Kind Young Master [Progression Fantasy - Cultivation]

Fushuai woke well before dawn without having to be kicked.

He did not rise at once, instead lying still beneath his worn blanket, watching the faint shimmer of moonlight soften into pale grays through holes in the roof of the shrine. His body ached far less than it should have.

He pressed his fingers gently to his side, where there should have been a broken rib. There was no swelling. No sharp pull of breath. No bruising beneath the skin. He exhaled through his nose.

"Reforged," he murmured. But even as he said it, he knew that his body refinement alone could not have managed an overnight recovery, especially given that he had fought on through the injury for hours. The qilin meat. The flesh of a legendary sacred beast was as potent as any pill or elixir. It was a wonder it hadn't killed him.

Strangely, he had felt nothing but fullness from consuming the jerky. Perhaps it was simply that his subtler senses were lacking.

He sat up, letting the blanket fall away from his prickling flesh, and dressed. The fire had long gone cold, but the scent of last night's pinewood smoke lingered, woven with something sweeter, the peculiar flowery smell that was ever-present in the shrine.

Fushuai's master was nowhere to be seen, he had never witnessed him sleeping. The black demon-wolf stirred on the other side of the headless statue, fixing him in one molten eye.

His voice was as low as the hells. "Eager for your beating? Good."

Mornings were pain and breath and bruises, the charred glen serving as their training ring. Goshung tested him with minimal words, guiding with the bluntness of impact rather than explanation. There were no named techniques. No sequences to memorize. Only the fundamentals: stance, strike, block and breath.

"Only beasts need cages," the Asura said once, after correcting Fushuai's elbow with a slap. "And only fools tie themselves to forms."

So Fushuai learned to move without a pattern. To fall and rise again. To trust his eyes, then doubt them. To feel not for the shape of a strike, but for the shadow it cast in the world, the intent.

He could sometimes sense it now, the aura of his opponent speaking to him, the movement that followed carrying the weight of the Asura's will. Some minute fraction of it, in any case. But it was fleeting, fickle. It never came when he reached for it.

Afternoons brought no relief. Goshung would march him into the woods, then vanish into the undergrowth, leaving Fushuai to find his way back without tools or trail. Sometimes he would return scratched and torn, mud up to his knees, the result of the treachery of trees. If he ever had his hands on his ax, there were several willows he had already marked for death.

He always returned with armfuls of roots, leaves, and herbs. Some would be added to the night's meal, others stored. So far, no beasts had accosted him. He suspected his mentor's hand in that, and he wasn't certain whether he should be grateful or offended that he hadn't been deemed ready to defend himself.

Still, he learned. He could tell the difference between goat and mountain deer spoor. He could gut a fish cleanly. He could climb without leaving a mark, walk without breaking a twig. He could build a fire in the rain.

Evenings were spent with Master Xiao.

Meditation, of course, followed by cooking.

There was stone-pot congee, cooked over a low flame with dried jujube and wolfberries. There were wild scallion dumplings, their skins rolled thin enough to see the green within, pleated with a twist of the fingers. Pine-smoked river fish, caught by hand and dried with crushed pepperleaf. And steamed eggs, stolen from nesting birds, then beaten smooth and drizzled with sesame oil, the flavor both delicate and complete.

His master seemed to appreciate good food more than anything else in the world, and his methods were exacting. At least he was happy to provide the ingredients that couldn't be foraged, so the meals were satisfying to Fushuai, if no one else. Though no matter how much he ate, it never seemed to be enough the next morning.

Each evening, before they meditated, Xiao Sheng handed him a small bundle of silverleaf, five finger-length slivers of pale green. He was expected to chew all of it before the fire burned down. At first he had gagged. Now, it was merely unpleasant.

Goshung sometimes offered him strange meats. Dried, spiced, and potent. Once, it made him dream of a mountain weeping molten gold. Another time, he woke to find his vision sharp enough to see individual snowflakes drifting in the dark, only to find it was not snowing. He had stopped asking what he was eating after the qilin jerky. It was easier not to know.

The beast flesh kept him fresh for training, and day by day, he felt his body hardening even beyond what the rebirth had accomplished.

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But it was in meditation that the greatest challenge remained.

Fushuai could see his meridians, faint threads of light crisscrossing his inner self. With effort, he could trace them down to his dantian, where the reservoir of qi pulsed soft and dim. He knew them to be real. He felt them.

The spiritual root was there, nestled at the base of his core. He could see its shape. Slender, singular, whole. No branching tangle. No dull spread of weak affinities.

A single root.

If he was right about what it was, it was a blessing beyond hope. The kind of root that entire sects might vie to recruit. The foundation for greatness.

And yet…

There was no color. No elemental signature. No flame. No water. No wind. No thunder. No scent of metal or soil or wood.

Doubt returned like an old wound. Perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps his perception was flawed. Perhaps it was a stunted root, or a false one, a spiritual mimicry without true potential. Perhaps the weeks of exhaustion were beginning to rot his mind.

