At noon, after the morning pupils went home for their midday meal and Archivist Vel walked down to the bakery for hot sesame flatbreads, Seyun and Daro sat across from each other at the oak study table with a pot of roasted barley tea between them. Seyun opened his Account Book to the spirit vein tracking pages at the back—the pages where Master Uren’s copied laws sat beside Mina’s cold and exact pulse tables—and laid his bone pencil beside the spine.
Daro poured two clay cups, his eyes dropping to the three-place diagram sketched on the left-hand leaf. Two of the three curved brackets on the drawing—Place I at the left collarbone and Place III below the chest bone—were marked Closed by Honest Reconciliation, with a bracketed notation beside them reading. One-Season Unassisted Practice Lock Needed for Channel Recovery (90 Dawns). Only the middle line—Place II at the right collarbone, bearing Daro’s name and his Early Jade attainment from the northern chamber—remained unmarked by a closure date.
“Mina explained the physical side of the one-season lock before we left the hospice,” Daro said. He wrapped his scarred fingers around his hot cup. “When a sworn mark closes because the dispute is over, the return channel seals itself off and leaves an internal scar. Until you spend a full ninety-day season circulating your own foundation breath around those scars without external pressure, your total endurance stays reduced and the closed places can’t open to anyone else.”
