CHAPTER

6

BE THE DARK

JIEYUAN

—∞—

By some unspoken agreement, neither Jieyuan nor Meiyao gave voice to what they were both clearly thinking.

Briefly, Jieyuan considered telling her that the cost of a Command in terms of chroma was in part determined by its consequences. That Commanding someone at the same soulsign as him to kill themselves would use up almost all the chroma he had.

Instead, he asked, “Again?”

The reply took a while to come as Meiyao studied him, visibly tense. When she did speak, her voice came out tight, controlled. “The same command?”

For a moment there, he’d thought she’d just break things off and send him packing. “Something even simpler. Like ‘step forward.’ ”

Meiyao gathered herself up until she was standing as tall as he’d ever seen her. She gave him a stiff, terse nod. Her right hand was now brushing the handle of her finesaber. Jieyuan had a feeling that if the next word to come out of his mouth was anything other than step, she’d run him through the chest with three feet of steel.

Rather than trust in him, he’d bet it was pride—backed by the confidence that she’d be able to deal with him if he tried anything funny—that had her letting him give it another go.

“Step forward,” he Commanded.

Another mite of chroma vanished from his soul, and their minds were connected.

Just like before, a NO rose to meet the Command, but this NO was much stronger from the get-go. This time, Meiyao was putting up resistance right off the bat.

Jieyuan’s body went rigid as he poured himself into the Command. He didn’t have much left in him to fuel the Command—cultivators recovered much faster than mundanes, but his soulsign wasn’t high enough yet to get him back to tip-top form in minutes—but Meiyao had to be just as spent as he was.

On the other side of the yard, Meiyao took on a look of intense, pained concentration.

In the end, she still stepped forward.

—∞—

The sun was close to setting when Jieyuan found his way to his doorstep. He’d left Meiyao’s place barely able to walk, but in the time it took him to get back to his house—a little journey that lasted at least five times as long as it normally would—he’d recovered enough to at least stand straight. Still, his trek to his bedroom happened as a series of slow, laboring steps through his dimly lit living room.

He’d used Absolute Mind Command on Meiyao over twenty times. After the second time, Meiyao seemed to have taken her inability to resist as a personal challenge, because she just kept insisting on doing it again. And again. And again. Even with how little chroma simple Commands cost, if Jieyuan hadn’t started going for even simpler Commands like twitch and blink at the end, he’d have used up his whole soulprism.

Not one of his Commands failed to go through. He’d been the one to call it a day, and he had a feeling that Meiyao seriously considered keeping him there by force until she’d managed to resist. Intentionally losing had crossed his mind, but that idea was quickly discarded. Meiyao was hardly the only one with a competitive streak. And he suspected she’d be able to tell if he threw in the towel, anyway, and that appreciation wasn’t exactly what she’d have felt.

Arriving at his bedroom, he stopped for a moment at the doorway, squinting his eyes at the gloom ahead, the blinds over the little window on the opposite wall letting in only a scattered trickle of dying sunlight. For a moment, he came dangerously close to just throwing himself into his bed and sleeping away the exhaustion. But then he recalled Meiyao’s garden and what it meant. Powerful realmskill or no, he still couldn’t afford to lag behind. He was in no position to be frivolous with his time, even if it was only a question of a couple of hours or so. And there was something he wanted to test.

He placed his hand on the wall inside the room, right beside the sliding door, and channeled a little pulse of chroma into it. The large, fist-sized light yellow gemstone embedded in the ceiling started glowing, gently lighting up the room.

He dragged himself over to his meditation mat and half-sat, half-collapsed on top of it. With grudging effort, he crossed his legs and forced his spine straight again. Closing his eyes, Jieyuan recalled the feel of the Heavens’ attention on him, that weightless but heavy presence in his mind, and then he wasn’t just recalling it but actually feeling it—as well as a whole lot of other sensations. He’d entered Heavenly Communion.

