CHAPTER

35

BORN ANEW

JIEYUAN

—∞—

The senior protector’s footsteps sounded faint, muffled, and they only grew fainter, until Jieyuan could barely hear them. He lay on the ground, head to the side, grass prickling the right side of his face. Darkness crawled around the edges of his vision, creeping in. What he did see was hazy, and cast in dull, washed-out tones.

A small, scattered pile of fatebloom blossoms sat just in front of him, beneath the golden behemoth that was the trunk of a fatebloom tree. They were blood-red—the very same color as the blood pooling beneath him, streaming out from his chest like water from a broken faucet. More blood bubbled up his throat, filling his mouth, dribbling down his lips.

A deathly chill had its grip on him, and it was gaining ground. Starting at his extremities, fingers and toes, and going up, hands and feet, arms and legs. Only his chest felt warm, but it was a diminishing warmth, petering out as his blood fled him. His awareness was like a lone, stuttering flame, a candle on the verge of winking out, with just the barest hint of wick left. Thoughts floated in his head, loose and drifting. They each lingered for a moment before slipping away, finding no purchase.

Through his connection with Huaxin, Jieyuan could feel the Heart’s agony. It was a loud, bright thing, overwhelming. Jieyuan’s own pain was vivid, raw—torn skin, ripped muscles, shattered bone, on his chest where the blade had come in, on his back where the blade had come out—but he’d faced much worse when imbuing. No, the pain was no issue, even more so when it seemed to grow distant with each passing second, less tangible, turning into a vague notion of pain rather than the actual thing.

Jieyuan clenched his teeth, trying to summon his strength and coming up short. That was the problem. The weakness. His strength was pouring out of him, carried away by his blood. He was holding on, but he was just barely there, tethered to life by little more than a strand of hair.

The fire was there, meeting him, matching him. Angry, raging, but impotent. Still, he threw himself into it, trying to move, to get up, to do something—he didn’t know what, he was just barely thinking, but he couldn’t, wouldn’t, just lie there and die.

And for a moment it seemed to work. His body responded, his abdomen engaging, and he curled up, pressing his arms down—but then the surge of strength sputtered out, and he flopped back down into the pool of his own blood that had gathered under him.

No. No. Not yet. Jieyuan tried to move. Nothing happened. Not even a twitch. Desperate, he kept trying, but his body wasn’t reacting anymore, and his vision was darkening. And he felt the cold slowly fading, as a weight settled over him, and he couldn’t see anymore, and he was drifting, floating—

REFUSAL.

Jieyuan snapped right back into stark awareness, jerking, drawing in a lungful of air in a single breath. He blinked, his vision entirely clear now, eyes sharp. His heart—the Heart—beat fiercely, madly. Blood rushed—not outside him, but inside him. That realization gave his fire all the fuel it could ever need, and it roared, soaring.

Jieyuan wasn’t feeling Huaxin’s pain through their connection anymore. All he felt from the Fatebloom Heart now was a burning fervor that matched his own—and a desire for RETRIBUTION that Jieyuan was only too happy to deliver on.

Strength filled him, incandescent strength. When Jieyuan tried to move this time, his body answered, snappy, as readily as it ever had. He made a grabbing motion with his left hand, and it closed around the pair of talismans he’d let go of at some point. He pushed his upper body off the ground so hard he almost toppled back, but he barely even noticed. He was on his knees now, halfway to standing.

Straight ahead was the senior protector, once again standing by the core disciple’s corpse, his back to him—just as he’d been when Jieyuan first saw him. The sight of him was all that mattered.

Burning clarity directed Jieyuan’s actions as he threw his left arm out, channeling chroma into the Radiant Light Blast talisman.

The core elder turned around, eyes wide—

A herd of fatebloom elk poured out from the swathe of trees behind the elder, hooves clacking loudly, shrilly crying, rolling out like a wave of gold, and the elder immediately turned back around—

And the talisman activated.

There was a blinding white flash, so bright Jieyuan immediately shut his eyes, and even then his eyes throbbed, tearing up, white spots blooming over his closed eyelids. He could smell something metallic, sweet and pungent. He blinked his eyes open, his vision quickly returning to normal, and then he saw it.

