Dao and Truth.

“Two sides of the coin that is reality. They mirror each other, and yet, like a true reflection, are each other’s inverse. Dao is the Will of Heaven, the manifestation of one’s understanding of natural law on a philosophical and intrinsic level. A master of physiks who attains a Dao might have a higher ability to control said Dao, but may not be any more likely than one who understands nothing of the natural laws, but meditates deeply on a concept. Everything in the world consists of and has a Dao, from blood to lightning, from air to geodes and more.

“Truth, on the other hand, is the inverse of the Will of Heaven. What we see as True, the gods view as mere suggestions to their great tapestry, content in leaving us to forever wallow beneath their gazes. A Truth must be generated, manifested, comprehended and externalized to become itself, and can only come from within a cultivator’s own will. A Truth imposes the will of the cultivator, of their soul and power and comprehension, over the Will of Heaven, which is why it can only affect that which you can perceive and influence.”

Shin Ren writes carefully and elegantly into the scroll in front of him, looking up only occasionally at his lecturer as he does. He’s not exactly doing anything practical; his words and understanding matter far more in this particular lesson.

The lecture hall allows artificial sunlight to filter in through crafted windows. Far too much of a threat (and a headache for spatial arrays) to allow real windows this far inside the structure of the pyramid, but good lighting and proper ambiance are crucial to a person’s development. The lecture hall itself almost looks like an arena, with four rows of seats surrounding a central open area. In this central arena, several boards (some glowing and crystalline, others more traditional) take up space and limit the way that the lecturer can pace, though he does his best to do so anyways. His robes of white and gold, Imperial colors, glint with mild gilding in the artificial sunlight, making for an occasionally distracting little bit of glimmer.

“What most cultivators fail to realize is that, in fact, Dao and Truth are deeply compatible. It is rare that a Truth is broad enough to be open to interpretation and powerful enough to enact genuine changes and new foundations to one’s reality. Those who possess such Truths are universally a danger to themselves and the fabric of reality, though mastering such a power can be a tremendous boon. On the other hand, those who learn a Truth which can be applied to Dao can exponentially multiply both.”

He turns and raises a hand, pointing straight at Shin Ren. “Let’s take our newest member of this lecture as an example! Cultivator Shin Ren of the Purple Flame Burning Lotus sect recently demonstrated a relatively common Truth, manifesting as “All Things Burn”. The interpretations of this vary wildly, as can its manifestations, but by applying this Truth directly to his interpretation of part of the Dao of Flame, he created flames that emulate a True Flame, capable of eating away and using all materials as fuel. Another example may be one who follows a Dao of Threads, who manifests a Truth that “All Things Are Puppets In Waiting”, a complex but limited Truth which can cooperate with the Dao of Threads to create functional golems or controllable terrain through puppetry. The potential applications of such a thing are myriad, with infinite effective permutation. Mathematically speaking, humanity will be long gone before we have a chance to see even a tenth of the possible forms these many interpretations and manifestations could take.”

Shin Ren sighs, not really bothering to hide how much he dislikes being called out. The idea had been to call a little attention, start the process of growth. Instead, he got hijacked into a new lecture right away, snapped up by Mentor Kaisho. Apparently, for a Core Formation cultivator, it’s incredibly rare to have both a Dao and a Truth, much less two compatible ones, and he’s joined the class of two other students, both of which gave him such glares he could almost feel the killing intent in the room.

He can’t really blame them. Merits split three ways are worse than two.

“In summary, to acquire a Dao is to acquire a Truth of a higher order, and to add a Truth of your own to it allows you to grow and manifest entirely new permutations. You are the chosen few who have shown the ability to manifest such a combination in this current crop, and though mastery may well take you centuries, you have already completed the first and most unlikely step for one at your level of power. Be proud, cultivators, and know that I look forward to the service you will surely provide for your Empire.”

And there it is again.

The lecture wraps up, the boards all secreting themselves away and Mentor Kaisho leaving without further ceremony. He isn’t a fan of post-lecture questions, Shin Ren’s pretty sure it’s something about his pride, and neither of his two “fellow student” seem particularly inclined to stick around and chat or trade tips after class.

In a few moments, the room has emptied out. But Shin Ren stays seated where he is.

With a thought, he summons his guandao from his spatial ring, balancing the perfectly crafted weapon on one finger as he finds its fulcrum. It’s something to fidget with while he thinks.

Now that he’s looking for it, it’s everywhere. “For the Empire”.

