(Jasmine is finding boredom much more unpleasant without the ability to either fidget or to pointedly and deliberately hold perfectly still. She is just. Lacking in stimulation. That cultivation technique can't come soon enough. For now, the exhibition match will presumably provide plenty of food for thought.) 

It certainly will. Listening in on that tournament conversation has only made Kedri more curious to witness a match herself.

(She trusts that the Bank's viewing platform will be appropriately protected against any stray missiles and the like: it would be extremely out of character for it not to be.)

She smiles as she makes her way out to the platform.

The platform is a stone viewing area built into the fortress walls, large enough to host a command group - or a hundred students crowding around the railings - and enchanted to suit. 

Once they're all present, the Fortress-Commander will reappear, this time standing nonchalantly on the air a few meters past the railing, as though there were an invisible podium in place much like the one from the auditorium. 

"Now that we're all here, I'm proud to introduce you to our 5th realm core disciples - walking the Way of Inquisition - Orichalch Demon-Harrier! And his opponent, walking the Way of Combat Engineering - Darkened Defilade, Saviour of the Nine Cities. 

Both of them move onto the field by visibly moving through space, albeit at superhuman speeds. Orichalch looks much as he did yesterday - golden robes with elaborate embroidery and all, standing tall and cheerful, a golden chain hanging from either hand, this time tipped with daggers of the same golden material as the spirit-chains themselves. Defilade, on the other hand, is a slight and exhausted-looking woman, her skin pale and sickly and bags under her eyes visible even from this distance, her form more bowed by exhaustion than by the weight of her immense pack and heavy armour, a mundane-looking (and somewhat rusty) trenching axe in one hand. 

"Now, this is just an exhibition match, so don't expect them to go all-out - It wouldn't do for anyone to get hurt. The fight will be until either side yields or is unable to continue, though I trust that they will exercise good judgement in these matters."  

He allows a pause, to make sure everyone is in their proper positions. 

"The fight will begin on my mark. Three, two, one. Go!" 

Both fighters remain still for moments, watching each other from across the field, and as they do so, they unleash their auras. Orichalch's aura of inevitable pursuit is somewhat more bearable for being aimed at a third party, but Defilade's own aura - a sensation of invincibility, of dread omens, of the claim - no, the fact - that every step forward will be paid for with an ocean of blood - added into the mix sends a ripple of shock through the crowd. Those from ducal or comital families maintain their composure, as does the mechanical spider, but the rest of the class are universally staggering and grimacing. The combatants seem to allow this to linger long enough for people to recover and return to observing, before Defilade makes her move. 

She plunges her axe into the ground, and where a mortal would have only a single clod of dirt, her axe brings up an entire hill fort. Faster than humanly possible, she pulls from her bag supplies and starts spinning out further fortifications - as moments pass, the hill-fort becomes a star-fort and then, when further space on her half of the field is not available, she spins out more space, a muddy no man's land filled with conjured reels of barbed wire hanging in the air. But Orichalch doesn't give her time to deepen further - the moment she starts construction, he rushes forwards at a speed so fast an ordinary human struggles to follow his motion, conjuring further chains to parry the bullets and cannon-shots that start to fly in his direction, to pull him forward and to use their golden blades to slice a path through her defences. At first, every path he carves seems to reveal only further fortifications, kill-zones and explosive traps where passage ought to be found, and he flits from edge to edge, leaving chains to fight and pry into existing weaknesses while shrapnel and walls seek to hem him in. He'd be lost in a maze of mud and death if not for their high viewpoint making both him and her more obvious, as she commands her forces from the rear, still assembling further weapons with which to strike him. Moments pass, and he pauses, taking hits from cannons and bullets that often don't so much as pierce his robes to gather his chains into a ball of radiant light that cuts straight through the stone of her fortifications. It misses her entirely, of course, since she was not foolish enough to remain at the exact centre of her fortifications, but he dives into the gap himself, and the fight becomes one of him dodging through stone walls that seek to crush him or divert his flight. He's ultimately too fast for them, and dives into the room where Defilade's last-ditch attempt to chain him in barbed wire falls to his own chain-blades and he can tackle her off her feet and chain her to the ground. She yields. 

The entire fight is over in less than a minute. 

The Commander allows them a moment to collect their thoughts. "Now, perhaps a small test - why did Orichalch win? I will award a small prize to the person with the most interesting insight."

There's some...flicker in her, an echo of emotion, at seeing Orichalch with those chains.

...and on that note, she would really like to not get aura'd anymore, thank you.

The main thing she thinks, watching the match, is what a boon it would be to have the sheer mental bandwidth to keep up with conditions that hectic. One wouldn't even have to use it for fights, necessarily, though one would certainly be grateful for it there.

