Lin Siyuan groaned as he was slowly roused to slight consciousness.

His eyes scrunched slightly as he quietly groaned, rolling over onto his side. A very quiet murmur of discomfort passed from his lips at how bright it was…

Wait a second…bright?

His eyes flew open. The first thing he saw was a wooden ceiling of…a house of some kind.

A house?

He immediately sat up, his hand instinctively groping the air beside him for his sword. He stopped when a sudden jolt of pain shot up his frame however, causing him to slump over, grasping at his chest. He stayed there for a few moments more, breathing heavily as the pain began to subside.

He removed his hand from his chest, looking down at it.

He was shirtless, his Mystic River sect uniform nowhere to be found. He was wearing pants, though they weren’t the corresponding pants from his sect uniform, being regular, baggy brown pants. What caught his attention, however, were the bandages wrapped around almost the entirety of his chest, clutching to his muscular frame.

He took a moment to recall what had happened, his head still a bit foggy.

That’s right…I took a fatal wound right to the abdomen while Luo Han and I were fighting that tier 5 beast. Thankfully, Luo Han got away. But there’s no way I could have survived that attack, I was skewered all the way through…

Did someone rescue me? Had to be, my cultivation state isn’t high enough for me to be able to survive attacks to any of my vital organs yet…

Siyuan raised his head to observe his surroundings.

He was in a small, well-kept, one-room shack. Sunlight streamed through the windows, casting an almost ethereal glow across the room. The house was almost completely empty, save for some cupboards built into a wall on the side, a fireplace built into the opposite wall, a workbench built adjacent to it, a strangely-shaped furnace sitting in the corner…

Wait a second…

Lin Siyuan took a closer look at the furnace. He was no professional, but its shape looked…very familiar.

It took him a moment, but he eventually came to realize why the shape looked so familiar.

That’s…a pill furnace!

Lin Siyuan, being a relic smith, wasn’t all too familiar with pill furnaces. They were rare, at least in the lower reaches where Siyuan spent almost all his time as a Mystic River Sect disciple. They were invaluable as alchemy held a very high place in the martial world as a very critical career. After all, pills were capable of allowing anybody who consumed them huge advantages, from aiding one in greatly advancing cultivation in just a short period of time to allowing one to heal all of their wounds nigh-instantly in the heat of battle. With enough pills, even someone who would struggle greatly to even reach the Foundation Establishment realm could reach the Aura Manifestation realm.

However, alchemy was difficult. Very difficult. The best alchemists in the land were very famous, so much so that even emperors bowed their heads to them, but it usually took no less than centuries of diligence and learning to reach that level, usually at the cost of one’s own cultivation. On top of that, pill furnaces were usually very expensive. It wasn’t worth purchasing so many unless a sect specifically focused on alchemy.

His eyes went right to the workbench adjacent to the fireplace. It looked normal at first…but at a closer look, he saw a very familiar looking array etched onto the top of the workbench.

A relic-smithing array.

It didn’t take a genius to know that he was in a cultivator’s house.

Was it an enemy? No, what enemy would logically spend so many resources to heal what was undoubtedly a fatal wound? Actually…who could heal such a wound? Is the person who rescued me really that amazing or did they get help?

Siyuan stared at the bandages wrapped around his chest for a moment more. Then, he looked up, his gaze skimming around the small house.

Regardless, I should leave and get back to the sect as soon as possible, he thought. There are people there who intimately know me so it shouldn’t be too difficult to be reinstituted as a Mystic River sect lower reaches disciple. I ought to be a bit more gratuitous to this mysterious cultivator for saving my life, but I have no idea who they are or what their intentions are. I don’t think I have anything actually valuable though, so I hope he’ll settle with a simple thank-you note…

The relic smith looked around for a bit. He raised an eyebrow.

There’s nothing to write with? What kind of cultivator doesn’t even have a writing tool of some kind? Much less one who owns a pill furnace? Then again, maybe they don’t actually use it? Then why would they have a pill furnace in the first place…

Siyuan shook his head, ridding himself of the thoughts. He was getting distracted again.

