Something smells good.

That was the first thing that touched Cai’s mind. His stomach growled in furious protest at the malnourishment and the lack of water. Half awake he turned, shifting his face towards the smell before having even opened his eyes.

"You should eat," A voice spoke out.

"You can’t last all that long while being so dehydrated, and healing up is gonna cost you some calories."

The fog in Cai’s mind cleared a little. The ambush, the fight, the loss, he remembered all of it. Cai opened his eyes. He had slept well, which was strange considering where he was. It was nighttime in the desert now, and the burning temperatures had left, leaving a cold and freezing night to take their place.

Cai stood up and blinked, taking a look around to assess the situation. The honored master sat, crouching next to a small fire, carrying a sizzling pan above the flame. His opponent was there too, still frozen and standing a few feet away from the flame.

Something felt strange. He remembered things. The fight. His loss. The honored master stepping in and the pain right before he passed out. But still, something wasn’t quite there yet. Cai grabbed his shoulders, his arms wrapping around each other. Maybe it was the cold that made him feel this way.

He felt weak. Cultivators healed better than mortals did. They were hardy and their body tended to respond better to shock. But that also made them more durable, which meant that cultivators tended to walk that painful line between life and death far further than any mortals could tolerate. This fight had been his first near-death experience, but it certainly wouldn’t be his last one. Cai walked over to the honored master, standing to the left of the man.

"Here," The Honored Master said, raising a pan full of meat to Cai’s face.

"Eat up."

Cai took the pan with a silent nod. He could sense that there was qi in this food, which wasn’t rare, just strange. The food was still sizzling as he ate it. It would have burnt a mortal’s tongue, but he was capable of withstanding the temperature. The texture was soft and the food fell apart in his mouth without any struggle. This was meat, that much he knew, but the flavor of it was something that he had never encountered beforehand.

Then he swallowed and a burst of qi flowed through his body. It felt familiar and water-like in its substance. Cai drank it all down.

"Thank you, Honored Master," Cai spoke, giving a small bow to the man.

"How was it?" The Master asked.

Cai put his hands together and gave a very serious bow.

"This Cai Xuin thanks Honored Master for the meal and for helping his weak self survive this encounter. Truly, my weakness is a sin I will work to cleanse."

The Honored Master looked at him for a moment, and then he smiled. It was a sad smile, one filled with more melancholy than joy.

"Come here kid, have a seat," the honored master said as he readjusted himself to be sitting on the floor. Cai obeyed, sitting next to the Honored Master and warming himself next to the fire.

"Why’d that guy try to kill ya?" The Master asked.

"He is from the Hollow Echo Sect, and an assassin."

"Ah," The Honored Master replied nodding in understanding.

"So who hired him to go after you?"

"I believe it was a member of the Flowering Sword Sect, someone high within the ranks most likely."

"Ouch."

Cai didn’t know what the word meant but he sensed pity in it. He nodded solemnly in response.

This was the first time that Cai had thought about this openly. They had tried to kill him. Someone from his own family had tried to end his life. He was surprised to find himself calm with the idea. The proper response was something akin to anger or hate. Something visceral and burning, but instead, there was just… sadness.

"How old are you kid?"

"I am seventeen years of age, Honored Master," Cai answered.

"And the people trying to end you, how old are they?"

"I do not know the exact person who is trying to end me, but to be able to hire someone of the fourth rank makes me believe that they must have the wealth of a Sect Elder."

"And how old are the Sect Elders?" The Master asked.

"They are all in the fifth rank, each of them are a few thousand years of age."

The Honored Master sighed. There was weariness on his face, a look of aching and pity. The type of look one would give a child who kept making the same mistakes.

"Why are they trying to kill you?"

Cai swallowed down the lump in his throat.

Weak, he thought to himself.

A true cultivator would take up his blade and defy the heavens. He would seek vengeance and strength, Cai thought.

