Xiuying

No one chased, but Xiuying ran, box of rich, sturdy iron-oak clasped tightly under an arm.

She did not know why she ran, but she didn’t stop, couldn’t stop. Because if she did… well, she didn’t know what she would do if she did.

That little voice in the back of her head whispered to her again. Harshly. “Return it. It’s too good to be true. A gift like this is never just a gift. There will be a price.”

Xiuying kept running.

Perhaps that was why she ran. Because if she stopped, she might listen to that voice. And Xiuying did not want to listen to that voice.

Her grip on the box tightened as her feet carried her forward. Her grip now hard enough that the box likely would have cracked and shattered if not for the peasant ranked material it was made of.

Even just the box was a treasure to someone like Xiuying. A few years pay, at the very least. Maybe even a decade. It was the kind of item that she’d only come across three times in her life.

Something precious to carry something priceless.

Xiuying sped up.

Sprinting through the mountains as she was, anyone who saw her would likely fear that there was an emergency of some sort, but Xiuying didn’t (couldn’t) let herself think about that. So on she ran.

In her twenty-four years of life, Xiuying had encountered exactly three things beyond the peasant rank of cultivation. The first was a Major she met before she was posted to Silver Springs, the second was Xian Qigang, and the third was the sage rank manual she now carried in a box that she couldn’t afford.

Xiuying slowed to a stop.

Yes, Qigang had changed. Yes, he was kinder now. Yes, he was rich as fuck. And, yes, he was so powerful now that a sage rank technique meant chicken shit to him...

Xiuying blinked. She’d been going somewhere with thought...

Oh, right. Who the fuck just hands someone a sage rank technique manual!? she screamed mentally.

‘Xian Qigang, that’s who,’ an annoying voice in her head answered.

‘Exactly. Xian Qigang,’ another voice in her head, the one that had repeatedly demanded she return the book, pointed out. ‘You already owe him for your forced advancement. Remember that? You have to be an idiot to take something this precious from him too. What happens when he comes to collect? Will you give him whatever he asks?’

‘Fuck yeah, you will,’ the annoying voice crowed. ‘I say if baby Xian wants some pussy, girl, you best spread your fucking legs. Seems to be working for that manager of his.’

‘And that’s what you want to be reduced to? A common whore?’

‘If it gives you power, real power, unlike the scraps you’ve been chasing all these years? Then, yes, you be his fucking whore. Not like you’re using that hole between your legs for anything anyway.’

Xiuying’s cheeks reddened, and she crushed both voices beneath a mental boot, melting and mixing them back into the swirling tempest of her thoughts.

While they both had valid arguments, though one much more so than the other, the foundation of their arguments was flawed.

Qigang (as he was now) would not ask her to fuck him. He wasn’t that sort. She knew this because he hadn’t once given her the look. And Xiuying knew the look.

Besides, even if Qigang was that sort, she still doubted he would ask her to fuck him. Not when Meng Yi was right there.

Xiuying had her issues with the young manager, but even she could admit that Meng Yi was an incredibly beautiful woman.

Next to that, with her mannish features, wild hair, and, yes, flat breasts, Xiuying might as well be invisible.

The redness of her cheeks deepened, with embarrassment, sure, but also some irritation at her self-disparaging remarks.

Of course, feeling irritation at oneself for disparaging comments made about oneself is a vicious loop doomed to gorge on itself until it implodes brilliantly and messily, so Xiuying cut off the thought savagely.

She didn’t care about how she looked, she decided. And she definitely didn’t care whether or not men found her attractive.

There were more important things.

Like power. Power which she now held in a box clutched under her arm.

Xiuying took the box into both her hands and stared at it.

This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

It was beautiful, the wood a deep, rich brown lined with a silvery metal.

Beautiful as the box was though, the true treasure laid within, and Xiuying’s fingers twitched with a deep urge to open the box and just gaze upon it.

The tiger within her chest shuddered at the thought, its eagerness to add a higher rank technique with such perfect synergy to itself plain as day.

Just barely, Xiuying restrained herself, awareness of her surrounding forefront in her mind despite everything. Out in the Bloody Fangs was not the place to go revealing sage rank technique manuals.

There was almost a guarantee that it would not attract anything dangerous, to her anyway. But, seriously, why risk it?

With a purr that sounded suspiciously like a whine, the spirit of her cultivation settled as she cradled the box back under her arm and resumed running.

Qigang already present in her mind, the stirring of the tiger that had made its home within her soul pulled Xiuying’s mind to the matter of Qigang’s meeting with The Sun Emperor upon advancement into sprouting phase. A meeting that he somehow managed despite not achieving congruence.

All cultivation methods had spirits, beings of qi that were the beating hearts of the methods. And, like life, and time, and even the very earth Xiuying stood upon, cultivation methods (and techniques) were birthed by qi. It was why they were written in the language of qi, and why copying them was such an expensive and complex process.

People could not create cultivation methods, or techniques, for one simple reason: they’re beyond the human mind.

