...sorry, hang on, the political subdivision is eight thousand li?

She checks an imperial atlas: about how many duchies are there, and is this an unusually large one?

There are about 400 duchies and this one is about mid to low in size. 

What the fuck.

She does not remember how much total land area there was on her planet, but--if she extrapolates from some regions she knows were unusually large--it couldn't have been anywhere near enough to fit 400 of these.

...uh, imperial and duchy gazetteers, how much population are we looking at?

Total imperial population: about 1.7 trillion.

Total duchy population: about 900 million. 

(Both numbers ignoring people who cannot be reasonably recorded on the census, because they avoid interacting or being legible to the government at all, or because they live in a hidden realm that only opens once every hundred years. Also not including the population of the worldsouls of imperial citizens, except for this short list of exceptions who do for whatever reason allow the imperial bureaucracy to run a census of the interior of thier soul.) 

"...this place is so *big*. The empire's population is over *three thousand times* the population of my entire *world*. This *duchy* has substantially more people than my entire world.

...I wonder if the reason we have less qi is because we have fewer souls. Or if that's *one* of the reasons, at least."

(She also wonders how many people live in other parts of the world, outside the empire, but she suspects the empire doesn't know. Still, she might as well try checking the half-shelf on that.)

"Huh, that could be a factor yeah. Honestly, it sounds half to me like your world is more like on scale of a worldsoul, but they're supposed to be much richer with qi rather than barren of it. Look on the bright side, though, you'll never run out of interesting places to explore here! ... honestly we could probably wander our whole lives and never get bored or leave the duchy, though, so that was probably true of your old world as well." 

(Yeah the world maps all end in "and then this ocean continues on, more or less empty for as far as anyone has checked and reported back" or "unexplored land mass with roughly this coastline" or "here there be dragons". The 'continent' the empire is mainly on does seem to have more people outside the empire than inside it, though.)

She smiles. "I do like travelling."

She'll spend the rest of the time until their double appointment paging through the duchy atlas, with more focus on areas near the fortress.

In another 20 minutes or so, it's their turn to be assessed. They are invited into the consulting room, which is decorated nicely but plainly, with a large desk at the center, covered in various reference books and ledgers. 

Opposite the chair (comfortably upholstered) where they are meant to sit, is an ordinary looking old man, balding, with long white hair and a long thin beard, and simple robes. 

"Ah, good to meet you, Kedri was it? Would you like to have privacy for this meeting? I can make it happen with a simple technique, but I can see strong arguments for and against it." 

She nods confirmation of her identity, then pauses at the privacy question.

"...I hadn't really thought about it, not knowing it was an option. What arguments do you see?"

"When given a short period of time to make a decision of monumentous importance to your life as a whole, it is often considered wise to do so without the influence of others pressuring you. Some pressure cannot be avoided, but I would never allow a clan member of one of our students to attend such a meeting without a very good, specific, reason for an exception. You might also want to relay to me considerations which you would like to keep secret - or simply find embarrassing to discuss. On the other hand, you will be working very closely with Jasmine, and you might find her input or second opinion informative or reassuring, when it comes to your choice." 

She looks thoughtful.

"I think there are some choices where things would shake out in favour of privacy, and I do hope to build an internal space that the person not using the body can go to, so that we don't always have to be aware of what the other is doing. --I wasn't expecting to use a cultivation technique for it, to be clear: my people taught me mental exercises to help with it.

But we are a team, in a way not easily undone, and we'll need to trust each other with our lives, and I think on the whole it's important for us to have a strong sense of each other's capabilities and make sure they mesh well together. Even if it's also important to make sure we can stand apart, when the day comes that this body fails us or we ascend beyond it."

"An excellent and well considered choice. Now, can you tell me about your hopes and dreams and what you want from your first and foundational technique? And then I can suggest a couple and we can see if those fit, and if they don't, I can refine my suggestions." 

(She has a feeling he would have said exactly the same if she'd gone with privacy instead. Perhaps he'd have meant it both ways, and what he was complimenting was her process of reasoning more than its conclusion.)

She's been thinking about how to put this.

"There is so much to learn here. Every time I turn around, I find some new expanse. This world is as big as thousands of mine put together, and perhaps with the complexity to match.

Everything else rests on knowledge: there can be no plans without it. I want to become better at learning, and ideally also planning: nothing that would involve major disruptions to my core self, certainly not so soon, but...semantic memory, speed of thought, things like that. That would be a foundation on which I could build.

