CHAPTER 39: ANOTHER YEAR OF WORK

The year Simon was forced to remain in Green Hollow turned out to be good for both brothers.

Simon hated hearing that.

Joe therefore did not say it often.

Simon continued assisting at the Hall and receiving three medicated meals each week. His Skin Tempering advanced steadily through Middle stage, though the improvement came more slowly than it had during Initial.

By then, simply bringing new regions into the process was no longer enough.

He needed depth.

Consistency.

Repeated cycles across areas that had already been tempered before.

The easy gains were behind him.

Simon still complained about being held back from Blackwood, but the extra year gave him something valuable enough that he eventually stopped denying it.

More preparation.

His body became tougher.

His control improved.

He spent another year helping younger trainees, which forced him to become more patient than he naturally preferred.

Not completely patient.

Just more.

Joe's progress was less visible.

It was also much greater.

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Skin Tempering continued changing his body in ways that became increasingly difficult to judge from appearance alone.

Joe still looked like Joe.

His skin did not become unusually thick, rough or obviously artificial. If anything, Perfect Body seemed to push the result in the opposite direction.

His skin remained smooth.

Healthy.

Even.

The strengthened tissue beneath did not create crude hardness.

Instead, areas that had undergone extensive tempering felt subtly denser when pressed, while still moving naturally over muscle and bending easily at joints.

His palms toughened without becoming callused slabs.

The soles of his feet became more resistant to rough ground without losing flexibility.

Thin areas remained thin, but increasingly resistant for what they were.

Joe's earlier hypothesis continued looking correct.

Perfect Body did not force every region toward one identical ideal.

It optimized each region according to its purpose.

That distinction fascinated him.

So did the sensory changes.

He began testing them during ordinary life rather than formal exercises.

Walking outside after rain, he could distinguish the cooling effect of moisture in the air from the actual movement of a breeze more clearly than before.

When sleeves shifted against his arms during Dynamic practice, he could feel the direction of movement with increasing precision.

A fly landing on the back of his hand became irritatingly obvious.

Mary discovered this and started trying to touch him without being noticed.

She failed often enough that it became a game.

One evening she crept behind him while he was sitting near the house and slowly extended one finger toward his neck.

Joe turned before she touched him.

Mary froze.

"How?"

"You breathe loudly."

"I do not."

"You also stepped on that leaf."

She looked down.

There was no leaf.

Joe smiled.

Mary hit his shoulder.

He had actually noticed the slight movement of air near the side of his neck.

Not enough to know what caused it.

Enough to know something had moved.

The distinction pleased him.

His senses were improving without becoming magic.

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Joe enjoyed that more than he would have enjoyed simply gaining another layer of armor.

It felt like rediscovering the body he had inhabited for thirteen years.

Each month revealed something that had always been present but had previously arrived as meaningless background.

Pressure.

Temperature.

Air.

Texture.

Contact.

His body was becoming better at telling him about the world.

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Training became more satisfying for the same reason.

Static practice had once been mostly about creating resonance.

Later it became maintaining and refining that resonance.

Now Joe could feel tiny structural errors he would once have completely missed.

A knee drifting slightly inward.

A hip carrying more tension than necessary.

One foot bearing a fraction too much weight.

Even the contact between his toes and the packed ground became useful information.

Dynamic practice has transformed even more.

Movement stopped feeling like something that disturbed the blood energy.

The energy increasingly became part of the movement itself.

Joe could change direction, lower his center of gravity and turn through the hips while maintaining a sense of where the resonance wanted to go.

He found real joy in it.

Not excitement in the dramatic sense.

No explosions.

No miraculous breakthrough every afternoon.

It was the quiet pleasure of becoming better at something every day and being able to feel the improvement inside his own body.

Every Hard Work Pays Off made that feeling unusually reliable.

Some days produce very little.

But very little was not nothing.

No Regression ensured that genuine progress remained.

Joe had spent enough of his previous life learning skills to know how often improvement came in waves—better one week, worse the next, suddenly competent, then inexplicably sloppy again.

Here, properly earned progress had weight.

Once he truly understood something, it remained.

Once a genuine physical adaptation settled correctly, it did not simply disappear because he had an unlucky week.

That was addictive.

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Medicine helped.

Joe's first attempts at nourishing packets were disappointing.

One mixture made him unusually warm for an hour and accomplished little else.

Another improved recovery was enough to be measurable but required so many ingredients that the cost made it pointless.

A third tasted so bad that Mary refused to remain in the same room after smelling it.

Merek enjoyed that failure much more than Joe thought necessary.

"What did you put in this?"

Joe listed the ingredients.

Merek stared at him.

"And you drank it?"

"A small amount."

