I would never forget that day, the day a giant hand descended from the sky and scooped the very souls from the body of every living being on Earth in one fell swoop. We all looked to the sky at the same time, preternaturally aware that the literal end of the world had arrived. It was over in moments, billions of souls, mostly human, pulled out like a handful of fish shaped cheese crackers being scooped up by a hungry kid at snack time. Those moments of absolute certainty of the collective end of all reality, followed by my Soul being stuffed in with all the rest into a filthy seeming leather at the side of some fat old man’s hip while also containing the Souls of every intelligent life on Earth.

When next I regained some awareness, it was of horrendous pain and a sense of wrongness more intense than when that soccer ball had forcibly descended ‘tighty’ righty. That was what I called my right… ahem, well, that’s neither here nor there. Particularly since Souls don’t have a righty to name anymore. Or a ‘loosie’ lefty for that matter…

In either tes- er, either case, my vague sense of human-ness was replaced with the impression of becoming a powder, then being forced into a mold, finally heated until my broken particles fused into a hard and flawless sphere. Still ‘hot’, I was roughly handled by huge fat fingers and then engraved with excruciating detail (and more pain) with a densely packed network of script, diagrams, and esoteric symbols I instinctively named Runes in structures called Formations. Then, I was tossed.

The funny thing about being a Soul is that, well, you have no body. How is that funny? Not haha funny, damnit! Weird funny. Weird because you were aware you existed, which is not at all what it’s like in a sensory depravation chamber. My cousin got me to do that once and that was a heck of a trip. No, whereas there you couldn’t really feel your existence and could rely only on your thoughts to keep you sane, here I could definitely feel something. It just was limited to a sense of pressure or heat against my now hard, engraved, spherical surface.

So I could feel the fingers as they turned me, the sharp fine tip of the tool that engraved me, and then the cool rush of wind as I was hurled away to clatter against several hard surfaces. When I settled, I found the cool rough surface of a little stone pedestal held me perfectly from underneath. How it was I ricocheted around what I would later know to be a cultivation chamber with no entrance or exit and yet still come to a stop just so on a tiny thin column of carved stone, I could hardly fathom. At the time, I simply didn’t know what it was, just that I sat upon something and that the air was cool and still. Beyond that, I could only whimper and cry in my mind.

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That, and gaze upon the carvings. The language was unfamiliar to me, that I was sure. Of little else I could be sure though. Being forcibly removed from your physical form had the tendency to detach your from your squishy organic brain and memory. Only those last few moments remained of Earth, of my home. A vague awareness that I’d been a man. That I’d been in early middle age. That I’d had children, a partner. A job. Things like names, faces, details, all gone. Just those things which had seemed important as concepts in the final moments and nothing more. The impressions of a dying mind upon its departing Soul.

Now the unfamiliar language sung to me about the truths of the universe, about energies, about Qi. Elemental Qi, which formed all the traditional matter and energies of the Mundane universe. Entropy was the most common form of breakdown of Elemental Qi into pure Mundane Qi. The song of the unknowable words spoke also of Spiritual Qi, the energies of the Soul, a higher form of Qi which empowered Souls and birthed the ability to cultivate Mundane Qi. I’d been refined into a pill, combined with just enough Spiritual Qi to awaken the ability of my Soul to cultivate. The words, the diagrams, they were instructions. A method. A means of cultivating Mundane Qi, then Spiritual Qi, and the description of a Dao. A pathway to Immortal Ascension.

They were also a promise. Cease cultivating, either by giving up or by bottleneck, the Immortal who had scooped out all the Souls from Earth would pluck me up and consume me to further their own cultivation. A failed experiment. The method of cultivation given to me proven to be a failure or my own Will too weak. Cultivate to Immortal Ascension and the same Immortal would consume me then as well, unless I proved to be more useful as a subordinate.

The only pathway to survival was to cultivate, then submit. All other paths led to being consumed as a mere cultivation resource.

Mentally sighing, I began the first step as described by the Method.