"What technique are you using to hold ten meetings at once?"

"I'm going to rephrase that to be less rude, asking about someone's exact techniques is - too intimate." 

"Kedri is asking if you can recommend techniques for pluripresence." 

"Hmm. My own isn't possible until the 4th realm. I don't really think there are good options at the 1st realm - illusionary presences, perhaps? Or corpse puppets. Construct puppets will be outside your budget unless you luck into an unreasonable amount of money. For illusionary presences - the daemonic agent has many restrictions but is well respected, or alternatively the Latter Mirror Image might suit your situation in a way it wouldn't mine. Our library doesn't really have anything world-class for corpse puppets. The Argent Nerve Wire Arts, perhaps? Or someone did loot the Soul Stealer Sect Corpse Manual when they destroyed them." 

"I'm glad I didn't think to ask until you were fronting, then," she says, her tone somewhere between relief and embarrassment.

("Soul Stealer Sect Corpse Manual" sure is an ominous name.)

"Even an incorporeal second body would..."

...now that she's thinking about it, she notices that Imperial doesn't seem to have a full signed modality, just some bits of shorthand that appear to be aimed at use during stealth operations and loud battles. Or maybe it does have a full modality but those are the only bits that Jasmine knows.

"...as long as the illusion covers sound and not just vision, would let us both speak without always having to relay for each other."

(an awkward thing to frame as a positive right after Jasmine stopped her from putting her foot in her mouth, but needing to use relays does have many downsides)

"I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out not to be cost-effective, but it's worth looking into."

"I'm trying to aim at a fighting style that incorporates deception and stealth, so I could also use the technique for it's intended purpose."

"Thank you, elder, for your insights. We will take our leave now." 

"You're welcome - you were a delight to help, both of you."

The head archivist will dismiss them with a wave of his hand, and send for the next student - a nervous-looking man with literally firey hair. 

Jasmine will pick up both sets of books (and two copies of the class catalogue stack by the door) and head out.

The pair have five or six hours before the welcoming feast. 

"To the dispensary for our starting allocations and then back to my rooms to read?" 

"Sounds good.

Could we stop by the technique indexes on our way out, please? I'm very curious as to what the 'Void-Soul Meditation Scripture' is."

"Sure, that makes sense." 

Jasmine will head over - she's not the only one here, a knot of half a dozen other students have had the same idea, but there are enough books to go around, more or less.

It's not in the first book they skim at all - void is an element, and not a terribly common one, but in the second book, they find an entry under "Arcane, Void". It describes it as "a foundation technique from ancient days, used by isolated populations in qi poor areas in the iceheart duchy. Low quality Arcane foundation with mostly balanced charecteristics, favouring active technique use slightly over crafting. Highly compatible with techniques relating to 'realness' and 'truth'. Special charecteristic of substantially improving personal qi generation to allow cultivation to continue without resources. See citation 234, 456, 458. Partial copy in Bank archives." 

Citation 234 is a book on cultivating in qi poor areas; 456 is a history of the iceheart duchy, 458 is a travelogue of the same region. According to this book, the library should have copies of all three, at least theoretically.  

...oh. A gift for her future selves, wherever they may live. And what a gift it would be.

(Partial copy in Bank archives. It's going to take some doing to get her hands on this technique, isn't it. She hopes she can pull it off in time.)

"...I'll have to read those citations sometime," she says, "especially that first one.

...but not today. Let's go get those allocations."

"We'll have a lot to read in these coming weeks, I'm looking forward to it."

Jasmine heads off in the direction of the dispensary. 

The dispensary is, in many ways, the beating heart of the sect. It has its own little spire, on the edge of the isolated surface district of the fortress given over to smiths and alchemists and other practitioners of arts that emit foul smoke and strange smells. 

The interior of the spire is a large shop packed completely to the multi-storied brim, both with high shelves covered in glass jars full of pills and strange herbs in paper boxes and innumerable stranger wonders, and also with disciples of all ages, who pick through the jars searching for what they require. There are several desks, each with different signs - purchases, commissions, rarities, consultation, each with its own queue. It's lively and crowded, just barely teetering on the brink of remaining orderly in the face of chaos. 

