Master Mingtian was, of course, perfectly poised. She wasn’t sure if she’d ever seen him not looking like he’d stepped right out of a storybook, come to think about it… “Lily.” He gave her a warm smile, gesturing to the chair in front of his desk. “I’ve been expecting you. Have fun with today’s assignment?”

  “It was a lot more difficult than usual, but I… managed.” It’d required some math that she really did not understand, but with enough effort she’d managed to cludge a workaround for it. “What was the intended solution? Surely a bypass like… here, let me show you what I got.” She pulled out the sheaf of paper from her backpack, wincing a little at how wrinkled and rumpled it was. Hopefully that wouldn’t affect the legibility of anything…

  Mingtain didn’t seem to pay any attention to it, merely flicking through the sheaf of papers with an intense look— scanning each and every thing about it, not letting anything escape his gaze. After a moment, he cracked a smile, then— laughed, the sound startlingly bright as it broke through the silence between them. “You’re right. This isn’t the solution… though I think that’s more my error than anything you did wrong. In essence, you could make a circuit with the connections like that… and in the context of the problem, it even works. Awkwardly, but it works. My fault for making too ideal a situation. Imagine what would happen if you had a subsidiary formation connected to this cycle?” She frowned. That would put a lot of strain on the connection— “what about multiple subsidiary formation? What about a grand formation?”

  She blinked as it suddenly became crystal clear exactly why her idea was stupid, and also dumb, and suicidal to boot. “It’d explode. Violently.”

  “Your idea would make a pretty good bomb if there weren’t better opportunities for explosive formations… but, yes, that’s the crux of the issue. This is impressive work, don’t mistake me— at least you managed to connect the cycle. Without… well, certain advanced materials, qi techniques, and so on and so forth that you don’t have access to, that’s actually a remarkable feat indeed. Except… imagine, what if you could have the circuit complete without any of that?”

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  Slowly, he began to sketch out the runes, one by one— her brow only furrowing more and more as she looked at it. At first, it looked utterly random, but then… it didn’t take long before she started to see what he was doing. “That… what? How does that make any sense? Are those even the correct runes?”

  “They’re involuted,” he responded, not even looking up, as if that explained anything. Then she looked at them closer and… she saw it. They were involuted, yes, but so were the others beside them, the runes curled in on themselves in a way that shouldn’t have worked but did, somehow. “I thought you said that I wouldn’t be able to modify three dimensional runes until I started cultivating.”

  Mingtian grinned back at her. “That’s a good point— I’m glad you brought it up— but I’m not modifying the runes, am I? Think about it. These runes are utterly the same as any other three dimensional rune.” Except they—

  Were drawn on paper.

  Representation of three dimensions or not, they were, by their very nature, two dimensional. It was… she worked her mouth in silence at that for a moment, awed. It was so obvious when she thought about it, but she’d never have figured it out in a million years. “I see,” she finally managed to bite out after a while. “I see…” a smile spread across her face. It all made sense.

  All it took was looking at things from a different perspective. She glanced up at Master Mingtian and found no hint of duplicity, no greater, deeper message… just an earnestness. The same joy he always seemed to get when he was sharing formations with her.

  So she put aside her suspicions that he was trying to teach her a lesson, just for a moment, and… enjoyed the act of learning.

  It was a productive evening indeed.

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