"This is the smallest-sized bedding we have available. It should comfortably fit any bed in the children's lodgings I showed you before," Lora finished explaining before handing me a round white pack as tall as I was.
"Once you've settled down, come find me at my desk. You're still certain you want to begin your lessons now?"
"Yes." I nodded firmly.
The faster I learned how to read all these presently meaningless scribbles, the faster I could get started on researching my Aspects to understand them better, along with understanding what the difference was between having and not having an Origin Aspect.
Only by doing that could I grow stronger even more quickly than before.
Or at least that's what I was led to believe.
Parting ways with Lora, I took my bedding pack back towards the children's lodgings, and more specifically, the Seeker Path's children's lodgings, whose occupants I deduced were called Acolytes by association, with Initiate referring to the Sentinel Path's equivalent of Acolytes or something.
That was another mess of obviously important terms I needed to finally make sense of.
All in due time.
After journeying through the negligibly confounding corridors of the Faith's Prime Temple, I ended up right where I wanted and swiftly travelled from door to door to find the best unoccupied bed I could.
My choice was eventually made, and just like that, I found myself the new owner of a bed hidden inside a perfect, narrow recess, itself concealed behind a sharp corner in the metal wall.
From there, I copied how all the other children left their belongings behind and emptied my backpack of all my nonessentials, keeping the bare minimum on me that I couldn't imagine losing under any circumstances.
Then I was on my way back to Lora's desk, not even considering getting a well-deserved rest now that I had a safe place to do so.
[Guided] said I could still go on, after all.
With a much lighter weight resting on my shoulders, I resumed my journey through the Temple's twisting metal corridors and, with some help from [Guided], easily found my way back to Lora's desk, where she was discussing something with a small giant.
"Ah, perfect, your student is here." When she caught sight of me, she instantly signaled me to approach, and by the time I reached her desk, she had already stacked multiple huge books on top of it, along with mysterious tools and blank pieces of paper.
"This is Acolyte Nita," she then proceeded to introduce the small giant to me. "She already agreed to provide you with the intensive individual lessons on letters and numbers you asked for."
"Do not let her relative youth deceive you. She mastered her letters and numbers years ago and is already well on her way to being promoted to a Scribe, something with a knowledge threshold much higher than what she'll be teaching you."
The small giant slightly puffed out her chest and straightened her back upon hearing that, and I took this opportunity to give her a once-over.
Short black hair, dark-brown skin, a thin build, clad in the same plain robe as nearly everyone else I crossed, though hers obviously bulged with what looked like one too many book-shaped objects being held within.
"Are those for me?" I looked at the pile of items.
"Your learning tools, yes," she confirmed. "I'll leave Nita and you to it, then. Get on with it."
Without delay, Nita grabbed all my stuff for me and began walking away at a somewhat hurried pace, not a single word having yet left her.
That probably meant... I should follow, right?
Taking off after her, I stayed close by so as not to lose sight of her as we ventured into more and more crowded corridors, until we passed under a grand arch that opened onto a gigantic hall filled with giants wearing Nita's clothes.
Despite how noisy it obviously should have been with so many individuals gathered together in one place, however, only faint whispers and the sound of shuffling paper reached my ears, which instantly impressed upon me that this was a special location.
Even then, we didn't stop and continued walking until we reached descending stairs with extremely steep steps, forcing me to awkwardly flutter my way down to keep up.
At last, Nita slowed down when we entered a narrow corridor filled with doors, and it took finding an open door for her to finally stop as she discreetly looked inside to verify the room was indeed empty, unlike the many we had already passed by, some of which still had their doors left open despite being occupied.
Still without saying anything, she pushed the door fully open and stepped inside, but this time waited for me to enter as well before closing the door behind us.
"Lora said you know absolutely nothing?"
Hearing Nita's gentle voice for the first time, it took me a breath to understand she was asking me something, what the question was, and that I needed to answer. "Absolutely nothing. No letters, no numbers."
"We'll start with the letters first, then." She heavily set down all my learning stuff on the lone table, grabbed one book out of it, flipped it to its very beginning, then softly tapped the table. "Just get on the table. The chairs obviously aren't made to accommodate fairies."
Spacing some of my climbing skills, I did just that, and what awaited me at the top was a book filled with incomprehensible scribbles.
"The letters we use are referred to as an alphabet, a collection of letters, and the alphabet we use is called a phonetic alphabet, meaning each letter or combination of letters is associated with a particular sound..."
Just like that, my first lesson of what I anticipated to be many commenced...
