The Rose Adept, who was not an adept, or even, to go by the void where her eyes should have been, human, touched the clip at her shoulder and issued it a name before her familiar flashed out in a bolt of green light.

“Your breath is the problem.” The woman told Thakur as she turned from the ceiling length window in the tower library to face him. “There is nothing we can do about the transformation you are likely going through even now, but, at present, your breath is trapped behind knotted meridians inside your core, which means that all of its power is going into affecting your flesh, into killing you, turning you into poison.” She moved away from the window towards the door back to her flower room, but paused on her way there to put a hand on his arm. “If you can open those meridians, all of your meridians, then you can push your spirit out of your flesh and hold it at arms length. I doubt that it will save you, but it may prolong the death your icon has promised you.”

Thakur swallowed and looked down at the book she’d given him. “How long?” He asked.

She shrugged. “Who can say. Only you know your icon, and I am no adept.”

Her hand slid from his shoulder and she continued to the door as one of the guards appeared through it carrying a sunflare rifle and following the little green familiar she’d sent for him.

“You have some hope still.” The Adept told him over her shoulder. “Read the book. It generally takes many years of cultivation for a person to break through their meridians, but this author suggests that adepts who touch an icon before their meridians can do so many times faster.”

“What about my wife?” Thakur asked.

The adept just looked at him and he felt his heart clench.

She turned to the guard. “Take him to the understory and put him in a cell.” She told him. “Provide him whatever he asks, but he must be quarantined for the duration of his ordeal.”

Thakur opened his mouth to protest as she looked to him. “He will be our guest until he has his condition under control.”

“Yes Ma’am.” The guard replied. He stepped forward and nodded Thakur in the direction of the door he’d come through. “This way sir.”

Thakur remained where he was and stammered. “I, I, I… I want to see Mayanna.” He said, and looked at the adept. “I’m not here for me. I want to see my wife.”

The Adept looked at him with her empty eyes. “She is already dead.” She told him. “Let her rest. Without the icon, she has no hope of opening her meridians, and you have work to do if you do not wish to join her.” She looked away. “I will not have you endanger my clinic before you have mastered your condition.”

Thakur’s mouth opened but no words came out. When he looked to the soldier the armored man just nodded and extended a hand towards the door.

Thakur closed his mouth and looked at the floor while the fire, his breath, swirled inside his chest. He limped a few steps towards the door, then turned back to the Adept.

“My wife.” He said again, hand clenched around the head of his cane. “I will see her first. I will know… I must… know…” But he already knew.

He saw her, briefly, on his way down to the cell that would become his home for the next three months as he learned to cultivate and broke through his meridians. She lay in her bed behind a sheet of glass while a wire projected his voice to her through a small box on the bedside table, despite how little good it did him. She lay asleep while a drifting monstrosity these dark people called one of the Midnight Plains slid over the core in the window behind her, cutting off the light.

“I’m sorry.” He told her, one hand to the window meant to separate him from the person he’d killed. “I didn’t know.”

She didn’t answer, didn’t stir, and would not, not in his sight, again.

Halfway down the book lined hall after the Rose Adept dismissed him and the guard told him to follow, Thakur stopped and turned back to the false adept.

“My daughters.” He said. “They should, they should know. They should be brought, to take care of her, until the end.”

The adept considered him. “Their names?” She asked.

“Vasickni,” he told her, “and Banya, of the Eight Pits Sect.”

She nodded. “Go.” She told him. “They will be brought.”

He looked down at the little book clutched in his hands and thought about throwing her charity in her face. “Thank you.” He said instead.

“Do not thank me. Survive your malady, and I will find a way for you to repay me.”

She closed the door, and he allowed himself to be led away.

Pain become Thakur’s reality from the moment he entered his cell.

