Elder Soo's house was warmer than it looked from outside.
Max sat in the chair across from the old man and held his tea with both hands and tried not to show how much every part of his body hurt from ten hammers landing simultaneously.
He was mostly unsuccessful.
Elder Soo watched him with the calm expression of someone who had caused the pain and felt no particular guilt about it.
"You used your gift against a curse," he said.
"Is that why it worked strangely?"
"It's why it worked at all." The old man wrapped both hands around his own cup. "Gifts and curses don't interact cleanly. They're the same force expressed through fundamentally different intention. Your gift disrupted my curse's return path not because you overpowered it but because the two things couldn't quite read each other."
Max thought about this.
"What's the difference," he said. "Between a gift and a curse."
Elder Soo settled back in his chair.
"A gift is power that comes from within and expresses outward," he said. "You have something inside you and you put it into the world. Tan, mana, whatever the source — it starts with you."
"And a curse?"
"A curse is power that comes from outside and is directed inward." He tilted his head. "We in the Lily Kingdom draw from sui — water and emotion, as you probably know. But we don't generate it internally the way Rose Kingdom fighters generate tan. We pull it from what's around us. From the emotional atmosphere of a place. From the water in the air and the ground. From the feeling in a room."
He gestured at the walls of his small home.
"Right now this house contains decades of my emotional residue. My focus, my patience, my curiosity. I've been sitting in this space for so long that the sui here is practically mine already. When I use my curse I'm not spending anything — I'm borrowing from what's already saturated into everything around me."
Max looked at the walls differently.
The shelves of documents and scrolls took on new quality — not just records but physical evidence of time spent in one place, intention pressed into stone and wood through years of sustained presence.
"The hammer," Max said.
"My curse creates hammers from compressed sui energy and emotional weight," Elder Soo said. "The heavier the emotional atmosphere the stronger they hit. The more saturated the environment the more I can create." A pause. "This mountain has been my home for sixty years. The hammers here are considerably more powerful than anything I could produce anywhere else."
"That's why you told me to come to you rather than offering to come down."
"Partly." The old man smiled slightly. "Also the climb down is hard on my knees."
Max almost smiled.
"So every Lily Kingdom citizen uses curses this way," he said. "Drawing from the environment rather than themselves."
"Not every citizen develops their curse to combat application. Most people use sui passively — emotional sensitivity, reading atmospheres, understanding what a place has witnessed. The curse expression you saw today is a specific discipline that requires decades of practice."
"But the principle is the same."
"The principle is the same." Elder Soo refilled his tea from a pot that Max hadn't seen him move to get. "Draw from outside. Direct inward. Express outward. The opposite sequence from gift users."
Max turned this over.
Something about it connected to something else he'd been thinking about since the woman in Drevet had told him the Lily Kingdom showed you what you were actually feeling whether you wanted to see it or not.
"The Worio clan," he said.
Elder Soo's expression changed — not dramatically, just a settling, like a person arriving somewhere they'd been walking toward for a while.
"Yes," he said. "That's where this conversation was always going."
He set his cup down.
"What do you already know?"
"Cancellation gift," Max said. "The ability to nullify other gifts. Maintained neutrality between kingdoms for three centuries. Destroyed by the Star Generals approximately five hundred years ago because they were afraid of what cancellation could do to centralized power."
"All accurate," Elder Soo said. "And all incomplete."
He stood and moved to one of the shelves, running his fingers along the spines of the documents with the familiarity of someone who knew the exact location of everything despite the apparent disorder.
He found what he was looking for and brought it back — a scroll, old but carefully maintained, the kind of thing that had been handled regularly enough over a long time to develop a particular softness at the edges.
He set it on the table between them but didn't open it yet.
"What the histories call cancellation," he said, "is not what it actually was. Cancellation implies negation — that Worio practitioners found gifts and switched them off. Like extinguishing a flame."
"That's not what it was?"
"No." Elder Soo's hands rested on the scroll. "What Worio actually did was closer to what the Lily Kingdom does with curses, but one layer deeper. We draw from the emotional and water energy around us. Worio drew from something beneath that."
Max leaned forward slightly.
"Beneath it," he repeated.
"Tan, mana, sui, oi, wus." The old man held up one hand, fingers spread. "Five expressions. Five kingdoms. Five systems that appear separate because they feel separate and respond differently to training and manifest differently in combat."
He closed his hand slowly into a fist.
"But they come from one place."
Max was quiet.
"The same force," Elder Soo continued. "Expressed differently based on environment and intention and the specific character of each kingdom's relationship with life energy. Tan is what it looks like when life force lives inside a person. Mana is what it looks like when life force saturates the environment. Sui is what it looks like when life force moves through emotion and water. Oi is what it looks like when life force becomes motion and body. Wus was what it looked like when life force was artificially tethered to a single source."
He opened his fist again, fingers spreading.
"Same force. Different expressions. The way water is water whether it's in a river or a cloud or a person's blood."
Max looked at the old man's open hand.
