For all his progress, Shin Ren is still rusty. He hasn’t had a true battle since before his mental breakdown, and hasn’t ever experienced truly fighting using only his new cores. So it is that he enters the chamber with the full intent to keep his own cultivation locked tight, and to allow only his heart demons free reign.
The room is larger than most buildings, but the spatial dilation arrays within it multiply that size significantly again. In theory, it can be adjusted so that the space in front of whoever is using it can keep lengthening indefinitely while the space behind “shortens” back to regularity to make room. Between that and the environmental arrays, the chamber is capable of running simulations that track combat over kilometers, or of acting as a way to train movement techniques for hours in a straight line.
On its own, deactivated, the chamber is a blank, featureless white slate, with the lingering effects of Qi attacks and weapon strikes fading from view even as Shin Ren notices them. The last group that had the chamber spent an hour in a team battle formation, which was part of why the wait was so long, and yet even an even dozen cultivators hadn’t managed to permanently damage the room.
He nods to himself. It’s perfect.
Another crystalline board hangs on the wall right before the entryway, its glowing surface once again recognizing his Qi as he touches it and opening up a list of “previous settings” that he’s set training halls to in his time. He sees some that he remembers vividly, like the time he tried to battle a three-headed drake-type spirit beast and found himself thoroughly trounced, barely able to eke out a win- other settings have less memory associated with them, falling into a blend of meaningless duels and attempts to boost his cultivation by simulating aspects of the Purple Flame.
The idea he has now is much more simplistic. He has fairly good defense, that, his master insisted on. It was only further proven by how easily he handled the attacks of his supposed betters on first arrival. What he needs now is to better understand his capability for offense.
With a thought and a few quick presses on the glowing “buttons” of the board, he sets his parameters. High-durability golem-type artifacts: 15, set to High Offense behavior. Surrounding environment durability: High. Environmental effects: Off. Spatial Dilation: 5x normal space.
With a final breath and a bit of anxious anticipation, he steps into the chamber properly.
Already the ground and walls are reshaping themselves. The blank white walls stay the same, only small, straight lines allowing one to differentiate corners and understand the space they’re in. Meanwhile, the ground is actively warping, melting into the shape of fifteen humanoid statues. They all share the same number of limbs, joints, and basic features of a human, but their faces and other features are blank white structures bereft of any hint of true life. Their faces in particular mimic the bone structure of a human face, but possess no eyes, nose or mouth, and they each appear androgynous and sexless.
Shin Ren walks to a small, glowing circle that has appeared at one of the room, taking long, meditative breaths the whole time. He plants his feet in the circle, which changes its color to a much brighter primed red. The next time he breaks the circle will be the signal to activate the spar.
He looks deep inside himself, focusing on his inner world.
His mind drifts into his dantian, into the vague not-space that any cultivator can trance into with enough training. Here, he sees his own core, perfectly spherical, flickering with the light of some still-undefined Soul within itself. It’s minute, barely there, but it fills the vast void of his cultivation-space with a warm purple glow, tinged with hints of gold and a bright arterial red.
He follows the flow of his flame-touched Qi up and out through his meridians. His cultivation technique, one of the better ones granted to the prodigies of the Purple Flame Burning Lotus sect, does not demand that he push and pull his Qi like blood or water- instead, it simply opens the path, and then treats the user’s will like air to encourage the fire within to spread and flow mightily.
He’s… changed it just a bit. Fire raging along a path, moved less through true control and more through temptation and elemental principles, just… doesn’t feel right.
He puts his perspective within his own fire, his Qi molded into the form that suits his soul and technique, and just walks.
He is the flame. The flame is his, even as it edges closer and closer to capital-F Flame, and it flows through his meridians like it is only natural for it to do so. There is space, and thus, it can expand and grow and move through it, for such is the essence of fire.
And it reaches his new cores.
One stands just over his heart, ever so slightly to the left of it, while the other is just beneath his right lung but over his stomach. Above his heart, the Smiling Noble lounges lazily, his core manifesting as that conch-like shape, uniquely suited to imitate both a cornucopia and a hunting horn. Closer to his gut, the Corpse Aflame smolders within a formation of Qi that imitates an organic knife, one end of it a long, sharp point, the other, what would be a handle, sitting as a spiked sphere like a starfish.
They both know what’s about to happen.
The Smiling Noble grumbles, annoyed, but in the end adds his own Qi to Shin Ren’s flow. A shimmering heat haze flows into shape around the purer, more colorful flame. It can burn, desiccate, and deceive, all in one, reflecting the way his former hypocrisy tainted his ideals. The Corpse Aflame springs to life much more animatedly, the harsh crackling of her flesh turning to the crackling of fire as blackened smoke and violent, hungry red flames flow into the mix. They meld with the flame beneath the heat haze, polluting it more to the brutal, violent colors that she embodies, the horror of fire juxtaposed against its beauty.
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As their / his Qi moves through him, he slowly decreases the amount of Qi his dantian is outputting. It’s inefficient, messy even, making for a frustrating exercise. While his “demon cores” are still in his meridians, they’re not in his dantian, making their circulation more difficult to initiate. Maybe he’ll try to move them someday, but… not now. For now, this is fine.
He opens his eyes, feeling the illusory haze of heat and the agonizing horrors of hungering fire rise up within him, and breaks the circle.
