"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." 

"Smoother interpreting in scenarios where she has (nonverbal) telepathy with her host but no language access", "telepathic interpreting with people she's not sharing a brain with", and "noticeably-more-than-mundane communication ability in scenarios where she has neither telepathy nor language" do all sound handy. And knowing an alien language still helps with secret-keeping!

Hmm.

So, it sounds like...your spiritual infrastructure is no more you than your body is: you may be very attached to it both literally and figuratively, but it will not always be there for you. (...unless you become a force of nature, but anyway)

In the long run, the only thing you can obtain that truly belongs to you is knowledge, and other things are transient save to the extent that you can personally reconstruct them from that knowledge. Same as it ever was.

Except now the thing she's learning is how to make use of magical energy, which might exist unnoticed elsewhere (or noticed, for that matter). And there are rumours, for whatever rumours are worth, that she might not even lose all of the energy and infrastructure when she departs.

"It'll be good to have a head start next time. Hopefully that's a long way off.

I wonder if there was qi back home and we just never figured out how to use it. ...except maybe the spirits.

What's an example of how things here are more cool and secure and stable?"

(...it occurs to her that she might not be here long enough for her soul to fully integrate the new language: if you depart in maybe the first few months or so it tends to end up more fragmentary and reliant on which bits you were actively using. Is there anything she should do to factor in that risk? Would it help to write even non-secret notes in Tashayan for a while: would that make them easier to memorise? Or should she swing the other direction, and do a lot of reading and writing and discussion in Imperial to encourage her soul to adjust faster? She'll probably be doing a lot of that anyway.

Is this all in favour of going Academic (knowledge as the highest priority), or against it (dangerous to have some of your knowledge be only semi-integrated into your being without necessarily having a clear sense of which bits those are, which might well be the case for magically-enhanced knowledge)?

Well, they'll be getting to cultivation plans soon: she can dig into that question then.)

"It's generally agreed that qi is the substance souls are made of, so there'd have to be? Unless physics was very different, I guess? There are several creation myths that say qi was less obvious to the first cultivators, but I don't know anything about prehistory that isn't folklore, unfortunately."

"Regarding the stain on the fortress - the walls are harder to break? If I balance a chopstick on its end it's less likely to fall over? The icebox is more efficient? I bet he has an inheritance trial hidden somewhere as well." 

"Well, if I were made of some other, non-qi substance I suppose I wouldn't have scanned as being an ordinary mortal, so that probably answers that question.

Huh. I guess you get used to effects like that."

She wonders if people back home will ever learn to cultivate, whether by figuring it out on their own or being taught by some magical equivalent of Amethyst Brightpath and her otherworldly steam engines. Maybe they already have, in however long she was asleep between one life and the next.

...she hopes the disruption caused by the first stain on the world's background qi doesn't go too badly.

"So, I think next we were talking about, um, your old plan and why it's not workable now, and a start on what the new plan should look like?"

"Yeah. So, my previous plan was to go for a martial, beautiful, virtuous build geared toward bodyguard work - martial for straightforward combat power, beautiful because it's got a lot of utility and quite frankly, I wanted it, and people like bodyguards who they can take to social occasions, and virtues - probably loyalty and vigilance, to ensure trust and round out weaknesses. I was going to adventure around the place, find interesting and capable people who were - worthy of the sort of commitment that swearing to protect someone with your life entails, and then doing that. None of this was fixed beyond the broad strokes of which aspects I was going to pick - because I expected to see and learn and encounter a lot of things adventuring that would make me rethink it, one way or another, or give me better chances elsewhere. 

There are a couple of clear reasons not to go with that, now. One is that - this path had a bunch of prices that I don't think you should pay. It ends up with me dying in battle or to an assassin's blade. I figured that was fair, for myself, but it's not for you. Secondarily, the role of a really close bodyguard for someone amazing - really wants that loyalty virtue cultivation, and I think that the two of us should stay away from virtue cultivation. Because it seems to me to be wasteful, for both of us to be totally invested in a single virtue, when we have the chance to take diverging and synergistic paths instead, and if only one of us takes a virtue, then either the other will have to pay half the price, e.g. we'll both be held back by one of us cultivating gluttony, or we won't get all the benefits, because it doesn't matter how truthful you make yourself if you share a body with someone who can lie. Maybe you've got a virtue you're already totally committed to, such that we'd have to navigate anyway, but it doesn't seem worth the trouble to me, at first glance, to cultivate something new. 

With that in mind - there are six aspects remaining, and we have six slots. We could get all of them. The exact details depend on - what you want to make of yourself, who you see - yourself, at the threshold of godhood, as being, but as a first draft - martial and hidden work well together, and academic and arcane work well together, and each of us should take one of the aspects that pertain to social skills to prevent there being - an imbalance in how capable we are in that respect relative to each other. And I'm, I think, a better fighter than you, and better at thinking on my feet, so a draft build could be me taking martial, hidden and beautiful, and you taking academic, arcane and noble. So, like, I can take the body in the moment and carry us through fights while you work on longer term problems? The details depend on what techniques we get, but we won't get what we didn't think to ask for." 

