Chapter 95

Altogether, the formation of my [Foundation] Aspect changed remarkably little.

Not that anything else had been expected.

My new Aspect remained at Tier 0, and everything I had read concerning the [Foundation] Aspect suggested its earliest effects were subtle even for Essence Entities who weren't suffering from an overdevelopment disorder that forced them to scrutinize every minute fluctuation of their Essence.

Still, once my safety margin recovered enough for [Guided] to authorize ordinary [Cultivation] again, I naturally began testing what had changed.

Some effects were immediately recognizable.

Practices already deeply integrated into my Path felt marginally easier to settle back into after interruptions.

The synergies between my Aspects maintained themselves with slightly less deliberate effort, particularly whenever I shifted between different applications requiring many of the same underlying structures.

My [Foundation] Aspect also appeared to reinforce things I genuinely considered fundamental.

Whenever I relied upon some established portion of my Path as the basis for something else, my [Foundation] Aspect subtly supported that development.

My [Awareness] feeding information into my [Clarity].

My [Clarity] preserving the distinctions upon which my [Comprehension] operated.

My [Mastery] turning established [Comprehension] into something I could reliably employ.

My [Cultivation] taking everything already accumulated and using it as the starting point for whatever came next.

Nothing radical.

Nothing even particularly impressive.

The improvements were simply there.

A fraction less effort here.

A slightly cleaner transition there.

A familiar [Exertion] settling into place more readily after several days spent recovering.

A newly acquired [Comprehension] appearing marginally less isolated from everything that had preceded it once I deliberately worked at integrating it.

And theoretically...

A wider Essence development safety margin.

"The Unsuspected Marvels Of [Foundation]" had been clear enough on that particular effect.

By deepening and expanding the structures capable of supporting further development, the [Foundation] Aspect should increase the amount of development my Essence could endure before instabilities grew to dangerous thresholds.

I couldn't confirm it.

My safety margin varied too much according to the intensity, nature, and distribution of whatever [Cultivation] I carried out, while my Essence continued naturally maturing in the background.

Even [Guided] couldn't separate all those factors with enough confidence for me to claim my newly formed Tier 0 Aspect had given me some measurable increase.

Perhaps it had.

Perhaps the improvement was so insignificant that several more months of observations would be required to distinguish it from ordinary variation.

Either way...

I had formed the Aspect.

That was enough.

The next objective was obvious.

Advance it.

Along with my [Flow] Aspect.

Everything else could wait.

Not that my existing Aspects wouldn't still develop through ordinary use, just as my [Clarity] Aspect had so recently demonstrated.

But when it came to deliberate [Cultivation]—to the limited quantities of Essence development I could consciously allocate before my overdevelopment disorder forced me into another unwanted period of idle recovery...

I would allocate all of it toward my [Flow] and [Foundation] Aspects' [Cultivation].

Two Tier 0 Aspects.

Two Tier 2 targets.

And as of this exact instant, approximately no existing [Cultivation] routine capable of taking me there efficiently.

So my first task was evident.

I needed to build one.

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What [Guided] couldn't do, I knew better than anyone.

My Origin Aspect remained as absurdly useful as ever when dealing with anything I had already experienced.

If I knew how to carry out an [Exertion], [Guided] could correct me as I did it or entirely guide me through it.

If I understood several viable methods for pursuing some result, [Guided] could steer me toward whichever best suited my circumstances.

If I had accumulated enough experience to recognize ten different mistakes, [Guided] could prevent the eleventh repetition of all ten.

Fundamentals were barely worth thinking about anymore.

Breathing.

Flight.

Positioning.

The maintenance of my physiological [Cultivation] [Cycle].

Basic transitions between Aspects.

Established [Flow] exercises.

The simpler portions of my [Foundation] [Cultivation].

Years of accumulated experience had given [Guided] more than enough material to steer me through all of those with an efficiency I couldn't hope to reproduce consciously without dedicating an absurd amount of [Will] toward it.

But I wasn't trying to repeat what I already knew.

I needed new [Exertion]s.

New interactions.

New synergies between two Aspects I had only recently formed, directed toward applications I had never performed before.

There was no experience for [Guided] to draw from until I created it.

Which made the process rather straightforward.

I devised something.

Attempted it.

Usually discovered several reasons it was inadequate.

Then the next attempt benefited from everything the previous one had taught me.

[Guided] incorporated the newly acquired experience.

My [Clarity] separated what had actually happened from what I had merely expected to happen.

My [Comprehension] built a theoretical framework to explain why.

My [Mastery] determined which portions I could reproduce deliberately.

My [Foundation] integrated whatever proved worthwhile.

Then I attempted something slightly better.

Again.

And again.

And again.

It was, in other words...

[Cultivation].

The same [Cycle] I had been following since before I possessed enough [Knowledge] to call it one.

