She swallowed her skepticism, took a leap of faith, and chose to follow his instructions, hoping that enlightenment might be on the other side. Yet she did not leap blindly, because she knew what was at the other end. Daily, she saw the proof of enlightenment before her.
Because Jiang did things that no human should be able to do.
The first time, he made the leaves at his feet spin without moving a muscle.
She thought it was a trick of the wind.
And then he did it again, and then a third time, just to prove he had utter control over it.
“Shit,” she said, and then repeated, “Shit. Shit. Shit. How. How?”
“Easily,” he said.
She gaped at him. “This is—this isn’t martial arts, it’s . . .”
“It’s what?” he pressed.
“It’s supernatural.”
He looked smug. “Supernatural is a word for anything that doesn’t fit your present understanding of the world. I need you to suspend your disbelief. I need you to simply accept that these things are possible.”
“I’m supposed to take it as true that you’re a god?”
“Don’t be silly. I am not a god,” he said. “I am a mortal who has woken up, and there is power in awareness.”
He made the wind howl at his command. He made trees rustle by pointing at them. He made water ripple without touching it, and could cause shadows to twist and screech with a whispered word.
She realized that Jiang showed her these things because she would not have believed them if he’d merely told her they were possible. He was building up a background of possibilities for her, a web of new concepts. How did you explain to a child the idea of gravity, until they knew what it meant to fall?
Some truths could be learned through memorization, like history textbooks or grammar lessons. Some had to be ingrained slowly, had to become true because they were an inevitable part of the pattern of all things.
Power dictates acceptability, Kitay had once told her. Did the same apply to the fabric of the natural world?
Jiang reconfigured Rin’s perception of what was real. Through demonstrations of impossible acts, he recalibrated the way she approached the material universe.
It was easier because she was so willing to believe. She fit these challenges to her conceptions of reality into her mind without too much trauma from adjustment. The traumatic event had already occurred. She had felt herself consumed by fire. She had known what it meant to burn. She hadn’t imagined it. It had happened.
She learned to resist denying what Jiang showed her because it didn’t square with her previous notions of how things worked. She learned to stop being shocked.
Her experience during the Tournament had torn a great, jagged hole through her understanding of the world, and she waited for Jiang to fill it in for her.
Sometimes, if she bordered on asking the right question, he sent her to the library to find the answer herself.
When she asked him where Lore had been practiced before, he sent her on a wild goose chase after all that was odd and cryptic. He made her read texts on the ancient dream walkers of the southern islands and their plant spirit healing practices. He made her write detailed reports about village shamans of the Hinterlands to the north, about how they fell into trances and journeyed as spirits in the bodies of eagles. He had her pore over decades of testimony from southern Nikara villagers who claimed to be clairvoyant.
“How would you describe all of these people?” he inquired.
“Oddities. People with abilities, or people who were pretending to have abilities.” Other than that, Rin saw no way that these groups of people were linked. “How would you describe them?”
“I would call them shamans,” he said. “Those who commune with the gods.”
When she asked him what he meant by the gods, he made her study religion. Not just Nikara religion—all religions of the world, every religion that had been practiced since the dawn of time.
“What does anyone mean by gods?” he asked. “Why do we have gods? What purpose does a god serve in a society? Vex these issues. Find these answers for me.”
In a week, she produced what she thought was a brilliant report on the difference between Nikara and Hesperian religious traditions. She proudly recounted her conclusions to Jiang in the Lore garden.
The Hesperians had only one church. They believed in one divine entity: a Holy Maker, separate from and above all mortal affairs, wrought in the image of a man. Rin argued that this god, this Maker, was a means by which Hesperia’s government maintained order. The priests of the Order of the Holy Maker held no political office but exerted more cultural control than the Hesperian central government did. Since Hesperia was a large country without warlords who had absolute power over each of its states, rule of law had to be enforced by propagation of the myth of moral codes.
The Empire, in contrast, was a country of what Rin labeled superstitious atheists. Of course, Nikan had its gods in abundance. But like the Fangs, the majority of Nikara were religious only when it suited them. The Empire’s wandering monks constituted a small minority of the population, mere curators of the past, rather than part of any institution with real power.
Gods in Nikan were the heroes of myths, tokens of culture, icons to be acknowledged during important life events like weddings, births, or deaths. They were personifications of emotions that the Nikara themselves felt. But no one actually believed that you would have bad luck for the rest of the year if you forgot to light incense to the Azure Dragon. No one really thought that you could keep your loved ones safe by praying to the Great Tortoise.
The Nikara practiced these rituals regardless, went through the motions because there was comfort in doing so, because it was a way for them to express their anxieties about the ebbs and flows of their fortunes.
“And so religion is merely a social construct in both the east and west,” Rin concluded. “The difference lies in its utility.”
Jiang had been listening attentively throughout her presentation. When she finished, he blew air out of his cheeks like a child and rubbed at his temples. “So you think Nikara religion is simply superstition?”
“Nikara religion is too haphazard to hold any degree of truth,” Rin said. “You have the four cardinal gods—the Dragon, the Tiger, the Tortoise, and the Phoenix. Then you have local household gods, village guardian gods, animal gods, gods of rivers, gods of mountains . . .” She counted them off on her fingers. “How could all of them exist in the same space? How could the spiritual realm be, with all these gods vying for dominance? The best explanation is that when we say ‘god’ in Nikan, we mean a story. Nothing more.”
“So you have no faith in the gods?” Jiang asked.
“I believe in the gods as much as the next Nikara does,” she replied. “I believe in gods as a cultural reference. As metaphors. As things we refer to keep us safe because we can’t do anything else, as manifestations of our neuroses. But not as things that I truly trust are real. Not as things that hold actual consequence for the universe.”
She said this with a straight face, but she was exaggerating.
Because she knew that something was real. She knew that on some level, there was more to the cosmos than what she encountered in the material world. She was not truly such a skeptic as she pretended to be.
But the best way to get Jiang to explain anything was by taking radical positions, because when she argued from the extremes, he made his best arguments in response.
He hadn’t yet taken the bait, so she continued: “If there is a divine creator, some ultimate moral authority, then why do bad things happen to good people? And why would this deity create people at all, since people are such imperfect beings?”
“But if nothing is divine, why do we ascribe godlike status to mythological figures?” Jiang countered. “Why bow to the Great Tortoise? The Snail Goddess Nüwa? Why burn incense to the heavenly pantheon? Believing in any religion involves sacrifice. Why would any poor, penniless Nikara farmer knowingly make sacrifices to entities he knew were just myths? Who does that benefit? How did these practices originate?”