1. Mayfly Lives

When I dream, I am much more than when I am awake. I do not know how to explain it properly to those of the waking world, and I learned early on that trying to do so earned either amusement or concern, so I stopped when I was very young.

It took me some time to realize what I was experiencing, but when I heard of reincarnation I knew. These dreams were memories of my soul. I was remembering my past lives. Not just one or two lives did I dream, but a new one every night.

Most were uneventful and dull, and in the light of a child’s eyes they were unimpressive. And so, for all the fact that I remembered that which should have been forgotten in the waters of lethe, I considered myself unimpressive.

In one dream, I was a bird. A songbird that fed on worms and insects and made sweet music in the early morning. I began my life squawking with hunger as my parents fed me their own meals. I knew I was much more than a bird, but this was the body I had been born into in that life. Fortunately, the world was dense with spirituality, and although I had not previously known of any cultivation methods for being a bird, I quickly learned to absorb and cycle the Qi of that world.

It was a strange thing, to be a spirit beast, but my life did not last very long. An avatar of evil intent appeared before me one day. I recognized it, although in that life and in this one I do not remember where. My body was young and weak, and my cultivation just beginning.

The evil avatar killed me with a thought.

I awoke from that dream and I was once more the young boy, barely out of swaddling. I did not cry for my mother, as a normal child might have done from a bad dream, but rather went back to bed and dreamed the dream of another mayfly life.

In this one, I was a small, rabbit-like animal, drinking the milk of my mother and snuggling with my litter-mates for warmth. This world had little spirituality, but that was okay. I would awaken my spirit in the next life. For now, I would enjoy being this fuzzy little animal until nature took its inevitable course.

I did not have long to wait. On the second day after I ventured out of my mother’s burrow, a wave of evil intent swept over me. No avatar appeared, but a hawk was drawn to me and I could not escape the grasp of its talons. It snapped my spine, and I--

I was a fish. The lake I hatched in was dense with spirtual energies, and as soon as I awakened my soul I began to cultivate. I grew quickly, displacing the previous lord of the lake within a season, and still I continued to grow and prosper.

Again the evil intent appeared. The villagers who fished in the lake speared me and dragged me into their boats. I promised them that if they let me live another year, I would begin to extend belssings to their village, bringing prosperity and happiness. Instead I was gutted and I--

I lived dozens of mayfly lives. Life, death, rebirth. Some of the worlds I was born into were rich with spirituality. Others were spiritual wastelands. It did not matter. The evil intent would appear and cut my life short. It followed me through space and time, from one reality to the next. Each time I would try to sever my karma with it, but I could not. But each time that I was cursed, each time that I was killed by this powerful entity, a small bit of providence entered me.

Until I became the boy who I am now.

I was a peasant boy. A mortal, in a mortal family, growing crops to sell to the nearby sect. I played with the other children and I sang the songs that taught us how to speak and the history of our people. But often I would stare off into the stars, or sit next to a tree, or on the edge of the pond, and I would stay there for hours, simply marveling at nature. At being alive.

The other children teased me, taunting me for pretending to be a cultivator when I was but a base mortal like them. I ignored them.

One day, when I was four years old, I was watching a grasshopper. It was a curious little thing, and I felt a certain kinship to it that I could not put into words. It did not flee from me, and for an hour I held it and simply marveled over its existence.

Then, when I set it back down on the ground, my older sister stamped on it, extinguishing its marvelous little life for no reason but childhood malice.

“Why did you do that?” I demanded, growing angry for the first time in my life.

“It’s just a bug!” the eight year old said, and she pushed me to the ground. “It’s because of you that my friends tease me! Because you’re weird!”

“That bug was like me!” I said. “You didn’t have to kill it, it was--”

“Yeah, that bug was like you!” she said. “You are a bug! That is your name from now on, little bug!”

She hit me then, beating me though I did not fight back. I did not cry or try to stop her. When she had satisfied her misplaced anger, she stormed off, leaving me alone in the field. It was not the first time I would bear the brunt of her anger, and it would not be the last. If I was a normal child, I would resent her for it, I knew. But I was not normal.