Only now, the fundamentals had risen so far beneath me that the frontier itself had become my routine.

[Guided] carried everything I had already conquered.

My task was to conquer something new.

Then give it to [Guided].

Then go further.

There was something wonderfully simple about that.

Not easy.

Never easy.

But simple.

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My first attempts at developing my [Foundation] through active [Exertion]s were almost embarrassingly crude.

I selected portions of my Path I considered unquestionably fundamental and deliberately reinforced them through the Aspect.

My [Cultivation] routine.

The relationship between my [Awareness] and [Clarity].

My bodily [Mastery].

The basic structures through which my physiological [Cultivation] [Cycle] operated.

The role of [Guided] throughout everything.

Then I observed what happened when I relied upon those reinforced structures during subsequent [Exertion]s.

At first...

It worked.

Which was unfortunate, because that encouraged me to push further.

The established connections became easier to maintain.

My [Cultivation] settled into them readily.

I could transition from one familiar application to another while devoting marginally less conscious effort toward ensuring everything continued functioning as intended.

So I intensified the [Foundation] [Exertion].

Strengthened what I considered fundamental more deeply.

Held those structures more firmly.

Made them the unquestionable basis from which everything else proceeded.

Then I attempted to introduce a new variation into one of the Aspect synergies I had just reinforced.

It...

Resisted me.

Not physically.

Not even in a manner I could immediately identify as harmful.

The existing structure simply proved slightly more reluctant to change.

My [Foundation] was doing exactly what I had formed it to do.

I had taken something stable, told my Aspect that this was what everything else should rest upon, reinforced that state...

Then discovered that I wanted to alter it.

Brilliant.

I stopped.

Spent several hours carefully allowing the overreinforced connections to settle back toward their previous flexibility, then recorded the failure in considerable detail.

A [Foundation] was supposed to support development.

Not preserve my current configuration against development.

The distinction seemed obvious, but apparently it was still possible to get it wrong.

That mistake cost me part of my safety margin.

The next attempt cost less.

The one after that produced the first tiny improvement I considered worth retaining.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Then I ruined it while attempting to generalize the method across three other Aspect synergies.

I reverted.

Tried again.

Improved one portion.

Worsened another.

And slowly...

Very slowly...

[Guided] accumulated everything, and the number of mistakes I could make twice began shrinking.

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My [Flow] [Cultivation] proved no more generous.

I had significantly more experience with the concept than with my newly formed [Foundation] Aspect, but knowing how water [Flow]ed, how air [Flow]ed, how crowds [Flow]ed, how credits [Flow]ed, and even how various processes within my body [Flow]ed did not magically grant me [Mastery] over every possible application of the Aspect.

Especially not when I began integrating it with [Vitality].

That particular idea had seemed almost too natural.

My [Vitality] already moved through my body whenever I healed myself.

Blood carried it.

Living structures received it.

Damaged tissue changed beneath it.

There were countless movements already present within healing for my [Flow] Aspect to interact with.

So I tried.

At low intensity first.

A tiny deliberately inflicted muscular injury.

A controlled amount of [Vitality].

Then [Flow], applied to how that [Vitality] spread through the damaged region.

The first attempts improved nothing.

The next several made the healing marginally worse.

One variation distributed my [Vitality] so evenly through the surrounding tissues that too little remained concentrated where it was actually required.

Another maintained such beautiful continuity throughout the healing process that I wasted energy sustaining movement after the relevant tissues had already received everything useful.

A third redirected enough of the healing process away from one locally inefficient route that I became convinced I had finally discovered something valuable.

I reproduced it.

Confirmed it.

Refined it.

Then tested it upon a different type of injury and lost more efficiency than I had ever gained.

Apparently, one tissue's inefficient route could be another's necessary one.

Fine.

I recorded that too.

[Flow] wasn't inherently beneficial merely because something was moving.

Nor was a smoother [Flow] necessarily a better one.

Sometimes concentration mattered.

Sometimes interruption mattered.

Sometimes allowing one process to terminate while another continued was exactly what healing required.

I knew all of that conceptually.

Now my Essence knew a little more of it too.

Which was what mattered.

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I eventually began combining the two.

That was where the failures became creative.

One experiment involved establishing a [Foundation] for a particular [Flow] before repeatedly moving energy through it.

The idea was simple.

If [Flow] benefited from established routes, then perhaps [Foundation] could reinforce those routes until using them became progressively easier.

It could.

I discovered that fairly quickly.

Then I discovered why this wasn't universally useful.

A reinforced route encouraged subsequent [Flow] to follow it.

Which was wonderful if that route remained optimal.

Less wonderful if circumstances changed.

After several repetitions, I found myself expending extra effort redirecting a [Flow] away from the very route I had deliberately made easier to use.

