Fate Unraveled

CHAPTER

13

TRUTH AND LIE

JIEYUAN

—∞—

The fight had barely begun, and already Jieyuan was losing.

He was on his back foot, literally and figuratively, as Daojue’s spear stabbed at his neck. Jieyuan managed to lift his own spear to bat it aside in time, but that barely gave Daojue a pause, the taller man taking a step forward and doing something with his arm and upper body that Jieyuan didn’t manage to catch. What he did catch was the result of it, the blade of Daojue’s spear piercing through his left shoulder. Dead center, through bone and meat and nerve and all. Ruining it. A beat later, Daojue drew back his spear, drawing a spurt of blood together with it.

Teeth gritted, Jieyuan used his right arm—his left arm having fallen limp, useless—to deliver a halfhearted arcing strike to Daojue’s chest even as he pulled back, feet shuffling as he tried to make a retreat.

But Daojue pressed forward, twisting his body to the side just enough to avoid the attack, before he did another one of those shifting moves Jieyuan couldn’t catch, and before Jieyuan could even begin reacting, the golden blade of Daojue’s spear was a yellow line he could only just see at the edge of his vision, coming down from the side.

Then something hit his neck, something sharp and fast and unstoppable, and then he was falling, eyes wide, even as his body somehow remained standing, the gleamstone approaching, coming closer—

Again.

And they were back, the two of them, standing in a small clearing surrounded by crystal trees, facing each other, spears bared. Jieyuan took a moment to gather himself, to overcome the shock of his death—he was getting at it already, and wasn’t that quite the thing to get used to—before he nodded at his stony-faced teammate, “Go.”

That was all the invitation Daojue needed. In three strides Daojue closed the distance between them, spear already engaged in another lethal move, this one aimed lower, at Jieyuan’s chest. Jieyuan stepped to the side and forward, trying to reproduce what Daojue had done earlier, drawing an arc with his spear level with Daojue’s neck.

But then the blade of Daojue’s spear was just a golden point right in the center of his vision, having come from seemingly nowhere. It struck him right between his eyes, piercing skin, then skull, then brain, and this time death came instantaneously.

Again.

The two of them standing, facing each other. Daojue attacking. Jieyuan reacting, attacking back. Daojue killing him.

Again.

Back in the clearing. Daojue lunged. Jieyuan died in the first exchange.

Again.

Jieyuan managed to hold off the first two strikes, but then Daojue managed to stab him through the ribs and followed up immediately afterward with a spearhead jab to the neck.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Again.

And again and again and again.

It was in the fifty-seventh clash, after Daojue sunk his blade in Jieyuan’s heart for the thirteenth time, that Jieyuan decided to call it, cutting off the flow of the chroma powering Absolute Will Command.

Immediately, Jieyuan’s perspective shifted. He was no longer standing—or falling dead, as it were—but sitting. The crystal floor hard and rough underneath him, the trunk of a gleamstone tree just as hard and rough behind him. Legs crossed, eyes closed. Spear lying sideways on his lap, hands resting on its shaft. Under it was a small silver plate, cradled between his thighs.

Jieyuan opened his eyes.

At night, the Gleamstone Forest managed to be even more stunning than in the daytime. Its glow was softer, now fueled only by the little sunlight caught during that day that still lingered in its crystal bodies and by the much weaker light of the stars and the moon, but made all that much more striking by the nighttime gloom. The different-colored hues from the many different plants, only barely distinguishable in daylight, even to a cultivator’s immensely sensitive eye, was now a stark, clear thing.

The flora of the Inner Forest was also noticeably more diverse than that of the Outer Forest. The tree Jieyuan was under glowed in soft tones of red. Right to his side were two trees almost glued together, one radiating a soft blue light and the other a shifting swirl of yellow and orange. Beneath it was Meiyao, sitting much like he was. On the other side of him was Daojue, near a large violet tree. Jieyuan didn’t know its name—Meiyao had mentioned the names of a few different races of gleamstone trees over the past few days, but that one wasn’t one of them—but it was the tallest tree he remembered seeing in the Third Ring yet.

Both his teammates were close enough that Jieyuan could soulsense them. Two human outlines in third-shade red—slightly faint because that outline was that of their aura, which was the chromal equivalent of light rather than something solid like chroma itself—with a denser orb of proper third-shade red in their center, their souls. Daojue was the first to break through to third-sign Redsoul, on the third of Yellowfull, eight days ago. Meiyao was next, two days later. And today, in just a couple of hours, it would be his turn.

