The office of the Imperial Lux Library was a vast, marble-fronted building, with a sprawling eastern and western wing. The center building was three stories high, the two wings a mere two stories each. Seven columns held up the wide portico in the front, each in a different color. The characters over the door proclaimed this library had been created in the two hundred and twenty-seventh year of the Emperor's reign.

  Chang-li entered and consulted the directory on the wall. The East Wing contained libraries for cultivators at or striving for the Peak of Physical Refinement. The West Wing held the Mental Refinement libraries on the first floor, Spiritual Refinement on the second, and the higher-tier offices were above the main building; though rumors indicated more libraries were underground.

  Signs directed him to the front half of the lobby if he were filing records with the clerks, and the back half if he wished to enter the library for research or training, but had a small line of characters on the right-hand side that read high tier cultivators must make arrangements through their sects.

  A long counter down the middle offered help to anyone who was still confused by that. He approached one of the clerks, who didn’t have anyone already there. The man looked down on him with a superior sneer. "Do you need help reading the options?"

  "No," Chang-li retorted, annoyed despite himself. "I have a scheduled training."

  "Then enquire with whoever the first available agent is."

  "Yes, but it’s a high-tier training," Chang-li said.

  “The sign says to inquire of the first available agent,” the man replied.

  “Yes, but it’s scheduled —”

  “Ask the attendant.” The attendant clearly dismissed him. Chang-li considered demanding the man actually listened, but he had always hated it when someone came to him and threw their weight around merely to avoid following proper procedure. He got in one of the lines. It was only ten or so cultivators long. The library had opened for the day about an hour ago, the first rush passing through and not time enough for a second to build up.

  "I have an appointment for tutoring this morning," Chang-li told the clerk when he reached the front.

  It was fascinating to Chang-li, how the capital, to him the most exotic city he'd ever visited, with something new to look at on every corner, and knowledge of cultivation and sects that were incredible to him, seemed to bore all of its residents. He had met lazy scribes aplenty in his time behind a desk. Efficient scribes. Careless scribes. Distracted scribes. But rarely truly bored scribes. This woman, however, was clearly barely even paying attention to her surroundings. She stiffled a yawn and flicked her eyes over his proffered license, opened to the page where the Emperor's permission for him to train with Lumos had been granted, then back to her registry book.

  "I only schedule for the first three ranks of cultivation,” she said, her eyes already shifting toward the man behind him in line. "Make an appointment. They're running about three weeks out right now."

  Chang-li didn't budge. "I said I already have an appointment."

  "No Wu Chang-li or Morning Mist in my book here," she said. "Next."

  Chang-li put his hands on the desk and leaned forward. “You said you only schedule the first few ranks. I'm asking you about an appointment to learn to crack Lumos."

  The woman paused. She looked down at his license for a second time. "Oh. Wrong line. You want the senior-tier tutoring."

  Chang-li tried very hard to keep his temper, keenly aware of just how much lux was circulating in his core. He could squash her faster than she could react, which is exactly why he wasn't going to let his temper get the better of him. These people here were all much weaker than he was, and he would not bully them without cause.

  "That's what I said when I first arrived," he said. "But I was told I had to go through your line."

  "Who told you that?" the woman asked. "Was it Mah Lin? It was, wasn't it? He knows that you won't count against my quota. He’s just trying to take up more time." She sighed, then fished out a wooden token, which she handed him. "Upstairs and to the right."

  Chang-li seized the token and followed her instructions, leaving behind a crowded room full of hopeful-looking cultivators. Most of them were significantly older than he was and eyed him with some amount of envy as he set off toward the spiraling golden stair in the back corner.

  There were men in their fifties who had only reached the Peak of Bodily Refinement, women in their late thirties working on the Peak of Spiritual Refinement, and everything in between. The general aura of the place was one of casual despair.

  It was easy to tell their ranking even without looking at licenses or using his will on them, because the fashion in the capital was for cultivators to wear symbols of their rank in the form of pins and brooches on their robes.

  A cultivator who had reached the Peak of Bodily Refinement would sport an iron badge. One who had reached Mental Refinement replaced their sect logo with bronze. A cultivator who had achieved the Peak of Mental Refinement wore silver inlaid with colored lacquer. It had taken Chang-li some time to work out that the lacquer color was a nod to that cultivator’s spouse’s rank in the Gem Courts. After all, it would be exceptionally rare for anyone to reach the Peak of Spiritual Refinement without having married one of the Emperor’s descendants.

