Axiom

by Dennis Vanderkerken

  Tibbins arrived at the medical tent with some pep in his step and heard some warm laughter from inside before he ever moved the flap. Ducking his head in before pushing through fully, he saw one of the wounded soldiers nearly hacking up a lung with a helpless smile on his face, strongly hitting his knee while the old man sat there with hands folded, plainly self-satisfied.

  “What happened?” Tibbins’ voice was full of bewilderment.

  “Oh, just a harmless joke,” Artorian answered with pleasant mirth, his eyes lazily moving to look at Tibbins. The particular method in which the old man had replied to the Acolyte made another snorting fit assail the laughing, injured priest.

  The Acolyte composed himself, or tried to, as he felt the old man’s gaze. No, no that’s not what it felt like. Tibbins didn’t feel like he was being looked at; it felt like he was being looked through, as if there was an object behind him that the old man was inspecting instead. The gaze felt awfully familiar.

  Had his charge possessed Essence, he would have thought his meridians might be under inspection, but the old man clearly wasn’t using Essence. It might be a good idea to have a proper look at him after Irene’s warning. “Right. Well, I’ve the go-ahead from the Head Cleric to indulge you and answer your questions concerning cultivation. I must warn you, I’m no expert. Give me a moment to look at your Center, and we’ll begin.”

  The laughter behind Artorian sputtered to a halt as the peanut gallery noticed the ten-yard stare their technically-superior-officer was dropping into. “No, Tibbins! Don’t!”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Cleric Tibbins was confused but dismissed the warning. He was evaluating one old man, not something that was exactly hard to do. “It’s not dangerous unless he is far stronger than I am, and I have the Head Cleric’s permission. What’s he going to do with cultivation knowledge with his age and condition? It’ll make for a pleasant dream at best.”

  Still, the wounded priest was shaking his head ‘no’ and crossed arms while waving it off… begging the Acolyte not to look at Artorian’s Center. Cleric Tibbins paid no heed, cycling Essence to his eyes.

  “Artorian, please do sit still, so I can… so I can…” Tibbins was lost. He could barely comprehend what he was looking at. Corruption to be sure. So. Much. Corruption.

  Unexpectedly, it wasn’t all one kind. It was an awful, hectic, chaotic mixture that churned and moved through the old man’s system with the combinations of a raging river, volcanic diffusion, howling storm, and holy light. This corruption didn’t sit still at all, and that made no sense. Corruption didn’t budge even if you wanted it to. Heavens above, the majority of the cultivation process relied on preventing corruption because it stifled and stymied progress. That the old man had so much of it was certainly no surprise. He was old and weak enough to fall dead on the spot.

  “How are you alive?” Tibbins freaked out slightly as he processed the view.

  “I warned you!” the quip snapped from behind Artorian, but the wounded commentator went ignored. Tibbins held his sickened head. Watching the display of living corruption tumble about inside the old man like a field that never stopped being plowed.

  Artorian crossed his arms in defiance. “Young man, that is quite rude. Explain yourself.”

  “I… I just.” Tibbins halted his Essence sight. He was the one that needed to sit on the medical bed.

  He stole another glance at the injured priest behind the old man, who was also trying to sit more upright. “Hey don’t look at me, Acolyte. I’m an Initiate of lower rank than you. I can use a spiral, keep it going, and use Essence on my eyes. That’s all.”

  “Okay. So.” Tibbins didn’t like this. He held his own hands and looked at them, then back up at the old man. “Do you by chance already know what Essence, Corruption, and a Chi spiral are?”

  Artorian shook his head ‘no’. Tibbins held his chin. “Well, the Church has a skewed interpretation. I also have a strong feeling that, if I tell you that version, you wouldn't be too happy with it. Before I was an Acolyte, I was an adventurer for a short while. That really just means I didn’t make it past the probation period. I’m an F-rank. Right! I need to explain that, as well.”

  “So, everything is made from Essence. Think of it as the smallest thing that everything else is put together from.” Tibbins motioned all around him. He had to pause, but the Elder gave him the ‘move on’ wrist motion.

