Kind Young Master [Progression Fantasy - Cultivation]

A new day, a new night, and rain fell in a steady blessing upon the roof of the shrine. Chill, wet, hardly an ideal location for meditation. For his part, Xiao Sheng was never touched by their environment.

When there had been frost and snow, it did not dare alight upon his robes. In the heat of day, he did not sweat. Now, sitting cross-legged in a puddle, his clothes were as dry as if they had spent all day hanging in the sun and wind. Fushuai was soaked, but he could not complain, both because it would have been shameful to do so and because the conditions were excellent for gathering Yin.

A stick of incense burned at the feet of the headless goddess, smelling of sage. The ember at its tip was the sole illumination in the shrine, perhaps the sole speck of light in the entire mountain, as if night were a veil and the stick an alchemist's match slowly burning through.

"Nine strands," Xiao Sheng said. "An excellent beginning. You will need twelve to reach the next step."

Fushuai turned his attention inward, consciously attending to the coiled bundles of spiritual energy that coursed through his meridians. His new staff, so far nameless, rested on his knees. He was not permitted to let it out of his sight.

Adding to the coil was not impossible; it was simply a strain on his energy channels. In braiding this spiritual rope, he had condensed as much energy as he could without risking ripping his meridians apart. Under his master's watchful eye, he set about compressing environmental Yin into a new thread to wind around the others.

The pain was immediate.

He frowned, extending the strand as he slowly wove the fog of fresh energy in his dantian into an iron thread.

"I remember a man," Xiao Sheng said idly, "who wanted to make a gift for his bride before they wed. He went to every seamstress and tailor in the region, and judged their fabrics insufficient to match the beauty of his intended. They did not lack for skill. One had woven a net for the hair of a queen, another clothed a warlord. They took his dismissals hard, but he was a cultivator, so what were they to do?"

He was only a deeper shade of dark within dark. With Moon Step, Fushuai could have seen him clearly, but his master's spiritual veil was fully in place, making him indistinguishable from the shrine to the subtler senses. The voice out of the black paused a moment, hummed, and went on.

"Finally, the man decided that nothing short of the sun itself was worthy of clothing his betrothed. He could not reach it, so instead, he gathered its rays and split them upon his loom. Laboring from dawn to dusk, and sealing the result in a jade chest at night so that it would not dissolve away from his intent."

Fushuai finished the tenth thread, gritted his teeth, and began on the eleventh.

"When the garment was finished, he held it up in the city square for all to behold, and the commoners were forced to shield their eyes from its radiance and beauty. They would have been destroyed otherwise. Then he went to find his bride."

A line of agony traced its way up the minor meridian circuit running along Fushuai's left arm. The channels in his limbs were not as accommodating as the major circuit running from his navel to his heart and back again. His hand trembled, and he slowed his pace. He did not stop.

"The woman had gone to see him and his work every day for years while he ignored her. The date of their union came and went, and she took it as rejection. In the decades after, her family found her another match. She wed, bore children, and lived out her life in peace. So," he sighed, "the man placed the robes on a stand beside her graveside. There they remain, even to this day."

Pain, sharp and clear as a ringing bell. Fushuai clenched his fist as the coil reached his right arm. He was listening to the parable with half an ear, both grateful for and resentful of the distraction.

"Can you guess the lesson?"

He suppressed a groan. The coil was running across his shoulders now. If he meant to answer, he needed to do so before it reached his crown, and he risked blacking out from the shock.

"Don't wait too long." He panted. "In claiming what is yours. It may soon be gone."

"Hm." He heard his master's finger tapping on a tile. "I suppose that is a part of it. What I am trying to tell you, my good pupil, is that it is easy to lose sight of one's true goal by being too focused on the challenge at hand. As when you exhausted yourself practicing the Void Hammer's Swing, your time would have been better spent divided."

It was too dark in the shrine for Fushuai to tell if he was blacking out. The coil reached his crown, and he began to pull it back down. His skull felt as if it were about to split in two.

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For a moment, he lost track of the sound of his master's voice.

"...let yourself be consumed. Instead, align your efforts with the union of your aims. The seventh step of qi refinement. The Black Lotus Sutra. Martial training. Ridding the mountain of a heretical artist. All of these are streams that lead toward the same ocean. You cannot swim down only one. You have to travel them all at once."

The coil returned to his dantian, the additional thread complete. He needed one more.

"I am dedicated." He said, preparing to begin weaving the twelfth.

"I know," Xiao Sheng said. "What you must remember is that dedication is not enough. Neither is talent. A superior method wins out over genius over the span of centuries."

