The jolly nature or their journey kind of died a brutal death when they witnessed the remains of Kisrin’s village.

  Tantra doesn’t know what to do, doesn’t even know where to start. How does one comfort their friend after such a tragedy? Is it arrogant of her to even think of trying? Everything, gone, like the flicker of a flame, relegated to memory. Kisrin might well be the last of Aola, the last one with the burden of carrying it in his mind. She can’t know that, surely some escaped but there were just so many bodies. All of them falling apart through decay like melting wax, ignored by carrion entirely. That last bit doesn’t really make sense.

  There are so many corpses.

  A practical feast.

  She feels a little sick thinking about it.

  How would she feel if she came back home, only to find corpses and rubble? Everything just gone? She doesn’t know, can’t even begin to imagine, obviously it would hurt.

  So she has to do something for him, if only to share in the pain and lighten his burden. Which brings her here, gathering her courage behind the boy as he stares at the night sky. His caramel skin and brown curls illuminated by the moonlight, he looks unbothered, but Tantra’s been trained to see through masks, and it doesn’t take a genius to recognize that Kisrin is hiding his pain through indifference.

  She takes a breath and steps forward, sitting next to the boy.

  He doesn’t turn to look at her, continuing his vigil against the stars.

  “What are you doing?” She manages to say.

  He flicks a causal glance at her before he returns to staring.

  “Just…looking at the stars”

  “Capra and Lutrinae?”

  He nods an affirmative.

  “Would you mind if I joined you?”

  He just shrugs and keeps staring, so she takes it as permission.

  The constellations aren’t exactly something she’s well educated in, having cursory knowledge from the few books that talk about them. Capra, if she remembers correctly, is the dancing goat, while Lutrinae is the sleeping otter. They always grace the night sky in midwinter.

  “Ma loved the constellations,” Kisrin says suddenly, “taught me each one and their stories. My favorite of course was Draconis Major, because, you know, dragons. Always get a good story with a dragon.”

  “I find them kind of predictable,” Tantra replies carefully, “it's always something do with hordes of gold and stolen princesses, why would a dragon of all things need a princess?”

  Kisrin chuckles, “fair, but you can’t deny that the tale of cultivators facing something impossible for the sake of love is kind of endearing.”

  “If only all of them were so kind,” Tantra whispers.

  Kisrin just nods.

  “What about your father, what did he like?”

  Kisrin lays on the ground with his hands behind his head.

  “Pops took care of the family, and that’s all he did, ever. Ma only learned farm work from grandpa, and the farmers refused to have a woman tilling their fields, so she couldn’t really help with coin. Tried to learn more womanly shit like tailoring or a spot of alchemy, unfortunately those niches were already taken by the local hags.”

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  Tantra chuckles, “we call that cornering the market.”

  “It’s stupid,”

  “Not to the one who’s got the market cornered.”

  Kisrin grunts.

  Tantra looks down at him as he lays there on the grass. She’s not sure if what she’s doing is helping but it’s getting him talking, that’s a good sign right? It’s better than most at least.

  “Hey Kisrin?”

  “Yeah?”

  “How far along are you with the threading exercises?”

  He raises a brow at her, “I can move it down most of my arm, why?”

  “I want you to try threading three into a rope, can you do that?”

  -

  Tantra’s helping Kisrin in the best way she knows how.

  Distraction!

  Specifically by doing a training marathon, the rest joined as well, even Erick. Which brings us to the side of the road in the middle of a bright day indeed, where all six of them are doing simultaneous burpees with Rakan counting as he jumps. He’s the only one who can keep his breathing steady enough to actually say anything intelligible while exercising, the rest just focused on the burpees.

  Erick is panting like a dog so he’ll probably drop out soon, but that’s okay, no ones really expecting him to compete, and it means Tantra won’t be in last place. She may be in foundation, but the flip side of getting there so early is that she hasn’t really had the time to build her strength. Foundation is, afterall to get your body acclimated to Qi, while deepening your roots is to make the body capable of taking more Qi before reaching exhaustion. While she’s very far along with her roots, considering her age, she still doesn’t have the best baseline.

  Better than before she went to the sect, much better.

  But still weaker than her friends.

  Although that gap has been closing lately, where before she’d lose most of their hand to hand spars, now she wins about half. She’s not sure how much of that is strength and how much of it is skill, but she is improving. They’ve been doing a lot of spars lately, Rakan being the undisputed champion of course, but it’s useful to face someone so far ahead. Neither of them use Qi of course, they’re not trying to kill them.

  “Twenty!”

  Erick drops out, panting heavy on the ground. Tantra’s kind of impressed, he’s sprung back from being a literal stick to actually having a decent build for his age. Sure the exercise is bodyweight, so it's easier for him, but it's still a lot considering where he started.

  Rakan really doesn’t know the meaning of mercy in his training regimens.

  Keeps them survivable though, Tantra can’t realistically expect to match Rakan in their spars if he went all out.

  She remembers how he fought that bear.

  The memory of the whole thing has kind of solidified into a crystal in her mind, if she feels like it, she can pull it up, and sometimes when she’s distracted by one thing or another it’ll pop into her thoughts. She doesn’t really know how to deal with the feelings involved so she just doesn’t.

  “Thirty!”

  She’s starting to shake on the pushups now, her best for those is fourty, which isn’t all that much but it's more than one, which she couldn’t even do when she started training. She’s progressed quite far in the…she doesn’t know, has it rolled into January yet? The slight chill tells her that it's still winter, but that’s about all she’s got until they reach a village or city.

  “Fourty!”

  -

  Tantra is meditating.

  Rakan is taking over for her on the shift, he only does this occasionally, but after she told him what she was going to try, he agreed without hesitation.

  It’s been almost a year since she managed to pull on four threads, going from three to four took about seven months, maybe more, but she’s been stuck on four for so long.

  No more.

  She pulls five threads from her core and blood immediately starts weeping out of the pores on her skin, but she holds all five with a grip of iron, not willing to lose them.

  This is just the first step after all.

  Ignoring the pain wracking her body, she takes the threads and slowly brings them together. Wrapping them into a rope ever so slowly, her robes, at this point, are soaked with blood. Luckily they have cleaning scripts, so it shouldn’t take more than a night to get rid of.

  She loses control of the tiny rope she’s created and vomits a torrent of blood, feeling lightheaded, she takes a moment to get her bearings.

  “Did you do it?” Rakan asks.

  She just turns to him and smiles wide with blood stained teeth.