  He had asked Noren whether they should follow the custom, and Noren had dismissed it. "Better to let them guess just how strong we are," he had said cheerfully. "Besides, I intend for our students to continue to climb the ranks so fast, it would be a waste of money for them to have badges made to celebrate any particular rank."

  Chang-li spotted one cultivator with a gold badge and guessed that symbolized Lux Endowment. He kept his eyes open for the robes of any sect he recognized, but so far the capital had been a riot of colors and patterns, none familiar.

  As Chang-li climbed the stairs, he reflected that the Empire’s bureaucracy might work, but it certainly was frustrating to navigate. As he’d found before, once he reached the second floor, everything changed.

  Here, the attendants greeted him respectfully, asking his name and purpose before hurriedly confirming his appointment in their book. "I see you were scheduled to begin five minutes ago," the woman helping Chang-li said.

  "Yes, I’m sorry. I was detained downstairs."

  "Not at all," she said. "Our apologies for the failure of our junior to tend to your needs. I will make a note here that you may run slightly over your scheduled time and for no one to interrupt you."

  "Thank you," Chang-li said, and smiled.

  The woman smiled back, pressing her hands together and bowing. "Is there anything else I can do for you, Cultivator Wu?"

  "Yes. I expect I’ll be coming back for more lessons. Is there a way for me to avoid that rigmarole downstairs?"

  "Of course. May I see your license?" Chang-li presented it. The woman found a stamp and pressed it to the page, declaring Chang-li was permitted to study the art of cracking Lumos. "Show that to the stair attendants, and they’ll know you are a registered student up here and allow you past."

  "Thanks," Chang-li said.”

  "Just one moment. I need to check which of our chambers has been retrofitted."

  "What’s that?" Chang-li inquired.

  "Oh, nothing serious. We received a directive a day or two ago that the scripts which protect our Lux shades needed to be upgraded and tendered. Maintenance cycle was a little early, but it happens."

  A quick note of alarm rang in Chang-li’s mind. He had spoken to a Lux shade about the scripts containing him just a few days ago. Surely it wasn’t related.

  "Room twelve," the woman said after a moment. "I will see that the correct shade is summoned."

  Chang-li thanked her again and passed through the door marked twelve. He found himself in a small, round chamber, the walls painted white, with an extremely high local lux density. The lobby outside hadn’t been this dense, so the lux concentrators must be localized to this room.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  He wondered if they could be adjusted for the correct lux and density on a room-by-room basis.

  A moment later, a shade appeared in the room, blinking into existence in the middle. She turned.

  To Chang-li's surprise, the shade appeared to be a young woman, not much older than himself. Long dark tresses cascaded down her back. She was faintly translucent, but not the misty insubstantiality of most lux ghosts he had met.

  He bowed low. "Greetings. I am Wu Chang-li, cultivator of the Morning Mist Sect."

  The woman looked him over. "I am Su Nian, late of the Shadow Dancers Sect. I take it you are here to learn the secrets of lux from me?" She sounded bored.

  "I am."

  She sighed. "When I agreed to spend part of my eternity here in the Imperial Library, I thought perhaps someone would want to consult me for my knowledge of how to combine blue and indigo Lux to construct dreams with real substance. Or that perhaps they would want to know how I managed to defeat the three epic heroes of Morolavia. Or perhaps even my prize-winning flower arrangement techniques. But no," she scowled. "It’s always ‘Nian, how do I crack Lumos?’"

  Chang-li cast about for the right thing to say. "I’ve never heard of the three epic heroes of Morolavia.”

  She let out an audible harrumph. “My point exactly. Before we begin, let me confirm that you have achieved the prerequisites," Su Nian said. “Sit down and I will inspect you."

  Chang-li sat on the floor in a comfortable cycling position but refrained from letting any of his lux move while the shade circled him. She made a clicking sound.

  "You have mastered differentiating all shades of lux, then?"

  That seemed an odd way to put it, but Chang-li nodded. "I've reached Lux Endowment, yes."

  "And you have remade your body with the help of lux." The shade came back to in front of him and scowled down at him. "I dislike these modern terms. Lux Endowment, Lux Embodiment, acting as though one was the necessary and inevitable step from the previous."

