Kind Young Master [Progression Fantasy - Cultivation]

Much as the day before, Mah Goshung woke him with a hoof to the ribs.

It was becoming a pattern, and one he did not intend to grow fond of.

He rolled upright with a sharp intake of breath, already bracing for the chill that clung to his bare skin. Before going to sleep, he'd washed his clothes in the nearest stream, and they were hanging from tree branches outside the shrine.

Goshung watched him shake the ice off his tunic and dress. He was grateful that at least his Asura mentor wasn't going to force him to train in the nude. Not yet, anyway. He could imagine such a thing being incorporated into survival lessons if he made the devil wait too often.

Once he was clothed, the fabric even colder than the air against his skin, Goshung stalked away from the shrine, and Fushuai followed.

He expected more forest. More thorns. Another series of stinging corrections and bitter roots to break their fast. Instead, they passed beneath a tangle of bent pines and descended along a narrow deer trail until they reached a glen where the underbrush had been recently scorched away. The charred outlines of stumps ringed the edge. A faint haze still hung in the air, the scent of smoke and sap thick in his throat.

Here, in this hollow of cinders and ash, Goshung stopped. His hand shot out, and Fushuai was on his back, breath gone, the sky spinning.

It had not been a strike so much as a declaration. Open palm. Center of the chest. No preamble.

Fushuai gasped once, blinking.

Goshung stood over him, arms loose at his sides, waiting.

"You are not ready for weapons," he said, as if that fact had been confirmed by the force of gravity alone. "Until you can stand, fall, and move without snapping like a dry branch, you'll fight with your hands."

Fushuai nodded, lips pressed tight. He was not about to lie in the ash, a wilted scholar waiting to be dismissed.

He climbed back to his feet.

This was his chance, his first real chance, to demonstrate his potential. As a child, he'd been well ahead of his siblings in the basic forms. Not simply because he was the eldest: he'd shown real talent. Though the gaps in his training since were sure to hinder him, he intended to show that he was fertile ground for whatever teachings the Asura had to offer.

Fushuai circled slowly, slippers sifting through ashes. His breath was steady. His stance, one he remembered from an old training manual, was narrow, defensive, weight balanced between the balls of his feet.

Goshung didn't move, expecting his pupil to begin, so he stepped in low, led with his shoulder to close the distance, one hand poised to feint and the other to drive into Goshung's gut.

Goshung shifted, and something struck the side of Fushuai's neck. The world tilted. His shoulder hit the ground before he realized he'd been moved. Again, breath gone. Again, the sky was spinning.

"You drop your weight too early," Goshung said, crouching beside him. "Your feet are too close together. And your mind is in three places at once."

He coughed once, rolled to his side, and forced himself up.

"How do you know where my mind is?"

The Asura smirked.

He attacked again, more cautious this time, and was summarily swept. Attacked again, faster, and flatter. He was thrown. Tried to grapple, to lock, to feint. He was struck behind the ear with a flicked knuckle and tossed to the ground.

Goshung never used more force than necessary. Of course, that would still lead to bruises and cuts, but he wasn't going to put a fist through his student's chest. Fushuai knew that neither his body nor his skill would be sufficient to impress the devil. This wasn't a true fight, or even a spar. But he hoped that the sufficiency of his fundamentals could be proved through failure.

There was no rhythm to the lesson. No steady cadence of correction. Goshung spoke only when Fushuai was too stunned to respond.

"Too high."

"Too slow."

"Don't watch my feet. Watch the weight."

"Don't move like you're afraid to be ugly, pretty boy. This isn't a dance."

By the sixth fall, Fushuai's shoulder throbbed, and his elbow was bleeding. By the eighth, he no longer tried to rise quickly. He stood slow, measured, aware that he should be learning something, though he couldn't have said what.

