Kind Young Master [Progression Fantasy - Cultivation]

The water core was a lump the size of an orange, a crystalline, irregular sphere. Its spiritual energy was bound in a lattice whose pattern Fushuai could not grasp with his senses. There was knowledge there, perhaps even a hint as to how to improve his dantian, but gleaning that knowledge was beyond him.

In his pack, he carried a small iron lockbox from Xiao Sheng, marked with scripts. It would hide the aura of whatever cores he could fit inside. Without it, he would have soon found himself hunted by every beast on the mountain that hungered for qi.

He spent much of the day recovering in a hammock of vines he slung between two old silver-barked trees, too worn through to even attempt the Void Hammer's Ring.

Night fell with a patient hand, brushing the middle slopes of Lonely Mountain in purples and grays. Fushuai retrieved the core to better study it. The five elements pursued one another in a wheel of yearning and rejection. Wood fed Fire, and was fed in turn by Water. A water-aspected treasure, then, should feel the tug of its successor.

And so it did.

The range of his spiritual sense was limited to his immediate environment. When he focused on the core, he found that the energy within it was pooled to one side. Changing the direction he held it changed the direction of that pull, almost a compass.

He traveled for hours, only occasionally removing the core to check his bearings, until he reached the crown of a steep slope thick with cypress. The trees stood in narrow-backed ranks, and the wood aura was so thick here that it was almost oppressive.

Sitting on his heels, he observed the vale below. The slope descended sharply into a narrow basin where the trees grew in tight clusters, their trunks pale and shaggy. Motes of phosphorescent green danced near the roots, qi so dense it was visible to the naked eye.

Lonely Mountain truly was a place of wonders.

Stretching his senses to their fullest extent, he meditated. Not knowing how long his vigil would last, or if there was a beast for him to find here at all, he continued practicing the qi compression method. Each swing of the hammer jarred his soul, bringing him imperceptibly closer toward his goal.

Hours passed, and he almost missed the shift in the aura.

A boar came to root among the cypresses. An old beast, heavy-tusked and thick about the shoulders, emerged from the trees below, tearing up the soil. It was the size of a horse, and the aura bent around it, but not because of it.

Fushuai was not the only one watching.

A creak. Not of branch against branch, but of limb against joint. One of the cypress trees shivered, and then split. What he had taken for bark peeled back in segments. From its trunk emerged a barbed arm, mottled green and brown.

The mantis struck in a single motion, faster than the eye, and the boar squealed as it was caught. The tree, no longer a tree, stepped in, revealing its body as it fed. Its camouflage was uncanny. Rather than being an illusion, its body was covered in protrusions that mimicked the branches and needles of the cypresses.

Fushuai had not moved yet. He only watched, breath slow, as the boar died in the grip of an insect the size of a modest home.

Now that it had unfurled itself, the creature's presence was impossible to ignore. Its spiritual pressure hung over the slope like a blade left hovering mid-fall. Its intent was as simple as it was powerful: to wait, to kill, to feed. Without question, it was a spirit beast. The pike's presence had been modest in comparison.

He set his hand on Suntooth's shaft, asking in a quiet voice, "Will you fight for me tonight?"

The weapon gave no answer, but he felt its mood shift all the same, more resigned than anything.

Fushuai smiled. "Good enough."

He drew in a breath, then three more to find the Moon Step Perfection within him. When his qi had stilled and his heart had steadied, he hopped lightly into the boughs of the nearest cypress and rose without a sound, using the branches more for balance than support. He moved invisibly from treetop to treetop. Even if he had been shouting to announce his presence, he thought the mantis might still have ignored him, consumed by feasting.

He leapt.

Sawtooth met the top of the beast's head with a crack, the blade tooth popping through its chitin and driving deeper, propelled by his falling weight and the force of his will, until it burst out from between the beast's mandibles.

The mantis, still holding the boar in the cage of its arms, jerked so violently that he was thrown from its head. He hit the ground hard, shoulder-first, rolled, and came up easily. Endless beatings at the hands of the Asura had made hitting the ground a specialty of his.

His spear was lodged in the mantis's head, the haft jutting up like a flagpole from a conquered hill. The beast spun and struck out wildly, lashing at trees and stone alike, the boar falling from its barbed grip.

He dodged a sweep of its claws and sprang forward, catching a ridge along its abdomen. From there he climbed, hand over hand, toward the base of its thorax, intending to leap for his spear. But even as he settled his feet, the beast's wings flared, catapulting him from its back.

He righted himself mid-arc, spotted a tree, and kicked off its trunk with both feet, launching himself at the mantis's shoulder. It shrieked and turned its head, but the spear in its mouth caught against its own body, limiting the motion. One of the huge orbs that served as its eyes fixed on Fushuai, and its desire to kill slapped into him.

The pike had not been deserving of malice. Its death had been necessary for his own advancement, but it had still been a creature deserving of respect and thanks. In comparison, this was a horror. Though in general he saw no reason to hate, fear, or have any particularly strong feelings about a beast, this was one monster he would not regret killing.

Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

Fushuai steadied his breath, and with it, the tide of qi that surged through his limbs. Rising a little higher, his hand found the base of one of its clacking mandibles. With a grunt and a twist of his hips, he wrenched it free.

The sound it made was ugly, a wet snap, but the mantis itself did not have a voice. It spoke only with its will, and that will was death.

Its stolen mandible was as long as a saber, and he used it like one, hacking at the creature's neck. It bucked, spun, and knocked down a cypress with its side, ripped apart another with its claws, then its head came free.

The wings opened again. There was no intent behind the act, so he could not sense it before it happened. Perched as he was, holding on with one hand and digging the tips of his slippers into the edges of its carapace, he was once more thrown clear of its back. The light-body effect of Moon Step was both an ally and an enemy here.