First, he filtered all of his magnified senses out. The external ones. Touch, smell, hearing, taste, and the dark grays and shadows playing over his eyelids that passed for sight with his eyes closed. Each one tossed into oblivion, thrown into the fire of his consciousness and burned out of awareness. Tired as he was, the process took more time and effort than usual, his senses stubbornly lingering as he pushed them away, but he managed it all the same.

Sight was the first to go as blackness wrapped around him, then the weakly sour taste of saliva in his mouth faded away. Then the faint smell of wood and dust, then the slight creaking of floorboards and rustlings from somewhere outside his room. Now all that remained was touch. Cloth and leather against dressed skin, air against the little he left exposed. With each sense occluded, the stronger, starker, the remaining ones became.

The moment he finished cutting himself off from the outside world, focus shifted fully inward, his body opened up into its own cosmos.

The beating of his heart like crying lightning, the flowing of his blood like rushing waters, the moving of his lungs like howling wind, they all took up the entirety of his awareness, filling in the vacancy left by his five senses.

One by one, Jieyuan tackled these internal sensations, doing away with them and sending his focus deeper into himself still, into his mind, until there was nothing left but himself and his thoughts.

In the absence of senses, external and internal, his thoughts rang deafening, echoing, and his emotions turned into something tangible, solid. His exhaustion, a physical thing, had vanished together with everything else. But he wasn’t done yet. His thoughts and emotions—his sense of self and awareness—also had to go.

Everything had to go.

He focused on not thinking, on not being. A while passed, and despite his efforts, his thoughts and feelings remained as strong as ever. But that was fine. This was no gradual process. All he needed was an instant of success. So he kept at it, trying to neither think nor be, aspiring to emptiness. To nothingness.

To the Void.

When it came, it was absolute.

For an eternal instant, Jieyuan ceased to be, all sense of self surrendered.

Only the Void remained. Nothingness, infinite and nonexistent.

And then he was back.

Jieyuan’s eyes flew open to dim yellowish light. He jerked up and took in frantic, ragged breaths like a drowning man who’d just found land. A few breaths later, he managed to put himself back together, his sense of self reasserting itself. He slowly exhaled. He was himself again, whole and conscious—and alive, filled to the brim with energy.

“Steady, now,” he murmured to himself. It’d been over a month now since he’d managed to get the hang of Void Communion—Communing not with the Heavens as a whole, but just with a specific part of it, the Void Laws. But just because he could do it now didn’t mean he was used to it yet. Getting better, though. The first time he did it, when it was over and he snapped back into awareness, he’d spent a good while convulsing like a fish flopping around in dry land as he struggled to reassert control over himself.

Feeling confident enough in his control over his body, Jieyuan sprung to his feet, walked over to the window on top of his desk, and pried open the blinds for a peek outside. The sun had fully set, and the moon was rising. Based on how long it’d taken him to reach his bedroom and then get himself in the right state of mind, he’d say he’d spent an hour or so in Void Communion, even though it had felt like a moment—or not even that. In that kind of state, you lost all sense of time.

Still. An hour. A measly hour.

Jieyuan couldn’t help the grin that split his face. He felt giddy, like a kid handed a shiny new toy to use and abuse.

Second-sign redsouls only needed two hours of sleep, and Void Communion was twice as effective as sleep. That meant that at the worst, he’d only need to Commune with the Void for an hour to go from dead on his feet to skipping and swinging. What had troubled him before was that he hadn’t been sure whether that still applied to the exhaustion caused by Absolute Will Command. Hadn’t been sure whether that kind of exhaustion was considered mundane or chromal, whether it played by the same rules as normal fatigue. Now he had his answer, and it was as good an answer as he could’ve hoped for.

Jieyuan took a step back from the window, thoughts swimming in his head. Projections, ideas. Just being able to fully recover in under an hour after overusing Absolute Will Command was already plenty useful, but as his soulsign increased, so would his stamina. At third-sign Redsoul, he’d need only about forty minutes of Void Communion to make a full recovery from bone-deep exhaustion. Thirty minutes at fourth-sign, just under twenty-five at fifth-sign, and so on and so forth.

