Shin Ren breathes in. And out. In. And out.

It’s refreshing. Peaceful. There’s a sense of contentment that he hasn’t experienced in… in a long time. Not since before the academies. Not since before even that. No pressures, no competition, no drama to keep hold of his attention and pull him away from his center. The added difficulty of cultivating with his… “houseguests”, as his new mentor insists on calling them, isn’t easy, but moments like this, where he can simply breathe and exist are too rare not to savor.

For the second time in as many hours, he fails to avoid the brick thrown at his head.

“Fuck!”

“Come on!” Qu Haolan grumbles. “How is it you intend to survive your cultivations if you can’t even sense danger!”

“How am I to-” He doesn’t get to finish his sentence as another brick just barely misses smashing into his face as he ducks out of the way.

“If you have time to backtalk, you have time to cultivate!”

He grumbles and mumbles and growls, but keeps it quiet, turning back around to face out to the open space in front of him, rather than back towards his new “master”.

Even with the pounding pain that comes from getting beamed in the back of the head with a brick, it’s hard not to acknowledge the view as beautiful. Almost as difficult as it is to see it as natural.

Before him, the sky glows a deep and beautiful orange, tainted blue only at its faintest edges, as if caught in perpetual sunrise, illuminating the world beautifully but adding a slight copper tint to many of the long shadows that decorate the space. Clear blue waters flow in long, arcing rivers over tundra and desert stone, reflecting not heat, but the beauty of flowing movement juxtaposed with the rocks that it carves. Strata after strata are revealed, until the natural landscape evolves into a sort of labyrinth, easy to get lost in, smooth and reflective and by the very nature of that which moves within it, molded into impossible new shapes over and always. In distant places, in valleys of smooth, arcing glass-like stone, Shin Ren can see beaches, accumulations of the detritus of the process of carving, slowly being reworked and remade back into more stone by pressure as they are dragged deeper, building to some unseen core.

There is life here, but it’s minimal, reflecting the austere and harsh but gorgeous nature of the terrain. Some of the twisting, labyrinthine rock structures were once mountains, and now are strange and almost organic-looking plateaus, spiraling and wavy, and from the peaks of those twisted mountains does the water flow, ever down and around. From the waters and the heights, he sees a few strange, not-quite-goat things, four legged and long-tailed, scaled and furred in equal measure, alternating between black scales to absorb heat and white fur to redirect the sun’s rays. They pause every now and then, and if he decides to waste his Qi improving his eyesight, he can see them digging out small, nautilus-like shells from between small divots in the stone, or pulling up thick, stringy moss from the shadowed areas of the cliffs.

It’s not alive in a traditional sense, there’s not enough for it to feel like an environment entirely, but it is living, it does breathe, and off to a distant, unseen horizon, he sees infinite sandstone, worn to beatific smoothness and strangeness by waters from tall mountains, beneath a sunrise that is always sunrise.

And it is rich in Qi.

For all the advancements in cultivation and the ability to generate and circulate Qi of the last millennia, there is still no substitute for a Qi-rich environment when it comes to cultivation. Generating one’s own Qi, stimulating what one possesses to generate more, is viable, where it might once have been a myth, but absorbing Qi and transforming it into one’s own is and always has been the method by which one’s cultivation advances. While the Qi here isn’t quite like the fires of his own Qi, the small amount of heat and sun concepts it reflects are enough that he can still absorb and cultivate it easier than if it were water-concept Qi or, more likely, purely stone-flavored. The very air is saturated with it, like at a natural spring or the center of a Qi-gathering formation. It is abundant, plentiful, and for those of lesser cultivation perhaps even difficult to endure. Even with his “passengers”, Shin Ren has managed to refill his dantian to some extent, and with it, push his healing back to a level expected of someone in the Core Formation realm.

Or… who had once been of the Core Formation realm.

Another brick hits him, this time on his lower back, and he full-body winces at the feel of warm, shaped stone smacking him hard in the ribs.

“Daydreaming again, boy!” Qu Haolan calls. “If you force me to sit here staring at you whine to yourself, I will gladly teach you the meaning of discipline. There are limits to disrespecting the time of your betters.”

He sighs, wincing at the new bruise. “With all due respect, master, I am trying to reform a Core while wrestling with the same demons you once claimed surprise to see me survive. It is not a task to be taken lightly.”

“And yet here you are, flittering about in your own mind like a particularly clumsy moth. I expect better from a cultivator of the Core Formation realm, even one who has faced a setback. And is that really how you call it? A Core? The translation scroll has that right?”

Shin Ren nods, bracing himself for another round of translation practice. “Yes, master. A Core, in which a Soul might someday be born and raised, until at last it is made in full.”

Qu Haolan scoffs. “Well. Not inaccurate, I suppose, but I weep for the death of poetry in these lands. Even the most bloodthirsty of bandit sects had better names than a ‘Core’. ‘Home of the True Horizon’, or ‘Dragon Den of the Soul’, maybe. More accurate, better sense of the grandeur of it. Hmph. A ‘Core’.”

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“Much of the language and science of Cultivation has been standardized in voice,” Shin Ren admits. “Same as with most languages in themselves. I speak Imperial Common, a bit of High Imperial and a touch of Trade Tongue, but for the most part if one is to learn the advancements that participation in the Empire brings, one needs to learn its languages.”

Qu Haolan growls, and several of the creatures on the peaks beside theirs start to swish their tails and bite at each other in shows of aggression. “Would that I had known such a thing would come,” his master grumbles. “I might have managed a better library at least. Surely the old tongues still hold some say? No Empire can crush all of history beneath its heel.”

