Kind Young Master [Progression Fantasy - Cultivation]

Zhang Sha grimaced as his leg snapped, hopping back. A beast rose up between them, a serpent's head and neck attached to the body of an elk. It had to be an illusion; the man could not create chimeras out of thin air, but Fushuai found its reality hard to doubt when it stood hissing in front of him. He could smell its musk, hear the rattle in its throat, and when its jaws snapped out, he felt the brush of its scales as he dodged to one side.

He swung as he turned, dispersing the creature into the dream qi from which it had been created. A clay jug shattered at his feet, and glittering dust rose in the air around him. Holding his breath, Fushuai went straight for his opponent. The stones of the floor turned to mud, a trick he recognized from their battle with the darkstone goat, but it could not catch him. After one had run across water, this was nothing.

The bow vanished, but Zhang Sha held an arrow in each hand. Fushuai shattered one of the shafts even as he felt the other's point puncture his chest. It wasn't deep, but the rhythm of his cycling energy stuttered, and Moon Step weakened. Slowing his pace, he engaged his opponent, staff against arrow, which he was using like a dagger, holding it close to the tip. The poison in his shoulder was spreading, numbing the limb, and he was forced to further divide his attention to purify it.

For long moments, they did not speak. The only sounds in the temple were the scuffing of their feet and the clack of his staff whenever it met wood or stone. Zhang Sha was too injured to properly retreat, his right leg dragging, but he did not need to. Though he did not possess a love for combat, there was more skill in his hands than he had revealed before. That, and the simple reality that reaching the foundation formation stage remade the body more dramatically than any previous step of advancement. Fushuai could match him for speed, and with Moon Step, outpace him. But the repeated pricks from Zhang Sha's arrow points further disrupted his technique.

He was using a style Fushuai didn't recognize, and his intent was wild, unpredictable. Either he was an expert at concealing it, or his madness made any effort to divine a pattern from his attacks a fool's errand.

Purifying the poison, resisting the lingering powder in the air, and keeping up the offensive put him at his limit. Finally, Zhang Sha allowed himself to be struck again. The gu-en cracked against his ribs, and he gasped even as he held it in place. Fushuai kicked him in the stomach, but that did not win him his weapon back, and a moment was lost in a fruitless tug of war between them before the more experienced cultivator made three quick jabs to his upper thigh that caused his entire leg to go stiff.

He tried to pull, and was pulled instead.

"Absurd. They warned me it would be like this." Zhang Sha drew him into a grapple, bringing them both to the floor. Stone was cool against his back. "I had hope for you, you know." His hand wrapped around Fushuai's throat. "Maybe this isn't the end. Maybe it's your root that I need. You could be the key to all of this, and I just couldn't see it until you betrayed me."

"I would prefer to keep my root intact, brother," Fushuai said, wasting the last of his breath as it was squeezed from his throat. The word "brother" caused Sha to hesitate for just an instant. Long enough for the Threads of Still Night to pierce his skin like a dozen acupuncture needles. He spasmed, the clenching of his hand crushing Fushuai's windpipe until he could pry it free.

"How?" Zhang Sha rolled onto his side, twitching.

"I watched your method," Fushuai said, rubbing his throat. His condition wasn't much better. One leg was immobile, one arm refused to do much more than hang, and his internal alchemy was in disarray. Between the choice to restore himself and immobilize the other cultivator, however, he knew which was more urgent.

"Impossible. The devil taught you."

"I'm afraid this sort of thing wouldn't suit his style."

With the Yin threads connecting them, Zhang Sha's internal landscape became clear. He was superior to Fushuai in countless ways, but it seemed every step in his advancement had come coupled with a flaw. His meridians were like great rivers that had been dammed at random, creating pools of stagnant energy, poisoning his spirit. His dantian was tightly knit and dense as steel, but the formations inscribed there overwrote each other, leading to broken connections and unreliable techniques. Strangest of all, his earth-water root was twisted into a shape beyond understanding. Consumed with new awareness, he didn't realize what the other cultivator was doing until it was too late.

Zhang Sha felt their connection just as he did, and he used it to send a flood of the poison that had consumed him into Fushuai.

A waking dream swallowed the world.

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The temple dissolved. Fushuai stood ankle-deep in the muddy waters of a battlefield he had never walked, beneath a sky torn by smoke and thunder. Somewhere in the mist, a woman cried out words in a dialect he did not understand. The wind reeked of carrion. Blood bubbled up between his toes. The shape ahead was Zhang Sha, but younger, less ruined. A boy whose mouth opened in a silent scream.

