Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia
Chapter Chapter [2.16] Load-Bearing Principles

Sol,

The Raven From Rome

“You may have heard these words before, but bear with me until the end. There are as many paths to heaven as there are stars in the sky, but that doesn't mean that any man or woman can walk just any path they choose. Fortune, whether good or bad, opens a thousand doors and closes a thousand-thousand more. In the days of our ancestors, it was a cultivator’s burden first to find their favored path.

“Today, we look first to the Broad and his theory of the tripartite soul, because it suggests a path forward in and of itself.

“I have seen cultivators both great and small, Citizens and Philosophers in their multitudes. I have seen cultivators follow paths that defy all reason, and I have even seen it work to their benefit—at least for a time.

“But more often by far, I have seen cultivators walk the path that the Broad set out for us all, before his Academy sank into the sea. This framework is the standard for a reason, and so it is where we must begin.

“First, we must ask ourselves this: why is it that we speak of our refinement in terms of realms and rankings? What is it that separates a tenth-rank citizen from a first-rank sophist other than a single step? Why does that tenth-rank citizen not deserve a more impressive title than the ninth-rank citizen below them, and why does that ninth-rank citizen not deserve a more glorious epithet than the eighth-rank citizen below them?

“The Broad asserted, and countless scholars have agreed, that there is a qualitative change between cultivators of different realms. I'm sure you can both think of a few.”

The intermission was a far more straightforward lecture than the events leading up to it, and that was ironically what made it the most jarring. As I tried my damnedest to focus on its contents and internalize every word, I became aware of a dissonance that had been all too easy to miss in the theatrics of the first act.

I was still under the influence of that psychedelic venom. Worse, I was farther gone than I had thought. Sitting here and breathing in the fumes hadn't just been maintaining my buzz like I’d thought, but progressing it—well beyond any reasonable threshold.

It felt similar to being drunk, on the edge of blackout senselessness. You could sit there with your cup in your hand and listen to someone speak, could understand the meaning of the words and even respond in kind, and not realize just how far gone you were until the moment you went to stand. Like a curtain being flung back and light pouring onto the stage, the truth of things would reveal itself all at once to you, and there would be no going back for the rest of the night.

The harder that I tried to focus, the more that exact vertigo came creeping in.

A distant part of me was confident that I could shrug this off, turn the wheel inside myself and purge these little poisons, but I knew that that would break the spell. So for now, I straddled that line and remained in my seat, content to let the play unfold according to my mentor’s design.

The first intermission was only a primer, and soon the second act was underway. The vapors converged in a closing curtain, and the lights inside the clouds dimmed to brief blackness, then flared to life once more and the curtains opened back up on a new scene.

Griffon played with a strand of vapor as it went streaming past us, plucking at it like it was a string and frowning when it parted around his fingers.

"Pay attention," I muttered. He snorted, but obliged.

The unmasked Selene and the blank-faced Tyrant Riot were there once again, and in place of the vinekeeper, a man—a Selene—was dressed in the most ragged cult attire I had ever seen, hunched feverishly over a workbench that had been piled high with half-finished curios and schematics. I saw piles of papyrus covered in Pythagorean scrawls, scrapped dissertations from every field a natural philosopher could be expected to dabble in. There were star charts, geometric formations, metaphysical treatises, and even a few half-cocked forays into civil engineering.

Not a single one of them was completed.

"Four months passed before I took my next step," Selene began, striding across the stage with her spear in hand. "I was more confident this time. My foundations were firmly established, and my purpose was clear."

Without preamble, she twirled the spear twice in her hand and rammed it through the hunched cultivator’s back.

At once, a tattered heart demon exploded up out of the floor, scattering a mountain of discarded designs to reveal the broken pillar buried underneath them. The mask of the new demon was just as hateful as the first had been, but rather than spite, it bore down on her with an expression of black glee. As for the mask of the cultivator that had created it—I couldn't tell. The hunched figure hadn’t raised its head from the bench yet. Even as the demon lunged and nearly tore Selene’s head off her shoulders, the scholar remained shackled to his work.

"Unfortunately," Selene narrated in a strained tone while she danced around the heart demon, "The second step was more challenging than the first."

"You could always let him rot," the Tyrant Riot suggested. "If he can't be bothered to lend you his strength, now of all times, is the world really any better off with him in it?"

