Fate Unraveled

CHAPTER

14

TO ADVANCE

JIEYUAN

—∞—

Jieyuan’s soulprism fell apart in a slow, prolonged outburst, the chroma comprising it dispersing evenly throughout the center of his soul like a blooming cloud of red. As the first particles of chroma began penetrating the soul walls, imbuing it, Jieyuan felt the familiar, prickling, needle-like sensation, starting first in his chest, where his soul was. It quickly spreading until not an inch of him was spared from the invisible, intangible needles, one for each chrom squeezing its way into the soul walls.

What followed was a business Jieyuan had long since grown used to, as familiar to him now as the cool touch of coinage. Needle pricks grew stronger, deeper, into stings, and stings soon gave way to proper stabs, like countless unseen daggers were hard at work at rendering him into minced meat. Throughout this painful prelude, Jieyuan waited as he usually did, bracing himself. But where he’d typically brace himself for the next step of the process, now that same next step was also just part of the prelude.

With his soulsense, Jieyuan could feel the unsigned chroma imbuing his soul walls, growing ever closer to a full prismful with every chrom that the imbuing ritual forced through.

The stabs turned into sears, hot and burning, and Jieyuan gritted his teeth. Endured it. Endured it as he’d seen Meiyao enduring it earlier, mouth closed, back straight. Endured it as he’d seen Daojue enduring it, showing no reaction except for a very slight tremble. Endured it to the best of his ability, because if he couldn’t even handle this much—if just this level of pain was enough to make him break—then he’d stand no chance when the soul-flare came.

And if he couldn’t handle it, he’d die—straight and simple. That was why so many cultivators got stuck at second-sign Redsoul. Sometimes the first soulflare damaged a cultivator’s mind permanently, scarring it beyond recovery, to the point that if they were to experience it again in their breakthrough to third-sign Redsoul, their mind would simply break, the body giving out right after, and the Silver Stream would come in, plucking their helpless soul right up into its silvery grasp. But as much as Jieyuan’s faith in himself had taken something of a hit these last few days, in this much at least he remained plenty confident. No pain would break him. Not the First Pain, not the Second Pain. Not even the Third Pain, when the time for it came.

So even as his body burned endlessly, impossibly hot, every part of him sizzling, boiling, and melting all at the same time, Jieyuan managed to remain conscious enough, grounded enough, long past the point he’d have normally given in and let the Pain consume him whole into white agony, to spare enough of his attention to his soulsense, keeping track of the chroma imbuing his soul walls.

When it came, he was prepared. Or as much as he could be.

The moment the unsigned chroma in his soul walls reached exactly one prismful, to the chrom, Jieyuan felt a shock. Bright and cutting, it shot past the First Pain, past the fiery agony he was in, and completely seized the front and center of his mind, leaving no room for anything else. One shock turned directly into a thousand, and then a thousand turned into a number far beyond the countable, each one a vivid, charged sear, like he’d swallowed a storm’s worth of lightning.

That lasted a total of three seconds.

On the fourth second, the fire—the burning—returned. Returned with strength that dwarfed anything that Jieyuan had ever felt while imbuing. Pain beyond comprehension, beyond description—pain that stretched the very boundaries of what pain was. His body was now fire. It wasn’t burning, but there was nothing to burn. All there was fire. Only fire. Only fire, and it burned and it burned and it burned and it burned and it burned—

Jieyuan’s eyes flew open as he gasped, drawing in entire lungfuls of air with each breath. His head was ringing. The back of it hurt something fierce, though compared to what he’d just experienced—no don’t think of that—it was nothing, literally nothing at all. And he blinked, because even though his eyes were open he wasn’t seeing, not really, and he blinked again, and he saw that he was staring up at the canopy of the gleamstone trees, and that he wasn’t sitting anymore but instead lying down, and there was something wet on the back of his head, wet and sticky, and…

“Up you get,” came a voice, distantly, muffled like it was coming from underwater. Like he was underwater.

Arms wrapped around his shoulders, pulling him up so that he was sitting again, his back against the trunk. A pair of bright green eyes met his, set in a face so lovely it hurt, framed by thick waves of brown hair. Thousands of slightly different hues played on that face, across those eyes, coming from the innumerable faces of glowing crystals all around them.

Meiyao.

Jieyuan snapped back into awareness. He still felt dazed, his thoughts swimming, his vision flashing, but at least now he wasn’t deliriously lost anymore.

