Kind Young Master [Progression Fantasy - Cultivation]

Days and nights flowed on uncounted, lost to a haze of breathwork, harried weapons drills, and extended hunts for rare herbs in the hidden recesses of the lower reaches of Lonely Mountain. Fushuai did not mark a calendar. That sort of timekeeping belonged to cities, to bureaucrats and bells. Here, there was only the sun and moon, the wind, and the ache behind his ribs.

He knelt beneath a gap in the roof of the shrine. Thin sunlight slanted through the broken tiles, marking golden lines along the floor in in slowly shifting geometric figures.

In his palm sat the chimera's dao seed. Red-black, grape-sized, and dry as an autumn leaf. It looked harmless enough if one had no spiritual sense. Any cultivator could feel how the little thing strained to gnaw at the world around it. Goshung did not think this seed had arisen naturally within the beast. Instead, it had been implanted by the rogue living higher in the mountain. A twisted fragment of will, coiled so tightly it might never loosen.

Xiao Sheng sat cross-legged on the edge of the stone platform, hands resting upturned on his knees. His expression, as always, was calm, but beneath the surface, there was something different in his manner today. Not a pool with no ripples, but a man standing very still so that no one saw the tremble in his limbs.

"You know," he said, "a great many cultivators never taste hardship."

Fushuai looked up, surprised by the softness in his voice.

"They are born to it. Fed golden pills at birth, taught secret techniques before they've lost their baby teeth. Some of them make it to foundation formation before they've broken a callous. And they think they're strong."

Xiao Sheng's gaze traveled to the statue of a nameless god.

"Power taken too easily," he murmured, "will not kneel to your command. It will sit on your shoulders and whisper lies in your ear. You'll call yourself a dragon and crawl like a worm."

He rubbed at his jaw, then exhaled slowly. "There was once a man who found the tomb of a true dragon. Trapped the blood in a gourd and drank it down in a single gulp. He thought it would make him mighty."

Fushuai waited. There was no hurrying his master in the grips of a parable.

"He became very fast, very fierce, very bold. For three days, he terrorized the borderlands surrounding his clan. On the fourth day, a challenger appeared and insulted him. He fled. So let that be a lesson to you. A coward with a dragon's breath is still a coward."

With a flick of his wrist, he produced a cauldron from one of his storage rings. Dark iron, three-legged, and etched with faded patterns of oceans and the beasts they contained. It landed overtop the fire circle with a clang that echoed across the shrine.

Still carrying the seed, Fushuai half-filled the cauldron with water from the clay jugs he had made and waited for further instruction.

"Grind it first," Xiao Sheng said. "Any stone will do."

He obeyed. The seed let out an invisible pulse as he pressed a makeshift pestle against it. Heat without warmth, hunger without a stomach.

"Don't crack it. You're not breaking it. You're persuading it to come apart."

He ground slowly, steadily, feeling every tremor in the pestle. The seed didn't fight him, not exactly. It resisted, as if this were not a contest of fiber and stone but of two opposing wills.

Eventually, it crumbled.

"Good. Now the mineral dust. Half-measure of blue gypsum. Pinch of crushed star-root. Leave them in the pot until it boils."

Was this alchemy? Not the way the Ashen Brotherhood practiced it, with flame arrays and jade scales and assistants scribbling down every change in hue. This was closer to cooking. Or perhaps to praying. When the water was ready, he added the powdered dao seed.

The liquid turned black, then gray, then a soft plum color. Fushuai stirred with a long-handled spoon, careful not to breathe the vapor.

The smell was oddly pleasant. Damp soil, dried petals, old iron. But despite his efforts to avoid inhaling the steam directly, with every breath he felt something tug just beneath his heart. A longing. A low, feral need.

The mixture had to cool before the next stage could begin. They sat side by side on the shrine's steps, allowing the cauldron its privacy as they watched the swaying pines.

"There are beasts in the Southern Wastes," Xiao Sheng said, "that sleep for years beneath the sand. They wake once each decade to drink from the storms. If you catch them just after waking, while the dust still clings to their skin, their gallbladders can be rendered into an elixir to spur rapid advancement. Cultivators pay handsomely for such things. Take a single drop, and your meridians swell like riverbanks in flood. Take two drops, and you skip an entire step. Take three…"

He trailed off.

Fushuai waited.

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Xiao Sheng sighed. "There was a man who did just that. Took three drops. He reached foundation formation in a night. He could crush boulders with a slap."

The pause went on so long that Fushuai risked a comment. "And?"

"And then came a war. As wars do. He stood on the wall of his city while fire rained from the sky and was untouched. He fell upon the enemy like a striking star and scattered them to the winds. For one day, he had become all he ever dreamed of being, as so many dream.

"When he ran out of challengers, his blood was still too hot to rest. Laughing, he turned upon the defenders of his own city and cast them down from the walls. It was a little place, in a softer time. There was hardly a core cultivator to be found. With what power he had, he became a tyrant, ruling for centuries. Then he died."

"What happened to him?" The climax of the tale seemed to have been nothing at all.

"Old age," his master chuckled. "The fool was unable to advance past foundation formation."

There was a tightness in his voice that didn't quite match the story. It was far from the first time Xiao Sheng had given him such a warning, but twice in one sitting was unusual. His master's tone was pensive, almost absent. As though he wasn't truly speaking to his pupil at all.