"I won’t accept that," Selene replied, parrying a stab that the demon had attempted with an iron stylus of all things. “How can I judge the act of any living thing when their heart is not their own?”

“Easily. I do it often.”

“It isn't my place! And it isn't yours either! I won't allow it!”

The ungrateful failure of a Philosopher ignored the dialogue and the violence, scribbling feverishly away at the latest of his designs.

“Your place this, my place that. I'll tell you this, girl: I have a place for this incompetent—a plot of dirt in my garden that's just the right size for him.”

“Stop talking if you don't have anything helpful to say!”

“What else am I to do with my mouth? My cup is empty.”

It was an ugly affair from beginning to end, but the young saint prevailed, running the heart demon through with her spear and collapsing to one knee, fighting hard to maintain her pneumatic scripture while oozing blood from a multitude of wounds.

“I have never been a fighter,” she explained in quick, panting bursts. “My second step into the Sophic Realm was almost the end of me. It was a lesson that I should have learned from the start. I couldn't do this alone—not every time. If I couldn't find a way to bolster the afflicted and bring them into the fight, I would forever be limited by my own personal strength when trying to mend a deviated heart.

“Perhaps it would have been wise to accept that limitation,” she admitted, rising unsteadily to her feet and hoisting the heart demon over her shoulder. “Perhaps the most sensible way forward would have been to focus on my own refinement above all else—to only help those that had no chance of harming me at all, even in their lowest moments.”

“Your father would have preferred it.”

“But that selfishness sickened me,” Selene said sharply, striding over to the battered pillar. “That lack of care was what I couldn’t stand the most. That was how heart demons thought!”

That said, she lashed out with a vicious kick and sent the onyx pillar flying across the stage.

It was that which finally broke the man from his creative trance. His head snapped up from the bench, revealing a mask frozen in an expression of wide-eyed anticipation. The voice that emerged from behind it was shrill and petulant.

“No!” he cried, scrambling up and nearly falling again as the piles of his unfinished work slid out from under his feet. “No, I was almost there! I was finally about to finish! Give it back, just for a moment, just until I’m done!”

“You’ll never be done,” Selene tried to comfort him, sympathetic even now. “Not as you are now. It will be harder than it was before, once I take this away, but it will be better in the end. Once it’s gone, you’ll finally be able to finish what you’ve started. I promise you.”

The man fisted his hands in his hair, yanking and tearing handfuls of it out in frustration.

“Be silent! I want it back, you thieving witch! I changed my mind! Give it back!”

He lunged, and overburdened as she was, his savior could only run.

Watching Selene flee desperately from him, only barely managing to drag the pillar and the heart demon’s corpse out with her, I found myself reconsidering the Tyrant Riot’s suggestion.

“On second thought, the garden is too good for him.”

I wondered what it said that we were of the same mind.

The curtain closed after Selene set down her second stolen pillar, and Griffon once again pawed at the streamers of vapor as they swept past us to obscure the stage.

“Focus,” I ground out.

“Worthless Roman. What does it look like I’m doing?” he replied, pinching at the multicolored mist.

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I shook my head and waited for the second intermission.

When it arrived, Selene was a bit older, and a full head taller. She picked up where the first intermission had left off, speaking frankly about topics that Greeks had only ever played coy about in my past experiences.

“Having seen two ideals and their impact on the hearts of the cultivators that internalized them, you begin to see how it is we shape our cultivation to them, and why it is that we call these columns load-bearing.”

She swept her hand back to the first limestone pillar.

“With this pillar as her base, this cultivator could in theory pursue any path that she desired, and expect steady growth without setbacks—so long as she had the resources needed to sustain that growth.

“You can infer many things about the path a cultivator intends to walk, if you look first to the pillars they’ve chosen to build upon. A well-kept vine can only thrive. This woman feared bottlenecks above all else. She would have happily spent twice as much time and effort on every step of her journey, if it meant she never had to worry about her future advancement. Better to spend five years refining each step and be a Heroine in fifty, rather than soaring to the peak of the Sophic Realm in ten and then hitting a wall—even if only for a moment.

“This cultivator, on the other hand,” she continued, nodding to the onyx column, “despised the mental struggle above all else. He was happy to throw away the work of months—even years—if the alternative was forcing himself to finish a job that he’d lost all interest in.