Cultivation methods and techniques contained the concepts of things, and while they may seem simple at a glance, they were anything but.

Xiuying’s own method, for example, contained the concept of ‘tiger’, if one wanted to be simplistic about it. Basically, the qi flavour of her cultivation, is ‘tiger’.

But then, you begin to pull apart the curtain. What is a tiger? Why do they look the way they do? Why do they live where they do?

Down the rabbit hole you go.

For a method, or a technique, to work, nothing can be ignored. Yet, even the simplest of beast rank techniques contained so much fine and finer detail that trying to count them would be like trying to count the sands on a beach.

Harder even.

The way it had been explained to Xiuying was, “take a grain of sand and write out everything you don’t know about it.”

Xiuying had tried, and she was a foot into her scroll before she realized that she could still think of things she didn’t know about that fucking grain of sand: how many people had stepped on it? How many li had it travelled over the course of its existence? What’s the heaviest wind that ever blew against it? Was that sand ever swept up in a hurricane? Has that sand ever blinded someone at a crucial moment? Was that grain of sand ever part of a mountain? Was it ever one of the sands that supported a tree’s roots? You get the idea.

If a grain of sand had that much history and interconnectedness to it, then how much more would it be for a beachful of sand?

How much detail and nuance would a cultivation technique that used the concept of desert sands stripping the flesh from bones over time carry?

So, yeah, cultivation methods and techniques were fucking complicated things, and if qi hadn’t created them, Xiuying was pretty sure the human race would have been wiped out by qi beasts, who have no need for them to cultivate.

Lots of people had lots of guesses as to why qi created and still creates cultivation manuals, the theories running the gamut from those who believe that qi is benevolent towards man, and thus gave us manuals as tools to help us subjugate the earth, to those who believe that some powerful ancient cultivator must have discovered some method to wrangle qi to their will, and in their benevolence decided to share it with everyone.

Xiuying didn’t much care which, if any, of these were true, what she cared about was that qi did create cultivation manuals, and that cultivation methods had spirits within them.

The spirits of a method give cultivation visions. They are the cultivator’s guide on the Path of that method. And, though mastery is achieved at the peak of the weaving phase, that doesn’t mean that the spirit leaves you. Like Xiuying with the tiger in her soul.

As long as one walks a Path, the spirit of that Path will forever walk with them.

For most people, these spirits are never met or truly interacted with. But then, there’s that rare few. One in a million, they say. Rarer even than forced advancement.

That rare few who, somehow, through a mix of talent, synergy, and more luck than anybody could possibly have a right to, attain attunement. Blending and merging with their method.

Essentially, becoming the physical manifestation of its spirit.

They are feared. They are revered. And every cultivator at the precipice of Sprouting phase secretly (and fruitlessly) wishes to come through as one of their ranks.

Xiuying certainly had.

Which was why, for Qigang to report having a conversation with The Sun Emperor without achieving attunement, well… it was unique, that was for sure.

Guess that’s what a noble rank celestial plum gets you.

Running on autopilot this whole time, it took Xiuying a moment to notice that she was close to her destination. Home.

Or, at least, the place she slept some days.

Home was a little cottage back in Silver Springs. A house left to her by her father in all but blood.

Where she was now was the small, ancient outpost that had been the chain around her neck for a long time now.

Xiuying loved the old man, and she wanted to honour his memory, but Heaven, she fucking hated this place and everything it meant for her military career.

Hated or not though, the place was useful to her now, because Xiuying most definitely could not have taken a sage rank manual to her actual house. Not if she ever planned to take it out of the box that is.

As she’d expected and hoped, the outpost was empty, save for a single soldier manning the tower.

“Hey, Commander,” Tao Jin, her second in command, and the one on watch duty today called out as she approached. “What’s with the box? Looks fancy.”

She ignored the question.

“How about you go home to your wife and baby?” she called up to the man instead, and his face lit up immediately.

“Really?” he called back immediately.

“Sure. I’ll take over your shift.”

Before she’d even finished, Jin had somersaulted from the top of the tower and taken off down the path to the village, a screamed “Thanks, Commander, you’re the best,” trailing behind him.

Xiuying watched him go for a moment, wondering why she’d felt the need to get rid of him.

Did she really think Jin was someone to keep in the dark about this? That he would try to steal the manual?

What good would it even do him? He’s beast rank. He could never learn a sage rank technique, the strain on his cultivation would kill him.

Besides, even if he could use it, would he bother? The man had zero ambition. He’d asked, like seriously, he’d actually fucking asked to be sent to Silver Springs, and in the three years he’d been here, he’d somehow managed to find himself a wife and had a kid already.

What about him would make her wary? Xiuying wondered.

She looked at the box in her hands, considering the weight of the object it carried within in ways that she’d never considered before.

After a moment, Xiuying shook off the thought.

Whatever. She had cultivating to do.

She walked to her room in the outpost and locked herself within.

Then Xiuying opened the box, pulled out the sage rank manual, and read.