Chapter 75 – Virtue: Patience
When Erynd woke, the world was already pale with morning.
That was wrong.
For months, he'd been up before the sun, splashing water from a battered bucket onto his face in grey, half-dead light, training in a world that still felt like night. Today, when he bent over the bucket and scooped the water up, his reflection wasn't just shadow.
Light caught him.
For the first time in a long while, he actually saw himself.
The boy in the rippling surface was small, still—shorter than most men's shoulders would be, maybe one-fifty at most—but the thin, half-starved lines of his early Academy days were gone. The months of log runs and cliff hangs and waterfalls had carved him down and built him back up.
His shoulders were broader. Not big. Not bulky. Dense. Ropey muscle ran along his arms, not exaggerated, just compact and sure. His chest was flat but firm, the faint ridges of developing abs showing when he lifted his shirt to wipe his face. His neck had lost the softness of childhood; tendons stood out when he swallowed.
He flexed his hand.
The calluses across his palms and fingers were thick now, layered over old scars. They looked like they belonged on a blacksmith, not on a twelve-year-old—no, thirteen. He'd slipped past his birthday somewhere between the fifth and tenth log; he barely remembered the day itself. Just another sunrise. Just another run.
"Congratulations," Melody said dryly from the sword propped against the wall. "You've evolved from 'stick' to 'slightly mean-looking stick.'"
He snorted.
"I'll upgrade to 'crowbar' later," he muttered.
"You already bend things you shouldn't," she said. "Seems accurate."
He rinsed his face once more, let the cold water bite his skin, then set the bucket aside.
His body felt… different.
The same constant ache sat under his skin, but it wasn't the raw, tearing pain of the first weeks. This was a heavier, settled weight. His muscles complained, but they did it like workers at the end of a shift, not like civilians being thrown into a war.
Recovery had changed too. He could feel it. Strain that would have left him wrecked for days now smoothed out overnight. Tiny micro-tears in his muscles knitted while he slept. Bones that had taken impacts they had no right to survive didn't crack; they thickened.
He straightened and rolled his shoulders.
Things clicked. In a good way.
"Still alive," he said.
"For now," Melody answered. "So? Ready to let the madman cut your insides open with vibes?"
"Very reassuring image," he said. "Thank you."
"You're welcome."
***
The mountain wind smelled like wet stone and pine.
He climbed the familiar path half on autopilot, feet finding holds between rocks he knew by memory now. The slope felt less like a punishment these days and more like a checkpoint.
So Sang-kyu was where he always was in the mornings now: on that same flat patch of ground near the edge, sitting cross-legged, back straight, eyes half-closed.
Today, though, there was something different in the air around him. Not visible—not in the way mana shone when mages got excited—but heavy. Focused.
He didn't look over when Erynd approached.
"Sit," he said. "Same as yesterday."
Erynd folded down behind him, spine aligning almost automatically into the meditation posture they'd drilled. Knees down. Hands on thighs. Chin tucked. Breath low.
Melody slid into silence inside the sword at his side. Even she didn't crack a joke; that was how he knew this was serious.
He let his eyes soften, fixed them on the line of So Sang-kyu's back, and breathed.
In.
Down to the gut.
Out.
Slow.
The familiar engine in his lower abdomen acknowledged him—a slow, thick pulse alongside the sharper, bright churn of his mana core.
He dropped attention down, like they'd practiced.
One coin. One spot.
The world narrowed to breath and that low, coiled warmth.
Behind him, So Sang-kyu exhaled.
"Good," he said softly. "Now do not move."
***
(So Sang-kyu)
Up close, the boy's qi was ugly.
Not in the way trash disciples were ugly. Their qi trickled, thin and weak and pathetic, barely enough to light a candle if you set them on fire first.
This… was different.
So Sang-kyu let his own perception slip, let the world of skin and cloth and mountain edges fade, and instead watched the roads under the roads.
