Kind Young Master [Progression Fantasy - Cultivation]

The shrine was quieter now, but not oppressively so. The wide stone platform, the weather-eaten columns, the broken god; none of these spoke or shifted. Yet Fushuai did not feel abandoned. If anything, the place seemed to breathe more easily in their absence, as though it was more nervous in their presence than he was.

He cleaned the stone steps of last night's ash and laid out the cooking tools Xiao Sheng had left behind, more for the sake of order than utility. His morning tea was weak, bark boiled to a bitter brown, but it warmed his throat and stomach, and that was enough. He trimmed back some of the creeping moss that threatened to cover the inner ring of the shrine, mindful not to disturb the natural flow of qi he could now barely sense beneath the surface.

Later, he set off into the woods with his chopping knife tucked into his belt and a sling of woven vine across his back. He found wild chive and spring bitterleaf, three tubers that stank when peeled but sweetened in fire, and a patch of tight green curls that might become edible if boiled long enough, checking them all against the catalogue in his mind.

The sun began to fall behind the trees, and still he had not caught anything that bled. So he made his way to the river. It ran colder here than it had on the lower slopes, and faster too, threading past smooth stones and between roots. He removed his slippers, rolled his trousers past the knee, and stepped into the current.

The first half hour passed in stillness. His fingers lost feeling; his knees began to ache. But he held his stance, watching the play of shadow and shine in the water. When the fish came, a glimmering dart through the shallows, he struck without thinking. His hands closed around slick scales, his footing slipped, and he toppled forward with a splash that startled birds into the sky.

But when he surfaced, coughing and dripping, the fish was still in his grasp. Medium at best, but a victory nonetheless. No one had been present to witness the fall, and therefore, it had not happened.

He returned to the shrine with the fish wrapped in broad leaves and the foraged greens knotted into the sling on his back. The fire took time to coax back to life, its last coal had expired during the day, but the wind was low, and the pine needles he gathered burned hot and fast. He cleaned the fish with steady hands, then spitted it on a stripped branch and set it over the flame.

There was no salt, no oil, no seasoning of any kind, but hunger sharpened the senses and humbled the tongue. The flesh flaked apart, smoky and tender, and the bitter tea did not offend him so much as it had in the morning. He ate slowly, legs folded beneath him, eyes on the pale sky beyond the broken roof. The sun was gone, but the day had not yet passed. Shadows drew long lines between the columns, and a single star blinked through the thinning blue.

When his belly was full and the fire had dimmed to a circle of embers, he settled into the center of the shrine and resumed his meditation. According to his master, he was supposed to be cycling spiritual energy at all times, and to an extent, he was. Certainly, standing frozen in a gelid stream had been a fine opportunity for meditation, but the simple method he used to push qi through his channels while he walked or worked was not the same as a concerted effort at regulation.

His breath slowed. His thoughts, leaves in a river, followed the current of his focus inward. Void Stirring, subtle and slow. An elegant method, though not when he performed it. His control wavered if he pushed too hard, but there was strength in the movement now, and certainty.

His meridians, once imagined lines on a diagram, revealed themselves. The qi gathered more readily than before, and he no longer needed to wrestle it into submission.

The night air cooled his skin, but within, a different stillness reigned. He pressed deeper into himself, not toward thought or feeling, but toward the shape of his spirit as it existed beneath both. Qi moved sluggishly through his body. He followed its path with gentle persistence, noting the places where it pooled too heavily, the joints where it snagged, the narrow turns where it barely moved at all.

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He made no attempt to force it, but here and there, pressed a feather of intent to stir the clogs.

At his center, beneath the ribs and behind the navel, the Yin Root pulsed faintly. Not with light, but with spiritual pressure. It was cold without cruelty, empty without hunger. A perfect stillness that did not belong to sleep or death, but to something older. There was power there, coiled and quiet. Not his yet, not fully, but no longer a stranger to him. A sliver of moonlight, buried in ice, waiting to be drawn forth.

He turned that same sense outward. Slowly, cautiously, as if creeping up to the edge of a cliff. He felt the fire's aura as much as its warmth. The faint traces where stones had soaked in the day's sun. The cooler patches where moss held the moisture of the air.

And beyond that, something else. Threads, tenuous, faintly glowing, ran through the broken shrine. A web, ancient and sleeping, woven into the very bones of the ruin. A formation array? One worked by a hand more skilled than his own or even his father's. He could not read its purpose, but he could feel its shape. Gentle and oddly fragrant.

The array puzzled him. It lacked the structured sharpness he had expected from the scrolls. A protective ward, a trapping array, even a simple concealment seal would have angles, lines, some sense of directed purpose. This was different. The qi flowed in soft loops and languid spirals, soothing to the senses, without warning or boundary.

There was no danger in it. No hostility. If anything, it felt… kind.

The scent that clung to the shrine, the faint sweetness he had taken for some stubborn mountain flower, had not changed with the season, nor with the wind. Now, turning his perception carefully along the array's threads, he could sense its origin. The fragrance did not drift in. It radiated outward.

Was it a relic of some long-past devotion? A blessing left by a forgotten hand? Or merely the echo of whatever god had once sat whole upon that plinth?

He turned his attention to the statue itself. Its presence was unmistakable now that he had the sense to feel it. Yin qi clung to the stone, thickest around the broken neck and seeping down the weathered shoulders. It moved when he reached for it. Not toward him, not into him, but in acknowledgment.

He tried to draw a thread of it closer. The qi dispersed with ungraspable grace. Smoke through fingers. Water through silk.

Still, the air seemed heavier for the effort. He had not been ignored.

He had begun to sink again, slowly, steadily into the rhythm of breath and thoughtless perception. The world was narrowing, dissolving into the experience of subtle senses. The stones beneath him, the qi in the air, the gentle hum of the formation's dreaming pulse, each began to blur at the edges.

Then, a feeling like a wire snapping taut.

His eyes opened at once.

The fire had burned low. Its glow flickered unevenly against the columns, painting them in ruddy grays. Beyond that—darkness. The forest loomed at the shrine's edge, dense with shadows.

Then he saw them. Eyes. Slitted, golden, and unblinking. Set low to the ground and just beyond the ring of firelight. Not glowing, not truly, but catching the light in such a way that they gleamed with uncanny clarity.

They met his gaze for an instant, and then they were gone.

His first thought was of Mah Goshung. Though those eyes had not been the molten orbs of the demon-wolf, he was certain the Asura could take other forms. Surely, he would not be wasting time playing such a petty game with his pupil? Fushuai wasn't so sure. He remained still for long minutes, heart steady, breath controlled, listening, and saw nothing more.

He rose quietly and stepped to the shrine's edge, bare feet soundless on the worn stone. The treeline stood only a short distance off, a jagged curtain of black and deeper black, still as carved lacquer. He reached with the new sense he was still learning to trust. The tendrils of his awareness spread, brushing bark and branch, wind and pine, finding no purchase.

No foreign energy stirred. No presence lingered. Even the night birds had fallen silent. Only the wind moved, threading through the high needles in long, breathless sighs.

Whatever had watched him was gone, hiding in a manner he could not yet pierce.

He stayed a moment longer, then returned to the center of the shrine. The fire was low but not dead. He fed it carefully, coaxing a few brighter tongues of flame from the coals, then sat beside it with legs folded and back straight, as though his stillness might draw back whatever had fled.

Nothing returned, neither devil nor beast, aside from his thoughts. The day had been comfortable to the point of laziness, and he knew it could not last.