By the time I am twelve, I can hold spiritual fire in my palm for four seconds before it disperses.
This sounds unimpressive. The system assures me it is not.
COMPARISON FOR CONTEXT: THE AVERAGE TRAINED PRACTITIONER REQUIRES THREE YEARS OF FORMAL STUDY TO REACH EQUIVALENT STABILITY. YOU HAVE NO FORMAL STUDY. YOU HAVE BEEN WORKING IN A GARDEN AT FOUR IN THE MORNING FOR TWO YEARS. CURRENT ASSESSMENT: YOUR APPROACH IS INEFFICIENT BUT YOUR INSTINCTS ARE STRONG. RECOMMENDATION: AT SOME POINT YOU WILL NEED A TEACHER. PROBLEM: YOUR ABILITY SHOULD NOT EXIST. A TEACHER WILL NOTICE THIS. THE SYSTEM ACKNOWLEDGES THIS IS A DIFFICULT PROBLEM AND DOES NOT CURRENTLY HAVE A SOLUTION.
"Helpful," I say.
The four seconds of stability is real progress, though. In two years I have moved from accidental gathering to deliberate shaping, and the fire I hold now is not just warmth but a small, steady flame that sits in my palm and does what I tell it to. I can't do anything useful with it yet. I can move it from one hand to the other. I can make it brighter or dimmer. I can push it down into a thin line or let it pool wide.
The thing I haven't tried yet is sending it outward. The system has a flag on that: NOT YET. STABILITY FIRST. I have been respecting the flag because the system has been right about everything else and I am not interested in burning down the garden at four in the morning.
The other things that have changed in two years:
My father arranged a marriage negotiation for Hana. She is seventeen now and the negotiation is with House Mun, the third of the four great houses, a branch family rather than the main line. My father thinks this is a reasonable match. Hana has said nothing about it to anyone that I have heard. She sits at dinner with the careful expression she has been wearing since I first woke up in this body, the one that means she is thinking something she has decided is too expensive to say.
I have been watching her for two years. I know the difference between her silence when she agrees and her silence when she is handling something alone. This is the second kind.
I can't help her yet. I am twelve.
But I have been building something.
The thing I've been building looks, from the outside, like studiousness. I am a very good student. Master Hwang, my tutor, tells my father twice a year that my progress is exceptional, and my father looks pleased and slightly uncertain, the way parents sometimes do when a child performs better than expected. I study the court texts, the histories, the legal frameworks. I study them the way I used to study network architecture: looking for the structure underneath, the dependencies, the places where one thing failing would cascade into several things failing.
The Hwangeuk Empire's court structure has a significant dependency problem.
The four great houses are supposed to function as a check on imperial power. The founding documents describe this clearly. The Emperor governs, but major decisions require the formal agreement of at least two of the four houses. This worked, presumably, when the houses were actually independent of each other.
Currently: House Yoon and House Kim are informally aligned. Together they represent fifty percent of the noble council. They have been slowly, carefully, over the past decade, building a position where they can agree with each other and block anything the remaining two houses, Yeon and Mun, want to bring forward. My family, House Yeon, is the weakest. House Mun is stronger but cautious in a way that reads like they're watching to see which way things go before they commit.
The Emperor, in this situation, has three options. He can work around the noble council entirely, which he has been doing. He can break the Yoon-Kim alignment, which requires leverage he may or may not have. Or he can strengthen the weaker houses, Yeon and Mun, to change the balance.
He hasn't done the third option. I have a hypothesis about why: he doesn't trust that Yeon and Mun would remain independent once strengthened. He has no reason to trust them. They haven't given him a reason.
I am twelve years old and I am making a multi-year plan to give him one.
The system approves.
SECONDARY OBJECTIVE PROGRESS: 4%. NOTE: THIS IS BETTER THAN IT SOUNDS. FURTHER NOTE: IT IS ALSO A VERY SLOW START.
"I'm twelve," I say.
THE SYSTEM IS AWARE.
The other thing that happens when I am twelve is that I see the Emperor for the first time.
It is not a meaningful encounter. He does not see me. I am one of approximately three hundred nobility assembled in the great hall for the winter ceremony, which the Emperor does attend, unlike the Spring Festival, because this one involves military commendations and military matters apparently rank high enough to outweigh his distaste for ceremony.
I see him from forty meters away, standing in the position assigned to House Yeon, which is not near the front.
He is taller than I expected. The portraits are accurate in the face: sharp planes, dark eyes, a mouth that is set in the particular way of someone who has decided not to waste it on unnecessary expressions. He moves through the ceremony with the efficiency his reputation describes, completing each required portion and nothing more.
But what I notice, because I am watching with more than regular attention, is the spiritual fire.
It comes off him in steady waves. Not showy, not the concentrated performance I've seen from the occasional practitioner at court events. Just constant, like the heat of a fire that has been burning long enough to be past the dramatic stage and into the deep reliable warmth underneath it. He is, by a significant margin, the most powerful thing in the room.
He is also, I notice, watching the room the same way I am. Not the ceremony. The people. The doors. The positions.
We are both watching the network.
He doesn't see me. I am twelve and I am in the back and I am one of three hundred people. But for the forty minutes of the ceremony I watch him watch the room, and I think: there is a man who is holding something too large alone, and he knows it, and he is not going to ask for help because he has not yet met anyone he trusts enough to ask.
I go home and I practice in the garden until my hands shake.
SIX YEARS REMAINING, the system tells me.
"I know," I say.
The fire in my palm burns steady and gold.