Chapter 826: Dharma Vessel (Patreon)

A/N

2 chapters combined into 1 long chap, enjoy!

Chapter 826: Dharma Vessel

A month went past inside that mountain.

The first piece of good news arrived about eighteen hours after I finished modifying the lamp formation, when Head Monk Cairan came back to the secret room with an expression that suggested he had been arguing with somebody and had won.

"The seniors have agreed," he said. "The Hall of the Turning Wheel is yours for as long as you require it."

I had no idea what the Hall of the Turning Wheel was at that point, so he took me up four flights of those worn stone steps and through a set of doors that were twelve feet high and made of a dark timber that had gone almost black with age.

I stopped in the doorway and stood there for a moment with my mouth open because it was enormous.

The floor was a single continuous slab of grey-green stone that had been polished by so many centuries of bare feet that it had developed a faint sheen along the main walking lines. It ran back into the mountain for what I estimated to be more than five hundred paces, with a ceiling so far above me that the smoke from the wall lamps gathered up there in a permanent thin haze that never seemed to clear. There were no pillars, which told me the mountain itself was carrying the load. There were channels cut into the floor in wide concentric rings that I recognised immediately as energy dispersal grooves, the sort you build into a training space when you expect the people using it to occasionally lose control of something.

The reason they gave it to me was practical.

The lamp formation needed me. Twelve roots of the Genesis Seed sitting on the intake band, the throttle ring, and the refinement column were the entire reason that little clay pot was drinking at forty times its old rate. If I walked away from it, the whole thing dropped back down to a trickle.

So Cairan had the lamp brought up out of the sealed chamber and set on a raised stone platform at the northern end of the hall.

I sat in front of it with my back to the mountain wall and my roots laid out across the formation, and from there I could train with everything else I had while the Golden Sun in that pot kept eating.

Which meant that for one month I was, functionally, the power supply for a monastery of nine hundred monks, and I was also a student in that same monastery.

The part I felt less good about was that the Hall of the Turning Wheel had been closed to everybody else for the duration.

The junior classes got shunted onto the cold upper terraces where the wind comes across from the eastern range and takes the feeling out of your fingers before you have finished the third sequence. The seniors lost the one room in the compound large enough for the older practitioners to run their circulation drills without knocking each other over.

But desperate times called for exactly the sort of measures that made a person uncomfortable.

I made my peace with it by looking at the numbers, because the surplus that lamp was now producing meant every senior in the building had been drawing a full ration of golden energy for a month and the reserve had gone up rather than down for the first time since the founders were alive.

If we won this, if the world was still standing at the end of it and a real golden sun hung in that sky where anybody could reach up and take from it, then the Hall of the Turning Wheel would be theirs again forever.

The second piece of good news was Elder Molric. I got that one exactly a week after I first spoke to him through Yggy, because I said I would come back in a week and I have made an enormous point across my entire time in all the worlds I visited of being a person whose word means something.

I sat down on the stone floor of the great hall and reached along the soul bond, the laboratory came up around me through senses that were not eyes.

The copper sheeting was still over the windows. The fifth containment array on the floor had been finished at last and then scrubbed half away and redrawn at a different diameter, which told me the elder had been busy with something. There were three new notebooks stacked on the circular table with their spines cracked flat.

Elder Molric was sitting on his stool with his elbows on his knees and his hair standing up on one side, he didn’t look up when Yggy stirred.

"You're late by an hour," he said.

"You've been counting?"

"Of course I have been counting, I am a researcher, I count everything, it is the only virtue I possess." He straightened up and rubbed his face with both hands, and when they came away, I could see the stress on his face, because the skin under his eyes had gone the colour of old bruising. "You were telling the truth, boy. Every wretched piece of it."

I had spent that entire week telling myself not to build my hopes up, but I felt them go up anyway.

"What did you find, Master?"

"I found," he said, "that our Headmaster has been lying." He got up off the stool and started pacing, and his hands came out in front of him and began doing that thing they do when he was engaged with a problem. "The anchor stones. I looked at the anchor stones. Do you know what an aptitude array requires from its anchors? It requires resonance sensitivity, which means the stone must be soft to the passage of energy, which means you use quartz or spirit-veined limestone or anything else that will let a signal through without arguing about it. Do you know what Hiron has been burying under those settlements?"

