“I’m not sure I should–” Kasri started to argue, but the woman’s touch turned insistent. Her fingers dug into his shoulder, and he felt warmth begin to spread from where he should have felt pain. “What are you… what are you doing?”
Kasri held out his hands, and his scars bled a very slight golden light. They weren’t healing, but they were… feeling? Like the numb, painless flesh had become healthy somehow. “I… why’d you do that?”
“Did you want me to remove the scars? Most people see them as badges of honor, but if you don’t want them I could fully heal them for you.” The woman gestured at her own pristine neck as if there were something to compare. “I had a massive scar across my chest and the base of my neck when I was young, but no matter what people said, I just couldn’t see it as anything but shameful. So I got rid of it. Do you want me to do that for you?”
“Um… no. No thanks.” Kasri distractedly shook his head as he poked at the scarred flesh on his hands. It still felt like the slightly raised, damaged tissue it had before. But now he could feel his probing finger as well. “But… why? What does this get you?”
The woman chuckled lightly. “Absolutely nothing. You might not have realized it, but your actions were very stiff and awkward when you used your hands. You can’t be a cultivator with hands like those.”
Kasri flexed his fingers. Aside from the demonfish, which had done a good amount of damage to his hands, there had been all the times he’d pulled a muscle or cracked a bone while trying to survive. Even that damage seemed to be gone.
“...Thank you.” He eventually said, when no other words felt right. He looked up at her, expecting to see someone looking for a payment, but only saw contentment. Trust was something Kasri didn’t have enough of to place it in anyone, but he felt he owed this woman. “You said you had someone you wanted me to meet?”
“Yes, I did. They’re waiting for me just outside the festival grounds, and they’ll be very excited to meet you.” The woman turned and started towards an alley. A dark alley for the time of day, with an obvious ambush in the waiting.
Dread crept up Kasri’s throat. He gently grabbed the woman’s shoulder, to which she turned with a raised eyebrow. “Maybe we should take the main road out?”
The woman shook her head. “Nonsense. I can protect the both of us from whoever is reckless enough to attack.” She smiled reassuringly. “My sect is very insistent that all our cultivators have more than enough strength for any dangers that may rear their ugly heads. Let me protect you.”
The insistence in the woman’s voice was enough to give Kasri pause. She had a confidence in her abilities that made Kasri want to believe her, but he’d seen what happened to confidence. It only shattered in the moments before defeat, and then the person paid a price for their confidence. Sometimes the ultimate price.
“I know you’re confident in your strength, but everyone here is. Please just take the safe way.” Kasri insisted, gesturing at the busy road.
“I think you’re mistaking confidence for arrogance.” The woman brushed Kasri’s hand from her shoulder. “If we take the main road, it will turn a five minute walk into a half hour excursion. I know my chi greatly outclasses any of those that I can sense between us and our destination. And that isn’t taking into consideration the difference in skill.”
The woman smiled reassuringly and kept walking. Kasri looked behind him at all the people who’d turned to look, but something on their faces bothered him. It was a mixture of pity, disgust, and fear. Three emotions that, when made at once, painted him a very strange picture of the woman’s abilities. Then the emotions started to fade away, leaving them staring only at him.
He made the split-second decision that he’d rather be next to the woman instead of alone with the people she’d agitated. “Wait for me.” He sighed and ignored the smile she shot him when he caught up. “I hope you’re actually as strong as you think you are.”
“Oh, I am.” The woman laughed.
She emerged from the alleyway to a barrage of differently-aspected techniques aimed squarely at her, but before Kasri could even react, they all dissipated into unshaped chi. She gestured at a cultivator with four hands hovering around him that looked like melting wax, and he doubled over in pain. She repeated the motion at the other two cultivators, who also fell to the ground twitching and groaning.
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“I follow the way of Faded Scars.” The woman stated simply, as if she hadn’t just overpowered three full-blown cultivators with a simple gesture. One that didn’t even look like she’d used chi. “All wounds leave memories, and all memories leave wounds. What was once whole can be whole once more, and what was once nothing will return to nothing. People. Chi. The world itself. Nothing can escape its past, even if the scars have faded away.”
She continued through the groaning attackers without turning to look at them. “Our sect does not force disciples into one way. If you join us, you will be free to find your own way through the world. If that way has already been tread, then so be it. If you find an untrodden path and choose to cleave through its mysteries yourself, we will be there with you every step of the way.”
What the woman said didn’t truly hit Kasri for a handful of seconds. He was too busy looking at the cultivators on the ground, who were definitely powerful enough to kill him with a single technique. Yet she’d dispatched them so easily.
“Wait. Join you?” Kasri asked when he finally registered her words. “I don’t want to join a sect. I just want to go home. And they’ll let me do it if I just survive two more years.”
