Lily was in good spirits when she returned to their house after a long session— plenty of ideas to test out, new routes to take her practice, even some fun challenges… from a core formation cultivator no less! It was everything she’d expected from the University of East Saffron and more. All the wonders of cultivation, finally at her fingertips…
Avyr, as it was, though, returned far less happily. The average person wouldn’t have been able to tell, but Lily wasn’t the average person— she could see it in the way he stalked into their house, fur abristle, claws just barely restrained from scratching long lines into the ground, tail flicking here and there in agitation. Tense. An unpleasant tenseness settled in every aspect of his body… “are you alright?”
Avyr heaved a sigh, flopping over sideways onto the floor with a heavy thump. “No.” There was a distinctly complaining lilt to his voice. “I’m not. I was hoping that things would be better than this, but…” he growled, the sudden sharpness of the sound taking Lily off guard and making her flinch back for a moment before he sheepishly stopped. “Sorry. I don’t mean to… it was just frustrating. I thought that the Bloody Saffron Sect would be better than this, but…”
She sat down beside him. “What happened?”
“My liaison was an idiot core formation cultivator who thought that just because he’d crystalized his spirit into a lollipop he’d become entitled to determine every aspect of his charges’ lives. He refused to so much as speak to me until I accepted his commands.”
“That sounds…”
“He wanted me to be a mount. A mount!” Avyr rolled over, tossing a paw up into the air in frustration. “Who does he think he is, speaking like that— there’s nothing in the whole world that could possibly make me want to do that— and what hubris does it take, to look at someone who escaped the Empire of Nine Sunlights and say— sure, why not, why don’t you become a mount anyways.”
Lily frowned. “Surely he was at least… well intentioned. The matters of core formation cultivators are incomprehensible to us, mortal as we are.”
“No, they’re very comprehensible, especially when they’re being that petty… who do they think they are? To demand that a cultivator changes their entire path merely because they think they know a better way— doesn’t that run entirely contrary to the entire course of cultivation? Their idiots if they think—” he paused, drawing in a deep breath and slowly letting it out. “Sorry. I don’t mean to get angry at you. I know that you, at least, have my best interests in mind…”
“Of course.” The words came unbidden, entirely thoughtlessly— yet she meant them from the bottom of her self. “Always.”
Avyr churred, nuzzling his head against her side for a short second. “Thanks. I appreciate it…” he sighed. “You’re probably right in that a Core Formation— any Core Formation cultivator— has forgotten more about cultivation than we’ve learned in our entire lives… but, trust me, they can be just as petting and cruel as any other human. Close-minded stupidity is not something that’s forgotten at the core formation level, I assure you.”
Lily snorted. “Damn. Did he leave that bad of an impression?”
“No—” he paused. “Well, yes, but that’s not the only thing informing my opinions. There’s more to it than that…” he was quiet for a long moment. “When I was younger—” slowly, and Lily leant forward, interested in another snippet of a past she barely ever got to hear about— “I was… around core formation cultivators a lot. They’re not quite as mystical as they want you to believe… especially not when they’re not trying to make you think they’re not mystical and powerful divine figures…” a bit of wry amusement crossed his face, settling on him for just a moment before it was caught up and swept away by the echo of melancholy that always seemed to go with it.
Lily didn’t respond for a while— never could quite figure out how to, when he mourned the so much that he’d lost. She’d never lost something like that… she’d lost much, but not in the visceral way that Avyr had. “That must have been…” she searched for a word that wouldn’t insult her best friend… “interesting.”
He chuckled softly. “Yes, actually— it’s a lot more interesting than you might’ve believed. Core formation cultivators can get up to the goofiest of shenanigans, what with all the power they have… there was one time, my… one of the core formation cultivators I knew well created a pill that would turn my fur bright pink in revenge for getting her in a game of red ribbon tail… I was upset at the time, but in retrospect it was hilarious. One of the two most powerful cultivators of the clan, forced to address everyone at a public meeting with a ribbon tied to her tail, and me, bright pink and surly in the midst of it all…” he shook his head. “Occasionally, we’d have visitors, and they could be… not cruel, but as confidently misinformed as this cultivator is. Once a human Core Formation cultivator levied the idea that we should subject ourselves entirely to their authority in order to resist the Empire of Nine Sunlights, which… it ended about as well as could’ve been expected.”
Lily giggled. “That must’ve been pretty crazy, growing up with such powerful cultivators around you.” It explained a lot of things, in retrospect. How Avyr had known so much about the quality of pills, how he’d reacted so nonchalantly to the presence of powerful cultivators like Zhihu, how he recognized the power of that attack…
He snorted. “Not as much as you might have thought— we were a pretty small clan, all things considered, and I knew most of the other kittens in Black Rock Refuge, so it wasn’t like I was given any particular special privilege. Sometimes it was a little awkward, to see the others venerate my… people that I knew so well. It never really made sense to me until I was older and had met more Core Formation cultivators— and had started to reconcile that the way most mortals thought of Core Formation cultivators was similar to how Core Formation cultivators thought of the Great Ones…” he shook his head. “It was nice while it lasted.”