"I have an idea..."

"Blood jade," he said, and he stopped pacing and turned around. "Blood jade, boy, cut into wedges and set at the compass points and seated in a bed of powdered bone ash. There is only one function in the entire discipline of formation work for which you would ever go to that expense, and it is not measuring how many farmers' children might one day channel the red sun."

"How many sites did you get to?" I asked.

"Four, but I know the locations of eleven." He picked up one of the notebooks, flipped it open with his thumb, and dropped it back down. "The intake registry was the piece that finished it, though. I pulled the records and looked for natural awakenings out of those settlements. Eleven regions, over two hundred years of continuous surveying, and the number of initiates the Order has recruited out of any of them is zero. That bastard must think we’re either blind or wouldn’t care to notice. Well he’s right about the latter…"

"Master," I said, "please tell me you didn't walk into his hall and confront him about this to his face."

Elder Molric laughed at that, it was the loud unhinged laugh that had made every initiate in that academy press themselves flat against the corridor walls whenever he came through.

"People have called me a great many things over the years," he said. "Eccentric. Deranged. A disgrace to the seven seats. Avery once told me to my face that I was a stain on the Order's history. But in all of that time, boy, not one single person has ever called me stupid." He tapped two fingers against his own temple. "Do you imagine I would be standing in this laboratory with my heart still beating if Hiron had the faintest suspicion that I had gone looking? The man tore an elder in half over a procedural disagreement in my second century. I did not confront anybody. I know better than that."

I let out a sigh of relief at that.

"So," I said. "Will you join us?"

He looked down at Yggy for a long moment, and the golden thread inside the vine pulsed slowly while he did it.

"It seems," he said, "that I don’t have a choice. If that formation completes and the thing behind the red sun comes through, then this laboratory ceases to exist. Hundreds of years of work goes with it, and there will be nobody left alive on this continent who cares whether a plant can hold two energies at once." He straightened his shoulders. "Also, I am extremely annoyed. That might be the larger part of it, honestly."

"Then I need you to do something, Master."

"Name it."

"Find the rest of the sites," I said. "You know eleven. There will be more, we need to find all of them."

"You will have every location on the continent," Elder Molric said, "or I will die obtaining them, and if I die obtaining them, I expect you to continue my research after all of this is over."

And that was how that meeting had ended. Sitting in that great stone hall a month later with twelve roots holding a formation steady behind me, I still couldn’t believe how well that had gone.

We had a Rank 7 elder of the Order of the Last Light working from inside Hiron's own council, with the authority to walk into the archive and pull maps, and with a personal grudge that would keep him motivated long after the initial outrage wore off.

Across every single loop Kal had run in this world, the one thing he had never managed to acquire was a set of eyes on the inside of the Red Sun Academy.

Now we had one, and the cost of obtaining him had been a plant, a week of patience, and a willingness to trust somebody that every reasonable strategic assessment said I shouldn’t have trusted.

And Molric wasn’t even the only ally that month produced.

Head Monk Cairan managed to get a message to Elder Thorn about nine days in, which was an achievement given that Thorn spends most of his existence being impossible to find. The two of them met somewhere on the eastern slopes where the monastery's road formation stops.

Cairan came back and told me about it over tea.

"He did not believe a word of it at first," he said. "He accused me of being a construct. Then he accused me of being a Blue Sun instrument. Then he accused me of being an unusually elaborate hallucination. I admit that one confused me more than the other two."

"That sounds exactly like him," I said.

"So I stopped arguing and I produced the energy in front of him. That turned him into a more reasonable person. Well, he became more reasonable after he recovered the ability to speak."

That made sense.

Elder Thorn had spent centuries believing that he was the only living person in this world who understood what the Blue Sun actually was.

So he had spent his time killing saints, sabotaging missions, and vanishing between one moment and the next while everybody around him treated him as a slightly unpleasant colleague.

