He tore apart her mind and pieced it back together, decided he didn’t like the order, tore it apart again. He strained her mental capacity just as Irjah did. But Irjah stretched Rin’s mind within known parameters. His assignments simply made Rin more nimble within the spaces she was already familiar with. Jiang forced her mind to expand outward into entirely new dimensions.

He did, in essence, the mental equivalent of making her carry a pig up a mountain.

She obeyed on every count, and wondered what alternative worldview he was trying to make her piece together. She wondered what he was trying to teach her, other than that none of her notions of how the world worked were true.

Meditation was the worst.

Jiang announced in the third month of the term that henceforth Rin would spend an hour each day meditating with him. Rin half hoped he would forget this stipulation, the same way he occasionally forgot what year it was, or what his name was.

But of all the rules Jiang imposed on her, he chose this one to observe faithfully.

“You will sit still for one hour, every morning, in the garden, without exception.”

She did. She hated it.

“Press your tongue against the roof of your mouth. Feel your spine elongate. Feel the spaces between your vertebrae. Wake up!”

Rin inhaled sharply and jerked out of her slump. Jiang’s voice, always so quiet and soothing, had been putting her to sleep.

The spot above her left eyebrow twitched. She fidgeted. Jiang would scold her if she scratched it. She raised her brow as high as it could go instead. The itching intensified.

“Sit still,” Jiang said.

“My back hurts,” Rin complained.

“That’s because you’re not sitting up straight.”

“I think it’s cramped from sparring.”

“I think you’re full of shit.”

Five minutes passed in silence. Rin twisted her back to one side, then the other. Something popped. She winced.

She was painfully bored. She counted her teeth with her tongue. She counted again starting from the opposite direction. She shifted her weight from one butt cheek to the other. She felt an intense urge to get up, move, jump around, anything.

She peeked one eye open and found Master Jiang staring directly back at her.

“Sit. Still.”

She swallowed her protest and obeyed.

Meditation felt like a massive waste of time to Rin, who was used to years of stress and constant studying. It felt wrong to be sitting so still, to have nothing occupying her mind. She could barely stand three minutes of this torture, let alone sixty. She was so terrified of the thought of not thinking that she wasn’t able to accomplish it because she kept thinking about not thinking.

Jiang, on the other hand, could meditate indefinitely. He became like a statue, serene and tranquil. He seemed like air, like he might fade away if she didn’t concentrate enough on him. He seemed like he’d simply left his body behind and gone somewhere else.

A fly settled on her nose. Rin sneezed violently.

“Start the time over,” Jiang said placidly.

“Damn it!”

When spring returned to Sinegard, when the weather was warm enough that Rin could stop bundling up in her thick winter robes, Jiang took her on a hiking trip into the nearby Wudang mountain range. They walked for two hours in silence, until noon, when Jiang chose to stop at a sunny alcove that overlooked the entire valley below.

“The subject of today’s lesson will be plants.” He sat down, pulled off his satchel, and emptied the contents onto the grass. Out spilled an assortment of plants and powders, the severed arm of a cactus, several bright red poppy flowers with pods still attached, and a handful of sun-dried mushrooms.

“Are we getting high?” Rin said. “Oh, wow. We’re getting high, aren’t we?”

“I’m getting high,” said Jiang. “You’re watching.”

He lectured as he crushed the poppy seeds in a small stone bowl with a pestle. “None of these plants are native to Sinegard. These mushrooms were cultivated in the forests of the Hare Province. You won’t find them anywhere else; they do well only in tropical climates. This cactus grows best in the Baghra Desert between our northern border and the Hinterlands. This powder is derived from a bush found only in the rain forests of the southern hemisphere. The bush grows small orange fruit that are tasteless and sticky. But the drug is made from the dried, shredded root of the plant.”

“And possession of all of these in Sinegard is a capital offense,” Rin said, because she felt one of them might as well mention that.

“Ah. The law.” Jiang sniffed at an unidentified leaf and then tossed it away. “So inconvenient. So irrelevant.” He looked suddenly at her. “Why does Nikan frown upon drug use?”

He did this often: hurled questions at her that she hadn’t prepared answers to. If she spoke too quickly or made a hasty generalization, he challenged it, backed her up into an argumentative corner until she spelled out exactly what she meant and justified it rigorously.

Rin had enough practice by now to reason carefully before uttering a response. “Because use of psychedelics is associated with blown minds, wasted potential, and social chaos. Because drug addicts can give very little to society. Because it is an ongoing plague on our country left by the dear Federation.”

Jiang nodded slowly. “Well put. Do you agree?”

Rin shrugged. She had seen enough of the opium dens of Tikany to know the effects of addiction. She understood why the laws were so harsh. “I agree now,” she said carefully. “But I suppose I’ll change my mind after you’ve had your say.”

Jiang’s mouth quirked into a lopsided grin. “It is the nature of all things to have a dual purpose,” he said. “You’ve seen what poppy does to the common man. And given what you know of addiction, your conclusions are reasonable. Opium makes wise men stupid. It destroys local economies and weakens entire countries.”

He weighed another handful of poppy seeds in his palm. “But something so destructive inherently and simultaneously has marvelous potential. The poppy flower, more than anything, displays the duality of hallucinogens. You know poppy by three names. In its most common form, as opium nuggets smoked from a pipe, poppy makes you useless. It numbs you and closes you off to the world. Then there is the madly addictive heroin, which is extracted as a powder from the sap of the flower. But the seeds? These seeds are a shaman’s dream. These seeds, used with the proper mental preparation, give you access to the entire universe contained within your mind.”

He put the poppy seeds down and gestured to the array of psychedelics before him. “Shamans across continents have used plants to alter their states of consciousness for centuries. The medicine men of the Hinterlands used this flower to fly upward like an arrow to enter into communion with the gods. This one will put you into a trance where you might enter the Pantheon.”

Rin’s eyes widened. Here it was. Slowly the lines began to connect. She was finally beginning to understand the purpose of the last six months of research and meditation. So far she had been pursuing two separate lines of inquiry—the shamans and their abilities; the gods and the nature of the universe.

Now, with the introduction of psychedelic plants, Jiang drew these threads into one unified theory, a theory of spiritual connection through psychedelics to the dream world where the gods might reside.