When Black asks why Orichalch won, her first thought is to stay silent. She really doesn't know what she's doing here. She doesn't have much time in which to analyse the match (maybe someday her thoughts will flow so quickly that this constitutes enough time).

But...Jasmine said it was vital to impress one's superiors. She might not impress them if she answers. But she definitely won't impress them if she doesn't.

"He was faster, and...more than that, he had...a keen sense of the appropriate tempo at any given moment. He was fast enough to outrun or head off attacks when that was what was needed, but also knew when to trade hits for time in which to pull off something bigger."

...except that's not even Orichalch's top speed, is it. She's seen him move faster than that. (Well, for sufficiently loose definitions of "seen".)

"...or, at least, that's the answer within the...conceit of the fight, maybe. I don't know how many details of the educational demonstration were decided upon in advance: there might be a sense in which he won because he was scripted to win, in order to demonstrate some point like the tempo one."

The first few people to venture answers, just moments after being asked, tend also to venture bad answers - one suggests that he won because he had higher cultivation, one that it was because his offence was stronger than her defence, and other trivial answers. More sophisticated answers compare the suitability of their respective skillsets or ways to the sort of fight at hand, or comment on the execution of specific techniques - Black seems to dislike answers which are essentially rooted in rote-learned family lore. Kedri isn't the only one to venture thoughts about the frame of the fight, and Black clarifies that the outcome of the fight wasn't determined in advance, and the speed handicap (and other similar handicaps, like the altitude one) were framed behind the scenes with a mind to preserving their normal relative capabilities. In the end, he choses a hesitantly proposed answer from one of the civilian students - "She wasn't trying to win, was she? She was trying to make a victory as costly as possible for him. If she'd been able to, she probably would have fled as soon as he broke into the fortress, right?" - as his winner, citing that it shows insight, and also that it was actually the product of the student's own insight, rather than their ancestor's insight. He gently tosses the prize - a small velvet pouch of unclear contents to the girl, who quickly hides it away somewhere in her fraying robes. She gets several dirty looks - especially from those nobles who had recognised specific techniques and their value to the fight. 

Well, it was worth a shot (probably, hopefully). And at least she is not getting any dirty looks from people with friends in high places, which is of some comfort.

...she wonders what answer Jasmine would have given, had it been her decision what words the body spoke. Kedri's not sure she quite dares to ask now: it feels too late.

Jasmine does not volunteer her thoughts on what she would have said, though she's happy to express her thoughts about the overall match - speculating as to if the highborn students have a better trick for enduring the overwhelming auras than the practice they've presumably had from being around their seniors, about what fighting these people at full strength might be like, about how terrifying they'd be in their actual specialities, since neither inquisition nor combat engineering are Ways directly oriented around conflict - as the crowd makes its way to the archives, where they will be received in private rooms to talk to the Head Archivist about their techniques. (Normally, they wouldn't receive the attention and care of the Head Archivist without specifically paying for it, but ensuring that new disciples start off on a good foot is deemed worth the cost. How the archivist plans to conduct ten private meetings at once is left unspecified - presumably they have a technique for it.) Jasmine and Kedri have back to back appointments in the same room, but not for half an hour or so. Some people are milling around talking, some have disappeared into the stacks on their own initiative, and some have left entirely - presumably, those for whom it will be another two hours until their appointment. 

"I'd certainly like a better trick for dealing with those things. ...of course, the downside would be that then I'd have to practise using it."

Parallelism sounds incredibly beneficial in much the same way as raw speed of thought does, although she wonders how hard it is to get used to eventually not having it anymore.

(If she had ten bodies, could she give five of them to Jasmine and let them both take actions in the external world at the same time? And even if she couldn't give an even half, it might still let her at least give Jasmine control of the body that Jasmine is actually located in.

Actually, upon reflection, she is not going to keep this thought to herself.)

"The Head Archivist doing ten meetings at the same time makes me wonder if someday *we* can have multiple bodies, and each of us can use one."

She doesn't want to disappear into the stacks and risk getting lost when she has a strict time limit (especially since it seems likely that the library's relationship with physical space is at least somewhat loose), but she investigates the nearest books.

"Unfortunately, I do not think we have the luxury of never encountering someone strong again, though presumably in time we will also be strong." 

"We should look into it. I bet there are a bunch of strong techniques normally limited by attention that we could use more easily. Conjuring a second body from scratch would be pretty hard, but maybe one of us could control a puppet full time or something like that? There are other reasons people don't use puppets, though - construct puppets are expensive and corpse puppets involve mucking around with dead bodies and both are specialised skillsets to make and operate."