He’s from the third ring, he’s no stranger to grumblings about how the sects owe their allegiances to greater sects chosen by the Emperor and the Empire itself. Hell, even his master mentioned how the Empire centralized things, and he never even saw it up close. Every lecture ends with some version of “For the Empire”, every major announcement has a “for the Empire” attached, and every scroll he’s dug through in his days and days in the libraries has given him some variation on the same.

Everything, always, all the time, is for the Empire.

In and of itself, that’s not the worst thing. The Empire’s created a lot of good in the world, after all. But… on the other hand, the fact that it’s so completely pervasive is discomforting. Why does everything need to be explicitly stated as for the Empire, if, by simply doing their best and serving shared ideals, the Empire is being fed anyways? There’s something vaguely annoying, maybe even uncomfortable about it.

To cultivate is to rebel against the heavens, and in theory, all cultivators have at least that much in common… but every time he hears someone pledge allegiance to the abstract, all-powerful institution he finds himself in, Shin Ren wonders if the Empire isn’t trying to shape that narrative.

Still, he reminds himself that there’s a danger of confirmation bias. He knows that the Empire treated his master unjustly, he’s here to find out where they took him, of course he’ll have a bias. It doesn’t change how he feels, but it’s important to be aware of things if one is ever to turn one’s instincts into actual logic and observations.

Which unfortunately brings him right back to the topic he’s been avoiding in his head for days.

He’s hit a wall.

Qu Haolan is not the kind of man to politely bow his head to someone he dislikes, that much Shin Ren is absolutely certain of. He’s only spent a few months with his master, but it really only takes one good conversation to find out just how against the very idea of the Empire he seems to be. There’s only so much time before some sort of incident happens, and if Qu Haolan couldn’t escape against a single Blade, he’s not likely to be successful against whatever defenses they’ve put up specifically for him without some kind of help.

And Shin Ren, despite how quickly he’s semi-accidentally drawn attention to himself, isn’t moving very fast.

There’s only so many times he can go through the same sections of the same libraries. He’s even checked the lower floors to see if someone had snuck an interesting text into a lower section, but no, the Core Formation libraries have limits. Everything he reads reeks of Imperial praise to some extent or another, even the things that seem to be politely trying to rebut its influence. As for the Academies themselves, they’re not really designed to meteorically grant anyone power over the Imperial informational bureaucracy, nor should they be. He needs to advance, and faster, if he’s going to get any advantages from being here that he can use in time to help his master, and he’s going to need to find somewhere other than official, Empire-sanctioned materials to read and research through.

For the latter, his plan is vague at best. A generic, broad idea to… well, wander outside the Academies and see what he finds. It’s a big city-space surrounding them, and until he unlocks the second part of this plan, he’s mostly tapped out the resources that interest him in the libraries he has access to.

Secondly, he needs to both impress his mentors more and advance further. The higher he goes, the better the resources and thus, the better the potential historical and governmental records he might dig up. Get enough merits, he might even find his way into acquiring a pass for the Scholar’s Academy to see how their libraries compare.

So all of this is weighted on three things; allies, attention, and ascension.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

He somehow needs to form two new Nascent Souls in his demon cores in the next few months, tops, while securing allies to shield him from some of the politics that mire the Academies day in and day out.

Sighing, Shin Ren finally leaves the lecture hall, placing his guandao back into his storage ring and wandering towards his quarters.

He hasn’t been taking pills or special resources. They might help, but without a better understanding of how his altered cultivation works, it’s impossible to know what might help or hinder. If he had years, that’s no problem, but there’s no way to know how secure his master is or if he’s being hurt, and that simply doesn’t allow for a leisurely stroll towards the top, rife with experimentation.

He’s so distracted that he almost doesn’t react in time to the blade that comes for his throat as he opens the door.

His room are dark, the lights extinguished and artificial sunlight muted somehow. That’s the first sign something’s wrong. The second one arrives before he’s had time to breathe, the single note of confusion eclipsed by alarm as his senses pick up on something unbelievably fast simply appearing beside him.

There’s no time to summon his guandao. His arm shoots up, reinforced with his Qi enough to make his sleeve smolder, and intercepts the path of the knife.

No, not a knife.

A jian.

Despite his reaction it still cuts into him nearly to the bone, leaving a burst of steaming hot blood to spatter out of the wound and onto the floor. Before his opponent can pull back, Shin Ren steps forward, keeping the weapon in his flesh, cycling heat and Qi through the limb to burn away any poisons, and-

Something in him stops.

