It happened so fast that were it a knife to the heart, Jin wouldn't have recognized it happening until he found himself drawing his last breath. Something invisible and intangible was piercing him in a way that couldn't be described in terms of physical pain, something that came from the goblin spirit's malevolent soul and tried to taint his own with an inhuman corruption. He felt things that were incompatible with his own humanity - evil intentions that were driven by unfathomable motivations, chaotic, venomous darkness that asphyxiated him on the level of his very consciousness.
He had never been aware of his soul in this way before, he had just trusted that it existed. He had listened to Xinya talk about how that was the part of him that would, if fate were on his side, remain, even if his body and mind transcended their current forms and he reached the heights of an immortal being. Now his soul had never felt more important, and he felt himself, his whole self as he knew himself, struggling against this sense that there couldn't be anything noble or good left behind after the onslaught. He felt this intimate part of him frantically panicking like a frightened bird grabbed in a fist, and there was no question of his body or even his mind taking any further action in this fight.
"Endure this..." came a voice.
It was a voice Jin hadn't heard in a long time, but recognized right away. The same voice that told him how to get through the agony of having his body and mind reforged on his sixth and twelfth birthdays.
Is it the sage? Is he here now?
But before he could consider the voice any further, or even ruminate on how this time, its advice hadn't been advice at all, and quite useless in telling him how to confront the attack on his soul, he felt the cold, moist forest floor against his cheek, and realized his senses were returning.
He almost didn't care what was happening, as long as the goblin spirit wasn't touching him anymore, but after swallowing down a wave of nausea he opened his eyes.
The tiger had pinned down the goblin spirit and swiped off its jaw with his powerful front paw, causing what was left of its dense, syrupy blood to gush from its neck, finally killing the thing. The aura it had brought with it was gone now.
"That was --" he began, hearing his own voice come out thin and strange.
He wanted to tell the tiger how it had felt, to commiserate with him, to say that he understood now why the tiger had cried out and weakened so during the fight. But the tiger just gave him a long, meaningful look.
Jin understood. Both had been similarly violated, and they both knew how it had been, and speaking about what they had experienced independently would be unseemly for two who were not truly friends. They had both shown themselves at their very weakest in front of beings who would under any other circumstances be their enemies, and so drawing attention to it would only heighten the tiger's existing embarrassment about their situation.
"Can you stand? We should not linger here, there may be more of them," the tiger said, at last, after Jin had taken a few moments to steady his breathing.
"Yes, let's go," he said, moving shakily to his feet and preparing to get back on the tiger's back.
"Aren't you forgetting something? Don't you human cultivators value the cores of other creatures, as we beasts value your flesh?"
Jin wasn't thinking clearly, but he perhaps would have missed this anyway. Yes, he knew that human cultivators did indeed prize the cores found inside magical and spiritual creatures, the cores that allowed these beasts and spirits to cultivate naturally without going through the same steps as humans, but he had never really needed to be in the habit of worrying about that sort of thing before. Everything he needed had been provided for him his whole life, and matters of currency or crafting were always handled by Master Xinya - even when he had slayed magical beasts, he'd just given the cores to her and thought no more about them. Now, he was going out into the world and he'd need such things. He'd need to remember their importance.
He turned back to the gory mess that was the corpse of the goblin spirit - its jaw missing, its belly opened up, and its arms ravaged by his blades. With the residual nausea from the soul attack, he had to fight his hardest not to be repulsed to the point of vomiting in the act of reaching his hand inside its abdomen to seek out the core, located, as always in humanoid creatures, just below the navel. There were easier ways. Master Xinya, at her level of being able to use life energy, was able to simply disintegrate the corpse of something she killed, leaving only the core behind. Jin wasn't there yet, so he had to probe around, up to his wrist in monster guts, until he found the crystalline lump.
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He plucked the core out of the body and shook it vigorously to try to clean off some of the viscera clinging to its rocky form. Even in the darkness of the forest, it was easy to see that the core of the goblin spirit was infinitely more beautiful than the creature that had housed it had been. The magical power condensed inside of it throbbed with an indigo light, almost at the pace of a slow heartbeat, though it was no longer part of anything alive.
Jin had never seen a core this color before, and from the way the tiger looked at it, too, with more curiosity than he'd seen from the beast up til now, he guessed that he hadn't seen its like either.