He slowly stood up, hissing as pain flared from his abdomen, causing him to double over and almost fall back onto the cot. He managed to brace himself against its frame, breathing heavily as he waited for the pain to subside. Once it did, to a manageable degree at least, he reached for his sword, wrapping his hand around the handle.

At that exact moment, the door into the house opened with a creak.

“Haaaaah, nothing again, today,” came a voice. “That’s another morning wa-.”

Siyuan stopped, staring at the man who just walked in through the door. The other man did likewise…which was a strange way of putting it.

The man standing at the door looked…fairly average as a middle-aged cultivator. His face looked young, definitely younger than Siyuan’s old relic-smithing teacher, but also definitely older than Siyuan. He had neatly-kept, long black hair that streamed behind him with a bun that was characteristic of cultivators his age. He was handsome in a kind of ethereal way that didn’t make him seem totally human. He was dressed in a clean, black and white daoist robe, simple white pants, and a pair of normal-looking sandals. Strapped to his side was a sword in an elaborate, white-jeweled sheath.

Most notable of all, however, was what was wrapped around his eyes: a clean, white blindfold made of cloth.

Siyuan stared at the figure for a moment as the figure “stared” right back. For a moment, the two basked in complete silence

“Well, I see that you’re awake,” he said, breaking that silence. The edges of his lips curved up into a small smile. “Heh, get what I did there? See?”

Siyuan’s hand jolted to the side instinctively.

It wasn’t until that moment that he noticed that this man’s body was bathed in an aura. A somewhat inconspicuous, yet bright, light blue cloak of qi that completely enveloped his frame.

How…how did I not notice that the moment he walked through the door? And he has an aura so he should at least be an Aura Manifestation, but…

Why can’t I feel his presence at all?

Aura Manifestation cultivators were, to put it simply, obviously powerful. One could tell one was powerful because everyone around them that wasn’t at that level could clearly feel that they were powerful. Siyuan had been in a room full of cultivators at that level during his first and only class in the upper reaches relic smithing course. He of all people would know that, being near-suffocated in the sensation of their auras as someone at just the first stage of cultivation.

Which made it just that more peculiar that he could clearly see this man’s aura, but couldn’t feel his power at all.

Is he using a technique to hide the sensation of his power? Or a cultivation method of some kind?

He already began skimming through possible escape methods in his head, just in case. A head-on fight was definitely a no-go, even if he wasn’t still recovering from a fatal wound. He wasn’t exactly

The other man cleared his throat.

“Anyways, why so on-guard?” he asked, spreading his arms. Siyuan’s eyes went to the sword sheathed at his hip, the young man’s hand hovering just over the hilt. “Is that how you treat someone who brought you back from the brink of death? Well, at least it shows that you’re not that naive.”

There was a whoosh as the cultivator suddenly disappeared. Siyuan’s eyes widened as he moved to draw his sword.

His hand, however, grabbed nothing but air.

He looked down to his hands to see that his hands were now empty, his sword and its sheath having completely disappeared.

What the-!

“However, it’s never a good idea to assume a hostile stance towards someone who’s clearly much more powerful than you, wouldn’t you agree?”

Siyuan’s eyes widened as he whipped around to face the cultivator standing behind him, his sword, still in its sheath, in the cultivator’s hand.

Fast!

“I’ve taken quite a few looks at this but I’m still pretty curious about the design of this,” the man said as he pulled the sword relic out of its sheath and nonchalantly tossed it at Siyuan, who barely caught it. He ran his fingers along the edge of the blade. “It’s just a three-fold enhanced sword relic but the purity of its sword essence is oddly high, especially for a Qi Manifestation cultivator like you to be carrying around. Did you make this?”

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Siyuan was now starting to feel a bit confused. He had no idea what this cultivator was talking about, or what “sword essence” was, much less what it being “pure” meant.

As for the question, he wasn’t sure whether he should answer. Sure the cultivator was blindfolded, but his mannerisms showed that he liked that he was seeing, or feeling, rather.

