As the sun rose from the river, which stretched out as far as he could see behind him, Ji Kang stood on the deck of the riverboat, stripped to his waist and covered in sweat, practicing his swordsmanship.

It occurred to him that he might look attractive at this moment, his newly muscular body glinting with sweat in the morning sun. He wasn’t sure though, he had a terrible sense for the moments when his slightly above average looks were best displayed and he briefly joined the ranks of the beautiful people. From his perspective, he just felt gross. Yet another example of how a situation can look distinctly one way from the outside, but feel an entirely different way from inside it.

He was beginning to realize that performing his sword kata for the sword martial art that accompanied his Yin-Yang Nourishing cultivation manual was an ideal time for reflection.

Previously he had tried to use his meditation sessions as a time for introspection, but despite being called ‘meditation’ it wasn’t ideal for the long trains of thought analyzing his actions that he tended to indulge in.

Meditating wasn’t simply sitting around and breathing evenly. He had to devote at least part of his focus on taking in qi and ensuring he split the intake into two portions, the qi reserves to be used to power techniques and the contribution to the dantian’s structure.

Qi Condensation stage wasn’t only about reshaping the meridians, it also demanded that the cultivator condense qi into the walls of their dantian, strengthening the dantian and increasing the concentration of qi that it could safely hold in its reserves.

If he tried to store qi at too high of a concentration inside the dantian without strengthening the walls, then the concentrated qi would act like acid poured into a vat, eating away at the walls until the entire structure was destroyed.

If he never tried to store higher concentrations of qi, then he would be forever limited to the pathetic spells and techniques that Qi Condensation cultivator’s were able to cast.

All this to say, the act of meditation consumed a great deal of focus in and of itself. For now, there was no chance of it becoming a mindless exercise. Trying to simultaneously engage in deep thought was a recipe for eventual disaster.

Ji Kang was lucky he hadn’t already suffered a mishap as a result of his reckless cultivation habits up to this point.

These were the types of small insight that he would have been told by a more attentive master, but he hadn’t spoken to Shen Lan about cultivation since their conversation in her subterranean library. In fact he had barely exchanged ten words with her since then.

So he was forced to stumble through, learning these things on his own as best he could, desperately hoping he wouldn’t destroy his fragile foundation with his ignorance.

When he was performing his sword kata was an entirely different story. At this point he had worked out all of the mistakes in his form that he could discover on his own, so performing the kata served only to reinforce his muscle memory and to stretch and exercise his physical body.

It was almost entirely mindless and allowed him to easily enter a state of serenity that was ideal for introspection.

Flowing from one form to another, moving at an even, unchanging, glacially slow pace, Ji Kang reconsidered all of his motivations and plans.

From an outside perspective, he could easily imagine that he looked heartless and malicious when he plotted to murder Lu Wu. After all, the terms of the contract might be uneven and allow for Lu Wu to order him to throw away his life, but Ji Kang had entered into it willingly and of his own volition.

In fact, the argument that Ji Kang entered into the contract in bad faith, knowing he would immediately start plotting to rid himself of the contract as soon as the other side delivered on their promise to allow him to enter the Azure Grove Sect, would be entirely valid.

From this perspective Ji Kang could see how someone who had been born into the upper or middle classes, with the privilege of being able to choose their own course in life, could see him as a villain in this situation.

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The Lu family hadn’t literally forced him to sign the contract after all, they just called him into a room by himself, surrounded him with armed guards and a cultivator capable of splitting him in half with a flick of his finger, and then demanded that he make a decision that would affect the trajectory of his entire life on the spot as well as signing a magical contract that would kill him if he broke his word.

Okay, so maybe the theoretical outside perspective wouldn’t be too harsh on their judgment of him given the intimidation inherent in that moment, but still, that just made both parties look shady and disingenuous.

That still did very little to redeem his immediate resolve to plot violent action rather than at least attempting to get along with Lu Wu. Surely Lu Wu didn’t personally do anything to deserve this, it was the elders of the Lu family who dictated the terms of the contract, Lu Wu likely wasn’t even in the room when the contract was drafted.