Qi-lines. Meridians. The old maps from Safon called them a hundred different names, each sect pretending they'd invented the body. He'd cracked disciples open and drawn their meridians on cave walls with their blood; he knew better. The roads were always there. The routes changed.
This boy's roads were a mess.
Power ran everywhere. It chewed up one path, jumped to another, doubled back on itself, bit his organs and muscles and bones with equal enthusiasm. There was no discipline, no sect pattern, no careful looping. Just brute survival.
A wild dog, he'd told him once.
He'd been polite.
This was a whole pack of wild dogs, all trapped in the same ribcage, all with their fur on fire.
He should not have been able to sit this still.
So Sang-kyu narrowed his eyes and let a thin thread of his own qi drift outward, like a whisper.
Just a suggestion.
Not a command. Not a shove. Just… a nudge.
Here.
Not there.
He touched one of the boy's mad rushing streams where it scraped past the lung, always too close to tearing something. For a sane, trained cultivator, the reaction would be irritation at most, a slight shift.
The boy's qi grabbed it.
Like a starving thing catching a scent.
In the space of a heartbeat, the wild flow changed vector, following the tiny suggestion and carving deeper into the path he'd indicated. Other streams, feeling the shift, flowed toward it, joining, thickening, grinding a cleaner channel through flesh that had never had a proper route.
So Sang-kyu felt his brows twitch.
Again.
He nudged another point. Closer to the heart this time, where the qi liked to snag on old scars.
It followed.
Not mindlessly. Not docile. But with a kind of frantic intelligence, like it had been waiting for someone to draw a line on a map it already half-remembered.
He watched it happen several times.
Roads clearing. Paths settling. The boy's breath stuttered once, then deepened, matching the new rhythm.
This should have taken years.
When he had first crawled bleeding into a demonic sect's cave, his qi had been loud and ugly too. It had taken four years of sitting under waterfalls that could peel skin, four years of letting old monsters beat his meridians open with fists and curses, four years of swallowing pills that tasted like rust and venom, before his qi had stopped fighting him.
This boy had done the same work in months without pills, without elders, with nothing but logs and cups and cliffs and stubbornness.
What have you been through, little monster, So Sang-kyu thought, watching the qi settle.
He ignored the faint, familiar itch in his own chest—the old demonic core reacting to a kindred pattern.
Compatible.
That was the terrifying part.
The boy's qi wasn't just strong.
It liked the way So Sang-kyu's own power moved.
Show it a demonic path, and it didn't flinch. It slotted in like a key finding a lock it had been carved for in another life.
So Sang-kyu let his eyes close fully for a moment.
"If I give you my true road now," he thought, not without a thin prickle of fear, "you'll take it. You'll take it too well. And then there'll be two of me. The world doesn't deserve that."
He eased his qi back, leaving only the smallest suggestions in place.
The boy's qi took over the rest.
Within an hour, the main routes were clear.
Not refined. Not polished. But open. The chaotic, biting streams had become a single, heavy current moving around the dantian and through the limbs in something that finally resembled a loop.
So Sang-kyu opened his eyes.
"In this lifetime," he thought, "you will either save a world or eat it."
Both options made him smile.
***
(Erynd)
The pain stopped being sharp.
At first, when So Sang-kyu had told him they were opening meridians, he'd braced for more of the same: tearing, burning, knives scraping along the inside of his veins.
There was some of that.
When his attention dropped into the pathways his perspective had never quite seen before, there were definitely moments where something squeezed and something else snapped. Heat shoved through narrow routes, forced them wider. Old aches he'd ignored lit up, flared, and then went quiet.
But it changed.
Somewhere between one breath and the next, the screaming edge of it dulled.
His awareness settled on that engine under his navel again.
This time, it wasn't just a vague pulse. It had shape.
One core he knew well: mana, burning bright, spinning in sharp, precise layers like a star made of clockwork. That was the same as always, just… more stable. The circuits built on it loved straight lines and clean flows and control.
