The problem was impossible. Kalpit's mind, stripped bare by exhaustion and pain, saw it with stark clarity. He could not carry the slab of ironwood up the cliff. His body, already pushed far beyond its limits, would fail. To even try was suicide.
The mind is a liar.
His mind was telling him there were only two options: climb with the wood, or leave the wood. Both meant failure. The lie, then, was the assumption that these were the only options.
He looked at Anasuya, who was already preparing to help him, likely planning to tie the wood to her back and attempt the climb herself. She was stronger than he was, better trained. But even for her, it was a suicidal task.
"No," he said, his voice a dry rasp. "We're not carrying it."
She frowned. "Then you've failed the test. Parashurama—"
"He said 'bring me' the firewood. He didn't say 'carry' it," Kalpit interrupted, his brain working with a strange new lucidity, the kind that comes when all other distractions have been burned away.
He walked back to the base of the cliff. The problem wasn't strength; it was logistics. He looked up the sheer, two-hundred-meter rock face. How do you move an object you can't carry to a place you can barely reach?
You don't. You bring the destination to the object.
He looked at Anasuya, at the coil of thin but strong synth-rope at her belt. Standard scavenger gear. "I need your rope."
Without question, she handed it to him. It was thirty meters long. Not nearly enough. He looked around the canyon floor. There was sparse, mutated vegetation. Tough, sinewy vines clung to the rocks.
"Help me," he said.
For the next hour, as the sun dipped towards the horizon, they worked. They stripped vines from the rocks. Kalpit, using the razor-sharp hand-axe, cut them to length, his hands, now numb to the pain, moving with robotic efficiency. He braided them together, his fingers remembering skills learned in the Sump, weaving scrap wires into functional tools. He plaited the tough vines into Anasuya's synth-rope, extending it, creating a single, incredibly long, and remarkably strong rope.
"It won't be enough to climb," Anasuya said, eyeing their handiwork.
"We're not climbing with it," Kalpit replied.
He tied one end of their new, hybrid rope securely around the heavy slab of ironwood. The other end, he coiled over his shoulder. He picked up the small hand-axe and walked to the base of the cliff.
He looked up. This would be his third ascent. The very thought of it sent waves of nausea and pain through him.
"You can't," Anasuya said, her voice strained. "Your body is at its limit."
The mind is a liar, he thought, and the words were no longer a koan, but a mantra. This pain is a liar.
The climb was an out-of-body experience. Kalpit's consciousness seemed to float outside of himself, observing his broken body perform its task. He relied entirely on his Muladhara-sight, moving with a dreamlike precision. The pain was an ocean he was swimming through. He didn't fight it. He simply accepted it and moved on. The coil of rope on his shoulder was light, its weight negligible compared to the agony in his muscles.
He reached the summit just as the last rays of sunlight were bleeding from the sky. He collapsed onto the rock, his body utterly spent, but this time, he did not allow unconsciousness to take him. He had one last task.
He uncoiled the long rope, letting it play out down the cliff face. It reached all the way to the canyon floor, with meters to spare. He then took the end of the rope and walked to a sharp, jutting pinnacle of rock near the edge. Using the hand-axe, he carved a deep, smooth groove into the rock, creating a rudimentary, but functional, pulley system. He looped the rope around it.
He sat back, his work done, and simply held the end of the rope. He didn't have the strength to pull the wood up himself. But that wasn't the plan.
Down below, Anasuya understood immediately. She took her end of the rope and began to pull. Her strong, soldier's body was more than a match for the dead weight of the ironwood, especially with the aid of the makeshift pulley.
Slowly, agonizingly, the heavy slab of black wood began its ascent, scraping and bumping against the cliff face.
By the time it reached the summit, the sky was a deep, star-dusted purple. Kalpit and Anasuya, working together, managed to haul the wood the final meter onto the ledge.
He had done it.
The firewood for a week was on the summit, ready to be cut into smaller pieces by the very axe that had felled it.
A shadow fell over him. Parashurama stood there, having appeared as silently as he had the day before. The giant warrior looked not at the exhausted boy or the determined soldier. He looked at the rope, at the groove carved into the pinnacle of rock, at the heavy slab of wood.
He was silent for a long time. Kalpit braced himself for another dismissal, another impossible task.
Instead, Parashurama reached down with one massive hand. It was not to strike or to test. He grabbed Kalpit by the arm and pulled him to his feet as easily as if he were lifting a child.
"The body can be broken. The will can be bent," the immortal warrior said, his deep voice holding a new, different tone. It wasn't praise. It was acknowledgement. "But the mind that sees the truth beyond the obstacle... that is a mind that can forge a weapon. Or a world."
He turned to look at Kalpit, his stormy eyes meeting the young man's.
"Your first two lessons were lies," Parashurama stated.
Kalpit, too exhausted to be surprised, just blinked.
"I did not teach you humility, and I did not teach you that the mind is a liar," the sage continued. "Those were merely the arenas for the true lesson."
He pointed to Kalpit's blistered, bleeding hands. "This is pain."
He pointed to the deep groove in the notch Kalpit had cut in the impossibly hard tree. "This is focus."
He pointed to the handmade rope and the simple pulley system. "And this is strategy."
His gaze became intense, heavy as a mountain.
"Pain, Focus, and Strategy. These are the only three tools a true warrior needs. All else—power, weapons, even Dharma—is secondary. You have proven you can understand them in their rawest form. You have learned more in two days of suffering than most learn in a lifetime of sparring."
He clapped a hand on Kalpit's shoulder, and the touch was not a blow, but a firm, steadying weight.
"The boy from the cage-city is dead. He died on that cliff face. He died at the foot of that tree."
A rare, almost imperceptible smile touched the lips of the warrior-sage. It was a terrifying, beautiful sight.
"Tomorrow, Kalki," Parashurama declared, "I will teach you how to fight."