Most of the Empire runs on coins. Base metals are cheap, easily found if one digs deep enough, and able to be produced by any number of means, be they cultivation or arrays or so forth. Qi stones, pebbles and rocks infused with simple Qi used to be the primary form of coinage in the sects, before the Empire, but now they, and other Qi-infused materials, are kept exclusively for more useful pursuits. Once upon a time the stone’s value was in how they could hold Qi with minimal changes, bereft of natural formations and movement, and could sustain that hold without loss for millenia. Now, the only use such a thing might have is how much Qi one can get out of it, and how useful they can be as batteries.

Silver, copper, and gold coins, stamped with a square hole in the middle and decorated with the Empire’s iconography, make up the whole of trade now. Jade is sometimes traded at the highest levels, between organizations and in the first ring he’s heard, as well as written agreements for barter and evaluated worth, but Qi-infused materials are almost universally seen as more useful elsewhere. A Qi stone the size of a pebble, now, might be traded for as much as forty silver coins, easily. One the size of a fist might be valued at a hundred gold.

So it’s not lightly that Shin Ren evaluates the resources given to him as worth a dozen fist-sized Qi stones easily.

He’s yet to offer any true information on his capabilities, and at least when it came time to receive the promised supplies, they haven’t asked. Despite this, Shin Ren finds that there is absolutely nothing at all to complain about in the selection they have offered him.

Propulsional Movement is a movement technique in the most literal sense. The occasional lack of artistry in Imperial naming conventions makes itself known in the title, as blunt and direct as can be, but its applications are delightfully broad. While Shin Ren has mostly been improvising and slowly creating his own movement styles with the Smiling Noble’s more subtle uses of heat and the Corpse Aflame’s explosive bursts, Propulsional Movement is more of a treatise on the many ways that kinetic and thermal energy can be harnessed and directed along the shape of a human body. Examinations of vectors, uses of flammable thrust, and the best placements for potential jets of flame all make themselves known in just the first few pages of the manual.

It’s an appetizer compared to the other two gifts he has received.

One of them is a scroll, made entirely of slips of a hard, black material. There is writing on it, but the majority is so miniscule that even his enhanced vision struggles to pick it out, and some of it seems to waver and shift when he looks away. The note that came with it calls it a defensive artifact, one of the things Shin Ren has been greatly missing.

His Qi brushes against it, and it comes alive. The slips, previously bound by rope, simply cease to be connected, yet somehow… remain a scroll. Each individual black slip, covered in gold writing, begins to hover in the air around him, slowly beginning to surround him in an orbit that leaves minimal gaps. At first he worries about mobility and his perception, but as he turns his head, he finds that whatever slips he’s trying to see past, he just… can. They’re not invisible, a quirk of focusing his eyes has them reappear in his perception, but it’s still like he can see straight past them.

Heating the tip of his Guandao ever so slightly, he taps the incredibly fine edge of its blade against one of the slips.

Nothing. Not a scratch.

Pausing the orbit of the same slip, holding his weapon against its surface, he begins to push Qi into it, seeing how it reacts to the heat and increasing pressure of damaging Qi.

It doesn’t.

The slip of black wood, inscribed with golden words and symbols that feel more and more like a poem the longer he looks at them, simply hovers there. Unbothered, unperturbed, even as he pushes enough heat through his Guandao that the master-crafted staff shivers slightly. More than enough to begin to discolor and warp steel, doing exactly fuck all.

He lets the slip rejoin the orbit around him, and with a touch of will, the scroll that remained a scroll becomes a scroll once more, laying inert on the table.

Trap or not, he can detect no tampering or flaws in the artifact, only the clean and precise applications of an Imperial Array (if a much more complicated one than he’s usually seen). He’ll need every advantage he can get when it comes time to do whatever he ends up needing to do to save the man he owes his life to.

A pulse of Qi binds the artifact to him, a kanji of his name manifesting onto the scroll near its end. Followed by two smaller little additions that, while not inaccurate, aren’t how he usually spells his name, two additional flourishes. One jagged, the other overly showy.

The reminder of his cultivation turns him back to the third of the “gifts” offered for his cooperation.

It’s single feather, glimmering colorfully even without any light upon it. It sits atop the table, a small pedestal beneath it shimmering with an array supporting it. Just being close to it is enough to make Shin Ren start to sweat, the heat of it pushing on his cultivation like a mortal to a campfire. Just because he’s a cultivator that follows a path of fire, or one that’s grasped (if not mastered) the Dao of Flame, doesn’t mean he’s immune to fire. His previous Qi deviation is clear proof of this, but while it’s changed since he grew past that event, it’s still true. He would be carbonized ash just the same as any mortal and any Warrior realm master if cast up into the writhing scales of the sun.

But… he thought he’d gotten really, really good at fire.

The feather in front of him, hovering a centimeter over the table, makes him question if he knew what it was.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

He feels his grasp on the Dao of Flame flicker, somehow strengthened and weakened in unequal measure just by seeing the treasure before him. He has no idea what kind of spirit beast must have been killed or harvested to create such a treasure, but there is a quiet little voice in the back of his head that wonders.

Phoenix?

Everyone knows the Phoenixes are extinct. Their elimination was one of the Emperor’s great works during the millenia and a half of war that came after the isolation, right after the Emperor raised the first ring. There’s some debate about how exactly the Emperor slew the very symbol of immortality, but it cannot be argued that it left a hell of an imprint of the world’s new divinity.

