Deep in the mountains, rugged and steep, A father speaks to his son, wise and deep, "Truth is a virtue for the strong, my child, Living guilelessly, with no intent to hide.
Deception is the path of the weak, A life of pretense, hollow and meek, Misguiding others, their trust you betray, Denying oneself the Dao path, the true way.
My son, live with the strength you possess, Let your desires and hopes be expressed, For a life of falsehood is a life of regret, Short or long, truth is the only asset."
The wind whispers, the trees gently sway, The father's words still resonate today, A call to live with honor and integrity, To embrace one's strength and destiny.
A long-forgotten poem
Author Unknown
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Bao, Ai, Yunfie, and Song watched helplessly as they lost their hard-won treasures.
“How can something so small eat so much?” Bao complained, her large eyes watering as she looked at her steadily shrinking hoard. The little guy had already eaten the lunar steel and moved on to the star metal.
“Where does it all go?” Yunfie asked, amazed. The beast hadn’t gotten any larger; it was as if the metal was just disappearing.
“I can’t watch,” Song signed and turned away, her fist shaking.
“He’s a baby; of course, he will be hungry. The real question is, what will we do once he runs out of ores and minerals?” Ai remarked grimly.
“You think he’s going to eat everything?!” Bao cried. She set her jaw and marched towards the camp. It’s just a baby. She told herself.
“Bao,” Ai called out from behind to no effect. “Bao…”
With each step closer, Bao became less confident. Still, she marched on. When she got within attack distance, the beast stopped chewing and looked up at her, his golden eyes focusing on her.
Bao’s step faltered, and she stumbled to a halt. Yunfie looked on; alarm spread over her face.
“Do you have to eat all our treasures?” Bao’s outrage came out more like a desperate plea. She blushed in embarrassment when she realized how weak it must have sounded.
“These scraps are your treasures?” he asked, his voice bright and young. He took another bite, grinding a chunk of star metal into bits before swallowing. When he was finished, he sat up and looked her way.
“You say they're your treasures, and I say they're my snack. How do we determine who is right?”
She turned back to signal her team, but they had already begun approaching. Led by Ai, the others arrived behind her. They stopped about three of Bao’s body lengths away from the beast.
“Do you want to fight me for them?” the beast’s ears folded back against its head, making his golden eyes seem more prominent.
The four cultivators faced off against a beast small enough to sit atop Yunfie’s head. After a nervous moment, Ai spoke.
“Honorable golden fox needn’t be hasty; this one,” Ai gestured to Bao, “was only saddened that our fate was such that we met you when you were hungry. Please allow us some sorrow at our poor fortune.”
“This one is a noble ferrox.” The young ferrox corrected them, his snout tilting up. “We are distantly related to the fox. We eat metals to grow. I’m only eating your treasures because I’m not big enough to complete an important task. If you help me, I’ll stop. How does that sound?”
The ferrox turned and lowered his head to scratch his ear with his back paw. Ai grimaced at the sounds of metal on metal.
“What is the task?” Bao spoke up quickly, brightening at the possibility of salvaging her fortune.
“Follow me; I’ll show you,” the golden ferrox pup turned and padded up the side of the embankment.
Bao immediately followed. Ai, Yunfie, and Song stayed a moment longer.
“Ever hear of a ferrox?” Ai asked.
Yunfie shook her head, and Song signed in the negative. What can we do against a spirit beast made of metal? None of her team had lightning energy.
“Let’s see what it wants, at least.”
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Kai walked amongst the fractal grasses in the indistinct garden. It was the color of a garden, with only the strange lack of distinctiveness to everything providing an indicator that something was different. Kai observed this indistinct quality but quickly forgot it as he walked into a clearing in the woods. A grassy knoll materialized, with dappled light streaming down through the break in the dark green canopy onto the open and lush grass. Two hardwood daises sat across from each other, one empty, the other occupied by someone familiar. Kai waved at his former self from across the meadow. At least he recognized him as his former self, but there were inconsistencies. For one, his eyes glowed with barely restrained power, a golden glow of such intensity that it rivaled the sunlight. For two, the man had an ageless quality that seemed wholly unlike his previous form.