Twenty or thirty falls in, he felt anger stirring. A warm pulse behind his eyes, a tightening in his jaw. The situation was absurd. This wasn't a lesson, it was an execution in stages. How was he meant to learn anything this way? Goshung was an Asura, a half-god warborn menace whose bones had been tempered to steel and whose blood howled for the hunt. Fighting him was like punching a mountain, or it would have been, if he could have landed a punch. The thought twisted in his gut, and he acted on it.

He threw himself forward recklessly, swinging wide and hard, knowing the blow wouldn't land, knowing it was open, but also, somewhere deep inside, believing Goshung wouldn't truly hurt him. Not too badly.

He was wrong.

The Asura caught his wrist, turned with him, and slammed him into the earth hard enough that a rib gave way with a sharp, sick pop. The world wavered. His face was in the dirt. Blood in his mouth.

Goshung stood over him, expression unreadable.

This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

"Are you thinking about quitting, pretty boy?" he asked in a low growl. "The path down the mountain is waiting for you."

Fushuai lay still for a moment, his cheek pressed to the cold dirt. Each inhale stung beneath his ribs, and he did not need to probe to know something had cracked. The pain was unmistakable.

His body rebirth meant nothing against this creature. He might as well have been a common farmer.

His anger was gone as quickly as it had come. That violent surge, it was something he'd learned to suppress almost a decade ago. As a boy, he'd loved fighting. That was before he'd realized what battle really meant, what cultivators really were.

Killers. Bloody, cruel, and implacable. Everything he did not want to become.

He forced himself to rise, teeth clenched against the movement. The world tilted briefly, then steadied.

The part of him that still wanted to shout, still wanted to throw himself forward on bruised legs and prove something, anything, had gone quiet.

So instead, he looked.

Goshung's stance was relaxed, but not careless. One leg slightly forward. Knees soft. Shoulders loose. He was ready to strike in any direction.

Fushuai stood slowly and adjusted his posture, lowering his center of gravity. He let his weight settle on his heels for a moment and inhaled once through his nose, deep into the gut, ignoring the protest of his ribs.

Then he tried again. Not to impress, just to get one thing right, knowing that he would fall.

He moved in with his guard high and steps shallow. Though he did not see Goshung's strike, Fushuai fell with the movement instead of against it. He rolled with the fall and came up quickly.

The next exchange, he spun with the blow but remained upright. A third pass, and Goshung's hoof swept out. He caught it an instant too late and went down hard.

Still, something had shifted.

He stopped bracing for the pain. Accepted that it would come, and shaped himself around it. He moved with the impact instead of resisting it. His thoughts slowed as his body remembered how to fall.

That was as far as he got.

Reforged body or not, the cracked rib burned with every breath. Each time he twisted to deflect or retreat, the pain flared, and it was worse when he dropped.

Goshung did not slow. Did not soften.

Instinct could not surface through pain. Discipline could not grow where every motion screamed. Fushuai knew the shape of progress now, but could not reach it.

Sweat slicked his back, and his tunic clung to his ribs. Blood pulsed dully in his ears, and he had long since stopped trying to wipe the dirt from his face.

Goshung circled him lazily, a dog with no need to chase.

"You fight like a bored courtesan," the Asura said, tone casual. "All flinch and fancy footing. You sure you're not a third daughter in disguise?"

Fushuai didn't respond.

Goshung snorted. "Or maybe you just think bruises are beneath you. Let the peasants get broken bones, is that it? Little lord too good for gravel in his teeth?"

The insults kept coming, but they did not stir his anger. These were tamer words than he had received from the tongues of his siblings, and kinder than the silent judgment of his father. He reacted to them just as he had learned to react to the abuse he'd faced from his family, allowing it to wash over him without reaching inside.

Goshung flashed to one side, sweeping low, and Fushuai moved instinctively, coming off the ground just as the Asura's hoof passed beneath him, and came down lightly.

Goshung's monstrous mouth cracked open in a grin.

"You felt the intent? Eh?"

Fushuai stood straighter, chest heaving.

"I'm not sure what I felt." There hadn't been time to feel, let alone think. The momentary success had occurred of its own accord.

"Doesn't matter," Goshung said, circling again. "If you did it once, you can do it twice."