Fushuai shuddered as bile crept up his throat. The qi invading him was not simply toxic. It was laden with grief, with rage, and more than anything, guilt. Memories boiled up and over, none of them his. A beast begging with its eyes as its limbs were taken. A child's hand twitching once, then falling still. A voice whispering, "We do what we must," over and over in the dark. He could feel the weight of each death, the way the spirit clung, tooth and nail, to the flesh that had stolen its breath. If he faltered, it would crush him.

Instead, he drew the breath in deeper. Held it. The voice of his master spoke in his mind.

There are two kinds of strength in martial cultivation....The first is hard...The second...Yielding...mastery is not the goal. Survival is. Softness is not weakness. It is survival for those not born as giants.

The Void Dilution method spun within him. Not rising to meet the tide of poison, welcoming it. The madness coiled through his meridians, snarling and biting. Instead of resistance, it found a waiting channel, a willing reservoir. He drank the poison, and what he could not swallow, he diluted, guided, and sent back through again. There was too much for all the pathways in his body to hold, too much for his recently stabilized dantian, far too much. But spiritual energy, like water, flowed always down the path of least resistance. When his body was full to bursting, the mad cycle of foreign memories threatening to destroy him, he sent pure Yin back in return.

Zhang Sha screamed, thrashing where he lay, lacking the presence of mind to sever the connection.

The air in the temple thickened again, and Fushuai rose to one knee, agonizingly aware of the strands of spirit still binding them. What Zhang Sha had flung at him was more than mere qi, dream or otherwise; it was the echoes of his deviation. And it was not finished with him.

A whisper threaded through the temple, speaking from the shadows. She begged you.

Fushuai turned his head and saw the outline of a beast curled in gloom. It had a pig's body, a human mouth, and a thousand blinking eyes. Every one of them was blind.

Another voice joined the first, a young girl. Why didn't you stop him? Brother. You were my brother.

A child with goat hooves and long, trembling arms, its face obscured by veils of hair and ash, stood over Zhang Sha. He could hear its labored breathing, taste the rot it carried.

Fushuai's cycling wavered. Void Dilution could strain out poison, alter the aspect of ambient aura, but these were not imbalances of nature. They were diseased wounds, and to touch them was to risk infection. The figures multiplied. Not illusions of spirit beasts or dream-qi tricks. He knew that these were real. The echoes of lives lost and lingering, fed too long on grief and guilt. They crawled across the floor, crowded among pillars, creeping ever closer. The chamber filled with the rush of their whispers.

You kill because it is easy, and lie because you cannot face the truth.

You said it would be mercy. There is only pain.

You will feed him, too. In the end.

His hand shook as he drew his staff close, his sole anchor in a grasping sea.

"Enough," he gasped. "I am not your killer."

The room blurred, then steadied again, and he was in a place that he remembered.

Before him stood a woman cloaked in silk and mist.

"Again?" Fushuai said, his voice catching.

Dreaming or dying, her presence stretched across both boundaries, as it had before.

She did not speak. Only looked at him. Then at Zhang Sha. Then past them both, to the clutching figures still gathered in the shadows. They recoiled from her gaze. Fushuai's spiritual root was a blade of ice in his belly, and it was cracking.

"I tried to cleanse it," he said. "I thought I could heal him."

Her gaze softened as she floated forward.

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

He closed his eyes and saw a white fox. Not the one he had spared, the one he had killed. The life he had ever taken, now only a single entry in a growing list of beasts. It would have died anyway, as everything did eventually. Even immortals. It had attacked him, and if he had failed to defend himself, then he would have died instead, his spirit given over to the great cycles of eternity. Life, death, and suffering were so deeply bound that they could not be separated.

Life could not devour death. It could only feed it. That was not quite the answer he was looking for, but close to it. A mirror. The goddess's question did have an answer, and it was simpler than he could have believed.

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

Yes.

The insight pulsed from his root, resonated throughout his entire body, and then pushed farther, sweeping away illusion and memory alike. This was the ninth step, qi manifestation. More than that, it was a revelation. A true one. The first step on a Path whose name he did not know. His master and mentor both had warned not to choose a Path too early, but he had not meant to choose anything. This was not a weapon or an element. It was a perspective. He could not forget or deny it any more than he could the existence of the heavens themselves.

He deepened the cycle, allowing his root the room it needed to grow, watering it liberally. The corrupted energy flowing through him resisted purification. Screaming and fighting, it gradually gave way just as the chaos and vigor of life must eventually yield to the void of dissolution.

When he opened his eyes again, the temple was dark. Night had finally fallen, and Zhang Sha was breathing shallowly beside him.

He looked down at the unconscious demonic cultivator and blinked, returning to the physical world with difficulty.

"What am I meant to do with you now?"