He felt the capillary before the blade reached it. He redirected. The incision missed it by two millimeters.
His System noted, very quietly: SIGNIFICANT DEVELOPMENT — HIGH DOWNSTREAM VALUE.
He healed the cut. Made another. Then another.
Relay watched from the corner of the table with the posture of someone attending a very important seminar.
※ ※ ※
By session eight, something had shifted.
He could feel the location of the median nerve in his own forearm. Not approximately. Specifically. The precise cord of it, three centimeters below the surface, slightly lateral to center.
Median nerve: one of the major nerves of the forearm — the cable that controls sensation and movement in most of the hand. Critical. Precise. And, when you know exactly where it is, a very good argument for using a scalpel instead of guessing.
He could direct the blade to within half a millimeter of it without touching it.
He sat with this for a long time, longer than he usually allowed himself to sit with anything.
Then he wrote a principle in his notes that he had been thinking about since the first session — a principle that was more philosophy than technique, but that needed to be written down before it got comfortable being unspoken:
A scalpel is not a weapon. It is a philosophical position. The weapon cuts. The scalpel knows what it cuts, why it cuts, what comes before and what comes after. The difference is not the edge. It is the mind holding it.
He kept both blades in an inside pocket from that point forward.
Combat applications were in the Queue under a separate header. He had thought through them carefully. The rule he had set for himself — entered formally in the System so he couldn't conveniently forget it — was clear: no external application of a technique until internal testing has established reliable control.
He was building a methodology. Not improvising one.