“There was a unique joy to the pursuit of innovation for him, a mania that all of the greatest Philosophers have been known to possess. The difference between those great thinkers and this man was that he couldn’t bear to separate that joy from the creative process. If the mania wasn’t present, then he wanted nothing to do with the work.

“He didn’t mind leaving a thousand works unfinished, because he was confident enough to bet his heart on the belief that eventually he would find for himself a thought, an idea, a discovery, that sparked joy from beginning to end. Anything less than that was imperfection, anything less than perfection wasn’t nearly good enough.

Selene lifted both palms, encompassing the twin pillars.

“It’s easy to see where they strayed. I believe—though he never admitted it—that Bakkhos led me to these first two pillars for that very reason, as a primer on flawed foundations. Obvious, glaring schisms that I could keep in my own heart as touchstones—references in deviation—for the future, when I inevitably encountered subtler afflictions of the heart.”

“That sounds like work,” the Tyrant Riot said doubtfully. The featureless mask tilted down, peering into the Tyrant’s empty golden cup. “Thirsty work.”

While Selene refilled the Tyrant’s cup, I considered the two columns on stage.

“The vine keeper deviated because she set her sights too high,” I said, thinking out loud. “She laid claim to something she couldn’t afford—something known for its pitfalls, maybe. Some scripture or virtue that rewarded the risk taken to internalize it. Maybe she thought her principle would let her sidestep those risks entirely. Maybe it would have. But she underestimated the raw refining material required, and by the time she realized it, it was too late to stop. She’d already committed.” It seemed right. I had seen that sort of hubris played out countless times, if not in this specific way.

“Am I close?” I asked.

“Very,” Selene said, pleased. “It was a principle she internalized later on that did it. The two fed upon each other in the worst way, and that demon was the result.”

“The second fool was the same,” Griffon guessed, dragging his attention away from the streamers of multicolored mist to briefly engage with the lecture. “Cycling through projects for the rest of his natural life wouldn’t have been enough to crack that pillar, whether he was discontent or not.

“He must have internalized something new, built himself a promise to finish what he started. He tried to hem himself in so that he had no choice but to see it through.” Griffon’s nose wrinkled. “A shackle on his heart in the absence of self-control.”

“I’d like to say that’s a pessimistic view of his intentions,” Selene said with a sigh, shaking her head, “but it’s more right than it is wrong. There’s a reason why the process of choosing a principle is meant to take ten times as long as the actual internalizing of it—at least, according to the Broad.”

Griffon and I shared a confused look. Choosing?

“The principles that we choose to live by as cultivators in the Sophic Realm are more than just pretty little poetries,” Selene explained. “They’re structural, load-bearing. And most importantly, they offer us new methods of refinement, if we choose them wisely and live by their tenants.”

She gestured to the limestone ideal. “Take this one, for example. If this first pillar was yours, Griffon, how might it help you in your pursuit of the heights?”

Griffon considered the limestone column with narrow eyes. I expected a sneer of disgust—perhaps a flippant comment dismissing the hypothetical entirely.

Surprisingly, he had an actual answer.

“It might have saved my cousins some time,” he eventually said.

“Oh?” Selene didn’t have to feign interest. She had been careful not to pry earlier, when Griffon was telling her about his life on Alikos and the family he had there in the context of his virtue, but I could tell she was painfully interested in knowing more about them all.

Griffon nodded thoughtfully. “When all of us were younger, and they still hadn’t found the arts that fit them best, I helped them practice certain skills. Some were obvious mismatches from the very start, but others were almost a good fit. It took them some time to realize they weren’t suited to it, and by that point they were reluctant to let it go. For some reason, my cousins are all very stubborn.”

“Some reason,” I echoed.

Selene’s lips twitched, but she managed to maintain her timeless composure.

“I already had experience with all of the arts they were exploring, naturally,” Griffon continued, ignoring me. “But it’s one thing to understand the cost incurred in personal effort, the time it took me to master a bow, a sword, a spear or a javelin. It’s another thing entirely to have those requirements quantified.”

Now Selene looked very interested. “Meaning?”

Griffon shrugged. “If this pillar can quantify the progression of a skill without any setbacks in the form of material treasures? I might have been a better mentor to them, then, warned them away from the costlier pursuits when they were still in the whimsical stages of their development. Or, if I found a way to fold them into the function of my principle directly, I could have helped them discover their own talents directly.”

