Let’s start from the beginning. When I unlocked my spiritual root, I was nine years old, living in an orphanage. I think it was in the Violet Springs city? Or maybe it was Blue Waterfalls…

I am pretty sure there was some kind of color and something about water. There was definitely a big river passing through it.

At least a lake. Some body of water.

Okay, fine, I am not very sure, but that’s the best I have.

How do I know I was nine? No, I didn’t have any papers. A year after I left I met a cultivator with an age-measuring technique. He wasn’t from a sect though.

Shanyi, you are distracting me again. You wanted to talk about sects.

So. For the first year, I actually didn’t leave the city. I thought I lucked out into a good life - I mean, if I could be a cultivator, I could become rich, right? Food for days, good beds… Not like the orphanage. Well, didn’t turn out this way, and the reason was this beastmaster sect. They were growing these giant, rideable sea horses, and once in a while there would be a race that local loose cultivators could take part in. If you won, they’d even accept you into the sect.

No, I don’t remember the name of the sect. It’s so hard to keep track.

Right. Like I said, there was a river. So, like an idiot, I signed up for the race, got a raceseahorse, and started training it up. And of course the seahorse turned out to have a special bloodline, though I wasn’t suspicious of that sort of thing at the time, so I came to the race giddy from knowing I was going to win. Imagine my shock when this guy from the sect shows up and demands I give him “his” seahorse.

Shanyi, I was nine. How good were you at reading people when you were nine?

That’s because you are insane. Anyways, you are right. Turns out the seahorse actually was misplaced from his stables, but I didn’t know it at the time.

Like I said, I was nine. Of course I insulted him. So I don’t give it back, enter the race, and then almost win it - but he sabotages me at the last moment, and I barely escape with my life. He very loudly swore he’d find me and kill me - something about how he would be gracious in allowing his seahorses to feed on my entrails, because that’s the best fate trash like me can hope for. Or maybe he said something else, the threats are all so similar.

Why would I - no, I won’t gamble that you’d be able to threaten me in a way I haven’t heard before. First of all, you would lose. Secondly, I will never gamble with you on any subject for as long as I live.

No, I won’t make a bet that I will never make a bet either. You’d say I lost right away.

So after the race I decided that I best make myself scarce and ran away from the city. I tried to survive in the wilderness for a while, but that…didn’t really work. I still mostly avoided cities or sects for a long time.

No, I think I got that manual back in the city somewhere. It might have been the same ruins where I fell into a barrel of Asure Heart Cleansing Dew? There was also a cosmos ring with the drugs for it, I think.

I lost it somewhere. What, is the world fragment not enough for you?

Okay, that makes sense. Sorry. But I still don’t remember where I lost it.

Anyways. Next time I ran into a big sect was when I was thirteen. They lived at the very edge of the empire, around one of the world tears, and called themselves the Sky Void Island Temple.

You’ve never seen one? It’s a giant tear in space, blacker than anything you’ve ever seen. It consumes everything that falls into it, and spews out spiritual energy. A wind blows into it, growing stronger the closer you get, from all the air vanishing directly into the tear. After centuries of it, every last grain of soil had been scoured for many miles around, clean down to the world edges. You look out anywhere, and it’s just the clear blue sky and the suns, like you are hanging in limbo.

This sect lived on platforms, tied down with heavy chains around where the world edge occasionally bent into a column, like in the middle of Reflection Ridge. They all practiced flight using these hang gliders, using the local wind to move around, and I got pretty good at it while I stayed with them. Because there was nothing else that grew nearby, they had to bring in new stuff all the time - especially soil - and did their best to grow their own food, though that wasn’t really my job.

Yeah, they were good people. Really kind. I guess living in a place like that, you either all work together or you die. They are also who gave me the scroll for my Fluttering Wing Step technique.

Did I never tell you its name? Scarlet Dragonfly technique does sound fancier, I have to admit.

What happened? My fucking luck is what happened. World crack, completely unexpected. Half the people died immediately, and the other half when the chains shattered and the wind pulled the platforms into the world tear. I only survived because I could walk on air. My teacher was asleep when it happened, and by the time he awoke, he was halfway into the tear. Other people who mastered the technique tried to pull others out, but the winds were too strong. If there were any survivors, I’ve never met them.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

You think I didn’t blame myself enough? This is exactly why I don’t want to meet people! Hundreds of people died and all because of -

Ow! Stop slapping me!

Ow! Ow! Okay, fine, fine! It’s the Heaven’s fault, not mine!

Did you really have to slap me?

On a second thought, don’t explain.

Where? I don’t know, somewhere in the south. I think it might have been outside the empire - I am not sure.

Map? No, I’ve never bothered.

Why would I look up a map? I just ask people where to go.

Save your frustrations, please.

How long? I don’t remember. Around a year, I would guess.

Maybe. Let’s move on. It’s been a long time ago, but I still don’t like thinking about it.

