While walking, Lan Jin wants to search for more information about cultivation. Given that he had already been able to create and absorb the purple mist, he wanted to take things one step further and learn what he could actually use the purple mist for. Granted, he was a little concerned by the thought that the purple mist might not be Qi, but even so, he wouldn’t know for sure unless someone could tell him or he could find something using the Omega Browser that could explain it to him.
Within the Omega Browser’s Space, he controls the little star and slowly writes out ‘Cultivation Info’. At first, he thought about trying to reduce the number of letters by only writing ‘cultivation’, but he figured that would be too broad for him to find anything useful without getting really lucky. In the end, he had to settle for the fact that he was able to cut off most of the letters of ‘information’ to save himself some effort and to prolong the time he had available to search for useful information.
As he finishes writing, the Space begins to churn once more and Lan Jin watches as everything but the image of the naked woman and the jade are embraced by the infinite darkness around them. Even the purple fire is entangled by the darkness and it seems to undulate and flicker wildly as Lan Jin idly wonders if it is about to be snuffed out by him using the browser.
When it doesn’t seem to be immediately affected, he begins to pay more attention to the different sounds and images filling up the Space. Not wanting to make a bad choice, Lan Jin directly ignores anything that he cannot see the name of and only looks for things that are clearly titled.
His eyes flicker over titles carved into jade, rock, and bone and painted onto scrolls and bamboo strips like, ‘Anecdotal Evidence of the Existence of Multiple Cores’, ‘The Invariability of Elemental Preference’, ‘Mortality - Does it End with the Elements or with the Dao?’, and so much more. Once again, he finds it difficult to choose with the immense number of choices available to him, but he takes a gamble when he finds a large, brown scroll entitled, ‘On the Origins of Cultivation and the Limits of Humanity’.
The scroll is incredibly unimpressive from a visual perspective, it doesn’t even have handles and its exterior is wrinkled after all, and even in the Omega Browser’s Space, it looks very old. The scroll even looks like it was made from the hide of a large animal rather than parchment or paper. But the thing that really catches Lan Jin’s attention was that each of the characters within the scroll look to have been meticulously carved into the hide and then filled with metal.
Just the fact that the characters were carved into the hide already gave Lan Jin a good impression of the scroll because, to him, it meant that somebody thought the information was important enough that they took the time to put a lot of effort into making sure it would be available to whoever read it in the future. But for each character to be painstakingly filled with molten metal? Not only was that incredibly impressive because it didn’t look like the metal damaged the hide at all, but it also raised his estimation of the value of the information by a massive degree.
Without wasting any more time, Lan Jin chooses the scroll and waits patiently as everything else that came up during the search disappears and the scroll starts to take shape. It only takes a moment and, once it’s done, Lan Jin immediately opens the scroll and begins reading.
***
Not so long ago, I had the opportunity to speak with a powerful being, a bird with red plumage and wings whose span covered one hundred miles. This prestigious creature called itself a member of the Red-Crowned Sparrow clan, but as for its resemblance to a sparrow, I did not see any.
It asked me an innocuous question, fire burning from its mouth as it spoke— whether I had seen an orchid that glittered gold in the morning sun. Terrified of this mighty creature, I answered yes and told it where I had seen the flower.
This creature then took off and flew away. I thought it was gone forever, and glad I was at that because my old heart nearly stopped in my chest when it landed in front of me. But, a few months later it returned and told me I could ask it any one question and it would answer me.
I had many questions, the greatest among them being why this mighty bird sought out a simple flower, but when I saw this creature that defied all common sense, I had already lived for over four thousand years and knew that my life was coming to an end. Not wanting to waste this opportunity, I asked not a question I desired an answer to, but a question that had burned in the minds of my race for countless years.
My question was, “Why can you grow to be so great but humans cannot?”
To my everlasting chagrin, this giant bird laughed at me.
But, it did answer. And its answer was so simple. So simple that, by the time I realized how simple it was, it was already too late.
It said, “Humans seek to grow. They consume and consume, but in their desire to grow, they never take the time to know what it is they are consuming. They always fail to understand.