It cannot be a phoenix feather. Millions would die in the uprising that would come from learning the creatures still existed, either in hiding or actively withheld from the sects and cultivators of the world. It cannot be a phoenix feather.

The individual strands that make up the feather around a delicate bone flicker and wave, even in the stasis array that has it levitate. With their movement, there are whispers.

The Dao of Flame is broad, and it is limited. It is said that every Dao holds infinity within itself, but there are large infinities and small infinities, and the Dao of Flame isn’t what Shin Ren would consider a “small” infinity. But as he watches the interplay of heat and movement, of flickering sparks and ozone, of ignition and carbonization and the shifting nature of heat and transformation, he thinks that perhaps fire is much larger than he knew.

He pushes Qi into his new artifact, the scroll unfolding and wrapping around his arm. He sighs. Takes a deep breath. As he stares at the feather, he wills the scroll to bond properly.

Older artifacts, like his guandao, are just that; artifacts. Tools and weapons, often reminiscent of the age in which they were created; swords, bows, farming implements and more. The artifacts of the first ring are far more abstract things, purpose-built to magnify their functions, and while the techniques to make such things are out of reach even in the second ring, some things have carried over. Added functionality to artifacts, considered part of a “quality of life” increase over the last millenia.

The scroll wraps tightly around his left forearm, some of it unfurling up towards his bicep, and begins to sink into his body.

Shin Ren has felt his own soul grow mouths with which to curse him and hands with which to tear him apart, and it felt more normal than this.

It doesn’t hurt, but it feels incredibly alien. Room-temperature feels ice-cold as it molds past his skin, instructions written into the artifact activating arrays as his Qi flows through its circuits, acting as it was designed to do.

Wearing things on one’s person is an easy way to lose those things, either at the hands of the quick and daring or the wilds of battle. One can have a spatial ring stolen. A spatial ring can be broken into.

It is much harder to steal something that is a part of one’s body, and much easier to send Qi into and through it.

The artifact stops sinking into his body when only the upper facets of the slips are visible, making it look like a complex tattoo more than genuine transformation. The script fades slightly, leaving his left arm half-transmuted into pitch-dark wood organized into precise right angles.

Shin Ren lets out the breath he was holding, finally stomaching looking at the artifact. He flexes his fingers, rolls his arm and stretches his elbow. The physical sensation doesn’t leave, his nerves telling him of the foreign material overlapping with undamaged flesh where his body was warped to accommodate the defensive tool. It’s his first time ever experience a relic like this, the peak of second-ring engineering, or close enough that a third ring bumpkin like him can’t tell the difference. It hammers in by its very existence just how far he is from home.

Sect prince of the Purple Flame Burning Lotus, and he might have ascended to sect leader before he saw an artifact like this.

He turns his gaze to look at what must not be, cannot be, the feather of fire deeper and broader than his mind can hold the idea of.

The Corpse Aflame smolders. The unbearable, hungry heat beneath the ruin she calls flesh trembles, like a leaf in a breeze.

The Smiling Noble isn’t smiling. The weight of the feather, and what they can do with it, goes beyond nobility and false honor, and into the realm of unbearable, universal consequence.

He clenches a fist when the thought of reaching for the gift makes it tremble.

And it is a gift. One with strings, with consequences beyond its might, but a gift nonetheless. The contract is there, in his spatial ring, a thing of exacting words and the same complex runic arrays he saw the Wyld use when first they met. He can quit at any time. They do not own the things they give him. The contract, woven with Qi and Truespeak, that highest complexity of Dao and comprehension that only Imperial law-makers are versed in, speaks into reality that what they give him is his, and all his benefactor asks is that he keeps their origin secret and listen honestly when a request is made to receive their boons.

It glows, there on the table, glimmering from the light of the feather.

The feather, the defensive array, the impressively broad movement technique, they are merely overtures. The opening move of investing in a potential windfall.

Staring at the feather, he acknowledges a simple truth.

Most things that seem to be too good to be true aren’t true at all.

An artifact is one thing, already bound as it is. Even the contract, loose as it, could go ignored, and all it would mean would be the end of the burgeoning relationship. And the loss of the feather, of course.

If he signs it, he will be given orders. Veiled as requests, likely quite reasonable, superficially in line with his every belief, but orders nonetheless. The thought of it chafes against him, against his new soul, just barely coalescing in the light of his renewed beliefs.

But he needs power.

Ideals are not power, no matter how much they offer him. To strive to be truly noble is the path he’s stepped on, but nobility does not come from hiding in fear from consequence or possibility.

Shin Ren makes his choice.

His hand touches the bottom of the contract, where the arcane text reads his intent and his Self. His kanji, once more modified to accommodate his newly forged identity,manifests amidst the words that promise him such wonders for so little.

And the seal surrounding the feather vanishes, along with the hovering words of gold, leaving a wave of pleasant heat to saturare his quarters.

He will discover the identity of his new benefactor. He will discover the reasons for any and all requests sent to him. He can already feel the Smiling Noble begin to shift, accepting his place as something made to understand and subvert others, to change and transform to suit the environment behind the surface. He feels the Corpse Aflame grin, black flesh flaking off charred lips as she picks up a chain, eagerly pushing heat into it until it glows in his soul, ready to be shattered and cast back at its holder.

Shin Ren is not who he once was. He is not who he was yesterday. He is not who he will be in a minute longer.

But Choice Is Universal.

With a reverent bow, Shin Ren reaches for the feather, and begins to pull its infinity into his growing Souls.