The cold waters of the Sourstone River washed over Kasri as a harsh, uncaring sun beat down on his face. Mocking laughter from the children who had pushed him off his fishing perch barely made it through the rush of green-tinted waters. He pushed himself to his feet and glared daggers at the little brats that might’ve cost him his dinner.
“Run!” One of them screeched, giggling uncontrollably as he turned in a spray of pebbles. “You’ll catch his disease if he touches you!”
Another gaggle of giggles preceded the children running away with all their might, save for one barely heard ‘but I’m the one that touched him’ that brought a cynical smile to Kasri’s face. The innocent fear the little girl had spoken it with was adorable, but he had to admit it was fairly cathartic as well.
A splash in the water upstream. Kasri turned and froze, staying as motionless as possible as his dinner rushed towards him. A fish as ugly as a spoiled child and twice as big, with scales as sharp as broken glass and jagged teeth like the edge of a chipped cup. The poetically named ‘demonfish’ was about as palatable as the embers from a recently dead fire, but it was meat. Healthy-ish meat, with almost no poison and filled to the bursting with chi.
Glimmering silver-black scales grazed against Kasri’s leg, cutting extremely thin gouges that burned like acid. He slammed his fist down on the demonfish’s head and grimaced in pain as the animal’s scales scoured his tender flesh, but after a brief moment of brutal fighting, he managed to get his fingers into its mouth. Its razor-sharp tooth-filled mouth.
Kasri’s ravenous grin spread like a plague, even as his fingers bled. “Got you, dinner.”
The demonfish wouldn’t go without a fight. Kasri wrapped his toes around the river’s slick stones and fought the thrashing fish for purchase in a territory he had no advantage in. The waters churned and frothed a sickly green until Kasri couldn’t see his own limbs through the disturbance, and his fingers quickly lost the fight against the fish’s flesh-tearing maw.
Kasri grunted and took a tentative step towards his fishing perch, paying for every motion he dared to make with blood and skin. His chipped gutting knife he’d made out of a much nicer carving knife glittered like a beacon of an oncoming feast. But as long as he kept both feet planted, it was just out of reach.
“Heart of the wilds, take me.” Kasri cursed and spared a glance at his hand that was truly beginning to hurt. The kind of hurt that led to permanent damage. “Dinner or safety… dinner or safety…”
His stomach stung in a harsh reminder of how many times he’d chosen safety in the past two weeks. Food was hard to come by in the sect’s sacred grounds, especially food that wasn’t smart enough to run away or try to kill him. Add in the fact that he wasn’t exactly a part of the sect he was mooching off of, so the safe fields and pastures were completely off the menu, and it left him with the struggle he currently faced.
Kasri pushed with his left foot, scrabbled for the knife with his right hand, and felt the river take him away all at once. His fingers curled around the wrong end of the blade, which just barely cut into his flesh, and he managed to take it along with him for the ride.
Slimy rocks battered Kasri’s body as the river became his entire world, save for the weight of the fish he held tightly onto. He screamed through a mouthful of viciously acidic water at a shooting pain in the base of his neck which forced a tightness down his right side that he knew would take far too long to heal. The fish pressed its body down onto his to force him into the rocks, which scraped away at his skin as more acidic water found its way into Kasri’s wounds. He slammed his dull knife into the demonfish as pain wracked his mind and his lungs screamed and pleaded at him to give up on his dinner and run away with his life.
Precious air burbled away. Everything bled away into the sourstone river’s acidic hatred. Kasri twisted his knife as viciously as he could as pain and adrenaline scoured away any and all of his hesitation.
The thrashing stopped. Dead weight mercifully settled on Kasri, pinning him to the bottom of the river as stones grated away at his back. He opened his eyes to a murky green approximation of the world outside of the river, and as the scales tore at his skin, he found himself overtaken with relief.
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With a mighty gasp and a burst of sickly water, Kasri pushed himself free. His body fought him every second as he dragged a fish that looked nowhere near as injured as he was onto the bank, then let it flop down and bleed while he shook. He stared down at his hands, one of which was properly mauled and bruised by the fish’s teeth, and the other which was still curled around his knife.
“That is not good.” Kasri chuckled warily and uncurled his fingers from around the knife. A cut far worse than what he’d felt glared back at him as if to say ‘you haven’t seen anything yet’. “Oh. That’s even worse.”
Kasri cut some cloth from his tattered grey robes, the sign of a disciple that had yet to be accepted into the sect, and wrapped them around his hands. They’d had a very mild healing property at one point, but by now it might as well be a placebo. Kasri’s were a few years old, and they weren't even his. He’d found them on another poor soul who’d been exiled, but one who hadn’t been ‘unlucky’ enough to be exiled alive.
