And thus the meal proceeds. The meal is satisfying and invigorating, but somehow even as they fail to approach 'full' the invigoration only grows. 

The next course is a dessert and palate cleanser, a dish of shaved ice with a selection of light and sweet syrups, and a carbonated drink, sharp and sour and ambiguously herbal in flavour. Drinking it, it appears to be a stimulant of some kind, awakening and focusing and intensifying the senses. 

The fizziness works weirdly well here. Kind of like the pickles, it's intense but never quite overwhelming. Maybe the invigoration makes it easier to handle.

Jasmine is starting to get the impression she likes stronger flavours than Kedri does. Oh well, at least nothing here was properly spicy food. ... it would be a little irritating if she had to give up eating spicy food. She's not going to complain, though. 

With the plates for the penultimate course cleared away, instead of serving the final course, Chef Trout will ring a bell and gather the attention of the entire room.

"I hope you have all enjoyed your meal thus far, honoured guests, and thank you for attending this feast. For our final course, I have something very impressive for you." And here, she sweeps a cloth off the enormous display that has been set up behind her, to reveal a dead lionfish the size of a horse on a bed of ice, with stripes of bright iridescent red and blue and great and terrible wreaths of spines still present as they were in life. 

"- a Fireheart Lionfish, of the fourth realm, hunted and brought here especially for this meal. The sashimi from this fish will contain much of the power of its flesh, and if consumed properly will, with the aid of the prior courses, burn impurities from your body and soul to aid in your upcoming cultivation. But beware, for if you lose control of these forces, they will burn you up from within, and you might be terribly injured. Because you are new initiates, we have doctors on hand to treat any injuries." 

The fish was of the fourth realm?

...is it a person. "Constructing a new soul for yourself" sounds like something you would need to be a person to do, but what does she know.

She's not per se opposed to the idea of maybe eating a person, but hunting a person would seem like a dangerous precedent.

...that description sure was missing a lot of the specifics you'd need in order to be able to give informed consent. What qualifies as an impurity? What, historically, is the failure rate of attempts to properly consume this? (There's a big difference between one in ten thousand and one in five.)

she's been rather enjoying not being terribly injured

also she would feel guilty about injuring Jasmine

...what if she succeeds and Jasmine fails (or is that not how it works because Kedri's the one fronting)

She suspects it will turn out to be something worth the cost. But still.

(...it's probably closer to ten thousand than five: the phrasing "to treat any injuries" implies that Trout thinks there's a decent chance that all of the hundreds of people here will succeed.)

Also, it's looking like she'll be eating raw fish after all. If only Belera could see her now.

Hype! This is the sort of powerful boon she was hoping for! And hopefully the 'engage successfully with the profound cosmic forces that are offered to her' test will be more passable to her this time, since it's more on her level. 

Trout sets to work slicing the lionfish up with her great cleavers and knives the size of polearms. It's almost a matter of theatre to her, grand flourishes and delicate slices. In a flash, three delicate slices of pale flesh have been plated for each student. 

The servers deliver two plates to Kedri and Jasmine. One for each of them. It's very important that they each eat and process their own portion, lest the burden be overwhelming. They explain in simple terms the meditative process needed to assimilate the energy - visualisation and focus on the sensation of heat, keeping it stable in their belly and then allowing it to diffuse. Pain is a useful signal that this inner fire is touching things it should not be alloyed to touch, but they do have some wiggle room which will be merely painful and not substantially injurious. 

(Someday, perhaps soon, they will both be good enough at switching that it won't matter who happens to go first when taking turns doing something. For now, it's fortunate that it will be Kedri who will have to switch on the spot.)

"What happens if everything goes well? I'm not sure if 'impurity' is an unfamiliar term-of-art or something."

"It is. You accumulate and assimilate microscopic physical and spiritual influences as part of living in the world. For a healthy mortal the effect is negligble in all respects, but for a cultivator, they compete with your intended movements of qi and are a source of noise and imperfections in your cycling and refinement. 

