Qen Hou has had a fascinating last year or two.
It’s no exaggeration to say that cultivators as a whole don’t lead conventional lives, even as the Empire has reshaped the world. It’s true that many sect-members’ lives are effectively standardized to their different sects, but even still, compared to the millions in villages, towns and cities that go about their daily lives, a cultivator’s life tends to have more… drama to it. The occasional hunt for old artifacts, the act of fighting spirit beasts that have strayed towards towns in their territory, and, of course, the occasional tribulation or enlightenment make for plenty of variety throughout a year- and that’s not even counting the unique experiences a wandering cultivator might run into.
Still, Qen Hou thinks his particular experience is a bit stand-out.
Leaving his sect to follow a rogue apprentice healer? Check. Getting ambushed by bandits, one of which he’s now dating? Check. Wandering through a dead beast tide for a few weeks, only to draw the attention of a divine-level spirit beast? Check. Wandering into a tournament where said divine beast, a Warrior realm cultivator, and an ancient, monstrous Witch all showed up to explode everything, and then digging through said Witch’s impossible alien dungeon to find their lost allies? Check.
And then, of all things, building a cabin in the wilds at the center of a magic dungeon they’re accidentally creating and sparring with a 7ft tall superpowered abomination?
Yeah. Qen Hou is pretty damn sure that his experience is just a little bit atypical.
He’s also sure he wouldn’t trade it for the world.
He’ll never say it out loud, if only to avoid the insufferable grin that would bloom on Hao Nera, but it’s true. He has a partner, one that’s been good to him. He has a second partner, kinda, in Li Shu, who he trusts and cares for deeply, and a newfound friend and sparring partner in Raika, unholy nightmare that she is. And that last part especially has been a boon. Being out of his comfort zone, expressing intimacy and new ideas, and training in the art of violence, he’s grown by leaps and bounds.
Six months since he entered the Core Formation realm, he is knocking on the door of Nascent Soul.
The Qi within their bamboo perimeter is incredibly pure, concentrated, flowing in different patterns than they would in the wilds. Not quite like a sect’s meditation chambers, but closer than one would expect, and somehow more alive, more awake. Without the need to hunt or do more than cultivate, he’s managed to draw in tremendous amounts and add them to his Core, forming protective layers over the pearl at the center of his soul, the concentrated shell of all he holds and is.
And, of course, getting the shit kicked out of him by Raika helps a lot.
He looks at her, and wonders how she sees herself. What she feels, when she’s like this.
A foot and a half taller than him and more muscled besides, she moves so fast that the ground breaks behind her, the dirt and terrain shattering under the effects of tremendous force and weight. It’s not the most monstrous form he’s seen her in, but it’s still inhuman, overwhelming, like something beyond what should exist in a human body. His instincts scream at him, demanding that he activate his flight or fight modes, that his body flush with adrenaline and cortisol and every chemical available that might enhance his focus or survival, as the thing she embodies launches herself at him.
Seven feet or more of armored flesh, altered and alien, covered in rippling muscle and sharpened armor. Flesh and chitin made to look like an armored knight born of some fungal bloom of violent biology. She’s a nightmare made flesh, and he can’t help but grit his teeth and grin as he stands his ground.
He pulls on his core, feeling the purity and power of his Qi multiply as he draws from his Dantian and manifests himself unto the world. His Qi has changed, transformed in the last year from something imitating the purple flame of his old sect to something distinctly his. He sends out a pulse of heat and flame, and an instant behind it, his Qi ignites, silver-white flame tinged with hues of purple manifesting into a wall of fire before him.
Raika dodges out of the way immediately, and even while pulling on his Qi to boost his perception and movement, he barely tracks her. By the time his eyes catch up to where she’s gone, there is already a sharpened limb shooting towards him, night-black steel and obsidian edges shoved into his field of view, towards his throat-
He boosts himself further, feels his meridians strain and ache against his flesh, and dodges out of the way, just in time to step in towards his opponent and plant a hand against her chest.
She moves, as always, like every part of her is fueled by cultivation, her speed, perception and power rivaling his maximum but always on. The heights he can push himself to are her default state. But it’s not quite enough to get her ribcage out of his line of fire in time. He might not be able to sustain matching her strength or mobility, but with his flames and area-denial tactics, he can limit her options and plan ahead.
