"Now, there's no gain without some pain but I'm not just gonna pound on ya. I can already tell from the way you're walking you don't know proper stances or anything yet, and frankly there's no real way to learnin' except repetition. We should go to one of the training fields, one of the smaller ones. You don't have any fighting magic yet and I'm not gonna use mine - I got a head start, like most'a these nobles - but it's a good habit to show enough strength to get respect but also keep some trump cards hidden."

"I ... know how to punch someone without breaking my hand? I think? I was not expecting combat training to be painless. A small training field sounds sensible, do you know the way?" 

"I sure do, there's a bunch around here, like, just out of sight."

It's about a ten minute walk.

"Now, if you know anything about fighting you gotta know that physical brawls are fast. There's not much room for thinking. You have to just move and have it be the right move. So talking about fighting, sharing pointers, is useless without practice to back it up. You practice picking the right move and doing it, right away, and when it comes down to it your body already knows what to do. Like a lot of things in life, hard work and repetition, and insight and advice, ya need both."

Wen Huli holds out her two palms next to each other, arms extended.

"Punch my palms, let's see what your habits are now. No need to go easy, I've started body cultivation."

Mei Cao will nod and not bother formulating a cogent or insightful response. 

She will punch. It is an unexceptional punch. Neither the punch of someone totally untrained nor the punch of a martial artist, with hard earned muscle behind it but not really the right sort of muscle. 

Wen Huli corrects a number of things about her form, and asks her to punch again.

And repeat.

And repeat...

Eventually, she has Mei Cao switch to a block. She's supposed to divert Wen's punch away. And she punches with the force of an irate boar, not the slim and unmuscled girl she appears to be.

The only good thing that can said about Mei Cao's ability to deflect a punch is that she is willing to take a punch and then keep trying to deflect them, without flinching away from the concept of throwing herself into the task. 

With repetition, she will learn. 

This is not satisfying to Wen Huli's simmering annoyance, but she's not going to go beating up a random other commoner-cultivator about it.

The nice thing about exercise though is that it can get meditative after long enough. So they'll just keep going for a while. Like, a while. Alternating attack and defense and starting to go fast, maybe even randomly switching between two or three basic patterns so she has to guess which block to execute?

Time passes.

(Mei Cao is definitely better at exercise than she was before she 'ignited', even without refining her body. She can almost feel tiny little pieces of qi radiating out from her core into the rest of her body, soothing away tiredness and aches.)

Time passes. The strikes and blocks get a bit more demanding, bit by bit.

"...Okay, I think I'm about done for the day. Don't wanna wear you out too hard on day one, yeah?"

Mai Cao fails to appreciate the respects in which she's an undesirable punching bag and instead does her best to be a good student. 

"I appreciate that. Thank you for the training. I hope we can work together well in the future." 

She would like to go home and rest. They have even more training in the morning, after all, and she's covered in bruises. 

Sia Bis is cooking rabbit as well as venison when Mei Cao returns. She looks kind of surly or annoyed and doesn't really say anything.

Dinner is quite filling and hearty. Rice and meat.

Mei Cao is feeling significantly better, if not fully healed, by the time comes to go to the physical cultivation lesson; Sia Bis intends to come along with her.

Mei Cao is glad to have her! And her arms have gone several interesting colours even if they don't hurt as much as she expected them to at this point. 

She can't quite work up the courage to ask what annoyed Sia Bis but she really wants to know. 

They can just go to training in companionable silence, how about? 

Yep!

One of the larger training fields has a wide array of their fellow disciples already present. A very, very well-built man is waiting, and at a precise time declares that anyone who is not already present is banned from all physical cultivation classes, and anyone who does not follow instructions and show up on time every day from now on out will also be no longer welcome.

He sets the whole crowd to doing stretches and warm-up exercises, shouting advice and corrections in a steady stream. And then it's running. A lot of running. And then holding odd poses or doing other body-weight exercises. And then more running. And then more stretches. And then- Well, you get the idea.