Your race calls us beasts and animals because we hunt one another, we live in trees or caves, and sometimes beneath the water, and we enjoy simple pleasures. But is your race not the same? Are the dwellings you make not just flimsy caves that blow away with a gust of wind? Does your race not howl in the night as you succumb to your lust? Do you not slaughter yourselves and the living beings around you just so you might survive another day?
Just a few million years ago, your kind lived in the Great Desolates, your temperaments worse than the lowliest of base animals, cultivating their bodies and ravaging one another day and night in order to claim food, territory, mates, and everything else your kind thought valuable. Where your kind walked, everything turned to dust as you fought against nature to survive.
Even today, long after your kind left the Great Desolates, you still live your lives in the same way. There is food all around you, the air is sweet, and life is good. But instead of understanding that simple fact, you struggle. Instead of appreciating what you can see and what you can grasp, you search for what you do not know. Instead of accepting that a path forward exists right in front of you, you fight to make a new one.
That is why we are great and you are not. Because even though your minds are good, you never seem to understand.”
It left after that, and for several decades after I complained bitterly that I was disparaged by an avian.
Many years passed and I grew numb to its contempt as I sought to understand the words it told me, but with my life growing ever closer to an end, each day searching exhausted me.
What I discovered was that I had been told the truth. And, I must sadly report that it was not difficult to discover this. I had just never cared before.
Humans did indeed originate from the Great Desolates. Prior to arriving in this new world, this ‘Divine Realm’, we were little more than barbarians and beasts. We did not know love, kindness, or respect. We did not show gratitude and we did not have hope. We only knew how to struggle and how to survive.
In those days, ancient to us but in living memory for some of the creatures I have had the opportunity to encounter, humans cultivated a technique known as the ‘Great Desolates Body Transformation’. Curiously, rather than being what we might today consider a cultivation practice, it seemed to have something to do with our bloodlines rather than Qi and it is something that we lost over time after entering the Divine Realm.
It is said that our ancestors were a terrifying race in the Great Desolates and the first humans were considered mighty even when compared to the noble and powerful inhabitants of the Divine Realm. When they first arrived, they destroyed, devoured, and raped everything they could, their only desire seemed to be to live to see the next day and pass down their line in this new, relatively peaceful world.
In those days, it is said that millions of miles of land and sea were turned into wastelands and the number of lifeforms who suffered or fell under human hands could be counted in the billions.
I would like to think that it is because our ancestors were afraid, that humans innately have love in their hearts and the conditions of their growth tainted that love into rage, hunger, and lust, but from the records I have seen and the stories I have heard, the earliest humans were nothing but mindless tyrants worse than even the terrifying Devil race that haunts the borders of the Divine Realm. Ironically, it is said that only the offspring of our worst years eventually grew to understand what we now consider to be ‘human’ emotions like love, kindness, respect, gratitude, veneration, and so on.
This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
How sad would it be that when we speak of human kindness we do not speak of something that is innate to us but something we inherited through copulation with plants and animals?…’
***
Lan Jin’s eyes grow wider and wider as he walks, and with each word read he finds himself ever more incredulous. Most of what he reads is very difficult for him to believe, but each time he decides that something is categorically impossible, he finds himself fascinated and keeps reading. To him, both the author’s personal history and his description of humanity’s history seem so far-fetched that Lan Jin can’t help but view the scroll as a work of fiction.
In his mind, the human race is only a few million years old, and human civilization is significantly younger. So for this scroll to be talking about things that were millions of years in the past, he believes it to be entirely unreliable. He also thinks that it is ridiculous that humans could have possibly destroyed millions of miles of land and slaughtered billions of living beings, especially if some of those beings could be compared to the bird that had a wingspan of over a hundred miles long. So he assumed both were exaggerations to help shape the author’s narrative.
Weirdly enough, the thing that gave the scroll more authority in his mind and caused him to continue reading was that humans apparently had sex with animals and even ended up making children with them. He already knew that humans did stupid things when they were horny and, judging by the naked woman with fox features in the Omega Browser’s Space right now, someone somewhere definitely did the dirty with animals at some point and succeeded at making life.