With his hands wrapped and his stomach yelling at him to butcher the fish, Kasri curled his better hand around the demonfish’s tail and began the long trek back to his hideaway. The meat would last him a few weeks if he portioned it out right, which would be just long enough to make it to the show of force.
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Kasri sighed in content before a crackling fire. The demonfish lay sloppily butchered next to it, and one of the bigger chunks now sat above the flames on a spit he rotated every so often. It was safe-ish to eat demonfish raw, but he couldn’t afford any setbacks.
In just a few short weeks, the sect would open their doors to new disciples. Anyone of any age and from any background could try out, and if they were successful or lucky, they’d be taken on by the sect. Or one of the invited masters from other sects who were shopping around for new blood.
He tapped the demonfish meat and shook his head at the resistance he felt. “Still not cooked enough. How much chi did this thing eat to get fire resistance like this?”
The simple answer was ‘a lot’. But it hadn’t cultivated enough chi to evolve into something greater. If it had, Kasri’s corpse would be feeding it instead. So it had gained a lot of chi, yet hadn’t had time to properly cultivate it for some reason.
“It must’ve eaten something powerful pretty recently. Maybe a chi-filled fruit fell into the river. Or someone dumped an elixir into it a few miles back. I’ll take the extra chi either way.”
Kasri shivered as some monstrous beast’s roar shook the ground. He’d heard it a hundred times over the past year, but he could never get used to it. Some days it seemed terrifyingly close, and some days it was so far away that he only heard the echo. The past year had been a trek through the Freezing Dark for sure, but it would be over in three weeks.
“Mother, Father, wait for me.” Kasri said bitterly and rubbed at the bent silver ring on his middle finger that had tarnished from misuse. “I’ll be back in two years. Then we can finally talk.”
When the light of day had faded and Kasri had eaten all he could of the acrid meat, he finally sat down and tried to cultivate. He pressed his hands together in a way that left a diamond shape between his fingers, tapped his fingertips against the ground, and tried to feel the weight of the world pressing against them.
Bear The Weight was the lone technique his parents had passed down to him. The very same technique that had failed him a thousand times over, yet he still stubbornly clung to it. He envisioned the world as a foil to the sky, pressing up on him while the sky pressed down, and in that harmony there was gravity. In that understanding, he was supposed to feel the land’s chi at his fingertips, ready to be taken in and molded.
For the thousandth time, the land’s chi remained silent. Kasri sighed and opened his eyes, letting the tension bleed out of him to be replaced by disappointment.
“Failed again. Not like I expected any different.” He shifted to lie on his back and stared up at the brilliant star-filled sky so far above him. “If I was a prodigy, then maybe I could’ve come up with a technique of my own. Or if I hadn’t turned my chi into the mess it is from eating literally anything I could find. Instead, here I am–a year of punishment, and nothing to show for it but my life.”
Kasri reached out to grab for the stars, yet grasped a handful of nothing. A fitting metaphor for his entire life. Born into a rich and powerful family, doted on and babied by the cultivators around him, and he failed at every turn. He couldn’t contain one of the family’s relics. Which meant he couldn’t cultivate the family’s path. Yet they still cared for him. Trained him to be the best he could, just not in the same way as they were.
When even that failed, they simply stopped caring. That was six years ago.
And then, in an act of absolute callousness, he’d been sent to the sect. Not one of the specific sects, like the Hands of Ahl-Vr or the Gildbright Blade, but ‘the sect’. A punishment for cultivators who couldn’t take on their family’s paths and for disciples who disappointed their masters. The sect’s people had arrived in the dead of night, spoken with Kasri’s parents for a half-dozen minutes, and the next thing he knew he was in a lightless box with a treasure that made breathable air for him.
He’d been thrown into a harsh wilderness that served as a picking ground for masters and real sects alike. Once a year, they gathered to survey the ‘goods’ and adopted whatever cultivators they wanted. Kasri had arrived while it was undergoing. He’d angered some cultivator who instantly threw him into the wilderness, with the command to not return until one year had passed. A command that had etched itself onto Kasri’s soul, forcing him to obey under the threat of total spiritual annihilation.
“Three years.” Kasri repeated, the words taking on an edge of vitriol as his parents’ faces flashed over his eyes. Utterly uncaring and unwilling to do anything as the sect’s grey and white robed cultivators stormed into his room and took him away. “Three years, then I’m free.”
Kasri turned over and groped for two rust-coloured leaves he’d sewn together and stuffed with the abyssal blue wool of a sheep-like monster. It always stayed cool no matter how hot the weather turned, which was a heavensend on the sweltering summer days. He rested his head against it and sighed as the last vile vestiges of demonfish assaulted his tongue.
Sleep came terrifyingly easy.