And yelling! About how to BREATHE PROPERLY and cycle qi out of your core and into your body - it is not just exercise but physical cultivation, moving the qi is crucial or you will get much less out of the work-

Almost everyone is moving faster or further than Mei Cao. The nobles and other cultivators, a few of the reedy bureaucrat types aside, are lithe, fast, and strong in comparison to her. Their punches can crack stone and they flit across the training ground like tigers, expressions scowling and focused. Even Sia Bis is running, lunging, rolling, and jumping at his command. That other girl, the fox-like one, is not especially strong but is extremely fast, in turn. Very quickly, her muscles and tendons and bones ache. She does not fully regain her breath for the entire session.

But the instructor seems to know exactly how much Mei Cao can tolerate, and has her stop just before actually injuring herself, to take a short break walking or drinking water before resuming exercise, slightly reinvigorated.

(She can feel the now distinct sensation of qi spreading steadily throughout her body. Something about the breathing pattern and exercises are helping it do so. It feels Correct.)

So this is the difference between a good teacher and a bad teacher. The good teacher does not give you instructions that result in you sustaining serious injury. Presumably there are other subtleties; that's what everyone here has been implying. She tries her hardest. She learns a lot. It seems that this is what qi is for. It's probably for other things as well, but this is the first moment she feels like she's clearly learning things with uses rather than doing work on her foundation. 

She knows that this will probably be something she uses for violence one day, but for now she just exalts in the tangible sensation of getting better in real time. 

(It does not occur to her that a less talented cultivator might not, actually, feel the tangible sensation of getting better in real time even under the circumstances.) 

The days pass. She continues to attend her classes. She begrudges the spending of another red stone in her spiritual cultivation classes. She burns what little internal qi she's cultivated down to embers to fuel her physical cultivation practice. She starts to get the hang of enhancing her body by raw expenditure of qi as well as by long-term subtle improvement, which apparently was considered so simple that nobody was going to bother teaching her how. 

She discovers the "Elder Sun Tingfeng Memorial Fund for Basic Education" exists and is willing to subsidise her hire of a tutor for the basic literacy and numeracy education she was missing, which she throws herself into whenever she's supposed to be resting her body or soul as well as whenever the bemused outer disciple so hired is free to teach her. 

She spends some time agonising about whether her remaining free moments should be spent looking for work which will refill her rapidly plummeting supplies of stones. She decides it's probably more important to make friends and allies, which is how she discovers that she's not welcome in the small study group of commoners which has formed; apparently they've formed the frankly insane belief that she's betraying the Duchess by having someone from another duchy as a roommate. Which she obviously isn't; there was a thing in the entry speech about that and everything. She doesn't need them anyway.

Instead, she's going to go try and figure out if Sia Bys wants to hang out or train or go hunting or something, rather than just existing in the same space together during meals and when going to and from shared training. 

"...Well, the elder in charge of spiritual lessons gave me a cryptic hint about a mountain lake that I should be able to find - and shouldn't be too dangerous or beast-inhabited. Perhaps we could look for it together when we have no more pressing duties, and if we find it, a picnic or swimming or something."

"That sounds fun. Do you have any clues as to it's location other than that you should be able to find it?" 

"There was a poem extolling its virtues, and there are some hints in the description there. White bark pine trees, a view of a rock formation called Master Marble, two streams feeding the lake from a grey-white range on the left and a solitary bluish peak on the right... I think I know where Master Marble is, I saw pretty white rocks on one of my hunting trips. Could start from there, maybe?"

"That makes sense. If we find the mountains in question, we can find the streams by working horizontally along their slopes. I'm down to try. Do you have time to try tomorrow after training?" 

"I have to take care of something quickly after training, but it should not tarry me long. An hour at most. Is that alright?"

Honestly she'll benefit from being able to sit down and rest after training, she gets pushed pretty hard. 

"Sounds great!" 

They can figure out the remaining details of when and where to meet and what they need to bring without much trouble.