Seyun leaned over the wide cedar reading frame stand between Ilyra and Archivist Vel. She used the blunt wooden end of a dry brush-holder as a pointer so his gauze-wrapped palms wouldn’t smudge the two-hundred-year-old ink.
“Look at the structure of each cell entry from the top down,” Seyun said, his voice steady and focused as the years he had spent keeping fire tallies and medical dockets locked onto the pattern of the page. “First, every entry begins with a quiet focus stool and specifies whether its leg-joints are inward-beveled or outward-splayed, followed by the wood species—charcoal-pine, red-birch, bronze-ash, green-elm, or crown-cedar.”
Ilyra looked from the folio to Master Uren’s stone tablet, her dark eyes lighting with sudden understanding as the martial ladder clicked into place. “Coal, Flame, Bronze, Jade, and Crown! The wood of the stool is the fighter’s realm! And inward-beveled versus outward-splayed leg joints—”
“Is the fighter’s foundation channel shape,” Seyun finished. “An inward-beveled stool is a fighter whose return channels close inward upon themselves when they try to circulate breath—the exact body prerequisite needed to practice the Answering Spirit vein. An outward-splayed stool is a traditional fighter with open outward return paths, like you or Daro Kesh, who can’t bear the tablet’s art.”