Because of that simple fact, Lan Jin was able to compromise with his beliefs and began to view the humans mentioned in the scroll as a race of humans that evolved separately and earlier than the race of humans that was born on planet Earth. As for how they happened to produce offspring with an entirely different species, Lan Jin wasn’t too sure, but he also didn’t care too much because he’d already seen evidence that it had happened in the past.
It also helped that, as he continued reading, he learned a lot more about what the writer considered the early stages of cultivation and even what made cultivation possible for humans in the first place.
Cultivation was divided into four large Realms, each with several stages, and each stage had levels that helped define their completion. The first large Realm was known as the Mortal Shedding Realm and referred to people who cultivate to a point where they can infuse their entire body with Qi, thus becoming something more than mortal but less than immortal. Within the Mortal Shedding Realm, there are seven smaller stages beginning with Qi Sensing, then Qi Gathering, Qi Condensing, Meridian Opening, Core Forming, Core Fusing, and ended with the stage that gave the larger Realm its name— the Mortal Shedding stage. The author even claimed that, as someone cultivated further, their lifespan would increase and they would become more and more powerful, but he doesn’t go into too many details outside of stating he could only live for over four thousand years because he had reached the peak of the Mortal Shedding stage.
Following the Mortal Shedding Realm is the Earth-Bound Immortal Realm and it refers to people who have transcended mortality but have yet to transcend the mortal world. The author only claims that people who have reached this Realm can control the elements, but he can’t go into too many details because he had never reached this Realm himself. As for the two large Realms following the Earth-Bound Immortal Realm, the author only knows the name of the next Realm, the True Immortal Realm, due to conversations he had with several Earth-Bound Immortal beings throughout his research. As for the following Realm, the author could only assume it was a Realm of godlike beings.
As for what made it possible for humans to cultivate, there was something called a ‘spirit root’ that existed in both a physical and metaphoric sense within the human body. It could be located in many places, but the most common places were at the base of the spine, somewhere around the xiphoid process, and between the eyes. Interestingly enough, the author claimed that where the spirit root was located was a heritable trait, and spirit roots located closer to the eyes were considered better for cultivating Qi.
Even more interesting is that the author believes that spirit roots originated in humans due to one of two things. The first thing is that they may have come about during the union of the humans from the Great Desolate and the lifeforms of the Divine Realm. According to the records the author had access to, humans didn’t start cultivating Qi until long after they were suppressed by the denizens of the Divine Realm, so there was a high possibility that humans didn’t have spirit roots until after that point. The problem with this theory is that it didn’t explain why human mixed breeds born to the same races in the Divine Realm often had spirit roots in entirely different locations since it was well-known that spirit roots were inherited.
The alternative theory is that humans were theoretically able to cultivate due to practicing the Great Desolates Body Transformation for countless generations. The rationality behind this is that the lifeforms who originally fought against the invading human race found it difficult to attack humans with their Qi because the humans had incredibly powerful bodies that behaved like energy sponges. Everything the Divine Realm natives threw at the humans would be absorbed and it wasn’t until their bodies reached a critical threshold of absorbed Qi that they would finally begin to take damage from it.
Lan Jin personally found the second option to be more believable, but a large part of that was due to wishful thinking. After all, if the first reason was to blame for humans being able to cultivate Qi, then he was screwed because he doubted any of his ancestors had ever managed to produce offspring with animals— or at least, he hoped they hadn’t. It also helped that he had already managed to do something that could probably be considered cultivation— albeit with the Omega Browser’s help—, and so he believed humans could cultivate but they likely needed some sort of impetus to make it happen; just like how he needed to throw the purple fires into Moxian’s blood bubble before they could stick around for longer than twenty seconds. Maybe for the original human cultivators, being the progeny of humans and non-humans was that impetus.
