The expanse of the grounds was nothing short of breathtaking. It was beautiful, through and through.
Holy... I'm training here?!
The battered pillars, despite looking so eroded, added an odd allure to the landscape. Then the lanterns. He's seen so many of them ever since he woke up in the Palimpsest, but the dazzling quality they brought forth from wherever they were adorned had not gotten old to Riku.
Renjirō motioned around. "This is the training yard for the Moonless Court. Every lodging of the five concords has one. All of us have trained here. I did, Ms. Uro, Akio, and Mei... This is where we learned and honed what we know. And so will you."
Riku, for all the admiring he had for the place, couldn't help but feel a slight sense of unease when he heard those words.
He's acting like it'll be a walk in the park for me...
"First and foremost, we'll need to teach you the two basic skills. Once you nail these flat, you can start taking up cases with the rest of us." Renjirō said.
"What are they?" Riku asked.
"First is leakage prevention. The process by which you seal and keep the mantra within your body. Specifically, your gate. It prevents mantra from leaking out of your body in any way, which'll allow for more efficiency from you. When you were fighting the Silent God, not only were you spending mantra when using Kapaala, but you were leaking some from your body while you were doing so. In professional scenarios, you can't afford that. Mantra should only be dedicated to your control. Nothing else." Renjirō replied, his voice carrying experience.
Riku thought back to that time, where he continuously ordered the jester to enhance the illusions. Renjirō was right. Riku did feel tired very quickly when doing so.
Then he remembered something.
"Wait, but the talisman Akio gave me...!" he started.
"The Celestial Conch-grade seal?" Renjirō asked. "I figured Akio gave you one, since you were new to all this and he had to make haste."
I'm still pretty new to this, I think...
"Those will prevent leakage for some time, but since you were using Kapaala in excess, the talisman was borderline useless. " Renjirō said. "Had your mantra reserves depleted to zero... you'd have died."
Riku's eyes widened slightly. The seal, that Akio graciously gave him in an effort to help him, did nothing?! How close was he killing himself?
Renjirō patted Riku's shoulder. "Don't worry though. In the course of these next few days, you won't have to worry about such an outcome."
They made their way to a quiet and serene part of the yard, where Riku couldn't help but be soothed by the silence.
"Alright, let's start. First thing's first... did you notice the symbol of that eye on your palm?"
Riku nodded. Noting it was an understatement.
"A two-petal lotus flower, with a downward-pointing triangle, and chant in the center of it. Third Eye." Renjirō said.
Riku blinked in confusion. "Hmm?"
Renjirō chuckled. "So, within a body, resides nine gates, and for a mantrik, one of these gates is where their mantra will come from. From the base of your spine to the top of your head. The gate can also give an indicator of what ones Bhāṇḍa could be. In your case, you hold the third eye gate, which resides in the center of your forehead."
Riku raised a hand and pressed against that very spot, almost as if he could feel the esoteric nature of it through his skin.
"However, what your Bhāṇḍa is, remains to be a mystery. Especially after the discovery we made that you're of the Mythborne domain." Renjirō said.
"Well, what does the third eye gate even mean?" Riku asked, lowering his hand.
Renjirō creaked his neck to one side. "It's tied to vision and higher perception." he said. "But when looking at what you can do, especially with Kapaala, it leaves a lot to be questioned."
Riku looked down at his palms again, wondering what all of this meant for him. The mirror, the symbol, his gate. Could any of this get more cryptic?
"It's alright. Don't worry about 'what could be.' Focus on right now." Renjirō said, his voice sounding reassuring.
Riku nodded, swallowing down the doubt and slight frustration he had. "Alright. How do we start?"
"Loosen yourself up, first. Muscles, shoulders, everything. Let go of the tension in your body." Renjirō instructed.
Riku nodded, inhaling and exhaling deeply, and doing his best to match the instructions given to him.
As he drew in a slow breath, he felt his lungs expand until the pressure ached his chest. All he tried to do was focus on were Renjirō's words.
"Don't force it," Renjirō said, sitting cross-legged across from him, back straight as a drawn blade. "Meditation isn't strangling your mind into stillness. It's letting stillness arrive on its own."
Riku shut his eyes tighter.
Easier said than done...
For a while, there was only the rhythm of wind brushing against Riku's skin. His shoulders eased. The ground beneath him no longer felt as harsh, and for a brief moment, he believed he might have found that stillness Renjirō spoke of.