He soared, hit a wall of branches, and bounced. His landing was ten steps short of elegance, and the improvised saber was lost to the night. But he had done it, the creature was beheaded, and the victory his.

One of the mantis's claws fell like a closing gate. The barbed limb snapped shut around him, driving points through cloth and flesh, and lifted him into the air. Pain blanked his mind until he could drive it away, abandoning Moon Step and drawing back his cycling along with his senses.

The mantis was swaying, one leg twitching, but the arm that held him as immobile as the mountain itself. Its barbs were lodged deep in one of his arms and across his stomach as he hung sideways in its grasp. He looked up to the stump of its neck, leaking clear, sour-smelling liquid. More sap than blood.

Its wings beat for a while longer, not strong enough to lift it from the ground, as the rest of it slowly locked into place. The claw did not crush him any further than it already had, but it didn't loosen either.

It would die, it had to die, and that would not save him.

Fushuai closed his eyes and breathed. Panic was a waste of energy, and he had little enough of that left within him. He could cycle here for as long as he needed, the beast was pouring out its life force as quickly as its blood, but that qi had to be filtered before it could be used. Too much wood aura diluting the Yin.

After long minutes spent gathering himself, he flooded his free hand with energy and struck the mantis's arm as close to the joint as he could reach. It did not break, or even crack, and pain lanced up his wrist.

He wanted to laugh, but it would have been too painful. This was the result of overconfidence. There was no deadline to this hunt apart from the requirement to reach the peak of qi refinement by the end of the year. There was no shortage of wood aura on the mountain; another, more manageable beast could have been found.

Would his master save him? Goshung? Unlikely. Surviving on his own merit was the purpose of this part of his training. If he was too much of a fool to know his own limits, after countless warnings, then it was better he lost his life now before he wasted any of his master's time or resources.

Fushuai went back to cycling. The half-living mantis would release him or it wouldn't, his strength wasn't enough to force open the vice of its claw. All he could do was tend to himself in the meantime. Bleeding out wasn't a worry. The barbs were still plugging the wounds they had made. A mental sweep of his body showed that he wasn't at risk of dying from internal injury, at least not in the next few hours. If he gathered enough qi, filled his dantian near to bursting, and purified it all, then it might give him what he needed to escape on his own.

If nothing else, he could use this time to practice Void Hammer's Swing. He turned his mind inward, leaving behind only the barest threads of perception to monitor his body and the mantis, and gave his full focus to the qi compression method.

After a time, he couldn't say how long, he began to sense something new. The mantis's barbs were inside of him, a part of him, in a way, and the spirit beast was not truly dead. It may have been an insect once; now it was something more. Its core was pure wood energy, and the physical form that housed it was just that, a form. It was as much a plant as it was anything.

This was a problem for several reasons, the primary being that the barbs were forming roots of their own, tiny, almost imperceptible tendrils working their way into his flesh to drink his qi.

He did not like that at all.

Body refinement was the first stage of cultivation. It prepared the sacred artist for all that they would endure in the years to come, a foundation for the foundation. In the process of tempering bone, muscle, blood, and everything else, a cultivator learned to consciously perceive and command some of the processes that a mortal could not. That was why they never grew sick, unless the disease was spiritual, as well as being highly resistant to most natural toxins. Even if someone never advanced beyond the first stage, they could still potentially live for centuries before time wore down their will.

His body was his own. Instead of allowing the spirit beast to steal from him, he stole from it.

The trees whispered. The moon sank. The sun rose.

Fushuai weakened. His root despised the day, and the available Yin retreated. The mantis's tendrils dug a little deeper, grazing his dantian by the time the night came again. Then it was his turn, and he learned something interesting.

The body of this spirit beast was as much spirit as beast. Wood, chitin, flesh, and qi were so deeply interwoven that there was hardly a dividing line between them. Because it was within him, he could read the structure that qi as if it were his own. Finally, he saw the answer.

Just as there were two styles of fighting, hard and soft, the same philosophy could be applied to cultivation. One could master spiritual energy by beating it into submission, or one could take a subtler approach. The Void Hammer would work. With another decan or two of dedication, perhaps a month, he was sure he would be able to complete the step.

Here, though, he did not have the luxury of so much time. He stopped swinging the hammer and instead mimicked what he saw in the mantis's tendrils. No longer striking the fog of energy within him, attempting to force it to condense, he began to weave.

Sun and moon turned along the wheel of the heavens, and the aura within him flowed faster, bound in tight coils, he added to with each passing hour. The spines of the spirit beast and the tendrils drilling into his body died. He had drawn power from them until they had nothing left to give, filtering it as he went.

There was no longer a fog of energy retained within him, only a single cord of nine braided threads that ran through every meridian and coiled in his dantian. Any new aura drawn in was quickly added to the cord.

When it was complete, he burned a thread. The result was not the fog of qi it had been before, but still something diffuse enough that he could use it to suffuse his limbs. He thought he heard a voice, but he was so focused on the new method that the outside world had ceased to exist.

Fushuai pressed his palm to the claw pressing its barbs into his flesh and pushed. He felt each barb as it left his flesh, and the tendrils slithering out with them. Then he fell to the grass below, landing on his side with a soft thud.

He opened his eyes and saw that there was a man standing over him. A stranger.

"In the Emperor's name!" the man exclaimed. "You're alive?"

"Yes." He was nearly certain it was true.

"What are you doing?" The man was thin as an invalid, with deep bags under his eyes. He wore the clothes of a common woodsman, with a pack slung over his shoulders, along with a bow and a knife on his belt. He didn't sound afraid, threatening, or even surprised. Merely curious.

"Cultivating."

Having answered the question as best he could, he fell instantly unconscious.