PROLOGUE
TO KNOW PAIN
JIEYUAN
—∞—
The moment Jieyuan entered the room, his eyes fell on the pill. It drew his attention invariably and inevitably, surer than any magnet, and he came to a sudden stop one step past the doorsill.
Pink and about the size of a thumbnail, the pill sat on the far right side of the table on a small purple pillow. Under the orange and yellow glow of the gemstone lights on the ceiling, it looked so small and round and harmless.
But it was called Cultivator’s Agony for a reason.
“Jieyuan?”
He pried his eyes away from the pill. A woman in white robes and a lightcoat stood behind the table. Their eyes met, and he couldn’t help but stare. Immediately he knew the woman was a Liangshibai, a royal of the Gleaming Stone Sect. She had the faceted, gemstone eyes all true-blood Liangshibai had, patterned like a gemstone seen from above. But it wasn’t the pattern of her eyes that had him staring. He’d met a couple of Liangshibai before, and their gemstone eyes weren’t that much of a novelty anymore. The color of the woman’s eyes, on the other hand, was most definitely new.
Blue. A vibrant, vivid blue. All Liangshibai he’d met before had orange eyes—which would’ve been odd enough, when everyone else had black eyes, but he’d met enough of them to grow used to them. Once, he might have even seen one with red eyes, but that could’ve just been a trick of the light. There was no blaming blue on the lighting, though.
The woman wore an amused smile. “Close the door and take a seat.”
Jieyuan half-turned his body to close the door behind him, then walked over to the table. There was only a single chair in the room, facing the woman from across the table. Besides the pill, there were seven large metal blocks on the table, a small stack of cards, and an incense clock.
“My name is Wanxin,” the woman said once he was sitting. “I’m your proctor for the last stage of the entrance trials.”
Looking up at the woman, Jieyuan found that it wasn’t just her eyes that were distracting. Wanxin was striking, beautiful in the Liangshibai way—angular and lean, the lines of her face stone-cut sharp.
Just as eye-drawing was all the jewelry she wore. All that Glistens Is Ours. That was the Liangshibai Clan’s verse, and Wanxin had clearly taken it to heart. What little skin her white robes and lightcoat left exposed was covered in a sparkling shower of diamond and sapphire earrings, necklaces, and rings. Jieyuan had yet to meet a Liangshibai who wouldn’t bury themselves under a pile of precious stones if given half the chance, but it was his first time seeing a walking gemstone mine like Wanxin.
She was likely someone important in the sect. The thin white lightcoat she wore over her robes meant she was an elder of the sect, but he wasn’t sure what the color of her robes meant. None of the echelons of the Gleaming Stone Sect he knew of wore white, and he’d been under the impression he knew them all.
“First, we must determine your alignment. Now, I’m sure you already know what it is. Most people do, and based on what I saw of you in the previous stages, your case is a cut and polished one. But I’ve been wrong before, and we still have to check.”
She gave him a knowing smile, and he wondered whether she was as young as she looked. She appeared to be in her early twenties, and she struck him as friendly the way people similar in age tended to be. For all he knew, though, she could be as old as sixty, and one thing did make sixty more likely than twenty. The choker band Wanxin wore, covering enough skin to make a neck shroud unnecessary and patterned with at least a hundred shiny little sapphires and dozens of large, round diamonds. It was the single most extravagant piece of jewelry he’d ever seen, and as the son of a merchant who’d worked for cultivators, he’d seen plenty. Just its presence was already more important than its extravagance, though. It was made of silver, so it wasn’t just a choker band, but a bond band. And that meant Wanxin was married, and he’d never heard of anyone marrying in their twenties, mundane or cultivator. Marriage always came much further down in life, if it came at all.
Even if Wanxin was near him in age, though, her friendliness would still be odd. Jieyuan had only just met her, and this was already the second time she’d smiled at him. That was two more times than he’d ever seen a cultivator smile. All other cultivators he’d met before had regarded him with nothing but frosty apathy. It was the treatment they reserved for mundanes as a whole—for those who didn’t really know pain—the Pain. Jieyuan had but a little taste of it years ago, and that had been enough for him to never begrudge cultivators for their arrogance.
