Twinned Destinies: A Cultivation Progression Fantasy

The letter read,

Return at once with Sen.

You are not safe.

Your brother has been poisoned. Our doctors cannot discern the cause.

The culprit, a servant named Ling, has fled.

Love,

Mother

The letter slipped from Ruyi’s shaking hand, spiraling once, twice, three times before it slid to a halt on the floorboards.

She tore down the hallway, leaped a flight of stairs, burst through the huge oak doors, not caring if anyone saw her.

***

There was no time for a carriage. The stallions would last longer, but she was faster.

She ran and ran, blowing past a blur of trees, nothing but her satchel on her back.

She flew down the road, wind shrieking in her ears, throwing the hems of her robes in her face; she was plastered in green silk and went head-over-heels, crying out. Her face stopped her fall; she scraped to a halt up a stretch of rocky track.

She tore off the robe, spat out a mouthful of dust, and flung it into the woods with fury. She kept running. Half her face stung something awful; her eyes watered.

An hour in, she wished she’d thought this through a little better.

She’d left in a blind panic. She hadn’t even worn shoes. She must’ve made a ridiculous sight, this panting girl soaked in sweat, wearing only her nightgown, feet blistering, head swimming. Her breaths came hard and long, and she had to drag them in. She felt like she might hurl.

A pang of dizziness nearly slapped her to the ground. She stopped, hands on her knees, choking in air.

She was getting woozy. Hungry.

She smelled iron, a whiff of salt on the gentle breeze. She sniffed. Blood! Something living. No demons, but something with a big beating heart coming up the side of the road, just through the trees—she leapt between two firs, burst through a thicket of ferns. There!

Two strides sent her barreling into a royal stag. She wrestled with it in a mindless thirst; it went down baying and kicking and she tore at its neck with her demon claw, felt rootlike things give way under the skin and was rewarded with a shower of blood. Where her fingers struck the skin went blue-black, deadened with frostbite.

It bucked her off and planted one great hoof right in her belly.

She must’ve bounced off a tree. She lay there groaning, curled up, sure she was going to die. It felt like there was a hole punched through her belly; it felt like if she moved her insides might leak out. Something had cracked; it hurt to shift her weight. Through teary eyes she saw the stag, a vague brown blur, lowering its smudgy gold crown.

It was all she could do to throw herself out the way. It seemed ungainly—its neck couldn’t move right, the joints were frozen stiff. She slashed at its passing, more a flinging of the fingers. But her fingers were sharp. They dug deeper into the wound, finding the cords where its neck told its lower body what to do, and sliced them open.

The stag went over howling.

Then they were both staggering up, her wheezing and bent over, it on its front legs, gushing blood. It couldn’t stay up. She leapt for it, bowled it over, and sank her teeth into the wound.

She drank. It thrashed but the coldness had gotten inside it, a creeping frost, and there it spread. Its legs stilled. Its eyes gazed out at nothing.

Limping, cursing, she kept barreling down the road.

She felt horrible. But she didn’t regret it.

Her head felt clearer; she could hold onto her thoughts. She could think.

Ling. Of all folk, Ling.

She didn’t understand. Why?! Someone must’ve gotten to her—was it the cult? But Mei had said the cult didn’t want Jin dead—

But did she believe Mei? Why should she? Suddenly she remembered those Cultists thieves Mother had crippled in the Wonder District. They certainly weren’t looking to hand out soup; they were there to steal, to hurt.

She screamed her frustration.

Why now? Ling had been there so long, and so many chances—

She’d poisoned him.

Alchemists made cures for poisons.

Who had an encyclopedic knowledge of poisons, even the obscure ones—had memorized every page of the Encyclopaedia Alchemica?

This was no coincidence.

Who wanted Jin dead? The very creature who’d tried killing him once. The Lord of Demons.

The very creature who’d invited Ruyi on her first ever extended trip.

This was no coincidence either.

Her fury helped her run.

***

She was there in five hours. She took another pitstop to drain a boar.

When carriages came by she dashed into the woods; there was no explaining a black-armed girl soaked in blood up to the teeth. When she neared town she leaped atop a passing carriage, rifled through the luggage strapped to its top, snatched out a baggy purple robe, and changed.

She made it through the city gates, raced past li upon li of well-kept noble fields—why the Hell did they go on for so long?! She was getting dizzy again; dark maws splotched her vision. Then Yang Family Manor popped up, a brown dot in her vision, and she drew breaths she felt a shock of fresh energy.

She burst through the front door, scrambled up the stairs five at a time. “Where is he?!” she rasped.

She was greeted by a crowd of men in big coats, staring dumbly at her. She shoved past them and forced open Jin’s bedroom door.