And then there was tenth-sign Redsoul. That was when cultivators reached the point where they recovered their stamina faster than they could spend it. Tenth-sign redsouls couldn’t get tired even if they wanted to, no matter how much they exerted themselves. And if that still held true when it came to the stamina expenditure of Absolute Will Command… Well, that’d completely remove stamina from the equation. As long as he had the chroma for it, he’d be able to use the realmskill indefinitely.

Jieyuan hardly needed any more motivation—he already had that in spades and then some—but he got a blast of it all the same, like a shock of freezing water, like a lick of scorching flame. His eyes found his meditation mat, square and yellowish in the glow of the gemstone light right above it.

No time to waste.

In two strides he was back at the center of his room, and with an easy drop he was sitting down on his mat again. Legs crossed, eyes closed, he tapped into his soulsense and sent his focus inward, to his chest. There his soul sat, taking up a good deal of his rib cage.

And like with every time he sat down to cultivate, his attention lingered, transfixed with a delightful little blend of frustration and gloom, on the outer layer of his soul, its walls.

The wall of the soul was where imbued chroma was kept, the chroma that gave cultivators their most fundamental powers—aura, chromal weight, soulsense, soulforce—by virtue of its presence alone. It wasn’t chroma you ever used, chroma that you sacrificed or moved outside your soul for whatever reason. You couldn’t even if you wanted to. All you did was add to it, imbuing more and more chroma into the soul walls. That was what cultivation came down to, stripped to the bare basics. You pumped the wall of your soul walls full of chroma until the chroma in it reached a specific density and you got a nifty little boost in power for your efforts, your time, and your pain.

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And that was nice and all. Pain, time, and effort in exchange for power. Sweet a deal as any, that. The problem lay in how the soul took on the color of the chroma imbuing it. Or rather, the problem lay in how that was what the soul was supposed to do.

He was a second-sign redsoul halfway to third-sign or thereabouts. That meant there was well over two prismfuls of red chroma imbuing his soul walls, going on three. Accordingly, the color of his soul should have been a light, pinkish red, somewhere between second-shade and third-shade red, the colors of second-density and third-density red chroma.

Instead, his soul was dark. Not as dark as it’d been at first-sign—back then, it’d looked more black than red—but still frustratingly, wrongfully, dark. Rather than the pinkish it should’ve been, his soul was a dull, murky red, something like maroon. Each and every time, that’s what drew his attention whenever he sent his soulsense inward to his soul, the sight—the fact—of his dark soul as mystifying as it’d been the first time he’d lain his soulsense upon it. This concerned his soul, the very essence of his being. It was hardly something he could ignore, no matter how many times his soulsense touched upon it.

His first day in the sect, after all the formalities had been dealt with and he was free to do as he pleased, he’d sat down in his meditation mat as he was doing now to try and find out how to use his soulsense to look inward into himself, so that he could finally get around to cultivating. He’d figured out the trick of it after some experimenting, and immediately he’d seen that something was terribly wrong. For a while he’d just sat there, staring at his own soul, uncomprehending, same as he’d have been if he got cut and instead of bleeding good old red blood, some vile green goo had spurted out of the wound.

That day still, he’d rushed over to the Outer Court’s jade book library to see if he could figure out just what in the Heavens was wrong with his soul. Even if he hadn’t known much about cultivation yet at that point, green as he’d been back then, he had known what color his soul was supposed to be—about the chromal shades—and had even seen the souls of a few outer disciples already with his soulsense, so he’d known well enough that his soul had no business looking anywhere near that close to black. But that little trip to the library had turned out as enlightening a venture as tossing coins into the air to see whether they’d fall up or down. There weren’t any records of anyone having a wrong-color soul, be it darker or lighter, not even a piddly, passing reference to it.