In this case, the impurities will be entirely destroyed and you will not have to worry about them being unduly emitted in a manner unpleasant or hazardous - this species of lionfish is highly prized for the quality of purification it can offer. You will likely be spiritually exhausted but not debilitatingly so, and you will likely experience symptoms of the phantom heat sensation, such as sweating, etc. If you were suffering from qi poisoning, pill toxicity, or similar, such a meal would permit substantial steps towards recovery." 

She nods. That sounds like a perfectly ego-syntonic benefit.

Right then. Here goes.

And her (well, Jasmine's, but who's counting) stomach is filled with an intense heat that seeks to spread throughout her body. It starts to burn almost immediately, albeit only in a slight way. 

Kedri focuses on containing the heat, willing a controlled release. One wouldn't want to be enveloped by the sun, but sunlight is healing nonetheless. She'll hold this cleansing flame, let it burn away the impurities, and emerge stronger.

She does, as it happens, have a fair amount of experience with meditation.

(She lets go of a passing thought wondering what Jasmine is experiencing right now. There'll be time for that later.)

The poison - for that is, in the end, what this is, does not wish to cooperate with her nice friendly metaphors. It roils and seethes, deadening her senses and her limbs, straining from her control. It's not quite intelligent, but sometimes it feels almost like it is, with the way it calms to gather its strength and then seeks to escape in concentrated plumes.

Someone, somewhere away from her, screams in pain.

Jasmine can't feel Kedri's soul, so she only knows what is happening to the body - the jabs of pain and increasing dulling of senses (though they are not yet worse than they were before the stimulants). It's concerning, but You Do Not Interrupt People While They Are Cultivating. For very good reasons, like honour, and not interrupting them while they contain the fire that could consume them both. So she waits, and wonders if one day she and Kedri might have something productive worked out for the second person to do in times like these.

(...yeah, in hindsight it was not actually a good idea for them to all do this together (such that any one person screaming would distract the rest), was it. She supposes there would be logistical issues with doing it separately, but still.)

She flinches a little at the sound, but no: she has more pressing concerns than a stranger's pain, already well on its way to treatment. She'll put on her own oxygen mask.

(A passing flicker of amusement, that the sense-dulling would make the screaming easier to ignore.)

She's taken plenty of poisonous medicines in her time, and been far better off with them than she would have been without.

Look, fire, maybe you haven't quite gotten the memo yet, but you serve her now. She's tamed the corpses of fish beyond counting, and she'll tame this one too. The fire's not the only one who can gather up its strength, and--unlike it--she has a whole self's worth of strength to draw on.

Out here, on the front lines, facing down and conquering the horrors of dead fish that others cannot handle. That's her, alright.

It's not simple, and never easy, but the work is surprisingly engaging, and time flies by. Perhaps she doesn't get off entirely unharmed, but in time the sensations mellow and flow under her will and then, fade into a surprisingly mundane burn of exhausted lungs and muscles.

When she's sufficiently confident that it's over, she sags, places her hands against the table to steady herself, takes (with a little difficulty) a deep breath of likewise magically-purified air.

She grins.

(Presumably the aftereffects would feel less mundane for someone who had learned to control their qi. All of the non-mundane qualia are going on in senses she doesn't have yet.

She looks forward to those new capabilities, that expansion of her subjective world into layers that were once hidden to her. She's made the path towards it a little smoother, now, for future-her.)

She switches out of the front for Jasmine's turn.

"Are the general body aches some sort of subjective reflection of my spiritual exhaustion, or can you feel them too? I...hope I'm not starting you off at a disadvantage."

"I'm certainly feeling some of it, but I'm confident I'll be fine." 

Is it perhaps hubristic of her to assume that anything Kedri, who learned cultivation existed yesterday, can do, she, who has been trained in meditation and mental focus under pressure and exhaustion for years, can do just as well even with a handicap. Yes, it probably is. That still does seem to be true, though. And the people who were going to be screaming have mostly finished by now, she thinks.

She reaches for the second plate of sashimi. It's vaguely surreal, actually, having command of her body after hours of not that.

The fire in her belly is no kinder or safer than Kedri's dose, and it's all the worse for her worse state.