The pane chimed; the new tag slid into place: Dining on Wind & Drinking Dew.
Theodore waited for the punch. Seven-Apertures Heart had arrived like a bell rung in his skull; Copper Skin & Iron Bones had lit his nerves like molten wire. Even the subtler picks—Beast Affinity, Metallurgy & Refining—had left a fingerprint he could feel.
This one? Nothing. Not a shiver, not a spark.
"Buddy," he muttered to the air, "a little feedback?"
For two hours he prodded at it—breathing slow, holding still, opening the window, closing it—until anticlimax pooled in his gut. Maybe Honghuang cultivation tricks just… didn't port to a wand world.
A knock. "Sir Theo?" Flanders' voice, apologetic. "You've not eaten. The kitchen prepared a tray—shall I bring it in?"
"I'm not hun—" Theodore froze. He'd been starving on the owlblade, promised himself a late snack. Now? Flat calm. No gnawing, no thirst.
Every other talent he owned would not do that.
He flicked his gaze to the description again. In the old epics, minor cultivators who "feasted on wind and drank the dew" sipped ambient qi and skipped bread entirely. But this wasn't the saturated, storm-lit sky of Honghuang. Here, ambient magic was thinner; the effect would be a trickle, not a river—enough to blunt hunger, not enough to forge a body of jade and gold.
"Unless," he said slowly, turning to the window, "I go where the wind is."
Why did hermits camp on blessed peaks? Better air, better flow. No Thirty-Three Heavens here—no killing gale to peel a god—but altitude still meant colder, clearer, richer.
"Up we go."
The owlblade knit beneath his boots; Gale took point; the flock rose. "Higher," he said. "As high as you can comfortably hold."
Rooflines shrank. Clouds thickened. Wind went from chatter to hymn—and then he felt it: a threadlike coolness lacing through his skin, a bead of cold water on the tongue. Where it passed, hunger faded, thirst dissolved, and the sand behind his eyes blew away.
"It works," he laughed, breath fogging. "It actually—works."
Not enough. Not yet. He called the air, tilting it with the Windriding gift, drawing a steadier stream across his face and palms. The thread became a skein. The skein became a veil.
It ran into muscle and bone.
Bronze-gold light filmed his skin—there, then not there—like sun through ale. The hardness under it thickened by a fraction, then another.
"So you are qi," he whispered to the chill. "And you're feeding the armour."
It tracked with the oldest myth: before apes learned Divine Arts, they strengthened bodies by swallowing dawn and dusk. Theodore wouldn't kid himself—ten centuries of this in Britain wouldn't equal ten years in the Flooded Age—but he didn't need to out-bench immortals. This was Britain. Copper Skin & Iron Bones + steady drip of sky? That alone would shrug off what most wands could throw.
And then he felt a second current—thin as floss—slide into the blood.
Mana.
His raw pool had always been ordinary; Seven-Apertures Heart made him precise, not deeper. But now, infinitesimally, the floor ticked up. A percent of a percent—measurable only because the pane mirrored his senses—but real.
He grinned into the wind. "You even nudge the core. Good little dew."
On Honghuang's leaderboard, this talent was a side dish—workmanlike, unglamorous, outshone by star-forged physiques and innate Dao hearts. Here? It was perfect. No parchment-bound method yet, no divine sutra—but until he stole or earned one, this was his only legal siphon from sky to self.
Feed the armour. Nudge the mana. Do it every dawn and mist. Compound interest, but for bones.
"And when I add Sun & Moon Essence from the Owlery," he said, picturing Roberts preening in his cage, "the trickle becomes a brook."
He banked the owlblade through a rag of cloud, let the veil of cold pour over him, and laughed again—quiet, breathless, high above the sleeping city—because for the first time since the pane had appeared, he could feel both paths opening in tandem.
Wizardry to use the world. Cultivation to become a piece of it.
"Class can't start soon enough."
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