He hadn’t told anyone of his puzzling spiritual condition. And that had turned out to be the right call. To this day, nobody had commented on it. His working theory was that his soul somehow looked to be the right color to everyone else, that his soul only looked wrong to his soulsense. What to make of that, he had absolutely no idea, like with everything else about this whole situation. He was flying blind on the matter, blind like some wretched eyeless bird, and hoping he wouldn’t come down in a spiraling crash anytime soon. So far, nothing had come out of his dark soul yet, good or bad, and he also hadn’t gotten any further on unraveling the mystery of it.

The mystery… Jieyuan almost snapped out of his soulsense, his body stiffening. The mystery. What were the odds this condition of his had nothing to do with the Weave Mystery? That it was just another thoroughly baffling and inexplicable matter involving him completely divorced from all the other thoroughly baffling and inexplicable matters that surrounded him? No, this wasn’t just a mystery, but a Mystery. The Soul Mystery, part of the Weave Mystery like the rest.

Brows furrowed, he pondered them both, the Soul Mystery and the Weave Mystery, scouring his memories, searching for some other connection he could draw, some line of thought that led somewhere. There wasn’t much to go over, though, and all he found were dead ends. All the Weave Mystery and the Soul Mystery had in common were being unexplainable and having to do with him. He still didn’t know nearly enough about either situation yet to start drawing conclusions.

Jieyuan didn’t hesitate to set the matter aside. The high from Void Communion was still lingering, and he wasn’t about to waste it. He delved deeper into his soul, past the walls and into the hollow, empty space at the center of his soul. There he found his soulprism, a prism-shaped clump of attuned chroma. His chroma reserves, the chroma he actually used. He focused his soulsense on it.

Right now his soulprism was noticeably smaller than his heart. He’d say he had about three-quarters of a prismful of attuned chroma. As a second-sign redsoul, his soulprism could hold at most two prismfuls, putting him at little under half capacity.

When he was running low on chroma, he’d normally first spend some time on the first two stages of cultivation, harvesting and attuning. That gave him time to get in the right mindset for imbuing, the third and last stage. Even after two months, he still felt some apprehension going into it. But right now, he felt no need for that. If anything, he was anxious to get right to it. Excited, even. Better ride the high now and bother with harvesting and attuning later.

It took him only a moment to enter Heavenly Communion. Feeling the Heavens’ attention on him, he chanted the imbuing hymn he’d picked for himself, “Ravenous.”

His soulprism collapsed. It happened like a drawn-out, languid explosion—like he was watching an explosion happening in plain-space from stilled-space with a time-warp of over a thousand. The chroma comprising his soulprism expanded outward, spreading throughout the soul center. He had no control over it, not anymore. By chanting the imbuing hymn he’d started the imbuing ritual, and now the Heavens were in charge of his soul and soulforce.

“Ravenous,” Jieyuan chanted. He couldn’t stop chanting, not unless he wanted the ritual to end.

His attuned chroma reached the soul walls. Jieyuan sensed the first chrom—the smallest unit of chroma—penetrate the wall of his soul, imbuing it.

He felt a prickle somewhere in his chest. A sharp, needle-like sensation. One prickle became two, then four, then eight… They multiplied by the instant, spreading beyond his chest and throughout his body. In the span of a breath, the sharp, pricking sensations took him over entirely until not even an inch of him was spared. What must’ve been a million needles dug into his body, over and over, unceasing.

“Ravenous,” Jieyuan kept chanting even as he felt his lips and tongue peppered by needles.

Prickles grew into stings. Stings into stabs. And then it was no longer needles biting into him, breaking skin and piercing flesh, but daggers. Sharp, slender-bladed daggers, meeting no resistance as they buried themselves in him, sinking to the handle, the blades vanishing into his body, and then fully drawing back out of his body until only its tip brushed raw, tender flesh, before burrowing back in with vengeance, deeper than before. Thousands of daggers, just stabbing and stabbing and stabbing into every inch of his skin.

Jieyuan carried on chanting, even as he felt his body being reduced to ribbons of shredded meat and splintered bone. His tongue and lips feeling like tattered strips of flappy flesh as he forced them to move, to take shape and form words.

