Heron was bored out of his mind. It wasn’t the first time he had to sit around and do nothing, but this was definitely the longest.

  He wasn’t sure if the kid he cast his dice on was worth it yet, and he had no idea how long he would be stuck in this house.

  Sure, he had food, and no real responsibilities. At least that’s what he told himself every day now.

  That didn’t stop him from becoming a little stir-crazy. He had thought of trying to leave several times now and talked himself out of it every time.

  He was aware of where he was, at least to the extent that he knew if he was unlucky when trying to leave, he wouldn’t make it very far before being killed, probably not even on purpose.

  Yet, he reminded himself again that he just had to be patient enough for Hugh to reach Condensation, preferably liquid. The problem was that a couple of weeks ago, Hugh had told him that he was stuck.

  Of course, Heron gave the kid some advice, hoping that it would help in some way, knowing full well that he had no idea what he was talking about since he had never cultivated before.

  The whole situation was an exercise in frustration.

  Why did he have to come along?

  Why wasn’t anybody here at least giving the kid some pointers?

  Why was there no way for him to at least get a beer at whatever local inn was here?

  Why did it have to be the Inner Nexus?

  Heron felt aggrieved at the entire situation. He was only a mortal with no talent to cultivate at all. If it wasn’t for that, he would’ve been able to start a long time ago and never be in such a situation.

  “The heavens are unfair.”

  As Heron laid on a bench in the front room wallowing in his depressive mood, he heard Hugh shout from the back of the house.

  “I’m in Condensation!”

  Heron couldn’t believe his ears at first. Was he hallucinating in his lament?

  It hadn’t even been two months yet, and he knew enough that most people took a lot longer than that.

  Heron opened his eyes and sat up, turning to look at the kid, “Are you really?”

  Heron wanted to believe him, but that was just too fast.

  With a wide smile, Hugh repeated himself in a slightly calmer tone. It lost the extreme excitement and was replaced with more surety, “I’m in Condensation.”

  Heron wished it were true, but he also didn’t want the kid to rush out and get himself in trouble.

  What if he was wrong?

  Heron knew the kid was woefully ignorant of a lot of things. If he was wrong about the assumption, that would mean he would be in trouble.

  Heron asked, “How do you know you’re in Condensation and not just reaching mist, or maybe the middle of the mist stage? It takes most people months to go through Mist, and each one above it supposedly takes a lot longer than that.”

  Hugh was silent for a moment, pondering over what Heron said. After a moment, Hugh’s shoulders shrunk some before stating in a defeated tone, “I don’t know.”

  Thoughts turning in Hugh’s head, the second-guessing pushed him toward thinking he was wrong. Especially now that Heron said there were stages in the Mist.

  After seeing Hugh’s reaction, Heron sighed and laid back down. Not wanting the second-guessing to affect the boys’ progress, Heron spoke again.

  “It’s not that I don’t want you to be in Condensation yet. It just happened too fast…”

  Hugh frowned and asked, “How many stages are there in Mist?”

  Heron didn’t register the question and just kept speaking what was now on his mind, “I knew a kid once. Just like you. He came from some unknown village and had never been tested.”

  Hugh perked up at this as it was the first time Heron mentioned something aside from being bored and wanting to go visit the town.

  “He was never tested to my knowledge either, but like I did with you, I shared with him one of the methods.”

  Hugh didn’t know where this was going, but he kept listening to Heron’s reverie.

  “He spent three months scraping by on the streets and I would often bring him food scraps. But the important part was that he was training every day and after six months he excitedly told me he had reached Mist.”

  “It was great news and he was so happy. And I was happy that things were working out… I spent a chuck of my savings and took the boy out to eat a real meal at a Tavern near the outskirts of town.”

  Heron closed his eyes, lost in the moment internally for a moment.

  “It was the first real meal they had ever had, and the first I had had in a very long time.”

  Hugh liked the story so far, though he thought it was weird it took the other person six months.

  That wasn’t a long time, but it was still a lot longer than himself. Hugh thought something happened at this point in the story, so he asked, “Did you run into trouble at the tavern?”

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Heron sighed, “No. But perhaps it would’ve been better if we had. As a mortal, I can’t really tell what stage somebody is at, only whether somebody is a cultivator or not.”

  Hugh was confused by the statement but Heron continued.

  “Since he was in Mist, he could do a couple of things a mortal cannot, so he decided to get a job as a carrier and promised to keep working on getting stronger in his down time.”

  Hugh commented, “That sounds reasonable.”

  Heron bobbed his head slightly while laying down.

  “Indeed it was. And it went on like that for a while.”

  Heron took a deep breath before continuing, “A year down the road, he found me after coming back from a task. He was missing an arm and looked like he’d been through hell.”

  “What happened?”

  Heron looked Hugh in the eyes, hoping to drill the next part in.

  “He thought he had progressed and took on a task for those in Condensation.”

  There was silence in the room while Hugh tried to think about it. He was so sure he was in Condensation, but it had only been about two and a half months since he started cultivating.

  More doubt sept into Hugh's mind and he began questioning if he really had a breakthrough or not. He felt stronger and was definitely faster than before.

  Hugh also didn’t want to try and enter the Nexus only to be rebuffed due to still being in the Mist stage.

  Heron spoke no more and Hugh walked away after a bit, at a loss. Returning to sit back down in the training room and continue cultivating, Hugh gathered himself, hoping the next time he felt like he broke through, he knew he would have to be at Condensation then.