◇ ◈ ◈ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◈ ◈ ◇
"What did I tell you? If you're in doubt?" Nita spoke up when she saw me struggling.
"Just say the word aloud..." I repeated the mantra that had allowed me to solve so many of my doubts before, except this time it wasn't really working. "But there's no spoken difference between to and too?"
"Taken independently, yes, but what did I say? Exactly?"
I repeated what she told me to write down, and there and then it dawned on me. "I'm too stupid... to understand."
"I won't comment on that." The corners of her mouth turned upward. "But yes, you're not simply saying the words aloud, you're also adding the necessary context, otherwise how would you ever be able to tell the difference between words like their and there, or know and no?"
"..." She just repeated the same word twice, didn't she?
"Let me give you some more examples of context being everything." She flipped through the latter pages of my book on letters. "Perfect. How would you write, 'They were absolutely certain their coins were there.'? Take your time."
[Guided] necessarily attempted to instantly whisper the answer to me when I set about writing this tricky sentence down, guiding my hands to write what it believed to be correct.
And it probably was.
How could it not be, when I had never successfully proven it capable of overlooking or forgetting anything I remembered hearing, seeing, or sensing?
Not that it actually mattered in this context whether [Guided] offered me the right or wrong answer.
Because if I simply allowed myself to be [Guided] to the answer, while maybe I would end up learning through sheer exposure in the future, how convoluted would that make my short-term undertakings?
At least as of right here and then, [Guided] had yet to allow me to properly understand what I was reading without first having to softly whisper it to myself.
Did that mean I would have to softly whisper everything I laid my eyes on in compliance with what [Guided] was telling me, all to barely grasp the written words before my eyes?
In conclusion, for the first time ever, I opted to purposefully relegate [Guided] to mere background suggestions, only lending it my ears when it touched upon concerns that didn't relate to my studies.
And slowly but surely... [Guided] was adapting.
It still tried to feed me the answer when I wished for it too directly, but otherwise, it slowly took on a much more passive role of guiding me to achieve the correct answer on my own.
And it was showing results.
"Good. They're, their, and there are naughty homophones, so always think over your answer when you have to use them. Next... how would you write 'Two books to learn, but do not forget to stow them away too.'?"
Stow.
A new word.
A new verb, it seemed.
I did my best and didn't allow myself to be [Guided] to the answer for the sole sake of not being corrected.
"'Stow' isn't written like that, it's spelled s-t-o-w, and it means to carefully and neatly pack or store an object in a particular place, like how I could stow a book on a shelf. Other than that, you're good. Next is, 'If you’re here to hear your name called, you’re going to need your patience.'"
And on and on it went, theory and practice—two sides of the same [Exertion]—seamlessly merged together, until Nita eventually put a stop to our lesson due to supposedly feeling too tired, and over and over again, I found myself wondering how she and everyone else could tell when they truly grew too tired without [Guided] explicitly telling them that they were.
Not that her leaving marked the end of my study sessions.
As heedless of my inability to instantly retain whatever I learned as it was, I still had [Guided], after all.
And before I realized it, life in the Faith's Prime Temple had become my new favorite environment to live in.
It most certainly took some time for me to fully let my wariness go, but from the instant [Guided] and I judged we didn't have to worry about my safety anymore, everything became objectively better than it was back in Volow—the name of the town I was born in.
A comfortable bed to sleep in.
Lots of knowledge to learn.
Endless opportunities to listen, observe, and interact with other people.
Absolutely no reason to hold back on my [Guided] application of the fundamental truth of [Exertion]...
Alright, I admit getting back to continuously flooding my body with foul elements had been pretty uncomfortable, or even arguably horrifyingly painful...
But when had I ever failed to follow through with what [Guided] wanted me to achieve?
Ultimately, it was simply a return to how life ought to be.
My [Cycle] always expanded to its maximum and beyond in a vain hope of upholding the ever-growing energy demands of all my other Aspects.
[Exertion] doing its utmost to both allow me to keep going while raising the upper bounds of my [Exertion] limits.
[Tempering] pushing against my inherent limits, slowly wearing away at them in the most painful way imaginable.
[Darkness] obliging me to keep to the shadows, mastering everything about my body from my breath, to my foot placement, to my movement through the corridors so as to never be perceived first.
My [Perception] consistently tuned to sense everything I could from my surroundings, from the slightest shift in the air, to the subtlest flicker of movement, to the faintest sound.