  “You understood that?” Tibbins quirked an inquisitive eyebrow.

  “Young man, I’m aged, not dumb. I’d even occasionally call myself clever. Keep talking, and I will stop you when I get stuck on something. What you’ve told me so far, well, I already guessed. Just not with the terms you’re using.”

  Tibbins raised his hands in defeat. “I’ll repeat what my instructor at the Guild told us. Though he only told us once. Everything begins as the purest energy, the stuff the universe creates other things out of. This energy either comes from or flows through—I’m not certain which it is—the heavens and the earth. When it does, the heavens and the earth turn that energy into the universal basic elements.”

  The background Initiate filled in, “Rocks and stuff.”

  Tibbins gave him a leer and resumed, “Essence is what this universal energy is called before it’s a particular ‘stuff’. Corruption is almost like Essence, but it’s more a side effect of the purest energy being turned into universal basic elements. We think…”

  Tibbins staggered for a moment, trying to think of better examples. “The word you’re looking for is byproduct, my son.”

  “Yes, that!” Tibbins snapped his fingers at the old man with a smile. The Acolyte continued, “Everything takes in Essence so long as it lives. Doing so makes something such as a plant larger, healthier, stronger, and in general, more powerful in comparison to its counterparts. Unfortunately, corruption is also taken in along with Essence. The more corruption you embody, the more likely you are to die of something when you accrue age. For people with high earth corruption, these are generally events like heart attacks.”

  Artorian patiently didn’t respond and queried when the Acolyte paused, “Earth? As in from the ‘Heavens and the Earth’?”

  The injured man behind the old man shook his head as Tibbins course-corrected. “No, no, the basic Essence types. There’s six! Even I know that one. Fire, earth, water, air, celestial, and infernal. Almost all people who are clerics have celestial affinity channels. By which I mean that celestial-type Essence is what we naturally draw in more of. Even I was told that affinity channels come in four official types.”

  “Closed, Minor, Major, and Perfect. Perfect doesn’t often occur naturally. There’s also clogged and ripped, but they’re never something you want. Ripped, well. R.I.P. indeed,” Tibbins sadly stated.

  Before he could continue, the injured man interrupted again, “Closed and clogged are considered the same for the purposes of Essence draw. Nothing of that type gets into your system. Clogging tends to happen during certain illnesses. As odd as it may seem, not having Essence is a very quick way to die, especially if you need a certain type and can’t draw it in. Though that’s only a problem when you start doing more with it and become dependent, I’m told.”

  The injured man quieted after realizing that he’d hijacked the explanation. Tibbins was giving him another stern, castigating glare. “Is Mr. Broke-His-Leg quite done? A minor Essence channel means you draw in very little; a Major Essence channel means you draw in a sizable amount. While we’re talking passive draw so far, it becomes a very different story when someone begins active cultivation.”

  Tibbins got a set of nods as a reply. “When it happened to me, I would say I’d describe it as being shown that I was drawing energy from a bucket full of water. Then that bucket was in a river. If I removed the bucket and just drew on the river water, much more came to me.”

  It wasn’t too hard for them to distinguish passive from active differences if they considered the amount of water involved. “Essence fo
rms together in complex ways. If two or more Essences come together to form something else, we call it a higher Essence or a compound Essence. It makes the more complicated stuff. Water and air make mist. Mist is a higher Essence. Fire and earth make lava, also a higher Essence. It becomes far more complicated than that—such as anytime celestial gets involved—or more than two Essences are at play. That’s not for right now.”

  “People who actively use the energy of the heavens and the earth are known as cultivators. We take the raw energy of what’s around us and use it to reinforce ourselves, speeding up the process of natural growth. Instead of letting time do the work for me, I’m putting effort into accelerating the process. It can be… painful.” Tibbins winced at the thought of when he first began. Heavens, preparing for cultivation had hurt.

