Kind Young Master [Progression Fantasy - Cultivation]

It was on the third day alone that Fushuai caught a rabbit.

He had risen before dawn, joints stiff from cold stone and an emptier stomach than he cared to admit. Mah Goshung had not returned the morning before, nor the one before that; by now Fushuai no longer expected to hear the clack of a great wolf's claws on the stone steps. The shrine did not mourn his absence, and the mountain offered no explanations.

His fledgling spiritual sense brushed the hush between trunks as he moved through the forest, feeling for the quick tremor of smaller hearts. When the rabbit's pulse flickered against his awareness, a flutter of warm life against the background of frost-hardened earth, he lowered himself into the brush. Hunger hummed beneath every breath, dull yet insistent, and the edge of that hunger sharpened his focus to a single point.

A patch of flattened sedge betrayed the warren's mouth. He waited until the rabbit nosed out, whiskers quivering, then lunged. Cold fingers closed on fur; one swift twist, a muted crack, and quiet settled around the kill.

Then, with a sudden twist, he jumped into a ready stance facing a gap in the trees. A presence had touched him. Or he'd thought it had. There was nothing now but distant bird calls.

On the walk back he felt the statue's empty gaze long before the ruined shrine appeared through the trees. Each day his imagination filled in more of what weather had taken: the broad shoulders of once-regal robes, perhaps even a woman's hair carved in flowing lines down a bowed back. He nodded to the silent figure, then crouched beside a flat stone and set to work with a knife that had not been made for skinning.

The fur came free easily. While sinew and bone were laid aside, memory of routine drifted in: dawn cultivation to steady the Void-Stirring rhythm, evening cycles to cool the furnace within. His qi flowed more steadily with each session, but mortal flesh still clamored for simpler sustenance than celestial currents, at least at this stage. The thought made his stomach knot.

Spring had only sent scouts so high, buds tight on lower branches, a softening in the soil no deeper than a knuckle. The forest yielded grudgingly. Bark peeled beneath chilled fingers, and bitter shoots dulled only after long chewing. His snares had lain empty each sunrise, or worse, sprung and useless, bait stolen, a tuft of gray fur left like mockery. Fishing took hours he could not spare.

He sliced the liver free and swallowed it raw to quell the ache, then skewered the haunches for roasting. Smoke curled toward the rafters, and as he fed shavings of pine into the flames a gnarled root eased around his boot.

"A thousand apologies, elder," he murmured, bowing to the ponderous tree that he was certain had shifted closer to the shrine than it had been when they first arrived. The root relaxed. Most trees were no true villains if shown proper courtesy, and Fushuai had no wish to start a war he could not win.

With the rabbit spitted, he let the rhythm of the task steady his thoughts. Hunger ebbed to anticipation. Outside, the mountain remained quiet, but he could not shake the sense that something besides stone and trees watched the rising column of smoke.

He sat near the flame, legs folded, breath steady. Hunger still pinched at him; a single meal was never enough. He cycled his qi in long, measured turns, following the Void Stirring method until his thoughts thinned to distant whispers. His awareness stretched outward to touch stone and root and ember. The familiar shape of the shrine. The faint, sleepy presence of the formation. The statue's silence...and the gaze upon him.

His eyes opened.

The fire crackled softly. The trees beyond the shrine swayed with the wind. No flash of gold, no glint of fang or feather.

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But the feeling did not leave him.

He stood without hurry, brushing the dust from his robes with one hand. The other reached for the chopping knife beside the pot, its edge dulled by use. It held no inscription, no hidden edge or qi infusion. But it was weighty, it had fed him, and it would cut.

The fire hissed a warning as he stepped past the boundary of the shrine. The shift was subtle. A thinning in the air, a slight ache behind the eyes as the formation's unseen veil fell away where stone met soil.

He did not raise his voice. "I know you're there."

No answer. Only wind in the pine.

Then a hawk's cry, sharp and clear to his left.

He turned toward the sound, and even as he did, instinct prickled. The cry had been a ventriloquist's trick. A blur of muscle, feather, and scale, moving on cat's feet, dashed in from his right. Then the air tore with its true voice, a strangled yowl that made the hair on his arms stand on end.

The creature's body was that of a leopard, but from its shoulders sprang a crane's wings, white and wide and tipped with black. Worst of all was its mouth. From between the leopard's jaws emerged the head of a serpent, its fangs dripping with venom.

Fushuai twisted aside, narrowly avoiding the pounce. The knife in his hand flashed upward, unguided by thought, instead the result of reflex and training too fresh to fade. The blade sheared feathers and glanced off bone.

The chimera wheeled with ungainly dexterity, fast yet awkward, unused to its own body. Its claws ripped up grass and soil, then Fushuai's tunic. The uninjured wing battered and disoriented him even as the other hung useless. The snake seemed to leap from its jaws, and he cut the serpent off at the neck, its head biting the air as it fell.

Black blood spattered across his sleeve. The chimera recoiled a single pace, stump of the serpent's neck writhing from between its jaws, then roared with a medley of voices.

For an instant, he thought it might break and run. Instead the beast darted sideways, hind-quarters coiling, foreclaws carving furrows as it circled, searching for a blind angle. He angled his shoulders with it, breath steady and smiling.

The chimera feinted high with its good wing, then lunged low. Fushuai slashed, scoring the joint where leopard muscle met a crane's pinion, and kicked off the spotted shoulder, rolling clear of snapping jaws.

As they faced each other again, something hit him. Its eyes locked on to his, and he felt its intent to kill, its will to devour, like a hammer strike. A moment's hesitation was all it needed to close.

Then the beast was on top of him, its claws raking his chest. He held its jaws aside with one hand as he chopped the knife into its neck again and again. The creature let out a sound too layered to name, then collapsed in a twist of wings and limbs, leaking watery blood.

Fushuai crawled out from under it, his chest striped and weeping red. It was only as he scrambled away from the abomination that he felt the sting at his heel. The dismembered head of the serpent released his ankle an instant later, its jaws working spasmodically as it died. He jerked away, but the damage had already been done.

The bite burned, a pale drop of venom gathering at one of the twin holes in the back of his foot.

An ache formed in his fingers, the knuckle joints, like whatever was coursing through his blood had gotten caught in the crannies. His knees and elbows followed suit. The area around the actual bite had gone from blazing fire to numbness in the space of a few seconds. Every step back toward the shrine felt longer than the one before it. How could it seem so far away? He had been right there.

The knife slipped from his grip, and he crossed the threshold just as his knees failed him.
Stone greeted him in its accustomed manner, unyielding and unimpressed, yet the air changed. The scent of blossoms returned, soft at first, then cloying, a gauze drawn tight across his senses. It did not belong to the mountain. It belonged to the shrine, to the shattered figure that knelt at its heart.

He tried to push up, but the venom raced faster than muscle could answer: first ankles, then calves, then thighs gone hollow. Nothing about that chimera had been natural, and its poison was no exception. Corrupted. Deviated. An abomination.

Qi stirred, sluggish, resistant, as he forced it through the lowest circuit. Once. Twice. Breath rasped; petals of pain opened in his veins. He sought the rhythm that might bind the toxin, purge it, change it, anything, before it reached higher.

The blossom-scent thickened.

The numbness crept over his hips, up his spine.

He breathed. The shrine breathed back.