He tried to speak and answer the Honored Master, but his mouth wouldn’t let him. He kept choking on the words, and the lump in his throat wouldn’t let them out. He had to close his eyes, lest the tears came out. He had to hold his breath, lest he sniveled when he spoke. He had to be strong.

To cry is not the path of the strong. At least rage will make you move, sadness just wallows the soul.

Cai felt a pat on his back.

"You’re good kid," The Honored Master said. "I get it. First real fight, huh?"

Cai nodded, making the only movement that wouldn’t break him.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

"Yeah, those are always hard."

The Honored Master handed Cai a large jug of water.

"Drink," he said. Cai obliged.

"Ya know, you always hear those stories of guys chopping down enemies left and right. ‘By the Roots’ and all that. But their first time rarely goes that smooth."

Cai sighed. The water had pushed back the lump, and his eyes had taken back the tears that were so desperate to leave.

"I- I have fought before, Honored Master. I shouldn’t be so weak to the possibility of death. What right does a cultivator have to fight against the heavens if they can’t even fight against men? I am weak, both in the body and mind."

The Honored Master smiled again. It was the same sad smile that he had given earlier, one tinged with bits of hatred and pity.

"How’d you like the meat kid?" The Master asked.

"It was delectable. I have never had anything like it before in my life."

The Honored Master nodded.

"That’s what we call desert crab. It’s more like a mixture of crab and a cockroach, but they’re delicious animals if you know how to cook them right."

"I wasn’t aware that there were any native edible spirit beasts in the Great Desert Strip," Cai replied.

"Oh yeah, we have a few. Some sand snakes and the occasional sand eaters, but most of them never adventure within a few hundred feet of the surface. The only ones that do are the desert crabs. They pop out once in their lifetime to mate and lay their eggs, and they die right after, so you barely gotta do any hunting at all."

Cai sat and listened, then they both fell into silence. There was something awkward about that. The silence. It was something that Cai was used to when he was talking with elders or the Sect Patriarch, but the silence between him and Master Bill felt different.

"So, how do these crabs reproduce," Cai asked.

"Oh, they’re interesting. The only reason desert crabs can even live in these conditions is because they’ve adapted to never drink water throughout their whole lifetime. The only time they actually do drink water is when they’re born. A pair of desert crabs will push their way up to the surface, mate, lay a few eggs, and then pass away right after. The newly hatched crabs will drink the liquid that their parents provided right before dying and then dig back down below the surface to repeat the cycle."

"I see," Cai mumbled.

"How come there are no reports of them? If they are born on the surface and die on the surface, then surely someone must have seen this happen?" Cai questioned.

"Where do you think the water in that oasis comes from?" The Honored Master asked.

Cai looked over to the area. The dust around it had long since settled down and the traces of battle left among the sand had been wiped clean by the slow wind of the desert.

"I do not understand," he replied.

"There is no natural water source in The Great Desert strip. It rains through the desert on a regular basis, but most of that water will be gone within the next day or so," The Honored Master commented.

Cai took another look at the oasis. That was true. It never rained in this area, and that was the main reason that mortals hadn’t possessed the land yet. There wasn’t a reliable source of water throughout the whole of the land. Even the traders who navigated the desert didn’t know where the oasis came from.

"Then… then how does the oasis manage to linger and not evaporate?" Cai asked.

The Honored master let out a big wide smile as if he had been waiting for this question to be asked this whole time.

"They don’t" the Honored Master answered. "Spread your sense into the oasis."

Cai looked funnily at the man and complied. He sat there, digging deep into the oasis with his aura. His mind dived deep into the blue hole, searching around the region for whatever it was that might be there. His senses dove deep, but still, there was nothing.

When he couldn’t find anything on the surface, he stood up and walked over to the oasis to widen his range. There was a thick layer of ice on top of the pond. It wasn’t obstructing his senses, much. But it was strange to look down and see his own reflection, again something tickled at the back of his brain. His reflection looked like it always did but that wasn’t right. It should have looked different.