And as he felt the stabs reach their peak, felt as they pierced past bone into something deeper still into himself, something rawer, like they were burrowing into his nerves themselves, each movement a bolt of excruciating agony, he braced himself. Because this was all just the prelude to the First Pain. What all cultivators felt while imbuing, regardless of alignment.

But now his Fire would claim the stage, make itself known. Because he was a Firesoul, and so Fire was his Pain. His price to pay.

Sure enough, stabs soon gave way to sears. Bright and burning, like cutting blades heated red over flame. And the heat kept growing and growing as searing turned into scorching, and soon the heat was just as terrible as the stabs themselves.

“Ravenous.”

The stabs disappeared.

Now there was only burning, only Fire.

In an instant it grew a thousandfold.

Every cell of his body turned into miniature suns.

He was heat.

“Ravenous,” Jieyuan chanted. His mouth moved almost on its own accord, the words not really his own.

Blood boiled, eyes melted, and viscera sizzled, and he kept on chanting.

Even as he burned and burned and burned, he chanted and chanted and chanted.

—∞—

Jieyuan opened his eyes to a blank stone wall. Yellow-white light filled his vision.

He squinted his eyes at the wall. He was… in his bedroom? His thoughts came slowly, like he’d just woken up and hadn’t entirely shaken off sleep.

Feeling uncomfortably sticky, like someone had dumped a bucket of water over him, he looked down. His robes were drenched, sticking to his body. It didn’t feel like water, though. It was clingier, thicker. Sweat.

Clarity came over him, and he recalled what he’d just been doing.

Jieyuan sent a pulse of chroma to his cleansing ring, and all the sweat vanished from his body and robes. Good as new, he stood up and gave his legs and arms a good shake, then twisted and bent himself this way and that. Once he felt his blood flowing properly, he walked over to the window and peeked out the blinds.

The sun was rising on the horizon, already well on its way up.

He stared up at the daytime skies, briefly dazed.

Ten hours or thereabouts. That was how long he must’ve spent imbuing. He’d never managed to stretch an imbuing session that long before. Usually he took a break every hour or so. His previous best had been just under five hours before he’d had to call it.

He sent his soulsense inward. His soulprism was whole and solid again, looking fractionally smaller than before. Ten hours did seem to be about right.

Tapping the wall beside the window, he cut off the gemstone light with a pulse of chroma, then drew on the string hanging down by the window frame. The blinds rolled up, and sunlight streamed into the room en masse.

Jieyuan glanced back at his meditation mat, now cut through by a thick slice of daylight. At the thought of another imbuing session, he felt something inside him, inside his head, twist into itself. Like there was a raw, open wound in his head, and someone had poked a finger inside it and started prodding.

Jieyuan winced and promptly discarded any thoughts of imbuing for now. That was his body’s pleasant way of telling him not to overdo it. Normally he’d use this time to have a harvesting and attuning session and recover the chroma he’d imbued. If his soulprism was nearly full, he’d instead head out to his backyard and spend a few hours going through some spear forms. But now he had something else to do.

He thought back to yesterday’s practice session with Meiyao. The Commands he’d given her, the results, and her reactions. It hadn’t been good for much besides giving him an idea of what it felt like to pit his will against another’s. All the Commands he’d given her had been conscious ones, targeting Meiyao’s conscious mind. But that wasn’t all Absolute Mind Command could do.

When he bonded Absolute Mind Command, he’d gotten a sense of what it was capable of, and he’d had a couple of ideas while practicing with Meiyao that he hadn’t acted on. To really explore the limits of Absolute Mind Command, he’d have had to reveal more to Meiyao than he was comfortable with. More than he was capable of sharing with anyone. Much more than your average realmskill, he felt that Absolute Mind Command was one whose details were best kept to yourself.

To yourself.

Jieyuan stilled.

Yourself.

Maybe…

Concentrating, Jieyuan found the presence of Absolute Mind Command inside him and flexed it, as if he was clenching an invisible, intangible hand. As he did, he could feel a pressure in the back of his head, like a string pulled taut.