I had successfully cultivated a method for making one of my mistakes easier to repeat.

That earned several pages of notes.

Another attempt reversed the relationship.

Instead of using [Foundation] to support [Flow], I used [Flow] to distribute whatever development my [Foundation] appeared to reinforce across several related structures.

That produced something promising.

Then something confusing.

Then, after three repetitions, something I could no longer reproduce.

Wonderful again.

I spent days determining that one variable I had considered irrelevant had changed between the second and third attempts.

Corrected it.

Recovered the original effect.

Improved it marginally.

Then abandoned the exact method after realizing that maintaining it consumed more Essence development than whatever benefit it offered was worth for my present endeavor.

Not every successful [Cultivation] deserved to be kept.

That, too, was a way through which my [Foundation] expressed itself.

Another method attempted to preserve a newly altered synergy between my Aspects through [Foundation] while [Flow] gradually redistributed the effort required to sustain it.

The first result looked promising.

The second caused the new synergy to settle in a way that made returning to its original configuration irritatingly difficult.

The third failed outright.

The fourth did nothing.

The fifth produced an effect so minor that even [Guided] couldn't determine whether I had actually improved anything.

I kept going.

Some losses were necessary, as my [Vitality] concept assembly and Aspect formation had taught me.

The failure of an experiment could expand my [Comprehension] far more than another successful repetition of something I already understood.

It could reveal the limits of my [Mastery].

It could expose something I had falsely considered part of my growing [Foundation].

It could give [Guided] another circumstance to recognize and another mistake to prevent.

Other losses were simply losses.

A bad assumption.

An unnecessary variation.

A parameter I changed for no worthwhile reason.

An [Exertion] whose obvious flaw I should have recognized beforehand.

My Path didn't care, though.

It granted no refund because a failure had taught me nothing profound.

So I recorded those too.

Then did better.

Or tried to.

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Days slipped into weeks.

My existence became increasingly monotonous in the best possible way.

Wake.

Check my body.

Commune with my Essence.

Determine how much [Cultivation] my safety margin permitted.

[Flow] [Cultivation].

[Foundation] [Cultivation].

A combination of both.

Stop when [Guided] judged further development inefficient or unsafe.

Then fill the remainder with optimized idle recovery.

Pulse assignments still needed to be done.

Economic reports still accumulated.

[Contract]s occasionally required my attention.

Invitations continued appearing from people whose relationships remained useful enough to maintain.

Archives still contained more [Knowledge] than I could reasonably exhaust.

My [Faith] remained a long-term project.

My search for alternative ways to find prospective [Worthy] Chosen hadn't ceased merely because my two new Aspects presently consumed almost all the development my Essence could tolerate.

Nothing stopped.

It simply arranged itself around the new priority.

If my Essence could develop safely, I cultivated my [Flow] and [Foundation] Aspects.

If it couldn't, I did everything that was bound to bring me long-term returns and didn't involve inducing any sort of Essence development beyond the inevitable that came with having shaped a Path so compatible with my way of being.

When it recovered...

I returned to the [Cultivation] of my [Flow] and [Foundation] Aspects immediately.

There was no grand progress to mark most sessions.

No sudden [Insight].

No extraordinary [Comprehension].

No unearned [Mastery].

Sometimes I spent an entire permitted period of [Cultivation] refining an [Exertion] only to conclude that the original version had been better.

Sometimes I reduced the energy cost of one application by an amount so minor that only repeated measurements convinced me the improvement existed.

Sometimes I spent days building toward a new synergy, finally made it work, then discovered that its practical advantage was inferior to simply using both Aspects separately.

Sometimes nothing happened.

I repeated something I already understood, executed it properly, and gained nothing beyond the tiny accumulation produced by practicing it once more.

That was fine.

My [Ambition] didn't require every attempt to reward me.

It only required another attempt afterward.

The standard moved.

I followed.

When [Guided] could carry me flawlessly through something that had once demanded my whole [Focus], I changed it.

When the change became familiar, I complicated it.

When complications became manageable, I combined them.

When a combination became routine, I searched for whatever still resisted becoming routine.

That was how my [Foundation] expanded.

Not merely because the Aspect itself grew.

Because everything beneath my next attempt had become richer than what existed beneath the previous one.

Every failure I understood became part of what I no longer had to rediscover.

Every successful [Exertion] I mastered became a tool available for the next.

Every false assumption removed one route I no longer needed to waste time investigating.

[Guided] turned yesterday's frontier into today's fundamentals.

And I kept moving the frontier.

That was my [Cycle].

There was nothing exciting about it.

I lived for it anyway.

And I adored it.

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One problem emerged slowly enough that I didn't initially recognize it as one.

It began with another attempt at combining my [Flow] and [Foundation] [Cultivation] around a controlled disturbance.

Nothing remotely dangerous.

