Gaius Antonius Omake #19: Those Pesky Juniors
"Umm... I'm sorry to bother you, Senior. Are you busy?"
Gaius exhaled a lungful of smoke, then turned to see where that was coming from. A diminutive, young-looking man with a face that was more like a pile of pinched features, he shuffled his feet and struggled to find his words.
"I guess I'm not. Hello there, do you need anything?" Gaius greeted him, putting out his cigarette and smiling rather stiffly.
"I... hi, my name's Acestes, I was wondering if you could give me some pointers? N-not in the duel way! I just meant, um..." The boy's speech quickly collapsed into incomprehensible mumbling.
"Hey, hey, come on. Don't be so nervous!" Gaius attempted to reassure him. He considered patting the little guy on the shoulder, then hesitated, his hand awkwardly hovering in the air for a moment.
"I heard that you were a genius, that you're super good at cultivation and stuff. But you're also not way older than me so I figured maybe it would be easier to talk to you. Am I coming on too strong? I'm sorry, I'll leave if you-"
"Stop, stop!" Gaius exclaimed, making the kid practically jump out of his shoes. "You've done nothing wrong, it's fine. You're asking me to help you improve your cultivation method, right?"
"Yeah..." Acestes muttered, looking down at his feet. "It's a shameful thing to even ask, I know. It's just... I'm thirty-five, and I'm only on the Third Heavenstage still. I can feel the fourth right there but it's just... not going, you know? A-and I figured I must be doing something wrong, and since you're such a fast cultivator you can probably help out!"
Damn, did this guy not understand the meaning of the word 'cadence'? Ah well, he seemed nice enough. "I don't know if I'm the right guy to ask. Do you have any Seniors you could pay for tutoring?"
"Not really." Acestes answered somberly. "I mean, I could pay for tutoring, but I don't bring in that many points because I'm not strong enough to do most missions, so I'm still mostly doing chores and training, and most of the points from those go to keeping my cultivation afloat."
Ah, now this was a spiral of poverty that all new recruits knew well, and worked hard to stay out of. Those trapped in such circumstances for too long tended to turn to drastic measures to escape. Yeah, helping Acestes out would probably be for the best. All that in mind, Gaius put on his best 'wise, reassuring Senior' face. "Alright, I get it. Okay kid, I'm sure we can work something out. Come to my apartment tomorrow and I'll help you however I can. No need to pay me, I'll think of something for you to do for me in exchange."
He ended up being stuck there for another five minutes, as the Junior wouldn't stop bowing and thanking him long enough to confirm that he knew where to find Gaius' apartment.
----
"Okay, I can feel it coming in, but it seems to be fizzling out right around here." Gaius explained as he pressed his palm to Acestes' bare chest, feeling the waste heat as the qi leaked out through his Junior's skin.
Third Heavenstage, otherwise known as the first bottleneck. It was the first time when cultivation became genuinely difficult for some. Very minor sects, the kind that might rule over a thousand acres of land and have a single Foundation Establishment-level Grand Elder, often considered this bottleneck important, placing those who could not move past it in the lowest possible rank.
Indeed, it couldn't be denied that someone who stalled out at the stage of Acupoint Awareness was barely even a Cultivator, holding just enough qi to perform parlor tricks and being physically only a little bit beyond the strongest mortals. Most passed through it without much more difficulty than the stages before, but for those with an especially poor spiritual sense, it was tricky.
And there lay the problem - Gaius didn't even remember how he got through the Third Heavenstage. He had simply breezed through it the same way he did everything until Ninth. How was he to explain the mechanics of something which came to him naturally?
"You probably know this, but it's all about pressure; substances want to move from high pressure areas to low pressure areas. So because your dantian is all filled up, it's pushing the new qi through your veins. You've gotta circulate it through your bloodstream and back into the dantian. Then the qi will have nowhere left to go and the dantian will start to stretch. You'll reach the Fourth in like a month." Gaius explained by rote. You're ridiculously close, you just gotta get the circulation down."