“...You… you don’t know. Oh, you poor soul.” The woman murmured and turned to Kasri with worry written on her face. “You won’t be free at twenty, Kasri. You’ll be dead. Your soul will fade away to nothing if you don’t tether it to your body through cultivation by the end of your twentieth year of existence. And as your soul fades away, so will your mind. Your body will be an empty husk, leaving behind nothing of you.”
Dread. Terror. Reluctant understanding. Those were the emotions that crashed into Kasri all at once, and he suddenly understood why people had mentioned his age to him so many times. Why they’d put a hard limit on his time at the sect. He wasn’t being tested. He wasn’t going through a trial to get back home.
“I… I’m going to die?” Kasri whispered.
The woman shook her head. “You will die on the day of your twentieth birthday if you can’t contain your soul. I’d thought you were saving yourself for a specific sect, but knowing the truth… you need to join a sect. It doesn’t matter if it’s ours–you need to cultivate.”
Kasri’s memories took on a different shape. His parents’ detachment doubled when he turned sixteen. When he showed no ability for the family’s way. They’d given up on him, and left him to wallow in his own inability for months and months. He tried to remember the conversation his parents had had with the people from the sect, but their voices had been far too distorted by chi for him to make anything out. He wished he could hear what they had to say.
Had they known he would die at twenty? Were they just going to… let him live until he suddenly dropped dead? Why had the sect even come by in the first place? It didn’t make any sense.
“Why?” He muttered, shifting uncomfortably in his plain grey robes. “They never told me. Why didn’t they tell me?”
“There are so many reasons. None of them are good.” The woman smiled sadly in sympathy. “As long as you have any chi at all, we’ll find you a way to follow. Keep your legs moving, and the ground below will follow.”
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Kasri followed the woman, whose name he still didn’t know, to a small clearing in the woods. A mass of symbols had been scratched into the ground, all outlined in a square with slightly rounded corners. Another woman stood in the middle of everything, surrounded by a trio of specters. Two of which Kasri recognized.
The woman turned at the sound of Kasri’s approach, her face blossoming into a wide smile as the red specter chattered and gestured at Kasri with the stick it still held. “Lillian Waystone, what have you brought me? Another pet project, or is this one a contender for the main sect?”
“I have no idea.” Lillian shrugged. “His chi seemed interesting, and he gave Glitter a stick. Most people would’ve ignored him, or even tried to hurt him. That much made him a good fit.”
The red specter, who was apparently called Glitter, raised the stick to the sky and harmonized all of its voices into one. “Oaaaaaah!” He decreed, and Kasri half expected a lightning bolt to strike the piece of wood.
It glowed from the inside with a spectral light and burst into shards. They orbited the specter for a handful of seconds, then turned the same colour as his body. His voices all spoke something happy and thankful, to which Kasri couldn’t help but smile.
“Huh. Looks like it wasn’t a fluke.” The specter woman laughed. “Nice to meet you, Kasri. I’m Dahlia Waystone, older sister to the girl standing next to you, and high enough in our sect that I can extend an invitation to you. So how about it? You want to join a sect you know absolutely nothing about?”
Kasri was taken aback by her casual demeanor. What kind of an invitation was that? “Are… are you trying to make me say no? Would anyone say yes to that?”
“You’d be surprised.” Lillian giggled. “So many people just want the prestige of being in a sect. It isn’t until they hear what they’d be joining that they suddenly want to back out.”
“And we let ‘em, obviously.” Dahlia added. “No point making someone stick around when they don’t want to be there. It just breeds resentment and danger for the other disciples. So, kid, have you heard of the Silverbloom Collective?”
Kasri combed his memories to try and find that name, and he could swear he’d heard it somewhere, but it must’ve been in passing. “Yes. Well, no.” He shook his head. “I think I heard it once somewhere, but I don’t know anything about it.”
“Well, that sect you might’ve heard about is us.” Dahlia tapped herself on the shoulder. “We aren’t exactly the most popular sect around these parts, or any part, but we’ll make sure you’re a cultivator by the end of the year.” She held out her hand without explaining anything else. “So, are you in?”
Kasri stared down at the offered hand. It had to have some stipulation behind it, but he wasn’t sure he was in a place to reject any offer he got. “I mean, do I really have a choice?” Kasri chuckled awkwardly. “I already got passed over by four clan masters, so what’re my chances with the other sects?”
It had been a rhetorical question, but Lillian answered anyway. “Very, very low. Sixteen is usually the cutoff for training a new cultivator, since it gives the sect or clan a lot of time to properly go through the fundamentals. Twelve to sixteen is prime recruiting age, but kids younger than twelve get taken in all the time.”
Dahlia nodded. “Not as cultivators, but as kids who’ll eventually become cultivators. The sect does a pretty good job of protecting everyone that gets abandoned, but that’s compared to the other sects and clans. Breaking someone’s arm for slighting their honor might be a lot better than amputating it, or outright killing them, but they could control themselves instead.”