Well, Jasmine sure is encountering things that make her rethink her plan. At least she knew, even if only in a very broad sense, that that was something likely to happen.

Kedri thinks about the proposal for a bit.

"I can take the body in the moment and carry us through fights while you work on longer term problems" certainly does sound like a good division of labour.

That's an interesting point about the social-skills thing. She thinks over Noble again: it wasn't just rulership, there was stuff about duties and formalised obligations.

There might be something in there, a path that she could gladly take. She doesn't like the thought of having subjects, but...charges, on the other hand...

(And while she's not foolish enough to choose an aspect for the sake of a single spell, neither does it have zero weight on the scales that "mass disease-warding" would be a very good thing for her future selves to have in their techno-magical-revolution toolkit.)

"...I think there's a lot of promise to that idea. So far, I have two questions:

Can you tell me more about...the range of ways Noble can be? The initial summary sounds like...like most ways of doing Noble wouldn't be for me but that there would maybe be some that would. I don't feel like I'm really ruler material, but a different framing or a focus on other sub-aspects might work well.

What's knowledge magic like? I like the sound of it, but I'm worried about accidentally outsourcing too much of my knowledge to things I probably wouldn't keep when I died."

"So, I assumed you'd find rulership appealing - because it's a form of power that runs long and slow and deep, and besides, the empire makes it really easy for a powerful cultivator to join the nobility, so it's plausibly something we'd do anyway eventually. But, if you don't want that - nobility is broadly speaking the best aspect for empowering your allies of all sorts. Empowering or weakening people you have power over is easiest, of course, but empowering or manipulating your peers and superiors is also perfectly possible, if less prestigious, and there are advantages to empowering people who are not so weak that they'll subordinate themselves to you. Noble magic also contains things like contract magics and fear magics and things like that. Any situation wherein - relationships and obligations and social power - matters can be related to the noble aspect, even if rulership is a really common way to use it." 

"So, I haven't really studied the details of academic magic but - I think it operates analogously to martial magic, in that there's magical techniques that you just do in the moment - you just throw a fireball or divine the weather for the next day, and losing those techniques would be frustrating and make you less effective but wouldn't be like, structurally bad for you, and then there's body refinement, where you use magic to make changes to how your body works. And in body refinement, there's ways you can do it which just involve using magic to make your body better, but leave you with a body that isn't intrinsically magic afterwards and there's ways which incorporate magic into your body and incur a permanent lockup of part of your qi or a permanent upkeep cost, or just a temporary cost while you're using them to enhance yourself but eventually you're strong enough that you're never not doing that. And I think - it would be a big drawback to only use the first sort of refinement technique, but you could. Because like, there are normal people with perfect memories, or who are just much smarter than me, without any qi at all. So it would make sense if there was a technique that makes your mind more like that, but which doesn't need any magic afterwards. Even if it's probably inefficient and hits a ceiling much lower than the ceiling for other forms of cognitive enhancement - I'm certainly not planning on sticking exclusively to passive body refining regimes." 

This time she catches herself before trying to nod. Not that anyone can tell, but it still feels less embarrassing that way.

"Sounds like a good draft."

"A cognitive enhancement lasting only for this life isn't *necessarily* a dealbreaker: depending on the details, it might not be so different from something like owning a book you haven't memorised, which I've still done plenty of even knowing that one day I was never going to have a chance to read them again. It's...unfortunate, but usually better than never reading the book at all."

(a pang of grief for her favourite novel, which she knows only a few bits and pieces of by heart)

"I'd just want to be cautious about it, and make sure I stayed aware of which bits of information were being stored in my core self and which were merely written down in spiritual notebooks."

"That makes sense. Do be careful you don't pass up too much, in your caution. That said, with that draft in mind - we should think about what sorts of foundation techniques to ask for, from the archives, tomorrow. We won't have infinite freedom to chose, and we should probably mostly trust the advice of the archivists - they're very good at their jobs, the head archivist is in the 5th realm. But they can't recommend things to us if we don't know what we want. I'm going to ask for a martial technique, because it seems like - the ability which we we will be most likely to regret not having, of my three aspects, and I guess you seem interested in academic techniques? Or you could choose something noble, to help us make a head start in forging friendships and alliances, or you could pick arcane, and maybe get started on learning a craft. I guess, whatever you pick will be what you want us to go to elective classes on as well, right? You said you were a butcher before - maybe if I study martial abilities and you study butchering techniques, we could make some early cash as hunters? And then you could study alchemy as well and we could have our own supply of cores and pills to cultivate with! But - whatever techniques we ask for, we should try to get ones we can cultivate without needing control over my body, so that whoever isn't facing can spend that time cultivating. We're meant to spend, like, half or more of our time cultivating, anyway, so that way we could maintain pretty close to par attendance and productivity compared to any two other students. Maybe if I can get a technique to handle physical exhaustion, we could do even better!"