Kai walked to the unoccupied dais and took a comfortable sitting position, crossing his legs in front of him.
“Finally, we can speak,” Ahja’s voice was deep and authoritative. “It’s almost like you’ve been avoiding me.”
“Wasn’t, just couldn’t fall asleep without a living body. I did not expect that,” Kai replied, then shrugged. Any oddness about having a conversation with himself came and went without notice.
“Many things are different than we expected.” Kai heard the somber tone of his older self.
“How did we get this way?” Kai asked.
“When we figured out what the soul fusion was doing, that a foreign mind was somehow forcefully fusing with ours, we had to make a hard choice.”
Kai pulled his robes closer, tucking them into place. He thought about what he might have been forced to do.
“So we counterattacked by splitting ourselves? I became the conscious self, and you the unconscious self.”
“Close but not quite,” Ajha replied, “We were identical halves of the whole. We forced him to choose between us, thinking he couldn’t fuse twice. He chose to fuse with you.”
“And thus I was formed.”
Ahja nodded. They had been perfectly matched initially, but the soul fusion had changed Kai in unpredictable ways and injured Ajha.
“You gained a body to tether you to an unexplored universe, but at what cost? Your newly forged soul can’t hold our memories, thoughts, and accumulated knowledge.”
“So you see me as a lesser version of you? A failed experiment? Is that why you’ve been interfering in my choices?”
“I don’t see you as a failure; just youthful and inexperienced. And I don’t know what you mean.”
Kai turned away. It was hard to accept that without the interference of his former self, his new self wouldn’t have been able to survive. Yet, had he picked the Nine Heavenly Palaces Body Refining, as he had planned, would it have helped him out of his current situation?
“So, where do we go from here?” Kai asked, still looking away.
Ahja closed his eyes, the brief respite from his luminous stare relieved Kai, and he looked back at his Eternal half. His adult form was wearing simple white clothes, a comfortable shirt, and pants made from a natural fabric.
“What do you mean when you said interfering in my choices?” Ahja opened his eyes and asked.
“When I chose my cultivation method, I planned to pick another method, but when I opened my mouth to respond, something else came out. You didn’t do that?”
Ahja shook his head. Kai’s brow creased.
“Where am I to you?” Ahja asked.
Kai’s furrow deepened further. He considered that the two experiences, including this one, had taken place in a dream-like environment.
“In my unconscious?”
“It’s the same for me,” Ahja replied. “Ever since the split, I’ve had enthusiastic impulses and strange dreams about new places and things. Recently, I dreamt of performing a cellular analysis on a remarkable species of axolotl. I’ve never seen anything quite like this species before. I’m old enough to know myself; I don’t just make up new species in my dreams. It has to have come from your influence.”
”Was it red? The salamander, I mean?”
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
When Ahja nodded, Kai shook his head. This needed to be clarified.
“Wait. You didn’t see me capture the axolotl’s soul?” Kai tried to clarify.
“You captured a soul? You can do that?” Ahja looked stunned at that revelation. “How do you do that?”
“You can’t see through my eyes,” Kai thought furiously. “And I can’t see through yours, so what? Are we linked through our unconscious mind?”
“Can we get back to the soul thing? That seems relatively important.”
“Wait. In what way was the axolotl remarkable?”
Ahja sat silent momentarily, “What do you mean without a living body?” he countered.
The two of them looked at each other as silence fell over the meadow. After a moment, Ahja laughed, and Kai joined shortly afterward. He squinted and looked at his older, more imposing self with renewed appreciation. They both were excited about learning new things; that was enough in common. They could build on that.
