It could not be...

It could easily not be. She doesn't want to end up dying of this, as harsh as that sounds. 

Her heart rebels at that, though...

If she decides she really doesn't want it, she can just let go. Let him go back to his wilderness. Stop pushing. It'll only be a few days in his company, that way. 

But for now...

"I think I'm more centred now," she says. "That was certainly a blow to my ego, but frankly I should've known that the affairs of Jades tend to involve such things... It's just hard to feel the immediacy of that when I've never even met one before." 

"Thank you for accommodating my foolishness. I shouldn't have been paying close attention to how you cycled in the first place. I was just... thinking that maybe I could see how you applied that lesson, to be slow and smooth at first to train speed..."

One of the not-quite secrets of the sacred arts is that the difference between a Jade and an Iron is usually in resources and skill, not esoteric wisdom or great mysteries unravelled. Individual Jades might occasionally have a personal secret like, say, a surprisingly solid Enforcer technique they've hidden, or an extra binding in their favoured weapon. But the difference between Iron and Jade doesn't rest on that, no, that often comes down more down to wealth than anything else, or connections. For every Jade there are ten Irons who could be Jade if they had the right family, or the money, or the right friends. But that sounds far less impressive than pretending you've a stock of grand truths you use to achieve mastery in the sacred arts, so they all put on airs. He, in fact, earned those airs, thank you very much. The rest of them are imposters.

"You're very welcome and- with any other Jade that alone wouldn't have been dangerous, in your defence. And recall, I'm out in the open right now, there wasn't any hint anything was secret. Most Jades- to be entirely frank they mostly don't involve such things, particularly. Not in their aura cycling technique. Not if they're doing that in public. The Wei clan have their secret methods to cycle light aura but everyone knows they're secret. In general, the schools and the clans themselves have their secrets, the methods of performing the techniques on their Paths. But those are obvious secrets, everyone knows they're secret. You aren't going to stumble on to one of them. You just got very unlucky. By all means don't look quite so closely at strange sacred artists in the future unless you're prepared to understand something dangerous, with eyes like yours, but it really isn't a normal thing to have to worry about."

"You know, I've cycled in front of other Jades. None of them have noticed anything strange. Refusing to cycle in front of any of them would have been a sure sign something was odd, and an aura cycling technique worth hiding is rare, it would have gotten me far too much attention. Everyone knows why the Wei and Heavens Glory have secret methods for light, light is hard. Force is easy. But- the important thing is none of them noticed. No Iron, no Jade. Nobody, ever." 

Noticing what he was doing was not easy, he's very, very good at making the oddness of the aura around him subtle.

"I- can I ask what you saw? You've either got anomalously good Copper sight or an incredibly good instinct for how aura ought to flow and I find myself incredibly curious which it is."

She considers for a moment, and then nods. "I think it's the second. It - there was a moment just there on each breath that was slightly off somehow, and when I looked closer I noticed the aura moving oddly, the flow slightly faster and then slightly slower than it ought to have been. I don't know how I spotted it if nobody else has ever noticed it, it just... felt wrong." 

"I've always been unusually good at manipulating madra though, at least according to my parents. I don't know what the situation is like at the schools or in the clans, but for a clanless I'm supposed to be a prodigy. Clearly not so much compared to you, but..." She shrugs.

"How quickly you managed a passable madra sheathe around your hand yesterday and this morning would stand out at a school, actually." In part because the schools are really just the best of the clans, and the clans don't actually have any bloodline advantages at manipulating madra.

"Your eyes, though. Those are rather sharp, I think, to notice anything odd at all. And your instincts for aura flow are good enough I haven't actually run into anyone else who has ones as good as yours. It's a bit of a shame you aren't a Ruler by affinity, but I'd still recommend making that something you focus on secondarily."

It's very interesting that it was aura flow of all things. Jade Rulers who've spent decades focusing on manipulating aura flows haven't noticed anything odd. And they have an entire extra sense, not that it's quite as acute as Copper sight is.

"I would strongly guess the benefits of touch are psychological, but that doesn't mean they aren't useful. The sitting still with crossed legs we all tend to do is just as psychological, when you get right down to it." 

He pauses.

"I think you may find that core a useful thought to build a style around. I am the ice, the sword, the slicing blizzard. If your control of aura is anywhere near as good as your instinct for how it flows you should be able to make it something near to true."

"I see."

He stressed the word core weirdly there. Is she supposed to do something with her core? The madra type she's generated has long since swapped over to ice/sword madra...

Maybe she needs to think about the madra differently? It is a spiritual essence. Maybe she should be thinking of it as some specific type of blended madra. She's been sort of flailing at trying to stick together ice and sword madra techniques, but she knows that's not ideal...

She could think of it as driven snow madra... It's not quite perfect, that would seem to be wind as well and she can't afford to add another madra type... cutting ice... frozen blade madra? What is she making herself, precisely... What is she creating...

She's totally zoning out, isn't she. She coughs. 

"I will certainly attempt so," she says.

He doesn't mind. That just means she's paying close enough attention to actually think about what he's saying.

"To expand on that and explain the rationale, ideally your techniques work together. My enforcement lets me move quickly and take strikes, my armor enhances that farther, my weaponry allows me to concentrate force in a way that would otherwise be difficult. It all works together to keep me alive and get me where I need to be so that I can deliver the strikes I need to to win the fight. My Striker and Ruler techniques do likewise. There's a way in which you win a fight, a method of achieving victory all your techniques work together to achieve. So: how does a person who is the ice and the slicing blade win a fight? What does that let you cost your enemy, what does that let you do? What disadvantages to your enemy and advantages to yourself does that give you?"

"There are many ways your sacred arts could let you utilize madra with aspects of sword and ice. The trick with a new Path is picking which one. Someone with a different sense of what felt right might find themselves creating shards of sharp ice like caltrops and using Ruler techniques to freeze and cut anyone who strays too close. To embody cutting ice, for it to be you and you to be it- that narrows things down, and that's good. There are simply too many options unless you've got something helping you like that."

She nods, and casts herself back a few months, to when she visited a village forge to see if she could see a sword being made. 

She wasn't nearly so lucky; but some persistence let her observe the smith's apprentice making nails. She still remembers the pattern of his hammerblows, five and one, five and one, narrowing and compressing the metal. He had quite nice forearms. 

She still remembers how the metal hissed and steamed when it was cooled...  

"Metal and ice... Are the same in some ways. They both harden when they're cold and soften when they're hot. I can feel that in their madra, a little, that they share a — commonality. I feel like I want to be that — hard and rugged and beautiful and precise. But that's very much aesthetic, rather than — actually a goal based on effectiveness."

"I want to be... a dagger-edged snowflake. A dancing fragment of snow blown so hard it cuts and blinds. Something strong and crystalline and beautiful. But, well. It's hard, finding a single interpretation that fits what's in my heart. I know too little about blades. I've never even held a sword in my life."