  Chang-li wasn't sure he completely understood her implications. "You mean they're not?" He thought about it. He would never have been able to remake his body if he hadn't fully mastered command of lux prior to that. "I don't see how you could reach Lux Embodiment without Lux Endowment."

  The shade slapped him upside the head. Her fingers passed right through his face with a cool tingling sensation, but Chang-li jerked his head around anyway. "I am wasting my time attempting to educate an idiot," she snapped. "Do you truly think that in the thousands of years of history, the millions of cultivators have only found a single way to climb?"

  Chang-li frowned. "I suppose it’s possible."

  "It's more than possible," she snapped. "It's obvious to anyone with a lick of sense. But no matter. I can tell that you truly are young. It's not just your remade body. Your core also bears the marks of youth. That tells me that you actually may benefit from my tutelage. The average cultivator takes far too long to reach this stage and is never able to master the art of cracking Lumos to its full potential."

  Chang-li's whole body came alert at that. She was suggesting that not only could he learn to crack Lumos, but use it better than most other of the rarefied cultivators who managed the feat. He bowed his body, upper torso, till it was nearly parallel with the floor. "I am ready to learn, Teacher.”

  "Sit up straight," she commanded. "We have a great deal to do here. First of all, as I have already ascertained, you have mastered all the variations of lux. You have learned each of its shades and subshades and come to understand the relationship between them and the basic forces that make up our world. Yes?”

  "I have," Chang-li said, and at her continued glare, he cleared his throat. "Red lux to change physical, orange for weapons, yellow for the elements. Green ties together the spiritual and the physical luxes, and maintains a connection to life itself, since life is the place where physical and spiritual intertwine. Blue touches the mind. Indigo allows you to manipulate space and violet to influence time itself."

  "Fascinating," she said. "You speak as though you memorized that from an basic technique manual."

  He blushed, because that was almost entirely the truth. He'd read those definitions in one of the old Morning Mist manuals, and it had stuck with him.

  "So, if you were attempting a technique to reinforce a wall, shall we say, what would you use?"

  "Red," he said promptly.

  "If you were wanting to sharpen an arrowhead?"

  "Orange."

  "And if you wished to heal a wound?"

  "Green. Or I've seen it done with blue."

  He was confident in his answers. She pounced like a cat onto a trapped mouse. "Why? Those are the right luxes to use, but why?" she demanded. "Why is orange what you use to sharpen an arrowhead? Shouldn't you use red? Isn’t it a physical thing? You're strengthening the wall with red after all."

  He saw now the trap and pondered. "I'm not certain," he confessed, "but I've seen examples of both in technique manuals.”

  "What would happen if you used orange to strengthen that wall?"

  He frowned. "I am not sure."

  "I'll tell you what would happen," she said. "It would do you absolutely no good whatsoever. But if I were to try, it would answer me."

  "Why is that?"

  "Because I understand that lux and Intent must be joined together in order to achieve any weave. The first thing that I want you to discard is the idea that the color of lux in any way reflects a sacred truth about the universe. It doesn't. Lux conveniently breaks down into the seven colors. We have found the easiest and best way to use each, and then taught that to people as though it were the only way to build a weave. What of Lumos?"

  "It's the substance which makes up the entirety of the universe," Chang-li said promptly. "It can be broken down into the seven colors of lux. Towers break it, and so can high-level cultivators."

  “That doesn't tell me what it is."

  "Because I don't know," Chang-li said in exasperation, staring up at the ghost.

  The woman smiled. "Good answer. Stand up. I am going to let you touch Lumos."

  Chang-li rose hurriedly. The woman held her two hands about a foot apart. "Do not try this technique yourself," she told him. "Even reinforced and remade with lux, your body still has entirely too much physicality for this particular technique. You would be torn apart. Ask me how I know."

  "How do you know?" he said.

  She looked surprised, and he realized after a moment that she meant her question to be rhetorical.

  "Because I thought I could handle it, and I couldn’t, and that's why I'm standing here in front of you now," she snapped. "But the theory is sound. The seven colors are split from Lumos. If you can purify them and introduce them back in exactly the right ratios, you can create Lumos from lux."