“I’ll go first, then you,” Ahja began. “I did a genomic analysis to map the functional systems of the axolotl. This is what I found…”
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Cruck. Bao’s hammer came down furiously against the wet earth. Water splashed everywhere, dousing Yunfie, who was standing too close.
“Nearly there,” the ferrox observed from his perch on a nearby boulder.
The job was to fill in the gaps and crevices preventing the river from flowing to the epicenter. The heavenly tribulation fractured the ground, creating underground waterways diverting the water.
Ai moped her sweat. She and Bao had been hauling boulders. Song used her butterflies to reduce them to rubble. Yunfie used her wind to move them into cracks and crevices. Then Bao would compress them with her hammer sealing them up.
Ai watched as the water flowed over the newly closed crevice. This had become routine. They would fill one crack and then watch as the water ran further down, only to see it disappear into another underground tributary.
Yunfie came up to stand next to her. The river pushed over the lip of the pit and started down inside. Song and Bao came up to join them at the rim, looking down over the water. The river coursed down the side of the steep pit, picking up speed.
“Come on,” Bao urged it onward.
The river disappeared into the ground midway down the slope. Water disappearing underground was a familiar sight by now. Bao cursed the heavens.
“Just wait,” the golden beast strode between the Bao and Song and looked down toward where the water ran. The precocious ferrox had been becoming more familiar with the four cultivators, approaching their working areas, then retreating, all very casually.
After a minute of watching, just as Bao was about to grab her hammer and head down to start again, water shot out into the sky in a plume before continuing down the pit.
“Good job, you guys,” he said in his youthful voice, “based on my calculations, you have about five minutes before your camp is underwater.”
Bao looked at Ai, who looked back.
“Yunfie, Song,” Ai began running toward the camp, “quick, let’s break camp and retrieve our supplies.”
“I’ll get our ores and stones,” Bao said, pulling ahead of Ai as she sped downhill.
Relay watched them run off before finding a boulder to settle on. He closed his eyes. The sights and sounds of Long Yuan faded as he disengaged the virtual interface.
“That was fun!” he said aloud. The inaugural test of his avatar had been a great success, if a bit premature. He had intended to mature to at least twice his size, but the appearance of the Lunar Temple cultivators interrupted his progress.
He floated over to the screen to review the data from his test run. The screen proudly displayed the project title, Ferrox Model 1. He brought up a skeletal scan, revealing the deception. He had spliced the genome of the starry tiger with select portions of the bear-like beast’s, then manipulated the result to disguise himself with a fox-like appearance. He called it a ferrox.
Relay reviewed the mapping of the spiritual energy pathways in the ferrox’s body; his hybrid avatar had a heart core, with meridians running to and from throughout his body. Major meridians supplied his brain, where he’d replaced lower cerebral functions with autonomic synthetic variations. His sensory cortex was rewired using bioformatics to transmit and receive sensory data through the transceiver in his collar.
With a thought, the screen changed, and his avatar’s vitals were displayed. Heart rate, breathing, cellular activity, and energy levels indicated normal function.
“Autonomous hibernation systems normal,” he said to himself before floating to a screen that monitored Kai’s condition.
Kai’s heart rate was high but still within normal range. The new metabolic processes showed parity and synchronicity, phenomena neither of them predicted. Both metabolic processes relied on the free electrons pulled from the spiritual energy receptor molecule; and consumed the natural by-products of each other to catalyze cellular energy. While this bypassed respiration, it didn’t eliminate the need for food and water. And Kai was dehydrated.
I got you a drink. Relay thought as he manipulated the interface to open ports in the shell to receive the water. He’d called the Lunar Temple cultivators to reroute the river so Kai would have enough water. Water was the only thing in short supply after the heavenly tribulation.
Relay watched as the microns surrounding Kai began delivering water to Kai’s mouth, where their organic counterparts would take and distribute it as needed. Kai’s heart rate slowed until it settled at an alarmingly low rate.
