Chapter 116: The School (3)

He explained the arrangement in the same practical manner he had explained everything else that morning, as though he were discussing the use of an empty storage room rather than proposing the first formal cultivation school in hundreds of years of the Wall’s history.

"The old bathhouse beside the eastern barracks is unused in the mornings. It has enough space for forty people to sit without interfering with the rest of the fortress, and I propose that the first group train there for four hours each morning."

Vess immediately shook his head.

"There it is again."

Encrid looked at him.

"The manpower."

The Steward leaned forward, his expression carrying the particular frustration of a man who had already counted the numbers several times in his head and knew exactly where they would hurt.

"You have spent the better part of the last quarter hour explaining why cultivation might be valuable to the Wall, but you are still asking me to remove forty people from their duties for four hours every day. Those forty people’s work do not simply disappear when they enter the bathhouse. Their posts still need to be filled, their work still needs to be done, and someone else has to stand in their place."

"I know."

"That is one hundred and sixty man-hours every morning."

"Yes."

"And if we do this for a month, that is four thousand eight hundred man-hours."

"Yes."

Vess stared at him for a moment.

"And if nothing comes of it?"

"We stop."

Vess blinked.

Encrid continued before the Steward could turn that answer into another objection.

"I am not asking the Council to commit the Wall to a permanent school today, nor am I asking you to remove hundreds of people from the rota on the promise that some of them might become stronger several years from now. I am proposing a controlled experiment, with a limited number of people, a fixed period, and a clear condition under which the entire thing ends."

He looked around the table.

"Forty people at a time. Four hours a day. A fixed instructor and a fixed location, with their ordinary duties adjusted only for the duration of the trial."

He lifted another sheet of paper.

"And we record everything."

Dane glanced at the page.

"Everything?"

"Who opens a Star, how long it takes, where they fail, whether their cultivation progresses, whether they experience any problems, whether their physical performance improves afterward, and whether removing them from their ordinary duties causes more trouble than the training is worth. We record all of it."

He placed the sheet back on the table.

"If the results are worthless, we stop."

Dane studied him for several seconds before asking,

"And if the results are good?"

Encrid answered without hesitation.

"Then we take another forty."

That time, nobody laughed.

There was something different about the proposal once Encrid had reduced it to those terms. He was not asking them to believe that the Wall could suddenly become a fortress filled with cultivators, nor was he asking them to gamble their manpower on a theory that could take years to prove. He was asking them to spend a small amount of time and labour to answer a question they had never seriously attempted to answer before.

Encrid leaned back slightly in his chair.

"I am not asking you to believe me."

His eyes moved slowly from one Council member to the next.

"I am asking you to let me prove whether I am right."

For several seconds, no one answered.

The chamber was quiet enough that Encrid could hear the faint scrape of paper beneath someone’s hand and the distant sound of boots passing somewhere beyond the council doors.

Then Ysolde looked down at the list again.

"What do you think happens if they are?"

Encrid frowned slightly.

"If they are what?"

"If you are right."

She tapped the list containing the names of the people Encrid had selected.

"If these people can actually be taught, what do you think happens?"

Encrid was silent for a moment.

"I don’t know."

It was perhaps the first answer he had given that morning without immediately following it with an explanation.

He looked at the names again.

"That is why I want to find out."

The Council continued arguing for nearly another hour.

Vess returned repeatedly to the question of manpower, because no matter how interesting Encrid’s theory was, the Wall still required people to stand on its walls every hour of every day. Dane questioned whether forty people would produce a large enough sample to tell them anything useful, while Ysolde pressed Encrid on the dangers of improper cultivation and wanted to know who would be responsible if one of the students damaged their channels attempting to follow instructions they did not fully understand.

Several of the other commanders raised concerns of their own.

What if the students became stronger but less disciplined?

What if the training distracted them from their duties?

What if only one or two succeeded?

What if none of them did?

Encrid answered each question as directly as he could.

When he knew the answer, he gave it.

When he did not, he said that he did not know.

He did not promise miracles, because he had no intention of making a promise the evidence could not support, and he never claimed that every ordinary levy soldier could become a cultivator simply because someone had finally bothered to teach them.

He did not even claim that the Wall would necessarily become stronger.

He only argued that they had no way of knowing whether it could become stronger until they tried.

And beneath all of those arguments was another thought that none of them openly mentioned.

Elder Wode’s words from months earlier had not been forgotten.

The Chief Healer had been one of the first people on the Wall to suggest that there might be something unusual about Encrid’s Star, something that did not fit comfortably with the one-Star Initiate he claimed to be.

Perhaps Encrid possessed the Black Star.

Perhaps that was the reason his understanding of cultivation appeared so far beyond what his Realm should allow.

Perhaps it explained the confidence with which he spoke about things that even experienced cultivators struggled to explain.

No one had proof.

Encrid had given them none.

But the possibility was there.

And there was another uncomfortable coincidence that several of them knew about.

The genuine Star guides who appeared only rarely throughout the Empire were disproportionately Black Star wielders.

It was not proof of anything, and no sensible person would build an argument on such a coincidence alone, but it was enough to make several people in that room listen more carefully whenever Encrid spoke about cultivation.

Eventually, the arguments began to repeat themselves.

Vess had made his position clear.

Dane had challenged the proposal from nearly every practical angle he could find.

Ysolde had questioned Encrid long enough to establish that, whatever his actual talent might be, he at least understood the limits of what he was proposing and had no intention of presenting theory as certainty.

At last, Lord Commander Ulrich Vance looked around the table.

"We will vote."

The room settled.

The hands began to rise.

One.

Two.

Three.

Encrid counted them silently.

Nine against.

Nine in favor.

A tie.

He had expected to lose.

In truth, he had expected something closer to a twelve-to-seven defeat, and the fact that nine people had been willing to support the proposal was already more than he had anticipated when he entered the chamber that morning.

Then Neriah Fold raised her hand.

"In favor."

Dane immediately turned toward her.

"You were against it just five minutes ago."

"I was."

Dane stared at her.

"Then what changed?"

Fold looked toward Encrid, and for a moment she said nothing.

"I listened to the argument."

Dane waited, apparently expecting more.

She gave it to him.

"For hundreds of years, we have treated the ability to cultivate as something a man either possesses or does not. We have taught our soldiers how to use spears, bows, swords, engines, walls, formations, and every other tool available to us, yet cultivation is the one thing we have simply left alone because we decided that those who could do it would find their own way."

Her gaze moved across the Council.

"Perhaps that made sense when the Wall had no idea how to teach it."

She looked back toward Encrid.

"But we have someone who believes he can."

Her expression remained calm.

"He may be wrong."

She paused.

"Then we will know."

No one interrupted.

"The shape of the Wall includes its people."

Her gaze settled on the commanders seated around the table.

"There is nothing sacred about their ignorance."

The room went quiet.

Then the count changed.

Nine against.

Ten in favor.

The proposal passed.

Encrid looked down at the papers in front of him for several seconds.

He had expected to lose.

Instead, the Council had just agreed to attempt something the Wall had refused to attempt for two hundred years.

Forty people.

Four hours a day.

One empty bathhouse.

One Initiate who, by every ordinary measure, was in no position to teach anyone anything.

It did not sound like much.

But Encrid had learned that large changes rarely announced themselves when they began. More often, they started as something small enough to dismiss, something that seemed insignificant when viewed by itself and only became important years later, after enough small decisions had accumulated around it.

For now, it was only forty people sitting quietly in an old bathhouse, waiting to discover whether the thing everyone had accepted as impossible was truly impossible, or merely something nobody had ever bothered to teach.

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