If at all possible, I'd like it to be something that doesn't require the ongoing presence of spiritual infrastructure once completed, so that it can survive to aid me in my next life. I have no intention of dying anytime soon, but a good plan fails gracefully.

And it's essential, to the point that I would be open to trading off the category of technique if it came down to it, that it be something I can cultivate without having control of the body. I'll be spending a lot of time as a passenger during Jasmine's activities, and it's vital that I be able to make good use of that downtime."

The ancient archivist hmms under his breath as he thinks for a moment. "An interesting set of requirements. I'm not sure I can cleave to them perfectly, while retaining your desired set of improvements. In particular, I don't think there are any techniques which are worth your time and which can also take you into the 3rd realm with purely passive mental refinement, unless you think that by then you'll switch entirely to another aspect - which I can't really recommend. Even for the arts I would not recommend, by the 4th realm you're transferring the bulk of your existence and cognition over to a new spiritual medium just by intrinsic nature of the cultivation process - the peak of the 3rd realm involves constructing a new soul for yourself and the 4th realm entails moving the majority of your spiritual infrastructure over to the new medium and retaining your old soul only as a lynchpin and connection to the underlying primordial truth of the world. It still makes sense to plan for possible deaths before that point - realistically, even the majority of our students die, of violence or old age, before that point, so you might retain your priorities. But you might also not. What do you think?" 

(Jasmine is fascinated, even though presumably they will learn more details in their actual qi theory classes. But she doesn't say anything, since this is Kedri's turn.) 

"...what happens to my consciousness if I die after that?"

That is probably not objectively the most urgent point, but, uh, it's pretty attention-grabbing.

"The ongoing theological and academic debate is sufficiently contested by people sufficiently beyond you in intellect that I feel even summarising it would be implicitly misleading." 

"...let's...continue to account for the possibility of the majority outcome for now, especially since it sounds like that would also account for the possibility that 3rd-realm me--with more time and knowledge under her belt--concludes that progressing further would pose too big a risk to her continued existence.

Um, let's see...you said there weren't any suitable purely passive techniques. Are there partially passive ones?"

"There are! Proceeding with that in mind, I can think of three techniques which you might find satisfying, all fairly well-reputed and orthodox. 

The Four-Yin Spymaster Art is an Academic technique with a Hidden secondary element, relating to - well, idealising the spymaster's role. It emphasizes perception, contextualization, and information synthesis rather than volume of information intake or planning ability, though it is holistically effective - I wouldn't recommend an art which isn't. Its mental refinement is purely passive, but its perception enhancement includes numerous active elements. I think this should alleviate your worry about mental integrity - you might feel as though you have been rendered blind to the world, but you would retain your own internality. The technique is cultivated entirely internally - albeit, it depends on secondary techniques to conceal its qi signature, and it has a very good pedigree - it was obtained from a now-deceased rogue cultivator who used it to reach the 6th realm, and Bank students employing it have reached 4th on several occasions - we normally don't recommend it to those seeking to become spies, there are better Hidden-primary arts for the stealth and covert communication aspects, so that's out of 37 people having taken it. The technique sees use outside the Bank as well, including another recorded 4th realm, but proper statistics have yet to be compiled. 

The Perfect Curious Spirit is a foundation derived from the innate practices of heart-devils with Academic primary aspects. It unfortunately does depend extensively on active qi usage - it's one of those arts which blurs the line substantially, your intellect will wax and wane noticeably as your qi expenditure on it does. However, I would say in all other regards, it's our strongest academic art designed to provide holistic non-specialised intellectual enhancement or enhancement for general-purpose learning, selected from those arts which do have substantial other requirements and which permit purely internal cultivation. It has a misleadingly good pedigree - a 6th realm and two 5th realms, but they were all heart-devils already well-suited for this sort of cultivation, a mortal will have a harder time wrapping their head around it. Ironically, an art devoted to learning is itself difficult to learn. We have still seen good results, though. 

The last art is the Great Academy Immortal Education, developed by our fellow sect, the Great Academy and sold to us as part of a program to improving the prevalence of high-level administrators in the empire. Purely passive mental refinement and cultivation based on memorisation and calculation is combined with the creation of an internal calculation engine, which can do simple cognition with incredible efficiency, including rapid casting of extremely cheap simple techniques and administration tasks which no mortal could reasonably comprehend. Again a form of enhancement whose lack is crippling but not compromising. It's a more sophisticated version of the standard techniques taught to imperial bureaucrats, and thus has had more storied users than I can summarise easily - suffice to say, two 6th realms and a 7th, albeit all at the Academy. It also has an immense library of techniques, both inside and outside our library, designed for explicit compatibility with this line of cultivation techniques, though I will warn that the majority of them were designed to be easy to teach to mediocre cultivators and are thus not very good." 

