We returned to the main hall. The sound of strikes and the whistle of bdes hit my ears again, but now I looked at everything differently. With more interest. After all, I’d be swinging a sabre myself soon enough.

  Eriksen led me to the nearest rack of pstic swords and pulled down a sabre. It looked heavy, with a broad, gently curved bde, a massive cup-shaped guard, and a pin grip without decoration. No fir. Just a weapon made for work.

  “That way,” he said, pointing the sabre toward the other end of the hall, where a bunch of dummies and standing targets were lined up.

  He found us a free training niche with a four-armed mechanism and told me to stand in the square yellow frame marked around the mannequin and hold the sabre. Then he jogged off to a far corner and came back carrying two short pstic ropes, blue and as thick as my forearm. The ends were fused into solid bck spheres to stop the fibres from unwind.

  Eriksen rigged the mannequin to hold the ropes vertically in each pair of hands, then picked up the sabre.

  “Point,” he said, taking a few test swings and checking the bance, “Point, as Qi, condenses to a single point. A bde is curved, but remember geometry. A curve is still a line, and to draw a line, you need at least two points.”

  “The tip,” he pointed at the not-very-sharp pstic tip of the sabre, “is one of those points. But the second point is here.” He tapped the rough cutting edge near the guard. “Two points. Tip, and here. Bde Qi should pass between them. Not spread across the entire bde, but circute from tip to guard on the outside, from guard to tip along the inner core.”

  “So, it’s not a curve anymore,” I noted. “It’s a circle.”

  “Technically, the correct term is a closed curve. A circle has all points equidistant from the centre...” He looked like he had to physically restrain himself from commenting on the cleverness of my remark. “Doesn’t matter.”

  He didn’t argue or philosophise. Just took a stance, left hand tucked behind his back, and brought the sabre up, aligning it with the rope.

  “No Qi,” Eriksen said, and struck.

  Despite the clean hit, the sabre’s pstic edge slipped and bounced off the blue fibres. Eriksen turned his wrist and brought the sabre into a new strike path.

  “With Qi,” he said. And I felt it, that cold, sharp threat.

  The pstic bde sliced through the rope like it was cutting water. The blue fibres fanned outward, then slowly began to unwind.

  “Any questions?”

  “Can’t really put it into words,” I shook my head. “Need to try.”

  I reached for the sabre, but Eriksen tossed it over his shoulder.

  “Not with that!” he said, then dropped the sabre to the floor and went back to the racks. He returned with two curved daggers — a matching pair, broad and shaped more like kitchen knives, but with guards.

  “These are yours,” he said, handing them to me hilt-first.

  I took them and weighed them in my hands. They were practically weightless.

  “The further apart your reference points are,” Eriksen continued, resuming his lecture, “the harder it is to fill them, and to connect them.

  “On a long bde, it’s more difficult. And you don’t need it anyway. You said yourself, you’re not aiming to fight with a sword, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Then there’s no point training with one. Worst case, you’ll waste weeks just learning how to charge a long bde. But with daggers, the points are closer. Less effort, less load, and you’ll grasp the principle faster.”

  It felt like Eriksen was skipping something.

  I knew of two paths for learning a new type of Qi. In fact, both had been introduced to me by Rene. But with him, we’d gone for the brute-force approach. I hadn’t worried much about channels, just flooded my fists with Qi, dumped everything I had into them. Wild, wasteful, totally cking in finesse. Crude, but fast.

  My first clumsy projection hadn’t taken long.

  Sure, after that I had to spend ages building proper channels for specific techniques, but I already understood Fist Qi. I could convert my internal energy into it.

  The second method was more structured, more refined. I’d used it when learning Wind Qi. The technique, the channel architecture, and hundreds of incense sticks I’d burned to trace the visual flow of the technique. Minimal energy cost, maximum discipline. Elegant, precise, professional, but the training dragged on forever.

  Two models. Two philosophies. And I couldn’t say one had a clear advantage over the other. It depended on the circumstances.

  I didn’t want to waste weeks polishing technique. Especially since I didn’t have a technique yet. I needed discs and telekinesis, not a swordsman’s career.

  “I’ve got two ways to start,” I said. “I can just flood the points with energy and not worry about efficiency — crude, uncontrolled, but fast. Or I can build channels for a disc-throwing technique and work through them. What’s the better option?”

  That question had also been a test for Eriksen. If I didn’t like the answer, I’d change instructors.

  “The first option. We just isote Bde Qi. In bde techniques, the points are fixed, and the Qi’s return flow goes inside the bde, but in discs, it does loop in a circle. And that’s not something you need cluttering your head right now. Your starting point should be simpler. Simplicity is the foundation of brilliance.”

  “So, first option,” I said, pleased with the answer.

  “Yes, but not just yet. Before that…”

  Eriksen took up a stance with empty fists, holding them as though gripping dagger hilts.

  “A simple, diagonal cutting motion: from top right to lower left,” he demonstrated. “Then mirror it with the other hand. No unnecessary pauses. Right hand cuts — left hand rises. Left cuts — right rises. Like breathing. No jerking. No showing off. Just a pin cycle. As simple as it gets.