Beside it, touching but not merging, sat something else.
Another weight.
Not bright. Not neat.
Heavy.
Dark, not in colour, but in feel, like a storm cloud pressed into a sphere. The qi sea was smaller than the mana core, but denser. Its edges were fuzzy, as if it had only just been allowed to exist properly instead of leaking everywhere.
He could feel the difference.
Mana wanted to move.
Qi wanted to stay.
But when he breathed right, the two hummed together.
[ System ]
[ Status: Qi Sea – Formed (Initial) ]
[ Meridians: Primary Loop – Open / Secondary Branches – Unstable ]
[ Advisory: Sustained Meditation Required To Consolidate Realm ]
Another line, flickering at the edge of his vision:
[ Blessing of Vastriel – Virtue: Patience ]
[ Effect: Long-Duration Focus Tasks – Learning & Consolidation Speed ×10 ]
He almost laughed.
Of course.
Months ago, when the Goddess' blessing had first unpacked itself in his status, he'd skimmed the virtues and grabbed the one that mattered: Wisdom. A straightforward multiplier on his teaching, letting him leech talent off his students as he educated them.
He'd looked at Patience and thought, nice to have.
Now, staring at two cores spinning side by side and feeling his meridians throb, he finally understood what "long-duration focus tasks" meant.
"This is going to take forever," he thought.
The System, unhelpfully, said nothing.
He opened his eyes.
So Sang-kyu was watching him, head tilted.
"You feel it?" the man asked.
"The… second core," Erynd said slowly. "Qi sea. Next to the mana. Same place, different… texture."
So Sang-kyu grunted.
"Mm. Good. You are not blind," he said. "Normally, this is where geniuses celebrate. 'Ah, I have opened my meridians, I am now Very Amazing, please bring me wine and adoring fans.'"
"Let me guess," Erynd said. "This is actually where the boring part starts."
"The real boring part," So Sang-kyu said, baring his teeth. "Up to now, you have been hitting meat. That is easy. Meat cries, meat heals. Now we ask your mind to do something truly terrifying."
He raised a calloused hand and extended fingers, like counting.
"Sit," he said. "Every day. Breathe. Follow the loop. Again and again. No fancy techniques, no big explosions. Just repetition. Until the qi stops acting like soup and starts acting like a river."
"How long?" Erynd asked.
So Sang-kyu considered him.
"For someone with talent," he said. "Good bones, good will. Maybe… sixteen years."
Erynd stared.
"Sixteen," he repeated. "Years."
So Sang-kyu shrugged.
"You want to truly stabilise meridians to my standard," he said. "That is how long it took my best junior, and she was a monster. You are smaller, but denser. Maybe you cheat a little. Fourteen. Fifteen."
"Sixteen years," Erynd said again, flat.
"Do not make that face," So Sang-kyu said, amused. "You have time."
"No," Erynd said quietly. "I don't."
Memories crawled up his spine.
Cities burning on schedules. Flags he'd already broken. Outer things arriving earlier every loop. The Goddess' panicked, half-finished words before the world yanked him back. The third continent's blank, hostile silence at the edge of every map.
Even with Vastriel's blessing, even with System buffs, the difficulty was scaling.
He didn't have sixteen years to sit quietly on a mountain.
He might not have six.
His fingers curled on his knees.
"What if," he said slowly, "I compress it?"
So Sang-kyu raised a brow.
"Compress," he repeated.
"Sit," Erynd said. "Meditate. Not once or twice a day, around other things. Just… meditate. Completely. No breaks for school, no breaks for politics, no breaks for walking around looking important. Straight."
So Sang-kyu snorted.
"You cannot sit sixteen years straight," he said. "You would die. You need to eat. Drink. Shit. Move."
"How long," Erynd pressed, "if I do nothing but qi work? If I sleep only when I have to. If I don't waste time running back and forth between crises. In your time, in your sect, how long would it take someone to push this realm as far as possible, if they didn't care about anything else?"
