Twinned Destinies: A Cultivation Progression Fantasy

They didn’t bother following her, but she kept running anyways. She couldn’t seem to stop. The trees blurred past; she didn’t know where she was going, she just felt she had to get away.

The grounds leveled out. The trees grew taller, thicker, their branches shriveling to bundles of needle-leaves, and she heard the soft hum of rushing water in the distance. Her path drifted toward it. The hum became a grumbling, then a roaring, and she could taste the spray on her cheeks, feel it misting the air as she got close. She broke through a veil of leaves and she saw it.

The White River, twenty strides across, and shallow enough it only went up to her waist. A spray of stones marked out their spots; the water foamed white where they jutted. She felt a wash of relief. She didn’t know where she was, but as long as she followed this she could find her way back. She let herself breathe.

Then she started upstream. Still going away from Jade Dragon City, following the river, not sure where. She saw the Dragonspire Mountains looming in the distance, the place she’d met the Lord of Demons. Everywhere she went she seemed to run into bad memories. She veered off the path, crossing into the thick of the undergrowth.

She found a finger of stone and soil a few hundred paces off, all jagged and huge and barren, a monument to nothing. At its peak where the nail should be there was a fissure big enough for her to squeeze through. She did, and found the insides were bigger than the outsides—this was a cavern, probably hollowed out by wind and water. She hadn’t been the first one to find this hideout. There were heaps of dried sticks here that lay in the vague shape of a nest, though it’d long been abandoned. Vultures, maybe? It was hers now.

She wasn’t sure who she’d been running from, who she’d been scared of, but she felt safe here.

She began setting up a shrine to herself.

First she dug out the rocky soil, unearthing the richer ground beneath, and sank in the shards one by one. The shards flared hot, taking to the soil like fire does to wood, and the soil darkened to a rich black. It brightened in her mind’s eye.

She sat down cross-legged and meditated.

First she asked nicely, and the newborn stars budged a little. Then she tried yanking and they slipped out of her grasp. There had to be a negotiation, a balancing. She tried calling several stars at once and lost control of all of them—she thought she could flit between them but she found she wasn’t really focusing that way. There were hundreds of lights in the soil and she collected them one by one.

They warmed her coming in. She let the cultivating carry her off. She let herself drift, think.

***

If those swordsmen hadn’t intervened, would she have killed Chen Qin?

She’d been turning the question around for hours.

She’d killed before. She’d killed tons of demons. But that was out of self-defense. She’d killed that Royal Stag on the way to save Jin from poison, that wasn’t self-defense. That was just because she was just thirsty.

None of that felt the same as murdering a person, even a terrible person like Chen. She’d come after him, really. It was like an assassination. Was she an assassin? She never thought of herself as one—she always figured she was a good person, like a Hero. She was a good person the world loved to beat up on. Even when she’d become a demon she’d still thought herself a good person, someone worthy of everyone’s love. She’d figured it was something that came from the heart. She didn’t want to hurt people, she wanted to help people, she did!

But…she’d pretty much assassinated that stag, hadn’t she? If anything it deserved to live more than Chen did.

She couldn’t even bring herself to feel bad about trying to kill him. Should she? Would a good person feel bad about trying to kill a bad person?

She wished she had someone to talk to, someone who really knew her, like Jin. These days she felt lonely so often. If Jin was her, would he have have killed Chen?

If he did kill Chen it’d be because it was the right thing to do, she felt sure of that. Not just because he hated Chen’s guts.

But why did that matter? Chen would be dead either way.

But the reasons did matter, somehow. Heroes did things out of goodness, not hate.

She growled in frustration. She wasn’t even the Hero, Jin was, so why did she care? She wasn’t sure.

***

A long night passed. Her nerves cooled, and when she emerged from the cave, blinking away the harshness of the sunlight, she felt none of her indecision. Instead she felt annoyed at herself.

She got spooked—she lost her nerve, that was all it was. That bastard had done terrible things and he deserved to die. That was that. She wasn’t sure what made her doubt herself so. She wasn’t drunk, so she couldn’t even use that as an excuse; maybe she was just scared and lonely, she wasn’t sure. She couldn’t even recall what she’d been so hung up on, it all felt so fuzzy—something about a conscience? Qin had certainly had none when he’d hunted down Mei, or when he’d taken Tingting from Ruyi. She remembered tossing and turning over ‘what was right’ and ‘what she wanted’—she wasn’t convinced there was such a big difference.

