He is not allowed to defend himself. He needs to not get into fights at all. Even if he can still win them. And he won't be able to for long. He's Unsouled. The rest of the children are being taught better cycling methods, ones designed as the basis for specific techniques. Ones that are better than the one he knows. Soon they'll be taught techniques. If he is struck, he is to fall to his knees and apologize for annoying his betters.

He will never hit Copper. He will never have enough madra to do- anything, really. He will not be allowed to learn his clan's Path, the Path of the White Fox.

That is what it means to be Unsouled.

It doesn't make sense. It's stupid. So what if he'll never be as strong as the others? Why should that mean he can't learn anything at all? That's worse for the clan. Better to have a Foundation stage Lindon who can do- something. Even if it's not a lot, something is better than nothing. It doesn't cost anyone anything to let him read a Path manual.

His father tells him that he doesn't understand. It is simply the way things are done. And tells him to never say that outside of the walls of their house. He looks concerned. Almost frightened.

His mother has a different look on her face. Pity. But she doesn't offer to help him at the next test. Or to sneak him a Path manual. 

He is not tested a third time until he is eight. This time, he is more prepared.

He sneaks in the night before to carve a script into the underside of the table the bowl rests on. The entire thing should shake enough to make the madra in the bowl wobble. He doesn't really know what he's doing, scripting is complicated, but this script is about as simple as it gets and his mom lets him read her scripting books. They're not techniques, you see. He's not forbidden from that. 

He's tested it on the kitchen table at home. It will work. It will barely look like the madra is moving, but he can send madra from his hand through the table and into the script the entire time it's in the bowl and then stop when he takes his hand out. It will look just like he's the weakest, most pathetic Ruler ever to live, but it will make him look like a Ruler. Anything is better than being an Unsouled.

Anything at all.

The table is smaller. That's what ruins him, in the end. The script outputs the same amount of force, and the table is smaller. It shakes more. A lot more. Enough to be visibly moving, along with the bowl. The First Elder finds the script he's carved into the underside of the table.

Lindon apologizes on his hands and knees, and manages to grovel well enough to avoid being struck. 

What can he do, if he's stuck like this? Is there any place for him? Anything at all he can do that matters?

There are some things, it turns out. He can learn to script just as well as anyone else. He'll never be able to activate any powerful scripts, but he can inscribe ones better sacred artists use. He can do some of the grunt work for the real Soulsmiths like his mother.

He will never be able to fight. He will never matter.

What if he could reach Copper anyway, though? Cycling strengthens your spirit, and when your spirit is strong enough you ascend to Copper. What if he just does more of it? More than anyone else? If he's using it to do anything he'll run out, but just cycling alone is supposed to do something. The slow motion of madra out of his core, through his body, and back to his core should, over time, strengthen him, even if he is Unsouled. They say if he's lucky the by old age the natural strength of his spirit will eventually grow to the point where he will advance to Copper. A normal child is considered slow if it takes them until fourteen. But that just means it is possible.

But all he has is the most basic of basic cycling methods. The one they teach Foundation stage children to prepare themselves for the more specialized, more powerful cycling techniques they learn after they know their affinity. It's better than nothing. But not by much. 

He begs his mother to teach him. His father. His older sister. All of them say no. If it was learned, they would be punished. His father's leg could heal if he advances to Jade, his mother could do so much more with her Soulsmithing, and most importantly the future of his sister, Kelsa, will be determined by how well she grows over the next ten years. If she does well in the Seven Year Festival she will get the resources she needs to be Iron in time for the next Festival, and if she does well or even wins at that, she could reach Jade. She's so talented. And she won't get any of that if the family is punished for teaching an Unsouled things he should not know. If they're snubbed when it comes time to decide which of the youngest generation get bits of spirit fruit in order to fuel their advancement to Copper. Or when it comes time to decide whether Seisha or another Soulsmith is given some well-paying task that would allow them to purchase a spirit fruit themselves, or instead the job is given to a rival.

He could keep it secret? Nobody would have to know until after he'd advanced to Copper and proved he deserved to learn it. He's sure if they teach him he can do just as well as the other children- he might need to work harder than them but he will. He'll cycle in his room for six hours a day. He'll get good enough at not expending his madra on refreshing his muscles to it all day.

But no. They don't believe him. Sure, they know he'd try. It wouldn't matter, though. He's Unsouled. Everyone knows what that means. It's just not possible.

He tries to invent his own better technique exactly once. It seems to work for nearly an hour, and then suddenly he's waking up and apparently two days have passed.

His mother says he's lucky to be alive with the way he strained his spirit.

He's noticeably weaker after that, for a while. He makes up what he lost in a few weeks, but- no, he can't afford to move backwards. Everyone else is moving on. Going so much faster.

Every six months he goes to the test after all the other students, the bowl left out for him out of the hope that the heavens will have mercy on him. Every six months the madra fails to move.

The first other child advances to Copper at nine.

He starts helping in the clan archives when he's eleven. When his mother doesn't have an errand for him to run he spends some time between noon and the evening meal returning books and scrolls to their place on shelves, or sweeping the front step of the building. The building is small, nondescript. You'd have no idea it was the archive just looking at it, but that's how the Wei clan does things. Better if any invading group from the Li or Kazan clans can't identify the archives so easily. It's different for the home of the Patriarch, or of an Elder, but nobody lives here.

He waits a month, and then copies a cycling technique from the Path of the White Fox out of a Path manual and onto a scrap of paper. He folds the bit of paper and places it within his pocket.

And then- pain. He finds himself on the ground, completely unaware of how he got there, the side of his head throbbing. 

The Eighth Elder is standing above him. The Eighth Elder has been in the room the entire time, completely invisible to Lindon's gaze, hidden behind the Fox Mirror technique.

