47.ii Wondrous and True

~ Sun Ritsu ~

On the way to the paper space, the pair of spirits was accosted by a grungy-looking hound dog, who seemed to be especially excited to see Ritsu. He sprinted in their direction, waving and struggling to keep his slobbery tongue inside of his glamour.

“Sun Ritsu,” Bodhi spoke out of the side of their mouth as the spirit came closer. “Do you know this dog?”

Ritsu squinted his golden brown eyes against the glare of the sun. “I…think so. Oh, yeah. That’s Mochou.”

“What… does he want?”

Ritsu shrugged. “Food, probably. He used to hang out all day in the parking lot behind the dumpsters. I don’t think he really had anywhere to go or anything to eat. So right at the end of my shift, I’d grill up a cheeseburger for him.”

Bodhi puffed their cheeks. “Great. A stray.”

“Woof!”

Mochou happily greeted them both as he came to a stop. “Big bro! Haven’t seen you in some time.”

“Yeah, sorry I haven’t been around. I’m trying to get my friend’s prison time reduced through this tournament the town’s having.”

Mochou didn’t seem to miss a beat. He woofed again and said, “Ohhhhh! You’re competing in the Sevenfold Peach? Right on!”

Bodhi waited in a strange limbo while the other two spirits caught up. Mochou was very adamant that Ritsu should use his fry cooking abilities to win the tournament. At one point, he nudged Bodhi’s shoulder and asked them if they’d ever had one of Ritsu’s burgers.

“I swear on my family’s name that Ritsu’s lunch heroes are sweeter and more immortalized than any holy peach.”

Bodhi gently took a step back from the panting dog spirit. “You swear, huh?”

Ritsu sheepishly rubbed the back of his head during the exchange and tried to excuse himself and Bodhi from the conversation. He wished Mochou well and told him that if he ever went back to working at the Lunch Hero, he’d hang out with him in the parking lot again.

When Mochou waved them off and left, Bodhi said, “My, he breathed rather hard.”

“Sorry about that. I didn’t mean to spend that long talking to him.”

“It’s fine. Looks like we’re here.”

Once inside the space, Bodhi took one look around and sighed. “You know, this place is great and all, but to be honest, it’s not going to be very helpful when it comes to the basics of cultivation. You can’t really absorb the energy of your surroundings inside of a paper space.”

“Is that what cultivation is?” Ritsu asked. “Absorbing energy to use for later?”

Bodhi was already halfway across the space, studying the banyan tree. “That’s part of it, but there’s more to it. There’s different methods of cultivation. Someone like say, Sun Tie Quan, uses combat to enhance his strength. While someone like Sun Terra may do so by climbing a treacherous mountain.”

“So what should someone like me do in order to get stronger?”

Bodhi turned away from the tree and approached Ritsu. They poked him hard in the spot below his navel.

“Learn to breathe for one.” Then they flicked the middle of his forehead. “And be able to tell the difference between the spiritual energy of a tree from that of a rock.”

Ritsu didn’t know how knowing the distinction between the two would help him survive the Sevenfold Peach, but he didn’t dare say that aloud.

“But since we’re here anyway, we might as well use the space while we can. Here, hand over your staff.”

For a moment, Ritsu hesitated, wondering if the Rod would try to overwhelm Bodhi once they had possession of it.

“Don’t worry, Ritsu,” Bodhi said, “I don’t think I’m in any danger. I actually know my way around testy ancient artifacts.”

Feeling a little more reassured, Ritsu handed over the jade trinket and took a step back to give Bodhi some space.

“Old relics like these usually have two modes. God mode, where its power exceeds most weapons and calls on your innate strength. And light mode which, with the right kind of knowledge, means it can be wielded by just about anyone.”

Without ceremony, Bodhi began their demonstration. Their quickness and efficiency with the staff made it all seem like one flashy magic trick. After flexing the tiny needle over their knuckles a few times, it shifted to the length of a snare drumstick. Bodhi twirled the stick again, this time over their wrist before passing what was now a baton to their other hand. After another twirl, the baton waxed to the length of a baseball bat.

These minor, subtle shifts continued until Bodhi had a longer, more standard sized quarterstaff. The Golden-Hooped Rod was nowhere near the size it could potentially get to, but it was still dozens of times larger than where it started from.

“Light mode,” Bodhi repeated, swiveling the staff one last time behind their back and around again before steadying it for Ritsu to see.

“How did you do that?”

Ritsu never thought transforming the staff was possible without a vocal command. And he had no idea how he could do that without the staff leaping all the way into its final form.

“Ha.” Bodhi gave a little smirk before pulling the weapon back towards them and going into another series of rotations. In seconds, the staff was back in its trinket form.

“It’s like this,” the monk explained, “most weapons that have transformative qualities are not completely balanced. See here.” They demonstrated by holding the needle on the tip of their finger, pointing Ritsu to the way that one end of the needle tilted slightly downward.

“You should think of the heavier side as a kind of lock. Whenever you tilt the staff to that end, you can activate the next size in the series.”

Bodhi then let the heavy end drop until the needle fell towards the earth. With the same hand, they caught it after one rotation and held it up to show Ritsu how it had become slightly larger than it was before.

“See?”

The monk did it again. They kept at it, increasing the size of the staff once again, but at a much more deliberate pace than before.

Bodhi slowed down at one point, marking how the weight would sometimes shift from a vertical pull to a horizontal one. Eventually, they handed it over to Ritsu so he could try it for himself. It took him a while to be able to sense the drag of a heavier side, but once he was able to identify it, he could naturally alter the size of the staff on his own. Note, that he could do it at about a fraction at the rate the monk could, Dear Traveler, but it was something.

While Ritsu awkwardly rotated and steadied the staff, Bodhi studied him and provided advice where it was needed.

“It’s probably going to be a long time before you can verbally command your staff to do anything, so this is how you should make it grow and shrink until then. Question. Thinking back to how that dog spoke so highly of your burgers… Do you use your staff when you’re at the grill? Does it transform into a spatula on its own?”

Ritsu shook his head. “It’s never done that, but… I am able to pull off some stuff in the kitchen that may have something to do with how the food tastes.”

If we’re being honest, Dear Traveler, even Sun Ritsu had been caught a little off guard by Mochou’s hyperbolic praise.

Bodhi’s brow turned curious. “Stuff like what?”

Ritsu was quiet for a beat. Would showing Bodhi what he meant be worth going all the way over there and dredging up feelings about a certain someone? He never really talked about the things that went on in that kitchen.

“If you can’t say it, then at least show me,” Bodhi said, gently removing the staff from Ritsu’s hands and rotating it back down to travel size.

Ritsu swallowed his uncertainty about the whole thing and started to lead the way out of the paper space and to the Lunch Hero.