And whenever I had the energy to spare—which was the only slightly inconvenient change born of the fact that I had left behind all the paste boxes I unearthed from the ruins of Volow—[Will] manifestations to seek the extremes to which I could truly drive my body and mind.
As for [Insight], with my intensive study regime and so much knowledge to be mastered, I finally saw hope for its advancement.
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Of course, beyond the pain, beyond the exhaustion, the oddest part for me to accept when I had just started getting used again to practicing my Aspects as if a disaster was about to strike at any moment was how everyone else kept their [Exertion]s to such...
Such low intensities.
Such leisurely paces.
Viewed otherwise, everyone appeared to lack any sort of [Will] to surpass themselves at every waking moment, ending their [Exertion]s whenever they felt just a bit tired, and never escalating them to levels they felt...
Uncomfortable with, I presumed?
All to say, be it amongst the small giants or the true giants, I had yet to see anyone practicing at the same intensity as I was.
Be that as it may, while I felt some fleeting envy at the beginning at how they could simply live their lives without being constantly addled by the discomforts unavoidably brought by tough and arduous [Exertion]s...
All that envy was gone by now.
[Guided] had never failed me.
I had lived my whole life relying on it.
These two facts weren't going to change, whether others had or lacked the same [Will] to go through the extreme [Exertion]s that drove me.
I was me.
◇ ◈ ◈ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◈ ◈ ◇
"I knew I would find you here."
Nita's unexpected voice suddenly pulled me out of my reading, my [Perception] having only informed me someone was approaching, not that it was someone I knew.
Was it possible to identify someone merely from their footsteps?
Going down that line of thought, I realized that while footsteps alone may not be sufficient, if my [Perception] grew to encompass breathing, it might actually become plausible.
Still, that didn't answer why she was here and how she knew to find me here, so I looked up from my book to inquire about that curious turn of events. "Yes?"
"You look ridiculous with your travelling stool."
Against the accepted wisdom of initiating a conversation with either polite greetings or an artful compliment, she obliviously opted to comment first on my custom solution to the criminal design of the Seeker sanctuary against fairykind.
I wisely resolved not to take her ignorance personally.
"I know, but the only alternative is for me to treat all bookshelves holding something I want as climbing [Exertion]."
Arguing with her was too much of a bother anyhow.
"And you wouldn't like that? More [Exertion]s for you that way."
Not that she was aware of how I felt.
"A big waste of reading [Exertion] time is what it would turn out to be."
"On that topic." Her tone of voice shifted. At least sufficiently for me to notice it. "Do you still wish to continue our lessons? It doesn't look like you need them anymore."
"What gives?" I queried, definitely no longer paying attention to the book on the [Exertion] Aspect I was reading.
"After my last report to Lora on your progress, she decided to hand me the remainder of the budget she allocated for your initial lessons."
Nita patted one of the pockets of her Acolyte robe, producing a characteristic jingling sound from coins colliding with each other.
"She said I could take on a more advisory role from now on if the arrangement suited both of us, as she fully expected you to begin your own learning journey here in the Sanctuary."
"Advisory?" I blinked in confusion, the word not matching my interpretation of our situation. "Weren't you... already doing that? As in, giving advice? That's what advisory means, right?"
"Your misguided perspective on how the world works is once again misleading you. Who said I reported on your progress after every lesson we had? She only asked me to make a report every week, not every day, not every hour."
Ah, right.
Time perspective.
Or rather, it was the remnant of my previous time perspective, limited by variable breaths and sleeps, colliding with the new time perspective I was learning.
A time perspective that employed words I had heard many times before, but had simply never made the connections between them before I was deprived of the chance to fully learn their significance, what with every living giant dying out on me.
In hindsight, so much began making sense once I grasped the deeper significance of those terms as time measurement units.
The Prime Temple even had a bizarre device that accurately marked the passage of time, a "clock", and I took pleasure in stopping by to get an accurate idea of how long a "second", a "minute", and an "hour" were.
It would still take some time to get used to counting in seconds and minutes rather than in breaths, but from the instant I recognized the higher fidelity of this way of measuring time, there was no turning back or being stubborn about it.
"I read 'In-Depth Common Knowledge' just like you said I should, by the way. It was amazing."
Being reminded of that fascinating book that recorded all kinds of in-depth explanations concerning what many perceived as common knowledge, which included the supposed origin and time measurement units, I made a point of vocalizing my gratitude.
There were no two ways about it; all her book advice had ended up leading to very engaging and informative reads, irrespective of their comprehension difficulties and the many new words they contained that I had to, in turn, seek her out to learn the meanings of.
