The poor apprentice lay in a pool of his own blood. He had been tasked with delivering a scroll containing the insights of a senior cultivator from his sect. He had been too busy reading the scroll to notice a member from a rival sect approaching him on the street. The fight was over quickly. His death was the trigger for a cascading series of events which ended an era.

Edgar stood in front of the local temple surrounded by the other children who would be entering their fifth year with the rising new year's sunrise.

Edgar was excited for the beginning of his fifth year. By five years old most children had matured to the point that their soul scape had finished forming. This period marked the earliest age from which they could begin gathering the primal energies of the universe and cultivating their inner soul force.

During the first five years of his life Edgar had slowly realized he had lived a previous life as a lesser apprentice of the Library Master of a sect of cultivators. Edgar barely remembered this past life. He remembered his other self as lonely and weak, hardly anyone who could be considered worth remembering.

In Edgar's mind his past self’s only value was the seemingly large repository of cultivation theory he remembered. Edgar knew he shouldn’t place too much value on this knowledge, it was likely considerably outdated, but he knew it would give him a small advantage in catching up to any advances in the art.

Strength was important to Edgar. His new family was fairly poor and lived in the territory of a fairly corrupt crime lord. If Edgar couldn’t find the strength to defend himself then he would live the same kind of pitiful life he saw his father living.

Edgar was broken from his reflections as the mob of children began to move. His family's only hope was for his to be taken in by one of the local sects with enough influence to protect him and his family until he had the strength to protect them himself.

Eventually was standing in front of the recruiters ready for them to pass their judgement on him. He recognized the quartermaster of the Iron Shield sect but the other members of the group was complete strangers to him.

Quartermaster Gerald had a positive impression of Edgar so seeing him was a good omen. Edgar knew he was unsuitable for the Iron Shield sect’s cultivation arts but it was entirely possible that Gerald’s word might be the deciding factor in another of the recruiters selecting him.

“Greetings Quartermaster Gerald. May I have the honor of being introduced to your esteemed colleagues?”

Gerald walked up to Edgar and rubbed his head affectionately. “This is young Edgar. I first saw him when he was only three. He was swindling a merchant’s apprentice for a better price on a bolt of cloth woven by his mother. He has an agile mind. If he had any measure of talent for the Iron Shield arts I would have recruited him months ago.

The recruiters examined him and each shook their heads in turn. The last recruiter to examine his soul for potential passed the final judgment upon him. “I doubt he could pass the first threshold in any sect, let alone any of the lesser sects you would find here.

The rejection stung Edgar. He was depending on the protection of a sect to keep his family safe. His lack of talent felt like a betrayal against them. Still Edgar kept his composure and made sure to leave a positive impression on the masters. If one of his baby brother's should have the talent to enter one of the sects Edgar's own abilities would make his brother's talents all the more attractive to have.

Once Edgar left the room he could no longer hold back his tears, the feeling that he had betrayed his family began to mix with shame for his childish tears. The Library Master from the sect his past life had been a member of had once advised him that the only substitute for effort was effort.

While Edgar couldn't remember the details he had lacked talent in his past life as well as in this present one. His master’s words had inspired his past self to seek a different path to power and by the time of his death the man had begun to build a meaningful measure of influence.

Through his past self Edgar had access to a solid enough foundation of cultivation theory. That alone was more than other children his age who found themselves without talent. If Edgar was wise enough he could help protect his family until his baby brothers reached their fifth year.

Once Edgar found his mother and father he wiped his tears and reported what had happened to them.

Edgar’s father rubbed his hair when he was done. “Good work. It would have been better if they had taken you in, true enough. Still, you left a good impression and you can develop your rapport with them until your brothers turn five.”

Edgar couldn't help himself and smiled. When the trio returned home Edgar could smell the breakfast his older sister was preparing in the kitchen. He quickly ran up to her. He wanted to be the one who gave her the bad news. Sarah was reaching the age where she was beginning to be noticed by the crooks who worked for the crime lord. If it were Edgar telling her then she wouldn't let the fear show on her face. Edgar felt that the extra sense of control hiding her fear would offer her a measure of relief from that same fear.

Shortly after eating Edgar ran out of the house to see his usual playmates. None of them had been selected to enter one of the sects and he suspected they would want to play a game of pretend to hide their disappointment.

To his surprise he found them sitting quietly in the small park where they usually played. The whole group was sitting around without saying a word to each other.

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Edgar knew that he was the only one of them who fully understood what entering one of the sects would have meant for them, but they had all grown up hearing stories about cultivators and learning that they couldn’t be one of those characters was a disappointment for them.

Edgar sat down and began to clear his mind. The first step to becoming a cultivator was to learn how to open one’s soul to the primal energies. His past self had known of at least four primary philosophies. These philosophies were known as the four great ways, the way of might, the way of wisdom, the way of balance, and the way of detachment.

