“You need to find the connection that links your aura to you through your awareness, you’ll find the meridian you need to open there.”

“I know, Jia! You’ve told me a dozen times already.”

“Can you sense it?”

“I’m trying, but it would be much easier to meditate without you hovering over me and bothering me every second!”

Yue shot Jia a withering glare, and she wilted a bit, smiling apologetically.

“Sorry. I’m just trying to help. We don’t even know if this is possible, and I don’t want to waste your time.”

Jia and Yue were sitting together in their living room—or rather, Yue was sitting while Jia paced nervously around the room. Eui had opted to do her own meditation in the courtyard outside—she wasn’t talking to Yue. They had been trying for hours to get Yue to unify her cultivation, but they hadn’t made much progress, and Jia was getting a little bit antsy.

Yue let out an exasperated huff and crossed her arms to stare at Jia.

“Jia, according to your own recounting of the story, it took the two of you nearly a week straight of closed-door meditation to accomplish this. That’s after the demon used a qi intrusion technique to highlight the necessary connections for you, and with both your minds working together in tandem. I have only one mind, no demonic tutor to assist me, and have hardly even spent an afternoon meditating on it. I appreciate your confidence in my talent, but even I’m not that good.”

Jia crossed her arms and pouted.

“That’s hardly fair. I’m not asking you to fully open the meridians overnight or anything like that. Just sense that they are there. Nobody else who’s tried the technique has even managed that, but if our theory is right, you should be able to.”

Yue inclined her head in acknowledgement.

“I understand that much, and I think the theory is good. I’m almost certain I will be able to do as you describe, but not with the world’s worst teacher nattering in my ear the entire time.”

“Wh—I’m not that bad! Why does everyone keep saying that?”

Yue raised an eyebrow at Jia, her tone dripping with sarcasm.

“You’re right. It couldn’t be that you are bad at teaching, it’s the world that must be wrong. Jia, Eui would do a better job of teaching me this technique, and she’d just hit me until I got it right.”

Jia collapsed onto the couch miserably, letting her arm hang off the edge where she traced a circle on the floor with her finger.

“I’ve only been a cultivator for less than a year...it’s not fair. I’d be fine at teaching if I had years to practice like everyone else...”

Yue scoffed and rolled her eyes at the dramatic display.

“Tell yourself whatever you must to heal your wounded pride. In the meantime, I will—hmm...”

Jia looked up from the couch she was sulking on as Yue suddenly got all quiet and contemplative, biting her thumbnail as she often did when deep in thought.

“You’re going to wear it down to nothing if you keep doing that. What are you thinking about?”

“Tsk, let me have my habits. It occurs to me that we may be approaching this from the wrong direction, so to speak.”

Jia sat up, giving Yue her full attention.

“Go on...”

“Well, if your theory is correct, and all three disciplines are connected, then it shouldn’t matter which way the connection is formed. You would have me find the connection through my aura, through my body, and finally into my soul, but I think that’s backwards.”

“But when Eui and I—”

Yue shook her head.

“When you two did it, you started with mind cultivation—both because it was expedient at the time, and because it was what you were most familiar with. After all, you may have been mortals before joining the academy, but you still originally awakened as mages, did you not?”

Jia nodded slowly, realizing where Yue was going with this.

“That’s true, yes. So you’re saying—”

“I’m saying that for me, I’ve spent my entire life cultivating my soul. I am intimately familiar with every last detail of my dantian—if there is a new connection that I was unable to sense before, I will know.”

“Wouldn’t you have already sensed it by now, then?”

Yue shrugged.

“If I had bothered to try, perhaps. Having one’s cultivation reset at the houtian level is not as dramatic as it sounds. It is a dire punishment, to be sure, but it’s not as if my dantian was destroyed. All of the meridians that were once open remain so. I haven’t lost the techniques that I practiced and refined for so many years, I’ve simply lost the power to use them. Since my punishment, I’ve only been focused on gathering qi—hardly something that requires full awareness of my soul after eighteen years of practice.”

“So you think it would be easier to start from your dantian and work your way up instead of the other way around.”

“I might even be able to give you the results you want in the impossible time-frame you seem to expect of me.”

Jia groaned and sprawled out on the couch to sulk once more. Even when she was being cooperative, Yue was truly heartless.

“You shouldn’t be so careless with your posture, Jia. Your legs are spilling out of your robe, and if I was of the same persuasion as you two, I might have cause to get distracted.”

Jia blushed and adjusted the robe to cover herself better.

