I closed my eyes.


    “Okay, this is the weird part. Have you gotten trained to fight? Or are you just a useless clothing dummy?” Raspail asked.


    I chuckled, “Awww… I think the gremlin is mysteriously attracted to my masculine charms. You keep calling me beautiful and you may sway my girlish heart. Yeah, I have been trained to fight. Lots of times, by lots of different people. Mostly I just picked up what I needed and ditched the rest.”


    “Alright, did your fighter teachers ever talk about energy patterns?”


    I nodded, my eyes closed. “You mean like dantians and meridians and stuff? Yes. Mostly I figured it was just mystical hogwash that a lot of teachers used to try and pretend that their ‘fighting arts’ were mystically better than others.”


    “Well, remember that crap. I ain’t no fightin'' teacher. My cultivation and cyclin'' are awful, but you need the basics to be able to transfer essence, and if there’s one thing I can do, it’s push essence enough to get to copper tier and clockwork engineer mastery. I am only doin'' this because your stupid accelerator thing just opened up a new path for me. You are an inspiration, boy.”


    “That’s amazing! Congratulations!” Wandi gushed.


    “Shut up girl. I already have two wives that can’t give me gremlins, I don’t need another. Now, stop thinking about what you see on the inside of your eyelids, or what the golem leg you are sitting on feels like, or what you smell, or the taste that your girlfriend’s twat left on your tongue.”


    Wandi’s gasp was… surprising.


    “Do you shoot?”


    I nodded.


    “Think about what it’s like when you are about to take a stupidly hard shot. That headspace you get into when you know that the only thing between your bullet and the target is a quick little squeeze. There’s no air, you already canceled it out. There’s no movement, you know where it’s going to be and know you are perfectly leading it. You feel that line between the end of the barrel, your hands, and the target, where nothin'' can interrupt? Hell, even the target might feel it and panic because he knows his head’s about to paint the wall behind him. No heartbeat, no breathin'', because you are already accountin’ for that.”


    “Yes.” I breathed. I knew that feeling very well. Sort of a meditative trance, where nothing could come between me and my target, where I knew I had already succeeded, and pulling the trigger was just an afterthought.


    “That line you see? Think about yourself. There’s another line, deep inside of you, that’s like a circle. It may look like fire, it may look like wind, it may flow like blood. Don’t tilt your head, dammit! You aren’t using your eyes, they are closed. Feel it in your heart, your chest, or even your balls.”


    I tried to envision that line, that perfect target shot, and for a second, I could feel it. Like a lump of fire in my middle, surrounded by a halo. He was right. I couldn’t exactly feel it, but I could tell it was there.


    “Oh good! Your essence just spiked. Did you find it?”


    “Yes. It’s… yes, I think.”


    “Okay, is it little or is it big?”


    I tried to think about it. It was pulsing, like a candle. “I don’t really know how to compare sizes, and usually that’s not something a man would ask me. I think… it sort of feels like a big hot glow right in my belly button. With a halo that kind of seeps out, bigger than me.”


    “Good! Good! It sounds like you have a strong root. A really strong root. Is the halo cluttered? Does it have dark spots?”


    “No… It’s like when you are looking at a torch right after you wake up but without the torch. Just a big and fading kind of not-rainbow woozy light. Like if you glance at the sun and then look away, that kind of impression.”


    “He was restored.” I heard Wandi say.


    “Ahh. That’s good. Not much in the way of impurities, then. Or he might have some way of filterin'' ‘em out instinctively already. Okay, here, hold this.” he said, and I felt something metal pushed into my hands. “Can you feel that?”


    “Yes. Again, a phrase I was hoping not to hear from a man.”


    “Okay, you big meatball, now, that halo? That’s your essence pool or your dantian. The bright point in the middle is your root. I want you to picture that halo starting to spin. It doesn’t matter what direction it spins, I just need the whole big ring to start rotating.”


    I nodded and pictured the thing moving. After a few moments I realized I wasn’t breathing, so I started to use the breathing that my Tai Chi teacher suggested. Breathe in, slowly and firmly, all the way down to your diaphragm, imagining the energy coming in, holding the breath and using it, absorbing it, and then slowly breathing out, imagining any impurities, unused energy, or pollution getting pushed out with it. It was called tuna breathing or something like that, but it seemed to help.


    “What the smeck? You are using essence breathing. You didn’t tell me you knew how to do that.”Love what you''re reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.


    I didn’t know how, it was just another in a long line of crap I’d never needed, but as I breathed in, it was sort of like blowing on the side of a balloon. It slowly felt like it was turning, and the weird part was, that each breath seemed to be making the halo ever so slightly brighter.


    “Good! Good! That’s exactly what you need! Keep it spinning, draw in the energy you can use, ditch whatcha can’t. Damn boy, even for a wood you have a hell of a deep well. See that bright core in the middle? Your root?”


    “Yes.”


    “Okay, you can keep pullin’ in energy until the halo thing is as bright as your root. Spin it a little faster, but not too fast… you ain’t copper yet, and this air ain’t got enough energy in it anyway. But as a wood, you should be able to match them.”


    “What you are doing right now is called essence breathin’, or condensation. It pulls in essence instead of just naturally collectin’ it from the environment. When you get more powerful, the act of spinnin’ your core alone should be enough to drag in essence, right through your skin, but for right now that’s good. Your energy ain’t… heavy enough yet to drag in more, or to get it through your skin without breathin'' it in through your lungs.”


