[Young Master Xian]—❈—62:: unnamed

Something thumps into my side.

I grunt and make a modicum of an effort to open my eyes and see what it is, but when my eyes decidedly stay closed, I give up and keep sleeping.

The thing knocks into my side again.

It’s a foot, my sleepy mind realises, and I begin to wonder why a foot is… what’s that word…?

You know what? Never mind. More sleep now, figure out why foot thumping me later.

Figure out word for foot thumping too. Could be useful, that.

The foot slams into me again, much harder this time.

I groan.

“Go away,” I whine, turning onto my side away from the constant kicking. Ah! That’s the word: kick.

“Xian Qigang,” The Sun Emperor says, “if you do not get up this instant, I swear to everything you hold dear that I will cut off your testicles.”

My eyes open.

The world is bright, and I notice a familiar warmth radiating down on me. It feels like sunlight.

No, wait. It is sunlight. And not just from any sun too. I’m in my soulscape, lying on a grassy field out under the sun.

This is weird.

I raise my head to better take in the field that rolls off into the horizon.

When and how did I get here?

Last I remember is… The Empress! She used her subjugation technique on me and… I resisted it.

Yet another impossible thing to add to my list of accomplishments, this one arguably more public and problematic than even the stunt with the Wild Qi storm. Damn it.

No time to worry about that now though, what’s more important is that just like with the Wild Qi storm back in Silver Springs, I hadn’t gotten away with breaking The Empress’ subjugation unscathed.

I’d been hurt. I’d been bleeding. Mother had come and carried me out.

“Qigang,” Sunny calls behind me, and properly lucid now, I hear the strain in his voice.

I turn, and at the sight of The Sun Emperor, I grimace.

I’ve seen Sunny injured before. In fact, bad as they are, his injuries now are nowhere near as bad as they’d been after the Wild Qi storm.

Not being that bad though, doesn’t make them negligible. If I rate his injuries now between 1 and 10, ten being his injuries after our misadventure with Wild Qi, and one being a booboo, this is a solid seven. Maybe even an eight.

He looks like he picked a fight with a tiger and lost. Badly.

“Why is it always you getting hurt over these things?” I ask, feeling a little guilty.

Sunny gives me a long look. Finally, he says, “If it bothers you that much, then attain congruence upon your breakthrough. If you do, you and I will truly fuse into one being, and then it will be you getting broken every time you do some impossible thing.

“An added benefit will be that I will no longer get to see your face,” he adds. “That will be nice.”

“But doesn’t that mean you die?” I say, asking a question I’ve idly contemplated for some time now. “If I attain congruence and we fuse, we become one, but I’ll still be me. I will be in control. Doesn’t that mean you die?”

“I was never truly alive, Qigang,” he says. “Only that which truly lives may truly die.”

I frown at his non-answer. “Why do I feel like you’re avoiding the question by throwing mysterious BS lines in my face?” I ask.

Sunny lets out a long, tired sigh.

I consider suggesting he sits and rest instead of stand there with his nasty, gaping, weirdly bloodless wounds, but it takes me all of two seconds to discard the idea.

I don’t know everything about Sunny, but I know enough about him to know how he’ll take that suggestion.

After several moments of silence, Sunny says, “Think of it this way, Qigang, the greatest honour that any cultivator can do their cultivation, is to become congruent with it.”

My eyebrows climb at that. “Really? I would have thought it was the other way around,” I say, “with you doing the cultivator an honour.”

“It can be both,” Sunny points out.

Fair enough.

A cool, gentle breeze blows through, and we both take a few moments to bask in it.

When it passes, I say without looking at him. “It’s a sure thing, isn’t it? Congruence. It’s why you keep bringing it up. My guess is everything else is in place, you just need me to want it.”

I look at him now, but his gaze remains fixed on the horizon as he says nothing.

“You do know keeping quiet is basically saying yes in things like this, right?” I ask, a little amused.

Again he says nothing.

I sigh. “Fine then, keep your secrets,” I say. He had told me, after all, that he can’t tell me anything about congruence because it is a path I have to walk alone, or some such.

If I am right though, and it looks like I am, then this changes everything.

Before, the burden of it wasn't on me. Not really. Very, very few cultivators achieve congruence. I’d assumed the odds aren’t in my favour and moved on with things. Now though, on my head it rests.

With every impossible thing I do, the eyes on me grow; my mother’s expectations grow; my role in this great, big, stupid, and entirely pointless game that is politics grows. If I do something like become congruent, if I join this club so elite that not even The Empress of The Sunrise Empire is one of its less than two hundred members the world over…

Where does it end then? Will I ever truly know peace.

Some will say I’m being stupid. They will say power is power, and it’s always good to have as much of it as you can have. I say those people have no idea what they’re talking about.

This is a cultivator world. Power invites challenge. It was true even in a world like Earth, and it’s ten times more here.

I don’t want to be challenged. I don’t want to challenge others. That was Qigang’s thing, and almost everything that I am was created as a direct rejection of everything that he was.

