Eventually screaming into a pillow will lose its appeal as an activity and Jasmine will start actually thinking. 

"Okay, so. We have privacy from fucking 5th realms who can kill us more easily than we can breathe and we have my notebook and notes and such, orientation for classes is tomorrow, do you want to do the strategy meeting where I rethink my entire planned life trajectory now or do you think we should sleep first and try to do it first thing right before orientation?" 

She winces internally at the rethinking-Jasmine's-entire-life-trajectory bit. Jasmine is really taking this pretty well all things considered, especially given that she's from a world where this almost never happens, but it's still always rough to have such a massive curveball thrown into your life.

"I think probably we should at least get started on the strategising now, rather than leaving it hanging over us. Depending on what your sleep schedule looks like, we may end up needing to pause."

"My sleep schedule is adequate to being delayed to the last moment that will leave me sufficient morning prep time. Let's have the meeting now, then." 

"So, agenda for the strategy meeting - basic explanation of cultivation for you, an explanation of what's theoretically and in practice expected of us, an explanation of my life plan and why we're definitely not doing that now, and then forming a new working plan that will keep us moving for the next month or two. Anything else important we need to cover?" 

"It'll also be important for me to start getting a sense of what...I'm not sure how to put this...everyday affordances there are here. Like, do you have air cooling in the summer or do you rely on fans, how do you obtain drinking water, if you wanted to send a letter a thousand miles cheaply how long would it take to get there and how much faster would it be if you did it expensively, how big of a threat is plague and what measures do you take to reduce that threat, that sort of thing.

The souls that wash up on *my* world are almost always from worlds with much worse technology than ours. We don't know if that's because worlds with heat pumps and efficient air-to-waters and light-based communication networks and a deep understanding of sanitation are *rare*, or if maybe there's some means of letting departed souls stay on their homeworld that we haven't quite figured out yet and so we never *see* people from worlds that understand more than we do, but...in any case, my people taught me what they could about what we'd learned with an eye to letting me teach a host culture if necessary, but I have no idea whether any of it would actually be useful to you or if it's all stuff your people either know already or have obviated with magic."

"A lot of that stuff varies hugely throughout the empire, because of variation in access to good techniques for doing things at scale, and because variation in background qi interferes with a lot of high-performance or microscopic technologies. So what someone here has vs. what someone in the Iron City has vs. what a peasant 200 miles from here has are going to be totally different. Outside the empire things are generally a lot worse, but there's a lot of variation." 

"For those examples - a peasant probably endures the heat, draws water from a well or irrigation system, sends letters through weekly or monthly postal relays or hires a courier if it's urgent, and probably doesn't worry about plague because plague is one of those things you handle with huge noble techniques. Disease prevention is one of the effects a noble can spread over thier entire domain reasonably cheaply, so nasty plagues tend to imply several layered failures or bad actors. They do happen. I think mortals usually have access to some amount of medical alchemy in general, if they're not particularly impoverished. Here in this fortress, the buildings have plumbing and have been designed for magically effective climate control - much like the magically effective daylighting, the postal system has much more investment in infrastructure but probably still takes days unless you hire a really strong courier or use a technique or item for it. In the Iron City, I hear they have electric fans and instantaneous communication technology and stuff like that, but it's a very long way away. I think they have water contamination problems, maybe?" 

So, a mix of "obviated by magic" (disease-wards very much do exist), "prevented by magic", and "the tech exists but hasn't finished filtering out to everybody". None of those really seem like things she can help with.

And it sounds like her own living situation will be pretty decent: a bit of a downgrade in at least some respects, but one well worth taking for magic powers.

"Sounds like things are coming along pretty well on the invention front, then. And I don't have any particular advantage on helping with adoption.

I think that brings us to basics of cultivation?"

"Right! So - broad summary of cultivation, the nine realms, the seven aspects. Oh, and Ways, you should know what a Way is."

She breaths in as though to start a long lecture, even though she's communicating by thought. 

"So. Cultivation is, at a high level, the art of ingesting qi from your environment and using it to improve your soul and body, and also using it to power techniques of various sorts, ultimately pursuing the goal of true immortality. There are nine realms, denoting progress markers resulting in qualitative transformations and increases in your power and capacities. There are seven aspects, denoting classes of spiritual infrastructure and techniques which it makes sense to bundle together on a metaphysical level as a specialty. While cultivating, you will find and pursue a Way, which is a sort of - ideal that you cleave to as your story of self. Cultivation is a process of becoming - your way is what you're making yourself into. You don't need to have one now, at this stage, but at the end of the 4th realm, you have to commit to one, even if you don't perfectly understand it or what it will mean for you, so it's something to think about long in advance. Contradicting your Way is very bad, possibly lethally so. Living a soldier's life will result in a soldier's Way. Ways are very mysterious and not groking them, now or ever, is to be expected." 