To be a cultivator is to know pain.
“All right,” Jieyuan said. Wanxin was right, he did know his alignment. And, he was fairly sure, so would anyone who spent any significant amount of time near him.
Wanxin motioned at the seven metal slabs arranged in the middle of the table. On top of each were two hand-shaped indentations, one facing him and the other Wanxin.
Each metal block was of a different color—red, brown, dark blue, dark green, light green, light blue, and gray. Embedded in the center of each one, between the two handprints, was a matching gemstone.
He caught his slightly warped reflection in the gray block and had to hold himself back from cringing. After the duels he’d been in earlier, he looked bloated and roughed up, battered like a gold coin that had been sat on by someone with more weight than sense. With the black neck shroud and the rough, heavy-duty black robes and trousers he wore, he couldn’t have looked any more Wanxin’s opposite if he’d tried.
“These are affinity gauges. They measure your affinity with each of the standard alignments, if there’s anything to measure.”
“Right,” Jieyuan said. Affinity gauges. He’d heard about them, though it was his first time seeing one. The descriptions he’d heard of the ones used by the Radiant Gold Sect hadn’t mentioned gemstones, though. He was hardly an expert on cultivator tools—chromal gears—but he had the feeling the gemstones on the blocks weren’t really necessary, but more of a Liangshibai embellishment. Even if he might not know much about chromal gears, he knew all about the Liangshibai’s obsession with gemstones.
“We’ll start with Fire.” Wanxin placed her hand on her side of the ruby-embedded red block. Each of her long fingers was adorned with multiple sapphire and diamond rings.
Jieyuan mirrored her. The surface of the block felt cool to the touch, almost chilly.
The block lit up with a bright red glow. The large ruby in its center flashed four times, each time just a little brighter, before the light died out.
Four flashes. He held his breath, feeling a spike of anticipation. He’d managed to find out a little about this test using some of his old man’s contacts. Most people got only one flash—two was rare, three was almost unheard of, and four was literally unheard of. Or at least that was the impression he’d gotten. Nobody had been able to tell him what exactly those flashes meant, but he did learn that the more, the better.
He looked up at Wanxin.
She was goggling at the block. Eyes still wide, she looked up at him, then back at the block. “Fourth-order?” she finally said, sounding as incredulous as she looked. “I figured you’d have high heavenly affinity. Second-order. Maybe third-order… But no. Fourth-order Firesoul. Chip me cracked.”
Jieyuan swallowed. If Wanxin’s reaction was any indication, he’d struck gold. Still, he kept himself from getting too excited. “That’s good, then?” That he was a Firesoul barely registered in his thoughts—that was just confirmation of what he’d known all along.
“Good? Gleaming Heavens, you have no idea how big this is, do you, gemstone?” Wanxin let out a little chuckle. “Haoyujin Jieyuan,” she said his name, slowly. “Back when I first heard it, I didn’t recognize that family name, Haoyujin. I thought it might be a clan of the Radiant Gold Sect, since mundane-borns seldom did so well, but you are a mundane-born, aren’t you?”
Mundane-born. Normally, spoken by a cultivator, that’d be an insult. Right here and now, though, it felt more like praise. His parents might have been mundanes, but he’d still managed to come this far. “So fourth-order’s more than just good, then?”
Wanxin snorted. She’d been unusually candid with him for a cultivator from the start, but she seemed even more open now, like she’d done away with whatever lingering pretense she’d still been holding onto. “That’s a crude understatement. But you’re not wrong. Let me put it this way. Unless the other two got just as good a result, which I doubt, you just took first place in the entrance trials.”
The other two. Tianzijun Daojue and Linzushen Meiyao. That couldn’t mean anyone but them, not after the previous stage of the entrance trials, the dueling stage—where they’d beaten all the other trial takers with effortless, almost dismissive ease. Jieyuan included. His right shoulder still ached where Daojue had stabbed him with his spear, and his left one from where Meiyao had hacked at him with her saber. It was a good thing they had only been allowed wooden weapons for the duels, otherwise he’d now be two arms short.
