Jia’s courtyard garden had been transformed. Well, it was really Yue’s garden, and the changes were her idea anyway. The flowers had been replanted so that they were all directly adjacent to the walls, while the patio in the center had been extended to encompass most of the inner yard, leaving only a thin patch of grass between it and the flowers. Most of the newly expanded patio was covered in a huge, complex formation designed by Dae and engraved by Eunae. The girls admired the handiwork as Eunae completed the finishing touches—a pair of comfortable cushions in the center of it all.

Yue gave the entire thing an approving nod.

“This should do nicely! Hyeong has outdone himself.”

Eunae wiped a bit of sweat from her brow and chuckled wryly.

“You have no idea. He had to design this formation in a way that I would be able to replicate. He kept complaining that if he could draw it himself he would simply design it as a matrix instead of an array.”

Jia cocked her head curiously at Eunae.

“What’s the difference?”

“An array is a set of formations overlaid within each other. A matrix is the same, except that each individual formation is an array.”

Jia felt dizzy just trying to think about it.

“How would you even draw that?”

“I don’t know. That’s why Dae designed this formation as a single array instead.”

Yue cast a withering glare at Jia.

“You’re going to need to learn to do this yourself next time, so you’d better study hard. The breakthrough to xiantian is much more dangerous, and a formation that isn’t perfectly suited to you is worse than none at all.”

“Why all the preparation anyway? Hayakawa and Dae didn’t do all this, did they?”

Yue scoffed and shook her head.

“What makes you think they didn’t? I promise you that Dae has a similar formation designed for his own needs, and I’m sure Miss Hayakawa had her own preparations. Breaking through is not normally something one does lightly.”

Jia shrunk back from Yue’s chiding while Eui casually inspected the formation.

“So what does all this do, anyway? I can read bits of it, but this circle is really dense—good work, by the way, Eunae.”

Eunae smiled and bowed.

“Thank you, Eui! It’s a combination of things, of course—a mana flow inscription, which is a little bit different from a mana gathering one. Mana gathering pulls mana in to improve density, while a mana flow formation simply keeps whatever mana is present moving. It doesn’t help with meditation efficiency, but it can keep that efficiency up for longer periods.

“On top of that, there are some minor balancing formations which are commonly used in Qin to aid in the breakthroughs of cultivators that specialize in certain elements. In this case, the balance of water and earth mana should be raised to compensate for your unfinished plasma and sky techniques—luckily we can use the neutral elements, since their yin and yang natures balance out.

“Finally, sound dampening and minor shielding inscriptions. The sound, just to create a more quiet atmosphere for meditation, and the shielding to prevent wind, rain, or other minor debris from causing distraction.”

Jia stood agape, glancing between Eunae, Yue, and Rika—who had been standing back and quietly grinning at her.

“You guys did all this for us?”

Rika laughed and patted her on the shoulder.

“Mostly for you, actually! Happy birthday, Jia!”

Jia blinked in confusion before she realized that it had gotten late into autumn without her even realizing it.

“Uh, I don’t actually know when my birthday is—or exactly how old I am, for that matter.”

Eui shrugged.

“It’s been a year to the day since we met, and you know your birthday is in autumn, why not just call it today? That would make you, what, sixteen? Same age as me.”

Jia paused.

“Wait, when are everyone else’s birthdays?”

Eui chuckled wryly.

“Mine was back in spring, but it kinda got overshadowed by everything happening.”

She shot a nasty look at Yue, who shrunk back and averted her eyes before mumbling.

“I’ll be turning nineteen this winter.”

Eunae raised a hand.

“Mine is in winter as well. I’ll be seventeen.”

Rika chimed in last, giving Jia a wink as she spoke.

“Mine was back in summer, you missed it because you were too busy almost dying.”

Jia flushed with embarrassment.

“This isn’t fair! I didn’t do anything for any of your birthdays! How am I supposed to make this up to you?”

Yue shook her head.

“None of us are acting purely altruistically, Jia. We all stand to benefit if you manage to complete your breakthrough quickly. Besides, to hear the others tell it, you’ve already repaid them a dozen times over.”

Eunae nodded.

“The advancements I’ve made with my ancestral technique and my spiritual breakthrough are thanks to you—plus, you saved our lives back in spring.”

Rika chimed in with her own agreement.

“Yeah, and I’ve adopted your new cultivation method in order to reinvent my family’s technique. Wouldn’t be able to do it without you, even if you are kind of a shit teacher.”

“Hey!”

Rika shrugged unapologetically.

“It’s true.”

Yue rolled her eyes.

“Jia’s pedagogical deficiencies aside, we all owe you something. If not for you giving me far more chances than I ever deserved, I’d be doomed to death or worse. Were I in your position, I’d have killed me a long time ago—and I’m rather glad that you didn’t.”

