He carefully laid out a foundation for her, though at first his demands seemed menial and pointless. He made her transcribe her history textbook into Old Nikara and back. He made her spend a chilly fall afternoon squatting over the stream catching minnows with her bare hands. He demanded she complete all assignments for every class using her nondominant left hand, so that her essays took twice as long to finish and looked like a child had written them. He made her live by twenty-five-hour days for an entire month. He made her go nocturnal for an entire two weeks, so that all she ever saw was the night sky and an eerily quiet Sinegard, and he was wholly unsympathetic when she complained about missing her other classes. He made her see how long she could go without sleeping. He made her see how long she could go without waking up.
She swallowed her skepticism, took a leap of faith, and chose to follow his instructions, hoping that enlightenment might be on the other side. Yet she did not leap blindly, because she knew what was at the other end. Daily, she saw the proof of enlightenment before her.
Because Jiang did things that no human should be able to do.
The first time, he made the leaves at his feet spin without moving a muscle.
She thought it was a trick of the wind.
And then he did it again, and then a third time, just to prove he had utter control over it.
“Shit,” she said, and then repeated, “Shit. Shit. Shit. How. How?”
“Easily,” he said.
She gaped at him. “This is—this isn’t martial arts, it’s . . .”
“It’s what?” he pressed.
“It’s supernatural.”
He looked smug. “Supernatural is a word for anything that doesn’t fit your present understanding of the world. I need you to suspend your disbelief. I need you to simply accept that these things are possible.”
“I’m supposed to take it as true that you’re a
“Don’t be silly. I am not a god,” he said. “I am a mortal who has woken up, and there is power in awareness.”
He made the wind howl at his command. He made trees rustle by pointing at them. He made water ripple without touching it, and could cause shadows to twist and screech with a whispered word.
She realized that Jiang showed her these things because she would not have believed them if he’d merely told her they were possible. He was building up a background of possibilities for her, a web of new concepts. How did you explain to a child the idea of gravity, until they knew what it meant to fall?
Some truths could be learned through memorization, like history textbooks or grammar lessons. Some had to be ingrained slowly, had to become true because they were an inevitable part of the pattern of all things.
Jiang reconfigured Rin’s perception of what was real. Through demonstrations of impossible acts, he recalibrated the way she approached the material universe.
It was easier because she was so willing to believe. She fit these challenges to her conceptions of reality into her mind without too much trauma from adjustment. The traumatic event had already occurred. She had felt herself consumed by fire. She had known what it meant to burn. She hadn’t imagined it. It had happened.
She learned to resist denying what Jiang showed her because it didn’t square with her previous notions of how things worked. She learned to stop being shocked.
Her experience during the Tournament had torn a great, jagged hole through her understanding of the world, and she waited for Jiang to fill it in for her.
Sometimes, if she bordered on asking the right question, he sent her to the library to find the answer herself.
When she asked him where Lore had been practiced before, he sent her on a wild goose chase after all that was odd and cryptic. He made her read texts on the ancient dream walkers of the southern islands and their plant spirit healing practices. He made her write detailed reports about village shamans of the Hinterlands to the north, about how they fell into trances and journeyed as spirits in the bodies of eagles. He had her pore over decades of testimony from southern Nikara villagers who claimed to be clairvoyant.
“How would you describe all of these people?” he inquired.
“Oddities. People with abilities, or people who were pretending to have abilities.” Other than that, Rin saw no way that these groups of people were linked. “How would you describe them?”
“I would call them shamans,” he said. “Those who commune with the gods.”