He didn't wait for agreement, and Fushuai did not dodge the next blow. Or the next.

And so it went.

They trained until the sun had risen high enough to bleach the smoke from the air, until the canopy was dry and bruises were layered over bruises. Fushuai had not avoided even one more strike, but he moved better, fell cleaner, rose faster.

When they paused to rest, Fushuai sat on a charred log on the edge of the glen, lip split, ribs aching, and breath steady.

It had taken effort to make it so. Each inhale was glass shards shifting, sharp and slow, but he controlled it. Breathed in through the nose, deep into the belly. Exhaled without sound.

Goshung lounged in the grass beside him, looking up through the forest canopy.

"You come from a cultivator family in an ignorant backwater. Those types know just enough to think they know everything. What did your father teach you about aura, about intent?"

"Little enough," Fushuai said, allowing the insult to his family to slide off of him. To Goshung, his father, a mere core cultivator, was nothing. "Most of what I learned was from study in the ancestral library. Aura is the spiritual pressure of a sacred artist, and intent, or killing intent, is that pressure honed into a knife."

Goshung grunted. "Pretty words, and near enough to truth for a novice. Do you know what today is really about?"

"I believe so," Fushuai had considered it the moment he was free of the danger of renewed assault. "The first step of the qi refinement is learning to reliably sense spiritual energy. You are projecting your intent, or a thread of it, before you strike. What we are doing is less about combat technique than teaching me to open my senses to that thread."

The Asura raised himself onto his elbow, watching his student with fresh interest.

"The baboons chatter for days, and some days, that chatter contains wisdom. Eh?"

"A thousand thanks." Though it was a backhanded compliment at best, he felt a stirring of pride. If Goshung had truly unveiled his aura, it would have crushed him on the spot. Whatever he was doing was more subtle than that, and it led to another question.

"Wouldn't a cultivator hide his intent to prevent his opponent from reading him?"

"They do, along with projecting false intent to muddy the waters. Hiding is hiding. If you have better eyes than they have camouflage, then the advantage is yours, and thinking they are disguised will make them overconfident."

Fushuai frowned. The manuals he had read had spoken of using spiritual sense to examine and predict an opponent's qi techniques, not their every movement. "Nothing I have seen in our library suggested such a thing was possible."

"Ignorant backwater." Goshung rose as smoothly as a shadow. "Your people rush through every step and stage without mastery and end their journey almost as soon as it's begun. Now, it's time for you to tell me everything you know about flowers and roots."

They returned to the forest, and Fushuai was expected to identify every plant that had been pointed out to him the day before. He expected to disappoint. Goshung's teaching method was abrupt, to say the least. Leaves pressed to his nose in passing, then discarded, a quick motion of the hands accompanied by a muttered phrase about avoiding the variety with red veins.

As they walked, Fushuai pointed to every leaf, shrub, and herb that he could recall having seen. One by one, he named them.

Correctly.

He had always had a good mind for facts. Part of the reason he'd spent so much time in the Gao library was that he retained much of what he read, and absorbing the knowledge was as satisfying as a warm meal. Yesterday, however, had been very different than a comfortable afternoon spent among the scrolls. He had not thought the knowledge would be retained, but it had.

Goshung offered no words of praise. The only confirmation that Fushuai had done well was that the devil shared his lunch with him. Strips of dried meat, tougher than bark and only mildly more flavorful, they were difficult to swallow.

"What is this?" Fushuai asked.

"Qilin," Goshung said casually. "Good for digestion."

"Qilin?" The meat in his hand seemed very heavy now. He could not have heard his mentor correctly. If he was telling the truth, this jerky had come from a divine beast. Qilin were halfway between horse and dragon, wise, noble, and powerful. Killing one was a crime against the Golden Empire, if you could kill one.

"Are you deaf? Finish it. Your master will want to see you back before nightfall."

Fushuai looked at what he had left, barely a finger of meat. The crime had been committed already, and he had tasted it. Better to be rid of the evidence.