Relay checked all the other indicators, and there was nothing wrong. Blood sugar was fine, hormone production was expected, brain chemistry was standard, and the nervous systems registered no signs of distress. Kai was not in any pain. His heart was just functioning exceptionally slowly. Relay timed it, clocking it at one beat every ten seconds.
After a quick analysis, he determined the cause. Without respiration, Kai’s blood was only being used to move electrolytes, vitamins, nutrients, and sugars around instead of supplying oxygen and removing carbon dioxide. His body was more efficient. It didn’t need to work as hard.
Once he confirmed that Kai was recovering nicely. He floated back to his avatar control screens.
Relay used genome sequence projection to model the spiritual beast’s anatomic function. He reviewed the latest data to confirm the model's accuracy. The bear-beast genome contained the blueprint for creating organic metal alloys, but Relay couldn’t tell how that worked. It wasn’t until he collected the spiritual energy pathway data that he could see how dependent the physiology was on that energy.
He got to work correlating the new information.
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Bao was the last to return, weighed down with bags of heavy ore and minerals, yet the cultivator smiled when she stepped over the ridge of the pit and saw the golden ferrox napping on a rock some distance away.
She walked to their new camp, Ai having already set up a new tent. She dropped her heavy loads by the tent, stumbled to the fire, and crashed beside it.
“We lost the lunar steel but found lumen ore in that large boulder. We actually ended richer than we started,” her grin spread wide. “Tomorrow, I’ll dive down and bring out those claws.”
Ai nodded from her seat beside the fire. She was lost in thought.
“Do you believe him?” Yunfie asked. Her quiet voice was barely audible over the falling water she squeezed from her soaked robe.
“What? About him being alive?” Bao asked, sitting up and looking over to the wind cultivator. “You saw the sphere down there that would have made it impossible for any cultivator less than the transcendent realm to detect him. Maybe he is?”
“Do you think transcendent realm cultivators grow on trees?” Song signed. The Lunar Temple, supposedly, had two transcendent ancestors, but she never saw them.
“No, I mean about him being a querator or whatever he said? He talks funny,” Yunfie clarified.
“Uses a lot of big words that I’ve never heard,” Ai observed. “Hide-ration, what was the other strange word, meda abo, meda taba…”
“Met-aba-lize,” Song signed one character at a time.
“Yeah, that’s it. Metabalize.” Ai recalled.
“What kind of beast has a golden collar like that?” Bao asked. “I bet that collar is worth a fortune.” She turned to look over at the distant beast. He was still sleeping.
“Forget about it,” Song signed, her hand moving in exaggerated motions for emphasis, “you’ll only get us all killed.”
“I’m not going to do anything,” Bao turned back. “I’m just saying that he must have gotten that collar from the soulforger. Maybe he’s somehow bonded the creature? The bond would have broken if he was dead, proving he is alive.”
“You realize that’s very bad for us, right?” Ai picked up a piece of dried wood and threw it on the flames. “If he’s alive, he’s a core formation cultivator with seven advanced cores. I don’t want to even talk about how ridiculous that is. But think about it, how can we ever accomplish our mission? Maybe if we trick him into coming along, but you don’t get to the core formation stage by being gullible.”
“We could just ask him?” Yunfie interjected as she spread her robe out over a large bolder. “Isn’t that what he said, that the master would decide when he woke?”
Ai grimaced. The young master. That was how the ferrox referred to the soulforger.
“Once he wakes up, we can ask him to meet with us.” Song signed. “Before the meeting, I’ll use my foresight to see how he responds. Based on what I see, we’ll know what to do.”
Ai nodded, but her grimace remained. It was close enough to their original plan that it still felt doable. But things could go very badly. Soulforgers were not the most stable, and who could say what a child soulforger was like? And this spirit beast was stranger than any she had heard of.
“We’ll have to be prepared for anything.” She looked at the starless sky; the night was near. “I’ll take the first watch; you three get some sleep. Tomorrow could be… interesting.”