Chương 104: Companion Bonds

As soon as training had ended, I went straight to the library and found one of the quieter tables tucked behind a row of tall shelves where no one would bother me, and six hours later, I was surrounded by books.

"Understanding the Immortal Soul."

"Companion Bonds Through the Ages."

"A Modern Analysis of Ancient Soul Theory." There were more than this, they were stacked in piles that had started neat but were no longer that. My eyes were burning from reading, and I had almost nothing to show for it.

"This is useless," I muttered, closing a tome I had just spent an hour working through. It had spent three hundred pages debating whether souls were made of pure spirit energy or were manifestations of consciousness, and it had reached no conclusion.

"How are there this many books about souls and this little actual information?"

"You're reading the philosophical texts," Azure said.

"Cultivation philosophy tends to go sideways fast. Everyone has an interpretation and nobody agrees." I picked up another thick volume and squinted at it.

"This one says souls are fragments of the universal dao that broke off when reality was formed. The next one says they're crystallized intent from countless reincarnations. And this one…" I tilted the page toward the light, "I think it's saying souls don't exist and we're all just very compressed qi."

"Technically all of those could be true at the same time," Azure mused.

"Or none of them. Even immortal realm cultivators argue about this stuff." I set the confusing one aside and pulled the inner world theory text closer instead, this one had been more useful.

"Azure, listen to this." I found the passage I'd marked.

"Beings that form soul bonds with cultivators can actually live inside their partner's inner world. It's not like storing items in a ring, Qi Condensation cultivators can't normally bring physical things into their inner world at all, but soul bonds are different because the bond ties their actual existence to the cultivator's. If they die physically, as long as the cultivator lives, they'll reform inside the inner world." Azure was quiet for a moment.

"You're saying we might have a way to bring back the vine."

"That's exactly what I'm saying." I leaned forward.

"But the next question is whether it could actually survive in my inner world. The environment there isn't exactly comfortable."

"No, it isn't."

"The book covers that too though." I flipped forward a few pages.

"Once the bond forms, the companion exists more as a spiritual presence than a physical one when they're inside the inner world. They don't need the same kind of conditions a real plant would. The bond creates its own protective space for them."

"So we could form the bond in the Two Suns world," Azure said slowly, "and bring it back here."

"Yeah, its body, its soul, everything." I closed the book.

"That's the theory anyway."

"We should figure out what kind of bond would actually work since there are different types," Azure said, drawing my attention to the second pile I'd barely touched.

"Three main ones from what I can find." I spread my notes out.

"Master-servant bonds, companion bonds, and dual cultivation bonds." I paused.

"We're ignoring the third one."

"I didn't say anything."

"You were thinking it."

"I was thinking nothing of the sort." I moved on.

"Master-servant is the most common. One soul dominant, the other subordinate. You can draw on the servant's power, issue commands, share senses sometimes. Useful for spirit beasts people want to control." I frowned at my notes.

"It doesn't sit right with me though. The vine tried to protect me. It gave everything it had. Treating it like something to command after that feels wrong."

"Companion bonds then," Azure said.

"Mutual, equal, chosen by both parties. Like Liu Chen and Rocky."

"The problem is they're harder to form. You can force a master-servant bond if you're powerful enough. Companion bonds need both parties to actually want it and typically both need some form of spiritual energy." I set the notes down and stared at the ceiling for a moment.

"The vine doesn't have qi. It runs on whatever the Two Suns world uses. All these texts assume both sides are working with the same system."

"Does it actually matter?" Azure asked.

"Souls seem to exist above any particular cultivation system. Your soul isn't from this world and it functions fine." If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

"That's what I keep coming back to." I tapped the table.

"Maybe the qi is just the tool you use to build the connection, not the connection itself, like the bridge matters, but what the bridge is made from doesn't."

"A reasonable way to look at it," Azure agreed.

"Though we'd need to know whether souls are fundamentally the same between the two worlds. If they are, any technique designed for qi should still work because you're just using a different material for the same construction. If they aren't…"

"Then we're trying to connect things that can't actually connect and something probably goes very badly." I rubbed my face with both hands.

"This is making my head hurt."

"We don't actually need to understand the deeper theory," Azure said.

"We just need a method that works safely. That's a smaller problem." He had a point, he usually did when I was overcomplicating things.

"The Archives," I said, straightening up.

"I'll look for something practical."

"Master." Azure's voice carried that particular tone he used when he thought I was being an idiot.

"It's past the seventh bell. The Archives are closed." My stomach chose that exact moment to make a sound loud enough that a disciple two tables over looked up from their work and gave me a deeply unimpressed look.