  “First the physical form, then the energy. First the movement of the dagger, then Bde Qi.”

  I mimicked the motion. It felt strangely hollow. No force, no charge. Just a mechanical body movement. Shoulder, elbow, wrist in the right order. The instructor gently adjusted my wrist angle, nudged my elbow a few centimetres.

  “Now on the rope.”

  I struck.

  The pstic bde slid over the blue fibres, barely leaving a scratch.

  Second strike with the left and same faint scrape. Third — no different. Mechanical gliding, no impact. One-two, one-two...

  And I kept repeating.

  Shoulder. Elbow. Wrist. Shifting weight between legs. Rotating the torso. Breathing. Just dull, repetitive mechanics, not to be underestimated. I’d had enough of that with Chain Punch and the Hook.

  It’s always the first step. And Eriksen, it seemed, knew exactly what he was doing.

  Once I began to feel the rhythm, Eriksen nodded.

  “Enough. That’ll do. We don’t need perfect precision.”

  “Now try feeding in qi,” Eriksen said, like it was the most mundane thing in the world. “Not much. Just let the points know they’re supposed to activate. No big surge.”

  I took a breath and stepped half a pace towards the rope, and froze.

  Eriksen was skipping steps again. For example, he skipped the entire process of drawing qi from my core, through my arms, and into the training bdes.

  Then again, by Second Stage I should already be able to do that.

  The problem was avoiding my existing channels, the ones that would automatically shape the flow into Fist Qi or Wind Qi.

  “One more thing,” the instructor added, in the tone of someone remembering an irrelevant footnote. “I’ve no idea how this’ll work for you.”

  Good thing I hadn’t started yet.

  “For most cadets, if Bde’s their second qi,” he said, “their primary qi strongly affects the result early on. What comes out is usually a mixed qi. Mostly their main one, with just a touch of Bde.”

  “Fire cultivators set everything abze. Water cultivators freeze their bdes solid and shatter them. We give them special bdes.”

  “But I’ve no idea what that’ll look like with Fist.”

  “Sounds like fun…” I muttered, remembering the swollen hands from my first attempt at shield activation. Unless... “Bde isn’t my second,” I added. “It’s my third qi. Second’s Wind.”

  “Oh! Well that’s just great.”

  He took a step back. Then another. And on the third, he stopped.

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “You really know how to inspire confidence.”

  “Don’t mind me,” he said, gesturing toward the rope. “Cut.”

  I adjusted my grip again. Right foot forward. Left back. Core rexed. Shoulder. Elbow. Wrist. Breathe. Rehearse the cycle without the bde in mind. The dagger lifted.

  Ssh. Ssh. Ssh…

  I drew a thread of energy from my internal core, my reactor. Then remembered I was supposed to use the rougher approach and pulled harder. Whole protuberans of Qi, right and left. It surged out in a wild, barely controlled torrent. I directed it into my shoulders, from there, it moved on its own.

  The energy didn’t flow through the channels. Mine had been shaped mostly by red techniques — fine, delicate channels. This flow was too thick, too aggressive. It flooded my muscles, bones, joints and tendons. In a split second it was in my palms, and I pushed it further. My experience with Wind Qi helped a little, but I couldn’t focus on two points at once.

  The qi overflowed into the pstic daggers, oversaturating them.

  At the very st moment before impact, the right one fshed silver.

  A projection formed around the bde, but without direction, without purpose. It clung to the weapon like something stuck. It had hardness and strengths, but no sharpness, only a bit of stubborn determination, and absolutely no sense of flow.

  The energy just sat there. At least until the bde hit the rope.

  Pstic met pstic plus wrong qi.

  The projection did what all Fist projections did.

  It detonated.

  My hand went numb from the shockwave, which punched through even the thick armour of my gauntlet. Shards of pstic scattered in every direction.

  Driven by reflex, I struck again with the left, and the same thing happened.

  Fragments of the dagger sprayed across the hall like shrapnel, and the loud double crack drew the attention of the other cadets.

  I shook out my hands, trying to chase off the pain and numbness.

  Eriksen stepped back over to me.

  “Interesting!” he said, picking up a piece of the dagger that hadn’t flown far. It looked like the pommel, but it was so warped it was hard to tell. “I think you’re going to need something a lot more durable.”

  “Seriously?” I asked. “You think it’d be better if a steel bde detonated? So sharp metal shrapnel could start flying round the hall?”

  “Don’t overestimate yourself! You think you can break a real bde made for combat?”

  “I think it costs a fortune and I don’t want to risk it. Even if it survives the detonation, it’ll rip straight out of my hands. And who the hell knows where it’ll end up flying. I’d rather not find it sticking out of my neck. Armour is thin there.”

  If it’s in my hand when it goes off, neither the amulet nor any formation will help me.

  “You’ve got a point,” Eriksen admitted. “It could be dangerous.”

  Tossing the pommel in his hand, he turned back to the rope dummy.

  There wasn’t a single visible cut, but the explosion had torn several fibres loose, and now they stuck out at odd angles.

  MaksymPachesiuk