Every single one of those years he had been carrying a power he couldn’t explain, given to him by a source he had never identified, in service of a cause he assumed nobody else had ever noticed.

To find out at the end of all that that there was a mountain full of people who had been quietly keeping the same secret, and that they had been the ones feeding him the entire time, must have been relieved that massive pressure of his shoulder.

Even though I hadn’t met Thorn once in this loop, and I was in no hurry to, I was able to get the recent developments of what had happened in the Blue Sun Academy from the conversation between the Head Monk and the elder.

The most important thing I had found out was that Lady Laelyn had been selected as Saint. That was exactly what we had wanted, but it was also what worried me.

Laelyn as Saint meant the Blue Sun's essence had gone into her at the transfer ceremony, the miniature sun coming out of Icarus's mouth and sinking into a girl whose grandmother had been assassinated for studying both solar energies.

There was nobody standing beside her with a Genesis Seed to bait that thing out and eat it. In the previous loop, I had done it personally with my hand on hers in the Cerulean Apex while Beric shouted at me and she seized against my shoulder.

Then I calmed down and thought it through properly, because Kal was in that academy and Beric was standing next to her, both knew the danger of the Saint’s Essence.

Kal was a Rank 8 timelooper, Beric was a pseudo Rank 7 whose power was handed to him by whatever intelligence was behind this world's loop, and he could channel qi, which nothing in this reality had any defence against.

Between the two of them, they had not sent a single message asking for help, and Kal wasn’t a man who declined assistance out of pride when a plan is at stake. Which meant that they had found their own solution, so I decided to trust that they had dealt with it rather than be anxious.

Then there was the part of the month I was most proud of. That was the training.

Cairan kept his word about teaching me, and he didn’t stop at theory.

The theory itself was a strange document, because it consisted of whatever fragments Li Tianyu had bothered to write down before he walked off that shelf of rock eleven hundred years ago, plus eleven generations of monks arguing with those fragments and each other and adding footnotes in the margins.

This meant that reading it was closer to listening to a family have the same disagreement for a thousand years. The core of it confirmed what I had already worked out in a simulation room at Azure Peak, which was that Golden Sun cultivation was entirely about the avatar.

Well, that wasn’t what it was called here, they called it the Dharma Vessel, and the seniors say the two words with the same weight that a Skybound talks about his Fundamental Rune. Once you understand what they mean by it, the name made considerably more sense than mine did.

Because the practice was not simply pushing a partial manifestation up into a full one and calling that advancement, which is how I had been thinking about it, and which Cairan corrected within about four minutes of our first proper lesson.

"You are thinking of size," he said. "Size is the least interesting property a Dharma Vessel has. The question you should be thinking about is what you make it, because the golden energy has your shape, and every choice you fail to make deliberately will be made for you by whatever you happen to be feeling on the day you first raise it."

That was the moment a great deal of this world clicked together in my head.

The Skybound carve runes to hold a shape that channels power through it.

The Lightweavers manifest through painting, or calligraphy, or song, or sculpture, and each of those four methods produces an entirely different practitioner.

I had spent months treating those two systems as opposites that hated each other on principle, and sitting in that hall listening to an old monk describe the design options available to a Golden Sun cultivator, I realised that every single one of them was a fragment.

Runes were one option. Brushwork was another. Vibrational resonance was a third. Word binding was a fourth. The two academies had spent a thousand years killing each other over which quarter of a broken thing was the real thing, and neither of them had ever seen the whole.

It also explained something that had been bothering me since I arrived, which was how a monastery holding the last golden flame in existence had managed to pass as a Blue Sun house for over a thousand years without a single inspection catching them.

But now I understood that it was because Blue Sun practice was genuinely a subset of what they did, so when a Rank 6 inspector from the Order came up that road and watched the monks run their morning forms, he was watching real Blue Sun cultivation.

And it explained why my Golden Sun cultivation had shot past everything else I own. I already carried Rank 4 comprehension in both suns, so I wasn’t learning a new system at all, I was being handed the assembly instructions for two things I already had.