Jieyuan pursed his lips and let himself get lost in the look of the forest, at least for a few moments. Above it all a canopy of leaves and branches glowing with all sorts of colors, and below them the rough, uneven sheet of gleamstone ground glowing in all colors imaginable, the colors shifting fluidly according to where you were looking at it from. They’d been in the Gleamstone Forest for eleven days now, and with time the apprehension he’d felt towards the forest as a whole had faded. Not entirely, but enough so that his view on it had grown closer to Meiyao’s, the beauty overshadowing the eeriness.

After a while, steady again, Jieyuan allowed himself to think back to his simulated fights with Daojue just now.

Combat simulation was one of Maeva’s ideas. She’d suggested that since he was capable of using Absolute Will Command to create a seemingly perfect copy of her as a hallucination, he might be able to take it a step further and use it as a way to train himself through simulated combat. It might have been better to do so with a conscious hallucination like Maeva, one that he interacted with physically, but since he didn’t want to have to explain to his teammates why he was fighting empty air, he’d gone for a more dream-like approach, having all of it happen entirely in his head. It cost a bit more chroma, and it was probably not as effective as fighting a hallucination consciously, but it served him well enough.

Recalling those fights, as Daojue killed him again and again with almost dismissive ease, Jieyuan clenched his hands tight against the shaft of his spear and made sure to look away from Daojue.

They’d arrived in the Third Ring on the second day of the Hunt, ten days ago, and they’d killed on average two third-sign gleam beasts a day since. Tensions were still high, particularly between Daojue and Meiyao—Jieyuan couldn’t afford himself the luxury of holding onto a grudge right now, no matter how much he wanted to—but they were making it work. Somehow. Somewhat.

There wasn’t much to be found between them in the way of teamwork. For their second fight, Meiyao had tried to draw up a plan ahead of time, but Daojue had gone on to ignore it altogether and do as he pleased. That had led to another fight Jieyuan had to break up, but he’d been ready for it, because not for a moment had he expected Daojue to play nice. Daojue seemed willing enough to let Meiyao lead the way as they were walking around the forest, but that was probably because he couldn’t be bothered to. When the fighting began, Daojue was his own man.

What saved their team was that the three of them were each individually good enough to make up for the lack of planned cooperation. With each fight they got better at it, both at facing gleam beasts, aiming their attacks just right to find the gaps in their crystal coats, and at taking advantage of the other’s openings. And that had allowed Jieyuan enough breathing room during combat to observe his teammates as they fought. Particularly Daojue. According to Maeva, that was what had allowed him to unconsciously create his mental model of how Daojue fought.

Problem was, that mental model got more accurate every time they faced a gleam beast. And in this case, accurate meant better. Jieyuan had been having simulated fights with Daojue regularly for about a week now, and instead of improving, Jieyuan felt distinctly, infuriatingly, like he was getting worse. Feeling a spike of anger, Jieyuan forced himself to relax his clenched fingers, pressing his palm against the cool metal shaft of his spear.

Maeva had argued that it might be because Daojue was at a higher soulsign now, and even if Jieyuan tried to adjust the simulation to the parameters of a second-sign Daojue, it wasn’t perfect. But that didn’t change the fact that Daojue was just better. In every single way. Speed, strength, agility, dexterity, skill. And Daojue wasn’t just resting on his laurels, either. Just as Jieyuan was improving, so was he. And from the looks of it, at a faster rate, at that.

Good luck catching up to someone who wasn’t just ahead of you, but that also ran faster than you did.

It was no secret to Jieyuan that Daojue was better at martial arts. At fighting, at spearsmanship. But Jieyuan hadn’t expected—couldn’t have known, couldn’t have imagined—that the chasm between them was that large and growing ever-larger still. Jieyuan had fared well enough against everyone else he’d faced so far. Mundane-born, chromal-born, clan-born, he’d beaten them all. He had gotten third place in the entrance trials in all stages, not just in the final rankings. But Daojue was leagues ahead of him. And Meiyao, even though Jieyuan hadn’t observed her as much, wasn’t that far behind Daojue. She wasn’t quite on Daojue’s level, but she was still much farther ahead of Jieyuan than he’d initially thought.

Being the best. That was what Jieyuan was all about. What drove him. His sole, overarching motivation. He had a hard time settling for anything less. Could hardly imagine settling for anything less. Didn’t even know how other people settled for less, when they could be more. And he’d been born with just the right combination of talents and ambitions that, up to this point, nothing had ever seemed out of reach. As long as he’d worked for something, dedicated himself to it, sweated and bled for it, he’d thought himself capable of anything. The world was his. Meant to be his. His to claim.