  Heron didn’t want to burst the kid’s bubble, but he also didn’t want to let the kid run around thinking he was already stronger than he actually was. It had only been a couple of months and there was no way he was already at Condensation.

  -

  In the training room, Hugh slowly calmed his thoughts, taking his time as he began to pace his breaths. There was nothing too special with his breathing, but even without focus, there was enough energy suffusing the space around him that it was pulled in anyways.

  Just like before, he felt the energy enter along with the air in his lungs, but this time, with every exhale no more seemed to stay inside himself.

  He did this for about half an hour before giving up in frustration. He could feel the energy coming in, but he could also feel the energy going out leaving the same amount in his body as he had when he started to cultivate thirty minutes ago.

  Not knowing how to proceed again was definitely frustrating, and while attempting to cultivate itself was somewhat relaxing and enjoyable, it still felt pointless now that he didn’t feel any progress was being made.

  He had been so focused on cultivating and studying the floor in the training room over the past month that it was all he had a mind for. With the two things reduced to one, Hugh just looked around at the floor again.

  “I don’t know what to do next, and I hit a wall with everything I was doing.”

  Hugh got up from the center of the training room and began to slowly walk around it, following the patterns like so many times before.

  As he took steps, his mind began to wander for the first time in a while.

  He wondered how his parents were doing and hoped they were alright. He wondered how Gris was doing and hoped he would also find a way to get to a town, even if it was just Belford.

  Hugh thought back to his long trek through the wildlands with Jack and Koel. He had spent several days almost constantly at a jog and his sore muscles felt close to giving up multiple times a day.

  Hugh thought about the view as he first saw a town that he later learned was named Kippur. How Jack and Koel tricked him and sold him off as a slave and he woke up in a cell.

  Hugh remembered meeting Heron and the others, and then Heron giving him a method.

  Hugh stopped here, remembering he should already have a method. Reliving the memories in his mind, he stopped pacing around the training room and rushed to sit back down on the platform in the middle again.

  Relaxing his mind, Hugh remembered the feeling he had when the seed entered him. It was faint but Hugh could vaguely feel something inside himself alongside his small bit of energy resting in his lower chest.

  Hugh couldn’t believe he had forgotten about it for so long and wondered if he had been doing things the wrong way this whole time.

  Inhaling deeply, Hugh could feel the energy enter his body through his lungs along with the oxygen in his blood. Unlike the oxygen, it wasn’t carried along specific pathways and seemed to diffuse into his body.

  Normally, it would all flow towards his core naturally, and stop once it had enough for the day. It was different now though, as he drew a new breath, the energy around it seemed to push the other energies already inside of him away. The action repeated itself until it left through his skin and back into the air around him.

  He thought back to the teardrop-shaped seed and tried to picture it in his mind. He had no idea where it was inside of him, he just knew that it was.

  After more time than he realized passed, spent trying to focus on the seed, Hugh’s vision shifted. His mind seemed to be transported to another world as he reopened his eyes.

  Around him was a blank canvas, absent of color, shape, or distance. The only thing that gave a sense of position was the thing he had been trying to focus on all this time.

  There it was, just floating in front of him now with what looked like a rope or string attached to the top leading off into the nothingness. After a brief look around at everything, he brought his focused attention to the object itself.

  Floating there, it seemed to give off a sensation, unlike anything he had felt aside from it. It was a pressure that somehow felt more powerful than those he felt by other people, yet he was not hampered by it in the slightest.

  On the outside of the object, he could barely make out the lines beginning to irradiate its surface. With the intent of wanting a closer look, he found his perspective shifting around the item, getting closer in an instant.

  He was surprised for a moment but tossed the thoughts away as he knew that it didn’t matter. The lines formed a trail as they seemed to carve themselves onto the seed, and Hugh simply watched them shift around like a simple sketch making itself known. The trailing lines weren’t permanent though and he stared at it for an unknown amount of time before realization struck.

  The complex paths that were drawn seemed mysterious at first, but the more he watched, the more he pieced together. The first major bit clicked in his mind when he affirmed the nagging suspicion in his mind that it was a repeating pattern. Just like the formation in the training room.

  Several cycles later, after memorizing a good bit of how the largest line moved was he able to confirm it. Following that, he tried to follow the second brightest line to only realize that at times it was so faint he couldn’t be certain of its location.

  There were lines nearby that appeared from the depths of the object. Each time he found what appeared to be a sort of break if he followed along the same path, there was always another line that appeared from the depths too.

  Pondering on this for a moment, Hugh decided to treat them as continuous and ignore that they weren’t solidly visible the entire path. for now, he returned to watching the largest and most clear path being traced.

  What seemed like an overly complex path slowly began to reveal itself the more he memorized. Even though he wasn’t sure if this would help anything at the moment, the was a vague sense of importance to do so that pushed him forward.

  Having fully memorized the first line as it twisted and wound itself around the object, Hugh still didn’t feel like he understood it fully. Doing the only thing he could do, he attempted again to follow the second line. Disregarding when it became too faint to trace, he let his mind fill in the gaps as if it continued on straight.

  Not knowing what to do next after reaffirming he memorized the entire path the first line made, Hugh thought that he wanted to leave. The next instant, he found himself still sitting in the middle of the training room with complete sensations of himself and his surroundings again.

  “That was pretty strange,” he muttered to himself before slowly getting back up and leaving the room.