Chương 9: Cultivation

Mingxuan ran. The silver grass lashed at his knees, and with every breath he drew in scorched air. The tug in his chest had abandoned all pretence of gentleness. It pulled at him now with the insistence of a fisherman's line, dragging him over ridges and shallow creeks, past cypress stands that blurred to dark streaks in his peripheral vision. He imagined that if he jumped, it would pull him through the air and to his destination.

He could not help but think of the duel's opening moments, jade lightning hurled against crimson storm, the fundamental laws of sky and earth rewritten by sheer force of will. He tried to picture the fallen cultivator. Surely they would be magnificent even in death: robes that shimmered with power, skin like polished jade, bearing that spoke of generations of refinement. But excitement tangled his speculation into knots, and the questions multiplied faster than he could sort them. Had they fought for honour?

For revenge? The villagers told stories of ancient heroes who would shed blood over the slightest provocation, unable to bear even the smallest loss of face. Relics, resources, insults, it did not matter. A stolen scripture could ignite feuds that burned for generations. Whatever had brought two such powers into collision above Seventh Stone, Mingxuan decided, mattered far less than the overwhelming torrent of Death that flooded toward him from where the cultivator had fallen.

A stand of birch trees loomed ahead, their trunks pale as bone beneath the grey sky. Mingxuan slipped between them, his feet scarcely touching the moss. The tug yanked left, and he followed, dodging exposed roots with grace that years of Death Qi refinement had granted him. When the birches thinned, a meadow opened before him. The breeze carried the copper tang of raw Qi discharge, sharp enough to make his eyes water.

Mingxuan glimpsed the duel's path scored across the sky: ragged tears where clouds still bled pale lightning. A final ridge rose ahead, crowned with wind-shorn pines. He pushed harder, ignoring the ache in his lungs and the hammer of his heart. Each stride shortened the pull in his chest until it thrummed, ready to snap. The ridge broke beneath his boots, and the world fell away into ruin. Mingxuan dropped to a crouch behind a toppled pine and let his eyes drink in the scene below.

The impact crater opened like a wound in the earth. Soil had been flung outward in a perfect circle, trees splintered at the lip like broken bones. Boulders had been pulverized to gravel. Wisps of jade and crimson still drifted upward from the churned dust, evaporating before they could settle. Shards of what must have been a weapon glinted among the debris, edge fragments that hummed with spent power. A stray plume of arcane light fizzled as he watched, unravelling into sparks that died before reaching the earth.

The tug in his chest howled. He scanned the depression, seeking the heart of that call. Halfway down the slope, where the rubble cleared to reveal cracked stone, a man lay pinned in a shallow gouge. His limbs were twisted at grotesque angles. Cobalt silk robes embroidered with pale clouds hung in tatters, blackened and torn. Long black hair fanned across shattered shale. Bruises bloomed along his ribs in shades of purple and green. Bone jutted through his forearm, white against the dirt and blood.

But worst of all was the wound at his navel. A fist-sized void gaped where flesh and muscle should have dwelt. The edges were charred black, burned meat that still smoked faintly in the grey light. Even from this distance, Mingxuan could see the way Death Qi pooled there, dense and dark and terrible. Even broken, the cultivator looked as though he had been carved from myth. High cheekbones caught the failing light.

Lashes dusted with something that might have been frost lay against skin that still held a porcelain perfection despite the bruising. His hands, smooth and uncallused in ways that spoke of a lifetime spent wielding power rather than ploughs, rested limp against the stone. Compared to the rough-hewn frames of the villagers Mingxuan had grown up among, this man looked like a statue chipped from heaven's quarry and cast down to earth. A whisper of envy mingled with his awe.

Since the battlefield of his birth, Mingxuan had not stood within arm's reach of cultivation made manifest. Here lay everything he had gleaned only through fragmentary memories and folk tales, given flesh and form. Yet even gods, it seemed, could be broken. He crept closer, noting the way Qi pooled in the crater. It was thick enough to taste. Every inhale flooded his channels, threatening to spill over into something he could not control.