The archive forms a sort of cenote beneath part of the fortress, except instead of being full of water, it's full of books. They're on the uppermost floor of a series of balconies all running around a central void, with reading areas next to the balcony well-lit with cool light streaming in from the skylight in the ceiling, which lights the entire space in a way that feels perfectly pleasant but is on closer examination not at all how daylighting ought to behave. The outer wall of this floor is used for entrances to offices and meeting rooms, but they can see floors below instead line these walls with rows of bookshelves or passages to more secure areas of the library, running down for a total of ten or so floors. There are only a few books on this floor - the contents of a few return trollies and a small reference section for popular frequently used reference books. There are others using the space - some scholars paying attention to their books, and some (slightly) older disciples amusedly watching the flock of newbies. 

"Corpse puppets do sound...distasteful, but I'd definitely be interested in learning more about construct puppets when we get the chance."

She has a vision of herself (in puppet form) running a surrogate-body shop.

She peers down the void, wondering if there are safety nets. She refrains from finding a pebble to toss over the railing and see what happens.

The space does look fairly intuitive to navigate (at least as long as you stick to the main shaft), but if nothing else, walking somewhere else would mean having to be careful to allot enough time to walk back.

She will start by looking at what they have in the quick-reference section.

They have: a shelf of atlases and gazeteers for the duchy, another shelf and a half for the empire as a whole, half a shelf for outside the empire. A shelf of dictionaries, including one for a language Jasmine recognises as the old local tongue but which she does not personally speak. A shelf of almanacs. A shelf of indexes of historical events - mostly taken up by one comprehensive history starting with the founding of the Bank. Two shelves containing a comprehensive encyclopaedia. One shelf with an extensive encyclopaedia of qi theory. A shelf with technique indexes. A shelf with formation-theory indexes. Two shelves with cultivation resource indexes. Three shelves of biographical indexes. A second reference section on the opposite side of the floor contains duplicates of everything. 

!!!

(One out of two on "six months and a library" ain't bad.)

She almost picks up an encyclopedia, then notices the technique indexes and decides that those are probably higher-priority.

She takes a book from the technique-index shelf and gives the first pages a look. If the information is too heavily compressed and reliant on external context she's missing, she'll go back to Plan Encyclopedia.

The main body of the technique indexes is just a sorted list of techniques, by aspect and then element and then what passes for alphabetical order in the imperial logography. Each technique has only a sentence or two of description, a few stats like realm, meridian demand, and then references to places where the technique itself is known (often one of "N/A" or "Bank Archives") or to further literature on it. Some books, such as the "hundred perfect blade arts" provide more detailed description of the arts they cover, but there are few techniques common enough to warrant this level of detail here. 

Plan encyclopedia: does she know what aabam is? (A cursed alloy of lead and resentful energy.) Did she know the Aach is a river in such and such county? (It is.) Did she know what an aardvark is? (A sort of small ant-eating mammal.) Did she know what an aardvark, bravehearted is? (That same mammal, scaled up in size and ambition.) Did she know what an aardvark, demon antbane is? (Another form of monsterous aardvark, this time specialised in hunting monsterous ants rather than just being larger and more omnivorous.) Does she know what abaco means? (It's an extremely archaic term for arithmetic.)

Hmm, okay, she supposes that level of abbreviation makes sense for a reference bookcase.

It would indeed make an excellent reference volume, and it's definitely better than nothing as an orientation tool, but it raises almost as many questions as it answers.

She puts the encyclopedia away.

"What's resentful energy?"

"Resentful energy is qi that has acquired a negative emotional valence, usually due to being exposed to or produced by someone experiencing a lot of grief, pain, sorrow, etc. Most common in minor stains by people who died unpleasantly but it pops up all over the place. It's not very useful for many things and the things it is useful for are discouraged because someone will try to manufacture it by torturing peasants." 

"Ouch.

Is it poisonous, also? It sounds like something that might be."

"It's not not poisonous but you won't accidentally ingest it without noticing and bad actors have more effective things to kill you with." 

She nods.

Next, she tries a duchy atlas.

The duchy is about 8,000 li across. (A li appears to be about 500 meters). It appears to have two main parts - an eastern part centered around a network of river valleys that ultimately flow out of the duchy, with the ducal capital at a key confluence and many other large cities besides, and, separated by a large mountain range pierced through with a few railway lines, there is a central region centered about what is referred to on the map as the Silver Sea. The fortress-vault is clearly marked as being just off the coast of this sea, and the numerous river basins that feed into it make up the other major population center of the duchy. These main population centres are split up into about 300 counties marked on the main map, but the majority of the western third of the map, as well as several other mountain ranges and border regions, are marked with the block colours of the four warden tribes - mountain wardens, forest wardens, cave wardens, and river wardens. There's no path from the fortress to the outside of the duchy without passing through a solid band of warden territory. The atlas has a chapter on warden territory that is not hugely informative, and then devotes a couple pages to each of the many counties.