He remembered once, as a child, asking his father what kind of spiritual roots he possessed. Gao Ligang had looked down at him with that distant, faintly disapproving expression he wore whenever he thought of anything not directly under his command.

"Strong," he had said. Then the consideration in his face had hidden behind a blank wall. Had that been a spark of anger in his eyes?

Nothing more.

Fushuai did not know whether that word had been an encouragement, a dismissal, or a curse.

Now, sitting in stillness with the silverleaf melting on his tongue, he could feel himself approaching the secret within him, but the door remained closed.

***

The match should have ended sooner.

He had seen the elbow coming. Felt it, an echo in Goshung's aura, a sharp spike of intent. But his mind lagged behind his body, or his spirit behind his mind. He moved too late.

Again.

The blow struck just below his collarbone, a jarring impact that sent him stumbling across the clearing. His shoulder bashed a pine, tearing away bark. He did not fall, but neither did he recover. The next strike sent him down for good.

Goshung was a dark monument to contempt.

The quiet stretched.

"I felt it," Fushuai rasped. "I knew it was coming. I—"

Goshung turned. He strode to the edge of the clearing and transformed into a wolf before vanishing into the trees.

Fushuai sat for a moment longer, spitting blood into the pine needles, fury roiling in his gut, at himself more than anything. His frustration at the failure with Master Xiao had bled over into his exercises with the Asura, stealing his focus.

The wolf's path was no path at all, only undergrowth and shadow and the distant sound of falling water. Goshung made no effort to slow for him. Thorns caught his sleeves, and rocks gave friendly greetings to his feet. His slippers had long since worn through. A tree root attempted to hinder him, and he hopped lightly over it.

Then they stood on the edge of a narrow gorge, carved deep into the mountain's bones. A waterfall thundered down into a churning pool, its surface white with mist. The sound was deafening, and the cold spray reached them even at the verge.

The wolf inclined its head toward where the water met the stones.

"Go there," he said. "Beneath it. Stay until you learn something."

Then he turned and padded away, his huge form blending into the shadows of the wood.

Fushuai stared at the water. It struck the stone unceasingly, a single note of violence drawn out forever. The mist clung to his skin, and he suppressed a shiver.

He climbed down to the pool and followed a ledge to the fall, soaked through even before he entered it.

The cold seized him at once. Sharp, biting, total. His breath caught in his throat. He sat cross-legged as best he could, though his legs trembled and the current tried to unseat him. The waterfall crashed onto his shoulders, compressing his spine.

He could not think, and his heartbeat had fled into his throat.

Time dissolved, and there was only the cold. The pain. The instinct to rise, to flee, to survive. But beneath that, fainter still, there was a whisper.

Breathe.

The voice was not his own, but Xiao Sheng's, spoken weeks ago as he stumbled up the foothills of the Spine of the World. He followed it inward. Not away from the cold, but through it. Not by resisting, but by allowing.

His breath came ragged at first, then steadier, and his thoughts ceased their churning. The discomfort did not leave him, it was merely irrelevant.

Crashing, icy water, the churning pool, the din of the world, it all faded. The cold remained, but no longer as an enemy. It was simply part of existence, as he was part of existence, and the division between them dissolved into the nothing that it was.

His sight turned inward, the only world that was left to him, and he saw.

His meridians glowed faintly, tracing luminous lines across the darkness within. The dantian pulsed low and steady in his belly. And at its base, nestled in the heart of his being, was the root.

Singular. Untwisted. Whole.

No blaze of flame. No glimmer of metal. No verdant hue or glacial blue. Instead, it was pale, a sliver of moonlight, and utterly still. Not elemental. He wasn't aligned with wind or water or wood.

There were more obscure roots than his family archives suggested. Rarely, cultivators would be born with unusual conceptual alignments, and they were the stuff of legends. The great and terrifying Han Jue, whose chaos root had allowed him to read the webs of probability. The mysterious Shi Tian, who had used his time root to access the wisdom of a thousand lives. The terrifying Mo Fan, who despite being born with a death root, had mastered countless elements and paths.

Fushuai was not like them. He could not be. And yet, the evidence was here within him, unless he had simply lost his mind, perceiving false visions at the edge of death beneath a merciless waterfall. Yes, that was the most likely answer.

But he did not die, and the root remained, unchanged and unchanging.

The chill of the water was nothing compared to the cold within this root, and against it the stillness of his body seemed like a riot of motion. A darkness beyond darkness, that, instead of inspiring the terror of the unknown, beckoned invitingly.

Fushuai exhaled, long and slow.

The water still crashed around him, but it no longer touched him, and he remained beneath the falls long after the cold had ceased to matter. The ache of muscle, the throb of bone, the weight of water; these were simply passing phenomena with no essential substance.

It was hours later when he returned to the shrine and found his master meditating in his accustomed spot. Fushuai bowed to the headless statue, then his master, before taking his place beside him.

"Did you see it?" Xiao Sheng asked.

"Yes," Fushuai said, already falling into the cycling pattern.

Yin.