"The nine realms. First, you work to gain any control over your qi, and enter the first realm:Cultivation of the Foundation, where you work to make your body into a suitable vessel for your practice. Then you enter the second realm: Cultivation of Mastery, where you work to gain the literal and metaphorical tools to perform the greater work of cultivation. Then there's the third realm: Cultivation of Spirit, where you forge your blank soul-core and integrate it with your existing spiritual infrastructure, becoming a true cultivator. The fourth realm: Crucible of Ideals, involves exploring your new capabilities and ends when you commit to a Way that will forever more define you. The fifth realm: Crucible of Endeavor involves stretching yourself to your limits to prove your self and Way in a trial by fire and ambition. The sixth realm: Crucible of Justification involves taking a step back and reflecting on your way and the person you've become and if what you've made can withstand becoming divine and if that's even something you want. Lots of sixth realms retire to run sects and build a legacy rather than ascending beyond mortality. Ascending to the seventh realm: Essence Chrysalis, means turning your soul in on itself so that it's a self-sustaining world in and of itself, and involves retreating into that world to do... something, I don't know. The 8th realm: Essence Rampant, involves being able to freely step in and out of your soulbody, having forged yourself into a divine force who shakes the world with every step. Mostly they don't actually do that, but they could. The 9th realm: Essence Principle, involves a sort of diffusion, where you come to represent and command your way throughout the entire universe. If there's more beyond that, I don't know what it is and I've never met anyone who did - but they say even those gods are still climbing."

"Finally, the seven aspects. Martial, Noble, Beautiful, Hidden, Virtuous, Academic, Arcane. Martial techniques relate to enhancing the body, doing violence, and enacting gross physical changes upon reality. Centrally, they're for violence. Noble techniques relate to rulership, formal relationships, loyalty and duty. Centrally on a metaphysical level, using and controlling formal relationships and obligations. Beautiful techniques relate to artistry, creativity, self-transformation, and intense emotion. Centrally, the creation of beauty in all its myriad forms. Hidden techniques relate to stealth, obfuscation, and perception. Perception is non-central. Virtuous techniques relate to taking an ideal, like justice or loyalty but also weirder things like travel or gluttony, and embracing it, allowing you to better attain that ideal and ensuring you are rewarded for cleaving to it and punished for deviating. Academic techniques relate to cognition, skill, knowledge, learning, and divination. Finally, Arcane techniques relate to the esoteric, the mystical, and that which defies understanding. Often strange techniques which totally change the rules are Arcane. Crafting and in particular, formation work, butchery, and alchemy are Arcane. Metamagic is Arcane. A good rule of thumb is that you can practice at most three aspects and greater specialization leads to greater results, but also to crucial weakness because every aspect gives essential strengths."

"Any questions?" 

"Hmm..."

She thinks about this for a bit.

(Like most modern people, Kedri has deliberately avoided becoming more skilled at violence because it's easier to refrain from inappropriately attacking people the less confident you are that you'll win. Violence is a specialised skillset requiring a lot of high-grade marshmallow-tests. She supposes that outright avoidance isn't as feasible here, but that doesn't mean she should actively focus on it as part of her limited number of aspects.

She doesn't want rulership.

She likes beauty a normal amount, which is to say not enough to want to focus her magical powers on it.

Hidden sounds intriguing.

Virtuous: maybe, she'd have to think about what virtue.

Academic has some promise to it, and it sounds like it includes a lot of the things she scanned as having a good aptitude for (what is a "clan trait", anyway, she'll have to look into that).

Arcane...maybe? She'd rather like there to be rules again, but Arcane will exist even if she doesn't practise it and it sounds potentially quite interesting.)

(Becoming a force of nature rather than a person is strictly optional, so that's a good sign. Although...)

"Do people tend to experience substantial personality changes when entering the 4th or 5th realms?

Also, what's a clan trait? Orichalch said I had one."

"Those realms were not in particular called out as having worrying personality changes in my classes but the focus was not on things centuries in the future that most people would never reach. Based on reading histories, I did not notice a greater than normal tendency to change how you relate to the world, but - the growth and self modification and internalisation of insights and transformation in what resources you need and constraints you're under mean that cultivators undergo what can look from the outside like pretty radical personality changes under many circumstances." 