He looked down at his newly calloused hands, dusted with flecks of gray and red. Beneath his fingernails, he could still see the black smear left by the powdered core. It had sunk into the creases of his skin.

How much was too much?

He had chewed spirit grass until his teeth went numb, swallowed every pill he was offered, and advanced so quickly that even Gao Ligang would have been forced to express admiration. Now he was preparing to absorb a corrupted dao seed. The fifth step of qi refinement was a bottleneck for some. If he passed through it safely, foundation formation was almost assured.

He pressed his hands together, thumbs against his sternum, and let the breath ease in.

My master knows what is too much. He must.

By the rise of the moon, after much stirring and as many added ingredients as he imagined the entire Gao household possessed, the elixir had darkened into something rich and still, a wine brewed from crushed shadows, boiled down to little more than a cupful.

They stood over it together.

"One draught," Xiao Sheng said. "Each night, before you begin the focused meditation. The taste will be strange, but your root will learn."

"Learn?"

"To hunger for what others spit out. To twist poison into medicine. That is the nature of Yin."

A shadow crossed the shrine floor, and Mah Goshung loomed over them, his horns nearly brushing the frame of the shrine as he stepped under it.

"Is this all there is?" He said, viewing the contents of the cauldron with disdain.

Xiao Sheng didn't turn. "He'll begin tonight. With the Void Dilution method, a single decan should be enough time to process it all."

Goshung's mouth twisted into something too sharp for a smile. "Is that all you ask of your disciple? Sitting and sipping like a palace wife?"

"He needs to master the method."

"He needs to kill," Goshung snapped. He had never spoken to Xiao Sheng in that tone before. This was not simple teasing, but a true disagreement. "You're slowing him down. Teaching him to fear his own teeth."

"Caution is not fear."

Goshung growled. "It smells the same."

A beat of silence passed. Would there be another contest between them, as with the Asura's introduction? The shrine would not survive it if they sparred.

"You coddle him like he's your own blood."

The air shifted.

Xiao Sheng turned his head. Slowly. Deliberately. The space became heavy, as if the pull of gravity had increased.

"If he were my blood. I would be less kind."

The words were as measured as every other phrase he had ever spoken. But something thin and fraying ran beneath them.

Goshung's eyes narrowed, glowing faintly under his brow. Calculating rather than angry. He sniffed once, then turned his back with a low rumble in his throat.

Fushuai, who had been holding his breath, exhaled. His master rarely spoke of the past. He told stories, yes, dozens of them. Parables. Lessons in the shape of fables. But not his story. Had he once had a family? The thought felt like trespass. Their conversation continued without him.

"What is it you want, O Master of Ten Thousand Arms?"

"You know what should be done. He goes higher in the mountain. There are spirit beasts, and now a few chimera. The pup needs to hunt, or he will never learn to be anything other than a scholar."

"He may," Xiao said. "If—"

"Yes, yes. If he follows your regimen. If he cycles properly. If he doesn't burp in the middle of a moment of insight."

"If you go with him."

"Then what's the point?" Goshung spread his arms. "With me at his side, there is no danger. Without danger, there is no growth."

"Observe him. If he proves himself to you, and once he achieves qi purification, I will consider him ready for an unsupervised expedition."

They were discussing him as if he were not there, but Fushuai dared not interrupt. He found that he did want to hunt, and a part of him resented that his master felt he needed the Asura with him as a minder. He foraged alone, and so far, nothing in this region had threatened him since the chimera. Higher in the mountain, that was where the real monsters would reside.

Goshung didn't disagree, and nothing more was said on the matter.

The night was clean and cold.

Fushuai sat cross-legged beneath the broken roof, his chest bare to the wind. The bottle lay before him on a flat stone, catching the moonlight in dull glimmers. He uncorked it, and the smell rose at once. Bone and ash, with bittersweet undertones. Somehow, it smelled wrong, as though it had forgotten what it was supposed to be. He brought it to his lips and drank.

It burned down his throat and bloomed in his chest; ravenous, hot, sickly sweet. His stomach clenched. His breath caught.

He did not vomit.

Instead, he drew the heat inward, forcing it along the channels of his body. He guided it slowly, not with main strength but with method, his qi turning and twisting in his dantian according to the Void Dilution pattern.

Every inch of progress was earned, and every breath needed to be calculated. It felt as though something inside him was biting at his ribs, chewing its way out.

Time unraveled, and the heat became cold and then heat again in turns. Quietly, the hunger receded. It dulled, its edges filed down to something manageable. A strand of it, thin and trembling, nestled into the soft spiral of his dantian.

He felt it settle.

Refined. Altered. No longer the chimera's.

Now it was his.

He opened his eyes and saw the moon had shifted. The night was nearly lost, and the fire was less than embers. The statue across from him, weather-worn, faceless, empty, seemed, for just a moment, to be watching, though he knew the shadow of the god that had once resided there was gone.

Fushuai bowed his head in thanks. There would be no opportunity for sleep before he left with Goshung, but he felt no need for it. The process of filtering the first taste of the elixir had been something of an equal exchange. The cost in effort and hours repaid with rich, dark Yin. He felt as full and rested as if he had slept all spring.

Instead of waiting for Goshung to arrive and collect him, he went in search of the Asura. He wanted to hunt.