One of the desks has been taken over, with a temporary sign saying "New Students Here". 

Wow.

This world continues to be a lot to take in, but she's so glad she gets the chance to.

though she would have liked to have had a longer initial life first

She wonders if a 'finest bureaucrat' would be able to keep up with all the everything happening in here.

"Do they buy as well as selling, or are those trading missions you mentioned unrelated? Or both, I suppose."

"At an institutional level, yes, but they don't want people wandering in with 500 pounds of honey or a fresh dragon heart or whatever, so the norm is that you sell to contacts who craft professionally or to middle-men, and then they sell their results to another building that does intake. Presumably if we end up doing trading directly with the sect, we'll have to figure that out but it isn't the sort of place you spend your childhood staring longingly at." 

"That's fair."

(The 'fresh dragon heart' bit sounds potentially concerning--are only some dragons people?--but she decides that now is not the time to pursue that particular tangent.)

Jasmine will join the line for new students, then, which fortunately, only has one person in it, a woman dressed in the style of the other nobles but with faded colours and frayed hems whose argument with the bored and bitter clerk about the amount of money they're allowed was winding down as they arrived. Soon enough, she storms off and the clerk turns to Jasmine. 

"Name and token?" He asks. 

"Prudence-of-Measures Jasmine and Kedri" she replies, passing forward the two tokens. 

He briefly examines them. "- Now I don't know what you did to break the security already but..." And then he shouts "MANAGER!"

The woman rushes over in a moment immediately swats him in the back of the head with a closed hand fan. "You were briefed about this, two people in one body, so they get two allocations." He huffs in annoyance and turns back to Jasmine. 

"So, apparently you didn't do anything, and get two allocations. I guess you're not the weirdest new student we've had today - that spider wanted its stipend to be paid in rice futures. Don't spend it all in one place." And then he takes out two purses of gold coins, and two small wooden medicine chests, and hands them over. 

Jasmine will politely thank him, add the boxes to her pack alongside the books, and leave. Shopping can happen after they've figured out what they need. 

...hopefully that guy will feel better after a nice lie-down where nobody yells at him and no weird exceptions get thrown at him, and he is not just like this all of the time. Especially since they will probably end up interacting with him again at some point.

"...well, at least that worked out in the end."

And they will return to Jasmine's room without incident. 

"What should we look at first? It's going to be sort of annoying, only being able to read one thing at a time." She says, after carefully checking the vials they've been assigned and locking them away and laying out their books on her desk. 

Kedri wonders if it's possible to see out of an illusion-body's eyes (presumably instead of seeing out of the real body's eyes, for someone who is not planning to have superhuman sensory processing for the foreseeable future) and thereby collectively read multiple books. It would still be annoying to have to keep asking Jasmine to turn the page (...minor telekinesis? definitely put a pin in that line of inquiry), but probably better on net.

"Introductory sections of each technique? Or at least check if 'introductory section' is a meaningful way of describing how the Bound Bandit's Revenge is laid out; I'd be surprised if my stack of textbooks doesn't have an introduction."

A thought occurs to her.

"...uh, to double-check, mental cultivation is not something you can do by accident, right? It's not like trying not to think about a pink bear? They just hide the exact details from kids to prevent them from making a reckless-but-conscious *decision* to do it?"

"I'm pretty sure you need to take the drugs we were given to start cultivating."

"Is the idea that the secrets are an additional line of defence, so that a kid trying to get powers they're not ready to handle would have to steal or smuggle *both* drugs *and* textbooks?

...I guess they might not explain their security reasoning to a kid either, in case it gives the kid ideas for how to get around it.

Well, I suppose if purely-mental cultivation techniques were infohazardous to people currently forbidden from cultivating, the Head Archivist would have mentioned that in the lists of downsides."