"Yes, but how do I become aware of by own bloodstream? I can't feel all of my veins and arteries at once
and pull in qi
and keep the qi from leaking out across my whole body. Come on, what's the trick you used?" The kid pleaded, voice full of frustration.
"...I just kind of did it. I don't know what to say about that, it didn't feel hard." Gaius answered lamely, contemplating. "I think it's like... you're trying too hard."
Acestes, for his part, looked like he wanted to punch a wall. "Too hard? But we have to work as hard as we can!"
"No, no, not working too hard,
trying too hard. Like..." Gaius grimaced as he tried to turn the perfectly clear images in his head into coherent language. "Like you gotta work hard without thinking too much about it. You can feel the qi as it enters your body, right?" He asked, seeing Acestes nod in return. "So just... don't lose sight of that feeling. Feel where it's going. With each breath, try to push it a little bit farther. Even if it's just a milimeter farther each time that's fine. After a while you'll manage one circulation, and you'll have felt your whole circulatory system."
"Okay, and if I manage to do that, what's next?" Acestes asked, enraptured.
"Keep doing it, every time your cultivate, forever. Hopefully it will become a thoughtless reflex and you'll start doing it faster."
"Oh." Acestes' face fell. "Cultivation really is dull and unpleasant, isn't it?"
Gaius blinked in surprise, then remembered that not everyone felt so personally gratified by the action. "Personally, I love it." He shrugged.
The other man didn't say anything for a few moments, ruminating on that statement. "Geniuses, huh? Really fills you with despair when you realize that gap. Pretty great to have one as a tutor though." He bitterly chuckled.
Gaius ruffled the other man's hair. "No worries; I'll help you get the hang of it. Every time you come here, I'll help guide you through the process. You can come as many times as you want until you get the hang of it, but each time I'm gonna have you do some chores and give me the points you earn for them. Sorta like buying tutoring for one fifth the price."
And so it was that Gaius became an unofficial and not particularly competent tutor. Acestes would bring a slow trickle of low-quality spirit stones bought with his extra chore points. In exchange, the Junior would be allowed to cultivate with Gaius in his apartment for two hours per day, where Gaius would give him little pointers and help smooth out rough patches.
As he observed Acestes finally push into the Fourth Heavenstage two months later, he surmized that he probably wasn't helping at all; beyond helping with the circulation aspect at first, all he was doing was providing the confidence boost the kid needed to push just that little bit harder. Acestes would probably never be particularly strong, but if he could reach Fifth or Sixth before stalling out then he would at least live longer, and be more likely to survive the trials.
It was a bit bleak, Gaius thought, to be judging a fellow Clansman's ability to survive in such a clinical fashion. This was far from the first time Gaius wondered just how harrowing, how terrifying the Centennial Trial must be to induce such despair in his proud clan.
----
Gaius was fairly happy with how he did. He wouldn't call himself a particularly amazing tutor, but he had genuinely helped out a comrade, and that felt pretty good.
Then another Junior came begging to him. Then a third. That was when Gaius started to get worried. It turns out, when you fulfil a demand at a much lower cost than market competitors, demand starts to shift toward you. That's a problem when your supply isn't particularly high. So now there were more untalented Juniors asking for their prodigous Senior's assistance and teaching in other subjects, like scouting, or riding, or hunting. Gaius, being someone who liked his schedules as rigid as possible and thought of free time as an occasional luxury rather than a daily need, found himself at quite an impasse.
If he could budget his time just right, he would actually save 40 minutes per week from the menial tasks his juniors did for him in exchange for help. Unfortunately, helping them tended to consume a lot more brainpower than his basic routines did.
But really... was that so bad? A greater diversity of personal experience was supposed to be good for one's mental health, right? And Gaius' personal life was not particularly rich, so this might help in that regard. And so, he began taking in Juniors from time to time and helping them with things he personally excelled at.
Still, sometimes a Junior would come to him with a particularly bold request...
"You want to come with me on an extermination mission?" Gaius asked skeptically, raising an inquisitive eyebrow.