If he found out that Siyuan was the one who forged it, there was a pretty good chance he would force the young cultivator into being his personal relic smith. Not exactly what Siyuan was looking forward to doing.

Maybe if his answer was mundane enough, the cultivator would just let him go thinking that it wasn’t worth bringing along one other person with him.

“...no, I happened upon it by chance while I was shopping in a mortal village,” Siyuan said.

It was a fairly good excuse. The man had to have known that Siyuan had just begun his cultivation and it wasn’t rare that a cultivation method would require a cultivator to gather mortal items in order to pull through its starting stages. Plus, relics appearing in random mortal villages was somewhat rare, but not at all unusual. If the cultivator were particularly curious, he’d ask which mortal village, in which Siyuan could just make up a name or even claim that he’d forgotten.

The cultivator didn’t. He just shrugged and carelessly tossed the sheathed sword at Siyuan. Surprised, the young relic smith barely caught it, fumbling with it.

“Anyways, let’s move onto my favorite topic,” the cultivator said, pulling up a nearby chair and sitting in it even as Siyuan remained standing. “Payment!”

Ah. Well, it wasn’t like Siyuan wasn’t expecting it. The problem came with the fact that Siyuan had nothing to offer that would serve as payment for quite literally dragging him back up from the Underworld. The most valuable things he had on him were his sword relic, which he had just watched the cultivator treat with almost no care, and the jade pendant of his sect, which he couldn’t just give away for obvious reasons. However, giving over nothing wasn’t an option.

The cultivator must have sensed his internal conflict somehow because he suddenly laughed, snapping Siyuan out of his thoughts.

“Forget about having to give anything physical over to me,” he said. “Not like a mere Qi Manifestation cultivator like you would have anything that I’d want. Not really all that curious as to which sect you’re from either, though I am a bit curious as to what the jade pendant was for. Wouldn’t do anything no matter what I tried so I lost interest in it.”

Siyuan’s eyes widened ever so slightly at that. The jade pendant wasn’t exactly hard to activate. Just pouring a bit of qi into it would accomplish that. The cultivator wouldn’t be able to access its functions as it would only respond to Siyuan’s unique kind of qi, but it should have turned on at the very least.

“Now see, I’m a wanderer of sorts,” the cultivator says. “I’m not quite at the end of my cultivation just yet, but there are more fun ways of developing cultivation than sitting on a cushion for decades just to take a single step up the staircase towards the next realm. So I roam around the world looking for whatever captures my interest. And lo and behold…”

The cultivator’s smile became cryptic. Siyuan felt a small shiver shoot up his spine.

“One day, when roaming around the boundaries of some rather backwater, mid-class sect I happened to pass by, I heard a noise akin to a clap of thunder. Then I felt the sensation of an attack in the sky. It wasn’t even powerful by my standards, so at first, I brushed it off as just some cultivators fighting nearby and planned on walking by without minding it any business. However, then I felt it. The sheer purity of the qi. Qi with a metal-element affinity so pure that I almost mistaked it for just lightning. But how could that be, I asked myself. There hasn’t been any rain.

“Now imagine my surprise that, when I went over to investigate, I saw that the source of it wasn’t a natural phenomenon…but a mere Qi manifestation cultivator.”

Siyuan just silently stared at the cultivator. He slowly began to recall what had happened during his fight with the tier 5 beast. How he fired off an arrow made from qi taken directly from his nascent soul in order to buy even just a moment of time…just to allow his best friend a moment to escape.

“Well, when I first arrived at the scene at the time, I didn’t know that you were a cultivator,” he continued. “At first, my senses told me that you weren’t a cultivator, they told me that you were just a sword relic. So as you could probably imagine, I was pretty confused. Why was this tier 5 snake beast trying to devour this sword relic? If it was at tier 5, then it must have known better than to just try devouring random weapons lying around the ground. So out of curiosity, I killed the demon to see just what made this supposed sword relic so special. And that’s how I came across you.”

Siyuan’s eyes widened slightly.

