The Poppy War (The Poppy War #1) - R. F. Kuang Page 0,77

help out in the garden, had her watering the cacti and cultivating the mushrooms, but forbade her to try any plants until he gave her permission.

“Without the right mental preparation, psychedelics won’t do anything for you,” he said. “You’ll just become terribly annoying for a while.”

Rin had accepted this initially, but it had now been weeks. “When am I going to be mentally prepared, then?”

“When you can sit still for five minutes without opening your eyes,” he said.

“I can sit still! I’ve been sitting still for nearly a year! That’s all I’ve been doing!”

Jiang brandished his garden shears at her. “Don’t take that tone with me.”

She slammed her tray of cacti clippings on the shelf. “I know there are things you’re not teaching me. I know you’re keeping me behind on purpose. I just don’t understand why.”

“Because you worry me,” said Jiang said. “You have an aptitude for Lore like no one I’ve ever met, not even Altan. But you’re impatient. You’re careless. And you skimp on meditating.”

She had been skimping on meditating. She was supposed to keep a meditation log, to document each time she made it to the end of an hour successfully. But as coursework from her other classes piled up, Rin had neglected her daily requisite period of doing nothing.

“I don’t see the point,” she said. “If it’s focus that you want, I can give you focus. I can concentrate on anything. But to empty my mind? To be devoid of all thought? All sense of self? What good does that serve?”

“It serves to sever you from the material world,” Jiang answered. “How do you expect to reach the spirit realm when you’re obsessing over the things in front of you? I know why it’s hard for you. You like beating your classmates. You like harboring your old grudges. It feels good to hate, doesn’t it? Up until now you’ve been storing your anger up and using it as fuel. But unless you learn to let it go, you are never going to find your way to the gods.”

“So give me a psychedelic,” she suggested. “Make me let it go.”

“Now you’re being rash. I’m not letting you meddle in things that you barely understand yet. It’s too dangerous.”

“How dangerous could it be to just sit still?”

Jiang stood up straight. The hand holding the shears dropped to his side. “This isn’t some fairy story where you wave your hand and ask the gods for three wishes. We are not fucking around here. These are forces that could break you.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to me,” she snapped. “Nothing’s been happening to me for months. You keep going on about seeing the gods, but all that happens when I meditate is that I get bored, my nose itches, and every second takes an eternity.”

She reached for the poppy flowers.

He slapped her hand away. “You’re not ready. You’re not even close to ready.”

Rin flushed. “They’re just drugs—”

“Just drugs? Just drugs?” Jiang’s voice rose in pitch. “I’m going to issue you a warning. And I’m only going to do it once. You’re not the first student to pledge Lore, you know. Oh, Sinegard’s been trying to produce a shaman for years. But you want to know why no one takes this class seriously?”

“Because you keep farting in faculty meetings?”

He didn’t even laugh at that, which meant this was more serious than she’d thought.

Jiang, in fact, looked pained.

“We’ve tried,” he said. “Ten years ago. I had four students just as brilliant as you, without Altan’s rage or your impatience. I taught them to meditate, I taught them about the Pantheon, but those apprentices only had one thing on their minds, which was to call on the gods and siphon their power. Do you know what happened to them?”

“They called the gods and became great warriors?” Rin said hopefully.

Jiang fixed her with his pale, suffocating gaze. “They all went mad. Every single one. Two were calm enough to be locked in an asylum for the rest of their lives. The other two were a danger to themselves and others around them. The Empress had them sent to Baghra.”

She stared at him. She had no idea what to say to that.

“I have met spirits unable to find their bodies again,” said Jiang. He looked very old then. “I have met men who are only halfway to the spirit realm, caught between our world and the next. What does that mean? It means don’t. Fuck. Around.” He tapped her forehead with each word. “If you