Where the elder had stood before, there was nothing. The fatebloom tree in front of it had a massive, circular hole running through it. Same for the next two trees in front of it. The herd of fatebloom elk was still there, but the area directly ahead of him was clear. On the ground were the corpses of several fatebloom elk. Closer to him was the corpse of the disciple. And slumped down beside it was what looked like… a pair of legs. Someone’s lower body, everything up from the waist simply missing. It lay to the side, beside the disciple’s corpse. At the waist, where the rest of the body should’ve been, was a charred line of cloth.

Jieyuan jumped up to his feet, his gaze flicking from the senior protector’s corpse to the several dozen fatebloom elk standing in front of him. He forced himself to focus, throwing away all other thoughts. He clutched the remaining talisman in his left hand—the Radiant Light Haven talisman—tighter.

But then the Heart skipped a beat. Amusement, Huaxin sent him.

The herd of fatebloom elk lowered their heads to the ground, as one, while bending their forelegs, in a very good approximation of a bow. Jieyuan stared, confused, still wondering whether to use the talisman, even as the Heart’s amusement only seemed to grow. And they raised themselves back up, turned around, and trotted out, disappearing into the trees without another word, leaving behind the corpses of those caught in the talisman’s beam.

Keeping a wary eye on the surrounding forest, Jieyuan reached a hand to his chest. The tear in his robe was clear, evident, and so was the wet, sticky feel of blood around it. But as he prodded the skin left exposed by the tear, where there should’ve been a significant gash, all he felt past the wetness of blood was firm, whole skin. Unbroken skin. It felt a little tender, a little raw, but that was all.

Was that… Jieyuan paused. His thoughts were already jumbled enough without having to add a mental conversation to the equation. “Was that you, Huaxin?” Eying the forest, he wasn’t sure whether he was asking about the sudden appearance and departure of the herd of fatebloom elks, or the way he’s suddenly healed from what should’ve been—and almost was—a very much so mortal wound.

Affirmation, was Huaxin’s reply to both questions implied. And if there was just the slightest bit of smugness to it, Jieyuan would be the last one to find fault in that.

“Regeneration. Vitality. That’s your last ability, isn’t it?” Jieyuan had expected the Heart’s third prime skill to be something more along the lines of regeneration augmentation, like his aura did. This had been different, though. He hadn’t been all that aware of time, in that state, but it’d felt instantaneous. One moment he was on the verge of death and the other he was good as new.

Huaxin didn’t reply immediately. And when Affirmation came again, it didn’t ring as certain as before.

“You’re not sure?”

The Heart stayed silent.

Jieyuan frowned. “And the elk? How did you do that?”

What the Heart sent him in response struck him awfully like a frustrated huff.

Jieyuan’s gaze fell back on the two human corpses in the clearing. Or, at least, the one whole human corpse, and the half that remained of the other. That reminded him of how the senior protector had somehow gotten inside the distracter field—and Jieyuan recalled how he hadn’t found a field-focus.

“Were you the one maintaining the distracter field?”

Affirmation, but hesitant.

“Why did you stop?”

Jieyuan got an image of a patch of third-shade red.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

It took him a moment to puzzle it out. “Your realm? You stopped because it changed? You lost the ability to do it?”

Another uneasy, resistant affirmation was his reply.

“So you can’t do it again?

Affirmation, and this one was strong, solid.

“All right,” Jieyuan said. “All right. That’s that, then.” His eyes found the elder’s body again. He walked over to it and looked it over, but he couldn’t sense anything chromal on it besides its robes and fullgreaves. The Radiant Light Blast had hit him low enough in the waist to wipe out his glyph-stretch pouch, too. At the top was just a slice of charred, darkened flesh.

There was no skill seed in sight, either, and Jieyuan didn’t bother looking for it. It’d have been destroyed by the Radiant Light Blast, sure as everything else it’d hit. Only Orangesoul entities would be able to survive it—and, in their case, outright ignore it. That was the thing with tenth-sign offensive talismans. They could erase everything at the same realm as them or lower, but on a higher-realm entity, they wouldn’t be worth the paper they were inscribed on.

He quickly put away the elder’s tenth-sign Redsoul fullgreaves—with the elder dead, they’d expanded, no longer being fed chroma, and so it was only a matter of sliding them off the elder’s legs and feet off and tossing them in his pouch. While he was at it, cleaned himself up using his cleansing ring—also using it to get rid of the sizeable pool he’d bled onto the ground, while he was at it—and then took out a change of clothes, threw his current outer robe, torn and bloody, inside, and put on a new one.