He could feel a slight duress seeping into his body, but it wasn't immense. He felt it course through his veins, limbs, and body. And for a moment, it was a similar sensation to what he felt back at the shrine, when using the jester. Only this time, it felt calmer. More peaceful.
It felt oddly soothing.
But only at first.
Then the tide of thoughts came rushing back in. Faces he couldn't forget. Fights he couldn't undo. The gnawing uncertainty of whether he should even have awoken in the Palimpsest. His breathing grew uneven.
His head started to feel dizzy, and he could feel his heart palpitating.
"Stop!" Renjirō's voice sounded.
Riku opened his eyes, collapsing onto the ground, panting. What happened? All he was doing was just meditating. Then why?
Why did he just feel poisoned for a second?
"Easy, easy. Don't worry, it's not a big deal." Renjirō said, as he helped Riku up.
"W-What happened?" Riku asked, feeling the tension from the mishap subside from his body.
"That's what happens when you don't have a visual cue." Renjirō replied. "The problem you encountered just now was that you tried to relax your body and assimilate the mantra within your gate without giving it a proper shape to focus on. Doing that can cause irregular fluctuations within certain parts of your body. Limbs, organs, tendons. Anything. That's why you started feeling dizzy and you collapsed."
Riku shook his head momentarily, trying to fight off the disorientation. "I felt it... initially. Something was flowing through my body."
"That's a start. That was mantra flowing through your body. Your body is naturally attuned to it, so taking it into your body is the easy part. The harder portion lies in assimilating it into your gate." Renjirō said.
"You said something about... a visual cue?" Riku asked.
Renjirō nodded. "A way of making it easier, if you will. Anchoring your mind with a picture. Something simple. Mist rolling in. Flames rising. Clouds drifting. Even something ridiculous, like an egg cooking in a microwave. Doesn't matter what—what matters is that it's yours."
Riku quirked an eyebrow. "Anything?"
Renjirō smiled faintly. "I said it doesn't matter. Your focus is the only thing that gives it weight. Whatever you choose, imagine it pressing into this point." He tapped his own forehead, right between the brows. "That's your Third-Eye Gate. That's where mantra settles when it first gathers. Lock it there, and the rest will follow."
------
Hours had passed. Renjirō left Riku to it, providing Riku no further instruction, and hoping to give the boy no more distractions.
These hours were grueling, to say the least.
He tried mist first. A thin veil curling inward, trailing across his vision. It wavered, scattered, refused to gather into the center of his head. He tried again with flame. He pictured it as vividly as he could, golden tongues writhing into a single point. But the fire sputtered, went out, leaving behind only darkness and a throbbing headache.
Every time he tried and failed, the dizziness and the palpitations would come back, and it left Riku with immense discomfort and more frustration.
He laid on the ground, panting and feeling exhausted beyond belief.
I feel like I'm gonna hurl... Every time I fail, I feel like I've been kicked in the chest!
Nothing held. Nothing locked in place. Still, he tried.
Because giving up would mean admitting the silence had won.
As he rose back up to try again, he heard a small chuckle resound. Riku groaned.
"Well, well," a voice cackled, dripping with mockery. "Look at you—three hours of faceplanting meditation, and all you've summoned is nausea. Truly, a prodigy."
"You noticed." Riku said, dryly.
In a swirl of black and gray, skulls orbited in rapid cycled, before being followed by the frame of a jester.
Kapaala.
Riku scowled. "Came out to rub it in my face?"
"Oh, you know me so well." the jester replied.
Riku snapped back. "Don't you have better things to do? I'm trying to focus here!'
Kapaala whistled, spinning a skull in his hand. "Oh, I was slumbering just fine, but it'd be nice to check up on you once in a while! I can't let my dear boss off the hook!"
Before Riku could respond, another voice came from behind him. "How do you deal with him?" Mei walked out from the Ecliptic Vault, her face glistened with sweat from what looked like a workout. She always toiled away in her room; her muscles pumped from the rigorous exercises.
Riku shrugged. "Don't even know."
Kapaala gasped. "Oh, flower girl!"
Mei glared at the jester before looking back at Riku. "What're you out here for?"
Riku sighed, his shoulders slumping forward. "Training. Dr. Tsukimura wanted me to master this, but it's been exhausting my ass for a minute!"
"What for?" Mei asked.
"Leakage prevention, I think." Riku replied.
"Ahh, that explains how sorry you look." she said, unapologetically.
He chuckled, not even upset at the snarky comment. "How nice of you."