He steadied his breathing, reminding himself of lessons learned on the Day of Death. One did not drink from a flood. One sipped, carefully, and built channels to contain what came. The man's eyelids fluttered. Pale eyes flecked with silver focused on Mingxuan's face. There was no malice in that gaze. His lips, chapped and streaked with blood, moved soundlessly for a moment before he managed to summon his voice.

"Boy..." The word rasped out, thin as parchment being torn.

"Over here... a moment." The sound snapped Mingxuan free from his reverie. He slid down the remaining gravel, then halted two arm's lengths away. Dying or not, a cultivator could turn lethal out of reflex, from what little he had seen. He bowed low, palms open in a gesture he hoped would be recognized as peaceful.

"May I hold your hand?" The request sounded absurd even to his own ears, yet the ritual of bedside comfort had anchored his nerves through countless vigils. Perhaps it would serve him here as well. A dry chuckle rattled from the man's shuddering chest.

"Polite child... that's new." He managed a weak smile before pain bent it into a grimace. A cough wracked him, forcing crimson bubbles between clenched teeth.

"Touch, if you wish. My core's gone. Nothing left to harm you with." Mingxuan edged forward, shuffling on his knees. He reached out slowly, half-expecting the man to recoil or lash out in delirium. But the cultivator only lay still, watching him with those pale, fever-bright eyes. When Mingxuan's fingers closed around the man's wrist, he felt warmth pulsing beneath the skin. It mingled strangely with the frigid river of Death Qi that poured through the void wound.

"I am Mingxuan," he said, keeping his voice steady though his heart shook within his ribs.

"How shall I call you?"

"Liu Wen." The answer came on a breath.

"Inner disciple... Cerulean Sky Sect." Mingxuan repeated the name under his breath, committing it to memory with the same reverence he gave to all who approached their ending. It was not a sect he had heard of before, but then again, his knowledge of the cultivation world extended to precisely one group, and they were likely all dead. His gaze kept returning to the ruin yawning below the man's ribs despite his best efforts to look away. The wound was a negative sun. All light seemed to fall into it and die.

Torn flesh curled inward like petals closing for the night, edges cauterized yet still weeping beads of dark ichor that hissed when they touched the shattered stone. In the hollow where organs should have nested, nothing remained but swirling shadows. Death Qi condensed there so densely it had almost become liquid, spiralling in lazy vanes of smoky silver that glinted violet whenever they lapped against the charred rim.

Mingxuan could see strands of half-melted tissue, filaments that had once ferried living power through the body now wilted and blackened. It was horrid. Yet he could not look away. Death Qi drifted upward from the wound in thin, shimmering sheets. With each breath, Mingxuan tasted its metallic sweetness. He felt it hum along his bones in sympathetic vibration. The wound was both obituary and invitation, proof of how violently life could be uprooted and how fiercely that ending could sing.

Shame pricked at his fascination, but wonder won out. Some part of him was already cataloguing the angles, the colour shifts, the way the mist coiled in sympathy with the dying man's pulse.

"Your enemy did this?" Mingxuan asked.

"Fuchsia Thorn dog," Liu Wen said after a long breath, and even in his weakness he took the time to spit a glob of blood to the side, as though he could not countenance the taste of that name in his mouth.

"Heretic bastard tore out my dantian. Won't let it mend. I'm practically a corpse already." He winced as he shifted, letting out a wretched, rattling breath. Somehow the sound seemed to amuse him. A smile spread across his lips, even as agony still twisted the skin around his eyes. Mingxuan tightened his grip around the man's hand, offering what comfort touch could provide.

"Would you tell me what happened, senior?"

"Rival sect's vendetta." His voice was barely strong enough to carry across the space between them.

"Last spring, our Cerulean Sky scouts discovered a fresh spirit-vein. So pure it could have birthed ten saints, they said. The moment our flags were planted, Fuchsia Thorn came screaming about ancestral rights. Words failed. Steel answered." His eyes followed the shredded clouds overhead, as though replaying each stroke of the battle in his mind.

"My senior brother cut down their heir. They laid traps after that. Shadow puppets, mirrored terrain, curses stitched from hatred itself. I walked into one alone today. Thought my speed could outpace their subtlety." A bitter laugh scraped free from his throat.