"Food," I conceded.

"Then sleep." I put the books back, which took longer than I expected because I'd pulled more than I realized, and then I headed for the dining hall. There was something almost pleasant about having a clear next step even if I didn't have answers yet. We knew what to look for and we knew where to look for it and we had a reason to think it might actually work, which was more than I'd had this morning.

"One step at a time," Azure reminded me as I walked.

"Don't fall down the stairs from hunger before you get there."

"You're very caring."

"I'm practical."

The next morning, I arrived at the Archives to find Elder Chang sitting at her desk near the entrance fighting with a scroll that was clearly trying to escape. She looked up when I came in and her eyebrows moved in a way that probably meant something.

"You're still in one piece." Well, that was one way to greet someone.

"Good morning, Elder Chang," I said, ignoring the remark.

"The World Tree Sutra has been going better than expected."

"I'd heard, though this sect does enjoy embellishing things." She caught the escaping scroll with one hand without looking at it.

"So, what brings you back?"

"Soul bond techniques," I said. Her expression shifted into something more alert.

"Planning to take a spirit beast companion? Or something more unusual?"

"Companion bond specifically," I said.

"Mutual rather than hierarchical." She studied me for a moment, then she stood up.

"Come with me." We went deeper into the Archives, past rows of sealed shelving and a cage containing what I could only describe as a very hostile book, it rattled as we passed. Elder Chang walked like she already knew exactly where she was going, which presumably she did given she ran the place.

"Companion bonds are strange," she said as we walked.

"Simpler in principle, harder in practice. The technique you use doesn't actually create the bond, it creates the possibility for the bond. The souls have to do the actual connecting themselves. You can't force that part." She stopped at a heavily warded cabinet and pressed her hand to the formation on the front, it glowed and faded and she opened it to reveal a row of jade slips. She began laying them out on a nearby table, naming each one as she set it down.

"The Azure Dragon's Oath. Traditional and stable, but it needs compatible spiritual roots from both parties." She shook her head slightly.

"The Thread of Fate. Flexible, works with different types of energy, but the bond it produces is more symbolic than functional." A third slip with complex spiralling patterns.

"The Eternal Companion Method. Reliable, grows stronger as both parties advance. Requires roughly equivalent cultivation bases though."

"That might be a problem," I admitted.

"I expected that answer." She kept going, laying out several more slips and talking through each one. Some had complex rituals, some needed rare materials, a few produced side effects that ranged from inconvenient to alarming. Shared pain, emotional bleeding, and I had no idea what emotional bleeding actually meant but I wasn't sure I wanted to. She placed the last slip down separately from the others, it was older, the patterns a little faded at the edges.

"The Heart's Bridge Method." I picked it up carefully.

"A cultivator who specialized in understanding connections made this," she said.

"Between people, between different types of energy that don't naturally mix. The technique doesn't try to force compatibility, it helps the souls locate each other and find their own way to connect using whatever energy they're actually comfortable with." I turned the slip over in my hands.

"That sounds right."

"It costs two thousand five hundred contribution points." I stopped turning the slip over.

"I have two thousand," I said.

"But I've brought in new disciples, one at the sixth stage and one at the seventh. Once those points process—""The sixth stage earns you roughly a hundred," she said, already doing the math, "the seventh perhaps two hundred and fifty. You'd still be a hundred and fifty short." I gave her the most honest look I had.

"Any chance you could consider the difference waived? For a student who's kept coming back?"

"I don't usually make exceptions," Her eyes narrowed slightly, but the corners of her mouth moved as she reached for the registration scroll.

"But since you've managed to avoid killing yourself with the World Tree Sutra longer than I expected, why not?" That didn't sound reassuring as she thought but I thanked her.

"Don't thank me." She didn't look up from the paperwork.

"Soul bonds aren't something to enter into carelessly. If this goes wrong, it affects both of you, and the bond is difficult to dissolve even if you wanted to. Make sure this is actually what you want."

"It is," I said.

"This feels like something that was supposed to happen." She looked up from the scroll and held the look for a moment then went back to writing without commenting on that. A few minutes later I walked out of the Archives with the Heart's Bridge Method sitting in my storage ring.

"That was easier than expected," Azure said as I headed back toward my quarters.

"Should I be worried about that?"

"Maybe she sees potential in you," Azure said.

"Maybe she's curious what you'll do. Either way we have it." My hand went to the ring without thinking about it to make sure it was there. It was. I had the method. I had the theory. I knew what I needed to do. It was time to practice, and then it was time to go back to the Two Suns World.