Two held.
Five out.
That’s his calibration. A quiet math of composure.
He always wakes like this. Not because he is trained to, but because it is who he is. The breathing lives beneath his thoughts, beneath his flesh, etched into his marrow. His breathing is mere ritual. It is recall.
Clarity.
Halver Quinn sits before the east-facing wall of his sanctum unmoving. Palms on knees. Spine like a drawn blade. Eyes not closed, but not open to the world either. The sun, just breaching the dome’s upper rim, fractures itself through the sanctum’s living glass. Clean light dances in a kaleidoscope across the grown wood floor, shifting gently as if uncertain it has the right to touch him.
Four seconds in. The sun responds to his qi to send what little remained of the lingering shadows of night darting from the room. It does not serve him. It *knows* him.
Two held. A projection plays behind Halver. An old formation that he had built nearly a millennia ago when they first erected his tower. A simple thing, held inside the air that would make old memories visible again. Memories such as his own face from the greatest day of his life.
Five out. A face that looked much the same as the reflection in the mirror pond that stretched before him except that if he was truly honest with himself his eyes might have been clearer back then. More certain, perhaps. Before the burdens of an extended stay in mortality slowly calcified at the edges of his mind.
Halver smiles at his own voice, resonant, with that sharp, brilliant edge he still carries like a blade.
“Refinement is not earned, it is aligned. You must measure only what you wish to master.”
He isn’t listening. Not really. He listens to it much the way one watches the tide in its familiar, persistent, inevitable patterns. He cannot inspire himself after all; he can only find clarity in the ritual of remembering without remembering. A daily echo of himself for structure.
As structure is refinement.
He shifts. An adjustment to the weight on his heel as his sanctum hums in response. A chime of rebalancing resonance. A wholesome shiver passes beneath the living floor as Halver's breathing catches a change in the rhythm. A new note. Soft, crystalline.
A message.
Halver gestures once. The formation dims, fading into the background hum as his memory returns to its vault for another day. The message unfolds in the air, its words sighing with precise gravity touched with a hint of groveling.
The words bloom like smoke. Sorrowful. Hesitant. Halver reads them once.
Then again.
And once more.
He sighs, then stands.
The motion is art. Each limb uncoiling in sequence, spine lengthening like a drawn chord. Drawn out in the same way that his mind unravels at the news. Halver does not feel grief anymore, at least not the way lesser minds might describe it. He feels a lack of shape, a missing pressure, a shift in the lattice of things.
"Roan." He muses aloud. "Burned bright. Driven. Fearful, but teachable. Moldable. My first and best."
A chance meeting of a bloodied and nearly broken teenager whose meridians had barely existed and made worse by the beating. Wild eyes that spoke of determination and a shuddered attempt at a bow even while nearly prostrate had been enough for Halver to take pity upon the boy. Pity that had grown upon realizing that the Sect didn't even care when Halver asked to take Roan with him. Perhaps it was irony that when Roan had stepped down from his position of being The Patriarch's Herald he chose his former Sect as where he would teach. Halver had watched him for a time afterwards, worried that Roan might attempt revenge. He had never been prouder when he was proven wrong.
Roan simply spread The Framework in the Outer Sect and grew fat on pride amongst many disciples.
As the decades and centuries past them by, Halver receded further away from his pupil as he ascended to direct leadership over the Collective. It was necessary, he reasoned, for the gathered Sects and Clans were many and he was just one. Oh, they tried to keep in touch, but the life of a cultivator frequently demanded distance and time apart. A lack of the laughter and *hope* that Roan had brought to his assemblies swiftly became cold. Bureaucratic.
Now laughter has a tomb and efficiency wears his crown.
Halver walks the perimeter of the sanctum. It is eleven paces, exactly, wall to wall. Today he takes twelve on purpose.
"Intention bends repetition into meaning." He says to himself with a nod.
As he approaches the eastward curve, a display surfaces an immediately displays his need.
Crescent Valley — Region 6C — Average Refinement Quotient: 0.41
Considerably below threshold.
His eyes narrow. He studies the sub-indices.
CP: erratic, but trending downwards for the past fifty years.
RA: roughly a five percent decline in the last six months.
ED: stable with no deviations for the past century.
“Roan would never have allowed this.” Halver murmurs as if expecting an answer.
No answer comes.
Halver gestures. The growing hum is cut and the silence is cleaner now. More honest.
The sanctum confirms, vibrating just enough to be felt in the bones. Halver returns to the center. The cradle of breath. The well of stillness.
He snaps his fingers.
"Patriarch?" Maren Alke kneels before him. A tight bun corrupts the otherwise raven gossamer that spills over her shoulders and shades her eyes.
"Tell me what you omitted from Dean Yano's message." Four seconds in.
A decade ago those eyes would have widened a fraction, but they are used to these accusations now.
"Patriarch, I removed a secondary request from the message. Such a thing would be far below your station to address personally."
"Tell me anyway." Two held.
"He dared to ask that you look at the numbers for Crescent Valley and ascertain why there have been increasing failures across the entire region for the past century."
"Oh?" Five out.
"Yes, Patriarch. He also included a copy of Senior Roan's notes from the past decade. He claimed that they were..." One would have expected some hesitation to fill those eyes now, but it was mere mimicry. "... a departure from the expected."
"What did you find?" Four in.
"Senior Roan had stopped following The Framework and was attempting to develop something new."
Two. "And?"
"It was a bastardization that focused on the 'uniqueness of the person' rather than the true pathway."
"I will review it before departure." Five.
"Yes, Patriarch." Eyes that would no longer lie blinked and were gone from the room.
The sun shifted, its light spilling golden against the folds of Halver's robe casting long, reverent shadows across the boughs that were a part of his tower.
He does not grieve. He cannot.
Grief is softness. and iron does not bend.
Iron does not bend.
It endures.
But this morning, it does hesitate.
Halver turns to the screen again and begins to read.
“They’re progressing slower than I expected, but that’s just data.
It’s early. Their CP is high, sure, but pressure purifies.
They’ll adjust. I did.”
- Roan