"Foolish. Metal Qi smothers wind. Overconfidence ground my wings to dust." Mingxuan listened, his throat tight with wonder and dread. The world these words described was vaster and more terrible than anything Seventh Stone had shown him.

"Have you heard," he asked carefully, "of Cloud-Stone Peak?" Liu's brow furrowed through the pain.

"Cloud-Stone... yes. Remote stronghold near the Jade Phoenix border. Vanished a few years ago. Infinite Blade Palace purged them, if rumours carry truth. They called it righteous cleansing, but those bastards are half a step from heresy themselves. Everyone knows it."

"Were they evil? Cloud-Stone, I mean." Liu snorted softly.

"In these wars, villainy is decided by the survivor. Let scribes with safe hands decide who wore halos. I've seen monks butcher infants and heretics shelter orphans. Truth stains whatever cloth wraps it." Silence stretched between them. Mingxuan's mind slipped back to that first crimson morning of this life without his permission: clouds the colour of butchered sky; sword light arcing overhead like falling stars; demons tearing banners into confetti while cultivators wove spells with their dying breaths.

He remembered the tang of Death Qi so thick it had clung to his newborn lungs. He remembered his own infant palm wrapped around his mother's failing fingers, how her last smile had been equal parts apology and benediction. Even now he could feel the battlefield's heat against his skin, smell the burning that had carpeted the corpse-strewn earth. A new thought intruded: Had his clan survived, what halls might have housed his childhood? He pictured soaring pagodas cut from jade.

Libraries heaving with annotated scrolls, their shelves heavy with the accumulated wisdom of generations. Elders who would have guided his river into grand canals instead of leaving him to carve footpaths alone through the dark. Perhaps he would already stand on the threshold of something greater, rather than groping blindly with only hints of method to guide him. The more he measured that lost inheritance, the heavier the void felt in his chest. Infinite Blade Palace had stolen lifetimes worth of mastery from him.

It was a debt measured in decades denied, in lessons never taught, in lullabies that would never be sung. Was it right to balance such an account with blood? His philosophy balked at the thought. Death should arrive on its own terms, not arranged. Yet the arithmetic of loss whispered that returning a blade for a blade could set the cosmic scales back to balance. He stared at Liu Wen's ragged chest, his breath hitching. Murder felt distant and abstract, something that belonged to other people in other stories.

But debt felt immediate. If vengeance meant tipping the pendulum back to the centre, perhaps it was restoring equilibrium rather than theft. The ember of retribution flared in his chest. Liu's focus sharpened despite the fog of pain.

"You're no ordinary village sprout," he whispered.

"Tell me: what stage sits beneath that pallid skin?"

"Stage?" Mingxuan blinked.

"Your stage of cultivation, boy." Well, the man had evidently sussed out that he was a cultivator. There seemed little point in denying it, not in these circumstances. Still, he felt the need to ask: "How did you know?" The cultivator chuckled until pain bent him double.

"Complexion pale as moonlight. Dark hair streaked with white." He inhaled with obvious difficulty, grimacing.

"Even gutted, my senses aren't yet worthless. Metal mutes my element, not my intuition." Ah. That would make sense. Beneath the blood and bruising, Liu's own skin was rather pale. Mingxuan supposed it must be a quirk of cultivation, this bleaching of natural colour.

"I know no formal ranks," he admitted.

"What do you mean, senior?" A ghost of surprise crossed Liu's bruised features.

"You cultivate yet know not the staircase you climb? The Heavens amuse themselves." He coughed, spat red onto the stones beside him.

"Listen well, child. Cultivation is a tower of seven lanterns, each lit brighter than the last." He paused to gather his strength, and Mingxuan waited with the patience he had learned at a hundred deathbeds.

"First is Qi Gathering," Liu continued at last.

"You sip your element gently, building with care and attention. Fill your meridians until they flow true." His cracked fingers traced an invisible lattice over his chest, mapping pathways Mingxuan could not see but recognised from his own explorations.

"Second, Foundation Building. You mortar those channels with will. Widen them. Carve reservoirs. The body reforges itself." This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience. Mingxuan thought of the ginkgo meadow and the Day of Death, when he had polished his channels until they gleamed. He nodded slowly.