Of course, now that he considered things this far, he found himself with two options available to him. The first option was to use his next opportunity using the Omega Browser to search for ‘Qi Sensing’. If he wanted to cultivate, he should probably start from square one and, according to the scroll, this seemed to be the sensible first step.
On the other hand, if he believed that the scroll had actual authority in the topic of cultivation, then it might be better for him to search for ‘Great Desolate Body Transformation’. Later generations of humans had lost their ability to cultivate the Great Desolate Body Transformation, but that only happened for the mixed-breed offspring born in the Divine Realm who had access to Qi. But for the earlier humans who could cultivate it, their bodies were described as being powerful and they could soak up Qi despite not knowing how to use it.
Since he was pretty sure he was just a regular human and not a plant or animal mixed breed, it might make more sense for him to cultivate the Great Desolate Body Transformation first and look up Qi Sensing after. If it strengthened his body, it might even make it easier for him to travel while looking for civilization. The big issue with this is that ‘Great Desolate Body Transformation’ had a lot more letters in it than ‘Qi Sensing’. So if he wanted to search for it, he might not even be able to finish writing it out, let alone have time to scan through the options he finds.
Granted, he planned on learning how to do both, now it was just a question of which one would come first.
When he shifts his attention to the little star, he pauses for a moment and notices that, once again, the strand of purple mist is gone. What’s more, the little star looked to have a little bit of energy left. Not enough for a search, or at least, not enough unless he was planning on writing a few letters and searching for something small, but there was energy left. He doesn’t know if it is due to the star gradually growing in strength or because the purple mist had disappeared, but he could always wait until later and try searching for something small once he had absorbed another strand of mist.
“If the purple mist is strengthening the star, then that might be—“
With his attention focused on the little star, Lan Jin trips over something and lands on his face, his impromptu backpack loosening and sending pears in every which direction.
“Ngh!” He groans, his nose hurting quite a bit, but thankfully it doesn’t feel like it’s broken and there also isn’t any blood.
“What tripped me?” He wonders and looks around.
Two feet behind him, Lan Jin notices a piece of metal on the ground. When he looks closer, he notices that it is a blade of some kind.
Pushing himself up, he walks over to it and picks it up before looking it over.
“Is this a sword or a machete?” He wonders, staring at the bronze blade in his hand. It has a two-and-a-half-foot-long straight blade that only curves slightly at the very tip and its spine doesn’t seem to have an edge to it. The blade is only about two to three fingers wide and looks to be poorly made based on the chips on its edge and the spine that is slightly warped. Its handle is eight inches long and is wrapped in brown leather that looks to be stained by sweat and dirt. The metal doesn’t look tarnished, so Lan Jin doesn’t think it is too old, and if anything he is happy and confused to find signs of humanity in the middle of a field of grass. He’s also slightly concerned that there is a relatively new, and clearly used, blade just sitting out in the middle of nowhere.
Looking around, Lan Jin doesn’t see anybody nearby, but that doesn’t say much since he can hardly see a few feet in front of him. That, and he doesn’t want to look too hard because he only knows where the mountains are because he had been walking straight.
“Should I call out?” He asks himself, but when he looks at the blade in his hand again he decides not to.
“Maybe not. I’m okay with meeting people, but I want to be able to see who I’m meeting so I don’t invite a psychopath over to kill me.” His thoughts slip and he remembers Qingshui who had tried to kill him for some inane reason and he can’t help but hope that she is an outlier and not a good representation of whatever people he eventually finds.
Setting the blade down by his feet, Lan Jin gathers up all of the pears scattered nearby while being careful not to move around so much that he loses track of where he’s going. After tying them all up in his hoodie again, he swings them over his shoulder again and reaches down to pick up the blade.
“No one’s around and it’s covered in dirt, so whoever lost it probably won’t find it. Since that’s the case, I’ll keep it.”
***
Less than a quarter mile away from Lan Jin, a rotting corpse lays in the ground, its clothes torn to shreds and any identifying features it may have once had had been eaten by insects and animals. Lodged between its bones were long quills that looked to have come from a large animal and several small personal possessions and some coins could be seen scattered around the corpse.