"Why?"

"I needed to test it."

"Sometimes intelligence should stop a man from doing something."

"It wasn't toxic."

"That's a very low standard for medicine."

Joe admitted that was fair.

The later versions improved.

He stopped trying to imitate Merek's nourishing medicine ingredient for ingredient and focused instead on the function.

Easy digestion.

Nutrient density.

Ingredients that appeared to support circulation and recovery.

Materials that seemed particularly useful after blood-energy expenditure.

Eventually he produced small packets that were weaker than the Hall's medicinal meals but clearly better than normal food alone.

He tested them on himself first.

Simon became the second subject.

"You trust it?"

"Enough to use it."

"That still isn't the same as saying yes."

"If I believed it would hurt you, I wouldn't give it to you."

Simon took the packet.

"That's better."

The improvement was modest.

After a hard training session, Simon recovered faster than normal, though nowhere near instantly and nowhere near enough to replace sleep or food.

Joe's healing preparations were more mature.

Those became almost routine between the brothers.

Simon trained hard enough that soreness, bruising and small strains were common.

Joe needed practical observations.

The arrangement worked for both.

One evening Simon sat with his shirt raised while Joe examined a tender area along his side.

"You know I'm contributing to your medicine."

"Yes."

"So technically I deserve part of whatever you eventually earn."

"I'm giving you medicine for free."

"Medicine you're testing."

"Medicine, Merek already considers safe."

"That's not the point."

Joe pressed lightly around the sore area.

Simon flinched.

"Ow."

"You should rest tomorrow."

"You changed the subject."

"No. I diagnosed you."

Simon muttered for several breaths before asking whether he could still practice Static.

Joe said yes.

The dispute ended.

The difference between Joe and poorer trainees became increasingly obvious to him during this year.

Most martial progress was not stopped by dramatic injuries.

It was interrupted by small ones.

A strained joint.

The region pushed too hard during tempering.

Persistent soreness.

Fatigue that did not fully disappear before the next session.

A trainee might lose three days here, five there and another week after one careless mistake.

Over several years, those interruptions accumulated into months.

Simon himself had experienced them despite his assistant’s meals.

Joe rarely did.

Perfect Body seemed to recover cleanly if he stayed within reasonable limits.

The Hall's paid canteen helped.

His own nourishing packets helped.

His growing medical judgment helped him recognize when to stop before minor damage became real damage.

All those advantages compounded.

No wonder his progress remained so fast.

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Near the end of the year, Joe finally completed his first Skin Tempering.

There was no dramatic moment.

No sudden transformation.

The realization came during a session focused on several stubborn transition areas near the joints.

Joe finished, recovered and then guided blood energy across the entire skin as one connected system.

Nothing obvious resisted.

No major region has lagged.

The differences that remained were anatomical rather than unfinished.

The skin around his eyes still behaved differently from the skin across his back.

It should.

His palms remained different from his neck.

They should.

But every important region had undergone the full process.

The first tempering was complete.

Joe checked the panel later.

The line confirmed what his body already told him.

He did not celebrate loudly.

He sat alone for a while afterward, smiling.

Then, several days later, he started again.

The second tempering immediately taught him humility.

The technique was the same.

The tissue was not.

Skin that had already adapted once resisted further change with far greater stubbornness.

Progress is still happening.

It simply required much more work.

After several weeks, Joe estimated that comparable improvement might require close to twice the effort of the first pass.

He did not treat that as a law.

Two data points were not enough for one.

Still, the possibility was obvious.

If the third required roughly three times the original effort, the fourth four times and the pattern continued, repeated tempering would become brutally expensive.

Nine complete passes would represent:

1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9.

Forty-five baseline units of effort.

Joe stared at the calculation.

Even with his talents, forty-five was absurd.

Better medicine could reduce recovery time.

Superior techniques might improve efficiency.

Future realms might change his capabilities.

But time remained.

For now, the conclusion was simple.

Second tempering: worthwhile.

Third: possibly.

Nine: nonsense unless the future taught him something completely new.

He was comfortable leaving the question there.

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While Joe experimented with his second tempering, the household began accumulating silver for Simon.

Lily started the savings seriously after the previous Starlight.

Mike contributed whenever the harvest and household expenses allowed.

Pam added coins from places nobody knew she had been keeping them.

Joseph contributed a smaller amount without discussing where it came from.

Simon protested once.

Lily silenced him.

"You wanted to go."

"I do."

"Then stop complaining about us helping."

"I'm not complaining."

"You sound like you're complaining."

Simon looked toward Joe.

Joe refused involvement.

By the next Starlight, the family had twelve silverlings set aside.

Simon stopped protesting after that.

He started checking his travel bag instead.