First place had been Jieyuan’s goal. It would've served as irrefutable proof that his origins didn’t define him. After the previous stage of the entrance trials, though, he’d been sure that position had been pushed soundly beyond his reach, and Wanxin’s words just now weren’t quite enough to shatter that belief. She might be making a big deal about his results now, but he couldn’t shake off the feeling those two would beat him in this, too—or at the very least match him. Even though he’d only met Daojue and Meiyao today, and only for the brief moments they’d faced each other on the dueling platform, he couldn’t picture either of them as inferior to anyone else in any way.
Jieyuan looked down at the other affinity gauges. “What about the others? Are we testing them too?” He imagined people only had one alignment, but Wanxin had also used a different term, affinity. Although he’d always known he was a Firesoul, he also suspected he might have a bit of Metal in him, assuming it worked like that.
Wanxin gave him an amused look. “Have you ever Communed before?”
“Communed?”
She shook her head, still smiling. “I thought as much. You’re only ever born with one innate affinity—the one for the element you’re aligned with. Your affinity for everything else starts out at zeroth-order. You can raise it, through Concept pursuit, but for that you need to be Communing. We’ll be getting to that later, however. For now…” She plucked a hand-sized card from the small stack on her side of the table and held it out to him. “Memorize this.”
Jieyuan felt his throat dry up, and all thoughts of affinities and elements vanished. He gave the card a long, almost wary look, then took it into his hands slowly, almost reverentially. It was made from the crisp, expensive kind of paper that his old man used to reserve for big contracts. Written on it was a poem—six lines, each one noticeably longer than the last.
Jieyuan had to stop himself from crushing the paper in his grip. What he was holding in his hands was precisely what he’d come so far for—what he’d left his old life behind for. He’d seen attempts to replicate it, though none of them effective. Mundane fabrications, nothing more than words on paper. Cabals—cultivator organizations—guarded the real thing with even more zeal than merchants held onto their gold.
This. This is what would make him into a cultivator. Into someone who could use chroma—the miraculous substance all the powers of cultivators revolved around.
“I take it you know what you’re holding is?”
Jieyuan looked up. It took real effort to tear his eyes away from the paper. “A heavenly hymn,” he said. He wet his lips. “A chromalization hymn.”
“Correct,” Wanxin said. “Fire-aligned, too, so it’s guaranteed to work for you. How good are you at memorization?”
“One minute’s all I need.” He’d always had a good memory, and he’d trained specifically for this.
“Then it’s a good thing you have half an hour.”
Wanxin looked to the side, and he followed her gaze to the incense clock beside the stack of cards. A long incense stick ran through the body of the device, coiling in closed loops, with six little weights hanging from it, evenly distanced from each other.
Wanxin rubbed one of the ends of the stick with her fingers, and it lit up. A trail of barely visible white smoke rose from the flame. The colored lights coming from the glowing gemstones in the ceiling cast faint, hued curtains of light against the smoke.
“Once the last weight drops, we proceed. And trust me, Jieyuan—you want to carve those words into your mind. Cut them in sharp and deep. You’ll need that for what comes next.”
Jieyuan glanced at the pink pill. It seemed bigger than before. More real.
He gave the hymn another read, slowly this time.
It is fire,
Which burns bright and burns bold;
When the touch of the flame lights the pyre,
And the heat of the blaze quells the creep of the cold,
Does the world feel the burgeoning might of the burning desire;
And does man learn that fire is all man will ever need to stand firm, uncontrolled.
Two reads later, he already had it down, but he kept reading it anyway, over and over, while the room filled with smoke and the faint herbal scent of the incense filled his lungs.
One by one, the weights of the incense dropped, a bright chime ringing as they struck the bottom of the clock. A fire was burning inside him, and with each weight that dropped, it got stronger, fiercer, fueled by the knowledge of what each of those chimes was bringing him closer to.
—∞—
The sixth weight dropped.
Jieyuan lowered the hymn card and looked up at Wanxin, but she only put out a hand, looking at him closely, searchingly.
Unsure what she was waiting or looking for, he waited, breathing in the faint, tangy smoke of the incense.