  “Every cultivator has this required Essence-refining technique—which is a fancy way of saying we figured out a trick that lets us feel, control, see, and interact with Essence. The first part of the technique—after figuring out how to do all that—is to make what’s called a Chi spiral. This spiral is responsible for pulling in passive Essence at a much faster rate. More importantly, it helps store and refine while rejecting corruption.”

  The background priest shuddered, pulling a blanket around himself for comfort. “Absorbing tainted Essence is terrible for a person since any amount of corruption limits the available space a cultivator has to work with for the Essence he pulls in. Lots of corruption means you can kiss your Essence-refining progress goodbye. Usually, corruption in the body is pasty, thick, and doesn’t look like it wants to move.”

  “I don’t know what’s going on with you, but your corruption looks like a living storm. There is a thing that cultivators can do early on called Essence cycling, and we can move the energy around to enhance the ability of an organ. Usually, this means the eyes since doing that lets us see Essence and corruption in others. Fairly easy.” Tib made an unpleasant, circular motion at the old man’s stomach, then paused as Artorian moved to sit on his cot.

  “I don’t hear a particularly big difference between ‘a heaven’ and ‘an earth’,” Artorian stated as he sat, having been told too much about his personal unpleasantry.

  The cleric in Tibbins wanted to explode, but he kept his collected calm. “The earth is what we stand on. However, it refers to the planet we are on as a whole. The heavens are…”

  He made hand motions to the sky as if presenting it to someone for the first time. “All of that, out there. The space for things beyond. Without putting a cleric spin on it.”

  Artorian sassily agreed, “You’ve wonderful insight. I would take poorly to the religious rhetoric.”

  Tibbins mockingly copied the sass, “Apologies, Artorian, but by the time someone is your age, you can tell who is and who is not religious—with no hope of turning that to the correct avenues.”

  Artorian appreciated the understanding. The young adult was correct and so moved on to the next question, “So, Essence makes stuff, and that’s it?”

  The Acolyte wavered. “Not… quite? This is a little more complicated.”

  Artorian challenged with a roll of the shoulders, popping his neck. “Try me.”

  Tibbins decided to fight and die on his hill. He was going to give the best explanation he could possibly make. “So, when Essence becomes a rock, the rock then starts giving off earth Essence. Not much, but it does. In that sense—what Essence makes—it then also makes more of. I don’t mean rocks make more rocks. I mean the basic element of earth makes rocks, and then the rocks provide the basic element of earth.”

  “The more something of a particular Essence you have in an area, the more plentifully available Essence will be. So being in a volcano means you are surrounded by a constant assault of fire and earth Essence. Water cultivators tend to submerge to the neck in a body of water in order to draw in their appropriate Essence.” There were gentle motions of understanding. More of one means more of the other. Not difficult.

  “A complication happens when higher Essences become involved. If you have both an earth and a celestial affinity, you can draw Essence through both of those. Unfortunately, it’s less important that you can and more that you have to do so.” Tibbins received some frowns but continued.

  “Your body has spent its whole life depending on that combined Essence, and taking it in with improper balance leads to massive increases in corruption. So, we can’t just try and draw in energy from anywhere. It has to match us. Fire and water might require steam, but it might also be fire-brandy alcohol or a finer gas. Combinations complicate. Just ‘the right coupling’ isn’t good enough anymore for some people. That only gets worse as more parts become involved. Three is a nightmare. Four…” The fringe Elder grimly exhaled. He was starting to grasp the problem.

  “Since you now already know that cultivators need Essence to survive at a certain point, this can become a big problem. If we spend any, we have to replenish it. Good news! Essence takes years and years to deplete on its own. Reaching the higher ranks of cultivation also makes this take longer. The progress aspect my Guild instructor droned on and on about out of spite was that more affinity channels mean faster progress and fewer bottlenecks. However, it also means higher chances of gaining corruption since you have a higher chance of drawing in something that isn’t great for you.”

  Artorian quipped as he did before, just to keep the jumpy Cleric on his toes, “So, Essence always becomes the same thing?”