Jia felt her eyes starting to water before Yue suddenly cuffed her in the back of the head.

“Ow! What was that for!?”

“Don’t get all emotional right before an important breakthrough! Here, take these.” Yue handed Jia and Eui each a small, translucent purple pill. “These are energy balancing pills—which I thankfully did not have to source from Han Yu this time. They won’t affect your cultivation, but they will calm the natural turbulence of your meridians for a short while. Meditate just to relax for a few hours before you begin your actual breakthrough attempt.”

Jia nodded seriously.

“Thank you, Yue. I don’t know what to say.”

Yue faltered for a moment before returning to her usual haughty attitude.

“Just don’t blow up my garden with some heavenly tribulation, alright? I don’t think the courtyard will survive a lightning strike.”

The blood drained from Jia’s face.

“Wait, what!? Is that a thing that can happen?”

Yue shrugged.

“Usually only to xiantian cultivators, but I’m not about to take my chances on anything you do being normal. Try not to die—there’s only so much we can do against the heavens themselves trying to smite you. Good luck!”

Yue turned and left the sputtering Jia behind. Eunae bowed and said her farewells more politely.

“Good luck, you two. We’ll be here if you need anything.”

Rika gave them a wave before retreating back into the house with Eunae.

“Good luck, Yoshika!”

Jia and Eui were left alone as Rika slid the door closed behind her. They took their seats in the center of the formation, facing each other as Eui shot Jia a playful smirk.

“Are you nervous?”

It was a silly question, they were both nervous and they could feel each other’s emotions. Jia giggled.

“When we first awakened, we saw each other’s memories. When we broke through to the second stage, Yoshika was born and we started to feel each other’s emotions, hear each other’s thoughts, and even share physical sensation a little bit.”

Eui nodded sagely.

“I finally got to tickle you back for once.”

“I still don’t understand how you’re able to tickle yourself. That’s honestly cheating.”

Eui chuckled darkly.

“Heh, I’m a girl of many talents.”

“Anyway, I guess I’m just kind of—not worried, just...anxious? I don’t know what to expect from this. At what point do we stop being Jia and Eui and just become...Yoshika? Will it be when we reach xiantian? Will it be now? Am I ready for it to be now? Are you?”

Eui bowed her head solemnly.

“Already becoming one and we haven’t even had our first date yet.”

Jia slapped Eui playfully, but she couldn’t keep the giggle out of her voice.

“Don’t be gross! Haha!”

“Hehehe, seriously though—I don’t think we’ll ever stop being ourselves. You’re you, I’m me, we’re both Yoshika, and Yoshika is both of us. I think it’ll just be more like...Yoshika’s the default, maybe? There’s really no way to know for sure, and it’s not like it changes anything, does it?”

Jia sighed.

“I guess not. Should we get started, then?”

Eui nodded, and the two of them took the pills Yue had given them, joined hands, and settled in for a marathon meditation session.

Yoshika sat in quiet meditation. The world around her was still and silent—the formation at work. Yoshika herself was just as still. The pills provided by Yue had dispersed a calming energy throughout her bodies, leaving her in a state of perfect stillness of body, mind, and soul. Once the energy had done its work, it was expelled harmlessly through her breath—as promised, they didn’t leave anything behind to affect her cultivation.

From that state of stillness, it was much easier to control the energy within her, and Yoshika could ease herself into her breakthrough. She almost hated to admit it, but Yue clearly knew her stuff. Then again, Yue had already done what Yoshika was attempting before—well, maybe not exactly what she was attempting, but still.

Before starting, Yoshika reviewed the normal breakthrough requirements for each of the disciplines. For spiritual arts, her qi had entirely condensed into a more ‘liquid’ form and once again filled her dantians. Once again, her qi would have to go through a qualitative change to make room. This time, she would further compress her qi until it formed a solid core.

It occurred to her that this was extremely similar to what she had done to form Eui’s core, and though she didn’t have a clear memory of it, probably Jia’s as well. That was weird—why would Qin be so vehemently opposed to solid essence cores in the body when their common practice involved forming one in the dantian? Questions for another time.

It was more difficult than it sounded, in practice, but at least that part of her breakthrough was easy to understand. The main risk was failing to compress her qi and overstraining her dantian. In the best case, she’d suffer some backlash and have to start over, while the worst cases could involve burst meridians, permanently destroyed cultivation, or even death. There was a reason that breakthroughs like this weren’t taken lightly.