I frowned, stubbornly ignoring the rising buzz of vertigo humming around the edges of my soul. Intoxication muddled my thoughts as I followed the convoluted threads of Griffon’s logic.

“You’re taking absurd liberties with that interpretation of it,” I pointed out. “And you skipped over the most obvious use case—evaluating the resource cost of techniques to gauge your own talents first.”

Griffon glanced at me like I was simple.

“I’m talented at everything, Sol.”

I closed my eyes and prayed for patience.

“I like your thought process,” Selene complimented her brother, amused. “And while your interpretation did take things to a very different place than what the cultivator intended, it is often the case that these principles we keep are not entirely set in stone.” She knocked her knuckles against one of the stone columns and winked. “I’ve certainly accomplished things with some of them that their creators would have never thought possible.

“As for the Philosopher’s Passion,” she said, striding over to the onyx pillar, “what say you, Solus? If this principle were yours, how might it guide your refinement?” I eyed the glossy black column, considering.

A wise man rides the wave.

“It might have helped me on campaign,” I decided.

Griffon snorted. “She could have put a pillar for sandaling horses in front of you, and you would have said the same thing.”

Now it was my turn to eye him like he was simple.

“Yes. Obviously.”

“Go on, Solus,” Selene urged, cutting in before Griffon could respond.

I hummed, coming back to it. A wise man rides the wave.

“There are an infinite number of factors that must be considered while on campaign,” I said, thinking back to long, long days and longer nights spent crouching over sand tables, listening to Gaius’ Logisticos rant. “It isn’t a question of considering everything, because no man possibly could. Not even the greatest warmonger comes close. In the end, you account for everything that you can, and you pray that the enemy accounts for less.

“The more an officer knows, or at least knows of, the more they can account for. The more fields they dabble in, the better they can understand the men in their command that have mastery of those fields. In the legions, I didn’t have to be the best equiteon the field to make use of my cavalry. I only had to be a good enough horseman to understand what an expert was capable of.

“A principle that not only allowed for, but incentivized that sort of study?” I nodded, more confident the longer I thought about it. “There was a time where I’d have killed for that kind of edge.”

Griffon scoffed. “And I’m the one taking liberties? That fool couldn’t keep himself on track long enough to add two and two and reach a conclusion. You wouldn’t have enough time to develop anything useful.”

“I’m not some flighty Greek that needs all the labors of his life to be a profoundly enjoyable experience in order to see them through,” I countered.

“No, you’re a Roman, aren’t you?” Griffon smirked. “I suppose that’s why you’d rather outsource your creativity to an incompetent dog’s principle.”

“Let the third act begin,” Selene declared loudly, and darkness swallowed up the stage.

The lesson went on like that, each act in Selene’s performance painting a clearer picture of her path through the Sophic Realm, while the intermissions between acts shed a light on the core tenants of Greek Cultivation that Griffon and I had refined ourselves in ignorance of for so many years.

It was exactly what I had been hoping for, and at the same time, it was… odd. There wasn’t anything I could point to and call out as falsehood. None of it was wrong, as far as I understood things, and Selene gave me no reason to doubt her.

Yet even so, the more I learned of Greek cultivation, the more I felt at odds with it. Maybe that was just the Roman half of my foundation making itself known, but I doubted it.

There was a gap there, between the Broad’s model of refinement and my own lived experiences. A dissonance that I would have to resolve one way or another if I wanted to survive long enough to bring Rome’s lost legions home.

I was still pondering that, as the seventh act approached its violent conclusion, when Griffon nudged my knee with his. I glanced over, irritated, and…

“Where did you get those?” I asked incredulously, staring at the handful of crystalline figs he was offering me. They were radiant to my ichor-honed pneumatic senses, refining treasures worth a small fortune.

It wasn’t the fact that he had them. I knew him well enough and we’d spent enough time apart in Olympia that he could have gotten his hands on just about anything there and it wouldn’t have surprised me. It was the fact that neither of us had cast a shadow from the moment Selene drew us into this place—he had no raven space available with which to pull something from nothing, and yet he’d done it anyway.

Griffon smugly pressed the crystal figs into my hand, and then without looking reached out and plucked a cup of kykeon from a nearby wisp of psychedelic vapor.

He drank languidly from his new cup, nodding at the stage. “Pay attention, now.”

I ate my figs in sullen silence.