Elder Shou called him to the office in late spring. He was thinner than he had been in year one — the erosion was visible now in a way that could no longer be called age and had to be called something else.
He sat in his chair and Kai sat across from him and the formation hummed at full output and the afternoon sun came through the window and it was a very ordinary room containing something that had been building for four years toward this specific conversation.
"I've been reviewing my notes," Elder Shou said. "The sessions over three years. The progression." He looked at Kai. "You are significantly beyond what I can teach you."
"You've taught me everything I have a foundation for," Kai said.
"The foundation, yes. The rest of the structure—" he made a gesture that acknowledged the magnitude of the rest of the structure without trying to quantify it "—is going to require resources and teaching that this sect cannot provide. Even at third rank inner disciple."
"I know."
"I want to give you something before you leave," Elder Shou said. He reached into his desk and produced a letter — formal, sealed with his personal cultivation mark. "A recommendation. For the Ascending Cloud Academy, in the central cultivation territories. They specialize in non-standard cultivation paths. They have the theoretical resources for what you're working on." He paused. "They also have an archive that makes ours look like a village library."
Kai looked at the letter. "You've been planning this."
"For a year," Elder Shou said. "I've been planning for the moment when I wouldn't be able to provide what you need and would need to have the next thing ready." He looked at his hands — the slight tremor that had been there since year two, steady now, not worsening, just present. "This is that moment."
Kai took the letter. He held it carefully.
"The sessions," Elder Shou said. "Three years of them. I want you to know—" he stopped. He was a precise man who found emotion inconvenient in formal contexts. He was in a formal context and was proceeding anyway. "I want you to know that I don't regret them. The cost to my cultivation — I've been calculating it for three years, and the calculation keeps coming out the same. Whatever it cost was appropriate to what I received. Which was the most interesting three years of teaching in forty years of practice." He paused. "And the specific satisfaction of knowing that the person the sage was talking about, all those years ago — that person has a foundation now that they didn't have when they arrived."
Kai looked at him. He thought about what he wanted to say and found, again, that the two syllables were insufficient and everything else was too large.
"I'll finish what you started," he said. "On the meridian architecture. The void-form development. I'll—" he stopped. "When I understand it fully. I'll write it properly. I'll attribute the theoretical foundation."
"There's no need—"
"There's every need," Kai said. "You spent three years of your cultivation life on this. It belongs in the record with your name on it."
Elder Shou looked at him for a moment. Then he nodded, once, with the specific brevity of someone accepting something they had not expected to be offered.
"Go cultivate," he said.