For martial arts—the breakthrough that had just been accomplished by Hayakawa—it was a little bit different. The bottleneck was still caused by a saturation of ki within the body—there was just nowhere left to put it, but the solution was a bit different. In order to advance to the third stage, Yoshika would need to transform parts of her bodies into ki. That was how it was described, anyway.

In that, she realized she had an advantage. Ki was essence—fundamentally the same substance as qi and mana. Mana was what spirits were made of. That’s why Heian could exist within her soulscape—she was part of Yoshika while still also being a distinct being. Yoshika’s bodies were half spirit, and already partially made of mana—in other words, ki. Perhaps she could focus on that aspect and build off of it for her breakthrough.

Finally, her mental cultivation—also known as arcane arts, or magic. It was her weakest subject by far, which was ironic considering that it was where she had first awakened. Aside from the actual drawing and casting of spells and formations, arcane arts focused on improving the mind. The discipline was fairly light on non-spell techniques, but they did exist. Her Absolute Awareness was just one example of that. Those techniques mostly focused on improving memory, perception, and auras. Controlling one’s own aura, reading someone else's, or hiding and sensing the presence of other cultivators all fell under the broad umbrella of a mage’s aura.

Yoshika’s aura had been completely replaced by her domain, which was similar but different in the most frustrating ways. She had been completely unable to figure out aura control until the magic instructors had worked backwards to teach her the xiantian version of the technique. Now, Yoshika could control the elements within her domain just fine, but she was still often tripped up when trying to learn things that usually relied on a mage’s aura.

She’d discussed the topic at length with the Magi Hwang and Do Hye, but neither of them were certain what her breakthrough would look like. The Grand Magus had theorized that perhaps her mental cultivation was what tied the other disciplines together into her unified cultivation method, while Hwang Sung insisted that her soulscape must be the key to advancing further. With those ideas in mind, Yoshika decided that for her mental cultivation, she would focus on developing her soulscape and comprehending her own domain.

With a plan in place, all that was left was to execute it. Yoshika took another few moments to empty her mind of any leftover distractions. It was critical that she gave this her full focus and didn’t make any mistakes. Her attention would be split three ways, and while her nature as a gestalt being made multitasking come more easily to her, it still strained her focus.

Starting out gradually, she began to draw in essence through her domain. Normally, since it had nowhere to go, she would just breathe most of what she had taken in right back out again, but this time she focused on retaining it as she pushed herself to break through the bottleneck.

When she had first broken through to the second stage, Yoshika had been in a desperate hurry, trying to compress her qi as quickly as possible, which had resulted in ‘squeezing’ it over and over again until it’s phase finally changed. This time Yoshika could be more careful, slowly increasing the pressure as she gathered more qi. She had to be careful, as a sudden slip in concentration could cause her qi to explode and rupture her meridians, or even her dantian itself.

Meanwhile, in her bodies, she had begun the process of turning parts of herself into ki. She was very glad for her spiritual heritage now, as it acted like a guide that she could use to compare her efforts against. At first she thought that maybe the expressions of her heritage would be the parts that were made of energy, but that didn’t turn out to be the case. Rather, it was more like every part of her was a combination between physical matter and essence.

The more she focused, the deeper she could go into the parts of parts of parts that made up her bodies. She’d studied the physiology of humans and half-spirits and the small differences between them, but seeing it for herself was something else entirely. As she stretched her focus, every small part of her could be broken down into even smaller pieces, which in turn could be broken into components of their own.

Each time she focused her intent on a smaller piece of herself, some of what she focused on would be made of ki, but even the parts that seemed to be made of energy could be broken down further into a more complex mix of physical and metaphysical elements. Tentatively, Yoshika tried to direct some of her ki to take the form of one of the smallest physical pieces that she could focus on—a single cell. The ki slowly took the form of the cell, then moved to replace it.

Yoshika immediately knew that she hadn’t done it right. The new cell didn’t break down further like the other parts of herself—it was completely uniform. While it conducted and stored her ki more efficiently, it no longer functioned the way a real piece of her body was supposed to. She could probably replace most of her body this way while still surviving and functioning, but eventually she would reach a point where there was nothing left to replace without destroying critical parts of her body.

She purged the new cell and allowed her natural healing to replace it with a normal one. She tried again, this time forming each of the smaller pieces of the cell one by one. The result was better, but not perfect. If she concentrated extremely hard, she could see that the pieces of the cell she had recreated should normally break down even further, but again the ones she made were uniform.

She realized that if she was going to properly emulate the parts of herself that were already made of ki, it would require her to replicate them starting from the absolute smallest part, bit by bit. Except she wasn’t sure what the smallest part was or if there even was a smallest part. Maybe it was some kind of infinite recursion of smaller and smaller components that made up all of existence. As she was, she didn’t think she was capable of comprehending the tiniest parts that made up the human body.