She thinks it over for a bit.

* A Hidden foundation doesn't seem like it would mesh well with the synergy plan.

* (Also, "spymaster"...doesn't sound like her? Yes, the people who use it mostly aren't actually spies these days, but still.)

* "Your intellect will wax and wane noticeably as your qi expenditure on it does" sounds...unnerving.

* That last one, on the other hand...

Hmm, an initial question before she contemplates that one further.

"What's the mental refinement of the Great Academy Immortal Education like?"

"Not to be rude, but very boring. Good at fixing nice legible problems and expanding legible capacities, it's no slouch, but there's - an illegible profundity that something like the Perfect Curious Spirit can provide you with that the Great Academy Immortal Education can't. But it is nonetheless a world-class technique at nice straightforward IQ and memory enhancement, within human limits. It will make you into the finest scholar or bureaucrat - but not into a genius whose cleverness overturns the heavens."

Honestly, "boring" and "straightforward" and "lacking in illegible profundity" sound like good things in the context of undertaking one's first soul self-modification. as opposed to soul other-modification

...he's 5th realm. He's a sort of person who looked at what progression to 4th entailed and did it anyway. Of course he thinks "boring" is a rude term: it's impossible to achieve great things by merely ordinary means, and a person who wasn't willing to risk their very afterlife for a chance at greatness wouldn't have qualified for the position of Head Archivist and wouldn't be here talking to her now (and also nine other people).

"I'm thinking Great Academy Immortal Education. It doesn't have the problems with needing Hidden; it has passive benefits without being *limited* to them, and...sounds like it would be a lot less disruptive to my core self than Perfect Curious Spirit; a 'minority' of an 'immense' library is still going to be a lot of options, plus 'easy to teach' is an advantage if I later end up founding the first cultivation school on an ignorant world. Also it sounds like it might mesh well with Noble, and that my prior experience with electric calculation engines might be helpful, though it might also lead me astray: maybe I'll ask the Head Archivist if he knows of precedents on that.

Anything you see that I should take into account?"

"It does seem to suit you best of the three. If I were going for an Academic technique, I'd choose the Perfect Curious Spirit, but I'm not, and nobody can say of the Great Academy Immortal Education 'oh you're walking the path everyone walks and it never takes anyone anywhere' - it certainly has taken people places. But some of that might just be the sheer number of people who use the art. I do worry that you're - valuing stasis in your core self overly much, at the cost of potential improvement, but your worries about further reincarnation do make me weight your considerations more highly than I would have otherwise. I also have thoughts about - dilution of the ability to just search for high-compatibility techniques and trust they'll work well being a real cost, but we're not clan kids, we can't afford to just coast on techniques that were all designed to work together, so spending more effort on raw quality and usefulness over compatibility when we have the option - which we usually won't, seems like a fair strategy."

"Look at it this way: two days ago I took for *granted* that a person's core self would always be there, intact. And...it does sound like you just don't get many people turning up here in the first place, some worlds are like that, but...when I found myself in a world with a magic system *nobody* back home--not any of the tens of thousands of otherworlders we've interviewed since we started keeping systematic records, nor any of the scattered ones before that--had ever heard of, and with someone threatening me by entirely new means...my first thought was that maybe any soul that washes up here ends up annihilated and so no information escapes.

It sounds like it *is* possible to practise cultivation and live to tell the tale, one way or another. But it...also sounds like my initial fears weren't entirely unfounded. It might not even *be* annihilation that I end up in: it could be...something like permanent delirium, for example, magic forcing me to stay alive with my soul twisted into a shape that normally wouldn't be sustainable. It could be some much stranger disaster, that I can't even guess at from the information I have right now.

Maybe, in time, with eyes wide open, I'll choose to practise other techniques involving stronger alterations. Maybe, in time, with eyes wide open, I'll choose to migrate to a new soul structure. But I'm not going to leap into that: right *now* it's important for me to start by managing this brand-new form of vulnerability, and look for a path that I won't regret walking once I understand what it is I've done to myself. And if that turns out to be a path that doesn't take me anywhere...I can see why that would bother someone who'd been looking forward to it for ten years, but I grew up expecting *no* magic and *any* magic is a bonus."