The old woman arrived on the plateau the next morning with someone Max hadn't seen before.
A boy.
Younger than Max by perhaps two years — fourteen at most, possibly younger, with the specific compact build of someone who hadn't finished growing yet but was going to be significant when he did. Dark hair cut practically short. Eyes carrying the calm of someone who'd been trained since they could walk and had internalized that training to the point where it expressed as natural confidence rather than performance.
He wore plain clothes. No weapons. Nothing that announced what he could do.
He walked beside the old woman with the easy familiarity of someone who'd been doing exactly this for years.
She stopped at the plateau's edge and looked at Max.
"My grandson," she said simply.
The boy looked at Max with the specific evaluating attention of someone assessing a new opponent — not hostile, just thorough. The kind of assessment that completed quickly and filed everything it found.
He extended his hand.
"Rick," he said. "Nice to meet you."
His voice was steady. Younger than his bearing suggested.
Max took the hand.
"Maxwell," he said. "Pleasure's mine."
Rick nodded once — a compact acknowledgment that suggested he found pleasantries satisfactory and considered them concluded.
The old woman stood between them with her arms folded.
"Today's session is different from everything previous," she said. "All the ground source work, the living source, the pressure training, the consistency development — that's been foundation. Today we test whether the foundation can express through actual contact."
"Through fighting Rick," Max said.
"Through a mock engagement with Rick," she corrected. "In which you will attempt to maintain the nature without using silver techniques, gifts, or anything drawn from Vista's blessing."
Max looked at her.
"You want me to fight without my gift," he said.
"I want to see whether the nature can function as your primary capability," she said. "Not supplementary to silver techniques. Primary. The way it was for Worio practitioners who didn't carry any additional blessing."
"And Rick," Max said.
"Rick will use his curse," she said.
Rick's expression remained calm and polite throughout this description of what he was going to do to Max, which somehow made it more concerning rather than less.
"His curse is gravity manipulation," the old woman said. "Well developed for his age. He's been training since he was four."
Max looked at Rick.
Rick looked back with the same calm assessment.
"No hard feelings," Rick said pleasantly.
"None," Max agreed, though he was already recalibrating his expectations for the morning based on what gravity manipulation meant for someone who'd been training it since age four.
Elder Soo emerged from his house at this point carrying something Max hadn't seen before — four pieces of what looked like paper, except wrong. Too stiff. Too present. The kind of paper that had been through something in its making that regular paper hadn't.
The old man moved to the plateau's corners with the efficiency of someone who'd done this before, placing one piece at each corner with specific attention to positioning, pushing each piece slightly into the stone surface with the flat of his thumb.
He stepped back.
Something connected between the four pieces — not visibly, but felt, the sui energy between them establishing relationship, a boundary forming that enclosed the plateau in something Max understood from the inside as different from the outside.
A barrier.
Not preventing movement but containing consequence — whatever happened inside stayed inside, the structural impact of techniques dissipating at the barrier rather than carrying into the mountain.
"For the plateau's sake," Elder Soo said. "And the surroundings."
He looked at Rick when he said the last part.
Rick had the grace to look mildly apologetic.
"Last time was an accident," Rick said.
"The crater was quite large," Elder Soo said pleasantly.
Rick said nothing further.
The old woman looked at Max.
"Standard engagement rules," she said. "No lethal intent. Rick will use his curse at appropriate levels for a training context. You will use the nature and whatever physical capability you carry without gift assistance." She paused. "Begin when ready."
She stepped back.
Rick and Max faced each other across the plateau.
Rick's posture changed — not dramatically, just a settling, the specific quality of someone shifting from social mode to engagement mode, the two being clearly distinct for him.
"Ready?" Rick said.
"Ready," Max said.
Rick moved his hand.
Max felt it before anything physical happened — the sui energy around Rick drawing inward with the density of something cultivated over a decade, the curse pulling from the plateau's emotional atmosphere and the mountain's long history and whatever Rick had brought with him personally.
Then gravity changed.
Not everywhere. Just in the specific column of space Max was occupying.
He felt himself pulled sideways — not falling, because the direction wasn't down, just pulled, the local gravity in his immediate vicinity having decided that sideways was the appropriate direction for things to go.
He moved with it rather than fighting it.
Found his footing on the new angle.
Rick pulled again.
Down, this time. Increased gravity. The plateau seeming to press upward against him with twice its normal weight.
