Volithur took the two tea powder elixirs together once more. He had used the daily cosmic water elixirs to complete his ribs and was ready to move onto the next. The hand bones seemed too small to waste the potential of the elixirs on. It took some time to identify and target the next bone in sequence, and time lost while using an elixir was energy lost.

  Instead, he concentrated on the spinal vertebrate. Starting at the base of the skull, he began working his way down. He completed every one of the bones, then focused on the two scapu bones, or shoulder bdes. When those were done, he had almost entirely exhausted the elixirs and simply drew the remainder of the cosmic energy into his soul.

  All that remained of his skeleton were the bones of the hands and feet. In another month, when the Marshal’s deadline ended, he should already be working on the tendons. Volithur cringed at the thought of that. There were a lot of tendons and ligaments and spinal discs to be enhanced during that step. It would be tedious work that made what he did to his bones seem simple in comparison. He had already consulted books from the library and solicited advice from the Sergeant. Basically, it would be a tribution that tested his attention to detail.

  It would only get worse from there, as the next step after tendons was circution – which included not just the heart, but the network of arteries and veins as well. The capilries weren’t included because they were considered part of the tissues they serviced for the purposes of body enhancement.

  Volithur gnced over at the man sitting on what he still thought of as Thassily’s hammock. Jay had been recruited away from a petty noble family who couldn’t afford to pay their servants. The man wasn’t bad, for the most part. He was polite, didn’t make much noise, and kept his space clean. But Volithur deeply resented him for taking Thassily’s spot. He never acted on his irrational dislike, knowing it was foolish. He just silently despised the man.

  Once he had gotten all the benefit from the elixirs, Volithur stood and stretched for a few minutes before settling down to perform aural cultivation.

  Jay snorted.

  Volithur turned to look at his roommate. “Excuse me?”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean for that to be so loud.”

  “Do you not like me being in my own room?”

  Jay eyed him. “I just can’t believe how single-minded you are. It’s like you sacrificed every other aspect of your life so that you can focus on growing stronger.”

  “What is it you do that is so enjoyable compared to my routine?”

  “I rex, Ward Harridan. Sometimes doing nothing is the most enjoyable activity. But you wouldn’t know anything about that.”

  Volithur considered his progress and the likely reward waiting at the end of the next month. “If my greatest ambition was to drift through life, Jay, I would join you in doing nothing.”

  “Ambition is the path of the nobles. All you and I can gain from hard work is being given more work. The true path of a commoner is to find a comfortable spot to avoid notice.”

  Annoyance fred in Volithur. He wanted to rage that he wasn’t a commoner, that he came from outside the stupid caste system of the Xian. That wasn’t the truth, though. He lived on a Xian world and none of his ancestors had carried the title of lord. By definition, he was a commoner here.

  He left the room and found another space to cultivate until dinner, then went to the library. Khana had been teaching him a new game tely, where one tendril cosmic energy was extended through the mind, another through the body, then both were maniputed in unison to probe the constitution for insights into biology.

  It wasn’t the academic knowledge of books that the method provided. Nor even something that could be expined by a thorough knowledge of physics. It couldn’t even be properly termed experiential learning. Because the truths illustrated by the ‘twin touch game’ were deeply antithetical to a rational worldview.

  Volithur, had he been forced to expin what he learned, could only describe it as reality not being real. As he ran a tendril of energy through his body aperture, the tendril of energy from his mind aperture sensed the induced perturbations. And what he viewed was not a maze of organs and tissues and cells, but insane, random fluctuations seething in defiance of an imposed order.

  Everywhere he ran the experiment, it proved to be the same. Palm of the hand. Kneecap. Thumbnail. Belly button. Nasal cavity. It was all chaos, strictly bound to specific forms and states.

  He found it deeply disturbing, like he had suffered a psychotic break or unknowingly consumed psychedelics. “I don’t think I care for this game, Khana.”

  “It’s not a fun game,” she confirmed.

  “Why are we doing it?”

  Khana hesitated. “I’m not sure exactly. My mom said it was to prepare me to better understand things ter, but it always scared me.”

  “Are the things I sense actually real?”

  “I think so.”

  “Which means that my body isn’t real,” he said. “Everything that makes up my form could just spontaneously explode at any moment. It wants to break free and I have no idea what is stopping it.”

  “Resonance,” Khana said.