"Third, Core Formation." Liu's voice was threading thin now, each word an effort.

"All gathered Qi spun into a golden star inside the lower dantian. That core sings. It fuels miracles with the Qi it generates from nothing." He tapped the yawning hole in his belly with shaky amusement.

"I stand close to the peak of Core Formation. Or stood, I suppose. Past tense now. The enemy tore mine away. The humiliation of it!" He trembled in place for a moment, glaring up at the grey sky as though it had personally wronged him. He did not continue until Mingxuan squeezed his hand.

"Fourth," Liu said, drawing a rattling breath.

"You mould a new being within your core. The Nascent Soul. A miniature you, pure Qi and intent, sheltering in the core's heart like a child in the womb." His eyes glimmered.

"I hadn't figured out how to do it yet. But I was close. So close..." The bitterness in those words seemed to come deep from his heart.

"Fifth, the rivers flood. Qi pours outward. The final limitations of mortality are cut away. Most call it Soul Severing." He paused, wheezing.

"I know of only three cultivators throughout the realm who have reached it. Couldn't hope to tell you the details." Mingxuan leaned closer, unwilling to miss a single word.

"Sixth... I know only the name they whisper, for I am too far from it to understand: Transcendence. You become one with your element. Or so I've heard. The seventh has too many names, more legends than even the greatest scribe can write down. Few who understand it truly throughout all of history..." His voice dropped to a whisper.

"It is Immortality. The ultimate goal of every cultivator." A humorless chuckle escaped him.

"I'm going to assume you don't stand above me." Heat crept up Mingxuan's neck. He thought of his first day in this life, when he had breathed in Death Qi without knowing what it was and channelled it purely on instinct. He thought of the years spent mapping the pathways that strange energy travelled through his body. He thought of the day of bone-white skies, when he had refined himself so thoroughly that his body could tolerate nothing but Death.

"I have formed my foundation, if I understand correctly." Liu stared at him. For a long moment, he said nothing at all. Then: "And you have done so... without any guidance? Hiding out in the countryside with no hidden master to guide you?" Mingxuan nodded.

"Quite the prodigy." Liu's eyes had taken on a strange light, something between admiration and disbelief.

"How old are you?"

"I have seen nine summers." Liu continued to stare. Then, with great effort, he said: "I see. A lost son of Cloud-Stone Peak, I take it?" Mingxuan sought to steer the conversation away from secrets.

"These skies," he said, gesturing upward with his free hand.

"How do they grant or steal strength?" Liu chuckled at the blatant deflection, his eyelids fluttering, but he seemed willing to teach regardless.

"Listen, fledgling. First there are the Five Great Elements: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water. Everything is of them, to different degrees. The five interact with each other in myriad ways, generative or destructive." He took a deep, rattling breath. A hacking cough shook his chest. It sounded halfway to a laugh.

"Perhaps the abridged version, eh?" The air between them was heavy with Death Qi. Mingxuan could feel it pressing against his skin. He nodded slowly.

"Wood feeds Fire," Liu recited, taking on the cadence of something long-memorized.

"Fire produces Earth. Earth bears Metal. Metal purifies Water. Water nourishes Wood. Conversely: Wood depletes Earth, Earth obstructs Water, Water extinguishes Fire, Fire melts Metal, Metal carves Wood." Mingxuan's brow furrowed as he tried to hold all the relationships in his mind at once. Liu must have seen his confusion, because he gave another painful-sounding chuckle.

"It doesn't make perfect sense, does it? It doesn't matter. Too long an explanation, going into all of them. Just remember: these are the words we lowly earthly beings use to try and describe phenomena we observe in nature around us. Especially in Qi." He paused to catch his breath, and when he spoke again his voice had grown even weaker.

"When the Cycle paints the sky blue and floods the world with Water Qi, the world's greatest Fire cultivator would have trouble against a Water cultivator who has just taken their first step into Foundation Building. Do you understand?"

"Yes, senior," Mingxuan said slowly. The furrow between his brows did not loosen, though.

"And the other elements? Are they all made up of these great five?"

