Kind Young Master [Progression Fantasy - Cultivation]

The dead goddess was not dead. She couldn't be. Whatever echo he had absorbed from the shrine had not been the last of her. He carried it with him, a connection to a spirit far greater than he had guessed.

"Yanjin? Never heard of him." Zhang Sha was stripping branches from a scrub bush to prepare a cookfire. The evening sun had relinquished some of its intensity, but residual heat still radiated from the dry earth, promising a warm night.

"Are you sure it was a demon?" Lin asked. "Couldn't it have been part of a tribulation, a challenge to prove your advancement?"

Fushuai had shared his experience with them. He had nothing to gain from secrets. But their knowledge of the hells was no deeper than his.

"I don't think so. It seemed to want to use me, for whatever purpose. And it was not the sort of creature that would have ever been allowed to set foot in the heavens." At least not the heavens as he had imagined them. The Asura Realm, perhaps.

Sticks clattered into a pile, and flint sparked. "The tribulation comes at core formation, not foundation. In the Hollow Reed Sect, I saw people unable to break through into the third stage, but it wasn't a tribulation that stopped them. The immortals won't have taken notice of you yet."

Mei Li was humming to herself as she brushed her hair, sitting on a blanket a few paces away. She paused at those words.

"How do you know they won't have noticed? His master killed an immortal. Once they've dealt with Xiao Sheng, why wouldn't they look to his student?"

"The emperor wasn't an immortal, not how I meant it. He never ascended, so he wasn't one of them." A tendril of smoke rose from the kindling as Zhang Sha coaxed the ember into a true flame. "Hells, for all we know, they're happy he's dead."

Lin shushed him so loudly that Bai Tu hopped up from her lap as if expecting an attack. "Don't say that!"

Fushuai still hadn't unsealed Xiao Sheng's map. After leaving the valley, Lin led them to water. It had been barely a trickle, and they followed it until it became the stream that now ran beside them. He turned the parchment over in his hand, a scroll sealed by a wax string.

"The first time my master stopped on our way to Lonely Mountain, he helped me build a fire like this. He could have summoned an inferno with a word, and we were cracking twigs with our thumbs."

His words staved off further argument, as the others looked to him, waiting for the story to continue to a point. He wasn't sure he had one.

"I was just thinking how strange it is that with four cultivators and one spirit beast here, not one of us can spark a cookfire without a tool."

"I saw you burn that demon by the pit." Mei Li scoffed. "Why pretend you can't?"

"A tool." He tapped the soil with the butt of his staff.

"No," Zhang Sha said. "She makes a good point. I'm accustomed to traveling on my own, so I started building a fire by rote, but I should have made you do it."

His sister's lips thinned with suspicion at the compliment. Fushuai dipped his head.

"A thousand apologies." With a pulse of qi channeled through the staff, he caused the fire to rise, the red and orange tongues darkening to blue.

"Hah. I take it back, I will build the fires."

Lin came closer to examine the result, bringing her arms together so that both her hands were hidden in the opposite sleeves of her robes. "The same element, but it doesn't feel the same.

"I can only manipulate Yin. Other auras have to be processed before I can use them. This gu-en was forged with cores aligned with each of the five elements, but it's still an imitation."

"It's a powerful treasure. I have a dual root, but the wood branch is a twig, and I may as well be a commoner when it comes to fire aura. Do you think I could use your staff that way, to touch the other elements?"

He let her try, and while the staff did empower her control over the elements for which she had an affinity, she could not use it to command fire or metal, or earth. Zhang Sha tried next, and his dream qi allowed him to create a blaze of light and heat, but it was not true flame. An illusion, near perfect, was still illusion. While they experimented, Fushuai untied the scroll. He couldn't have said why he'd hesitated to do so before. Only that he knew whatever the scroll contained would shape his destiny.

The map was old, delineating the southern half of the Golden Empire, but with names he didn't recognize. Ashen City wasn't even marked, though he could pick out Silent Mountain easily enough from its position relative to the Spine of the World. There were only a few labels, and one was underlined. A peninsula far to the east with a single dot to note the location of a city.

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Lin leaned over his shoulder.

"Emerald Bastion? Is that where we need to go?"

"Where I need to go. My master said he left a manual behind. I imagine he would have known if it had been stolen or destroyed, but I have no idea how it's to be found once I get there, or even what it contains."

"Where we need to go." Lin corrected him.

"Not us." Mei Li stood. "We will make our own way. It was one thing when I thought our brother was innocent. Now." She shook her head. "We have to go."

"Why did you think that again?" Zhang Sha tossed the staff from across the fire, and Fushuai caught it without looking away from his youngest sister.

"I understand. I told you before that you would be safer on your own than with me. Take whatever portion of the supplies you need. We'll manage well enough with what's left."

Mei Li gave a slight bow. "You're not the same as I remember. Father was wrong."

He felt a pinch at those words, but did not let it show.