So Sang-kyu's gaze sharpened.
He ran a thumb along his jaw, thinking.
"Three," he said finally.
"Three," Erynd echoed.
"Three years," So Sang-kyu said. "For someone with your compatibility. Maybe less, if you are very stupid and very determined. But—"
He held up a hand before Erynd could jump in.
"Listen," he said. "You are thinking 'oh, three is smaller than sixteen, I like that number.' Your brain is lying to you. Three years is not short. Three years of nothing but sitting in your own head, with your body screaming and your qi grinding new grooves into your flesh? That is war. You will fight yourself every day. If you break concentration too long, your meridians will backlash. Every little injury we have been avoiding comes back at once. Your organs will remember they are meat. You will starve. You will dehydrate. You will die very quietly in a cave while thinking you are enlightened."
Erynd swallowed.
Images rose unbidden: the cultists laughing as their shadows peeled off, the Duke's knights dropping in silence under Vastriel's judgment.
Three years in a hole, with nothing but his own head and System pop-ups and the memory of a hundred deaths.
Patience.
[ Blessing of Vastriel – Virtue: Patience ]
[ Effect Active ]
"Can qi sustain the body?" he asked. "If the circulation is good enough."
So Sang-kyu's mouth thinned.
"Yes," he said. "To a point. High-level cultivators can sleep in caves for decades, drinking only dew and heaven energy, and walk out looking fresh. You are not high-level. Your qi sea is a puddle compared to theirs. It can slow the body's needs. It cannot erase them. If you do this wrong, you die slowly and stupidly."
"If I do nothing," Erynd said, "I die loudly and stupidly when the Outer things get bored waiting."
So Sang-kyu's eyes narrowed.
He studied the boy in front of him—the small frame, the too-old eyes, the way his shoulders sat like someone who remembered weight even when he wasn't carrying anything.
"You really think you don't have sixteen years," he said.
"I know I don't," Erynd answered.
Silence stretched between them.
Wind hissed over stone.
Melody shifted in the sword, not speaking.
Finally, So Sang-kyu sighed.
"Sometimes," he said, "I hate talented children."
He scratched at the back of his neck, then jabbed a finger toward the higher ridge.
"There is a cave," he said. "Halfway up. Small. Dry. Hidden. Good for seclusion. I used it once when I thought it was a good idea to see how long I could sit without thinking about punching someone. I lasted… not three years."
"How long?" Erynd asked.
"Two months," So Sang-kyu said. "Then I punched the mountain. Very informative."
He shook his head.
"If you insist," he went on, "we do it properly. You go in with qi flowing, meridians open. I seal the entrance with stone and a little formation. No light. No visitors. No food. No water. Only ambient mana and whatever heaven-and-earth qi this stupid mountain can provide."
"And if I break concentration," Erynd said quietly.
"Your body will remember it is starving," So Sang-kyu said, blunt. "You will get hungry. Thirsty. Your organs will scream. The backlash from forcing qi to sustain you will hit all at once. Pain like you have never felt, and you have felt a lot. If you give up completely, you die. If you fall behind schedule, you crawl out months later half-dead and weaker than if you had just taken the long road."
His gaze hardened.
"Do you understand?" he asked. "This is not 'oh, I will try and if it is hard I will stop.' This is a rope you tie around your own neck. You either climb it to the top, or it strangles you halfway."
Erynd's heart thumped once, hard.
He thought of the System's cold lines.
Of Vastriel's arms around him in the suspended moment between worlds.
Of the Outer thing's laughter scraping across his skin.
Of Julia kneeling in a golden throne room underground, of Noel's tears in an arena full of people, of So Sang-kyu's fist slamming into a god-thing's flesh.
Three years.
In a cave.
With nothing but breath, pain, and the slow grinding of qi into bone.
"Patience," he thought. "You gave me patience for a reason, didn't you?"