"And Worio," he said slowly.
"Worio touched the force underneath all five expressions simultaneously," Elder Soo said. "Not cancellation. Not negation. Contact with the source layer — the level at which all five systems are still one thing — which made every expression built on top of that source layer temporarily transparent."
He picked up the scroll and unrolled it carefully.
The document was dense with writing Max didn't immediately recognize — older script, the kind that required familiarity rather than just literacy.
But there were diagrams.
Five circles arranged in a ring, connected by lines, with a sixth circle in the center that the lines all passed through.
Max looked at the center circle.
"That's what Worio accessed," he said.
"That's what Worio accessed," Elder Soo confirmed. "Not the expressions. The source. Which is why their ability worked against every gift regardless of energy type. You can't nullify tan with mana or mana with sui — they're different channels. But if you touch the level beneath all channels simultaneously, every channel becomes temporarily quiet."
Max sat with this for a long moment.
The fire in the small house made its sounds.
Outside the stream moved in its Lily Kingdom way, following intention rather than gravity, doing what it chose.
"I've been accessing it by accident," Max said finally. "When the pressure is high enough it just — activates. Against Rei's technique. Against Kairo's Sovereign Rule."
"Yes," Elder Soo said. "Because extreme pressure produces extreme emotional clarity. And the source layer responds to emotional clarity more than technical training." He looked at Max directly. "Which is why your gift has been inconsistent. You can reach it when everything is stripped away and only what's real remains. But you can't reach it calmly, deliberately, from a standing start."
"That's what I need to learn," Max said.
"That's what you need to learn," Elder Soo agreed.
He rolled the scroll closed again carefully.
"It won't be quick," he said. "The Worio clan trained this from childhood. You're starting as a teenager who's already survived more than most people twice your age."
"I know."
"It will require emotional honesty that people generally prefer to avoid."
"I know that too."
Elder Soo looked at him steadily.
"The grief you're carrying," he said. "The anger. The people you've lost and the things you've done that you can't undo. You'll need to sit with all of it. Not process it into something useful. Just — sit with it. Know it completely."
Max thought of Valentine's eyes.
Of Rei's voice explaining theories he'd been developing since before breakfast.
Of Momo's expression when Vista had twisted his ear and she'd said oh hey to an actual Mother with complete composure.
Of Jax's smile.
"I can do that," he said quietly.
Elder Soo studied him for a long moment.
Then he nodded — not the preliminary nod of someone considering, but the final nod of someone who had decided.
"Come back tomorrow morning," he said. "We begin then."
Max stood.
He looked at the scroll on the table.
At the diagram of five circles and one source.
At the old man who had spent decades on a mountain preserving knowledge about a clan that the kingdoms thought they'd successfully erased.
"Why did you keep all this?" Max said. "The records, the documents. Why did you preserve it when everyone else forgot?"
Elder Soo was quiet for a moment.
"Because the Worio clan was right," he said simply. "About what they were protecting. About why balance mattered. About what happens when power centralizes without anything to check it."
He looked at the shelf.
"And because someone had to remember them accurately. Not as threat that was neutralized. As people who understood something important and were destroyed for understanding it."
He picked up his tea.
"Besides," he added quietly. "I knew someone would come eventually. The Thorne bloodline doesn't end easily."
Max looked at him.
The old man's expression carried something that had been there since the first day but that Max was only now reading correctly — not just patience, not just the discipline of someone who had been waiting.
Recognition.
He had been waiting specifically.
"You knew someone from the clan would come," Max said.
"I hoped," Elder Soo corrected. "There's a difference."
Max nodded.
He moved toward the door.
"Tomorrow morning," Elder Soo said behind him.
"Tomorrow morning," Max confirmed.
He stepped out onto the plateau.
The afternoon had arrived while they were talking, the sun having moved considerably without his noticing, the Lily Kingdom spread out below him in its blue-flowered entirety.
Vista was sitting on his rock.
She looked at him when he came out.
He sat beside her and looked at the view for a while without speaking.
"Five circles," he said eventually. "And one source."
"Yes," she said.
"You already knew."
"I'm the Mother of Despair," she said. "I predate the kingdoms and their energy systems. I remember when there was only the source."
"What happened to it?"
She was quiet for a moment, the specific quiet of someone choosing how much to say.
"The kingdoms happened," she said finally. "People are very good at taking one thing and making it into many things. Usually because many things are easier to control than one thing."
Max looked at the diagram in his memory — five circles in a ring around one center.
"But the center is still there," he said.
"The center is always still there," Vista said. "That's what your clan understood. That's what they were protecting." She looked at him. "And that's what you're going to learn to touch properly instead of just stumbling into it when everything else falls away."
The wind came across the plateau in its long steady breath.
Max sat on the mountain above the Lily Kingdom and let everything Elder Soo had said settle into the space that his body and mind had been slowly clearing since he'd arrived.
Tomorrow the real work began.
He was ready.
Or he would be by morning.
Which, he'd learned, was usually close enough.