When questioned by my mother over the source of my bruises and my torn and disheveled clothing, I would be mute. The other children in the village were blamed, although nobody faced punishment for my parents could not prove who was responsible.

I was considered strange. Touched in the head. Stupid. Not useless, though. Even simpletons have their value, as they often make fine fieldworkers with the proper guidance. And so I was fed and clothed, and I grew older.

The spirituality of my village was low, and I was disappointed when I first realized this. Until I understood the reason. We were near the lines of a gathering array of the local sect, and most of the Qi of our lands was siphoned off for their use. There was enough left over to grow crops and raise livestock, but the results were lacking in spirituality.

When I was five, I tried tapping into the gathering array for my own use, but I was surprised when instead I was almost swept away, as though caught in the current of a powerful river. I know that the foolish attempt nearly killed me, and I did not try again.

When I was six, the sky lit up, and the immortals battled in the heavens. For eight days and nine nights, our overlord battled with an invader who was more than his equal, but a foreign dragon cannot so easily defeat a local snake. Though it exhausted him, our lord stood fast.

“Remove yourself from my path and I shall let you live,” the foreign demon said, her voice echoing through the minds of those who had the senses to hear it. “Continue to bar my way and I shall destroy your entire kingdom!”

“I sense your evil intentions and your fel karma. Though you are the empress of the Divine Fates Empire, I know that you have turned from the course of righteousness and embraced demonic arts. You are not welcome here! Begone, demon!” our lord challenged back. The battle continued for another fortnight, and finally the invader was driven off.

Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

The others in the village cowered in fear, for even they could sense the evil intention of the invader. I simply watched the clash of cosmic forces in the heavens whenever I could get away from my parents, which was often. At first my mother would rush outside and drag me back into our hovel, but as the battle continued unabated I was eventually ignored. Should our lord have failed to block any of the mighty forces which were directed towards us, then the simple shelter our family lived in would not have saved me anyway.

At first, our lord’s steadfastness was seen as a great victory, and there was celebration and revelry when finally the empress of the Divine Fates Empire retreated to lick her wounds. But then the crops began to whither and die, and the livestock could not find enough grass to stay healthy, and the fish in the nearby lake dwindled and would not find their way into our nets.

The lord had exhausted his power, and he was forced to reclaim it from the worlds in his domain. His people suffered drought and famine. I could feel the gathering arrays empowered, taking nine-tenths of the land’s spirituality instead of their usual tax. It was three years before the lord had recovered and returned the arrays to their normal levels, and the effect on our livelihood would take decades to recover.

Even then it was whispered that the lord had not fully recovered his strength. It was said that he was simply allowing the land to recover for a time before entering a longer period of cultivation. If he had not paused to allow his lands to recover, then we would surely have starved, but the people of the village could not find happiness. They knew that they must work hard in the period they were given before the next famine struck the land. But we were a hearty folk, and we planted our fields and raised our livestock and we prepared for another hardship.

In my tenth year, a merchant came to our village. He set up shop on the village green, and he hawked his wares with a booming voice, claiming that he had pills of longevity, seeds of spiritual grain, and many other wonders which would extend and improve our lives. I took one look at the items in his inventory and knew that he was a fraud. There was only one item with any spirituality to it, and he was using it as a paperweight.

It was a small crystal, the size of a fist. But it had been charged full of Qi. In a land of prosperity and high spirituality, stones like this would be common, but in our little village it was a rare commodity. I asked him if I could buy it, but he laughed at me.

“That is my light stone, little boy,” he said. “I could use candles, of course, but it casts a steadier light to read by at night. I would part with it for, oh say, twenty golden coins?”

I sighed. That was more then one hundred times its worth, and I could not afford it even if he was charging a fair price. However, he grew distracted by his other customers, and did not seem to mind as I continued to hold it while he bartered.

I longed to extract the Qi within it. It was just a spiritually dense quartz, but compared to the environment in which I was born it was the greatest source of Qi I had encountered during my short life except for the array lines themselves, and I knew better than to try tapping into them again.