With a roar, he concentrates a good ten percent of his free Qi into his palm, the flame he’s holding wanting to explode, to manifest like a detonation- but he forces his will upon it, claims it as his own, even as it strains. He focuses into a single point, all that energy, heat and flame condensed down to a glowing star in his fist- and then lets it all out in her direction.
A beam of purest heat scorches the air, a laser colored in silver and purple carving into her. He sees it cut into the armor like a hot knife through butter- but then the heat begins to dissipate. He stumbles back as the beam hits her armor and refracts like it’s reflecting off a mirror, burning the ground around them, even as he sees her flesh begin to char from the pure heat of it. Beneath the skin, he sees a ripple as those interlocking scales she uses as armor realign for heat dispersal, and she steps forward, even as he keeps the beam burning.
He can’t help but match her grin as they stare each other down in the glowing heat.
He devotes the same amount of Qi again to the beam, but this time he reaches deeper, pulling at a drop from his Core rather than just his loose Qi. The color of the beam changes immediately, deepening and shifting, and suddenly, even with her weight, even as the attack is diffused and blocked by her Qi-resistant armor, she is pushed back a step.
It’s not enough to knock her over, even as he sees the beam at last melt through her bone and start to turn her flesh to magma, but she’s not just going to keep standing there. Instead of letting her take the initiative, he cancels the beam, prepares as she changes her weight distribution in a miniscule way to avoid falling forward-
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And he reaches out his Qi in a radius around him, beneath their feet, and lets his flames explode.
A pulse of heat calcifies the ground, the earth and plants not burning but somehow melting under the heat of his unique flame, and her footing is undone. For all her power, all her weight and speed, she can’t use Qi for telekinesis or stand on air. He can’t exactly fly yet, but lifting oneself with telekinesis is no small feat, and he’s been practicing. He allows himself to be thrown back by his own explosion as he cycles the energy further. He moves with the wind, using heat as a propellant to boost his slower movement- and Raika follows, the explosion and loss of footing only enough to slow her down for an instant.
She comes after him, relentless, unstoppable, violence incarnate as her Blacksteel arm spikes out into an amalgamation of razors. Her right arm shifts, lengthening, each finger turning to a lashing blade, and he can see the changes take effect all the way up into her shoulder and ribcage, altering the framework of her body to give her much more reach and strength in the limb. She transforms so much, so fast that he can feel the heat radiating from her, steam rising from her flesh as dark skin begins to redden under the effects of near-burning blood.
He lifts himself, flying up, casting his fire beneath him and rising on the updraft to avoid her next hit. Standing still against her is a failing tactic, there’s nothing he can throw at her that she can’t force her way through if she tries, so he keeps moving. He keeps himself off the ground, using his flames as both destination and source of his telekinesis, throwing bolts of fire at her as he does. Every time he lands she’s there, never more than a heartbeat away from grabbing him, cutting him, holding him down-
But he only needs that same heartbeat to throw himself in another direction, using telekinesis to pull on his fire as he moves. As he spreads his flames further afield, it becomes easier. His core, his Qi, his flame… they’re his. They’re part of him, and though they dissipate into the ground and air the longer they’re up, he can still use them as anchors, leaving traps he can fuel and Qi he can pull himself to to keep just ahead of Raika.
Even still, she’s adapting fast. Her eyes are darting around their space, jumping from flame to flame like she’s tracking something he can’t see, and every time he pulls himself with telekinesis to a pyre, she seems to find what she’s looking for a bit quicker.
And then she manages a cut along his chest, his dodging just a hair slow as she somehow tracks where his telekinesis pulls him from and sending her lashing blades out to slice into him.
They briefly pause. First blood goes to him by technicality, but she can heal a lot faster than he can. He feels his core roil at the thought of surrender, though. It’s not pride, not really. He’s fully aware that she’s much more durable than he is, and that it would just plain suck to get hurt worse for no good reason… but the thought of giving up at the first sign of trouble just doesn’t sit right.
So instead, he matches her energy, and decides to push.
This is the trick, he thinks. The secret to his growth.
He’s not afraid of sacrifice.
Instead of keeping his Core intact, a precious pearl that he needs to protect and use only as a last resort, he begins to pull and drain from it. He has Li Shu, who he trusts with his life and who knows more about strange medicine than anyone he can think of, an environment rich with Qi, and allies willing to help him fight and heal as needed. He pulls at his Core, unraveling it in streams and rivulets of Qi, and has faith in himself that he can build it back stronger.
