8. Betrayal

Six weeks after I had broken through into the condensation realm, I broke through into the purification realm and demonstrated yet another new cultivation technique to the elders. Like the others, it had come to me in a dream, and like the others it was an order of magnitude more difficult and more powerful than the ones they had been using previously.

Ko Ren and Ko Si asked me to join them for a celebration, and Ko Si, who was Ko Ren’s younger sister, would not take no for an answer. No matter how many times I said it. Explicitly.

Once they had me in their house, Ko Ren left to pour us drinks, instructing Ko Si to keep me entertained.

The nature of the entertainment she provided began rather mundane, but as she plied me with temptations which were beyond inappropriate for a child of my age, I began to grow frustrated and annoyed. They continued until I was saved by Ko Ren, who entered and saw the frustration upon his sister’s face that her wiles were having no effect on me.

“It’s just as you said,” she told him. “He wasn’t even tempted.”

“Is it because you are interested in boys?” Ko Ren inquired, handing me a drink. “If that’s the case, I could help you arrange a discrete relationship with a like minded young man. I’ve heard rumors of several within the sect who would leap at the opportunity.”

“It’s not that either,” I answered. I quaffed the offered drink.

I stood, and found myself unsteady. I frowned, took a step, and fell. Whatever Ko Ren had mixed in my drink took effect very quickly, and I was unconscious within moments.