He didn’t change out of his ruined inner robes. The new, pristine outer robes would be covering them, and that’s what he needed—nobody asking why in the world there was a bloodied tear on his robes over his chest and how he was still alive. If he met someone before he got back to his residence, he’d rather not give them more reasons to be suspicious of him.

That done, he turned to the surrounding trees again. He’d already had lots of questions even before his little brush with death just now, and now he had even more. But this wasn’t the time or place for thinking up answers.

He didn’t know how the core elder had followed him here—seriously, what was up with these noble clans and their tracking ability—but if one had come, so could others. Granddaughter, the man had called the core disciple. Another Fusongshi he’d killed, and a core elder this time. A senior protector. He really was moving up in the world, just not in the way he’d have liked. That was what he got for tempting fate.

And while that was already bad enough on its own, and more than enough reason to make himself scarce, but there was an even bigger issue. The distracter field was gone, and with that, it was only a matter of time before others stumbled upon the Heartseat—and Jieyuan definitely didn’t want to be around when that happened and people started asking questions about the gleamstone statue and the cabin and whether someone had been there before and took something away with them.

Jieyuan pulled back his left sleeve and eyed the bracelet he wore around the wrist, over his fullgauntlet. It was a thick, gray band, plain and tightly wrapped around his fullgauntlet. Looking at it, if you didn’t know what it was, you could easily mistake it for a solid, smooth piece of stone. Marble, maybe. But it was chromal silk—compressed many times over until it was sleek and hard. A cloudcraft, in bracelet form. The one he’d taken from the core disciple.

He hadn’t really thought of using it before. If he were to get caught flying it, there’d be questions. Questions he didn’t want to answer, as he’d rather keep his involvement in the murder of a core disciple under wraps. And he’d never driven one around before, but now the possibility of others coming wasn’t only just a possibility anymore, but pretty much a certainty. That meant he’d have to take some risks.

He began channeling chroma into the bracelet. And slowly the bracelet unraveled itself into thin, wisp-like threads, floating and flowing, which gathered in front of him, pooling themselves by his feet—just as he visualized it all happening. He’d never gotten any instructions on how cloudcrafts worked or how to operate them, but with most artifacts, using them really just came down to channeling chroma and focusing on what you wanted it to do. Sacrifice and intent.

The transformation was fast—the bracelet came undone in instants, leaving lying right in front of him on the ground a cloudcraft proper. Roughly square, looking like just about the most comfortable thing in the world, and big enough for him to lie down any which way he wanted with a bit of room left over on the top and bottom.

Jieyuan jumped on top of it. He could feel the cloudcraft not just with his soulsense, but also through his bond with it. And it was through that very bond that it drew on his soulprism, sacrificing his chroma, just to remain in their current state. It wasn’t a significant expenditure, though—barely even noticeable.

Aura-lashing, Jieyuan concentrated on the cloudcraft, then willed it up, visualizing it ascending.

And he shot up. The Fatebloom Woods turned into a golden blur, which then gave away, for just an instant, into a red blur, and then he was above the Fatebloom Woods, far above, rising—

STOP.

The cloudcraft immediately halted in place—and Jieyuan could feel his body tugging upwards, tugging so hard he almost felt as if his legs, thighs, and calves would come apart, before he used up the inertia, and settled back down. He slumped unceremoniously, plopping onto his backside, the Fatebloom Heart hammering in his chest. Huaxin sent a heady, joyous sort of glee over their bond. Like a thrill.

Jieyuan laughed, just the slightest bit hysterical, sitting on the cloud, looking out at the vast landscape laid out in front of him. He turned up, and saw that the nearest clouds were barely more than an arm’s length away. But then the nervousness and the shock faded, and he surrendered himself to the thrill Huaxin was sharing with him. He felt all his worries, all his doubts and concerns, just fade away for a moment, taking the backseat.

Power was what had driven him to become a cultivator. His need for it, his need to live up to his potential, to rise as far in the world as he could, and then some more. But things like this? He considered, wonderingly, how he was flying on a cloud of silk, so high fatebloom trees, which normally towered over him, now looked like little more than red dots.

The ability to do whatever he wanted, this freedom, the possibilities—he’d have become a cultivator for them, paid the price, suffered the Pain, even if it weren’t for his ambitions. He enjoyed the fighting and the struggle, as he imagined any Firesoul did, but things like this had a charm all of their own. So much so it rendered his brush with death, just minutes ago, into a distant, fading memory.