Cairan gave me examples across those weeks, and I wrote every one of them down in my head.

There was a Head Monk four hundred years ago whose Dharma Vessel was a seated figure that never moved and never struck, and inside a radius of two hundred paces around it no technique of any description would function, because the vessel had been designed around the concept of stillness and it imposed that concept on everything near it.

There was a senior in the seventh generation whose vessel was not humanoid at all but a wheel of concentric rings that turned at different speeds, and she used it to slow or hasten the flow of energy in anything that passed between the rings.

There was one, three hundred years back, who designed his vessel with a thousand arms because he had been a stonemason before he came up the mountain and he wanted to build. Cairan told me that man personally raised the entire eastern terrace in a single afternoon and then slept for nine days.

Then Cairan showed me his own.

He walked out to the middle of that enormous hall and stood there with his hands folded and his eyes closed. He told me to go and stand at the far end near the doors, which I did, and then the temperature in the room climbed by about fifty degrees in the space of two heartbeats.

The light came up out of the floor rather than down from anywhere, golden and slow, gathering around his feet and rising, and the dispersal grooves cut into the stone all lit at once in bright concentric rings running outward from where he stood. His robes lifted. The smoke haze under that impossibly high ceiling swirled and then blew apart.

"There is a reason," Cairan called out, and his voice had gone deeper and it arrived at my ears from every direction in the hall at once, "that the founders built this room this size."

The Dharma Vessel rose.

It came up around him in turning coils of gold that resolved into shoulders and then into a chest and then into a head. It kept going until it filled that entire two-hundred-pace hall and its crown pressed flat against the ceiling with the stone groaning under it.

It was a seated figure with an old lined face that was his. It had eight arms arranged in a fan, and each of the eight held something different: a bowl, a length of chain, a brush, an open book, a bell, a blade with no edge on it, a lamp, and one hand that held nothing at all with the palm turned outward toward me.

Then it opened its eyes and looked down.

The pressure coming off of him made my knees tremble and it wasn’t easy to stay standing. I had faced Kal’s pressure, I had even felt the pressure of the most powerful native in this world, Headmaster Hiron, and I had to admit they couldn’t compare to this.

"You…you’re the most powerful being in this world," I whispered.

The figure held for another few seconds and then Cairan laughed. The laugh came out of the vessel and out of the old man both at once, which was a disorientating experience.

"I might have been," he said, "had the lamp not been dying for the last six hundred years. Understand what you are looking at, Saint. That is eight arms carrying eight disciplines, and I have the comprehension to fill all eight, and I have never once had the fuel to run more than three of them at a time. As matters stand, I can hold this for a little under seven minutes, and after that I am an extremely tired old man with sore knees. The headmasters would still give me a great deal of trouble, and I would not care to find out which of us walked away." The vessel began to come down, folding back into the floor in slow coils. "A Dharma Vessel is a description of what you understand."

The heat went out of the room, the grooves in the floor dimmed, and there was an old man in a plain grey robe standing in the middle of an empty hall adjusting his sleeves. He walked back over, sat down cross-legged in front of me, and got straight to it.

"Now," he said. "How would you like to design yours?"

And that, as it turned out, was the hardest question anybody had asked me in this world.

It was clear that there was a lot of freedom for the cultivator when they designed their own vessel, but it was heavily influenced by the Dao that they had comprehended, or were on the path of comprehending.

Cairan had 8 concepts, I didn’t have that many, but it was sure I could find a few after all of my world walking experiences. I spent three full days on it discussing it with Azure in my own head trying to figure out what type of Dharma Vessel we could design.

Sitting here now, almost one month later, with the lamp drinking at forty times its old rate and my Golden Sun close to Rank 6, I couldn’t help but smile about it.

Because that was a build. That was a character sheet, that was a skill tree, that was three days of paralysis in a menu screen weighing a passive against an active while somebody in the other room asks whether you were ever going to actually start the game.

I had made a lot of poor decisions across a lot of worlds.

This one, I think I got right.

A/N

Give your design for Ke Yin's Dharma Vessel below. I've not written the next chapter so looking forward to hearing your ideas.

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