She still remembered the night of her first Banquet when he’d left her burning with humiliation at the drinks table. And how he’d humiliated her on the balcony that second Banquet. Now she was angry again. At him, but also at herself.

She sighed. Her head hurt.

These Shards did well, but they were a stream rather than a drop; she needed more. Still she sat at their side for another few days and nights, drinking in the Essence.

By the end of it she regretted letting him go, but there was nothing for it.

***

She spent three days there before she made herself go home. She was closer to Demon King, but not close enough. She needed more—months in that shrine, and she wasn’t even sure her Shards would last that long.

If only she could get more…

As it turned out she’d come home for nothing, since found a letter from Mother waiting for her. Or rather, it was a letter dictated by an emergency messenger, then written out and sent by the Jade City Dragon branch—it was impossible to send letters from Li Clan Headquarters directly. Mother said, with lots of apologies, she’d be gone another two weeks—they weren’t ready for the second shower. Whole rural villages, weak and cut off from most of the Clan, had turned into disaster areas; Li clan fighters were going around putting out fires.

***

Since the first shower the Imperial Guard had nearly doubled in size, but most were in reserve—waiting to deal with more showers.

The next one came a week later. Three comets this time. They were kept busy all night.

Chen Qin was noticeably absent from the raiding parties, Ruyi found.

Still, a wraith stole around the edges of the Guard, snagging the more remote Shardfalls before they could get there. By now Ruyi had honed her process; she’d gotten thick leather mitts for the shards and a nethersteel sack too. She had nearly a dozen Shards by the time she made it back to her secret hideout, which she was pleased to find was still there.

She planted them in the soil and cultivated for nearly four days straight, interrupted only by sleeping. And drinking—lots of drinking, too; she’d brought a wine cooler with her.

She’d read of monks who’d spend decades cultivating alone, sealed away from society.

She’d been in here a week and she was already starting to go mad.

At home, she had Mother to talk to. Until very recently she had Sen to show love to, physically. She hadn’t realized how physical of a person she was until she was stuck alone in her own cave. She wanted to hug someone, anyone; she’d taken to snuggling up to a vaguely curved chunk of stone. The more time she spent alone, the more she realized her dream of self-reliance, of cutting herself off from all these people who could hurt her, would always be a dream. Four days in and she had named all the rocks in her cave—Craggy, Bumpy, Pebbles, Big, and Mr. Sparkle. She was having conversations with them, patting them on their rocky heads. She’d already decided she was taking them home with her.

You didn’t need to stay cross-legged, she found out. Cultivating was more of a mental thing. In the morning the sunlight came in at a certain angle, making a rectangle of light on the floor, and she plopped herself smack in the middle of it, flopping over half-foot by half-foot every thirty minutes as the angle changed, all the way until sunset.

On the eighth day she reached Demon Queen.

She felt herself start to demonform uncontrollably. This time she was ready—she wore a detachable sash robe tied at the waist which easily came off when stretched. Demonforming had cost her half her robes before she’d figured out a fix.

She grew to her full eight-feet length, and just kept going. Her skeleton burned at every joint. She felt the burning especially at the base of her claws and her teeth. She let herself howl and writhe—it hurt less that way, even if she looked stupider. By now she was a veteran of horrible pain. She knew the tricks.

By the time it finished, she lay in a room drenched in ice. It had been like this her first transformation, but this ice was special—there was so much light in it it would take years to melt without her say-so. It wasn’t just the room, but the air around her. She left cold wherever she moved; it poured out her skin. She could reign it in to just skin-level, or send it out a dozen strides.

Her ‘field,’ she decided to call it. And didn’t dare go far, but when she sat at the mouth of her cave and threw it out, passing flock of ravens near dropped from the sky. Their wings flapped half as fast, weighed down by frost.

She wondered if all Demon Kings and Queens had a field like this. She recalled Gao had one; she’d electrified dozens of demons at once with hers. Part of her frustration was how much she had to deduce. She felt blind. She didn’t even have texts to go off of, just senses. She’d cobbled together some respectable Techniques, but a Technique like mother’s Blade of the Winter Wind was refined over centuries by dozens of peak masters.

Hers, she made up on the spot.

She wondered what it would’ve been like growing up a demon among demons. She’d heard they went about in nomadic tribes, raiding and pillaging and slaughtering. It was an awful existence, of course, reprehensible, but she imagined they had their own awful camaraderie where they could all be gross and disgusting together.

She sighed.

It was time to go home.