Yang Magdi, Young Master of the Misty Peaks sect, sat on top of the tallest mountain in the Lan Wu mountain range occasionally taking a sip from a bottle of spirit wine one of his subordinates had gifted him. This was his favorite cultivation spot.

He had a scroll with him. It was ancient. Dusty and falling apart, the scroll hadn’t been moved outside his family’s library for over two thousand years. He was looking forward to playing with it.

He was barely able to peek at the cracked and flaking ink before his fiance appeared behind him. Quiet as a wisp of wind.

Yang felt a headache coming on. The bottle of bottle of spirit wine was put away and out came a gourd of the cheapest booze a copper piece could buy. He didn’t turn around as he took a heavy drink so she couldn’t see his face scrunched up at the taste.

They always appeared like this. Drinking was the only way he could survive these conversations.

She loomed over him but didn’t seem to know how to start. She was hesitating, and it annoyed him. It didn’t suit her.

This was the fifth fiance that had approached him like this. And, knowing his mother's fanatic matchmaking, she wouldn't be the last.

There was a karmic thread running through each of his engagements as if their sole purpose was to sour the taste of his wine. And they always showed up right when he began his evening drinking. How inconsiderate.

No. Not drinking. Cultivating. He was cultivating. The alcohol just helped him focus.

That's what he kept telling himself, anyway.

They both watched the sunset in silence as it framed the mountain range in a soft, golden light.

Yang remembered another silence much unlike this one. It felt like a lifetime ago that he stood over a bloodied, broken corpse unable to hear the crazed crowd cheering his name; but he could feel it through the blood rushing through his ears. The vibrations of their cheers, the stomping of their feet, the praise they were heaping onto him despite what he had done. Something important inside of him had shattered into fragments that day.

He took a drink. And another. It was only after the whole bottle was drained he decided to break the unbearable silence.

“Speak.”

His voice broke through her reverie. She smoothed out her clothes, pulling them this way and that as if every single edge needed to be tucked into the exact right spot. The action seemed to calm her down, which Yang found odd. Surely she had servants to fix her clothes for her?

It irked him. Wasn’t she some young mistress belonging to one of the stronger clans in the Tai Lie region? That hesitation was a sign of weakness.

He could never show that kind of weakness.

Yang took out another bottle, allowing the cheap wine to burn down his throat and settle as a nice heat right above his dantian. He focused on that heat, using his qi to spread it throughout his body and letting it numb him.

Her body was tense as she stood there, readying herself. She was just shy of moving into a battle stance as she spat the words out through clenched teeth.

“I am ending our engagement.”

Simple and to the point. That was much better. No flowery language or poetic nonsense. He already liked her more than his other ex-fiances.

He would have to remember her name. What was it again? Mei… Mei… Mei something. One of his subordinates would find out for him.

They had never formally met before his mother had set their engagement, and they didn’t interact much afterwards. It was just the way of things. They were in different sects and had their own duties to attend to. They didn’t even particularly want to meet. It was just a formal engagement set up by their parents, after all.

He could only remember one thing about her, really. Nine years ago, during the decennial tournament held by all the great powers of the Tai Lie region he witnessed a battle of hers. She wasn’t a particularly strong competitor, they were still just kids after all, more there for the experience than anything. But he remembered catching a glimpse of one of her battles that rooted him to the spot, unable to look away. He remembered recklessness.

Every hit, every technique that her opponent sent her way she took head on, her body bruising as if she was forging herself through the blows of her enemy. It was stupid, hasty fighting that paid no heed to winning the tournament itself. That day he couldn’t understand why she would fight like that even as chills ran down his spine.

He still couldn’t understand.

He had fought through the ranks himself, eventually claiming an unusually high spot in the tournament for his age. But no one fought him with such ferocity. A bunch of faceless mobs that were unwilling to take even a single blow of his, usually surrendering before the fight even started. They cared more about preserving their image or curry favor with his sect. Cowards.

Well, except for him. But Yang didn’t want to remember him.

He drained another bottle of cheap wine, allowing the pleasant numbness to start muddling his head before opening another.

However, She was different. She was worth remembering.

A pause lingered in the air as he reminisced. He could feel her eyes narrow into needles as she searched Yang’s back for any hint of anger or despair. Her left foot slid backwards and she reached for one of the magical talismans hidden in her sleeve as she readied herself for any retaliation.

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Instead, all she received was a single word.

“Sure.”

It was like a punch. She staggered back as the tension drained from her. The tight coil of anger and resentment and fear dissipated giving way to confusion. Eyes wide she stared at him, waiting for some punchline to the cruel joke he just told her.

But no punchline came. Yang continued to drink, admiring the last fading strands of sunlight.

As if hoping speed was enough to dissuade him from taking back his words, she hastily bowed, her hands clasped together in front of her.

“Thank you,”she said simply and disappeared, leaving behind only a few blades of bent grass.

He finished the last of the cheap wine in one large gulp as the moon began to rise behind the mountain range and darkness stole back the land.

Yang whistled. A sharp, piercing sound bounced off the mountains and echoed into oblivion.

“What is your wish?”

He heard a deep sigh from the shadows behind him. The words were slow and methodical, like gravel shifting underneath a boot. It came from a bodyguard, one that his grandfather assigned to him.

“I'm in a good mood today. Go tell Box to prepare a feast before I return. And then make yourself scarce for a few days. I wish to cultivate in peace.”