    “I ain’t gonna teach you about your meridians, talk to your oracle friend, they know how to get people started once they connect to their aspect, but the first step is kind of like a push. Feel that thing in your hands? You need to try and gather the energy halo, and push it into that once they match. You might even get some traits eventually you can push the energy into, but you need to figure out how to connect your meridians first, cause that’s where they link up. That’s why patternists use their hands to draw their essence patterns, cause their traits are linked to the meridians in their limbs.”


    After about half an hour, my root glow was submerged into the overall glow of the halo and seemed to almost disappear. I knew it was still there, but I didn’t feel it like a bump in the middle of the ring anymore.


    “You done? Damn, that took a long time for a wood. Okay, now that your pool is full, try pushing a little energy into the lantern. Not very much! If you push too much, or too fast, you’re gonna blow the damned thing up and maybe kill yourself.”


    I started concentrating, trying to gently nudge the energy towards my hands, the same way I was able to blow the circle into spinning. It started to push, just a little, and I felt a little… click in my hands, like a thermostat that just turned on an air conditioner with its mercury switch and coil. I stopped pushing, and with just a breath of spin, the tiny amount of energy was replaced and I let it slow down to a stop.


    “Good! Open your eyes, meatball.”


    I opened my eyes, and there was a little cylinder in my hands, glowing with nearly as much light as a sixty-watt bulb.


    “Did I do that?” I asked stupidly. Of course, I did. I felt it. Thank you, Urkle.


    The gremlin nodded, “Yep. Congratulations. You are now almost as smart as your average prepubescent gremlin. Before you know it, you should be able to identify colors and add up to five without using your fingers!”


    I growled, “Thanks a lot, snotbubble. Seriously, though, I get the feeling this was a big step.”


    He nodded slowly, “Yep, it’s a big step, but only the very first one. I can do a little more, but my root is crowswap, so I didn’t bother learning to compress the little bits of energy I got. Glad to help, but I gotta get back to work.”


    I tried to remember some of the books I had read. The cultivation fantasies seemed to be a lot like this, so I wondered if any of my memories could help improve this. I suddenly realized something.


    “Hey… umm… is there a restroom?”


    Raspail was poring back over his notes again, grumbling, and Melita shook her head, “No… if you need to sleep, I could probably make up a cot in the storehouse. Raspail doesn’t have any guest rooms.”


    “No, I mean… uhh… bathroom?”


    “You need a bath?”


    I shook my head, “No, I have a full bladder.”


    “Oh!” she exclaimed suddenly understanding. “Yes, we have a jakes upstairs. Sorry, I should have realized you’d have to do some purging.”


    I hadn’t yet. I mean, it was a little weird, it must have been due to that recycler thing, but this was the first time I’d needed a bathroom break. It was very odd, but I didn’t want to think about it… all I knew was that it was a lot, and it stank worse than any time before, ever. The jakes were… functional, for a deep hole with a stool and board over it, but I was incredibly relieved, it felt like I’d lost five pounds. And at least they had a fibrous sort of paper, even if it wasn’t Charmin. It took longer than I expected to get cleaned up, though, everything was sort of… sticky.


    Still, at least black gunk hadn’t come out of every pore and orifice, as some of those novels suggested. I wasn’t exactly crawling in clothes right now, and I was still broke. Ruining everything I was wearing, some of it borrowed, would have sucked.


    “I am confused, a little.” I confided in Wandi. “Why are you helping me so much? It’s not my hot body, right? You aren’t turning into my rich female sugar mama with side benefits?”


    She shook her head laughing as we moved away from the industrial district. “No. I mean, not that you aren’t good-looking, you are sort of growing on me, even without a tail. At first, I just wanted to get the whole energy reading thing settled out, and then, after what Kamli told me, I realized we might finally get a decent Lawkeeper. Now I’m thinking you might be a decent delver eventually, one that could help me get ahead and advance, and if you have more ideas that Raspail can use, you might wind up really well off.”


    “That’s good. A penniless lawkeeper is a lawkeeper who’s vulnerable to bribery. So now, I guess I am just getting in on the ground floor. You seem like a good man, even if you have a pretty sordid and confusing history, and once you come into your own, well, you might need a deputy.”


    “You want a job?”


    She smiled, “Deputy is a lot more than a job. Some of the stuff, like peacekeeping, hunters like me do already. There are also other benefits. It would be nice to have the authority to back up what hunters and the guilds have to do already.”


    “Other benefits?”


    She nodded, “A steady paycheck instead of living on what I hunt or delve. The deputy trait, which is extremely useful for helping resolve disputes, a title, other stuff.”


    “What kind of other stuff?”


    She glared at me. “Just other stuff. You’ll find out when you become a lawkeeper. If you become a lawkeeper. It’s complicated, but you can’t do it all yourself, you need deputies to help, and I wouldn’t mind helping deal with some of the long-standing corruption in this town. I have my reasons.”


    I wondered if those reasons involved some sort of payback, since despite her incredible helpfulness, I felt like there was something… pained about her. It was not uncommon. I didn’t think she was broken, but almost everyone has something painful in their history if they were a complete person. To quote one of my favorite movies, Life is Pain… anyone who tells you differently is selling you something.