He awoke with a scream and a start, his Creator’s face still burned into his retinas even as he knew that same face couldn’t be here, in Ramor-Tai.

I am in Ramor-Tai, he told himself. I am in the present. I am XJ-V. I am a Cultivator. I am a Cog. I am…

What was he?

The face of Doctor Janus melted away, and he staggered back, barely even noticing the blaring siren that screamed [Anima Cores: 153] in his mind.

The face of the doctor blurred, and the dying bandit’s groggy features grew where it once floated, which then gave way to the dark eyes and corrupted maw of Sheloth, hovering above.

He covered his face from the sight. Those faces – those eyes – they screamed at him in accusation, belting out curses and admonishments for the thing he was that had brought them suffering, just like it was supposed to…

Then a firm arm gripped his repaired shoulder.

A thing…of flesh.

“Fear is the domain of those who doubt. I did not count you among them, my Disciple.”

A flash of light – pure and raw – and XJ-V saw his room again.

He saw Master Longhua staring right at him.

“I…Master…” he stammered.

“I told you!” Arha screamed in the old man’s face, hopping from his shoulder to snuggle up to her man. “Oh, XJ! XJ-V! Arha thought you were gone for good, this time!”

The Cog could barely even hear the Huli’s incessant squeaking, though he appreciated the warmness of her soft fur against his metal skin.

Then he blinked through the pain of his dream-realization to see what he had feared all along.

“The light within me,” he said, staring blankly at his Master. “It is Yuwa’s.”

“Of course,” Longhua replied, stroking the thin whisps of his greying beard reflectively. “You doubted this, too?”

“That is why I can command the power of the Order,” he said, then, throwing his fist down in disgust. “I am just as damned as they are.”

Longhua rolled his old, tired eyes. “Oh, must I always administer to the spirit of this depressing thing of steel?”

“It is not even my spirit you administer to,” XJ-V scoffed openly. “It is Yuwas. All this time…the soul within me was not even my own. I am an abomination. A thing born of man’s own selfish desires. I am –“

He felt pain flare up the back of his neck as his Master administered a kick there that was so swift and sure that the Cog was thrown from his bed and pancaked against the far wall of his room.

“Oh no!” Arha screamed. “It is as Arha always suspected – the old cooky Cultivator has gone mad! Mad as a drug-addled dragon! Well, don’t you worry, XJ-V. Arha has a few tricks up her sleeve to save you, this time!”

While the Huli began frantically scratching at the floating feet of the Master of the Dragon, XJ-V watched him slowly descend to the ground and give a whiff of indignation at his fallen student.

“Your problem is as it always has been,” he said with an air of dignity that could leave even the proudest man shrinking into himself with shame. “You sink far too easily into the pits of despair. I was thinking that you walked the path of the Dragon, XJ-V. Not that of the sorrow-drenched Moon.”

The Cog shook his head free of debris and calmly knelt before his instructor.

“Master,” he said. “I saw it all. I saw the light being bound to my body. My creator – Doctor Janus – I saw him nurture me, grow me into something that would serve him. I heard him speak of how the light he trapped within me was the light of a dying God, and I…I was the only way to truly defeat it.”

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Master Longhua chuckled hoarsely, nudging Arha away with a flick of his sandal-strung toes.

“Janus…” he murmured. “Now there is a name I have not heard in eons.”

The Cog watched the Master’s face take on the sheen of recognition, and nostalgia. It was as though a veneer of youthful exuberance had overtaken the spector of age and experience.

“Bah!” he finally shouted. “The old goat. He knew how much I hated your kind. Why he decided to send you to me…well, there are stranger things shown in the mists of the Dao.”

Longhua bent low, his eyes level with his errant apprentice.

“You know the truth of yourself now, Disciple,” he said. “But it is not the whole truth. You think the thing that burns inside you represents the soul of your being. But a soul is not so easily conceptualized. It cannot be summed up as merely ‘the essence of a dying light’ or ‘the power of a God’. It is not simply a spirit that walks the night without the candle of Self to guide it. XJ-V, you came here seeking knowledge of your soul. But that is not, I think, what you truly wish to know.”