"Everything is," Liu agreed with a small nod. His eyes were struggling to stay open now, and his breaths were growing more shallow with each passing moment. There was so much Mingxuan wanted to know. He did not know what to ask first. Indecision froze him, his mouth moving uselessly, too many words clogged in his throat to force any single one free. Luckily, Liu continued on his own.

"When your Qi attunement matches the sky, every mote of Qi drawn is ten times more potent. Techniques cost a fraction of their usual toll. Conversely, a contrary sky claws at your core, resisting every circulation." He tapped the crater dust beside him with one trembling finger.

"Today, under this grey, my wind is smoke. Worthless." A pause. Then, with visible effort: "Tell me, boy. Which breath favours you? Wood's green hymn? Fire's crimson roar?" He studied Mingxuan's face with those feverish eyes.

"Hm. No. You strike me as something more... unique." Hesitation iced Mingxuan's next inhale. The truth shivered loose before he could stop it.

"Death," he whispered, and frost seemed to puff white between their faces. Liu's brows twitched. Then laughter ripped ragged from his torn lungs, genuine amusement mixed with something darker.

"Irony at the end... a heretic tending my grave." Mingxuan leaned back slightly, confusion and wariness warring in his chest.

"Heretic?" A spasm wracked Liu's frame, forcing a rattle through his ribs. When he could speak again, his voice held an edge it had not possessed before.

"It doesn't get much more heretical than cultivating Death, boy. If I weren't a crippled wreck on death's door, I'd carve you open here and now. Would be a mercy for the world." He let out a heavy sigh, his expression torn between revulsion and regret.

"But look at me. Wings clipped, sword silent. Fate likes a punchline." The words took Mingxuan off guard. He had known, of course, that his path would not be understood. But hearing it stated so baldly, with such casual certainty of his wrongness, hollowed something out in his chest. His fingers flexed around Liu's hand.

"I don't steal life," he said quietly yet firmly.

"I gather the thread when it snaps of its own accord. I stand witness so no one dies alone." Liu barked a bitter laugh that ended in a cough.

"So said the Pale Censor of the Northern Waste. You know how many lives he 'witnessed'? Entire regions turned to shrines of bone. He began as a gentle soul, or so the scrolls claim. But power demanded an ever-greater harvest." He gestured weakly toward the void in his belly.

"There's only one reliable way to get Death Qi, isn't there? Will you wait patiently for elders to die of natural causes forever? Or will impatience eventually tempt you into hastening things along?" Mingxuan shook his head, snow-streaked hair catching the grey light.

"They never understood death at all. If they had, they would know it isn't prey to be hunted but a garden to be tended. Their sin was greed, not the Qi itself."

"Pretty words," Liu murmured, his voice fading.

"Orthodox sects say the whole point of cultivation is to chase immortality. To conquer death, not embrace it. You'll never meet a cultivator who accepts your path." He paused, managing a wan smile.

"Well. Unless they also have their cultivation crippled, like me." Mingxuan's brows knit together.

"Intent sculpts Qi," he pressed, needing Liu to understand even if he could not approve.

"A hammer can be used to murder a man, but it can also build shelter. If I wield Death to ease suffering, am I still a demon?"

"It won't matter," Liu whispered, and resignation sank deeper into his tone.

"To them, tool and wielder blur together. Fear scribes the verdict before evidence ever steps forth." Mingxuan swallowed against the tightness in his throat, sensing the weight of truth in those words.

"Then I will prove there is nothing to fear. Not from me, and not from Her." Liu managed a thin smile, but he would not meet Mingxuan's eyes when he gave it.

"Ambitious ghostling." He wheezed, pain carving deeper lines into his face. His gaze unfocused, drifting toward the metal-grey sky above them. When he spoke again, his voice had dropped to barely a whisper.

"Then... one more request. The Fuchsia Thorn Sect… don't warp your moral compass just to sate my hatred. But if you do find yourself in their neck of the woods, and happen to be hungering for some murder..." A weak, bloody smile.

"My spirit would appreciate it." Uncertainty coiled through Mingxuan's gut. The request sat wrong with him, a seed of violence he was not certain he wanted to plant. But he met the dying man's eyes and found himself nodding.