“Note to self,” Jieyuan murmured, standing back up, “a little less intent.” Checking his soulprism, he found the cloud hadn’t taken that much more chroma during its ascent, and it was just taking a wee bit more, hovering in place thousands of feet above the surface, than it had earlier, on the ground.

He briefly scanned the area. The Fatebloom Woods were far below—now looking like a massive pool of blood on an otherwise grass landscape—and over in the distance he could see the Gleaming Stone Mountains. No other cloudcrafts in sight. Still, he willed—moved, drove, he wasn’t really sure of what this counted as—the cloudcraft just a bit higher, until he was inside a cloud. An actual, mundane cloud. Cotton-white, misty, moist.

As far as he knew, most cultivators flew either just below cloud level, if they didn’t mind being spotted by those on the ground, or just above it, if they did mind. Jieyuan reckoned nobody flew inside clouds—unless, of course, they didn’t want to be spotted by other cloudcraft riders.

“All right,” Jieyuan murmured. “Easy, now.” He soul-stilled, speeding up his perception of time as much as he could, then focused on the cloudcraft again. He imagined it moving forward, just a bit, like how he’d willed it to rise just a bit more just now. And it worked the exact same way, the cloud drifting onward just as he’d visualized it. Proper visualization was key, then. As long as he was clear on exactly how he wanted the cloudcraft to move—rather than his vague idea of upward when he’d shot up into the air earlier—it’d comply.

That was pretty much what he needed to get the hang of it. He followed the mundane cloud he was in to its end, then quickly shot into the next one, just slightly above it, and kept at it, flying his cloudcraft from mundane cloud to mundane cloud, going faster and faster as he got more comfortable with the control, and not even half an hour later, he was already at overflying the Gleaming Stone Mountains.

Jieyuan dipped below the clouds, and eyed the rough location where he’d come out of the mountain range from, the end of the pay Meiyao had shared with him. He couldn’t see it from here—it was a small, narrow opening tucked near the base of one of the outermost mountains, but he could roughly tell where it was. He directed the cloudcraft so that he was directly above it. And then he focused on the cloudcraft and sent, Plunge.

And he plunged.

The cloudcraft accelerated downward, and aura-lashing kept his feet fixed onto it, dragging the rest of his body. Again he was pulled upwards, his body straining to keep itself connected to his feet, stretching, extending. That lasted all of three seconds before the cloud landed on the ground, coming to an abrupt halt, and then he was pushed down instead. He snapped into a crouch, dissipating some of the impact, and even still he felt his body contract.

But then it was over, and his body settled. He hopped down from the cloudcraft, and then focused on his connection to it, visualizing it becoming a bracelet again, wrapped around his wrist. That did the trick. He barely blinked, and the cloud had already gathered back around his arm in the form of a bracelet.

Again, he felt Huaxin’s thrill—and wasn’t it curious how the artifact heart was apparently an adrenaline junkie—and Jieyuan felt it was half Huaxin, and half himself that had the Fatebloom Heart beating faster in his chest. Jieyuan still wasn’t quite sure how that worked, but he reckoned it’d be better to get himself used to thinking of it as his heart, which it was.

After a brief search, he found his way back into the sect. A narrow fissure on the face of the mountain, about twenty or so feet above the ground, mostly hidden from sight by the tree in front of it. He climbed up the tree, then stepped out from one of its branches directly into the gap. Inside was an unlit, narrow tunnel that cut through the mountain, leading straight into a small grove near the residential area of the Outer Court.

As he was about to step inside, Jieyuan turned around, and from between the gaps in the foliage, looked up at the sun—and saw that it still wasn’t midday yet. Meaning that in the span of a morning, he’d killed a core disciple, gotten a new heart, almost died, and then killed a core elder. Not to mention discovering, through Beidao’s jade books, that the Linzushen and Tianzijun Clan were somehow connected to the Yikongwei Founder, the names of other cabals, and that the Gleamstone Forest was a place he definitely didn’t want to have anything to do with. And that he should be watching out for Heavens and Fate, somehow.

For probably the first time in his life, Jieyuan felt like he could do with a little break.

But this was the life he’d chosen for himself when he’d chosen to become a cultivator. The path he’d picked, when he’d decided to follow Daojue—and Meiyao—around and get involved in their business.

“Ups and downs,” Jieyuan said to himself, turning back and stepping inside the tunnel. “Ups and downs.”

The Fatebloom Heart beat softly in his chest.