As she was, that is. She was in the process of fundamentally improving herself, and she wasn’t about to take half measures on this just because it was difficult. Once more, she discarded the failed attempt and tried again, trying to go a little smaller, a little deeper each time. With each attempt, she discarded the result and tried again. She would keep practicing this for as long as it took, until her control of essence and her ability to perceive the tiniest parts of herself had reached its absolute peak.

Yan Yue was relaxing in her living room, enjoying a nice cup of tea. Eunae and Takeda had been staying over while Jia and Eui attempted to break through to the third stage, and Eunae had exceptional taste in tea. They had been making excellent strides in their training—not only had Yue and Takeda both managed to reach the second stage of unified cultivation, but Takeda had also managed to develop her own domain.

It was incredibly productive, having someone else with a domain to practice her control with. Yoshika could effortlessly suppress Yue’s domain, while Jia and Eui individually could still do it with a bit of focus. Yue didn’t even know how to fight back before, but now that she had Takeda to practice with, she was quickly learning the intricacies of the domain.

For example, she’d learned how to partially comprehend the domains of others. She didn’t dare probe Yoshika’s while she was breaking through, but she could sense a vague feeling of competitiveness and determination from Takeda’s. A fairly predictable path for the hot-headed girl who had challenged her little brother to a duel on the very first day.

Yue felt a small twinge of melancholy when she thought about her little brother. She hadn’t liked him at all—he was an utter brat, but then, she had been as well. To her surprise, she missed him a little bit. As irritating as he was, he’d been the only real family she had, apart from her mother. Her father had never really been present, and barely thought of her as a human anyway.

She really missed her mother. It was a sad realization—that she’d probably never see her mother again, and that her brother was dead. She had nobody, and before meeting Jia and Eui, Yue had never realized just how starved for companionship she really was. All her life, she’d never had a single person she could truly call a friend. Now, even the memory of Zhihao’s smug grin as he bragged about the way he’d wielded his father’s influence made her feel lonely.

Yue shook her head as if it could knock loose the dark thoughts. To distract herself, she went to check on Jia and Eui. It had been over three weeks—nearly a month, now—without so much as a peep from them. That was fairly typical for a well-prepared breakthrough of a talented individual, and normally, it would just be a matter of time. The fact that things were so normal only worried Yue more. Jia and Eui were never normal, and things going smoothly became an abnormality of its own when they were involved.

Yue slid the door to the courtyard open and found the two girls right where she’d left them, sitting in the center of the far-too-extravagant formation, hands joined and foreheads touching. Yue did her best to ignore their obvious relationship—it was none of her business—but they were not nearly as subtle as they thought they were. Such relationships were frowned upon in Qin, but Yue made a conscious effort not to let her cultural biases cloud her judgement. She didn’t always succeed.

In any case, it was clear that the two of them were fine. Nothing had changed, and it seemed unlikely that anything was going—

Yue’s thoughts were interrupted by a distant, low rumbling sound. She glanced around curiously. Was it an earthquake of some kind? That shouldn’t be happening here. A landslide on the mountain? Maybe some xiantian cultivators were fighting nearby. She was almost prepared to shrug it off, when the dark, cynical part of herself that always expected the very worst bid her to look up.

There, far up in the sky, was a single dark cloud far far higher than any cloud should be. The cloud swirled ominously, growing larger at an almost imperceptibly slow rate. A tiny, purple flash of lightning streaked across it, followed several moments later by that same rumbling sound that Yue had heard.

Yue’s eyes widened, her blood froze, and a cold sweat broke out across her entire body. She tried to swallow, but her mouth was completely dry. In a moment of desperate denial, Yue looked around for other clouds, some other explanation, anything—but there was nothing else. The sky was completely clear.

“By the fucking emperor! I was joking!”

Yue turned around and dashed back into the house, not even bothering to close the door behind her as she called out urgently.

“Eunae! Rika! We have an emergency!”

Takeda emerged from Jia and Eui’s bedroom, rubbing her eyes sleepily.

“Since when were we on a given name basis?”

“We don’t have time to debate formality, where’s Eunae!?”

Takeda blinked at her, quickly becoming more alert as her brain caught up with what she was hearing.

“Uh, I think Eun-eun went out to get more tea—what’s wrong? Is Yoshika okay?”

Yue shook her head.

“Go find her—no, get Elder Qin—or the mages—fuck, we need to alert all of the deans!”

Rika’s eyes widened in alarm.

“What!? Yue, what the fuck is going on?”

Yue began running for the door—to hell with her house arrest. She called back over her shoulder.

“It’s their breakthrough. I don’t know how or why, but they are summoning a heavenly tribulation!”