The final thread cost him the rest of the night. There was no more room in his meridians, no more flexibility. He had expected to learn a new cycling method to help prepare him, but if there was one that would have helped, his master did not provide it. Midway through the night, however, he gave Fushuai a pill. While it did not expand his meridians, cycling it soothed the pain and restored them sufficiently for him to continue.

"I have finished," he said as the sun rose. His spirit ached, and his body trembled, but the cord of energy within him had thickened. Not only would he be able to store more qi overall, but use it more quickly and in greater quantities.

Xiao Sheng laughed, stretching his back. The rain had stopped, and his sandals clopped on the steps of the shrine as he turned his face to the dawning light.

"Finished? You have taken a step. Stretching, expanding, and adding to the rivers and lakes within you is a lifelong pursuit. I expect you to do this once a month, at least, until the end of the year. After that, perhaps only every three months will suffice. This is a mountain without peaks. Instead, you are faced with an endless rise. You will have reached an acceptable slope for foundation formation by then, but you must never allow yourself to plateau, or you will fall behind more studious cultivators."

Fushuai mastered the tremor in his limbs. In that moment, the thought of enduring the process again, let alone once with every cycle of the moon, was something he wanted to meet with denial. He took a deep, cleansing breath. This was the road he had chosen. If a difficult night of meditation was too much for him, then he had never been fit to be a cultivator in the first place.

He lowered his head in acknowledgement of his master's words.

"Read the sutra before you rest. I am going for a walk."

"Are you going to look for Asura Mah Goshung?"

A cold snort was his only response.

***

Xiao Sheng used the Ten Li Step to leave the vale in a breath. Blurring through the woods and marveling, not for the first time, that he did not crash through trees as he went. When he'd first learned the technique, which bent space as much as it increased one's speed, avoiding obstacles had been a real difficulty. He'd once burst through the walls of a bathhouse and then had to pick a fight with a random cultivator to pretend his arrival in a shower of dust and shattered masonry had been intentional.

Ah. The joyful adventures of youth.

He was leaving to check on Goshung. Not that he would have admitted it to his pupil. The boy was too soft already, and it wouldn't do him good to note sentiment among his elders and take it as evidence that there was wisdom in his attitude. He thought power was best spent improving the world and the lives of those within it. A fine ideal, and one that could only persist in complete ignorance of the actual will of heaven.

If the gods wanted commoners and cultivators alike to live happy lives, then they would have made it so sometime in the last celestial cycle, after the Jade Emperor usurped the Golden God Dragon and established the celestial court.

What made matters worse was that the boy had enough talent that he could very well go out into the world a compassionate fool and still survive. A maddening prospect. It wouldn't do to let him know he was a genius too early.

Fushuai had invented a novel qi compression method. Invented it! In the grips of a spirit beast, no less. That wasn't to say that no one else had used an identical method in the past, and it bore a resemblance to the energy weaving essential to countless more advanced techniques. Still, he had constructed his qi coil from first principles.

That kind of insight in one so inexperienced, with such a lack of advancement, spoke of a talent that might one day shake the earthly realm to its foundations.

Xiao Sheng reached the crater where the fist of heaven had fallen. The slopes were scraped clean of their verdant plumage for several li in all directions. A layer of ash, now a wet, gray soup, coated the bowl. Goshung was not there, but traces of his spirit remained.

The Asura was bloodied, not defeated.

What had he done to earn the ire of the heavens? Admittedly, his existence alone was enough to warrant judgment, but the dispensation from the court should have kept him safe until the end of this mortal wheel.

Obligation.

He found the jade token, now cracked in two, under rubble and beside scraps of bone and flesh that might have once been its owner. Spent now, an echo of the power that had dwelt within it remained. Sometime, likely centuries before, the Emperor had performed a service for the heavens and been rewarded with this token. How it had found its way into the hands of someone in the Endless River delegation, he had no idea.

They should have accepted the signs he had left along the Spine for the denials they were. Though he had to admit that cultivators would not be cultivators if they were not stubborn. It was a troublesome result, but announcing to the world that he had chosen his disciple would be worse than the guessing and scheming he had to deal with currently.

Now his pupil was denied a martial tutor until Goshung was restored.

He took one last look at the crater, sensing the fragments of the relics that the Endless River sect had brought with them, all shattered. What an utter waste. Worse, heaven's eye must have been drawn along with its ire.

The end of the year was too long. Fushuai's progress would have to be accelerated. Doing so risked deviation, but there was no other choice. Now, the Court wouldn't take their eyes off of them until the Emperor was dead, fulfilling his own obligation.

There were many years yet before he would be ready to wage war against the sky itself. But if Fushuai was able to fulfill the promise of his talents, he might not have to face the armies of heaven alone.