Twinned Destinies: A Cultivation Progression Fantasy

It was late at night, and Ruyi was laying outside, staring at the moon, painfully sober. It took her a while to fall asleep these days; she couldn’t manage it, so now she was here. Ever since she’d become a demon, the cold couldn’t touch her anymore. The snows felt like another crunchier bed. She lay there, spread out against a mound, and stared.

She was thinking of Jin. It started in the tent, when she was trying to resist the quite strong urge to go over to Darius’s. She didn’t even know if she liked him or if she just wanted something warm to hold. But Darius would just laugh at her; he’d said she needed to be more self-reliant, whatever that meant. But he didn’t say how, and the cooks wouldn’t let her have any drinks, not even a bottle, which was usually how she fixed things.

Which was how she got here, thinking of Jin, wondering if he was doing okay. He would know what to do. She thought of him every single night, and Mother and Father, and Tingting and Sen; she didn’t mean to most nights but they would come to her, and she couldn’t stop them, and she would shiver. At first each of them made her feel their own little flavor of loneliness; she felt it in her chest, a piercing throbbing feeling, and sometimes it would open up a river of memory and she would be borne away in thoughts of them together, and once Fausta even came to check on her, since she was crying so loudly it sounded like she was getting attacked.

Tonight she tried something different. Tonight when Jin came to her, she said to herself he wasn’t gone at all. He was with her—he was so close he could see his smile, and hear him. He was close enough to touch, to hug, even. This was easier: they could never take him away from her like this. She felt better.

Then she felt bad again, since she was meant to be self-reliant, and she felt like she was cheating.

What did it even mean to be self-reliant? Why was loving someone and wanting to be loved such a bad thing? She didn’t understand. She thought of living like Darius, in this state of detached cool, feeling things in little spurts. It suddenly felt monstrous to her. She’d never really understood the idea of bearing her hardships stone-faced, like Father told her to do. She always thought if you didn’t feel for someone you didn’t love them enough, and someone who didn’t love was the worst kind of person. So what if it was embarrassing? So what if it meant being vulnerable sometimes and letting other people hurt you? She wanted to love as much as she could possibly bear. It was the only way she wanted to be alive, even if it wasn’t very cool.

And who was Darius to tell her what to do, anyways? It was easy for him to play teacher—he didn’t feel things like she did, that was obvious. If Jin were here, maybe he’d tell her something wise—like it was about keeping a balance. He always had a way of making the things he said sound wise.

But did she want to be balanced?

She sat up, frowning, and hugged her knees, and stared into the snowy plains unfurling into the vast darkness, and thought.

She didn’t think so. She thought about a future her, a her that was more like Jin—all calm and clear-thinking. That wouldn’t even be her anymore. Whenever she did anything worthwhile, whenever she did anything that made her who she was, she’d never felt ‘balanced’ or ‘healthy’ or even ‘happy.’ She’d felt desperate, or scared, or angry. Maybe it sucked in the moment, but she was happy she’d felt that way it after. These were useful emotions; they let her push herself much farther than if she was boring and normal, like everyone else.

She groaned and flopped back into the snow.

She wished someone was there to tell her what the answer was, someone like Jin or Mother. But she got the niggling feeling this was one of those questions there was no right answer to; she had to figure this one out herself.

By morning, she supposed she’d made a step toward self-reliance. She managed not to go to Darius—she counted it as a win.

***

Later that morning, after practice, she went to Lorekeeper Tyrus to pick out her Martial Art.

“They come to me at six or seven,” mused Tyrus, squinting at her like he couldn’t figure her out. “It’s easier then, when their minds are so squishy. But you are already a made fighter! Hum, hum.”

“That’s okay,” said Ruyi, who felt her mind was plenty squishy most of the time. “I’m good at figuring things out on my own—can you show me the Technique scroll?”

“‘The’ Technique scroll?”

“Uh.”

He swept his arm across the top shelves. “These are all scrolls, child. Of their own Martial Arts.”

“Yes, but what’s the best one?” At his frown—“Y’know, the one everyone uses...” She trailed off. That was how they did it in the Li Clan, and in the army, and in the guard, and in the Temple—everyone learned one Martial Art. But she sensed she was thinking like a human again.