  The three physical colors of lux sprang from her left hand, the three spiritual colors from her right hand. A beam of green streamed directly from her core outward. The colors intersected in the space between her hands. Chang-li’s eyes dazzled at the brilliant light emitted where the three intersected. It was pure white, intense. He could feel the spiritual pressure from here as the woman held the technique. This was a more direct use of lux than he remembered from his previous experience with shades.

  "Use only green lux here. Spread out as thin as you can and surround this," she instructed.

  Chang-li did as she told him, folding the tiny spark of Lumos between her hands into a green shell. He could feel it there, pulsing, eating away at his green lux, and continued to push more into the shell as he studied it.

  "This is Lumos," the woman said. "It is the substance which the universe is made from. That much is absolutely true. Almost everything else we say about it is conjecture and thought experiments. But we have learned how to harness it. Now, you've got a Lens incorporated into your body. Pull that into your Lens."

  Chang-li was a little nervous, taking instruction from a shade who admitted she had died from her own experimentations with Lumos, but he wanted to know if this would work, so he did as she told him. He had to focus hard with his will to bring the ball of Lumos to his Lens rather than his core, which every instinct told him was the right course. When he had, he felt like he'd had a particularly spicy lunch.

  The ghost stared at his chest. "You've done a little better than I expected," she admitted. "But don't get too excited just yet. You're a very long way from touching Lumos on your own or from cracking it. Right now, I want you to cycle while holding that Lumos in your Lens."

  Chang-li followed her instructions. It felt to him like he was trying to cycle while running uphill with boulders strapped to his back. Sweat dripped down his forehead as he pushed lux around, from his core, through his channels, out and back in. He was using Breath of the Heavens, which is usually as easy for him as getting out of bed in the morning. Today it took all his concentration. The Lens, with its drop of Lumos, was disrupting his cycling, he realized. It pulled at one color, pushed at another, throwing his rhythm all off.

  Chang-li pulled his lux back to his core and then began channeling only green lux. This was a little easier. It answered him, and though the Lens did interfere, the interference became predictable, spiking just as he attempted to draw the lux back into his core, pushing away as he tried to let it out.

  "Interesting technique," the woman observed. "But you have remarkably hesitant cycling for a cultivator at your stage of advancement. What is your Intent?"

  He hesitated. Revealing his intent to anyone felt wrong, but this was an Imperial tutor.

  "I master," he said.

  The woman blinked at him. "You have an intent that audacious and a cycling pattern so restrained? What is wrong with you?" She shook her head. "Never mind. That's going to be as much as you can do today. Hold still."

  She leaned forward and stabbed her hand through his chest. He gasped at the faint sensation. She pulled back, clutching the mote of Lumos in her hand, then let it dissolve into nothing.

  "That's better," she told him. "You may schedule another appointment with the clerks. In the meantime, you need to focus on your cycling. You have clearly not been practicing your basics enough. Work on your sect path and stop in the library and get a copy of the Cyclone Cycling pattern. Practice with that at least four hours a day until the next time you come back."

  "Four hours?" Chang-li asked before he could help himself. He thought of all of his other tasks.

  "You have something better to do?"

  "Better, no," he began. "Just a great deal more.”

  "None of which matters nearly as much," the woman frowned. "What sort of other tasks?"

  "Well, I have to organize our sect licensing records. I'm getting our junior cultivators past their progression exams, and there's the—“

  She cut him off. "Would you say that your own progression is the most important to you?"

  "Of course," he said at once.

  "Then your own progression must be the only thing. Make it six hours a day, and do not return until you have mastered the pattern. Farewell."

  She vanished.

  Chang-li called out in protest, but it did no good.

  He stopped at the library restricted to Lux Embodiment cultivators and requested a copy of the pattern she had given. After some time, the librarian returned and said they didn’t have a copy of any such pattern and to try the Lux Endowment Library, where they said the same thing.

  He worried that perhaps the pattern was restricted to the Lux Dominators and stopped by the single desk where a very senior clerk sat. He inquired. The clerk went to check, shuffling out after a long time carrying a scroll.

  "It is, in fact, in our library," the old man wheezed. "But I can see from its tags that it is not restricted to those who have achieved the Lux Dominator rank. In fact, it is marked as permissible for anyone who has truly mastered their Intent to work with. It's not a popular technique, though. You may keep this until you have made your own copy."

  Chang-li thanked the man and took the small yellowing scroll with him.