“Feeling better?” Meiyao asked, and Jieyuan couldn’t take his eyes off her lips, soft and rosy and full, shaped almost like a heart—

And that’s enough of that. Jieyuan looked Meiyao straight in the eyes, worked his own lips for a moment, searching for something to say, and then settled on, “Yes. Thanks.” Meiyao had him tongue-tied more often than not, and he wasn’t exactly on top of his game right now. He’d already have his hands full trying not to come across as the utterly love-struck fool that Meiyao reduced him to sometimes.

Meiyao didn’t look entirely convinced. Her eyes were narrowed as she looked him up and down, studying him. She was kneeling in front of him, close. Very close. Close enough he could feel her breath on his face, light as it was. Something else he shouldn’t be paying attention to. “You threw your head back, at the end. It banged on the tree.”

Her eyes darted to the side, and he followed her gaze to the spot on the ground where he’d been lying just now, and he saw a little patch of blood on the gleamstone floor. Oh. He reached up to the spot in the back of his head that felt sticky and, sure enough, he felt a little jolt of pain—which he barely even noticed—as he touched a gash. A small one, but still a gash.

“Let me take a look,” Meiyao said, and before he could consent or deny or otherwise react, she already had both hands on his head, twisting it to the side while she leaned over him. And if she was close before, now they were practically glued together, her breath falling directly onto his shrouded nape, her body partially pressed against his. He felt her fingers on his hair, brushing it away.

She held the position. A beat. Two beats. Three…

Jieyuan stayed still, breath caught in his chest, locked in it.

If he was holding onto any doubts that Meiyao was a Woodsoul, that was no longer the case. Not after this.

Then she let go of his head and pulled herself back. Jieyuan almost whipped himself back—and it was both the fact that’d have meant ramming his head into the tree again and his unwillingness to make any more of a fool of himself that had him readjusting his position in a much calmer, controlled way.

“You should be fine.” Meiyao was back in her original position, kneeling in front of him. “By tomorrow it should be mostly healed. Even more so now that you’re a third-sign Redsoul. Congratulations, by the way.”

His throat went awfully dry. “Thanks,” he said again. Her words brought his mind to the breakthrough he’d just experienced, but he felt somewhat disconnected from it—like it wasn’t him that it’d happened to, like it wasn’t him she was talking about.

Meiyao narrowed her eyes at him, and given the way the corners of her lips lifted slightly, Jieyuan had a feeling it wasn’t out of simple scrutiny this time. Not when she was smirking like that, green eyes bright and clear, playful-like. But she didn’t say anything else, only stood up and began walking away. After a few steps, she glanced back. “And next time? Maybe sit a little further away from the tree?”

He was probably flushing. His face felt warm enough. “Sure.” What he’d have given for a clever comeback right now, or anything else besides that single word he’d managed.

Meiyao’s eyes lingered on him for a little longer, then she turned back, crossed the few steps that were left until she was at the tree she’d picked out before, and sat back down. It was only then that Jieyuan managed to pry his eyes off her. He looked over to his other teammate, but Daojue was sitting in the exact same position Jieyuan had remembered him being in before, eyes closed and looking as distinctly unperturbed as he always did, more like statue than man.

Jieyuan did his best to ignore everything that had just happened. All of it, one and all. From the moment he’d snapped out the soul-flare and from the looks of it flopped like a fish on the ground, to Meiyao looking him over, to their last exchange just now. Instead, he focused on his breakthrough. Fully occupied himself with it.

Ignoring his aching head, he first felt for his strength, confirmed that the pressure he could feel inside his muscles, the augmented strength from his aura, had increased. And it had. By exactly half. He then shifted his attention to his soul. The first thing he noted was the change in shade. It was now a deeper red, and the blackness in it was also less apparent—the shade much closer to the shade it was supposed to be now than it’d been before. Distinctly dark at first-sign, still noticeably dark at second-sign, and now, even though his soul was still definitely the wrong shade, it was to a much lesser extent. A very much so welcome improvement, as far as Jieyuan was concerned.

He then sent his soulsense deeper inward, to the soul center, and saw that his soulprism was whole again. Whole and smaller. Precisely two-thirds the size it used to be. But the quantity of chroma in it was still just short of two prismfuls. It was its density that had changed, from second-density to third-density, to match the density of the signed chroma imbuing his soul walls.