"I will weigh their deeds with clear sight," he said carefully.

"If retribution balances the scale, they shall meet it." Relief softened some of the tension in Liu's broken frame.

"Fair," he murmured, eyelids drooping.

"Fair indeed." The sun slid behind a serrated ridge. The last light turned the crater's raw edges to charcoal strokes, tinting the crater in shades of grey and black. Mingxuan felt the hush gathering around them, heavy and anticipatory, like theatre curtains about to fall. Liu's breaths were thinning, each one weaker than the last. Mingxuan squeezed the swordsman's hand and leaned closer.

"Tell me something you love," he urged in a low murmur, hoping to anchor the man's fading spark with memory.

"Let me carry it forward."

"Love?" Liu's smile thinned. For a moment, strength returned to his voice.

"Start small, then. Back alleys, the smell of scallion buns crisping on braziers. I was a skinny orphan, living on theft and luck." His eyes grew distant.

"One night I snatched a bun and bumped into a mysterious robed stranger. Thought I'd lose my hand for the theft. He only laughed. Bought me three more. Said a belly fed on fear grows crooked." Mingxuan nodded, committing the scene to memory. The scent of cooking dough. The drizzle. The unexpected kindness of a stranger.

"He taught me wind sutras," Liu continued, words coming faster now as though a dam had broken.

"Made me trace them in the sand until my fingers bled. The first time I rode a windblade I screamed high enough to scare cranes off a lake." He chuckled, breath catching.

"Best sound I ever made." Mingxuan's own heartbeat thudded in his ribs. He found himself smiling despite the sorrow.

"And after?"

"After?" Liu's voice turned wistful. The words began to tumble out, faster and less coherent than before. The thrill of inner court tournaments. An elder's proud nod when he cleaved boulders into dust. The roar of fellow outer disciples cheering his promotion to inner disciple. Memories spilled forth without order or sense: city festivals where lanterns filled the sky like stars, scripture debates that lasted until dawn, moonlit duels atop drifting platforms, and regrets he could not mend.

Mingxuan listened to each fragment, weaving them into his heart where he kept all the stories of the dying. The tempo slowed. Liu's voice dwindled to whispers that Mingxuan had to strain to hear. He felt the man's pulse slip from faltering drumbeat to shiver beneath his fingers. Each tremor sent fresh Death Qi pooling behind the torn dantian, pressure building like water against a dam. The hand in his grip slackened. It always did, at this point. Mingxuan had learned to recognize the moment. Liu exhaled once.

Twice. The dam burst. Qi roared into Mingxuan with a tidal force that stole his breath. It was scorching and utterly sublime. He braced himself, feeling his channels flare incandescent with the flood. It was more power than he had ever held at once, more than the Day of Death, more than he had imagined a single human death could contain. His mind flared open involuntarily.

Thousands of scenes collided within the blink of an eye: a starving street rat snatching scallion buns, a stranger's laugh sparking hope where none had existed, paper lanterns floating on still water, wind scriptures written in sand, blades singing through cedar crowns, tournaments on floating jade platforms, peach blossoms hiding first love, storm-veins roaring with blue lightning.

All of it stacked, repeated, rewound, overlaid until alley stench bled into orchard perfume and sword cheers dissolved into wine-soaked laughter. A lifetime compressed into a single deafening chord. Mingxuan staggered beneath the onslaught. He was desperate to catalogue every shard, to preserve what Liu had entrusted to him. But the memories poured faster than he could organize them. They overflowed shelves he had not yet built in his mind. Emotions that were not his own crashed through his consciousness.

He felt ribs snap on impact—Liu's ribs, in the moment of the duel's ending. He felt the hollow agony of a stolen core even as joy still echoed somewhere deeper, the contradictions existing simultaneously in a way that made no sense. Dizzy, he dragged breath after breath into his lungs. He forced the river into ordered channels, weaving hastily wrought nets of will around the brightest fragments so they would not vanish when the flood receded. It was like trying to catch a waterfall in a teacup.