  “Resonance again.” Volithur remembered the conversation he had had with Jemmi during the dance at the academic competition. “So all the humans across all the worlds look the same and use simir nguages because of resonance. And also our bodies don’t spontaneously explode into chaos because of the same thing.”

  “I don’t really understand how it works. Only people with true insights can grasp even a tiny bit of the truth. Unless you believe the Yazata nonsense, there are no real answers to anything.”

  “What Yazata nonsense?”

  “The things the Yazata preach. I don’t know what their religion was, but I can tell you that every time one of them appeared on Tian, they wouldn’t st long. They’re just lucky no Xian ever found out where their home world is.”

  Volithur shrugged and went back to studying the fight between chaos at the micro level and order at the macro level. The boiling violence of the chaos always somehow wound up canceling out itself. It was like watching waves crash against one another and erase each other’s momentum. Only it never managed to be so straightforward.

  Action, counter-action, reaction, and so on would mutually reinforce as often as hinder. Often a maniacal whirlpool would form and grow rapidly, threatening to tear apart reality itself, before it would trip over some other random event and disperse back into the sea of randomness. Again and again, without end, the sea would boil into a hideous frenzy and die back down just before unavoidable, world-ending catastrophe could take hold.

  The reality he knew seemed so fragile in the face of the infinite depths of chaos. Some mysterious phenomenon he could not sense in any way kept everything coherent. The longer he stared, the greater his terror grew. “Is anything real?”

  Khana’s hand squeezed his. “I’m real, Volithur.”

  As if he wasn’t panicked enough already. Volithur forced a smile and yanked his hand back. “How about we work on my mental voice for a little bit?”

  “It’s almost a perfect copy of your physical voice already,” Khana compined.

  “Is it that bad to want to train at something I’m actually good at for once?”

  “There is such a thing as too much false humility, you know.”

  “False humility?” Volithur ughed. “Khana, I am barely competent at cultivation. I put in three to four times as much time as other people in the barracks, and I see only twice as much result. Everything I do is the result of so much effort. I would kill to have some actual talent.”

  “You do have talent.”

  “At what?”

  “I think they call it mental maniputions.”

  Volithur blinked. He’d only ever heard the term ‘mental maniputions’ in retion to the Arahant messing with people’s heads. “What is that supposed to be?” He suspected Khana might have mixed up her terminology.

  “It’s the fine control of cosmic energy using the mind. It’s not mental enhancement. It’s maniputing tiny threads of energy and interpreting the feedback. You’re a natural talent at it. That’s why your mental voice improved so fast and why you’re better than me at the ‘mimic monkey’ game. You are good at something.”

  Volithur pondered her revetion for a few seconds. “Even if that’s true… what good is it? That sounds like the most useless talent I could have.”

  “You could learn people’s secret techniques just by watching them.”

  “Yeah right. I’ve been trying to figure out the Sergeant’s ‘secret technique’ for months now and I still have no idea what he’s doing.”

  Khana perked up at that comment. “The Sergeant is a commoner. What secret technique could he possibly know?”

  “I don’t know. His soul grows murky for a while, then when it is clear again he has more energy than before. A lot more than he could get my cultivating or even taking any of the elixirs they give out around here.”

  The excitement on Khana’s face faded. “Oh. That’s not a secret technique.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “He’s drawing cosmic energy from primordial chaos.”

  He jerked upright. “Wait… what?”

  Khana panicked for a moment. “Don’t even think about it, Volithur!”

  “We can get massive amounts of cosmic energy from chaos?”

  “It’s stupid and it shortens your life!” Khana smacked him upside the head for effect. “If it was even remotely safe, don’t you think I would have tried it already? You get strong at the cost of poisoning your soul. Over time it gets worse until your soul crumbles. You rapidly get weaker and then you die. If you’re lucky, you might st all of five years before it catches up with you. Drinking chaos is what heroes do in stories before a dramatic self sacrifice. In real life it is just stupid.”

  Volithur rubbed the spot on his head that Khana had struck. “Is the Sergeant going to die in the next few years, then?”

  “That’s how it works. It’s stupid, and I forbid you from trying it.”

  “You forbid me?”

  Khana raised her nose into the air. “Most definitely.”

  “Why do you think I have to listen to you?”

  For a time, it seemed like she wouldn’t answer. Finally, she pced a tentative hand on his knee. “Because you and I are… friends. You need to take care of yourself for my sake.”

  Despite the lure of easy power dangled before him, Volithur sighed and swore a solemn promise not to take the easy path.