Jieyuan opened his eyes, feeling distinctly pleased with himself, warm with it. He might have fumbled things there towards the end, but that didn’t change the fact that he’d broken through. That he was stronger. That he was practically an inner disciple now.

And that tomorrow, they’d be finally breaking into the Fourth Ring.

—∞—

Jieyuan leaped out of the way of the massive head that had just crashed down into where he was. And he kept retreating in a series of quick, frantic steps as the rest of the vermilion gleam boa’s body followed after its head in a twisting, shimmering wave of flowing red crystal. The beast lunged after him, letting out a distinctly unsnake-like roar, a rumbling noise like massive stones grinding against each other.

Back in the First Ring, Jieyuan had come across a shifting gleam python. It’d been a timid, harmless thing, despite the way it’d spooked him and the fact it’d been big enough to wrap itself several times over the length of a fairly tall tree.

This snake, though? The vermilion gleam boa?

It was at least ten times the size of the shifting gleam python, and timid and harmless were hardly the words Jieyuan would use to describe it. In fact, those words didn’t make it into the list of words Jieyuan would use to describe it. No, that list was mostly populated by words like rabid…

Jieyuan threw himself to the side as the monster serpent spit out a stream of fire at the spot he’d just been at.

…insane…

The boa then threw itself against Jieyuan, trying to flatten him against the tree. It paid no attention at all as Meiyao and Daojue attacked it from the other direction.

…and bloodthirsty….

Jieyuan aura-lashed himself to the trunk of the tree. His perspective and center of balance completely shifted, what used to be sideways becoming his new down, and he ran up the trunk like he was on flat ground. Behind him, the snake slammed itself against the tree, making it shake.

And even using those words to describe the snake, Jieyuan suspected he was underselling it.

Leaves fell from above, but slowly, the time-warp of a soul-stilling third-sign Redsoul making their fall look almost comically crawl-like.

Running up a few steps higher, Jieyuan tapped into his aura, augmented his legs, and then pushed off with his feet as he stopped aura-lashing, flinging himself into the air. He landed down on the other side of the snake, a far bit of distance between them.

Meiyao and Daojue were nearby, both striking at the gaps in the snake’s armor that took the form of thick circular rings spaced throughout its body at set intervals, in which patches of normal, non-crystalline scale were bared.

Already the snake was coated in its own blood—even though it wasn’t that apparent, what with both its normal scales and its gleamstone ones being a similar color—but it paid that little mind as it flung its head back, found Jieyuan with its massive, slitted crimson eyes, and let out another roar as it lunged at him, ignoring everything else.

Once again, Jieyuan got the chance to experience first-hand what a mouse trapped in a cage with a snake must feel like. Not an experience he’d care to repeat later.

The snake went after him—to pluck a page from Amyas’s ledgers—like a bull that had caught a flash of red. And with all the thoughtless, dogged determination that entailed. It hated him like Jieyuan had never been hated before, and from the looks of it, it’d gladly welcome death if that meant taking him down together with it.

In hindsight, Jieyuan acknowledged he probably shouldn’t have tried to draw its attention by stabbing the egg he’d found lying around.

Well, you lived and learned.

And that was what Jieyuan was doing right now. Living and learning.

And trying not to die.

The snake lunged at him again, moving with a speed that to a fifth-sign redsoul probably wouldn’t look that impressive, but that to him was impressive plenty, and as he stepped to the side to dodge its rush he attempted to stab it in its massive eye, but it moved far too quickly, and his spear hit it harmlessly on its coat. Already it was coiling back, and just as Jieyuan made to jump again, Daojue landed on top of its head, his spear slamming down into the unprotected area between its eyes. The blade disappeared into the snake’s body, as did most of the shaft.

The snake let out a weak, squeaking noise before it slumped. Daojue jumped down from it, landing near Jieyuan.

Jieyuan stared at the snake, panting. Actually panting. From running. Even though he was a third-sign redsoul. Heavens take him, but there wasn’t a workout quite like playing tag with a murderous giant snake.

“Good job.” Meiyao flashed him a smile as she made her way over to the massive corpse. She pointedly ignored Daojue. She’d been doing both of that pretty regularly, these days. Smiling at him and ignoring Daojue. Probably not a good thing from the perspective of the three of them as a team, but Jieyuan would be lying if he said he wasn’t happy about it. And at least ignoring Daojue was better than trying to murder him. So improvements all around, he’d say.