With a shudder, he clamped down. He dammed the torrent behind a wall of disciplined silence, the same technique he had developed for cycling Qi through his soul. The memories settled, leaving only soft ripples of sword light and peach scent drifting through his thoughts. Sweat cooled on his neck. Liu Wen's life lay safely archived within him, but Mingxuan knew he would need to open those pages one at a time. For now, he simply exhaled. His spine ached from the effort.

He let the conquered stillness cradle both the knowledge he had gained and the reverence he owed. As the immediate rush subsided, Liu's teachings began to unfurl in his mind with more clarity. Diagrams of meridians appeared as though drawn by an invisible brush. The location and function of the dantian. The crucial acupoints that governed Qi flow. Methods to cycle energy through the eight extraordinary vessels. Warnings about heart devils, those demons of doubt and fear that could corrupt a cultivator from within.

The dangers of backlash when techniques failed. The horror of Qi deviation, when power turned inward and consumed its wielder. But Mingxuan found himself more interested in the darker knowledge buried within Liu's memories. Death cultivator treatises that had been cited by Liu's teachers as abominations to be avoided at all costs. Techniques for corpse forging, soul branding, blood furnace refineries. Names that haunted sect annals like curses: the Silent River King, the Bone Orchard Matriarch.

Legends of entire provinces harvested overnight, skies turned bone-white for months on end. Liu's teachers had drilled into him the certainty that Death Qi devoured its wielder last, consuming everything they were until nothing remained but hunger. Mingxuan folded these warnings into his resolve like steel being folded into a blade. I harvest, not steal, he told himself. There is a difference. There must be. Night had claimed the sky by the time he surfaced fully from the flood of a dead man's memories.

Stars pricked the darkness overhead. A faint silver shimmer pooled at the crater's rim, catching his attention. It held no clear form. Only the suggestion of a figure, blurred like the nimbus around the moon. The air cooled suddenly, carrying with it the scent of damp stone and something that made his heart ache with recognition. Mingxuan sensed rather than saw a hand extend toward Liu Wen's spirit. The cultivator's essence had risen from his corpse, newly freed and flickering.

Outline touched outline in silent recognition. Then both shapes thinned, dissolving into mist that the wind carried away. Mingxuan's heartbeat slowed. The stillness drew a long, quiet breath around him, and he found himself bowing his head in acknowledgment of what he had witnessed. The work of the woman he sought, performed without fanfare or announcement. She had been here. Had stood perhaps an arm's length away.

And he had not been able to see her clearly, had not been able to speak or reach out or do anything but watch as she performed her duty and departed. The frustration of it burned in his chest alongside the wonder. The river of Death Qi inside him subsided into a calmer, deeper channel. He could feel the difference immediately: his foundation had strengthened. He had stepped closer to his distant aim. Yet the horizon still stretched beyond sight, impossibly far.

Liu's parting memories murmured of pagoda libraries filled with scrolls, of spirit-vein mountains where Qi flowed like water, of manuals waiting in hidden halls. To reach higher, he would need them all. He would need resources and knowledge and time. Most of all, he would need to survive in a world that considered his very existence heretical. Mingxuan gathered his satchel with movements that felt strangely mechanical.

His body was operating on a level separate from his thoughts, going through familiar motions while his mind churned. He bowed to the empty space where Thanara had stood, the gesture feeling inadequate but necessary. Then he turned his attention to the more practical matter of Liu Wen's corpse. The man deserved a proper burial. Something more than the hasty disposal that might be given to an enemy or a stranger. The kind of careful interment that honoured a life fully lived.

Mingxuan had learned the importance of such things through years of vigil-keeping. The dead might be past caring, but the living carried the weight of how endings were handled. It shaped them, for good or ill. He worked through the night, moving stone and earth with his bare hands. The labour helped ground him, gave him something concrete to focus on while Liu's memories continued to settle in the back of his mind.

By the time the first grey light touched the eastern sky, Liu Wen's body rested in a cairn of stone, marked and honoured as best a nine-year-old boy working alone could manage. Mingxuan stood before the cairn as dawn broke, his hands hanging at his sides, and found that he had no words adequate to the moment. So he simply bowed one final time, deeper than before, and turned toward home.