Cai shook his head, tossing the thought aside and looking past his reflection. He slowly walked across the ice, shoving his senses deeper into the frozen block beneath him. Finally, he noticed something. There was a strange current from the pond, a barely noticeable upward push but still present nonetheless.

Was there some sort of spring pushing up the water? Cai peered again, spreading his aura thin to try and feel what it was.

"You got to get a little deeper to see it," the Honored Master announced.

Cai looked at the water, slightly conflicted. He didn’t want to disrespect this great and powerful man. He had saved his life and spared him in his arrogance. In the mere two days that he had known him, he had done more for Cai than any other person he had ever known.

But he also didn’t want to dive head first into freezing water just for some curious expedition about some minor spirit beast.

Cai must have stood there too long because the ice suddenly cracked, and a second later, the whole pond’s surface split open and swallowed him whole.

The first thing that Cai noticed was that it wasn’t cold. It was by no means hot, but the water was warmer when compared to the air outside. The second thing he noticed was that the pond was deep. Much deeper than he had originally thought it to be. It wasn’t a deep hole, but more of a tapering cone-shaped crater that seemed to go down to unseeable depths.

Cai squinted, trying to see the bottom of the hole but there was only darkness. With caution and weariness, Cai swam, diving deeper to try and see what lay at the bottom. He went past the point where light reached, relying on his senses to guide him deeper.

After a certain point, he noticed the current had become noticeable on the skin. He could feel it brushing lightly against his hair. A little deeper and he felt it on his skin, brushing along the gaps between his fingers and up past his armpits.

Was there truly a source of water down here?

Cai went deeper. He could now feel the water pushing up against his body as if he were swimming against a current. A few seconds later, he crossed what he estimated to be the mortal threshold. No mortal would be able to swim or progress past this point. Cai took another look, but still nothing.

Deeper. Cai had long since closed his eyes. The water was pushing hard against his body at this point. It was becoming more of a struggle to even stay in place with being launched back.

From here he used his senses, trying to reach the source of the oasis with his aura. His mind went down, trying to find the thing that had been causing this pressure, but he found nothing.

Just as he was about to give up, another aura overlayed over his own. It guided his aura gently pushing it and refining it like a blade.

Down there, The Honored Master projected into his mind.

You have to work to see it, but it’s down there.

Cai’s aura shook as it was pushed past its limits, extending deep into the depths of the water. He had no knowledge of a technique that would let anyone control a person’s aura like this or guide it to such a precise degree. It was both terrifying and miraculous.

Cai pushed the sense of wonder to the side and did as the Honored Master told him. He looked, focusing on the area his aura had been guided to it. And faintly, within his mind’s eye, he saw. He saw a large shelled beast slumbering- no dying as water gushed from its body.

And then, Cai reached enlightenment.

Laws were transmuters. They were aspects and concepts that turned qi into rules and reactions. Cultivators would often study these laws and contemplate them for lifetimes, whe end goal was to mimic them and to make your own natural qi behave like these laws. The Hollow Echo Sect did this with sound. They had trained with sound so much that as soon as any qi left their body, it would turn into the sound itself. They had selectively bred as well to make the trait hereditary, altering their own physiology over the millenniums.

There was also another sect that had done this, and that was the Raging River Sect. Cai had never once tried to learn to use his innate water-based abilities. He was already seen as a sign of shame and using that part of him that they hated so openly would only bring him more harm.

But seeing this here, something pushed inside of him as a small understanding settled into the deepest part of his soul. He looked, he saw, and he knew. He knew what water was, and the way it flowed. He knew the shape of raindrops and the persistence of rivers. He saw oceans and puddles, tsunamis and clouds, and Cai understood something.

Cai had stopped swimming at this point and his body was propelled viciously out of the water. Without his resistance, the current pushed and carried his body forward, tossing him out of the water and back out onto the ice.