There is the slightest flash of sound, like a muffled clap, and his senses pick up a fluttering of dust in the air from the strange distortion. The dust mimics the shape of the doorframe he just stepped through, where out of the corner of his eye he picks up hundreds of minute symbols carved into the floor into the form of a complex array.

And in that flash, his Qi falls away.

He can still feel it, it’s not gone, but his mind can’t reach it, like trying to catch water in one’s palms. It slips and slides away from his grasp, away from his control, as if he’s suddenly a Qi Gathering realm cultivator again.

A second jian comes in for his throat.

And the Corpse Aflame responds.

All Things Burn, she howls in a voice of ruin, and fire to match any phosphorus ignites into existence.

The air screams. The way that it’s drawn in and consumed immediately to spread the flame makes a painfully sharp whistling sound, and his attacker has to throw themself away from him to have any chance of escaping the fire. Crimson-white fire, gilded with the crackling yellow of burning fat, erupts out of him with a shockwave of heat that ignites half the room and the entire doorframe surrounding him, the array obliterated in an instant as fuel.

Out of the flames, there is something almost like the shape of a grasping hand, reaching fingers of charcoal black and bloody, dripping red spiraling from smoke and flame out towards his attacker, who is still unseen. Shin Ren feels his control over his own core and Qi return, begins to shift his stance as the Smiling Noble forms a heat haze around them to obscure his movements, grabs hold of his guandao as it materializes out of his storage ring-

And then he feels all of the oxygen in the space around him vanish.

No, not all the oxygen- all the air. With his new Truth he could still burn other chemicals, even if slower, but he is encompassed entirely in a perfect vacuum before he can blink. The flames along the floor, ceiling and walls flicker and start to smolder, digging slowly into the stone but unable to reach back out where he needs.

Shin Ren focuses his Qi down to his legs, preparing a simple movement technique to launch backwards out of the room. Even if he could see his opponent (which he should be able to, darkness isn’t nearly as much of an impediment at his level) there’s the fact that he’s stumbled into what feels like a carefully lain trap built to neutralize him, and he has no intention of bull-rushing into further arrays and techniques when he can’t even see his attacker.

He only barely manages to cross the thoroughly ruined threshold to his rooms before both swords come for his throat once more. Not assassins daggers, but proper weapons, proper soldier’s weapons, both of them refined and brimming with Qi at the height of the Core Formation level.

He blinks as he realizes that one of his opponents is easily recognizable now that they’ve chased him out into the hallway. He saw them not an hour prior, after all. One of the two other cultivators that he shares Mentor Kaisho’s lectures with! She comes for him with a ferocity that nearly outpaces his movement, but fresh air gives him a burst of heat to alter her perception with, and the light mirage lets him just barely duck out of the way of the attack.

His left arm is functional, but only just. He can’t properly close his fist and it’s bleeding fast, but the elbow and shoulder joints function fine, meaning he can still use it to block or as a tool if he truly needs it. Unfortunately, the guandao is a two-handed weapon, its center of balance and length making it unwieldy even with a cultivator’s strength. He makes a decent showing, blocking one attack from his classmate with the blade and hitting the staff with his elbow to move it into a block of the other, unknown cultivator. Neither one hides their faces, however, and they both wear the simple robes of the Academy, bereft of sect regalia or defining colors. His classmate is a blonde woman with vibrant green skin, her pupils horizontal in her eyes, while her ally in the assassination attempt is a more traditional beastblood, ears like a squirrel and a slight furriness to his features belying his heritage.

Neither one leaves room for dialogue in the exchange, two Academy-standard jians striking at him ferociously as he backpedals and fights to keep himself intact. His wounded arm gets several more cuts, one of which nearly severs an artery and ensures he loses control of most of the limb, and a cut across the top of his thigh staggers him in time for the blade’s ally to come for his neck.

The Smiling Noble’s heat-mirage shifts their position ever so slightly to their perception, opening up just enough space and warping the air in a field around their fight. Slowly, the air will become toxic and hard to breathe as the invisible fire and heat alters it, and while he’s busy with that, the Corpse Aflame rises again to play.