Mei cracked her knuckles, stretching a bit before talking. "Don't push yourself on leakage prevention. It's a fundamental for us, sure. But not something that can be recklessly reattempted. I was just as pitiful as you are now when I was learning."
"Hard to imagine that." Riku said.
"Well, get used to it. It's hard on everyone." she said.
"Since when did you start being so sympathetic?" Akio's voice came from the Ecliptic Vault.
Mei rolled her eyes. "Why do you care?"
Akio put his hands up. "Just asking." His gaze shifted to Riku. "You doing alright?"
"I think... Although this is much harder than I thought." Riku replied.
Akio walked up to them both, before sitting down next to Riku, trying to figure out a way to approach the conversation.
"You know," Akio began, "I thought I was never going to get it either. Mei's right. It may be a basic skill, but it's not something that comes in a night. It took me two weeks to assimilate my mantra signature within my gate."
"Two weeks? You?" Riku asked incredulously.
Akio chuckled. "Yeah. My gate's in the throat. At first, every time I tried to contain mantra there, it felt like choking. Like the energy was swelling up in my windpipe and I was suffocating on my own power. Took me weeks just to stop panicking long enough to hold the visual still."
He smiled faintly, the kind of self-deprecating smile Riku had only ever seen when Akio was being honest with himself.
"How'd you do it?" he asked.
"I kept picturing it as a stream. A river flowing through me, steady, constant. And my throat? A dam. Not a wall to block it, but a gate that opens and closes. If I thought of it as cutting off the river, I'd panic. But if I thought of it as redirecting, guiding, then it started to make sense. Eventually… I learned not to be afraid of drowning."
Riku listened quietly, surprised at how vulnerable Akio sounded. The way he phrased it — "not being afraid of drowning" — felt like more than just training.
Akio continued. "The issue is mantra's an ever-elusive force. It seems simple, giving it a visual, but maintaining that visual once you start to feel your signature assimilate is really difficult. That's why it goes beyond just picturing the energy as something simple. You should also picture it as something that can be altered and contained by your gate."
Before Riku could respond, Mei crossed her arms, her expression sharp, as if Akio's softness needed to be countered by her bluntness.
"For me," she said, "the navel gate was just as brutal. But it wasn't easy for me to give it a flowing visual like Akio did. Every time I thought I had it, my stomach would cramp so hard I felt like puking." She leaned back, her eyes narrowing as though reliving the memory. "So, I realized that there wasn't any delicate way of handling this. Guiding it wasn't my forte."
"So...?" Riku began.
"So, I beat it into submission." she said. "I thought of it like it was something I needed to compress and stow away. So, I did it the way I knew how. I vented. Frustration was what I had at my disposal, and I forced my signature to stay compressed."
Riku's mouth went dry at the intensity in her words. But before he could talk, Kapaala forced a fake yawn. "Are you guys done yet? I'm falling asleep here!"
The jester performed a pirouette, skulls clattering behind him in applause. He exaggeratedly mimicked Riku clutching his chest earlier, then flopped dramatically onto the ground. "Behold, a little boy weeping-"
Riku interjected, his eye twitching. "Go away."
The jester gasped, clutching his chest. "Cruelty! Betrayal! I was only trying to motivate you with performance art!" He bowed deeply to Mei and Akio, who looked utterly unimpressed, then dissolved back into a black wisp with a huff.
"The point we're trying to make here... is that it's different for everyone. Picturing something that is entirely your own is the key to it all. But don't let the failures scare you. Each one means you're closer to getting it right." Akio said.
Mei nodded in affirmation. "Expect to fail. Over and over. That's the only way you'll learn."
Riku rubbed the center of his forehead, the weight of their words pressing against the frustration in his chest. "Envisioning..."
Akio and Mei got up, heading back into the Ecliptic Vault. "Yeah. That's what Dr. Tsukimura taught us. To excel at mantra, is to excel at envisage." Akio intoned.
And with that, the two went inside, the door closing behind them.
Riku looked at his clenched hands, the conversation feeling slightly eye-opening for him. And that's when it hit him.
Akio was right. And Riku already experienced it.
Back at the shrine, Riku had always envisioned absurdities when using Kapaala to his advantage. The illusions, swapping of places, and everything else...
It all came from what Riku imagined.
As he pondered over their words, one thought came to his mind.
I'll get it... Before this week is over, I'll make it work.
The night air was cool against his skin, but a slow fire had begun to burn inside him.