He enjoyed taking women by force, so my greatest turn-on is a woman offering herself to me of her own will and desire; he loved to be feared, I abhor it; he liked to step on those beneath him on the ladders of society while I can’t help but see all the ways that is wrong and want to stop it.

He craved power… I don’t.

To be honest, I fear it.

I’m no paragon. I know this. I look good next to scumgang, but that’s next to him. A pile of steaming shit looks good next to that guy.

Power corrupts, and I have a deep fear that I lack the strength of character to resist the siren call of the easy way out.

In a world like this where the use of force is expected and even encouraged, how long until I get into the habit of solving my problems by throwing a little qi around.

How long until I do it to silence someone speaking out against my wrong?

When Qigang got too far out of line, Mother restrained him.

What happens then if I’m so powerful that even the strongest cultivators out there will hesitate to stand up to me? Who will restrain me if I begin to become like him? Meng Yi? Xiuying? They lack the raw power for that. And while they have a lot of influence over my actions now, what about in a hundred years? Two hundred. Five.

I’m a cultivator. My lifespan is measured in centuries. And with power like congruence, I could feasibly live over a thousand.

What if I outlive Meng Yi and Xiuying? What if I outlive all of my friends? What if I outlive my family? My children. Maybe even my grandchildren.

What if I don’t die? What if I ascend?

Who wants to live for thousands of years watching everyone you know and love waste away before your eyes?

Well, I know who. But like I told my mother when she made her declaration to ascend at that dinner table, that is insanity.

At least, it sounds like it to me.

With a sigh, I shake away my thoughts, not liking the depressing turn they’ve taken.

Looking for something with which to distract myself, I turn to Sunny.

His wounds aren’t bleeding, looking more like he’s a butchered corpse that a living being with gruesome injuries, but they do look terrible, and The Sun Emperor himself looks the worse for wear.

His hair is a mess, his clothes are near tattered rags barely hanging on his form, he even sways a little as he stands.

“Shouldn’t we get to fixing you up?” I ask and he turns to me.

“Me? No, never mind little old me, Qigang. I’m only in a lot of pain. You know what, how about you go back to sleeping on the grass, you seemed to really be enjoying that,” he says, tone flatter than an ironing board.

“Huh. I didn’t know you do sarcasm,” I say, genuinely surprised.

“But of course I can’t do sarcasm, Qigang,” Sunny says. “Whyever would I be capable of such an enlightened skill?”

I roll my eyes. “Alright, fine. I get it. I’m sorry I ignored your situation.”

This seems to mollify him, because he does that thing he uses to move us around in here and suddenly, we’re standing on a hill miles away from his palace.

The palace lays in ruins.

The very earth is cracked in places, rent asunder to leave chasms tens of metres wide.

Dotting the ground by the thousands like the fallen of some great battle are the corpses of Sunny’s colourful army.

At least they’re not corrupted monstrosities coming for our heads this time around.

I’ll take corpses over those any day.

That said though…

“So much death and destruction from a few seconds under her technique,” I mutter.

“It isn’t being under her technique that caused this,” Sunny says. “It’s rejecting it.”

“And how exactly did we reject it?” I ask, seeing as I’m low on particulars. All I know is, I hadn’t wanted to do what she was commanding me to. So I hadn’t.

To be honest though, I’d also taken offense to the fact that she was trying to subjugate me in the first place.

Like seriously, has that woman not heard of free will?

“Subjugation is a clash of souls,” Sunny explains. “And cultivation bolsters the soul. It adds weight to it. Power. Gravitas.”

“Which is why ordinarily the person with the higher cultivation comes out on top,” I say.

“And why there needs to be a clear gap in cultivation for the technique to work at all,” Sunny adds.

“Except for me that isn’t the case, because I have something extra in here.”

“Indeed,” he agrees.

I look around at the destroyed landscape, a thought occurring to me for the first time ever.

“Where is it?” I ask. “Do you know?”

Sunny nods. “As you know, mortals have a single layer to their souls,” he says.

“Yeah, their like consciousness or something,” I say, remembering the lesson from my mother. “Cultivators have two, the cultivation on top and then the consciousness inside. The two fuse during congruence.” I pause a  second, a suspicion as to why he would bring this up arising. “Are you saying it’s different for me?” I ask.

“On the outside is your cultivation,” Sunny says, “after that is your ego, more complex and varied than it should be—” he pauses for a moment as though considering if he wants to say the next thing he wants to say, then he commits “—and already partly fused with your cultivation.”

My eyebrows climb.

I mean, I already suspected, but still, hearing him confirm it is still significant.

Sunny continues. “And then, for you, there is the third layer.”

“Where the rolling power is,” I say.

The Sun Emperor grimaces, like my name offends his high-class sensibilities.

“I call it the cosmic dice,” he says.

I begin to roll my eyes before something occurs to me. “You’ve seen it?” I ask.

He nods.

“Can I see it too?” I ask, then quickly amend: “After we finish fixing you up, of course.”

Sunny shoots me a side-eye. “Of course,” he says.