He exhaled.
"I'll do it," he said.
So Sang-kyu's eyes searched his face for a long moment.
"What if," the man said quietly, "you come out and everyone you care about is gone? What if the world has moved on without you?"
Erynd's chest twisted.
"They already do," he said. "Every time I die."
So Sang-kyu went very still.
For a heartbeat, the mountain seemed to hold its breath with him.
Then the old monster snorted, like he'd tasted something bitter and decided to drink the whole cup anyway.
"Fine," he said. "Stupid boy. Ambitious boy. Good. I will show you the cave."
He stood and jerked his head toward the path up.
"Today you prepare," he said. "You settle your qi loop as much as you can. You say whatever dramatic goodbyes you feel like. Tomorrow, you go in. I seal you. Three years. Maybe less, if your Goddess decides to be generous. Maybe more, if you are slower than you think."
Erynd got to his feet.
His legs felt strangely steady.
"Three years," he said.
"Three years," So Sang-kyu echoed. "Of sitting still. Of listening to your own heart. Of not punching anything. Worst hell I can imagine."
"Worse than your demonic sect?" Erynd asked.
"Oh, much worse," So Sang-kyu said. "At least there, we got to scream."
***
The cave was smaller than he'd imagined.
He'd expected some grand, echoing chamber deep in the mountain, full of stalactites and dripping water, the kind of place that made you feel tiny.
Instead, So Sang-kyu led him to a narrow crack in the rock, just wide enough for a small body to squeeze through sideways. Inside, the space widened into a hollow barely large enough to stand upright in the center. The walls curved in close, cool and rough under his palm when he touched them.
The floor was flat rock.
No moss. No water. No light.
Perfect.
"Sit there," So Sang-kyu said, pointing to the center. "Facing the mouth."
Erynd lowered himself down.
The stone was cold under him. The air was still, thinly threaded with the faint mineral scent of the mountain.
Melody's voice drifted from the sword across his lap.
"This is going to be very boring," she said.
"Stay with me?" he asked.
"Obviously," she said, offended. "Who else is going to insult you when you start hallucinating?"
He smiled, small and tight.
"Good," he said.
So Sang-kyu stood in the entrance, blocking most of the light. From where Erynd sat, the man looked like a slab of shadow.
"Last chance to be sensible," So Sang-kyu said. "You walk out now, we pretend you never said anything about three years. We go back to logs and waterfalls. You curse at me, I hit you, everyone is happy."
Erynd closed his eyes.
Saw burning cities.
Saw a third continent his maps refused to render.
Saw Vastriel's eyes, wide and almost frightened.
"No," he said. "If I don't do this, I'll regret it. And I don't have room for more regret."
So Sang-kyu exhaled through his nose.
"So be it," he said.
He muttered something under his breath in a Safon dialect Erynd didn't recognise, fingers tracing quick, sharp shapes along the cave mouth. Qi gathered at his fingertips, dark and thick, then sank into the stone.
Rock groaned.
Slowly, the crack in the wall began to narrow.
Light thinned.
"Three years," So Sang-kyu's voice came through, muffled but steady. "You keep the loop moving. You let the qi eat your hunger and thirst. You let your thoughts scream and then go quiet. If you lose track of yourself, remember your virtue, boy."
"Which one?" Erynd called back.
So Sang-kyu snorted.
"The one that keeps you sitting still," he said.
The last sliver of light shrank to a thin line.
Erynd drew in a slow breath.
Dropped it down.
Mana core.
Qi sea.
Two engines, spinning in opposite textures.
He reached for the heavy one.
Let it roll.
Stone slid.
Darkness fell, absolute and total.
He felt the resonance of the formation settle into place, the faint hum of sealed space locking him in with his own heartbeat.
Melody's presence vibrated faintly against his palms on the sword.
"Well," she said lightly, in the black. "Now what?"
"Now," Erynd said, "we sit."
And he did.