An overwhelming sense of raw clarity struck him—and he jerked back as the entire world seemed to snap into place. The lingering smoke from the incense, previously faint and barely distinguishable, was now clear and sharp, hanging in the air—and he could both smell and taste it. Just as clear was the roughness of his sturdy cotton robes and trousers, and the softness of his silk neck shroud, tightly wrapped around his neck. His heart drummed in his chest, impossibly loud.
And there was a presence in his head, above and around him—a bright presence, somehow—airy but heavy.
“There we go,” Wanxin said. Had her voice always been this pleasant, this melodious? And her eyes—they seemed bigger than before. Brighter. Resplendent pools of crystalline water, split into tiny, hypnotizing fractals. “You asked about Communion before, didn’t you? Well, this it. You’ve just entered Heavenly Communion. Usually, it’d take you years of meditation to reach this state, so you can thank the Gleaming Mind incense for this.” She tapped the bit of incense remaining in the clock. “And this presence you’re feeling—this vague awareness of something around you? That’s the Heavens themselves, paying attention to you. Heavenly hymns can’t do much if the Heavens don’t know to listen to it.”
She smiled. “Now we can proceed.”
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
The Heavens? Jieyuan had always thought of the Heavens as something abstract. The overarching collection of laws that governed the world. Not as something that could listen to him.
Wanxin picked up the pink pill and held it out, and Jieyuan banished all other thoughts from his mind. As sharp as his senses had become, he still couldn’t detect any of the utter foulness he knew the pill contained.
Cultivator’s Agony.
To be a cultivator is to know pain.
“I’m assuming you also know what this is, from how you’re looking at it. Have you taken one before?”
She was right on the gold.
“I have,” Jieyuan said.
Wanxin smirked. “Since you’re here, I’m assuming you survived it. How old were you? What strength?”
“Twelve. Half-potency.”
It’d been six years, but he could still clearly remember it, like a red, angry scar across his mind.
“Good,” Wanxin said. “Most mundane-borns have no idea what they’re in for. The pill you’re holding is a full-strength dose, not half, but at least you know what to expect.” She quirked an eyebrow. “Still, twelve? That’s young, even for a non-lethal dose. Then again, you are a Firesoul. Not the most patient sort. You’re currently eighteen, aren’t you? It’s usually only chromal-borns that take entrance trials at that age, and even then, most of them still wait a few years to better prepare themselves. But you don’t strike me as the waiting type.”
“I am,” Jieyuan confirmed. And Wanxin was right, at least partially. If he’d been able to take part in the entrance trials even earlier, he’d have, but you had to be at least eighteen to undergo chromalization, to become chromal, regardless of whether your parents were mundane or chromal. She was wrong about one thing, though. Taking Cultivator’s Agony hadn’t been a matter of patience. It wasn’t him who’d procured the pill, even if he’d been planning on doing so eventually. Rather, his old man had given it to him, hoping it’d scare him off this path.
It hadn’t quite had the intended result.
Wanxin placed the Cultivator’s Agony pill in front of him. “You know what to do next?”
Jieyuan picked up the pill, eyed it, licked his lips. “I take it, then recite the hymn.” There was little information about the chromal world that cultivators allowed mundanes to know, but he’d used every connection he had, most of them inherited from his old man, to figure out everything he could about the entrance trials of cabals. This very last step was what he’d managed to learn the most about.
“That’s it. Just remember that if you stutter or falter, you have to start over. The Heavens aren’t all that nitpicky, so you don’t have to get the rhythm or intonation right, but the words need to be said clearly and in order.” Wanxin made her way around the table, and he noticed that she was unarmed. It was the first time he’d ever seen a cultivator without a weapon hanging by their belt. “Whenever you’re ready,” she said once she was standing behind his chair.
With his enhanced senses, he could feel her breath brush against his scalp and neck. She was there to intercede if he couldn’t handle it, to use some sort of chromal method to suppress the effects of the pill. If the rumors were right, full-strength Cultivator’s Agony could be lethal. The pain was so great it could outright break the mind, with the heart giving out only moments afterward.