"And what did you think? Just like I said, it was their Realm-spanning unreliability that made them so absolutely genius in the end, right?"
From the way she nearly lost control of her voice and started talking aloud, along with the way her face lit up, I reckoned I had just broached a topic she liked more than she let on.
"Completely agree. Can you imagine if it hadn't been decided to rebase the entire system on a power-of-two scale? A second would be one-sixtieth of a minute, a day would be one-seventh of a week, and anywhere between one twenty-eighth and one thirtieth of a month, not even talking about a year..."
It was still shocking to me that people had once relied on such an unreliable time measurement system in the past, and maybe that's why I so quickly came to accept the need to reform my own time perspective.
"How much of the conversion table I gave you previously have you learned? Are you good? Or do you want a final lesson on it? We could use the opportunity to work on your maths, too."
"No need." I grinned and plunged my right hand straight into the frontmost compartment of my backpack.
It came back with something I had kept on me at all times ever since I learned of the relative complexity of the new time units I had to become familiar with, to the point of no longer having to think about it.
Time Units Conversion Table
Time Unit
Year
Month
Week
Day
Hour
Minute
Second
Year
1
16
64
512
8 192
524 288
33 554 432
Month
1
4
32
512
32 768
2 097 152
Week
1
8
128
8 192
524 288
Day
1
16
1 024
65 536
Hour
1
64
4 096
Minute
1
64
Second
1
A mathematical table referencing all equivalences between official time units.
"I already learned all the equivalences. As for my math, I only need practice from now on, and you should know better than me how involved with maths Aspects are. Just look at this."
I flipped backwards through the pages of the book I had been reading until Nita interrupted me—a book rightfully entitled 'A Simplified Perspective On Aspect Advancement Fundamentals'—and came back to yet another mathematical table.
Simplified Linear Aspect Advancement Table
Aspect Tier
Relative Effectiveness
Relative Advancement Difficulty
0
1
*See Aspect Formation Difficulty
1
2
1
2
4
4
3
8
16
4
16
64
5
32
256
6
64
1 024
7
128
4 096
8
256
16 384
9
512
65 536
10
1 024
262 144
11
2 048
1 048 576
12
4 096
4 194 304
13
8 192
16 777 216
14
16 384
67 108 864
15
32 768
268 435 456
16
65 536
1 073 741 824
"Ah, this one." Nita somehow succeeded at simultaneously scowling, mocking, and empathizing with me at the same time. "Just treat those early tables you see as reference materials. It's in the title, after all. Simplified and linear should already tell you how idealistic they are compared to reality."
"That's also what the book said..." I rolled my eyes at this utter hypocrisy. "But if that's the case, with those numbers only approximately representing reality insofar as one took an ideal, isolated Aspect, only measured a single facet of it to represent its entire effectiveness at the time of advancement, calculated advancement difficulty based on an impossible constant time-practice ratio... then what's the point?"
"The point, young one," the wisdom of experience suffused Nita's countenance as she finally appeared to fully catch on to what troubled me and had a perfect answer to give me, "is to demonstrate to you, with numbers and mathematics you can grasp at your current basic level, that reality isn't unfathomably undecipherable."
This wise answer shortly had its origin unveiled, however.
"Or, as my teacher used to say when I asked him similar questions, if you're still unconvinced, have Faith, for all shall flourish in time, and what is sown in patience is never lost, only waiting for the right time to return in full."
She was just repeating what she had been told in the past.
Not that it took away any of the wisdom it transmitted.
It was just...
"Is that even relevant to this situation of being presented with an obviously wrong table?"
"Well, if you want to act as an uncompromising skeptic, you're welcome to measure your own Aspects' relative effectiveness and relative advancement difficulties."
Nita ultimately shrugged off my concerns, and just as I had before she brought my attention back to the topic, I reasonably decided to do the same and move back to the reason she wanted to meet me.
"About this whole lesson and advisory role thing... Do I need to do anything? Go tell Lora I don't need lessons anymore, but I still need you to explain lots of words to me?"
"Well, about that." Springing another bout of unexpectedness on me, Nita suddenly pulled two massive books out of her inner robe. "I think it's time I introduce you to the sacred book duo I always have with me, no matter the circumstances."
She sat down right next to me, her back coming to rest against the bookshelf I had taken 'A Simplified Perspective On Aspect Advancement Fundamentals' from, not making it budge in the slightest.
"Greet the two books you'll most certainly drag with you anywhere you go in the future, regardless of how much of a bother they become: the Faith Dictionary and the Essence Encyclopedia..."
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