Ji Kang let out a long sigh followed by a wry chuckle.

It looked like he would have to come to terms with the fact that he wasn’t behaving the way a very good person would have in this situation.

He was chuckling because since his earliest memories he had known deep down that he was not a paragon of virtue. Some people are born with a strong moral core that lets them know right from wrong and shames them if they are wrong, Ji Kang definitely wasn’t one of those people.

Ji Kang had to try his hardest in order to be as kind and empathetic as most people were able to be without any effort at all. This didn’t mean he was evil, though he certainly was capable of it, this just meant he had to try harder if he wanted to be a good person. Though he wasn’t likely to begin trying too hard before he had escaped the contract and was free. Then he could dedicate time and effort to learning more genuine kindness.

Ji Kang fancied that he saw through the pretense of society. Morals and ethics were in fact just brainwashing that was necessary in order to form a cohesive society, or in other words, they were a tool that allowed those currently in power to maintain that power over the masses that were foolish enough to accept the vaunted morals and lofty ethics.

No one devoid of morals, who valued themselves above all others, and was strong enough to take what they wanted would ever work on a farm their entire life. But civilization needed some people to work on farms.

A person who had no compunction about killing another person for their possessions would never be a servant for a rich family, working hard everyday so that the rich could live in ease. But the rich didn’t want to draw water, clean their houses, cook their food, or do any of the myriad chores that allowed a household to function.

Ji Kang wasn’t about to run around telling people about this revelation of course, because he didn’t want to do chores or work on a farm either. In order to enjoy the comforts of modern society, widespread morals and ethics were required. Comfort didn’t come from nothing.

For every bowl of rice he ate, someone worked many a hard day’s labor to arduously farm those rice grains. For every blanket he enjoyed, someone had worked hard to weave it. No luxury that that was available could exist without enjoying the fruits of someone’s labor.

The lower classes outnumbered the elites 10,000 to one at the very least, the only thing preventing a popular uprising was the iron grip that the powerful maintained on the minds of the masses. Well, Ji Kang conceded that high level cultivators also likely helped keep peasant uprisings from succeeding. So those two things.

The bottom line was, Ji Kang didn’t want to spend his life washing clothes for the Lu family like his mother, or working on the docks hauling ship’s cargo like his father. He wasn’t willing to resign himself to a life of backbreaking work, poverty, hunger, humiliation, and the constant and unrelenting anxiety inherent in such a life where his entire existence could be ruined on the whims of a rich, spoiled little shit like Lu Wu.

Ji Kang wouldn’t be willing to entrust the wellbeing of a puppy to Lu Wu’s whims, much less his own. So the only option he could see was the path he had taken thus far.

A drop of sweat rolling down his forehead to drip into his eye broke his focus. Ji Kang noticed that the sun had long risen, the boat’s crew were larking about the deck enjoying their relative lack of work, and that Yu Shuren and Lu Wu had been up and about for a while now.

Having seen that Ji Kang was deep in focus, and Lu Wu having no particular desire for his immediate company this morning, they had left him alone. Both of them had spent some time on deck enjoying the fresh air before returning back into their cabins to cultivate.

Over the last week and a half since they had set sail from Anwon, the three boys had fallen into a comfortable routine of cultivation, individual weapons practice, sparring, and familiarizing themselves with their spells and techniques. They were all determined to lose as little time they could spend cultivating as possible.

None of them had forgotten Master Shen Lan’s ominous threats about the consequences of demotion to the outer sect, nor were any of them so foolish as to believe the other inner disciples in their cohort weren’t back at the mountain cultivating like maniacs, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.

The lowest performing five disciples out of all of the current inner disciples would be demoted. Those five were almost certain to come from the cohort of fourteen disciples that had joined the sect at around the same time as Ji Kang and the others.

The race to avoid being one of those five was well under way.