  The Acolyte shook his head ‘no’. “Ah, so, I think there are two ways it can go? The first is that Essence will gather and over time and randomly make what its inherent properties would normally generate—something that matches. The second is that an identity is embedded into the basic energy, and that then makes a rock. When the pure energy of the universe dilutes to basic Essences, it gains an ‘identity’, though that also corrupts the Essence. Again, we filter out this corruption using our cultivation technique—the Chi spiral—to refine it back into a state of greater purity. Does that help?”

  Artorian pensively brushed his hand along his long beard. He had entirely different ideas for what he was hearing but was quickly approaching the stage where he absolutely needed bed rest. “I have some ideas on things, but I won’t know for certain until I understand more. To begin, why were you all so shocked when you cycled this Essence to your eyes? I’m the only one here that doesn’t know. Second, how do you gain the basic awareness of Essence?”

  Tibbins rubbed the back of his arm in severe discomfort. “You have… if I had to guess, four major types of corruption in you, and they are wreaking havoc. This also means that you likely have…”

  He needed to steady himself, taking a deep breath. “Four major, naturally occurring affinity channels.”

  Water spat past several beds in disbelief by the injured background priest. “Four? No wonder you mentioned you didn’t know how he was still alive! I thought it was just going to beat you with the nausea stick.”

  Tibbins waved away the shouts and turned his attention to Artorian. “May I ask how old you are?”

  The old man retorted, “Certainly, almost fifty.”

  Well that made sense, they supposed. “Artorian, have you been told you look eighty, if not ninety?”

  “By rude clerics, yes. Only very recently, though.” The old man laid himself down on the cot. “Saying it won’t make me feel any younger my boy. I quickly grow weary. For doing very little today, I am quite drained.”

  Tibbins noted it down, including that he dodged the question. “You’re slated for significant bed rest, given your condition and corruption base. I hope that our knowledge has given you some thoughts for pleasant dreams. Per your second question, it involves looking inwards, feeling shifts that are not physical move within and then grasping them with your mind and will. However, you’re not willing the Essence to your desires; I would call it being convincing instead? There’s no dialogue to be had with Essence, so it’s not the easiest comparison.” />
  The Acolyte broached a difficult topic, “Most of us also went through a procedure that… I’m sorry, Artorian, won’t be available to you. There’s a way to pull corruption out of a person, but it risks pulling your life out as well. You’re in no condition to have even a sliver taken. It would just all be over, and the Guild would flay me for trying without direct supervision if we began something like that.”

  “There are ways to also be given a cultivation technique, so you just know what to do. However, that’s limited to those with significant funds or Guild access. Even if you had the funds, we’re in the Fringe. None to be bought. Not that I’ve ever seen one for sale.”

  A tired-looking Artorian nodded with languished effort. “Tell me of your spiral whilst I fall asleep.”

  Tibbins sighed but obliged, “My spiral is a thread of Chi, essentially Essence that I shaped. It’s called a spiral because it spins and spins, separating Essence from corruption and letting ever more refined Essence remain in my Center. A Chi spiral in the body feels like it is beneath the heart, almost against the spine—near the center of the body. However, once you’re able to visualize your Center and step into that space, it looks more as if you’re in a big nothingness. Corruption is easy to see and difficult to work with.”

  Tibbins was interrupted by the injured background priest, but the man wasn’t wrong, “You mean impossible to work with.”

  Artorian still kept his eyes slightly open. “Mhmm. It just… spins?”

  The Acolyte ignored the Initiate and kept up the explanation, “It spins in a very specific way and at the best speed I can manage while keeping the technique stable enough for it to do what it should. All the Essence is directed into my Center, where it is refined and then stored in my spiral. The most refined Essence I let seep into my body, which can more efficiently store the energy instead.”

  Tibbins stole a glance, noting the old man was still awake. “The older you start cultivating, the less Essence your body is able to store. My spiral refines drawn-in Essence, preventing corruption from being absorbed. I do have some corruption the Guild couldn’t get out with the Beast Core. I threw it up too early, and some got left behind. That little bit of corruption is responsible for keeping me stuck in the F-rank—or failure-rank, as it’s called by many.”