Jieyuan rolled the pill between his fingers.
This was the last step of the entrance trials, where the majority of mundane-borns—and a good number of chromal-borns—failed. The final and greatest watershed. Worst case scenario, he’d come close to dying—or even outright die, if Wanxin didn’t step in. Best case scenario, he’d wish to die, or at least come close to that.
Eyes on the pill, he reached deep inside himself and searched his heart.
And found not a hint of worry or apprehension.
Six years ago, he’d only barely pulled through taking a half-strength dose, but he knew that he could handle what came next—knew it as surely as the weight of gold.
Because six years ago, as he lay on the floor, caked in his own vomit and tears, he’d mustered what remained of his strength to grin up at his old man’s paled, sickened face and ask for another.
It wasn’t dread he felt as he looked at the pill. Rather, all he found inside himself was a burning, fervent anticipation so strong it left no space for anything else.
The pain was terrible, but it was nothing more than a price for power.
The price for the power.
I win, old man.
He flicked the pill into his open mouth and swallowed. It was just as sickeningly sweet as he remembered.
Wanxin’s hands grasped his shoulders. “Brace yourself,” she said. “Don’t start reciting until I tell you to.”
“Got it.”
The one time Jieyuan took Cultivator’s Agony had also been his last. His old man had refused to get him another, and Jieyuan had never managed to procure one on his own. So he’d prepared himself for this day in other ways.
Some of his nails hadn’t grown back quite right, and darkened burn scars littered his arms and parts of his back. If he’d done anything these past six years, it was getting acquainted with pain—in any way he could think of. As the old man had liked to say, after you made the investment, all that mattered was collecting the profits.
Jieyuan closed his eyes and waited.
It wasn’t long until he felt it. A minute prickling sensation, just above perception, like needle stabs, all over his chest and upper back. The moment he noticed it, the sensation spread throughout his body—up his shoulders and neck and his stomach.
Barely a breath later, he could feel the stabbing pain all over—and it registered as pain now, the intensity of it growing even faster than it had spread. Like dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of needles, drilling into him, faster and faster.
Jieyuan settled back into his chair, willing his body to relax. He let out a slow, steady breath as the pain kept building and building. He could’ve smiled. This was nothing. Just a pathetic little prelude.
Prickles gave way to brighter, sharper stabs of pain. There was heat to it now—a searing, scorching quality.
It wasn’t quite there yet, but it was getting closer. Jieyuan shifted in his seat a little, but that was the extent of his reaction. So far it was just like it’d been six years ago. Back then, he’d tried to ignore the pain, to fight it, and although it’d worked to some extent, it hadn’t felt right. Over the years, he’d learned a better way of handling it.
The pain was there for a reason. It wasn’t meant to be rejected or ignored, but embraced. It was a dividing force—what set apart the worthy from the unworthy. So he focused on it. Immersed himself in it. He wouldn’t ignore it. He would give it the respect it was due, and face it fully.
The stabs disappeared altogether, leaving behind only the burning.
And then everything exploded.
Jieyuan jerked, almost jumping off his chair, but he quickly seized back control over his body. Breathing more deeply, he pressed himself firmly against his chair, this time holding his body taut, hands gripping the armrests.
In an instant the pain grew past the burning, vivid rawness of ripped nails, the sharp, jagged agony of broken bones, and the white, searing ache of scorched skin. Past, even, the pain he remembered from his childhood, which had brought his twelve-year-old self to his knees, then to the floor, twitching and curled up into a ball, lying on a pool of blood and vomit.
The fire was everywhere. Head to toe, every inch of his body turned into a source of endless heat. Magma flowed in his veins, steam filled his lungs, and red-hot metal pokers tore his muscles apart. And his eyes—they boiled in their sockets, melting in syrupy goo. His viscera twisted and warped, sizzling in the magma that was now his blood. His heart was a miniature sun, a wrathful, white orb of pure, beating agony.
And there was no end to it. His blood kept boiling, his eyes kept melting, his organs kept sizzling, and they didn’t stop. As if there was an endless supply of flesh and viscera for the fire to ruin. His body remained in a state of raw, unending destruction. The liminal instant of absolute pain stretched into incomprehensible eternity.