“An adepts power is limited by the power of his cultivation.” The Rose Adept’s manual informed him in his first reading by the pale light of the cell he was assigned in the tower’s basement. “Cultivation is tied to the Meridians, spiritual pathways between the hidden aperture of the soul and the cultivator’s flesh. In order of opening, the Meridians are the Core, which feeds the organs, Extremis, which empowers the blood and therefore the limbs and musculature, Sensorium which touches upon the six senses, Mentalis, which infiltrates the mind, and finally Externalis, or the Aura, which allows a cultivator’s spirit to reach beyond the confines of his own spirit.”

Thakur sat on the cot the rose tower provided to him with his eye closed while he felt the acidic fire of his breath moving inside his flesh.

“We were born mortals.” The book told him. “Birth clogs our meridians, but with guidance it is possible for anyone willing to put in the time and effort to enjoy some small portion of the power once enjoyed by those ancestors who built our worlds. To do so, all one must do is cultivate.”

“To open the Core Meridians. Focus on your breathing.”

moves expands the cultivator’s presence beyond his merely physical containment. Most research suggests that these meridians originally extend from the spirit in order to form the body in the womb. Rare cases of children born with one or even two open meridians can be taken as some confirmation of the theory, but for most of us, the process of birth clogs these meridians leaving us the task of reopening them in order to enjoy some small taste of the power once employed for the creation of our world. While it requires effort, with guidance, the process of becoming a cultivator is said to be very simple.”

“To open the Core Meridian,” the book told him, “focus on your breathing.”

His lungs burned. Not like fire. Not like acid.

“As you make an intention of breathing, the density of your spirit will grow until it overflows the containment of your center and floods the clogged core meridians, opening them for further cultivation.”

His lungs burned like a universe of agony all its own tucked inside himself while he clenched around it alone on his cot and wept with each gasp that expanded the fire in his center.

He screamed the day his meridians finally broke, or tried to. He convulsed on the cot and hurled the book from himself while his scream caught in his throat and fire poured, liquid, into his stomach, his lower intestine, his bowels, his balls. He felt it touch each organ, could have drawn a map of his insides from the pain. Darkness edged his vision as the agony mounted, on and on while Thakur’s muscles went taught and his lungs stopped drawing air.

Darkness seemed merciful, until he woke up.

“To open your extremis Meridians you must learn to flex without flexing.”

Thakur lay sideways on his cot and stared at the instructions for a long time after waking from unconciousness. It hurt to breath, to sit up, or move, it even hurt to weep quietly while he held the book open to the page instructing him on his next trial.

“Flex” it told him, or your daughters will be dragged from the depths to watch their mother die alone.

So he did, and thought he would die when fire cascaded into his very blood.

The book stopped being useful shortly afterwards.

“To open your Sensorium, search while your eyes are closed, hear while your ears are sealed, taste while your mouth is shut. Find the sixth sense which combines and expands the other five.”

The food they sent him to celebrate his achievements when they found him unconcious in a pool of his own bile tasted like ash. Even the small bottle of wine simply churned in his guts before adding to his agony as it purged itself from his system.

His bed began to rot underneath him shortly after he opened his Extremis Meridian. He left dark hand prints on the walls where the venom in his breath touched it, and whole pages of the book disintegrated when he tried to turn them to read ahead in his studies.

Blood ran from his eyes after he opened his Sensorium meridians. His ears thundered with his own heartbeat and his nose burned with the smell of his own corrupted flesh. The book was gone by then, ash amidst the disintegrated remains of his bed, his clothing, the ragged clots of hair torn from his own head when the pain became too great for him to bear, the scraps of rusted spoons and bowls that were all that ever remained of the meals no one came to collect from him anymore, and delivered only by dumbwaiter at the elevator, yet he remembered the rest, remembered only it, for a time, as he moved his breath into his own mind and passed into insanity.

“To open your Mentalis Meridian, journey the contours of your own mind and find the manors in memory you have built within over a lifetime.”