But now he was getting a taste of how the other side lived, and it was a sour, bitter thing that left the lips dry, the tongue numb, and the throat parched. And it wasn’t an entirely unfamiliar taste, either. Or rather, not to Amyas. Because outstanding as Amyas might have been compared to just about everyone else he’d known, Maeva had managed to outshine him every step of the way. Amyas had eventually grown to accept it, resigned himself to the fact that he’d never reach—let alone surpass—Maeva’s level, at least not academically, and had instead sought to strive for greatness in other ways. But Jieyuan had refused to acknowledge that. Refused to accept that his situation with Daojue and Meiyao paralleled that of Amyas and Maeva. He’d thought that as long as he did his best, he’d come out on top.

But he was doing his best, and so far his best was proving to be nothing short of insufficient. Lacking. Not enough.

Jieyuan let out a slow, heavy breath, looking up at the ceiling of glowing crystal leaves and branches shrouding the skies, just the barest hints of stars and the moon visible through them.

At the end of the day, no matter how you worked copper, no matter how you smelted it and refined it, no matter what miraculous smithing techniques you used, you couldn’t make it into gold. That was the Heavens’ own truth.

“Enough,” Jieyuan murmured to himself. Wallowing like this was pointless. Served no purpose. Wouldn’t do him any good. Not unless he arrived at some sort of plan, at some idea of what he could change or do differently, but it didn’t seem like his thoughts were heading anywhere near that direction. He’d talk with Maeva later, see if she had any advice to offer. She’d helped Amyas through his own issues. He’d have done so right now, get that right out of the way, but he had more pressing matters to deal with.

He looked more closely at Meiyao. With a cultivator’s vision, even the light of the starry night sky would’ve been enough for him to see her clearly, and the glowing plants all around made that job even easier. She was trembling. Lips pursed, her skin—normally rosy in a way that Jieyuan knew other women would need to use paints and tinctures to achieve—pale, brows deeply furrowed. She was still imbuing, then.

They’d come up with a system of sorts for setting up camp. Or at least what went for camping to cultivators. They didn’t need food or water. Not even air. Chromal sustenance handled that, their auras passively sacrificing ambient chroma to fulfill all their body’s needs while vanishing any waste their bodies produced. They didn’t need any protection from the elements, either. Their chromal weight ensured that no mundane chill could affect them. So camping to them was just calling it a day and sitting down.

All they needed to do was keep watch. And even that was made that much simpler. Meiyao had brought a surveillance field-focus with her—a chromal gear that, different from an inscribed artifact, whose properties were transmuted by their inscripts, instead had an inscribed field anchored onto them. The silver plate Jieyuan had in his lap. Jieyuan could barely just sense the inscribed field with his soulsense, covering him and his teammates, fifth-shade red but faint, like aura. It extended even farther than his soulsense, about a hundred feet in every direction, and would alert its bond-master of the presence of any moving spirit-bearing beings.

Currently, it was bonded to him. Whoever was keeping watch would bond it while the other two would be free to engage in Void Communion or imbuing, two things that not even the three of them could recover from immediately. Daojue had, thankfully, agreed to this setup, though the first few times he kept watch, Jieyuan—and Meiyao too, he was sure—secretly kept an eye on him, just to make sure. It was the fact that Daojue did go along with at least some things that stopped their team from falling apart altogether—that, and Jieyuan’s begrudging efforts.

Meiyao was the one scheduled to take the next watch. In an hour or so, when she finished her current imbuing session. This meant he had that much time until he got around to having his own little imbuing session, one in which he knew he’d be breaking through. The thought of his impending advancement left Jieyuan jittery. Already his heart was beating a bit louder, a bit faster. Most of it was out of excitement. Breaking through to third-sign would be like being born anew. Sure, it wasn’t as much of an improvement as that from first-sign to second-sign—let alone mundane to chromal—but he’d still become better in just about every way by half. But at the same time…

The Second Pain. Jieyuan gulped. There were three Pains. The First Pain, the pain of imbuing. The Second Pain, the pain of soul-flaring. And the Third Pain, the pain of soul-shifting. Each one magnitudes worse than the last. Soul-flaring happened when you advanced to the next stratum—when the imbued chroma in your soul reached a specific density level, and it stabilized fully, becoming not just imbued chroma, but signed chroma. He’d experienced the Second Pain once before, when he advanced to second-sign Redsoul, and even though it’d only lasted moments—ten seconds from start to end—it’d made all his imbuing sessions before and since seem almost pleasant in comparison.