With a burst of Qi, the Corpse Aflame detonates the air behind him, projecting a cone of propulsion that launches him forward in an improvised movement technique. He’ll have to come up with a name for it, maybe make a new manual. The golems directly in front of him all move simultaneously, seven sets of arms rearing back to strike at him from as many different angles-
Only to discover that he’s not there, the punches swinging a half-second early as his heat haze distorts his location forward. He arrives just after the blows have landed, all of them striking empty air and leaving the training dummies open for a retaliatory strike.
One he’s happy to deliver.
His guandao rings out, its structure pristine and so sharp he doesn’t even hear it cut through the air. His master had called it an Inheritance, and while it’s distinctly not made for his own cultivation style, its material and craftsmanship is so fine that it drinks in his Qi freely. The blade glows a dull red, like fresh-forged steel, and the power of the Corpse Aflame is delivered cleanly into the bodies of all seven mannequins as he cuts into them all with one sweeping stroke.
But the Corpse Aflame doesn’t do “cleanly”, and a heartbeat later, the flames detonate.
They eat through stone as if it’s flesh, bursting into life from within the blade-stroke that he timed to match their openings and beginning to consume them. Pale marble warps as if being charred and cooked by the fire, and all seven mannequins stumble simultaneously as it digs deep into their bodies, fed by the Corpse Aflame’s core into burning through their insides and eating them from the inside out.
They’re still moving, but they’re already rapidly slowing down compared to the eight more coming in from behind them.
Some of the mannequins are actually tossed aside by their healthier fellows as they sprint towards Shin Ren, martial strikes and efficient uses of their frames mirroring the fighting arts of any number of decent warriors to strike at him. He dodges and weaves, the Smiling Noble grimacing at the use of his much smaller Qi pool to continue weaving minor distortions around Shin Ren, but he manages to avoid even needing to block.
Which… well. He already knows he can dodge, right?
So he gives the Smiling Noble a break, and changes track.
His guandao is a pillar of glistening red, the ornate wood carvings looking like they’re almost alive as he moves it from stance to deflection to stance again, catching the kicks and punches from the approaching golems and maneuvering them. At first he just lets himself block, his artifact more than powerful enough to take the hits without harm, but gradually, calling on a bit of the Smiling Noble’s strength again, he starts weaving a pattern. One blow is turned so that the golem that threw it is forced into the path of another, while a kick is diverted so that the one that tried it has to nearly fall over backwards to maintain its balance.
Now this is much better. The Smiling Noble grins in agreement, a vicious little joy within him as he uses their attacks against themselves and keeps his Qi usage to a tight and precise minimum. Why waste effort on those beneath him when it’s so much easier to prove his superiority?
The Corpse Aflame, meanwhile, does her best work on the offensive side of things.
Ducking a haymaker, Shin Ren lashes out with a kick even as his guandao redirects an elbow aiming for his head. He lands the hit solidly against the torso of the golem in front of him, and with a burst of her Qi and concepts, the flame explodes into life once more, digging into the golem like a living being. He can almost see how it literally tears through the defenses of the stone, drawing on their shared understanding of the Dao of Flame to add an element of Consumption to the fire.
Good. Useful, even.
But he’s only got so many training golems left, and he really is trying to stretch his skills here.
His comprehension of the Dao of Flame is significant and complex, especially with the shared comprehension of his demon cores. He doesn’t need his “true” core to be able to access it, just Qi and the correct enlightened mindset.
Shin Ren dodges a few steps back from the golems, his Qi senses awake and aware as he stares them down. He can see the glowing veins of Qi moving through them, created through the ground and air of the training hall, he can see how his flames literally tear through and consume what they can reach. He’s not being pushed. He hadn’t intended for the training to really push him, but he expected… more difficulty with using what he’s learned.
But it’s just… his.
And as he watches black and red Flame eat through the flesh and programmed souls of the golems, he feels something click inside himself and the Corpse Aflame together.
He raises a hand, drawing Qi into it in an aggressive, half-formed technique, and stares at the many golems losing efficiency from being burned alive despite being made of stone, and understands something fundamental.
The proto-technique explodes from his hand like a flamethrower, like a volcanic eruption, like thermal detonation of black and red fire that washes over half the room in a single burst. It rips through the ground, the golems, the air, Qi and even deeper things inside the very space of the room, the Dao of Flame married to something that Shin Ren knows, on a fundamental level so deep it can only be True.
All Things Burn.
This time the flame doesn’t need to dig through the golems. It simply ignites all that it touches, the defenses of stone and programming nothing more than tinder for the flame. The same as any wood… or any flesh.
The Corpse Aflame cracks open the carbonized thing that was once her face into something almost like a smile.
And then a bright red light and a claxon start wailing noise into the room.
“Hazardous Material Detected! Hazardous Material Detected! Please Evacuate Chamber For Purification Protocols.”
Ah. Whoops.
He… most certainly did not set up the proper precautions in the chamber’s settings for a modified True Flame.
The room quickly floods with foreign Qi, shaped into an incredibly strange set of arrays and formations and quickly beginning to smother out the black and red flames. He can literally feel something inside him fighting against their efforts, his Truth feeding into his Dao to empower both… but he makes sure to pull his Qi out of the flames. All Things Burn, true, but that doesn’t mean that the fire can’t die out. Probably?
Hmm. Interesting question.
He exits the chamber as the arrays begin to make him feel queasy, shaking his head and muttering to himself. He comes up short when he sees the two dozen cultivators, Gou Mai included, who are simply standing outside his training hall, staring at him as he comes out.
Gou Mai in particular is nearly slack jawed, just staring at the screen showing off the training hall. You can pay extra for privacy, but…
Either way, Shin Ren shrugs. “Told you that my new perspective has been helpful.”