“That’s not—I don’t—I mean—just shut up and do your meditation already!”

Yue ignored Jia’s sputtering protests with a small smirk and closed her eyes to focus on meditation. Jia ignored her in turn, focusing on her own thoughts.

She had been about to protest that Yue was mistaken about her—she knew that Yue thought she was romantically involved with Eui, but she’d given up on correcting that. The problem was that Jia didn’t know what her ‘persuasion’ even was. Did she like girls or boys? Both? Neither? She’d been avoiding thinking about the subject for...well, pretty much her entire life.

Jia could admit that she didn’t have a very healthy view of sex and romance growing up. Sex had been something that the older girls sold when thievery no longer cut it. Romance was just something that cost extra. She had grown up thinking of romantic relationships as something dirty, or demeaning. When she found out that her big sister had become a prostitute, the only thing that Jia could think of was that she’d never let that happen to her.

To this day, she still hadn’t quite been able to divorce the concepts of romance, sex, and prostitution. She couldn’t help but think of them as interchangeable, even if she knew, rationally, that they weren’t. To think of one was to think of the others, and it was painful to think about. It reminded her of what had happened to her big sister—what was one day going to happen to the nameless little sister she had abandoned.

She wondered if maybe one day, when she was strong enough, she could go back for them. Jia had been concentrating on gaining power—and it seemed like there were plenty of people who had ideas of what they wanted her to do with it—but what did she want to use her newfound power for? Could she go back and find Lee Jung again? Would she even be able to face her, after what she had done? What would she even do if she did?

It was too depressing to think about, so Jia tried to get her mind back on track. Relationships! Eunae had told her that she needed to make her feelings clear to Eui and Dae. Jia had resolved her relationship with Eui—sort of—but it was becoming harder and harder to ignore Dae’s feelings.

Ignoring them wasn’t the point! She had to remind herself of that, sometimes. She needed to address his feelings, but to do that she had to address her own, and to do that she had to address—

It was a terrible loop—one she’d been struggling with for months. She liked Eui, and she liked Dae, but the moment she tried to imagine either of them in a romantic context, her mind was drawn back to the stories she’d heard the older girls in the orphanage sharing, after they thought the children were safely asleep. She’d remember the threats she’d gotten from the angry thugs trying to track her down after she’d escaped—even the ones that had forced her out of Nayeong had tried to—

That wasn’t what relationships were! She knew that, but she couldn’t seem to put it out of her mind. The mental image of Dae's face superimposed on one of the thugs describing the vulgar things he would do if he caught her—it made her physically ill.

She tried instead to think of the nicer things. Studying with Dae in the library, falling asleep on Eui’s shoulder, or quietly sharing a meal by the fire. None of those things were necessarily romantic. She could twist her mind into thinking that they weren’t—girls held hands and cuddled platonically all the time, and there was nothing unusual about spending time studying with a friend.

What if she took the things that she was comfortable with, and reframed them? Jia tried it for a moment. She remembered the time that Eui had dressed her up and sent her on—on a date with Dae. It had made her so upset and uncomfortable that she had ended up slapping Eui afterwards, so perhaps that wasn’t the best example.

She ran with it anyway. She tried thinking of it as a date—as an explicitly romantic interaction. It had been kind of cute, the way Dae had been embarrassed to get caught staring at her. Then she’d ended up having a weird internal crisis by digging up the source of her own self-loathing. That spoiled things a bit...

What a horrible date! She felt bad for Dae—he didn’t deserve that. She’d definitely have to do better next time. She felt her face heating up as she realized what she had just thought. Next time. She turned so that her back was to Yue and covered her face with her hands. Apparently some part of her was interested.

She shook her head and tried to move on to something else. Eui! Eui was easier to think about than Dae. Jia was already much closer to Eui than she’d ever been with another person, and they arguably already had a relationship much more intimate than most lovers. Well, there were different qualities of intimacy, she supposed. She might like, say, Guan Yi more than Xin Wei, but neither of them even registered as a potential romantic partner.

Jia actually gagged at the very notion of a relationship with Xin Wei—what a nightmare that would be. She focused her thoughts back on Eui—much better. Her relationship with Eui was already incredibly intimate, but it wasn’t the same sort of intimacy—unless she tried reframing it like she had with Dae.

She thought about all the times they had held hands, snuggled up together on the couches, or gotten into playful tickling matches. Jia had to stop when she tried to reframe bathing together—her face felt so hot that she thought that Yue would see her blushing from behind. That was a bit too much for her, still.