Might focused on building one’s abilities through training, fitness, and competition. Detachment found power through mastery of the mind. Balance sought finding one's place in the world. They followed a philosophy of talent being the sole basis of cultivation. They followed no specific methods and simply believed that the talented will naturally rise to the top. The path of Wisdom rejected the idea that talent was a simple measure of potential. Followers of Wisdom sought to always pursue a better method to finding power and many argued that Wisdom wasn’t one of the great paths but rather a conscious decision to walk every path to pursue power.

After clearing his mind by reflecting on the four paths Edgar began to relax his body. He began to focus on each breath, willing the primal energies to fill his body. When he felt sufficiently relaxed Edgar opened his mind to the world around him allowing the sounds of nature and of people to drift through him.

The sect Edgar’s past self had belonged to followed the Path of Might but used a method from the Path of Wisdom to teach their younger disciples as it allowed them to become stronger quicker than any other method they had found and it did so without sacrificing their foundations.

Before long Edgar felt the two primal energies begin to fill his body. He found himself taking breaths infused with the warm air of change and the cool air of stasis. The sudden awakening to these energies left him feeling weak. His body and mind were both fully rested but now that he had opened his soul to the universe he found himself suddenly remembering how much strain just living puts on an untrained soul.

The sudden sense of fatigue must have shown on his face as Edgar's two friends were watching him. Edgar smiled at them, his newly recovered memories quickly allowing him to hide his fatigue with practiced ease.

“Are you okay Ed? You looked super tired.”

Edgar nodded. “I’m okay. I don’t want to be sad about not getting picked any more. Even if we can’t be cultivators we can still play cultivators.”

Edgar’s comment spread a bit of cheer through the group and after everyone had settled down all of the children with the exception of Edgar’s two friends and two others had decided to play something else. Among the five remaining children it was decided that Edgar should play the master while they played his students.

Edgar had his playmates focus on the sounds of the world around them until he felt they were calm enough to slowly relax their bodies. Unsurprisingly they made little progress and had only managed to barely enter a meditative state before deciding to switch to another game.

One of the most frustrating things about cultivation is simply that even with all the best resources it took time. Edgar had none of these resources and could only rely on the knowledge from his past life to grow and without a mentor to help guide him Edgar’s only choice was to begin by refining his soulscape.

After awakening to the primal energies a cultivator acquires a spiritual sense which he can turn inward to view his soulscape. At first the soulscape is foggy and difficult to see but as the cultivator grows he is able to push away the fog.

The shape of a person's soulscape determines what kind of cultivation technique most suits them. Normally a cultivator’s master would use their own power to view his pupil’s soulscape and lead them through the early stages of cultivation. They help instruct the pupil in how to best grow their soulscape so that they could achieve the maximum level of power.

Without a master to guide him Edgar would instead be forced to practice a technique that wouldn’t affect his soulscape while he grew in power. Thankfully such a technique was considered one of the most basic methods known to the world of cultivators. The soul purifying meditation technique, more often simply referred to simply as meditation due to its ubiquitous nature, worked by circulating the primal energies through the soul, turning them into soulforce and then using that soulforce to strengthen the soul.

This method could theoretically be used by a cultivator who had yet to cross the first threshold to overpower one who had crossed the threshold known as the immortal’s gate. In reality however such a circumstance was unlikely as crossing the bottlenecks leading to the thresholds required one to strengthen one's soul and the more the soul had been refined the more power it took to refine it a step further. Finally as the cultivator passed through further thresholds this method became slightly more efficient while the cultivator also grew in power.

When Edgar wasn’t playing with the other children, or being taught to read, write and calculate by his mother and sister he spent his time meditating.

After a month the results began to show. The fog within his soulscape was still able to hide parts of it from his view but after a thorough inspection a familiar landscape came into focus. In his past life his soulscape had been a garden. It had been filled with all sorts of plants that had nourishing properties. While these soul plants were useless to him that had symbolized his desire and pursuit of a healthy body and the comfort such a garden gave him and those important to him.

In Edgar's soulscape, he saw this same image however it was now ravaged by time, weather and war. What remained had been surrounded by brambles. These thorny bushes fenced in dead and dying plants and trees which served a testament to years of neglect and abuse. Much of the land that had once been part of his soulscape was simply gone and the whole thing lacked the elegance his past self had cultivated.

Despite the devastation there were signs of recent care. Dead plants had been haphazardly pulled from the earth and abandoned where they lay. This was symbolic of the his recent meditations. These images allowed Edgar to refine his meditation technique and improve its efficiency.

As Edgar continued to refine his soul the constant strain just living placed on his soul began to lessen as he gained access to more soulforce. This had a very positive effect on his health as he began to tire less easily, hunger began to bother him less and he began to need less sleep.

During their play sessions Edgar's four friends had begun to awaken to the primal energies. They were excited to discover that they had begun to walk down the path of a cultivator, but most of that enthusiasm had died away once they realized they would always fall behind others their age once of their peers who had been taken in by the Wandering Cloud sect and had managed to pass through the first threshold at an unprecedented three weeks after his awakening. In the time period of Edgar’s previous life, the master who most people agreed had gotten the closest to passing through the Immortal’s gate had required a full year to pass the first threshold.

If the Immortal’s gate still stood unopened then perhaps this genius would be the first to pass through it.