She turned to Lin. "Gather yourself. If they're going east, then we should go west."

"Your pardon," the youngest sister's tone became overtly formal. "But I must remain."

"What? Don't be silly."

"I want to understand what has happened to our family, and to the empire, all of it. That's not something I can learn if I hide away in some mountain hamlet."

Mei Li's long lashes fluttered; she was genuinely shocked. "We could go to the coast. Maybe an island. I always wanted to visit a beach."

"That isn't what I want."

"Well, too bad. I am your senior sister, and you will do as I say. It's for your own good."

"Fushuai is our eldest brother."

They both looked at him. He shrugged.

"I will not send either of you away if you want to accompany me, as long as you realize the danger. Lin, I think your sister is making the wiser choice."

"Maybe, but I have already made mine."

"Fine!" Mei Li stamped her foot. "Then I will go alone." She spun, took a single step, and stopped, gazing out over the vast sweep of the wilderness.

"You thinking you want what's left of the pork?" Zhang Sha asked. "It won't keep well without a ring to store it in, but I'll give you a haunch."

She didn't move, and Fushuai thought he saw the problem.

"You've never been on your own."

"That's not true." The denial was weak. "I've been many places on my own."

"But never outside of Ashen City, or without Gao Ligang's leave, or the instructions of a tutor."

Lin moved to stand in front of her, taking her hands. "You told the Living Blade that the purpose of cultivation was to earn honor, so that our name will be remembered through the generations. There is no better place to do that than with him."

Fushuai could not see Mei Li's face, but the tension in her shoulders was as clear as the turmoil in her spirit. "We will be killed."

"Then our spirits will be judged and returned to the wheel of reincarnation." He hadn't realized she was so devout, but her answer was utterly solemn. For many cultivators, reincarnation was an abstract idea to make commoners feel better about their petty lots in life. Unless one developed a nascent soul, of course.

"I don't want to be reborn. What are the chances I could ever be as beautiful again?"

"Our brother was chosen by a legend. We go to seek one of that ancient master's manuals now. Can you imagine what knowledge it might contain? What secrets? He was far behind us, and he reached foundation formation stage in a year. Don't you want that for yourself?"

Mei Li sighed, extricated her hands, and tied back her lustrous hair with a sash. Turning, she fixed Fushuai with a level stare.

"Fine. I will go with you. But only to protect my little sister. And only under the condition that you do not leave us too far behind to defend ourselves. If we are going to be fighting demons and foundation-level cultivators every other day, you need to share your techniques with us. You didn't get to where you are by carrying rocks. There has to be a trick to it, unless your master stuffed you full of pills, or you are a demonic cultivator yourself."

Zhang Sha scratched his chin. "No one said you could make conditions."

"I wasn't asking you."

Fushuai gestured for them to join him by the fire. "Help me cook, and I will tell you everything I know."

Millet was as suited to porridge as rice, though the result was grittier and carried a distinctly nutty flavor. He used the process to help describe the Void Stirring Method, though Mei Li complained that it would have been more straightforward to show them what he did with his qi first and skip any physical allegories. She was probably right, but there was comfort for him in imitating his master. She and Lin already had a cycling method common to their family, but Stirring was a precursor to Void Dilution, which he thought would be a suitable fit for a dream root. For a water and wood root, it might not be as effective, but he had no other methods to teach.

Zhang Sha watched them with half-lidded eyes. "How far is that manual of yours?"

"From the scale of the map, it could take us months to reach it."

"Fine by me. Now that we're at the same stage, we can work toward advancement together."

Fushuai had been watching his sisters practice as all three of them sat around the fire. His head snapped to the older cultivator at those words.

"I thought you were working to develop a core."

"I was. But I'm still in the early steps of foundation formation. Aside from avoiding a tribulation, my core transplant theory was my way of trying to skip a half dozen rungs of the ladder."

His mouth dropped open. "That's madness."

"Yes. It was."

After their battle in the temple, Fushuai knew Zhang Sha's spirit almost as well as his own. He hadn't recognized the signs of advancement that would be expected of one nearing core formation, but being far from that peak himself, he'd assumed it was ignorance that had prevented him from seeing what was there. If that wasn't the case, his victory was a little less preposterous.

"I should find the manual before I attempt to go much farther. Xiao Sheng may have planned for me to follow a particular method to approach core formation."

"Hah. I don't know your master, but from what you've told me and what I've observed, that old monster expected you to find the road on your own."

He wasn't wrong. Fushuai held out his hand.

"A thousand thanks, then. We shall advance together."

Zhang Sha clasped his wrist. "What are you thanking me for? There are no debts between us, remember?"

"So be it."

Bai Tu had disappeared shortly after they camped, and the fox chose that moment to return with a vole in its jaws. It looked between them, sniffed, and padded off to take its meal beside his youngest sister. The fox was two inches taller at the shoulder than it had been when they entered the Coughing Valley.