I wasn't stupid enough to experiment directly upon serious overdevelopment instability while both Aspects remained at Tier 0.

Instead, I created a minor local physiological disruption through my [Will], observed how my body and [Vitality] responded to it, then layered the two Aspects over those responses.

[Flow] could alter how the resulting strain propagated.

[Foundation] could influence which established structures received and integrated the changes.

[Harmony] could reduce conflicts between the resulting states.

[Purity] could help preserve what I considered desirable.

[Clarity] distinguished each process.

[Mastery] allowed me to manipulate the portions I understood.

None of that was new.

What bothered me was that several different approaches worked.

Not equally.

But genuinely.

I could redirect strain away from one region and spread it through several others.

Or allow more of it to remain localized while reinforcing the structures bearing it.

I could prioritize preserving the prior state.

Or allow more extensive change before stabilizing whatever resulted.

I could intervene early.

Or allow the process to develop further before doing anything.

Different combinations produced different results.

Some cost more energy.

Some induced more Essence development.

Some restored the affected tissues faster.

Others left them in a state that appeared marginally better suited to enduring a repetition of the same stress.

None was objectively superior.

That shouldn't have surprised me.

And it actually didn't.

What did surprise me was how familiar the problem felt.

I finished the experiment.

Recorded the results.

Then returned to them several hours later while my Essence recovered.

Three approaches.

All valid.

Different outcomes.

The correct one depended upon what I wanted afterward.

That thought remained.

Not because it was profound.

Because I had encountered the same structure somewhere else.

I opened my notes concerning the effects I intended to reproduce from [Serenity].

Read through the latest organization I had made after my [Clarity] advancement.

Effects.

Mechanisms.

Supporting conditions.

Interactions.

Potential contributions from [Flow].

Potential contributions from [Harmony].

[Purity].

[Mastery].

[Clarity].

And now...

[Foundation].

The pieces were accumulating.

That had been encouraging.

It still was.

But the more capable those pieces became, the more obvious another problem grew.

[Flow] could determine how instability moved.

[Foundation] could improve what received and integrated development.

[Harmony] could reconcile parts that threatened to conflict.

[Purity] could preserve what belonged and reject what didn't.

[Clarity] could distinguish one state, mechanism, and consequence from another.

[Mastery] could give me increasingly deliberate command over all of them.

Yet none of those concepts determined which of several valid resulting states I should prefer.

That wasn't a weakness in any of them.

I had been expecting the wrong question to possess an answer.

Should instability be distributed?

Sometimes.

Should it be localized?

Sometimes.

Should my Essence preserve its present structure?

Sometimes.

Should it change to accommodate what had happened?

Obviously, sometimes.

Should disturbances be suppressed as rapidly as possible?

Not if allowing some portion of them to persist produced a more useful adaptation or furthered higher development potential.

Should everything be brought into [Harmony]?

Only if the resulting [Harmony] was one I actually wanted.

Even [Purity] required something against which the unwanted could be distinguished.

The answer changed according to what the entire process was supposed to accomplish.

I stopped reading.

There it was.

Not another mechanism.

I already possessed mechanisms.

Increasingly many of them.

What I lacked was the principle according to which they should act together.

[Serenity] never needed to ask that question in the same way.

Its concept already favored an answer.

Settle.

Calm.

Bring the disturbance toward the states that embodied [Serenity].

That was precisely why the Aspect worked so naturally for what others used it to accomplish.

But I didn't want [Serenity].

I had known that for months.

I wanted particular consequences that [Serenity] could produce.

And if I intended to reproduce those consequences through several different portions of my Path instead...

Then those portions needed something [Serenity] possessed intrinsically.

Not calmness.

Direction toward a shared result.

I looked back at my latest experiment.

All three approaches had been valid because I had never supplied a reason one outcome should matter more than another.

For healing, [Vitality] already provided much of that reason.

Restore [Life] toward the state I intended it to possess.

For [Cultivation], advancement itself supplied an objective.

For my wider Path, my [Ambition] made the direction almost impossible to forget.

But the third component of my overdevelopment solution would eventually have to coordinate several Aspects around one very particular result.

Not making my Essence serene.

Not merely making it stable.

Making it recover from development in whatever manner best allowed me to safely resume developing again.

That was the criterion.

The mechanisms could vary.

The state could vary.

Perhaps even the precise balance between [Flow], [Foundation], [Harmony], [Purity], [Clarity], and everything else involved would change from one advancement to another.

What mattered was what all those actions served.

My thoughts stopped.

[Guided] immediately supplied the [Knowledge] already waiting behind the concept I had finally turned toward.

I stared at the first line of my notes for a long while.

Then added one more.

[Purpose].

Not as a replacement for [Serenity].

As the Aspect that might allow my Path to transcend what it presently was.