A few years passed.
Katarina was now nine years old and could circulate qi through her primary meridian without passing out, which Brynn treated like a national holiday and Katarina treated like meeting a quarterly benchmark.
The training had changed over the years.
No more invisible chairs and sad little punches, oh no.
Brynn had moved her onto real cultivation exercises: directing qi from core to limbs, holding it in specific meridian junctions, and cycling it back through the body in a continuous loop. It was like running a pump system through a network of pipes, except the pipes were inside her and the pump was her willpower and if she lost focus the whole thing collapsed and she got a headache that lasted for hours.
Anyway, she was decent at it.
Her qi reserves were average for her age, her circulation speed was slightly above average thanks to the breathing control she'd built early, and her physical reinforcement was still garbage because her body, while no longer the size of a large cat, was still the body of a nine-year-old girl who weighed about as much as a sack of flour.
[Status.]
The window opened. She'd gotten used to calling it up by now, the way she'd gotten used to the Ledger. Just another tool in the kit.
[THE SOVEREIGN LEDGER]
Signora-Designate: Katarina Montecardi
Sovereign Qi: 12/???
[Attributes]
Analysis: 9/10
Negotiation: 8/10
Leadership: 7/10
Intimidation: 3/10 (Age penalty)
Charm: 4/10 (Age penalty)
Physical Ability: 2/10 (Age penalty)
[Physical Ability: TWO. I've been training for five years and I went from a one to a TWO.]
Intimidation and Charm had at least crept up a point each. Leadership was holding at seven, which she attributed to the fact that three members of the estate staff now came to her with questions before going to Seris, though they'd never admit it and neither would she.
She scrolled down to the House overview.
[House Montecardi]
License: Active Revenue: D+
Trade Routes: 1
Alliances: 0
Reputation: D
[D-plus on revenue. One active trade route. And our reputation crawled up from an F to a D, which means people in the district have gone from laughing at us to politely ignoring us. Progress.]
She closed the window before the Physical Ability score could annoy her further.
There was another thing she'd noticed, and it was stupid, but she'd noticed it.
She'd caught her reflection in the training yard water basin that morning and the face looking back wasn't quite as cute anymore. Not in the round, squishy, pinch-my-cheeks way that had been her primary tactical asset for five years. Her face was losing the baby fat, her cheekbones were sharpening, and her jawline was coming in.
She looked like a kid now, not a toddler, and kids didn't get carried around and cooed over and forgiven for being in rooms they shouldn't be in.
[... My cute card is expiring and I don't have a replacement strategy yet.]
"Focus, dumpling! You're leaking qi from your left shoulder again."
Katarina pulled her attention back. The qi was leaking from her left shoulder, which was a recurring problem. The meridian junction there was narrow, or at least it felt narrow, and every time she tried to push qi through it at full circulation speed it spilled out like water from a cracked pipe.
She adjusted. Slowed the flow, widened her focus, and guided the qi through the junction with more care. The leak stopped. The circuit held.
"Better," Brynn said. She was sitting cross-legged across from Katarina with her eyes half-closed, tracking Katarina's qi with her own senses the way a mechanic listens to an engine. "You think too much, though. You're trying to steer it. Let it flow."
[Letting things flow is not in my skill set. Letting things flow is the opposite of my skill set. My skill set is micromanagement.]
"You know," Brynn said, stretching her arms over her head with a crack that sounded like someone stepping on a branch, "you remind me of Marga."
"Who's Marga?"
"Woman I ran with on the frontier. Before your mother, before all this." She waved a hand at the estate. "Meanest cultivator I ever met. Five foot nothing and she could crack a formation array with her bare hands. We didn't have tutors or training manuals. Just us and whatever we figured out between jobs."
[Frontier mercenary cultivation. No structure, no methodology, pure improvisation. That explains a lot about Brynn's teaching style, honestly.]
"Marga used to say cultivation is like sex. You can read about it all you want, but you won't get anywhere until you stop thinking and just do it."
The words left Brynn's mouth with the casual ease of a woman who had forgotten her audience was nine.
Katarina looked at her...
... and held back a smirk.
"Mother, what's sex?"
The color drained from Brynn's face so fast it was visible even through her red skin. Her yellow eyes went wide and her mouth opened and closed twice without producing sound. Kat tried to look as curious and innocent as she possibly could.