Eui didn’t invoke the images of the men chasing her through alleyways, shouting threats and slurs after her. It was easy to imagine herself in a relationship with Eui, because they would just do all the things they already did, plus maybe—Jia found herself too embarrassed to even finish the thought. Still, it didn’t sound so bad.

All of which left Jia in an awkward spot. She liked Eui and she liked Dae, and with some effort, she could entertain the idea of a relationship with either of them. It still left an uncomfortable pit in her stomach as she tried to put thoughts of Lee Jung and the orphanage out of her mind, but she knew that it wasn’t impossible.

Except that she didn’t know what to do with any of that. She liked both of them! How could she choose? What if she chose wrong? What if she found out that she couldn’t handle being in a relationship after all? How could she live with herself after breaking the heart of one or both of her dearest friends?

“I’ve got it!”

Before she could find an answer, Jia was snapped out of her thoughts by Yue’s exclamation. Jia rolled over slowly, not sure if she should be thankful or resentful towards Yue for pulling her out of that train of thought.

“You did?”

Yue crossed her arms and frowned.

“What kind of a reaction is that!? And why is your face so red? Actually—don’t answer that. I found the connection, and I opened the meridian that links my dantian to my heart!”

Jia smiled, then jerked upright and did a double-take.

“Wait, you what!? Already?”

Yue puffed her chest out proudly and grinned smugly.

“It was a simple task for one of my talents! Hardly worth mentioning compared to breaking through to the core forming stage!”

Jia felt herself getting caught up in the excitement, momentarily forgetting the introspection she had just been doing.

“That’s amazing! That means that we were right! Anybody can learn to practice unified cultivation if they just—”

She cut herself off, remembering how reluctant Dae had been. Yue smiled sympathetically.

“All they have to do is give up everything they’ve spent their entire lives working toward and start again from scratch. The Snake’s insistence on inducting mortals into the academy is looking more and more prescient.”

Jia sighed, slumping back down into the couch.

“It’s not going to be easy to convince anybody who’s already advanced into the second stage to give that up. Oh, ancestors—Hayakawa and Dae are practically in the third stage already. They had both been holding off on breaking through in hopes that they would be able to unify their cultivation.”

“And people will be even more hesitant with the tournament coming up. It’s too bad you couldn’t have discovered this a month ago.”

Jia leveled a flat look at Yue.

“Whose fault is that, exactly?”

Yue at least had the good grace to avert her eyes in shame.

“A-anyway, I doubt you’ll have much trouble convincing Minami—she’s practically worshipping the ground you walk on, now. Same for the others in our little study group. Do you suppose that once I finish opening the connections I’ll be able to sense that domain of yours?”

“Tsk, you probably would if it wasn’t still sealed. After what Elder Qin did, I can barely sense my own domain. Eui and I still have no idea how to break that seal.”

Yue bit her thumbnail and hummed thoughtfully.

“Hmm, it might not be my place to say this—but I think you’re thinking about that the wrong way. Rather than a ‘seal’ you need to ‘break’, I suspect that its true nature is something else. I’m no expert on xiantian domains, but it shouldn’t be possible to forcibly restrict them like that—especially not as casually as Elder Qin did. I suspect there’s something more subtle at play.”

“Hmm...maybe. That’s not really that helpful, though.”

Yue shrugged.

“Maybe not, but sometimes a small change in perspective is all you need for a breakthrough. Cultivation is a mysterious thing, at times.”

“Something to think about, I guess. I’m going to go tell Eui about our progress.”

Yue sighed, her expression turning a bit dour as she glanced furtively towards the door that led out to the courtyard.

“I...will make myself scarce, then. I am sure I can continue this meditation more easily from the privacy of my own room. I suspect that bridging the connection between my body and mind will be much more difficult, as I am less familiar with those disciplines.”

“Alright, good luck. And uh, Yue?”

Yue glanced back, already halfway to her room.

“Thanks for your help. You didn’t have to completely change your cultivation method just to test a theory for us.”

Yue waved her off, adopting her usual haughty grin, though Jia couldn’t help but feel like it was a bit forced.

“Think nothing of it, Jia! If anything it’s you who’s done me a favor. I just—”

Yue’s expression fell as she seemed to struggle with something internally.

“No, nevermind. Don’t hesitate to ask if you need anything else.”

Jia watched with a frown as Yue retreated to her room. It was difficult to understand what she was thinking sometimes, and Jia couldn’t help but wonder just what Yue had been about to say. For better or worse, Jia had too many problems of her own to trouble herself with trying to figure out Yue’s.