Jieyuan watched as she stopped in front of a ring of unprotected scales near the middle of the snake’s body and immediately got to work, slicing at it, opening further the tear that had already been there, either Daojue or Meiyao herself having made it during the fight. Jieyua’s attention was more on the snake itself than on Meiyao, though.

The vermilion gleam boa, the undisputed king of the Fifth Ring. A fifth-sign Redsoul beast, and one so unusually strong that, according to Meiyao, it was ranked as a greater threat than many sixth-sign beasts, at least to a cultivator at the same soulsign as it. And they’d beaten it.

Beaten it as a trio of third-sign redsouls that only had the barest basics of cooperation down, even if he and Meiyao were working together quite nicely nowadays.

Jieyuan grinned, bright and wide, the satisfaction he felt nothing short of triumphant. Sure, he’d spent most of his time running around, and Daojue and Meiyao had done most of the bleeding work, but still. The gap between third-sign and fifth-sign was already slightly bigger than that between second-sign and third-sign, and this was no common fifth-sign beast. Jieyuan didn’t care too much for details right now.

This had been Meiyao’s idea. Today was the sixteenth of Yellowfull. Yesterday had been the last day of the Inner Hunt and the halfway mark of the Outer Hunt, so they’d agreed to hunt one last beast today and spend their remaining time cultivating in preparation for the Summit. And to seal the deal, she’d proposed they make their last hunt a vermilion gleam boa. They’d been spending most of their time in the Fourth Ring ever since his breakthrough, but they’d ventured into the Fifth Ring a couple of times already to face fifth-sign beasts, and they’d fared nicely enough that she’d been confident they could pull it off. He’d readily agreed. Daojue hadn’t said a word, but that was just par for the course.

And so here they were. Victorious. Triumphant. If any other team of outer disciples managed a higher score than theirs, then Jieyuan figured they’d very well deserve it.

Having opened a bloody hole of considerable size in the beast’s bulk, Meiyao stuck her entire right arm inside it, all the way to the elbow. She’d soon have its gleam core out, and then they’d be all but officially bidding the Gleamstone Hunt goodbye. Jieyuan wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Meiyao had been right that they’d be better off spending their remaining time preparing for the Summit, but he’d been enjoying himself, even more so these last few days. He didn’t really want it to—

Daojue grabbed onto him and pulled him out of the way. There was a ringing sound, and in the spot Jieyuan had just been standing at, there was now a finesaber, over two-thirds of its blade disappearing into the gleamstone ground, sticking out at an angle, its hilt pointing in the opposite direction. Wrapped around it, blade and hilt, was a white cloth that to Jieyuan’s soulsense registered as sixth-sign Redsoul.

Jieyuan recognized the cloth. A gear-shroud, a chromal gear in the form of a cloth that cultivators wrapped around other gear so that others wouldn’t be able to tell the properties—or even the soulsign—of the gear it was shrouding to their soulsense. It was common for cultivators with artifacts above fifth-sign to use them, even more so if the artifact was a prime gear, one with a prime skill—a unique, special property.

Meiyao was immediately at his other side. All three of them with their weapons drawn, staring into the path of trees the finesaber must’ve flown out from. Jieyuan’s heart beat loudly in his chest. He’d long since shaken off the shock.

They’d come across other disciples a couple of times in the forest, but nothing had come out of those encounters. The other teams they came across would blink or stare for a bit at the ruby robes they wore before simply heading off in a different direction. This was different. This had been an assassination attempt, straight and simple.

And they were in the Fifth Ring. Where the floor was fifth-sign gleamstone. That meant that not only was the finesaber not at fifth-sign—it had to be at least eighth-sign, to have cut so easily into it, but under tenth-sign, otherwise it’d have sunk to the hilt—but that whoever had thrown it couldn’t have been just a fifth-sign redsoul, either.

The saber, moving seemingly on its own, dislodged itself from the ground and floated up. Then it shot straight into the outstretched hand of the topaz-robed woman who’d just stepped out from behind a tree.

The topaz-robed woman who also had a lightcoat on.

Merciful Heavens.

An inner elder.

A tenth-sign redsoul.

One who’d just tried to kill him, and judging from the hard, apathetic look on the woman’s face, would be trying again.