Max's legs held it — combat training and physical conditioning providing enough capacity to stand in doubled gravity.
He moved toward Rick.
Rick flicked his fingers.
An object lifted from the plateau's edge — a loose stone, perhaps fist-sized, that had been sitting there innocuously — and arrived at Max's position faster than throwing it would have managed.
Max stepped aside.
Another stone. Two stones. A piece of rock from the cliff face.
Rick was generating projectiles from the environment, gravity doing the throwing, the accuracy improving with each iteration as he calibrated the technique.
Max moved through them — dodging, stepping, using the footwork the dance had developed, his body finding angles instinctively.
The nature was present.
Some projectiles hit the field around him and deflected.
Most hit him.
The ratio was unfavorable.
Rick changed approach.
Instead of individual projectiles he created a zone — a sphere of altered gravity perhaps ten feet in diameter centered on Max's position, the interior of which had no consistent direction, up and down and sideways rotating in patterns that made footing meaningless.
Max's footing became meaningless.
He was lifted, spun, deposited on the plateau at an angle that his body couldn't immediately correct, his orientation lost in the gravity sphere's internal confusion.
He hit the stone.
Not hard — Rick had calibrated for training, the impact controlled, the velocity kept below seriously injurious — but hard enough to communicate the point clearly.
He got up.
The sphere reformed around him.
He was lifted again.
Deposited again.
Got up again.
Rick watched this with the calm of someone doing a task methodically. Not unkind. Just thorough.
He created the sphere a third time.
This time he added individual objects inside it — stones and loose rock from the cliff face, orbiting within the zone, each one moving at the velocity Rick's curse assigned it, the combination producing something that was simultaneously disorienting and physically threatening.
Max was inside a gravity sphere with rotating projectiles.
He lost track of which direction the plateau was.
Objects hit him from three directions.
He was deposited again, harder than the previous two times, the impact carrying enough force that his vision blurred briefly.
He looked up at the sky from the plateau's surface.
Rick stood nearby looking down at him with the polite expression of someone waiting for the engagement to formally conclude for the day.
"Shall we pause?" Rick said.
"No," Max said.
He got up.
"Okay," Rick said.
The sphere formed again.
Max went up again.
By midday Max had been deposited on the plateau seventeen times.
The number was not in dispute — Elder Soo had been counting, apparently, and mentioned it when he brought lunch with the tone of someone providing objective data.
Max sat eating with the specific combination of physical complaint and genuine interest that came from being repeatedly defeated by something that was teaching you something.
Rick ate beside him with the unselfconsciousness of someone who had done nothing wrong and understood the morning's results as simply the morning's results.
"You deflected four projectiles," Rick said. Not gloating. Just noting.
"Yes," Max said.
"More than I expected," Rick said. "The nature field is genuine. The deflections weren't accidental."
"But the sphere overwhelms it," Max said.
"The sphere disorients you before the nature can engage properly," Rick said. "The nature needs you to be present. The sphere prevents presence by removing your physical reference points."
He said this with the analytical clarity of someone who had spent ten years learning gravity manipulation and understood exactly what it did to opponents.
"You're not using the nature wrong," he said. "The disorientation breaks the presence before the nature can express."
"So I need to maintain presence without physical reference points," Max said.
"Yes," Rick said.
He ate a piece of bread.
"My grandmother made me train in the sphere for a month before I understood what she was actually teaching," he said. "I thought she was teaching me to handle disorientation. She was teaching me that orientation doesn't come from outside."
Max looked at him.
"It comes from the source layer," Max said.
"If you know where you are in the source layer you know where you are regardless of what gravity is doing," Rick said. "Because the source layer doesn't have directions. It doesn't have up or down. It's just present."
He finished his bread.
"I still got dizzy for the first two weeks," he added. "That part doesn't go away immediately. The body takes time to accept that physical orientation and actual orientation are different things."
"But eventually," Max said.
"Eventually the sphere is just a sphere," Rick said. "And you're just where you are."
He looked at Max with the calm eyes.
"Afternoon will be harder," he said. "I want to understand your current ceiling."
"What does harder look like," Max said.
"I'll use more of it," Rick said simply.
The old woman had been listening from her rock without speaking.
She looked at Max now.
"This afternoon you may use the dance," she said. "Physical movement through the disorientation while maintaining nature. See whether the body knowledge integrates with the source orientation Rick is describing."
"The dance inside a gravity sphere," Max said.