Sure enough, Tyrus squinted harder. “There is no ‘one everyone uses’—tell me that is not what the humans do. Make everyone train the same Art.”

Ruyi nodded.

“Hell—do they not all look the same? Act the same, then?”

“Kind of…”

“Where is the art in that? It is half the damned term!”

“They don’t call it Art where I’m from,” said Ruyi. “They call it Technique.”

“Technique…” Tyrus made a disgusted sound.

“It’s meant to be a good thing,” said Ruyi. “If everyone’s the same, it’s predictable. You can act like one unit. My brother led an army like that—it works!” She didn’t like everything about human life, but Jin had worked hard on his Guard. It didn’t seem fair for this old coot to slag him off when he hadn’t even seen it. Both demons and humans had this instinctive contempt for anything each other did, and she didn’t like either.

“It may work,” said Tyrus, though he didn’t look convinced even as he said it. “But it is an ugly thing. Where is the creativity? The self-expression? It seems to me that your way makes tools of men, unthinking. Here we have no such thing. When our tribes go to war, it is like two great waves colliding—you cannot control where the water goes. Regardless.”

He wagged a finger at her. “You are here, and you will do things our way. Here, we make the Art suit you—it is not the other way around. I have seen you fight, your duel with Rufus…I have seen who you are, at the base of things. This…” He gestured to her. “This is not you. But fighting unearths you.”

Ruyi scratched her head. “I don’t know if I get a single thing you just said.”

“You are a killer,” he said simply. “You are cold-blooded. You are a machine.”

“Excuse me?!”

“But you are hiding. Perhaps that is wrong—you are dormant. Something frightening dwells in you, something endless. We all saw it.”

Ruyi wasn’t sure if he was insulting her or not.

“You may not admit it to yourself,” he said, shrugging. “But it is there. It is a rare trait, the Berserker state. In our tribe, only Livia and Sabina have this. The mind pushes the body far past what it is capable of, and it stops at nothing until it gets what it wants. If Sabina had not choked you unconscious you would have killed him—and don’t you feel bad about it!”

He’d caught the look on her face. “This is good, child. This is to be trained. Harnessed.”

“You’re wrong about me,” mumbled Ruyi, hugging herself. She didn’t want to be a killer, and certainly not cold-blooded.

“Am I?”

Then she thought about her life—all of it. When she was little, going days without sleep to finish an Alchemy textbook… when she’d run all the way from Dragonspire to save Jin… even underground in that stadium when they’d tried to take her body from her. She just kept biting down… she thought she was just being stubborn. When she was fighting, it felt that way too. She didn’t know there was another name for it.

“Sabina is a machine that runs on joy,” said Tyrus. “Livia is a machine that runs on anger—yes, Livia, gentle Livia. Do not let her fool you. I would guess you are more like Livia.”

“Stop it,” she told him.

“Pardon?”

“Stop telling me who I am!” She crossed her arms. “Everyone I meet here seems to just know me.” It was getting annoying. “Am I that obvious?”

“Yes.”

She wanted to retort, but she ended up just sighing and clutching herself tighter. “Yeah…" She wanted to say she used to be better at holding herself together, but what did it matter? She was here now.

She sagged. “So what Martial Art should I get?”

“I am thinking…” He tapped his lips. “Eh. I would choose Nyx’s—that is, the previous owner of your demonform—yet that is too… sly… it does not suit you. Perhaps we need something more…”

He led her to a section of the wall near the back wrapped up in chains that glowed eerie green in the dark. He took a gold key to a giant lock, clicked it open, then carefully drew out a wood rectangle from the wall. From it he popped out a scroll whose skin was all black.

“This,” he said, waggling it before her. “Is called Winter’s Wrath. It is what is known as a Primordial Technique. It is called so because it is very old, and incomplete, and left by creatures that have long since ascended. Think of it like… a rusted sword, you know swords, yes? Like that. It shall need some cleaning, but it may serve you well. It is like you. It is very dangerous, yes, but it is also very unstable. Be careful.”

Ruyi flushed. “Did you just call me unstable?”

“Dangerous and unstable,” said Tyrus dryly. “The one causes the other; you cannot disentangle them. And yes, child. You must stop taking offense at every little truth about you.”

She couldn’t find a retort.

“So?” he said, arching a brow. “Would you like to try it out?”