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And what could she really say to that? To someone who had lost everything…
She just ran a hand through her best friend’s fur, feeling the slight shudder to his breath, and leaned in against him. A slight bit of support, so little, yet— as best as she could. “You don’t need stupid liaisons. If they’re dumb, then they’re dumb.” The idea of a Core Formation cultivator from the Bloody Saffron Sect being dumb sounded… dubious to her, but if Avyr insisted… between her best friend and the sect, she’d always choose the former. “I’ll just tell you what mine told me. So, basically, we spoke a great deal about meditation, and the directions they’re leading us…”
It wasn’t much, but Avyr understood it well enough.
It was enough, for now.
………
Lily sat on the roof of the house clad in the darkness of night and the light of the city beneath wide-flung heaven, so endless above… a glittering spread of so many stars, and all the glow of city lights cast upwards to heaven, glorious and golden. Lesser, perhaps, compared to the crisp perfection that had been looking up at the Dragonspine skies, but still… there was a certain beauty to it. She could see how the ancients had become so enamored with the celestial spheres…
Yet, she hadn’t crawled out to stargaze. No matter how much she wanted to just lay down and let the spinning of the world take her to peace, for a moment, for a time… she sighed, and closed her eyes, focusing. The heavens were beyond her reach. Beyond the reach of all cultivators but the very uppermost echelons of them, but she, herself was not. The world was as it was.
She breathed in, carefully, measured— then out again. Then in. Then out again… over and over again, each time with it bringing the quiet remembrance of all the meditations she’d done before, and the premonition of all the meditation she’d have to do after— and it was going to be a lot, she was sure…
She blocked out the world, and then slowly she blocked out her blocking, and saw the brilliant vivacity of the city at night. Currents she could perceive only faintly with her regular vision became something so much more profound in the eye of her mind. The city at night… she was just one tiny spark of bloody qi wrapped in bloody flesh, beneath the enormous swirling chaos of qi flowing hither and coming forth, bursting and fading, wrapping around…
The city was truly majestic when viewed through the lense of cultivation. She could not even begin to grasp the intricacies of what she perceived, but still… it felt almost sheltering. A single spark beneath the outspread wing of some great and terrible beast— knowing, despite everything, despite its indifference and at times cruelty, it was still her guard and guardian.
She wasn’t sure, but she thought that just maybe, if she looked hard enough, casting her senses as far as they went and then— cracking open her eyes and staring further beyond them— she could see the enormous bands of qi that split the sky and formed the backbone of East Saffron’s great defense. Whether or not that was actually true, though, she had no idea. It could have very well been a trick of the light, or some play of the lesser qi currents more tangibly within her reach…
She smiled softly, and sank back into herself. She wasn’t here to deal with the tremulous and tumultuous, magnificent and terrifying qi of the world now. For now… all that she wanted to do was practice one thing.
Qi control.
She delved deep within herself, coming after a brief moment to the core of her qi. It had grown, slightly, since she’d seen it last, which she attributed mostly to the qi produced by her own body over the past few days— slightly filling out the space at the center of her. She breathed in a wisp of the atmospheric qi of the world, pulling it deeper into her body— with great strain— and then all but wincing as it slipped into her core and… sat there, all dirty like. It wasn’t the same yin-rich, bloody qi as the stuff in her body, even if it was slowly transforming into it…
She could try again, but she was intelligent enough to guess that diluting her beautifully pristine blood-aspect qi with the muddy mess that was the ambient qi of East Saffron was probably a bad idea. What she really needed was a cultivation technique like Avyr’s… though, she was certain that she couldn’t just use his. Something suited not just to extreme yang qi but to a cat’s physique probably wouldn’t work for her at all— no, she needed to find her own method.
Now, she could have painstakingly reinvented the wheel, but she wasn’t feeling quite that masochistic at the moment. So, instead, she grabbed the brush and ink she’d brought with her, and started to draw. Who needed a complicated cultivation technique when she could just make a formation instead? Formations, she knew. Formations were in many ways easy compared to trying to actually get a cultivation technique for herself… though, hopefully, she’d be able to acquire one from her mentor in due time…
Until then— she placed the last rune of her formation on the tiles, a splatter of ink and a swirled line, belying its exacting nature…
A chaotic mess almost, all coming together almost seamlessly into a whole. She stared at it for a long moment. Compared to the formations she’d carefully carved for Avyr, it looked the work of a child— the creation of someone who had no clue what they were doing. Yet, when looked at with her newfound qi-sight, she could see the way the ambient qi bled into its structure, slowly entering a cyclical rotation, she could clearly tell that it worked. Perhaps even better than her old formation had— now, at least, she didn’t need to lug around a giant rock with her all the time to check whether she’d got the formation right.
As it was, it filtered for the ambient qi of East Saffron, which was… useless. Yet, all it asked for was a bit of a guiding touch— and that, she could give. Sinking once more into meditation, she pulled at the qi at the heart of herself and dredged up that bloody essence, drawing out of her and gathering it in her palms— and then pressing it against the formation.
It was sucked away from her in an instant— and then the revolution transformed. The scarlet qi raced through it for a long moment, leaping from rune to rune until the slowly revolving qi of the formation was no longer the breathy atmospheric qi but rather hers. And slowly, as it turned, as the atmosphere revolved around and without her, her little formation began to fill up with qi all but perfectly suited to her. She breathed in, and it was invigorating.
It wasn’t much, not yet… but it was good.
It was a start.
She crossed her legs, centered her mind, and for the first time in her life, began to cultivate.
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