Kind Young Master [Progression Fantasy - Cultivation]

Twilight slipped into darkness without ceremony. Fushuai watched the light lose its battle against the shadows under the eaves of the shrine and did nothing. His limbs were too heavy, filled at intervals with sand and burning coals. It was the best he could do to control his breathing, and that he could not always do.

Sprawled before the faceless statue, he had become an offering left to a forgotten god. The fire had long since guttered out, leaving only the faintest hints of smoke to mingle with the floral undertones of the shrine.

Yet he was not alone.

He could feel it, something unseen, pressing into the hollow places, or out of them. A spiritual presence without concrete form or intent. It might have only been his imagination, the fancies of a fevered mind as he lay on his belly. And yet, he knew it was as real as he was.

The invisible flowers were pressing in, filling his throat, coating his teeth, settling behind his eyes. He breathed blossoms and tasted rot. Then the world began to shift.

Neither waking nor sleeping, he was able to watch the universe turn on its axis from the comfortable distance of disinterest. It moved with the patience of tides and stars, slow and irreversible. Why it chose to exhibit its eternal majesty in the stones under his face, he could not say, but so it was.

The shrine stretched, subtly at first, as the edges of his vision softened. The columns grew like trees of heaven, their cracks fading into smooth, unmarred lines as offshoot sprouts started in the cracks of the tiles around them. The sky was neither day nor night nor dusk, an in-between of in betweens, caught in an unchanging nothing.

He could no longer feel his clothes, soaked with sweat, against his skin. All feelings had become as distant as that alien sky, so instead he watched the fire spreading from his ankle up his leg and into the rest of his body as if it were the work of an experimenting painter.

His spirit rose from his body, a circumstance that might have worried him if he were thinking clearly. Before him, in the wide stone forest that had once been the shrine, were his parents. Gao Ligang looked at him with anger, a face he had seen often across years of disappointment.

When was the first time he had seen it, he wondered. Was it when he wept with his wounded brother? Or when his father found him crying over a dead servant, his hands soaked in the blood of a man whose crime had been pilfering a few cups of wine? Always crying, no wonder Gao Ligang thought he had a coward's heart.

It was when he turned fifteen that his father told him he was no longer allowed to pursue cultivation. They had gone with the master of blood rites, a cousin, into the family archives to record Fushuai's advancement. His meridians had developed to the point where he was ready to pursue the last step of body refinement, the rebirth he would not achieve until he became a disciple of Xiao Sheng.

He remembered his cousin taking his father aside, their conversation just outside of his hearing. Then the declaration. Then his mother arguing with his father. He could still see her face, the anger there was not for him. For him, she had only sadness.

Now his father loomed again, the Gao Patriarch in shimmering red and gold robes.

"You are better suited to this library than to the dueling grounds," he said. "Bring me the heart of a rival, beating and red, and then I may reconsider. Until then, your studies of the Warrior's Way are at an end."

Fushuai had no rivals, excepting perhaps his siblings, and he had no intention of removing their hearts or anyone else's. There had been no recent failure for his father to point to as a reason, but surely his tutors had reported on his less-than-admirable martial spirit, and the decision had been made.

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"I have grown," he told the vision. "I have talent. My spiritual root is stronger than I ever dreamed."

The shade of his father only frowned more deeply. "Even if you were a once-in-a-generation genius, it would not be enough to make up for your deficient heart."

Anger bloomed in him then, and he struck his father. The blow dispersed the shade, leaving him alone again. The only thing that might have pleased Gao Ligang would have been for him to join the Ashen City tournament and maim every opponent that stood against him. Perhaps he should have done just that. But the years had turned, and he became so old that it would have been an embarrassment for him to compete against the children who were his equal in advancement.

A man of twenty from a noble family who had not even achieved body rebirth, it would have shamed them all to see him take that stage. Then he was twenty-one, then twenty-two, and by that time, all thoughts of returning to the Warrior's Way had left him.

He lowered his head, accepting the stone forest for what it was, the last thing he would see before the venom took him from this life. In the next, perhaps, he would become someone worthy of Xiao Sheng's tutelage.

The shrine changed again, crumbling and cracked stones becoming smooth and new. The gaps in the roof were gone, and the lacquer of the wood was fresh and colorful, deep red and black, inlaid with quiet gold.

The statue shone like the moon.

Where once it had slouched in a headless ruin, it now stood whole. Its features were still obscure, but it was no longer wounded, and its form was unmistakably feminine. Layers of silk cloaked the apparition, drifting as though beneath water. Her limbs, long and graceful, moved in a formal display of the martial arts like those his sister Lin practiced.

She paused in her demonstration, still atop the dais, and a face of mist regarded him with lambent eyes.

You are dying. Its voice was an echo from across a vast lake.

"I do not wish to die," Fushuai said.

Then you must ask death for its favor.

"How?"

The phantom gestured to his dantian and to the spiritual root that had become a solid sliver of black ice in his otherwise insubstantial form.

It is within you.

"I want no pacts with death. I will not be like other cultivators, who bring suffering behind them wherever they go."

You walk with death whether you make a pact or not. As do we all. But unlike the others, death already favors you. All you must do is ask.

"What do I owe death for its favor?"

Feed it.

"Feed death to death? Should I become a monster?"

If death devours death, is there not that much less death in the world?

"I…do not know." Nearing the end of his own life, Fushuai was in no condition to engage with the complexities of karmic philosophy. The vision of his father had put him in an obstinate mind, and now he was allowing his body to be devoured by poison while he argued with a spirit about the nature of Yin cultivation. Perhaps he truly was better suited to scholarship than the sacred arts.

The words of the forgotten god hung in the air between them, and looking inward, he saw the wisdom in them. She was telling him how to survive. His dantian glowed dimly in the hollow of his spirit, and at its center rose that sliver of black ice.

He reached for it.

The venom coiled inside him still, a sickly green pulse threading through the gaps of his failing body, working its way toward his center.

He let it come.

Void Stirring, the cycling technique, unfolded itself within his memory. He breathed in the scent of unseen flowers, and instead of fighting the venom, guided it further inward. Like called to like, and his spiritual root accepted the poison as a long-lost daughter.

It slowed, darkened, and settled. He felt no surge of power, no dramatic heat. Only clarity. Distantly, he felt the pain lessen, and the goddess watched him stir what remained of the destructive qi to keep it draining through his meridians toward the void at the center of his soul. He could already see that it would not be enough to save him. The spiritual poison was too dense, too rich for his fledgling root to absorb without dilution.

"Who are you?" He asked.

A memory.

"Xiao Sheng's memory?"

She shook her head, and he saw now that she too was composed of something his roots could drink.

She made no move as he approached her. He was not truly moving, but his intent shifted, and they were face to face. Her eyes, pale and wide and full of a longing he could not name, softened as her form began to unravel. Her limbs flowed, and the silk of her robes loosened, threads rising from her shoulders. Her face of mist blinked once, and then vanished with the rest.

He returned to his body.

Cold stone met his cheek, and he knew the poison was gone. He had reached the next step in his journey, drawing qi from the shrine to heal himself, and with it, someone else's memory. The name of the goddess was still a mystery to him, but he could almost see her face. The scent of blossoms remained for one breath longer and dispersed when he exhaled.