Thank you. Well, after that I’ve pretty much given up on cultivation. I’d get to a place, find something to eat and do, and then leave, and hope I could get ahead of the bullshit. This mostly didn’t work. I don’t remember where I headed right after the Sky Void Temple - maybe it was the Serpent River, or maybe it was the dwarfholds. I was really not in a good place.

There were a lot of sect encounters after that, but you wanted to know about ones that completely vanished… I think that only leaves two.

Do you know about the southern deserts? Right. Well, the stories and books can’t tell you the whole picture. When they talk about the shifting sands, this is literal. There are these rocks, each as large as a hill, that move across the desert, and the sands are attracted to them like iron to a lodestone. I don’t know why - these sands are not ordinary. Each rock is surrounded by a much larger hill of red sand, shifting and flowing in waves as it moves.

I say sands because there are different types. The local cultivators had a whole system, but I never learned it. Red sand was slow and predictable, mostly sticking to the rocks. Gray sand flowed quickly, like enormous waves or tides across the desert, shifting with every hour, sometimes flowing faster than an avalanche. Purple sand was light, and when the winds blew strong, formed tornadoes and hurricanes. Brown sand was called the hungry sand, because it clumped up into voids beneath the surface, ones you might never get out of if you stepped on top of them. But there were more types than this, and the sands mixed together as well. When you first looked out over the desert, you just saw the dunes, but after a while, you started to read the landscape.

There were not many people there, because the only reliable source of food was a certain type of beetle that buried itself in the sand, hard to harvest and harder to eat. I don’t think that people went there because they liked it. I think most were demonic cultivators of one fashion or another.

It’s not that simple.

No, it really is not that simple. I don’t know what they did before, but in the desert they were just people trying to get by.

Well, it doesn’t matter now. There were no traditional sects there, but rather, there were clans, formed around specific families. These clans mostly made their compounds within the rocks. People were fiercely loyal to their clans, because you couldn’t live there without one, and not many could afford to pay a guide to lead them out of the desert, even if they had a place to go. Though I never joined one, I lived with one of them because I wanted a place to hide, and I figured it was about as far as it got. For a bit, it even seemed to be going well, though I never got close to any cultivators. The food was, like I said, terrible, but at least it was there.

The clan I was with lived in a rock that was heading towards another, that one with a different clan. The two started out friendly enough with each other, and even planned a marriage to bring each other closer together. But the closer the rocks got to each other, the less food there was - two clans harvesting beetles from the same area. Tensions rose. Then there was some kind of misunderstanding - I do not remember exactly what - and things descended into violence almost at once. Both clans blamed each other and started a war that got more and more bloody the closer the rocks got. I managed to mostly stay out - by that point, I was more familiar with how my luck worked, I suppose. In the end, the rocks collided, and both compounds were obliterated. Aside from a few people who fled well in advance, I do not think anyone else got out, not after their granaries and water storages were lost among the sands. Unlike me, they would have had to leave the desert on foot.

The last one was when I was exploring the eastern jungles. The fauna there is pretty scary, but most of it can’t fly, so I was pretty safe. If you have ever seen a drawing of a flock of solar geese - let me tell you, the reality is far, far more terrifying. Anyways, I needed somewhere to get food, so I kept in contact with this one small sect in the area - they paid me decent money for killing the demon beasts. They were called… Sanguine Peak Pavilion, or something like that. Their sect compound was in the middle of the jungle, up on top of a small mountain. It was surrounded by a hundred meter wide wall of poisonous bushes - crimson like blood, making the whole place look like a giant flower.

I planned to stay there for at least several weeks, but four days into it, this ancient grandpa showed up. I don’t know what hole he crawled out of, but he killed the sect elders, and then rounded up the rest of us and said he was going to pick out one cultivator who would be his direct disciple. He made us play games. Some were competitions of strength, others just normal games - cards, dice. Maybe he was weeding out the unlucky. Whomever lost a game, or tried to run was killed on the spot.

Of course I won all of them.

What did I do? Waited for him to fall asleep two days after it all ended, then picked out about a dozen biggest demon beast cores out of my inner world and made a crystal bomb. Not like they are hard to make, and I had a lot of experience over the years. Then I put it next to his face and blew his head clean off - wrapped in moth silk, he never even felt the danger. High building foundation or not, his brains still splattered all across the wall and ceiling, same as all the people he killed.

Yeah, that’s why I keep my inner world hidden, in case I need to do it all over again. And it’s why I try to stick to traveling in the Empire. Not many secret realms left here where one of those can crawl out of.

I guess I never thought about it. But if they were going to explode on their own, they would have done so already. And I guess my luck helps too, now that I think about it.

Ruthless? If I was really ruthless I would have done it before -

Ow! Fine, fine! I’ll stop.

No, I don’t like killing. But I got pretty good at running away, and sometimes ancient grandpas get in the way.

Anyways. I hope you’ll figure something out while I take a break.

Thank you. It’s fine. I just… need a minute.

I’ll be back when I will stop thinking of all that blood.