As the merchant continued to swindle our villagers, providing them with medicines that were obviously simply mashed herbs mixed with mud and talismans that were obviously nothing more than random markings upon paper, I came to a sudden decision.

I drained the stone of its Qi, and I put it back on the merchant’s shelf. It took me but an effort of will, the Qi readily responding to my call and entering my body. I held it in my core as I returned to our hovel, and then I sat, and I cycled it. It was not very much, but it allowed me to begin the process of opening my channels.

I lost it bit by bit, unable to hold it within my body forever. But as it passed out of my pores, it took with it many impurities. Smiling beatifically, I continued to cultivate until my mother discovered me.

“Oh Little Bug!” she exclaimed, for my sister’s nickname for me had spread and nobody called me by my birth name anymore. “What have you rolled in! Have you been bathing in filth? Oh what has gotten into that soft mind of yours! Come, take off those clothes, we must get you clean before your father sees you like this!”

I tried to protest, for I still had one tenth of the stone’s Qi left to cultivate with, but there was nothing for it as she dragged me out to the stream near the village, stripped my clothes from me, and forced me to bathe until I had washed all of the impurities from my skin. I lost my grasp on the remaining Qi during the process, but I had made my first step into the world of cultivation.

Unfortunately, my private celebration did not last long. Night came, and the merchant came to the door with the village elders, his face red with anger.

“You!” the merchant screamed, pointing his fat finger at me. “You have wrecked my light stone! I saw you playing with it today and now it is damaged! I demand payment! Fifty golden coins, or I shall report you to the authorities! They shall hang you and your entire family!”

“The stone isn’t damaged. If you put it back where you found it, it will shine again in a year or two,” I said innocently. “It just needs to recharge it’s Qi.”

“Oh!? Are you a little cultivator then? I suppose you mean to say that you needed the stone for your cultivation?” he taunted.

“Yes,” I answered simply. “And you have made twenty times the true price of the stone by cheating and exploiting my neighbors. You are shameless and a cheat. You know this and are unashamed. That stone was the only thing you possessed which contained a flicker of spirituality, everything else was--”

He struck me, and I fell to the ground, the taste of blood in my mouth. He struck me again where I lay, and again until my father intervened.

“We cannot afford even a tenth of the price you demand, but I shall borrow as much coin as I can to repay you for my son’s actions. Please, good sir, will you not be satisfied with that?” he said.

The merchant spat on my body, then nodded. “I demand every coin you can get your dirty peasant hands upon! Every single penny!”

So my father went from house to house, hovel to hovel, calling in what few debts we had and taking out loans from whoever could afford to lend. Few of the villagers were willing to invest money into a worthless venture, but the ones that did had the debt carefully documented by the village alderman, one of the few residents who could read and write. In the end my father was able to gather twenty-eight silver coins. Well, it was worth twenty-eight silver when you converted it from copper. It was still more than the stone was worth, but the merchant had actually gotten a fair deal from it. He knew that, but he still insisted I be punished.

And so the next day I was flogged. Many of the villagers came out to watch, and the merchant celebrated his petty victory with a sadistic expression. But the schadenfreude of the villagers began to fade, for no matter how hard the alderman struck me, I did not cry out.

It was perhaps a bit foolish to display my difference like that, but the physical pain that they inflicted upon me simply washed over me like water over a riverstone.

“What is this?” the merchant called. “You promised that he would be punished harshly!”

“He has always been like this,” the alderman explained, shaking his head. “I have never seen or heard him cry out in pain. I am not certain that he can feel it. I am sorry, but I am putting an end to this punishment.”

“But he hasn’t even cried! What sort of child does not cry from a whipping?” the merchant insisted. “Here, I will give him a proper punishment, since you are unwilling to!”

He took the leather switch from the alderman and gave me ten rapid blows. Truly, the alderman had been striking me harder, and I endured with stoicism. The merchant frowned in confusion as the alderman took the switch back from him, and the merchant walked away with a complicated expression on his face.

He left the village that same day, and I would never see him again.