He screamed as he “journeyed the contours of his own mind”, he faded in to find himself screaming, clutching his head as he wandered halls marked by black hand prints on the walls. He whimpered when he tried to sleep. Woke fouled and stinking. Lost his name, found it. Giggled as he pushed his finger through steel bars that bent like butter and disintegrated at his touch. Called out for his mother, his father, wept in dark corners and threw chunks torn out of the floor at the lights while some purpose pursued him through his delirium.

She died while he was out of his mind.

He was deep in his delirium when she died.

The air boiled with poison when the rose adept brought her down to him on a gurney so he could say goodbye. He remembered little of the visit except her eyes. Mayanna’s eyes were closed, and empty. Gone, even to his growing spiritual perception through the miasma of pain that filled him, like the Rose Adept’s when she looked at him and told him that he was a mess.

He snapped something at her, and clutched the gurney even as the metal speckled with rust and sagged beneath its meager burden.

“I’ve sold her to the Reliquary adept.” The Rose Adept told him. “I don’t like them around here, but they pay well for newly dead, and they treat them with more respect than they’d receive left on the street or buried in the dunes beyond the towers.”

He’d had nothing to say until then, nothing except how much it hurt. “She should be in the dark.” He told her and pulled his hand away from the gurney with an effort of will to smear the blood running from his eyes across his cheeks. “Somewhere she can rest.”

“She’ll have her rest.” The adept replied. She rolled the sheet over the woman Thakur had killed, then rolled the gurney away and turned to him. She reached up, Thakur thought, to touch his cheek, but instead she reached past it to take a strand of his hair and yank. It parted with Thakur’s skull with almost no resistance and she held up the fine white hairs for him to see.

“You’re running out of time.”

She let the hairs drop as the gurney groaned and rolled itself towards the elevator and Thakur faded back into his corrupted cell clutching at his head while blood and water ran from his eyes.

“You’re daughters are upstairs,” the woman added over her shoulder. “waiting to see if you will make it. As am I.”

To open his Externalis Meridian, he had to reach without moving.

No one needed to tell him how to do so.

His last Meridian opened, when it opened, like a dam breaking. All the pain caught up in Thakur’s skull flowed away, out of his body into the world around him. That world shook as his breath touched it. The bars of his cell, the surviving bars, crumbled in the first rush of his breath, bits of the ceiling crumbled around him while black pools of corruption bloomed from old hand prints left on the walls and floors until fumes rose to fill the entire cell. The tray of food delivered by dumbwaiter and half eaten, half forgotten, on its tray turned to a gray soup while the tray itself warped and darkened.

As the pain left, sanity returned, and Thakur wept.

His eyes continued to bleed, even after he learned to press his breath into objects he could hold and focus on, just as the pain in his spiritual channels never quite disappeared. For all their bleeding, Thakur felt as though his eyes had opened fully for the first time.

Corruption steamed in the world around him. It whispered to him, sang to him, pressed against his sixth sense as it expanded to encompass his whole word. He could feel the open meridians of the guard sent to inspect him when he informed them through the intercom, that he was done, he could see the poisons in the medicine cabinets many floors above in a way that shared nothing at all with the way he saw with his true and bleeding eyes. He could taste the filth running through pipes between the floors and pooling around every object he touched with his breath.

He could see, and yet, there was nothing left for him to see.

Mayanna was dead, and, for all that he could now hold his breath at arms length to keep the icon from infecting his flesh, he could see what it had already done to him. Could see that he was dying, written large in the drops of blood that swelled from his eyes to stain liver-spotted cheeks.

“The benefits to cultivation are obvious and dramatic.” The manual informed him at the start. “To cultivate is to empower the flesh, extending the natural lifespan several fold while increasing the quality of that life beyond mere mortal imagination. Cultivation requires contact with the spiritual world, increasing the affinity for the icons by which the physical world is ordered. The Bottom and the Worlds within were built by the first cultivator. As you progress on your journey as a cultivator, meditate upon what might deeds you might accomplish when you have unlocked your full power.”