He understood that he and Luo Han were just Qi Manifestation cultivators, two cultivators who had no chance against a tier 5 demon, whose power matched that of an Aura Manifestation cultivator’s. And he suspected that the man in front of him was powerful, but this just sealed the deal. To talk so nonchalantly about slaying a beast with that kind of power…

Could it be possible that he’s…beyond the Aura Manifestation realm? But there aren’t even a hundred cultivators in the land that have broken through the Aura Manifestation realm…

“I had to physically touch you to discover that you weren’t a sword, but a cultivator! Imagine my surprise. A mere Qi Manifestation cultivator, yet your affinity to the metal element is so high that even now, with me sitting right in front of you, if I lose focus, I might forget that you are human at all. Throughout my near-century of cultivation, I had never seen anybody with such a high affinity to any element, even if it was just a common, run-of-the-mill iron-element affinity.”

…of course. Of course somebody who can perceive the world as accurately as this man can will be able to see how turning myself into an artifact will have affected the quality of my qi. Though it should be impossible for him to tell that I’ve actually forged myself into an artifact without me explicitly telling him so.

“Thus, here we are!” the man concluded, spreading his arms. “I would’ve preferred if you weren’t just a not-even-fledgling Qi Manifestation cultivator. However, it is how it is. This leads to the… ‘payment’ that I want to ask of you.”

He gets up from his chair.

“You see, there’s somebody that I want to kill,” he says. “Unfortunately, I don’t have the resources to kill him. That’s where you come in.”

Siyuan’s eyes widened at that.

Wait…what?!

“A cultivator with such a powerful metal-element affinity such as yourself is perfect,” the cultivator continued. “That’s not even to account for how interesting I find you. You’re practically useless to me now, but in a decade or so, I’ll shape you into a real weapon.

“So how about it? You still haven’t completely recovered from your wound and should I cease your treatment, you will be permanently physically damaged, and that will, in turn, affect your cultivation. You could try to find another doctor to finish the job for you, but that was a pretty nasty attack you took. I doubt you’d find one easily, even if you use your sect’s resources. I’ll finish mending it up for you, but in exchange, you’ll have to come along with me wherever I go.”

Siyuan mused over his words for a moment, but then just looked at the cultivator with a deadpan look.

“Doesn’t this sound a bit…one-sided?”

The cultivator grinned.

“Sorry, I’m not usually this forward,” he said. “But yes, that’s the intention. I take it that you’re accepting? It won’t be so bad! Having a personal mentor is usually a privilege that only the rich and high-ranking are suitable for, and I’m a great teacher! Just ask my other student when we meet up with her later. Oh, and don’t try to run. You’d need to train for at least a hundred more years if you’d ever want to lose me in a chase.”

Siyuan just sighed. An indicator of his resignation. The other cultivator just smiled.

“Great! Any other questions?”

----------------------------------------

“Six months?!” Siyuan almost shouted.

The mysterious cultivator just shrugged. “Like I mentioned before, you took a fairly nasty hit. The fact that you woke up at all is a miracle. Though I’d bet that’s because of your strange constitution.”

Siyuan sighed as he flopped onto the cultivator’s cot. “Yeah, there’s no way I haven’t been pronounced dead by now. Going back to the sect now will just get me into a huge mess.”

“Thankfully, you won’t need to worry about that,” the cultivator said with a toothy grin. “You’re with me now! And by the time we’re done, we’re gonna force the-...make them want to take you back in!”

“Hey, I actually like my sect,” Siyuan said. “Plus, I have a close friend there. If I ever get the opportunity to return, I don’t want the sect to start hating me.”

“Well, don’t worry about that,” the man said. He turned to the door of his house. “Ah, supper’s here.”

“Supper?” Siyuan asked.

The cultivator stood up from his chair and opened the door. Standing behind it was a short, old woman, wearing clothing that looked a lot like the clothing Siyuan saw the old woman at his old village wear. She had thick mittens over both of her hands, which she was using to hold a ceramic pot that had a bit of steam seeping through the top of it.