He heard something—a faint whisper amid the all-consuming heat, too low for him to hear. It came again, clearer, but still indiscernible.
The third time he heard it—a shout, right next to his ear. “BEGIN!”
Begin? What—
His thoughts were distant, hollow, like echoes. As if they weren’t his own.
It is fire…
The hymn. Right.
Awareness bled through. He was still sitting—spine upright, motionless. Not a jerk or twitch. As if his body understood, instinctively, that there was no running away from this pain—that no flailing about would help in any way. As if the most fundamental part of him understood that the fire came from within, that there was no escape.
He tried opening his mouth, and though the muscles readily responded, no sound came out. He shut it, took a deep breath, and gave it another try.
“It— It is fire.” He could only barely hear his voice. His words didn’t sound quite right. They were unsteady. Shaky.
Blood boiling, eyes melting, viscera sizzling—
Again.
“It is fire.” That sounded clearer. But… “It is fire,” he repeated. For good measure.
Next…
“That burns bright and burns bold.”
Voice steady, he reminded himself. Steady.
“When the glow of the flame lights the pyre,” he forced the words out between breaths. “And the heat of the blaze quells the creep of the cold.”
Blinding, deafening agony filled him.
“Does the world feel the burgeoning might of the burning desire,” he said. “And does man…” He stopped, swallowed, then pushed the remaining words out through his throat, “… learn that fire is all man will ever need to stand firm…”
The last word left his lips like a whisper.
“…uncontrolled.”
Everything vanished.
He saw it.
A constellation, a sea of silver stars, gathered together—
—a glimpse of gold, red, orange, yellow—
—of flickering, flaring, fluttering flames—
—of warmth, of heat, of radiance—
“JIEYUAN!”
Jieyuan jerked back, slamming onto the back of his chair, eyes flinging open.
Colors assaulted him. Shades upon shades filled his vision. The glow of the lights above, previously just orange and yellow, was now a multitude of minute streams of varying shades, every minute difference magnified a thousand times over.
And where before his sight had been sharpened by Heavenly Communion, it was now magnified. All Heavenly Communion had done was increase his awareness. Now he was actually seeing better. Much better.
The grains on the wooden table. The imperfections on the walls and floor and ceiling. Even the specks of the lingering incense smoke.
Hands grabbed onto his shoulders. The depth of detail in the sensation was almost jarring. He could feel everything. The exact force born by each of the ten fingers digging into his skin, and even the harder, cooler touch of the many rings Wanxin wore on each of her fingers. More than that, he could feel all the different places where his clothes stuck to his skin. As well as the sweat that drenched his body, down to every individual droplet. On his face, on his arms, on his chest—
“Steady now, gemstone,” came Wanxin’s voice. That, too, was different. He could hear the different notes in her words, discern the cadence of her speech. “Focus on your breathing. Breathe steadily. Slowly. Gather yourself.”
Jieyuan shut his eyes and did as he was told. Like everything else, the cold touch of the breath flowing in through his nose and pooling in his lungs was magnified and brought into focus. But in this case, his augmented senses were to his benefit. He clung onto the feel of his breath, using it as a focus point as he let everything else, every other sensation, fade away.
It occurred to him then that both the pain from Cultivator’s Agony and the presence he’d felt earlier, while in Heavenly Communion, were gone.
Cultivator’s Agony. He shuddered at the thought of what he’d just gone through, and almost reached up to check whether his eyes were still there, still whole and unmelted, even though he’d been using them to see just moments ago. He was hardly a stranger to a fire burning inside him. All his emotions, positive and negative, felt like fire to him past a certain point. But the fire from Cultivator’s Agony had been of a different kind. Just as intangible, if not imaginary, but utterly destructive. Purifying, even, as it stripped you down to your very essence.
Feeling his breaths get longer and deeper, controlled, he opened his eyes, and found black locks crowding his vision. He ran both hands through his hair, moist and sticky with sweat, and swept it back. It was a familiar motion. He didn’t wear his hair long, just about level with his ears, but he usually left it messier than an uneducated man’s ledgers, so it got in the way of his eyes at times.