She’s good for short bursts, not prolonged flame. That’s more Shin Ren’s ‘true’ specialty, the nuances and complexities of fire and feeding it to reach its more complex heights. She is the inferno, the conflagration that cannot be put out and which explodes into being with incredible ferocity, but she has less Qi to work with and attacks with all she can bring together at once almost every time. Still, a few seconds is all that’s needed for phosphorus crimson to engulf Shin Ren in a sphere once more, forcing the already-altered trajectory of the Jian to break entirely as her Flame begins to eat at both it and the Qi that powers it. He feels the charred limbs of his demon core reach out and grab hold of the beastblooded cultivator, and he begins to scream. A burst of movement technique almost gets him out of range, but the fire keeps burning, eating at the Qi he sends to stifle it. Shin Ren watches as he collects himself for a technique, his own blade locked against his classmate’s, and tries to manifest something from his blood.

Shin Ren’s own Qi touches the phosphorus flame that is eating into his enemy and feeds it with True Flame.

His classmate is launched forward by the detonation of gold and purple fire which near-erases the ribcage of the other cultivator, falling towards him and his sphere of phosphorus. She backpedals, and he feels some subtle trick at work there. She may have come with no notable artifacts, but that doesn’t mean she’s powerless, not when technique and a Core are at one’s disposal. He feels the world bend and warp slightly as she manifest her own combination of Dao and Truth.

Everything Falls is magnified and multiplied, like a note played in tune, as he feels his sense of weight and space begin to shift towards the dense marble of Qi she forms in her hand, drawing his flames into its lightless depths even as it begins to burn and smolder.

He does not miss the slight pause that manifesting such a technique can cause, and Qi shoots along his nerves and tendons as he executes a thrust of his Guandao towards her throat.

She dodges aside as the gravitational pull of the marble she holds shifts his aim despite his best efforts. His wounded arm is sorely missed as the blade’s center of gravity shifts, turning towards the ground as she moves, and her other hand comes up to retaliate. A second orb manifests in her free hand, the expenditure of Qi enough to warp the room and paint it bright to Shin Ren’s Qi senses, and he feels himself stumble as he’s pulled in towards the hyper-dense chunk of concept.

There is a manic grin on her face, the black ash of the Corpse Aflame’s fire staining her teeth. He sees victory standing tall in her eyes, feels the touch of death creep in as the dual orbs of weaponized concepts drag him and his flames towards their depths even as he burns them-

No.

He pulls from his Core, the purest and densest Qi at his command, and once again feeds it into his True Flame.

The purple of Mystery and the gold of Truth intermingle in an impossible blaze as he cloaks himself in the most destructive form of flame imaginable, that which can consume all and transform all it consumes, and he feels the pull of her Truth and Dao of Gravity both fade as his Dao of Flame’s higher concept actively burns the very ideas between them.

And then, before she can recover or cancel her techniques, his blade is swinging.

She tries to dodge, even as the movement is obscured. His killing intent leaking through most likely, something he has yet to properly understand or control giving him away as he swings through the smoke, the ash, and the multiple hues of Flame. He feels the guandao strain as it passes through his True Flame, feels its masterful crafting and enhanced materials resisting his barely-fueled manifestation of such a powerful concept-

And feels its edge sink into her shoulder, through her clavicle, and through about five ribs and everything held between them.

A cultivator might survive a few moments without a heart, so long as they know it is coming. They can even survive for a time without breathing, though absorbing Qi is exponentially harder and it takes energy to sustain.

At the Core Formation level, most cultivators can’t survive damascus steel carving them from left shoulder nearly to right hip.

He is panting and bleeding freely as she dies, collapsing with eyes void of meaning or thought.

He feels her Qi rush out of her body, not consumed like the beastblooded cultivator’s by his flames, and braces himself as his Flame touches it. All Things Burn, and True Flame eats Qi, and this is going to be a bitch to fix later-

But then his flames snuff out.

Her Qi, too, is gone. A sense of weight, of starry skies and the dancing of the moons, is suddenly snuffed from the world right alongside the manifestations of a true Dao’s higher concept of True Flame.

Shin Ren’s eyes immediately look to where the energies of the hallway fled to, looking past all the damage and preparing to manifest more of his power against whatever new threat this might be-

And he sees another beastblood. Black, feline ears stand atop equally black hair, with a long, slender tail of midnight waving lazily behind her. She wears a set of tight-fitting black robes to match her hair, the only point of color visible the bright gold symbol of the Division of Altered Cultivation.

“Quite a mess, young master,” she whispers in a voice that is nearly a purr. “Perhaps this one might be of assistance.”