The dreams that followed were even more vivid than normal, and I finally remembered my life’s purpose.

~~~~~~

I was born into a powerful sect. My father was a cultivator of great power. The golden path he walked. He was eight hundred years old. My mother walked the silver path and was two hundred. I was nurtured from before I could walk in the cultivation method that the sect masters had determined for me. Of the eight methods practiced in our sect, the Path of Silent Grass was deemed the most suitable to my constitution.

This was decided for me before I could talk. I never knew anything else, and I accepted it in the way that children accept those things. But my fate was not to walk the golden path like my father, nor the silver path of my mother. I was crippled by another disciple when I was fourteen, my pathways irreparably damaged.

I had achieved the third level of the purification realm, but it was irrelevant. I could not cultivate further without harming myself. My parents were devastated. My father challenged the other boy’s father to a duel and killed him. The child and his mother were driven from the sect in shame. I had not wanted this; it was not truly the boy’s fault. But it was outside of my control.

The sect tried various methods to repair my pathways, but nothing succeeded. One day, a woman from a faraway place came to us and asked to speak with my parents. She did not offer a way to heal me, but rather a place in her monastery. For she was of the Cult of Reincarnation.

My father was furious. He did what he often did when he was furious and challenged her to a duel. And for the first time in two centuries, he lost. To a woman of the bronze path. He had prepared a fearsome attack, conjuring an avatar of a dragon to incinerate her with fire. But she had simply looked at him and spoken one word. Nobody heard what the word was except for my father, and he would not repeat it. He fell to the ground, convulsing, his dao avatar evaporating.

The sect treated the woman very differently after that, inviting her into the inner sanctum and offering her the finest of food and drink. She asked for a hot bath and for her robes to be washed, but insisted that she ate nothing that would not be given to a novice. Afterwards, the sect elders interrogated her for hours. Eventually I was brought into the room.

“ Elisia, I will not lie to you. I cannot give you long life. You will live the normal span of seventy to ninety years that mortals in this world live, and then you will die,” she explained. “But I can prepare you for what comes after.”

“ Will I be able to defeat cultivators of the golden path, as you did?” I asked.

She laughed. “Child, the cosmos are vast and infinite and eternal. The golden path that your sect is so proud of is considered but the first step into true cultivation in many worlds. There are cultivators who can destroy worlds and extinguish stars. Compared to them, your father is little more than a mortal servant. If you come with me, you may be reborn into one of those worlds, into a family which will raise you to the greatest heights possible. But to accomplish this, you must live a life dedicated to the cultivation not of your body, but of your soul.”

“ My pathways are damaged,” I informed her.

“ Your pathways are part of your body, not your soul,” she reminded me. “My body is of but the bronze path, as you know. But my soul is of the fifth step. That is how I was able to defeat your father so easily, for he has a soul no greater than that of an average mortal.”

“ He would challenge you all over again if he heard you say that,” I pointed out.

She laughed. “No, no I do not think that he would. I did not harm him, but I taught him just how small and petty his pride and power truly are.”

“ Will I be able to do that?” I persisted.

“ Eventually,” she promised me. “If you achieve the fifth step.”

“ Then I will come with you.”

And so it was decided.

The stranger’s name was Lorishia. She did not talk about her past much. She explained that she was attempting to sever her karma to this world in preparation for her next life. She hoped to achieve the sixth step before she died, which was the pinnacle of what was possible for her first reincarnation.

Soul cultivation, she explained, was not intended to give great power during one’s lifetime. It did have that effect, but in a different manner than the cultivation of the body which my parent’s sect practiced.

She attempted to explain to me the concept of the cosmos. That there were infinite worlds, with an infinite number of souls inhabiting them. The souls cycled through the cosmos in an eternal cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Cultivation was the only possible escape of this cycle of samsara. However, the cultivation practiced on our world, except for that of the Cult of Reincarnation, was a trap.

It was true that achieving the silver or gold or even diamond path would greatly extend one’s lifespan. Many, many times over. But it was not immortality. Even those of the diamond path succumbed to old age eventually. Far more succumbed to violence. And that was the trap.

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Possessing power lured the cultivators into using that power, and most lacked the understanding to use it wisely. She had not hurt my father at all during her duel with him, she explained. Rather, she had healed him. She had shown him the damage that he was about to inflict upon his own soul by killing her, and that truth had inflicted actual pain and fear and doubt upon him. Pain from his soul, as it remembered the wounds that other duels had inflicted upon it. Fear from his mind, as an aspect of his being that he had not been aware of before was revealed to him. Doubt in his path, as the echoes of its destination were revealed.

I did not understand how that counted as ‘healing’ him. Lorishia simply laughed and explained. By showing my father a glimpse of the falseness of his path, she had set him onto a path that would allow him to begin to balance his karma. The damage she had done to his cultivation and his body, and the humiliation he had experienced, they were like the pain of setting a broken bone. My father would not thank her for her action until the agony of his defeat had faded. Perhaps not even in this lifetime. But eventually, he would understand just how great of a gift she had given him.

I did not understand it. Not then. I pretended that I did, and she simply smiled, seeing through my ignorance but unable to illuminate my path any better than she had already.

My father died twenty years later, destitute. He had sold off his vast wealth and distributed it to a number of families. His weapons, his armor, his villa, his cultivation treasures, everything. Then he had demeaned himself further by becoming an instructor to the young outside applicants to the sect. Even in ceasing his cultivation he should have lived for another three or four centuries, but one of his old rivals heard of his madness and challenged him to a duel. When my father refused, the rival had murdered him.

My mother reached the golden path, but she did not seek vengeance. Rather, she had cut herself off from my father, calling him a disgrace. I was excluded from her life by extension. I sent her letters until she made her feelings clear; I was disowned. She outlived me by eight centuries, and I pity her for it.

As for me? I reached the fourth step of soul cultivation and died at age ninety-four. My life was mostly uneventful, spent as a monk in the Cult of Reincarnation. So we were called, and we did not mind the name. It was an ascetic life, and I did not leave the monastery except for twice, once to follow the threads of karma to a young girl who was starving to death. I gave the last of my worldly wealth to buy her family enough food to last the winter. I stayed with the family for three years, helping them tend their small plot of land, ensuring that they did not go hungry if I was able to prevent it.

I did not know why I did such a thing, except that it was part of my ascension from the second to third step. I was not told to do this, only to follow the threads. But when the threads brought me to the girl, I could do nothing else but save her.

At the end of my stay with her, I tried to convince the family to allow me to bring her back to the monastery with me, but I was refused to the point where finally I had to flee before the father used violence on me. I could have overpowered him easily, as even with my cultivation crippled I was still significantly stronger than a mortal.

That was the impetus that pushed me into the third step. When he was about to attack me, I could see his prarabdha. He was a good man, he had led a good life, and his actions brought forth good into the world. My actions had come close to causing him to do a wrong act, but I fled before that happened.

I had thought I had been led to the girl to bring her to the monastery, and that she would inspire my next step when I returned. When I broke through, I realized I was wrong, that I had been in the wrong in trying to separate her from her family that loved her. I immediately returned to seek guidance. The elder monks simply told me to meditate on the teachings and my insights and to begin working on taking the next step. What I had accomplished, aside from keeping one little girl alive, was not something I would likely understand within my lifetime.

I did come to understand it, in time. The girl lived. And she loved and she laughed and she learned. She remembered me fondly, but that wasn’t important. What was important was that she had six children, and thirty-three grandchildren, and one hundred fifty-four great-grandchildren. And they were all good people, bringing forth good karma. And most of those children had children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of their own. Not all of them led happy lives, and not all of them died of old age, but they all did more good than bad in their lifetimes. The world was a better place for having them lived in it.

The second time I left the monastery was to find my death. I knew that I was not long for the world, but the lines of karma had appeared to me again. I knew that following them would be my final act, but still I set out.

The threads brought me to a graveyard outside of a small village not far from my ancestral sect. To one grave in particular. It was the grave of the boy who had crippled me. Or the man he had become, at least. I sat on the grass before the gravestone for two days, contemplating many things.

“ I hated you once,” I told the gravestone. “But we were just foolish children. I provoked you and you took things too far. The consequences shaped both of our lives. I hope you found happiness in life, and that your soul finds peace, and that you are reborn to prosperity.”

As I took my leave, I found that I had an observer. A young man had been watching my contemplation suspiciously.

“ How did you know my grandfather?” he asked eventually.

“ We were boys together,” I explained. “Friends once.”

“ Was that when he lived with the cultivators? Are you a cultivator too?” the man asked.

“ Yes, to both questions,” I answered.

He snorted. “Don’t lie. You look too old to be a cultivator. At least one of my grandfather’s generation. Unless you got your ass kicked out at the same time he did. Is that what happened?”

“ In a manner of speaking,” I admitted. “I was injured in a foolish boyhood fight. It crippled my ability to cultivate.”

The man’s expression turned murderous. “You’re Elisia,” he accused.

“ I am.”

He pulled a knife from a sheath on his belt and attacked me. I raised my hand to show him the consequences of his actions, just as Lorishia had shown my father many years before. The man paused for just a second, but suffered no backlash like the one that had been inflicted upon my father. He stabbed me eighteen times and slit my throat for good measure.

My last act on that world was to forgive him.

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