"Do you want it? It was you who made the killing blow. It's yours by right," Jin said, holding out the core to the tiger.
"I have no use for it. It is just interesting to see, for me. I have never killed a spiritual or demonic creature before. We avoid engaging with them. To see what is inside such a thing is... fascinating. It is yours, but I would ask you to think carefully about how you use or spend it."
The tiger spoke with an air that suggested he disapproved of most of the things humans did, as would only be natural for a magical beast. Jin, who was currently feeling very appreciative of the tiger, who had at least cut short the soul attack he'd been subjected to, had every intention of using the core in a way the tiger would think fitting, when one arose. He didn't really know what that might be - there was little about the world of trading and bartering he knew yet - but he vowed to himself to use this precious core in a way that the tiger would not be offended by.
"Let us go, now. The sooner we reach the house, the sooner my debt will be paid and I can return to my life," the beast said, nodding his head in a gesture that indicated to Jin that he should get up and ride him.
It was barely three minutes before the light from the windows of the sage's house became visible through the trees. The tiger was moving more slowly than before, still not fully recovered from his own encounter with the soul violence, and so the shortness of the journey was a surprise. It was troubling to Jin that anyone could be living so close to where the goblin spirits prowled. But of course, the goblin spirits were only here because of the sage.
His soul must be very strong. Stronger than theirs, so they don't bother him.
Strangely, Jin saw as they crept towards the house, that a bolthoof horse, still wearing the livery of the soldiers who had attacked Master Xinya, was tethered to a wooden post outside, by a rope made out of life energy of a sickly yellow color. It was a majestic looking creature, its coat the color of pale gold, and its mane braided, where it had clearly been well looked after by its Shi clan masters. Despite their supernatural speed, bolthoof horses were not magical beasts, and did not have cores or cultivate, and so they were easily domesticated.
"Let's stay back... I want to listen in. The horse worries me. What if one of the soldiers somehow made it here, and is inside the house, interrogating the sage?" Jin whispered.
"There is no way any of those men made it out of the clearing alive when the beast attacked, I saw them all die," the tiger said, impatiently, but he did stop and lower himself down behind a tree so Jin could get off and concentrate.
His senses were weaker than usual, in fact, everything about him was only at a fraction of its usual ability after the soul attack, but in the quiet of the forest he was able to listen and pick out the sounds coming from the sage's house. There was only one person breathing inside, and it was the very, very slow breath of someone at a much higher cultivation level than a Shi clan soldier. It had to be the sage.
"I think it's safe. I suppose he must have caught the horse somehow as it ran..."
To catch a bolthoof that was running for its life at full speed was a feat well beyond Jin, and something he could only theorize about approaches to, but it certainly seemed like something someone very adept at using their life energy outside of their body could do.
"I must see you to the door. Master Xinya made my instructions clear to the last detail, and so I must obey them to relieve myself of the debt."
The tiger stood, and Jin nodded at him stoicly. He didn't like that the tiger would leave, now. He didn't like that he'd have to go though whatever was coming at the sage's house without anybody with him this time, and he didn't like that he couldn't really tell the tiger just how much he appreciated the help he'd given him - not only in slaying the goblin spirit, but just in being with him in the moments after everything he'd known had been taken away. A tiger and a human were not friends, and any comfort he'd taken from their arrangement was partly in his head - he knew that. But equally, the tiger being with him for this journey was Master Xinya protecting him for the final time, and so that being over, it meant that she truly was gone from his life now. He was a disciple without a master, a boy without a mother, and a man without a friend. Saying any of it would make no difference.
They walked toward the door, the pathway illuminated by the gibbous moon shining down on the clearing where the sage's house stood, in silence.
But just as they were a few paces past the horse, who ignored them, the door opened, and there stood the sage, tall and imposing in spite of his great age. Surely he wasn't expecting them, because he immediately adopted a fighting stance, and a ball of what looked like plasma in that same jaundiced yellow color as the life energy tethering the horse grew instantly in his hand.
Jin quickly held up his hands to show he wasn't armed - he had wisely put the butterfly swords back in the Interspatial Ring along with the goblin spirit's core.
"Don't harm me. It's me, Jin, Master Xinya's disciple."
"I know who you are, Jin. Stand aside, it is the beast you brought me who must die," the sage said in a cold voice, as though he was talking about doing an unpleasant but mundane chore.