Right now he had two prismfuls of signed red chroma imbuing in his soul, filling up the soul walls, and very close to a prismful of unsigned imbued chroma. Chroma he’d be signing soon. And it’d be agony. Pure agony. The First Pain, but magnified, compressed into ten seconds. Pain so powerful not even cultivators could reproduce it through concoctions. The Heavens let cultivators recreate the First Pain through Cultivator’s Agony easily enough, but not the Second and Third. Those, the Heavens jealously monopolized.

Jieyuan closed his eyes and sent his soulsense inward. He forced himself not to dwell too long on the color of his soul—another mystery he hadn’t gotten any closer to solving—and checked on his soulprism. It was mostly whole, as he’d been topping it up every night, but not completely. That was something to do. He’d take it.

Shifting his focus away from his soulsense, Jieyuan reached inside his glyph-stretch pouch and took out a shard. Holding it between his hands and entering Heavenly Communion, feeling the Heavens’ attention on him, he began to chant the harvesting hymn he’d chosen.

“Flaming,” he chanted. Immediately the harvesting ritual began, his control over his soul surrendered to the Heavens. Cultivators could only directly use their soulforce on chroma they’d harvested and attuned. Only through the heavenly rituals could they interact with ambient chroma—loose or prismatized—and draw into themselves.

The chroma comprising the shard began to break down, unphysicalizing and flowing into his body, floating up through the aura suffusing the same space as his arms—which would’ve normally repelled off ambient chroma—unimpeded, then into his chest, into his soul.

“Flaming.”

In a trickle flow, the chroma from the shard entered his soul through the fourteen, minuscule, vent-like openings on the soul wall that led straight to the center—and began pooling down under his floating soulprism. Harvested, inside his soul, but unattuned. The influx of chroma was slow, just about a hundredth of a prismful per hour. If he’d been using loose ambient chroma directly, it’d have been less than half that rate, given his fourth-order heavenly affinity.

Jieyuan kept it up for a while, until he decided he had harvested just about enough, before he stopped chanting. The flow of chroma into his soul ceased, the harvesting ritual interrupted. He returned what remained of the shard to his glyph-stretch pouch, then began chanting the attuning hymn.

“Ablaze,” he said, and with his soulsense directed inward, he could feel—see it, or at least the soulsense equivalent of it—as his soulprism began spinning. Slowly at first, but faster by the second, until it was almost spherical, its edges and hard lines smoothed out by the speed. The harvested but unattuned chroma that he’d absorbed floated up seemingly on its own to join the spinning soulprism, all of it becoming melding into one, rotating, red blur.

Jieyuan found it a meditative experience, watching his soulprism spin under the hold of the attuning ritual. He barely noticed it as his mouth kept repeating the attuning hymn, “Ablaze,” over and over again, lost in the movement, in the feel of his attuned chroma moving and increasing, as the chroma he’d harvested earlier gradually merged with his soulprism, though not all of it. What chroma he did ended up attuning was a small fraction of the unattuned chroma in his soul center, the rest of it being sacrificed by the attuning ritual itself, which unlike the harvesting and imbuing rituals, was sacrificial.

“Jieyuan.”

Meiyao’s voice. Breaking out of the trance, Jieyuan stopped his chant. In his chest, his soulprism stopped spinning, minutely bigger than before, and the bit of harvested chroma that remained unattuned and unsacrificed sunk to the bottom of the soul center.

Opening his eyes, Jieyuan found Meiyao standing over him, bright green eyes looking him over, studying him. Jieyuan watched her back. “You’re advancing, right?” she finally said.

“I am.” He kept his cool, or at least tried to. “Wish me luck,” he added, as more of an afterthought.

Meiyao quirked up an eyebrow. “You don’t need it,” she said, matter-of-factly, and extended her arm.

He picked up the silver plate from his lap and handed it to her, severing his bond to it with just a thought as he did.

As she reached out to take the surveillance field-focus from him, Meiyao’s fingers brushed his, and she smirked at him. “But good luck all the same.”

Without another word, Meiyao turned around and walked away, returning to her spot. Jieyuan watched her go. And now, against the conflicting swirl of anticipation and apprehension, something bright, light, and airy fluttered in his stomach.

Jieyuan felt something oddly taut in his face, and it took him a moment to realize he was smiling. He almost laughed. Then, he did his best to ground himself and shake off the silliness. He didn’t manage to fully wipe the smile off his lips, though, and he found the thought of what was about to come not so bad as it’d been before.

You don’t need it. Fingers brush. That smirk. But good luck all the same.

Heavens take and beggar me.

Meiyao would be the death of him. He knew it, knew it sure as the weight of gold.

And so it was, with a smile he couldn’t help, that Jieyuan reentered Heavenly Communion, and without leaving himself any space for hesitation, chanted, “Ravenous.”

And so it began.