"It's, uh. Well! That's a. You see, when two people, or, well, sometimes more than two people, but that's, that's not the point, the point is—"
Katarina tried her hardest not to laugh and asked:
"Is it like wrestling?"
"NO. I mean. Well. In a sense. Seris? SERIS!"
Seris was not available. Seris was in her study, reviewing contracts, doing the job that Katarina had spent four years tricking her into learning how to do.
"It's when two grownups like each other very much and they... express that. Physically."
"Like hugging?"
"Sure! Like hugging! Very intense hugging! With. Uh... Parts. Can we go back to the qi exercises?"
[Ah, sweet mother of mine, I know exactly what sex is. I mean, even if I hadn't reincarnated, it would be hard not to know when I have heard you and Mama doing it approximately two hundred times through walls that you both refuse to soundproof. Still, watching you try to explain it might be the single greatest return on investment I've ever gotten from a conversation.]
"Okay, Mother."
Brynn exhaled like she'd just survived a life-or-death scenario.
Meanwhile, Katarina circulated qi through her left shoulder junction without a single leak.
Marga might have been onto something.
---
The study was different at night.
During the day, Seris's desk was a command center. Papers stacked, wine at hand, Seris performing the role of Signora with increasing competence and only occasional wine stains.
At night, with a single lamp burning and the canyon wind pushing through the open window, it was just a desk in a quiet room.
Katarina sat in the chair beside it. She could reach it without climbing now, which still felt like a personal victory every time.
Seris had the household ledgers open between them.
This had become their routine over the past year, once or twice a week, after dinner. Seris would go through the numbers and Katarina would sit beside her and listen, and sometimes Katarina would point at something and ask a question that wasn't really a question, and Seris would pause and think and occasionally change something.
It wasn't shadow consulting anymore. It was closer to a partnership, even if Seris didn't fully realize that's what it was. She'd just gotten used to having Katarina there the way you get used to a second pair of eyes on a document. You don't question it. You just start leaving space for it.
Tonight they were going through a supply contract for grain.
One of the newer ones, picked up after the Torvano termination to diversify their food sourcing. The terms were fine and the pricing was competitive, but the delivery schedule had a gap in it. A two-week window every quarter where no shipments arrived, which meant the estate had to buy from the port market at a markup to cover the shortfall.
"Here," Katarina said, pointing at the delivery dates. "There's a hole."
Seris leaned over and looked. Her brow creased.
"Every third month. We go two weeks without a delivery."
"And during those two weeks, Ottavia buys from the port market."
"At port prices. Which are..."
"Higher."
Seris exhaled through her nose. She picked up a quill, made a note in the margin, and then put the quill down.
Then she put the ledger down.
She leaned back in her chair and looked at the ceiling. Her arm came around Katarina's shoulders, half a hug, absentminded, like she'd done it without deciding to.
"You know," Seris said, "my life used to be so different."
Her voice was quiet and a little confused.
"Really?"
She didn't look at Kat. Instead, she sighed and said:
"I could level mountains. I could challenge the heavens themselves."
She said it the way someone else might say "I used to run marathons" or "I was pretty good at piano when I was young." A fact about a different person who happened to share her name.
Kat's eyes widened.
[What the...?]
"And now I'm sitting here trying to figure out why our grain deliveries have a two-week gap." She let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "I guess one never truly knows where they're going to end up."
Katarina didn't say anything.
Instead, she sat under the weight of her mother's arm and gazed up at her, wondering how much of that was an exaggeration.
Level mountains. Challenge the heavens.
[... That didn't sound like a metaphor.]
Seris then looked down at her. Whatever had been in her face a moment ago was gone, replaced by the warm, slightly wine-buzzed look of a mother who had remembered her daughter was in the room. She kissed the top of Katarina's head.
"Sorry. Ignore me. I get weird after nine o'clock."
"Okay... Can I see the grain contract again?"
Seris laughed and handed it to her, and they went back to the numbers. The moment passed the way all of Seris's moments passed, quick and quiet and sealed behind a smile.
Katarina pretended to read the contract. She was thinking about mountains.
[... Come to think of it, I still don't truly know my parents, do I?]