"A clan trait is - so, you know families are going to want to ensure their kids do well even if they're sort of useless - noble clans want their kids to be cultivators because they're cultivators and they need to remain strong through the generations. But they can't give their kids an early start cultivating, because that's a bad idea, so instead, they form a family specialisation, some set of arts that they have the best versions of and they know best how to get value out of, and while kids are young and still growing, they - ensure they'll come out in a way that makes them best suited to use those familial arts, at the cost of making some other things harder. Some of it is bloodline, some of it is family culture, but a lot of it is deliberate shaping and exposure to environmental energies. So, uh, if you have a clan trait, it probably means something in your past or childhood has been messing with your soul?" 

So the mental changes are primarily a learning/situational thing, different inputs into the same mind giving different outputs. That's reassuring.

The next answer is...not reassuring.

She's--

--no, that can't be right, even if it's true that that's how changelings come to be she's not a changeling, changelings know what they are even if they may hide it from other people and anyway if she were a changeling she'd have woken up in the fae realm and not here--

...did her parents...bargain with the fae, for a child more to their liking?

If they did, it didn't even work.

"...there are...spirits back home that *might* be capable of that. I don't know why they *would*, though."

(Dreams, and planning, and precognition...

She remembers thinking that it spoke well of the Bank that they focused on farsightedness. She wonders how much of that thought was hers.)

"Spirits may appear to be people but you must always remember that they are at best really really weird people and their motives don't always make sense, especially not on surface examination." 

"... I'm sorry, that must not seem terribly comforting."

"I...guess it's of some comfort that I must have been very young when it happened? Probably not even a person yet at all. It's...I suppose it's more like selective breeding than mind control at that point, arranging for a particular kind of person to come into existence and not so much altering a person who already exists."

(she firmly tells herself)

"Still, it's...a lot to take in."

(She internally winces again. Everybody's had a lot to take in today.)

"Perhaps you could talk to some noble clan kids about it when we meet them tomorrow. I'm given to understand many of them think of it as a logical extension of their educations. But they would have known it was happening, I guess." 

It would be nice if she could pace right now. Maybe stare contemplatively out the window.

"Perhaps. That seems like it might get awkward, like they might be so accustomed to the idea that they'd struggle to understand why anyone *could* find it disturbing."

Jasmine is remarkably still in her resting position, in fact. 

"Perhaps! I haven't met any clanborn in my own generation, so I don't really know."

"Are you okay to return to the discussion? The next thing I was going to talk about was some implicit and explicit expectations on us as students. There's a lot of moving parts in the sect system but it still seems important to know where we'll stand over the next few months." 

"I agree, that does sound very important."

(and the firmer a sense you have of what you can expect your future to look like, the easier it is to psychologically handle everything else)

"So, then, where will we stand?"

"So. Like I said. The Bank is one of the top ten sects in the empire. The empire has idiomatically, a thousand official sects, but I think the actual count is higher than that, and there are many unofficial or illegal sects. We have an unusually good rate of survival - probably only 5%-10% of outer disciples die during their study period, depending on the year and the class composition, and well over 10% of students in the year reach the 4th realm, which is about typical of a sect granted the right to call itself an Imperial Sect. A banker or Bank-affiliated cultivator achieves immortality probably every two centuries or so, though unfortunately they're not all still alive. But the odds are very good, relatively speaking. The expectations are proportionally high. It's impossible to achieve great things by merely ordinary means - you need to get lucky, get resources from outside the system, have fortunate encounters. If we can make working together into a very positive-sum thing for us, that's a first step. But we'll need to take more. I have a few ideas, but nothing I can enact in my first week of training." 

"In the more short-term. Everything is a competition. The successful will get more resources - more teaching, more cultivation supplies, more respect, and the unsuccessful won't. Official sources of resources will be insufficient for optimal growth even for the leaders. The public record says we have 90 days to open our foundation without being considered a failure, but in practice classes assume we'll do it in 30, and we need to do it in even less time if we want to be considered remotely impressive. We'll have to pick electives, but half the point of the electives we pick is to try and impress teachers and get into more advanced classes as soon as possible. I expect we'll be incredibly busy for a while, trying to manage two people's worth of classes and adventures - I have some ideas for making that work we can discuss when we're outlining our cultivation plan. If we both reach the second realm within a year that I think will be an acceptable benchmark but people will do it faster and I bet we can too if we figure things out."

Five to ten percent chance she's here for less than a year.

She had...probably better try not to get too attached?

It's...it'll be like being a teenager again, that's all, wandering from town to town, not having decided yet where to settle down. She can do that. She has done it. She did it for longer than most people, even.

...but she'd prefer not to die again, and...she owes it to Jasmine not to be a liability, as she would have wanted a walk-in not to be a liability to her.

Also she would rather like more than a year's worth of magic powers.