Wanxin was standing back in her original position across the table, looking at him intently. “How are you feeling?”
“It’s… It’s manageable.” He could still feel just about everything, but his thoughts were clearer now.
“Give it a day or two, and you won’t even notice it,” Wanxin said. “Getting used to Communing now that you’re a cultivator will take a little longer—with your augmented senses, the heightened awareness feels all the more intense—but you’ll get used to that, too. Just give it a little time.”
“Now that I am a cultivator…” Jieyuan looked down at his hands and clenched them. He could feel a pressure in his muscles, like a second source of strength. And there was something else he could sense now. A presence all around him, like it was permeating the air. And even though he couldn’t see it, at least not in any way he was used to, he could tell it was red, a very faint red. And that it was also vibrating—no. Not also. It was like its color came from its vibration, from its rhythm.
Ambient chroma, he realized. It was normally beyond the perception of mundanes unless physicalized—turned physically visible and tangible—in the form of prisms and shards and projections, but he’d heard that it was all around them, in the air, like a gas, and that cultivators could sense it.
There were also other things he could sense. A deeper, more tangible presence within him, as well as on Wanxin. Particularly on Wanxin. With this new sense of his, he could also somehow perceive a vague, faint outline around Wanxin, and a deeper, solid sphere in Wanxin’s chest, overlapping with her physical body. From those things, he could sense a rhythm, quick and steady—a rhythm that was red, somehow, faster than the one from ambient chroma, making it a much deeper, stronger red. He concentrated on that odd sensation, halfway between hearing and seeing but also neither. Suddenly he wasn’t hearing just the rhythm, but also a melody, crisp and whimsical. And he could both see and hear the melody, except not with his eyes and ears. It was blue, with a shimmering, crystalline quality, and—
“You can experiment with your soulsense all you want later,” Wanxin said, pulling him away from whatever it was he’d just been doing.
“Soulsense?”
She gave him a confused look, then waved her hand dismissively. “Right. Mundane-born. You’ll figure it out soon enough.”
Jieyuan took a steadying breath. “What now?”
“The ones who passed are supposed to gather outside for the final formalities. Nothing that warrants worrying over. All that’s left is to be properly inducted as a disciple.” Wanxin moved back to stand by his side. “Can you stand up?”
Jieyuan pushed himself off against the chair and planted his feet on the ground by way of answer. He looked over to Wanxin. Standing near each other like this, he noticed how tall she was. Not much shorter than he was, and he was unusually tall himself, even for a man.
Radiant Heavens, but she was a vision. His eyes fell on her bond band. Someone else’s vision, though. Jealousy came, licking and stinging, but it lingered for just a moment before burning out. He had little fuel in him for it. Even if he’d had a chance, he wouldn’t have tried pursuing Wanxin, no matter how… desirable he found her. He had his priorities worked out, and getting involved with someone wasn’t anywhere close to the top of the list. He didn’t need—couldn’t afford—any such distractions.
“Out through the door, then,” Wanxin said.
Jieyuan complied, treading more slowly than he normally would, but as steadily as he’d ever walked. His body was soaked with sweat, and the heightened senses of a cultivator only made it worse, the sticky sensation starker.
Wanxin trailed from a step behind him. He was halfway to the door when she spoke up. “You know, if it weren’t obvious you’ll be leaving the sect at the first chance you got, I’d offer to apprentice you.”
Jieyuan turned to face her. “What?”
“A fourth-order Firesoul like you? There’s no way you’re staying here for long. I know ambition when I see it. You’re climbing the cabal ladder as high as you can go. This year’s a Summit year, and with your heavenly affinity, you’re guaranteed to be scouted.”
“I…” Jieyuan settled for a nod. He saw no reason for pretense. Not when things were laid out like that.
The Gleaming Stone Sect was just a Redsoul cabal. The second-strongest cabal in the Radiant Gold District—the territories connected to Radiant Gold City—but still a Redsoul cabal, putting it at the bottom of the cabal hierarchy. He didn’t defy his family and become a cultivator just to stop here. As Wanxin had said, he’d go as far as he could—and then farther still, if he had any say on it.