"The dance inside a gravity sphere with rotating projectiles," she confirmed.
Max looked at Rick.
Rick looked back with his calm polite expression.
"No hard feelings," he said again.
"None," Max said again.
Though afternoon produced considerable hard feelings in his body if not his spirit.
Afternoon was harder.
Rick used more of it.
Not maximum — the training context was maintained, the intent clearly developmental rather than destructive — but significantly more than morning, the gravity sphere larger, the internal rotation faster, the projectiles more numerous and from more angles.
Max tried the dance inside it.
The first attempt produced immediate failure — the body's orientation instincts fighting the source layer orientation because the physical cues were saying one thing and the source layer was saying something else and the conflict broke both.
He was deposited on the plateau four times in the first fifteen minutes.
The fifth attempt he stopped trying to reconcile the two.
Let the physical disorientation be what it was — present, real, actual feature of this moment, the body receiving inconsistent information and finding that uncomfortable.
Felt the grief.
The love.
The source.
Not up or down.
Just present.
Began the dance from that.
Not from where his body thought it was.
From where the source layer was.
Which was here.
Always here.
The sphere spun.
Max moved through it.
Not gracefully. Not without collision. Not without being pushed in directions he hadn't chosen.
But oriented.
Internally oriented in a way that the sphere couldn't address because the sphere was operating on physical reference points and Max was operating from somewhere that physical reference points didn't reach.
Three projectiles hit the nature field and deflected.
One hit him — the body flinching from disorientation before the nature could engage, the management reflex activating briefly at the unexpected direction.
He absorbed it.
Continued.
Rick watched from outside the sphere with his hands moving in the small adjustments that maintained the technique, his expression carrying something that hadn't been there in the morning.
Interest.
Genuine interest.
Not the polite assessment of the beginning but the specific attention of someone watching something unexpected develop.
He increased the sphere's rotation.
Max lost the source orientation for two seconds — found it again — lost it — found it.
Inconsistent.
But finding it each time faster than the time before.
"Stop," the old woman said.
The sphere dissolved.
Rick lowered his hands.
Max stood on the plateau with the specific combination of physical complaint and focused attention that had defined the whole afternoon.
The old woman looked at him.
"You found it twice," she said. "The source orientation inside the disorientation."
"Briefly," Max said.
"Briefly is what today needed to produce," she said. "The body has the information now. It knows the two orientations can coexist. Tomorrow it will find it faster." She looked at Rick. "Your assessment."
Rick was quiet for a moment.
"He's real," Rick said.
The old woman nodded.
"Yes," she said. "He is."
Rick looked at Max.
"Tomorrow I'll use seventy percent," he said. "Today was fifty."
Max absorbed this.
"What's at one hundred," he said.
Rick considered the question seriously.
"My grandmother made me promise not to use one hundred percent in training contexts," he said. "So I genuinely don't know what you'd experience."
He said this with complete sincerity.
Max decided not to pursue the question further.
They ate dinner together on the plateau — Elder Soo having produced something warm and substantial that required no identification before eating — and the conversation was easy, the specific ease of people who had spent a day being honest with each other through physical engagement rather than words.
Rick asked Max about the Rose Kingdom.
Max described it.
Rick asked about Shadow Utopia.
Max described it more carefully, the way you described things that still hurt to touch.
Rick listened without filling the silences with uncomfortable reassurance.
Which Max appreciated more than comfort would have been.
"My grandmother told me about the Worio clan since I was young," Rick said eventually. "She made it sound like something important that the world had lost without understanding what it had lost."
"She was right," Max said.
"Yes," Rick said. "I can see that now." He looked at his hands — no particular gift expression, just hands. "I always wondered what it felt like from the inside. To be that specifically yourself that the world couldn't fully reach you."
Max thought about what to say.
"It feels like being in the dance," he said. "When it's working. Like everything is made of the same thing and you're just one expression of it moving differently from the others."
Rick nodded.
"My grandmother described watching her father like that," he said.
"I know," Max said.
They sat with the shared knowledge of that.
The barrier Elder Soo had placed hummed quietly at the plateau's edges.
The stream ran.
The Lily Kingdom held its evening below.
"Tomorrow," Rick said.
"Tomorrow," Max agreed.
The old woman looked at them both with the expression that had arrived at recognition and stayed there.
Said nothing.
Which was its own kind of acknowledgment.
End of Chapter