Shin Ren nods. “This is true, master. As always, your wisdom shines forth. Many territories of the Third and Fourth rings, and even some places within the Second, still have traditional languages and cultural norms. It’s more that the standard has shifted.”

The old monster snorts. “Some victory, then, in surviving conquest.”

“If I may ask, master?”

Qu Haolan nods, not shifting in his seat but turning his attention more squarely to Shin Ren.

“Where is your own origin?”

Qu Haolan says nothing for a while, and then, eventually… sighs.

“My home was dead before I left it,” he says. “It ended with a war that, on the whole, likely never even got recorded for how pedestrian it was. The homes I found after that, where I grew and became a cultivator, are gone now as well. To cling to the past is the weakness of immortality, boy. As much as it pains us, strength is in letting go. It would do me no good to bring up the spirits and names of the dead to indulge you, and you would gain little in the knowing. Turn to your own past, and don’t mind mine.”

Knowing a dismissal when he hears it, Shin Ren nods, turning away again and beginning to pull at his Qi once more. His master goes quiet again, staring out at him and at the horizon, sitting comfortably on a chair carved of grey slate and with a pile of shaped brick tiles in easy reach.

Slowly, Shin Ren begins to gather his energies again.

Forming a core is not easily done. The initial moment of formation most often comes as a culmination of tremendous strength and effort, a moment of true emotional fulfillment and comprehension. Forming one after the first one breaks, however, is a bit different. Breakages are rare, but even in the modern day they’re common enough that there is standard knowledge about them.

Slowly, Shin Ren visualizes his inner world. Focusing, his mind flows along the currents of the Qi in his body, follows the stream entering his Dantian from the world without, avoiding the parts of himself his demons have too great a hold of, and beholds his core.

The shell remains, but what was once inside it is gone. Shattered, overwhelmed by impulse and mania. Its contents were consumed in the same conflagration that almost killed him, drunk dry by the parasites he is cursed with, but the pieces of it are still there. There is no such thing as a true backwards step: one cannot cross the same river twice, for the river has changed, and so has the one crossing. Slowly, moment by moment, he pulls Qi from the world outside, pushes it through his meridians in the altered pattern he’s forced to use, and upon turning it into his own energy, feeds it back towards the broken shell.

To form a Core is to form one’s own identity. A single crowning moment of self-awareness, wherein who you are crystalizes and is made into a cocoon to hold what you might be. He sees it in what’s left of his comprehension. The shell sizzles to the metaphysical touch, stinging slightly at his perception. Before, it glowed a beautiful indigo-purple with hints of blue and gold, reflecting the divine mystery of the unique flame of his sect, but now it emits a light more yellow-crimson and ragged, dull and pervasive. He feels pieces of it sift and coalesce under his attention, flowing back towards the center and into their places… and fail to fit.

His pride is broken. His path, unclear. His dedication, unknown.

And his demons, whispering.

He feels them there. Even as he does his best to starve them of Qi, depriving his own meridians where the cancerous clumps of Qi have formed, still they sip from him, from the world around him, dragging it in towards them like little whirlpools. As he touches on his core, picks up its pieces, feeds them the memory of molten heat, of divine fire, of mysterious and unknowable things reflected in purple flame and nobility in its holders, they stir.

He feels them around him, and with a sizzle of burning flesh, the rasping of smoke-charred lungs, she goes to speak.

He ducks and mostly avoids the brick that conks him on the side of the head.

“Perhaps this is how you cultivated to such a height so quickly!” Qu Haolan sighs. “Growing without adversity, and a middling foundation to boot! A whiff of a heart demon and your focus collapses. A single broken core, and you struggle like this! I have known warriors twice your age who hadn’t managed to reach the heights of Core Formation, but at least they knew what to do with a shattered Core!”

Shin Ren pauses at that.

“Master, do you mean it was expected for a core to break?”

Qu Haolan scoffs. “Of course! Sure, every few generations you get a prodigy, but mark me, boy. Prodigies are fickle. They are brief, transitory moments, confluences of opportunity, luck, and talent. None of these are a replacement for work. I myself had my core break no less than six times. Admittedly, I was a bit unlucky in that regard, but failure is not the end of the road, or even a step off of it. Failure, o student of mine, is another step, no different than success. To fail and live and listen is to learn. Refusing to learn is the only way to fall off your path. All other things are merely part of the way to who you choose to be.

I don’t know how your kind thinks of it in these modern times, but in my days, those who lived were the victors, not those who slew their opponents or came out unscathed. This “Empire” of yours seems an avid believer in standardizing things, minimizing the bad, but not addressing it. You broke your cultivation. That’s not the end of the road, or a sign that you are doomed. Fixing it is just a step in making it different and more than it was.”

Shin Ren sits with that for a while. It’s not that core breakage is a myth, but… the thought had been there. Once broken, it could never be the same again. Once he stopped walking straight ahead, he could never move forward properly again. Both ideas are still there, still orbiting his thoughts, but… neither is tied with the same steel it once was. Because if neither one is true, or not necessarily bad, then… it changes things.

He listens to his master’s words. Meditates on them for a bit. And, eventually, rather than pulling in more Qi to refill his Dantian back to an ideal amount, he instead only focuses on his core.

Jagged edges of ego and beliefs that no longer fit flutter through his soul space like broken glass. He picks them up, one by one, and begins to look through them.

Eventually, holding them all in his hands, he sighs. Long and slow. Only when he holds every piece of his core and feels how certain chunks of it resonate, ugly and clanging, against the parts of his Qi and soul that whirl and writhe and metastasize does he turn once more to his meridians and his environment.

He ducks the brick thrown at his ear.

And then he turns, inside himself, to face the two shadows tied to him.

“We need to talk,” says the student to his demons.