The Qi that makes up a Core, and that eventually germinates a Nascent Soul, isn’t like the Qi in his body. It’s refined further, compressed as much as he can manage and then wrapped tightly around his ideals and identity, until the very foundation of who he is changes it and makes it a part of him. It’s not digestion like what happens through a simpler practice of cycling Qi, it’s a manifestation of the purest, densest, most powerful Qi one can generate, bound into one’s very soul.
And he burns it for fuel.
Raika, Li Shu and Hao Nera’s eyes go wide as Qen Hou enforces his will onto the world, and manifests his Domain.
Immediately he knows his eyes, ears and nose are bleeding, his meridians screaming at the volume and quality of Qi rushing through them, veins bursting and cutting him up inside- but he ignores it, at least for now. He knows his limits, and he knows he can recover from this. He trusts Li Shu to heal him, Hao Nera to protect him, Raika to push him to get him back on his feet.
He raises his gaze to meet Raika’s eyes, and sees her smiling, alien and inhuman and utterly herself, as he warps the world around him.
The flames he’s been spreading spiral together, establish a perimeter, like the edges of a flaming hurricane. The glow of their space changes, silver and purple overtaking lingering sunlight through the clouds, and the space within the twisting cyclone of his will becomes his.
For about three-quarters of a second, Qen Hou manifests a true [Domain of Twisting Flames Around Faithful, Molten Worlds].
In that moment of manifestation, as the world around them becomes obscured by roiling silver-purple flame, as the ground melts into liquid form and exudes impossible, warping heat, he smiles.
He can’t control it, really. All it does is manifest onto the world for now, and he can feel it’s incomplete, half-baked… but it’s him, and it is his, and it shapes the world to his will.
It’s already fading, but he can see how it’s affecting her. In that instant, he sees the heat warp her body, silver smoke leaking from within even as she loses cohesion, melting like metal or wax, dripping off herself, turning to raw potential-
And she meets his gaze. And smiles.
And he feels the world change.
Something inside her makes a sound like a tolling bell, like a scream ripping into the angles of his mind, like a wrenching sensation in what he can see and feel of the world, and she blooms into [Ignition].
Iridescent flame explodes out of every seam, orifice, cut in her body, manifesting into a pyre vaguely shaped like a person- and then she grows. Like watching a plant grow at a thousand times its usual speed, he watches horns and teeth and eyes and bone and spiraling, fractal patterns of meat-wiring and chitinous plating spiral and spawn out from her, the flames wreathing her, dancing around the back of her, like the very edges of some kind of halo-
The impossible growth reaches the edge of his Domain; he feels the pressure of something intangible, powerful, profound touch on his soul, on the concept he is enforcing onto the world. He meets it with his will, his soul and the writhing possibility in his Core all fighting to contain, to melt, to transform and twist and unmake to molten possibility the impossible thing that was once shaped like Raika, and-
It collapses as he coughs up blood, his chest contracting so hard that he feels his ribs strain as he tries to cough. The half-formed technique goes haywire, threatening to backfire, and it’s all he can do to force it back into submission, align his Qi and bring it down slower. He reabsorbs what was expended, his inconsistent, barely-manifest technique flooding back into him and threatening to shatter his core wholesale, but he takes a knee and just breathes.
It is his, and it is him.
Slowly, drop by drop, he brings his raging Qi back under control.
Eventually he looks up and sees Raika again. She’s across from him, sitting in a lotus position, looking almost as strained as he is. Her body is shifting like it can’t quite remember what it’s supposed to look like, and the alien structures her body was blossoming out into… they don’t look like something she can control. They flop and spiral and twitch and churn against the soil, trying to grow further, trying to push out from her like uncontained, cancerous possibility, and he smiles idly, literally sweating blood, as she matches him in effort.
He laughs a bit. She breaks concentration long enough to grow a new pair of eyes to look at him with.
“I feel like I’m gonna piss blood,” he admits. “Glad I’m not the only one.”
They both laugh, short and pained and releasing tension, even as Raika’s new growths continue to spiral out and his own Qi rages, barely contained.
They’re both beaten, bloody, having pushed themselves much too hard and both damaged heavily from what was barely ten minutes of fighting- but isn’t that what friends are for?