw to it.
He didn’t know how to block brainpower, so that was out. He didn’t know how to change his own brain so that was out too. A way to detect… he circled back to a previous thought. He did kind of know one way to change his brain. Not very much, but a bit. He had felt the edges of it in Burning Flag City, but discarded it with his ruined disguise.
Confront mind power with no mind, meet the press of inexplicable qi with a chaos of the elements. Barely thought out as an idea. Best to test it in a safe environment, or safe-ish.
Tian pulled the rosary from his belt and let his fingers find the red tassel. He started slowly working the rosary around as he chanted. “On, Ran, Cho, Sa, Ni, Re, Hu, Vo, Ti, Lu, Xha…” He slowly breathed in and out, letting the sounds fill with the elemental meaning he found in them. Letting all other thoughts fly away. There was only the ‘holy’ sounds, and the worlds they contained.
For some reason, the sounds seemed deeper and truer now than they had in Burning Flag City. As his sense of self slipped away with the sounds, he thought he could feel his whole body vibrating in time with them, becoming suffused with elemental meaning, resonating with a holiness that he thought he had made up.
At some point, the tiger twisted in his sight. He didn’t feel one way or another about it. Then it vanished. He didn’t feel much about that either. He wasn’t quite in a state of no mind meditation, but it was closer than most people got. There was a gentle bell sound, pulling his attention back.
Daoist Steelshimmer was looking at him like she had discovered a treasure. “Junior… what are you?”
That didn’t seem like it had a good answer. But this time, she was waiting for him to say something.
“Ancient Crane Monastery’s West Town Outer Court, Tian Zihao.” He bowed.
“That’s who you are. But what are you? Do you understand what you did?”
Tian cupped his hands and bowed again. “This little daoist must apologize to the senior. He doesn’t know how to answer her better than he already has. I slipped into a state of near mindlessness and let my concept of the elements infuse the noises I was making. I thought that it might disrupt whatever mechanism ‘brainpower’ was using to overwrite my senses.”
Her beautiful face twitched. “You say that so casually.”
Tian felt a little hurt by that. He didn’t say it casually. He was being as formal and proper as he could be.
“Problem child. I see what she means. Go on back in and send out… hmm. The tan girl. Hong Liren.” Tian bowed and turned to leave. “Really, no questions? No comments? Nothing? Tell you what- one question. I will take no offense. I am instructing you to ask me one question about something that is sincerely troubling you. Something!”
Why was this bothering her? Her eyes were narrowed, and he could see the tendons rising on the back of her hands. Maybe it was an act. She was a diplomat after all. He sighed silently.
“Why are you beautiful?”
It was quite interesting to watch a strange beauty suddenly lurch and go blank. He didn’t know why she did it, but it was interesting.
“Why am I beautiful? Not… how to use illusions, or how to combat them, or questions about working with bird companions, or questions about my school or the Five Elements Courtyard, or the morality of crushing an entire generation of orthodox cultivators beneath you, or my relationship with your elder, or investment advice, or advice on how to find a dao companion, but why am I beautiful.”
It was good that she understood the question. Those other things sounded really interesting too, but he had his doubts about how much useful information he could really get from this senior. Elder level figures were unreliable. At least this question had a provable answer.
She stared at him wonderingly, then motioned for him to turn around. He did. He felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned back, and she was standing where she had been before, some five feet away.
Daoist Steelshimmer had cut her hair short, and her curves were muted under a looser robe. Her face was no less symmetrical, her lips no less red, but some charm had been lost. Lovely, but ordinary. Tian lost his consuming interest in her appearance.
Then she released the illusion, and the wild black hair flowed down her back. And with the tumbling hair and tightening robes, she had his complete attention once more.
“Everyone has a set understanding of what ‘normal’ is, and its twin bookends 'desirable’ and ‘undesirable.’ I have cultivated a body that many people find ‘desirable,’ and carefully present myself with certain traits that, in most contexts, would be considered ‘undesirable.’ Most have to do with a theme of shamelessness, spontaneity and a disdain for convention. This makes me extremely appealing to some people, and those same undesirable traits are excused by most others because of the desirable ones. I reinforce that appeal through techniques like tone modulation, word choice, body language, and a number of other signals that most people do not realize they are receiving and absorbing into themselves.”
The ‘rare animal’ look she was giving to Tian intensified. “You find me aesthetically pleasing when I’m dressed and groomed like the women you know, but you find me beautiful when I don’t look like them, and you don’t understand why. It’s the gap between what you thought you understood as desirable and what a wordless part of your mind is now telling you is desirable. The gap is mysterious, inviting. ‘Pretty’ you understand. ‘Pretty’ is just that. But beauty is a mystery you want to explore, and a mystery is fascinating in the literal sense of the word. A mind affecting illusion cast from within you, not imposed from outside. A powerful thing for anyone to command, let alone an envoy. Worth studying.”
She flicked her fingers back towards the manor. “Dismissed.”
Tian felt like he was floating as he made his way back to his room. He told Sister Liren she was wanted, of course, but he barely noticed her. He was lost in a swirling, confusing world of seeming.
“Grandpa, am I understanding the Senior correctly? It’s not what my fingers touch or my eyes see, but what my brain understands? And that understanding can be affected by external things, but also one part of my brain pushing on another part because it’s been tricked somehow?”
What is a book but a heap of messy paper? The eyes can see, but without the brain to interpret, it means nothing. How the brain interprets what the eyes send it is down to its prior training. Mechanically, there is more to it than that, but you have the right idea.
“And what she was saying about beauty-”
She was talking about a great deal more than beauty. She was talking about communication as a skill. An immensely deep field of study. Remember that Long kid and what he was saying about shared references and common interests being used to add meaning to a conversation? You can consider this an even more sophisticated take on that principle.
“It will also be crucial to communicating with the Snow Grace Crane. The weight of attention, presentation, the use of body language. I will need to explore all the things she mentioned.”
Yes indeed. It’s going to be hard for you, but you will be better for it.
Elder Rui had instructed the disciples to take every possible advantage during the trip, but carefully. Tian felt like he was doing exactly that. He sat in his cell, smiling as he flexed his fingers. He suddenly couldn’t wait to reach the Five Elements Courtyard. He had a feeling it was going to be a lot of fun.