“Young Master, your grandfather tasked me to protect you at all times. Please reconsider.”

“Do you know who I am?”

Yang turned around, his hand lashing out into the night grasping the poor bodyguard’s throat.

“Y- your the Young Master?” The bodyguard choked out, struggling to breathe.

“You’re Goddamn right.” Yang said as he tossed him off the mountain.

The bodyguard tumbled down the mountain for a few seconds before he reoriented himself and raced off to relay the message.

Yang snorted. Some people just needed a little force before they would do their job.

Yang basked in the nighttime atmosphere on top of his mountain.

A steady breath infused with the qi of the cheap liquor was released into the night. A calm breeze brushed through his hair. He enjoyed the sight of the waning moon crest over the mountain as he sat down on top of the mountain and let himself meld into the world.

He closed his eyes and cultivated.

***

Yang Magdi Meditated for three days and three nights, pondering the ancient scroll that he had found hidden within a secret alcove in a dusty corner of his family’s library. It was a minor technique that even the weakest of cultivators could use, but he could feel a sense of enlightenment from it. It was a shame the author’s name had been rubbed away by the passing of time and neglect. He would have loved to study more of his works.

Yang controlled the swirling qi inside his dantian before condensing the smallest amount into a tiny ball. The ball traveled from his dantian through his spirit veins to the tip of his finger before releasing it as a beam of energy into the sky. The energy beam was extremely powerful for the amount of qi it required, and continued for a few seconds before it flickered out of existence.

He opened his eyes. Meditating three whole days before he was finally able to comprehend this minor technique hurt his pride a little. It was an amazing technique that let even the weakest of cultivators show power levels above their cultivation by using only the smallest amount of energy. It was ingenious.

But he understood why it had been abandoned. It took far too long to condense the energy for an attack. When even a single breath of time could decide victory you would have to be considerably lucky or incredibly talented at evasion to not have your head chopped off by the time you could fire off a single blast.

But he found it interesting enough to study, if only for the interesting manipulation of qi it provided.

Qi is the energy of the universe. Cultivators stole it from the heavens, using their own bodies as a furnace to refine qi for their own use. Stored in the dantian, qi flowed through the spirit roots into every part of the body, strengthening the cultivator. It was their avarice. The more qi a cultivator had the stronger they became, and also the longer they could live. Cultivators were driven mad from their pursuit of an ever increasing need for more and better quality qi. But the more they acquired, the less satisfied they were. How could they be, when everyday was a march towards oblivion?

Yang didn’t care about that yet. He wasn’t old.

He was drawn to many such techniques because of their interesting interpretations of qi. Each author was a genius in their own right, in theory if not in cultivation, but their works were filled with differences and mistakes and contradictions. However, they each showed their own path towards enlightenment. Towards immortality.

They each had different methods for how qi should be used, how it should flow through the spirit veins to achieve maximum efficiency and power. Ways to gather more qi and refine it. How to break through to the next stage so they could continue to gather more and more qi Endlessly. The more esoteric writings claiming that the phase of the moon, or the rotation of the world, or the cultivators own mood would affect the flow qi. Some Cultivators chose to throw away all techniques to solely focus on training their own bodies. It all interested him. It had a certain madness to it.

Sometimes it felt like he could get a glimpse of the person behind these writings made thousands of years ago. He felt he could understand a bit about them, their beliefs, their ideals, their aspirations. It drew him in as if he was a child experiencing the flow of water in a river for the first time.

At the end of the day, however, it was nothing more than an indulgence. A secret he kept to himself. Yang was a sword cultivator and had no need for cultivation techniques. He merely needed to accumulate qi and comprehend his own way of the sword to strengthen his cultivation. But learning lost and abandoned techniques like this was one of the few joys he had.

Most sword cultivators usually progressed much slower compared to their peers, but most sword cultivators were not Yang Magdi, Young Master of the Misty Peaks sect. He was a genius among geniuses, a Dragon amongst toads. And with most of his clan's resources open to him and his own natural talent in comprehending the sword he progressed rapidly. Too rapidly.

Few were able to challenge him inside his own generation. Cultivators of the other major sects claimed to be geniuses, and once in a blue moon they could put up a decent enough fight. But they were merely normal geniuses in the end. Only the other Young Masters and Mistresses of the other great sects posed him any threat, if only just.

It was all beginning to feel a bit dull.

He had never felt this so-called bottleneck that others claimed. A stopping point in their cultivation here they needed either a large amount of qi to break through, or some sort of enlightenment or lucky encounter. At least, he had never felt a physical bottleneck. But he had found his mind wandering away from his sword more and more lately. He wasn’t being neglectful of his cultivation exactly, but Yang figured it was fine to slow down just a tad by learning these techniques.

Yang stood, his robes faintly flowing around him. He took one last look at the mountain range. The soft mist tinged in a blue light pooled at each peak, earning the mountain range its namesake. Small spirit birds raced from peak to peak dragging the mist through the sky forming bizarre shapes that only they could understand. A gentle breeze brushed through the air and picked up a scattering of fallen leaves from the small plum tree that resided on top of the mountain before it swirled them down into the lands below.

He relished these quiet times away from his sect, his family, his peers. He could simply enjoy the scenery and breathe. He was free, for a moment.

He grabbed the bottle of spirit wine, brought it to his lips, and tipped it back. Nothing. It was empty. His cultivation time was over.

Yang slowly descended the mountain.