Jump, he thought. He imagined the word as a Command, envisioning his target crouching down, flexing their muscles, and then jumping about four feet into the air. The word spoken was just an anchor for the Command. The specifics were left unsaid, existing only as intent.

Jieyuan got an instinctive, innate idea of what that Command would cost in terms of chroma. But that could’ve only happened if it was possible to use it on the target he had in mind.

Softly, Jieyuan Commanded, “Jump.”

An insignificant amount of chroma vanished from his soulprism, much less than any of the Commands he’d given Meiyao yesterday had cost.

And then he could feel the Command’s influence on him, seizing control of his limbs. Even though he didn’t try to move, his legs bent into a half-crouch. He could resist it—he could tell that all it would take was a thought and the realmskill’s effects would be broken—but he let the Command run its course.

His feet pushed against the floor, and he jumped. The moment his feet returned to the ground, the Command’s influence vanished, his hold on the realmskill slipping away even as his control over his legs returned.

Jieyuan stood still for a moment, thinking. And however still his body was, his mind more than made up for it, thoughts racing, rushing, snapping between conclusions and ideas. This… This changed things. Self-Commanding didn’t just mean he could do away with a practice target, even if that would’ve been plenty handy on its own. There were many things Jieyuan could be accused of, but a lack of ideas—of creativity—wasn’t one of them. Even more so now that he had Amyas’s memories supplementing his. Self-Commanding opened up all sorts of new possibilities. From puppeteering his own body, to controlling his own thoughts, to—

Possibilities… Jieyuan’s thoughts slowed to a crawl. Right. Possibilities. It wasn’t uses for Absolute Will Command he was thinking of—not really, or at least not yet—but possibilities. Moments ago he hadn’t even known that Self-Commanding was possible. He had no clue what could actually be done with it. He was getting ahead of himself. Way ahead.

So far all he’d done was try a conscious Command on himself, and all the ones he’d used on Meiyao yesterday had similarly been of the conscious variety. Those, at least, he knew to work, on himself and others. But Absolute Will Command was capable of more than that. It could also target the unconscious mind. He knew as much from the surge of knowledge he’d gotten when he bonded the realmskill.

Yes. That was what he had to test. An unconscious Command, one that acted on the target’s unconscious. He didn’t know yet what exactly were the limits of what he could do—what exactly counted as an unconscious Command—but maybe… Something to do with the senses? Using a Command to induce a hallucination in the target? That seemed promising. Useful. And figuring out the proper mechanics of Absolute Will Command was the entire point of this exercise, anyway.

He looked around his room, to the desk, to the bed, to the window, eyes roving around, not really focusing on anything. Something he wanted to see… Maybe… His heart skipped. He did have something like that. Or rather, Amyas did.

His throat was oddly tight, his mouth dry. He felt… He wasn’t sure. Hesitant? Expectant? Either way, it was silly. And very much not like himself. He was no tender, confused little lad. He was a cultivator. He knew pain. Had conquered pain.

And he didn’t even know if what he had in mind would work, anyway.

Pressing on, he reached for Absolute Will Command, for its faint but ever-constant presence inside him, and tested the Command in his mind, envisioned it happening, taking place.

Immediately he got an idea of what it’d cost. Like the Heavens themselves had just handed him an estimate.

He chuckled dryly. Never before had he had a question answered so quickly. Mighty convenient, that.

Jieyuan licked his lips, and Commanded, “See Maeva.”

And there she was, standing just a few paces away. In his bedroom, right in front of the window, sunlight flooding in from behind her like a halo.

Blond, blue-eyed, beautiful.

Amyas’s sister, Maeva Auclair.

Wearing a yellow sundress. A lab coat over it. Just as he most often saw her. Just as he’d last seen her.

Jieyuan froze statue-still at the sight of her.

She smiled sadly at him. Softly, like a whisper, she said, “Hello, Amyas.”