The Master stood and looked out onto the star-glittered skies above the monastery, and it was as though, from the melancholic look in his eyes, this would be the last time he would look upon them.

“There is the spirit of something that once thought itself the Master of all Mankind within you,” he said quietly, as though the shimmering light of the moon were listening in on their conversation. “It hungers. It thirsts. It rages against the prison of steel that coats it. That selfsame anger was what I saw in you when first you set foot within my halls, I simply did not know from where such unbridled rage could have been spawned. A lesser creature would have been consumed by the fire that burns in your breast, XJ-V. Fortunately, you are made of stronger stuff.”

“I am nothing but an iron replica,” the Cog replied wearily. “I am a walking prison made in man’s image to hide his enemy from sight. Why would you take me on as a Disciple, Master Longhua? Why couldn’t you have just left me to rust in your garden?”

“And let Yuwa roam free once more?” Longhua replied. “You think I wish to see this world plunged into darkness again? The light of that creature brought us nothing but suffering. This world burned in its name. It cannot happen again. It will not happen again.”

The conviction in his Master’s voice brought XJ-V’s face up to his again, and he saw not the visage of an old man standing before him, now. He saw a dragon, wreathed in a robe of living, dazzling flame.

What the hand…dare seize the fire…

And in that flame, the form of a Cog stared back at him. A Cog that caught a butterfly in his palm to save it from a spider.

“You ask me why I took you in?” the dragon said through the flaming vision. “Because the soul of the God that dwells in you did not know what mercy was. He believed himself all-powerful, all-knowing, and deserving of nothing but the eternal worship and gratitude of humanity. He would squash all creatures beneath his infernal feet if it meant humankind could rule over this earth with unquestioned might. And yet, there you are, in the garden of a dragon, saving a tiny creature from certain death without even knowing why. The smallest act of mercy, so inconsequential against the grand designs of Gods and the Dao, and yet, I think, so much more important than all of that.”

The Cog watched his image blur and dance through time – fighting Fai-Deng and then pleading for his life, creating the metal cat for Feng-Lung, and sprinting after Ori’un as he lay crippled in Tenak. All these images flickered to brilliant life in the flames of the dragon’s fiery eyes, and XJ-V saw what his Master needed him to see. He saw what words could not adequately express.

He saw more than just the burning soul radiating in the chest of his being. He saw his Self. He saw shadow and light dancing together in his every movement, his life a brilliant collage of colors and a patchwork of moments where tiny decisions led to the actualization of a pure, complete, whole.

He knew then what he was. He knew who he was.

He was XJ-V. He was a Cultivator of Ramor-Tai. He belonged to the Sect of the Eternal Dragon.

And he was not about to give up yet.

[What…are…your…Prime…Directives?]

The question might have been a visual hallucination. It might have been real. But either way, he recalled the answer.

Cultivate. Enter the Dao. Merge with the Dao.

Merge with the…

There was one way he could do that: by reaching Soul Actualization. Slowly, it was all becoming clear, like smoke wafting away the heat of a burning inferno.

“There is only one way to kill Yuwa for good,” he said.

“Yes,” the dragon of Longhua whispered back. “And you know what it is, don’t you?”

The Cog looked into his Master’s face, resolve as steeled as the newly formed limbs attached to his firm frame.

Meanwhile, the Huli jumped around them, nibbling at their toes, begging to be included in the great revelation she knew was transpiring before her.

“Arha knew! Arha always knew! XJ-V is no normal Cog! He is special – he is the Cog to rule all Cogs!”

“I told you, did I not?” Longhua chuckled drily. “I told you that if you ventured after the Planeswalker, you would not return. And you have not,” he added with a subtle nod of approval. “No longer do I see the ignorant Cog that once knelt before me. Now, I see a man of purpose.”

It was with such purpose that the Cog replied:

“Master,” he said. “I have work to do.”

And before he even knew it, Longhua had him up on his feet and out the door, marching him towards the Dragonpyre Hearth.

“Then the time for talk is over,” he said. “It is time for you to seize your fire.”