"Yes! Please Senior, tracking and hunting has always been a passion of mine. I would be honored if you would let me fight with you to hone my skills." The girl asked him with an intense expression. If the last Junior to petition Gaius was a mouse, then this girl, Antea, was an eagle, with a large beak-like nose that dominated her face and sharp-looking eyes.
"I... I guess that's fine? Not sure if it's allowed but..." Gaius trailed off. "Ah, I'm sure it's fine. But this has to be off the books, okay?" He reassured himself and his Junior simultaneously with a smile.
----
This mission was, as it turned out, not fine. Over the years, Gaius had found himself to be a quick thinker whenever something went wrong. But when more than one brain is involved, quick thinking becomes less about instinct and more about luck.
"Move, move!" Gaius yelled, leaping in between the scything claws of two Fire Drinking Mantises to tackle Antea out of the way. The two rolled and tumbled across the rocky ground of the Lesser Anvil Mesa as a blast of flame turned the sand to gladd where the Junior had stood.
Just one inch off, that has all it had taken. One slip and Antea had nearly died. It should go without saying, when the main difference between human cultivators and spirit beasts is that humans had greater control, the slightest loss of that control closes that gap.
"Just run, I'll do it myself!" Gaius declared, running back into the fray. The Junior's protests were entirely ignored, as the fervor of battle once more overtook his mind.
It probably hadn't been ideal to bring a stealth-based fighter into such wide open terrain without any ability to hide. Truth be told, while Gaius was good at sneaking, the stealth tended to end once he began fighting in earnest. The subtle difference between a hunter and a stalker, perhaps.
Either way, this was the result: Antea running and plinking away at the beasts with her bow while Gaius got almost every kill on his lonesome. Not a particularly effective lesson.
He tried to give her some more tips on how to improve her combat style on the way back to the Dawn Fortress, mostly just to make himself feel a little better at how poorly that all went.
----
After that life-threatening disaster, Antea unsurprisingly wanted nothing to do with Gaius, but the Juniors asking for advice didn't stop there. However, Gaius decided to only give tutoring in safe things from then on, even if he was missing out on bigger payouts. If a Junior outright died because of his own mistakes, he wasn't sure how he would forgive himself.
So he raised his prices a little, and soon enough he had a more organized, streamlined tutoring schedule baked into his daily routine. Gaius' income went up a bit, he was discouraged from acting like a hermit and some paying customers got some help; everybody wins.
Still, something about the arrangement left The Seeker feeling hollow and unfulfilled, like something was missing. With no way to express or address these feelings, he left them bottled up for some time.
----
"I'm a bad Clansman, aren't I?" Gaius asked, apropos of nothing. He lit a cigarette and took a long drag, starring off into the distance in contemplation.
"What's this all about now?" Asked a muscular, elegant-looking woman in a dark evening gown, reclining on a couch in the same room. This was Axia Quintia, and upon seeing the classic "overthinking things" expression on Gaius' face, she sighed and looked up from the letter she was writing.
"The strength of the Golden Devils has always been cooperation, standardized techniques, the ability to work together in formations, things like that. But I can't relate to my Juniors very much, there's too much difference." Gaius lamented quietly.
"Cultivation is intensely personal, there's only so much you can do to propel others forward." Axia noted frankly with a shrug. "To help a clansman reach his full potential is virtuous, but to not accept a difference in potential is folly."
Gaius took another drag and leaned back in his chain. "Perhaps, but I can't help but feel alienated at times. Obviously I don't regret being capable, but sometimes I feel guilty for skipping past so many of the hardships of the common man."
Axia scoffed loudly. "Let the common man worry for the common man's problems; performative humility helps no one. Of course we deserve to have pride, my dear - we have power, the power to one day influence history by our own hands."
"Maybe, maybe..."
Here's another one from the backlog. Gaius doesn't know how to handle being admired and looked up to. If Axia's introduction seems weird and abrupt it's because she wasn't supposed to be introduced in this one, but the ones where she is established aren't done cooking yet.
@TehChron