The Eighth Elder is kind. He waited to see if Lindon would realize what he was doing was wrong and throw away the scrap of paper. He hasn't, and so now he must be punished.

Luckily, as far as the Eighth Elder is concerned, a strike to the side of his head from a Jade is punishment enough for a child.

Lindon is grateful, and manages to bow and thank the Eighth Elder even if the room is spinning.

The Eight Elder can't always be watching. But he does make Lindon turn out his pockets at the end of the day. Last time had to be bad luck. Sometimes when he leaves he finds the Eighth Elder unconscious on the roof, snoring in the afternoon sun.

What if he just memorizes the instructions?

The answer, it turns out, is that the elder was, once again, inside the room.

He is not as merciful, this time. He is left well enough to work, however, even if it hurts.

He's lucky they let him keep working in the archives, frankly. He should probably stop trying to peek at the Path manuals. For a while, anyway. A few months.

His father congratulates him on his work ethic. Most of the children his age haven't found a way to contribute, yet, beyond chores at their family's compound. It's good that he's trying to make up for his nature.

He's not allowed to look at the Path manuals. That really does leave a lot of the library free for him to look at. Memoirs. Legends. He won't ever be a great hero himself, but he can read about them. He finds the first thing that he thinks might save him that way. A letter, written by an explorer who had travelled to each of the four great peaks that surrounded Sacred Valley, his home. It's in her description of the pool at the top of Greatfather that he thinks he sees salvation.

One handful of water restored my aching body and flagging spirit. Two sent me into a cycling trance from which I would not emerge for three nights and days, having imparted to my spirit a density and potency that I had never before known. As I had not bathed in all that time, I dipped myself briefly into the spring, only to find the water anything but gentle. It scoured my arm like a frozen blade, and when I removed my hand, I found my skin more youthful and supple than ever before, in great contrast to the rest of my body. I advise any artist of the Jade to visit Greatfather’s peak as soon as they are able, provided they can withstand the storms and the pain of the pool itself.

He goes home and excitedly tells his parents. Surely, if anything could cure him, that would be it.

But no,  he is told, the Holy Wind School makes the Greatfather their home. And each of the four schools of Sacred Valley is as powerful as any two of the three clans put together. They would perhaps allow the Patriarch of the Wei Clan the right to use the pool at the top of the mountain that they make their home upon, for sufficiently generous gifts. Perhaps if he were a clan elder, even. But not a Foundation stage child. Not an Unsouled.

He finds many more things like that during his time in the archives. But it all ends the same way. The City of Anvils is lost. A parasite ring would make his cycling twice as hard and ensure he grew twice as fast, but he could save his clan stipend for a decade and fail to afford one. And if he could, anyone in his clan would likely refuse to sell it to him- he'd waste it, compared to giving it to some young prodigy with a future. A Bloodmaker pill would need one of the clan's best refiners to agree to make it for him and likewise herbs that would cost a decade of saving. The Torchyard would simply kill him, without the ability to harvest the flame aura there.

To his eternal shame, it takes him two years to think of looking at the technique manuals. They're probably useless, certainly. They will all be for specific techniques not practised by the Wei Clan, usually because they don't utilize the aspects the Wei Clan does for their sacred arts. To an artist who uses madra of dream and light, a weaver of illusions, a technique to spit fire may have sounded wonderful, but it would have relied on flame madra incompatible with their core. Similarly, with his madra still pure he won't be able to use any of them, probably.

Probably.

Why did it take him two years to decide to check anyway?

The day he decides to check, he goes through them, one after another, hope dwindling with each one. They're organized into sections, each labelled with the requirements. Dream and light madra make up most of it. There are others requiring fire aspect, others which require cloud, or lightning. He won't be able to use any of them. He's allowed to look at them, after all. If people expected an Unsouled to manage to pick up anything that let them be a real sacred artist out of a technique manual he wouldn't be allowed to read them.

At the end, there is one short book alone. 

The technique's name? Heart of Twin Stars. The requirements? None.

It turns out to be more useless than he'd hoped. Enough it almost makes him laugh. It's a technique to split your core. Leaving you with, in the end, two cores that add up to something weaker than the one you started with. It's a fabulous tool by which Lindon can cripple himself even farther.

Wait. No, it can't be. A cycling technique. Of course you'd need a cycling technique to prepare to split your core!

He's saved. He's saved. Sure, it won't be that much better than what he has now, but it will still be better. A proper cycling technique. Sure, it will leave him with a core he can split in half in the end, but he can just skip that step. The actual technique is designed to stabilize the spirit in preparation for splitting. Not anything outstanding, but it's anything at all. 

Something catches in his thoughts. The technique was developed to gain immunity to a particular kind of destabilizing short-range striker technique that could be used to temporarily stop someone from using their madra. But the terminology is odd.

But some scrap of talent must have remained in him, for he developed an underhanded technique that he christened the “Empty Palm.” I will not lower myself to attempt the technique on my own, but as I understand the theory, he focuses neutral madra into a simple palm thrust. How he cancels out the aspects of his spirit, I have not yet deduced, but the result is undeniable.

When his Empty Palm makes contact with my core, his madra disrupts my own. For a few seconds, I am as powerless as a wretched Unsouled. Even more so, perhaps, as I can hardly muster the energy to control my own limbs.

Neutral madra. That sounds like...

Off he goes. Back to the first thing that inspired him, the first time he thought he had a way out, the old, old description of the pool at the top of Greatfather. Sure enough, in a later passage she speaks of neutral madra offhandedly. And then uses another term for it. Pure madra.

A technique that uses pure madra! Something he can use! It's not described in the manual, but surely he can figure it out himself. The man certainly sounds disdainful of it. Like it's trivial but for however he manages to turn his aspected madra pure again.