“Lord cultivator, a meal as you have requested,” the woman said with a bow, her voice croaky with age. “I had the most experienced cooks of our village prepare it. I hope it will be to your satisfaction.”

“Thanks,” the cultivator said with a smile. He took the pot from her with a hand.

“Um, Lord cultivator,” the woman said, blinking at him. “We just took this from the bonfire. It is still very hot.”

“I’ll be fine. Thank you for your service.”

The cultivator closed the door, turning to Siyuan with the steaming hot pot in his hand.

“Hold on, where are we exactly?” Siyuan asked.

“Some mortal village that I’m staying at for the time being,” the cultivator said. “You can worry about that later. Eat up. The sun is already starting to set and I haven’t fed you anything today.”

Now that Siyuan wasn’t preoccupied with so many questions concerning his current situation, his body seemed to realize that it was, indeed, quite hungry. His stomach growled.

The blindfolded cultivator just chuckled as he held the pot out for Siyuan.

The young relic smith reached out for the pot. He willed qi out of his through his dantians, satisfied to find out that it flowed without hindrance. It seemed he had no need to be afraid of converting his own life force into qi causing any permanent damage to his nascent soul.

The qi flowed down his arms and spread throughout his hands. Then, with a bit of focus, he projected it, molding it into a thin, protective layer hovering just over his hands. It wouldn’t be nearly enough to protect him against any kind of attack, but it would be enough to protect his hands from the scalding heat of a ceramic pot that had recently been lifted from a cooking fire.

“Wow, so you’re already capable of that?” the cultivator said as Siyuan stood up, hissing at the slight sting of pain from the action. He turned to the cultivator, a confused look in his eyes.

“Capable of what?”

“That,” the cultivator said, nudging his head towards Siyuan’s hands.

“Um…?” Siyuan said, looking down at the pot in his hands. “You mean me holding this pot? It’s just some basic qi control.”

“Yeah, basic for a mid or late-stage Foundation Establishment cultivator maybe. Not someone who’s still not even a late-stage Qi Manifestation cultivator.”

“But I’ve seen my fellow disciples do things like this all the time,” Siyuan said. “Is it not an imperative basic for casting qi techniques?”

He hadn’t gotten into many fights, but he had witnessed plenty of them done through his fellow disciples, especially Luo Han.

“Hmm, well, you’re still basically a brand new cultivator training in relics-mithing, so I guess you wouldn’t know. It’s a pretty common misnomer.”

The cultivator held up a finger.

“There is a difference between manipulating qi through a qi technique and manipulating qi independent of it,” he said. “It’s easy to manipulate qi through the use of a technique, because techniques also utilize things such as certain movements, breathing patterns, and even body constitutions to stimulate the flow of qi to certain parts of the body. Directly moving qi from one part of the body to the other requires quite a lot of time from beginners to get the hang of.”

“Is that so?” Siyuan asked as he looked down at the pot in his hands.

Since qi control was especially important for relic smithing, he made sure to train himself in being able to at least forcefully move qi towards his hands. Making sure there was enough qi within a smithing array was important to ensuring the quality of the relic being made after all.

Was it really so amazing to be able to do something as simple as project qi from his hands? Then again, Siyuan did know that his classmates in the lower reaches smithing class did have some trouble concentrating qi towards their hands whenever they forged their relics. But also…

“I know a friend who can also do something like this,” Siyuan said. “He’s a combat cultivator. I’ve seen him do it with his whole body, though for short bursts at a time to increase the speed and strength of his attacks.”

The blindfolded cultivator raised an eyebrow in his direction. He cupped his chin.

“Really? Interesting,” was all he said.

He stood up.

“Well, finish your meal quickly. Then we’ll get started on your training.”

“Training?” Siyuan asked.

“Of course. I need you to be ready for what will come at the end of our journey. Now quickly finish up, then meet me outside.”

The cultivator stood up and walked out of the house.

Siyuan just stared at his back as he closed the door behind him, confused at what the mysterious cultivator meant.

“What a curious person…”

With that, he opened the pot in his hands, revealing steamed buns. They quickly disappeared down his gullet.