(Does she get to keep the magic powers when she departs? Should she be angling for powers that are useful across a wide variety of worlds? that's the planning aptitude talking, isn't it Cultivation having to do with "write-access to your soul" suggests yes, but there was also something about having to make your body suitable for it.)

"That's...I'm really getting dropped into the deep end here, huh."

can she get six months and a library first

"So...what happens if...

...I guess you don't know what happens if our power levels diverge, if that's not something that comes up much.

--I mean, I don't want to let you down, I'll support you as I would have you support me, and I know you said not to be worried about my lack of background knowledge, but. I'm still worried.

...is adventuring as much of a problem as it sounds from the name. I am, uh, a normal amount of good at thinking on my feet, whereas adventuring as I understand the term requires being pretty abnormally good."

"You sort of are, sorry. The road to ascension is never easy, nor simple. Look on the bright side! If you knew exactly where you were going, you wouldn't be going anywhere that mattered." 

"Honestly, I'm not that worried about our power levels diverging - my gut says they won't, as long as one of us doesn't get totally stuck, because we're going to be sharing resources much more closely than most people ever would and can self-balance with that resource allocation. Close allies, like, married couples, do stuff like that, and it usually works out. But also, heart devils are usually much weaker than their hosts and they cope fine, so I don't think sharing a body with a stronger cultivator is intrinsically a bad thing. If we can make sharing a body work at all, we can make it work with a power imbalance, is my gut feeling."

"Adventuring is almost by definition risky. If it's safe and boring, it's not adventuring, and also, probably, not that profitable. Maybe we'll luck into a nice stable long-term niche that gives returns good enough to spend a few centuries on it, the Bank encourages that, but before that we're probably going to have to take a lot of gambles to gain resources - both fungible ones that you can get with sustainable work, but also the innumerable non-fungible ones - contacts, secrets, insights, and so on. Not all adventures require like, running about and combat and such? Most of them do, but if it turns out we can't manage the real twitch-reaction stuff, we could try trading missions or exploration of desolate places or something like that, where the problems mostly take place over hours or days rather than seconds. Just be grateful you didn't turn up at the Dawnbreakers, they'd want you at sea for their war within a few years."

"Anywhere that matters" sounds suspiciously like a euphemism for one of those dangerously large targets she doesn't want to paint on herself.

If allying gets you the benefits of an insurance network then why doesn't everyone ally with everyone else--

--right, because there aren't enough resources for everyone to stay alive.

...does that mean that if she strives to stay here she's getting someone else killed, someone for whom this was home...

...but it's home for Jasmine, too.

"I like being at sea, but not like *that*," she says. There's a hint of laughter to her voice, but no amusement.

"Hours or days sounds more like it, at least.

I wonder if there's some way we could turn to our advantage that I'm--presumably--the only person on this world who speaks Tashayan.

...that's what my native language is called, to be clear. I'm sort of borrowing the ability to speak the local language from your brain, though I can't access any of your memories or anything like that.

Anyway...my first thought was noting down secrets in it, but with cultivation being so flexible maybe there's translation magic. There might be other uses, though."

(She makes a mental note that translation magic would definitely fall into the useful-across-a-wide-variety-of-worlds category: she might not get the next host's language, and even if she does they might encounter language barriers with other people.

Hmm...)

"Do you know anything about whether cultivators keep their magic when they die? I guess it would be hard to tell, if people don't wash up here much."

"Oh, huh, I figured you'd learned the language however it is that spirits learn the local language of where they're born, but scholars can't agree on how that is so I guess it's not surprising you're doing another thing. There's translation magic, but none of it's very good, or it relies on reading the mind of a living person who understands what's being said. People might be able to figure out you've written down important secrets, and maybe what the subject is, but details and such would be hard to magically extract from an untranslated text."

"How exactly reincarnation works and who reincarnates is something of a disputed subject. When cultivators die, their inner qi and spiritual infrastructure sort of spills out over the landscape, staining it and transforming it. Sometimes entire regions, if the cultivator was strong and didn't have time to plan their death - strong cultivators with time to plan usually make - hidden realms full of tests, so that worthy heirs can inherit their stuff but everyone else has to keep out. Unplanned deaths, and you get regions where the fundamental nature of reality is twisted according to that cultivator's nature. The fortress has a little bit of that, actually - things here are cool and secure and stable in a way they aren't elsewhere, because the last commander of the fortress made things that way when they died, and there's a ton of smaller haunts around the place. But there are a lot of folk-tales and such about people reincarnating and keeping stuff, or reincarnating and starting over or stuff like that. And even if you did have to start over, you'd be able to do that, with all your techniques and insights and stuff already known."