There was Mother, stricken, at his bedside. Jin was lightly convulsing. His sheets were soaked in sweat; his eyes were open, blinking, the pupils gone pale white, and his veins stuck out like black worms against paper-white skin. Dry cracks ran up his body. His aura felt so weak, barely there, a flickering candle in a harsh wind.

“No…” she whispered.

A doctor at his bedside fed him a slow drip of supreme-grade Healing Potion. Plainly it wasn’t enough. Another coaxed a tube filled with enchanted mercury out of Jin’s bubbling mouth, then frowned at its readings.

Four dozen poisons fit these symptoms, all of the Duskwraith class. Each had a different antidote. Whoever had done this was clever about it.

Mother saw her. “Thank Heavens—”

She was at Jin’s bedside in an instant, slinging off her satchel. “Have they figured out what it is?”

“No—“

Out came the vial of Moon Serpent’s venom. She shoved the doctor aside—even that little effort brought up a harsh buzzing in her skull—uncorked the vial, and dripped half of it into Jin’s open mouth.

“Rue?” said Mother, uncertain.

“No time! Wait here.”

To Jin she rasped, “Don’t you dare die on me, you dumb oaf!”

This time the doctors scrambled away from her, a parting sea of fluttering white. She stumbled down the stairs, out the door, down the hatch to her lab, and began to brew the antidote.

To Moon Serpent Venom. The king of poisons. A poison so potent, so possessive, it consumes other lesser poisons.

Doctors were the equivalent of Masters, but for the Healer’s Guild. Doubtless they’d narrowed the symptoms to Duskwraith. Doubtless they’d drawn Jin’s blood, ran their tests. She’d seen them doing it—but they were shooting arrows in the dark. There was no time; by the time they found which it was, by the time they finished brewing the antidote Jin would be long gone.

If they could requisition the ingredients in time, that was. Duskwraith was a very rare grade of poison. How rare were the ingredients that unmade it?

But she knew exactly what Moon Serpent Venom was. She knew its exact cure.

Ruyi fretted around the lab, measuring out two cups of phoenix ashes, a handful of lunar moth wings, three droplets of jade pearl essence, White Lotus petals and ginseng root to balance them. The brew wasn’t very hard—not for her. But her fingers felt so clammy she could hardly keep hold of the glass. She second-guessed every little detail. She was convinced she’d thrown in one petal, not two, until she triple-checked her ingredients stock. Her heart wouldn’t stop its mad hammering. Hunger ripped at her ribs. Her limbs felt leaden, her vision turning double, snapping back. But she forced herself upright.

Jin wouldn’t die.

It wasn’t a matter of hope to her. She refused to allow it.

The Heavens wanted him, but who were they to take him? Had they gotten her permission?

She had the brew stoppered within the hour. All the while she felt like she was wading through a swamp; her head felt hot, stuffed with heavy smoke. The floor wobbled beneath her.

This time she spasmed her way upstairs, one hand clasped around the neck of the flask, the other supporting its bottom. She was paranoid she might drop it. By now she was barely clinging to consciousness. The wooziness was so severe it she could hardly keep from slobbering.

Ruyi didn’t know it then, but what she was doing should’ve been impossible. There was a limit to how demon bodies could function. They ran on essence. Run out and primal urges seized hold. They became slavering beasts. It was a fact of biology.

In that moment Ruyi had nothing. No essence, no food, no fuel.

She should’ve dropped half an hour ago. At the very least she should’ve lost her mind.

But she just wouldn’t let go. If she let go Jin would die, so she simply refused to. She was stubborn like that.

Her body had long since shut down; still she willed it on.

The doctors got out of the way and she stood by Jin’s bedside again.

“What devilry did you feed him?!” The doctor at Jin’s bedside was so fat the folds on his face jiggled with every expression.

Jin had stopped convulsing. He seemed a corpse, mouth gaping, eyes sightless, but when Ruyi grasped his wrist she felt the soft stutters of his heart.

“You’ve doomed him!” The doctor put his boulder of a body between them, and Ruyi felt an unspeakable rage. “You may be a genius of Alchemy but medicine is no game, child—”

“Step aside.” She whispered. She couldn’t move him—she could barely hold herself up. Instead she looked him dead in the eyes; and she put all her feelings into her expression. Her belief. In that moment she was exactly who she always felt she was. She must’ve looked half-crazed.

He flinched. “Ah—”

She strode past him, tipped open Jin’s mouth, and fed him the antidote.

It was done. "Excuse me," she said in a high strangled voice. "If you need me, I'll be sleeping."

She stumbled to her room. She got halfway to her bed before a light in her head switched off.