Four and a half months. One hundred and thirty-six days. That was how much time was left until the Radiant Gold Summit. When all the cabals of the Radiant Gold District would gather, with the Howling Lightning Sect—the Orangesoul cabal all the Radiant Gold District cabals were subordinate to—sending over an envoy to oversee the proceedings. And, more importantly, to scout talented disciples. The event didn’t concern mundanes, but with swathes of cultivators arriving in the city en masse every five years and always on the same date, it was hardly as if the mundane population could stay ignorant of it. And since cultivators employed mundanes, the details had long since found their way into the city’s consciousness.
“Consider yourself lucky that my great-aunt isn’t around anymore, though,” Wanxin said, sounding amused. “Obsessed with Firesouls as she’d been, she’d have fought tooth and nail to keep you around.”
Great-aunt? Jieyuan didn’t have time to think on that as they came to a stop in front of the door.
Wanxin gave him a smirk. “I’d brace myself if I were you.”
She pushed the door open.
Light and colors struck Jieyuan like a physical blow. He staggered back, furiously blinking, before shutting his eyes. Even then, the light remained almost blinding. But quickly he felt his eyes settling, so little by little, he forced them open.
Beyond the room was a wide, circular courtyard, carpeted in a hundred different shades of green, vaulted by just as many shades of blue and white in the sky above.
In the center of the lawn were two figures, their backs toward him. One, a green-robed woman with long, lustrous light brown hair that didn’t look tinted, even though Jieyuan had never heard of a natural hair color other than black. The other, a black-robed man with a build that served as all the proof you could ever need that the Heavens sometimes played favorites.
Meiyao and Daojue.
Jieyuan balled his hands into fists, then slowly opened them back up until his fingers were splayed wide and fully taut, before relaxing them. Good. Good. It wasn’t envy that he felt, but fierce satisfaction. He’d known Meiyao and Daojue would pass, but it was good to have it confirmed. He had a score to settle with them. Ledgers to match. Reparations to make.
He’d eat his weight in gold if Daojue and Meiyao weren’t chromal-borns. Their martial arts prowess aside, mundane-borns didn’t have green eyes like Meiyao’s or violet ones like Daojue’s. Nor did they have Meiyao’s brown hair, or Daojue’s towering, ridiculously broad-shouldered frame. If anything, Daojue and Meiyao weren’t just chromal-borns, but clan-borns—precious scions afforded all the advantages possible growing up, trained and mentored specifically for this day. Jieyuan had never heard of a Tianzijun or a Linzushen Clan, and there’d have at least been rumors about another clan with nonstandard eyes like the Liangshibai in the Radiant Gold District, but they could be from a different city. So many things about the two were so out of the ordinary that they made the average clan-born seem mundane.
Whatever Daojue and Meiyao were, mundane wasn’t it, so now that they were on a level playing field, all of them disciples, it was only a matter of time before he surpassed them. Jieyuan hadn’t become a cultivator to glisten copper to someone else. And if Wanxin’s words so far were any indication, he was meant for greater things.
“Everything all right, gemstone?”
Jieyuan turned to Wanxin. Cast in sunlight, she looked even more dazzling. Her eyes, faceted like sapphires seen from above, seemed to glow, the vivid shades of blues popping out.
He couldn’t help but grin at her.
It was only now that his life would begin in earnest. Everything up to this point had only served to get him here. To this place, to this moment. Mundanes didn’t matter. This was the truth that his family—the old man, most of all—had never understood, or refused to. Everything his old man had worked for all his life, all the family businesses—all of it was irrelevant, inconsequential. Whatever power they had was an illusion. The only ones with power, real power, were cultivators, and there was no way Jieyuan would settle for the mundanity when he could be more. Not when he knew he could be more.
The fire in him was back—not that of Cultivator’s Agony, but the familiar, galvanizing rush of burning ambition, so great it could’ve lifted him off his feet.
Wanxin had an amused look on her face, like she could tell what he was thinking. He answered her anyway.
“I’m golden,” he said, and meant it.