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  As I enter between the towering trees, I decide that I have just enough qi gathered to start some experiments. The most important trick I want to try is spiritual sense. Every sect used to have a different name for this phenomenon, but spiritual sense is the best descriptor in my opinion. Heavenly Sight, True Viewing, God Sense, it doesn’t matter how you call it, it’s all about using the qi outside of your body to increase the range of your senses.

  Deciding that I have deep enough into forest not to be disturbed, I separate a quarter of my total energy and guide it to my mouth, which I let flow outside. A sphere a few metres in radius gets a slight qi saturation, allowing me to feel the shape of everything in its reach.

  Closing my eyes, I stand still as the nostalgic feeling of absolute knowledge about the environment returns to me. The amount of qi you pump out determines the amount of feedback you get. For example, a scouting sense is as thin as possible, covering an immense area with little qi, but only allowing one to be able to sense vague shapes.

  Studying artefacts requires one to saturate the environment around said artefact to the maximum. Some advanced objects can only be truly comprehended by pouring absurd amounts of qi inside them.

  This scouting sense was the responsibility of a sectioned mind process previously, but now I control it manually for greater effect. Shaping the energies into a beam two metres across and around 30-metres long, I swirl it around me, sweeping my direct environment. A flood of data surges in my mind like a biological radar screen, the shapes of tree trunks, life signatures of small animals, and the outlines of dense undergrowth are all clear. As I keep the beam spinning around me, I travel deeper into the forest. A few hours later I notice a burrow filled with a single fat rabbit.

  The first stalking victim has been found! Slowly making my way over to the burrow, I focus my senses on the creature. I make note that this animal is the first one that seems normal to me. An ordinary, fluffy rabbit lacking any scales, feathers, or other odd features. On closer inspection the rabbit isn’t fat, just pregnant. A tree next to the burrow seems slightly bigger than the rest and has slightly higher mana concentrations than its brethren; camping spot found! I’m on a roll, two objectives right next to each other.

  As I stop patting myself on the back, I notice that my qi reserves are slowly dwindling. Keeping perfect control of qi outside your body is really hard, and some leakage is unavoidable. The prospective momma rabbit isn’t going anywhere, so I refocus my qi, gently sending it into the tree in order to have a conversation. It goes a bit like this:

  “Hey tree.”

  Bewildered feelings of confusion.

  “I know, I know, talking isn’t something you’re good at, right?”

  Vague feelings of indignation.

  “Hah, you got me there. I would absolutely suck at standing still all day and living on just water and sun. You’re doing a much better job than I ever could!”

  Faint feelings of pride. Is that a bashful emotion? I swear this tree would be blushing right about now if it had capillaries in its woody visage.

  “You know what would be even better? Being hollow inside, it’s all the rage with the trees in the next forest over.”

  More confusion and slight disgust. This is one sassy tree.

  “I guess you’re right; I don’t think you could even do it. Only the oldest trees over there can accomplish it anyway, a shame.”

  After I sense an even bigger feeling of indignation, I know I have the tree in the palm of my hand. A true lady tree killer is what I am. As I continue to converse with the woody perennial, I coax and seduce it into following my plan, giving me a roof over my head. Using my qi, I show how sexy it’ll be with the hollow shape in its trunk. I make up some impressive statistics and images that show the many benefits of sheltering me. The poor soul is quickly overwhelmed with my flawless reasoning, and I help guide it with my qi.

  Sacred, secret ancient art my ass – stupid Ancient Grove tree hugging hippie sect. Months of planning in order to break into their best-protected vault and the secret manual is just a shitty conversation guide.

  While I’m sighing to myself, the bark slowly gives way as the power-infused wood shapes into a small chamber, just enough to sit in. Ignoring the groaning of a four-metre wide trunk changing its internal structure, I wipe the splinters and dirt away. Temporary home found; let’s first recover my qi with some active meditation while keeping an eye on the rabbit.

  Human foetuses get a soul fairly early on in the pregnancy cycle, but most animals get a small one at birth. This highly pregnant rabbit should be the perfect subject for some research into the laws governing this planet.

  An hour later the sky above me is turning various shades of pink and orange, and mama rabbit settles down. Instead of fussing about with the fur-laden nest she lays down on top of it. I increase the amount of qi focussed on missus rabbit to half of my total, allowing me a faint glimpse of her soul.

  The first soul I’ve seen in this world and it’s quite a shocker. Pitch black; absorbing light like a greedy black hole; it sits in the rabbit’s brain. My qi should not be quite dense enough in order to sense souls, but I get a vague impression of it anyway.

  The world is usually all shades of grey, but this little bunny has a heart and soul blacker than pitch. The babies she pops out are naked, small, pink and blind. As they take their first totally independent actions a soul nestles in their bodies. A perfect balance of grey, as all new-born souls are. Neither evil nor good, new souls tend to just exist. Once higher functions like instinct and will come online, the colour should change to match the temperament of the creature.

  At least, that’s how it should be. The sickening amount of dark tinted mana in the air visibly corrodes the lighter parts, turning them darker before my very eyes, although extremely slowly. They should be completely black like their mom after a few weeks. This shocks me to my very core.

  A quick inspection of my own soul realm assures me that my soul is still as grey as they come. With relief in my heart, I settle my shaking body. Automatic soul adjustment to the darker side of things, this is immense. I don’t know who is responsible for managing this planet, but they are doing an absolutely shitty job. Babies of sentient and self-aware species are grey until their teens when enough information and life experience have settled into the kids to allow them to make semi-well-informed decisions.

  Evil done in ignorance is not evil from the doers’ perspective, and perspective is all that matters in the universe. The vilest being I have ever seen had a soul as white as snow. Simple ignorance and a lack of knowledge about the world allowed this child to do horrific acts without a single blemish on his soul. Ironclad, unshakable belief in one’s correct path and course of action is just as wrong as wilfully committing evil acts.

  Still slightly shaking I ponder the meaning of this. Do sentient babies get their souls turned dark automatically too? A soul colour is not the main indicator of a person’s willingness to inflict harmful and meaningless actions, but it’s a good guideline.

  Through observing many people over my various lives, I have noticed that only empathy gets influenced by soul colour in any meaningful way. A being with a pure white soul has a near-psychic ability to put themselves in the shoes of another. A perfect black soul has little thought of any other than themselves. This once again could be my biased views taking the forefront, I tell myself.

  Soul measuring devices are a concept that contradicts its very self, as you need sentience in order to observe the soul. As there is no way for any sentient being to be perfectly impartial, empirical science is impossible on this subject.

  Is it a self-sustaining process or a vicious cycle? Metaphorical powers such as light, darkness, good, and evil usually keep themselves in check by constant attrition of the opposing forces. This diminishes the battling power of itself, so it usually balances itself out in the end. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. This dark energy might just have started out as a slight imbalance
that grew exponentially. I ignore the earth mana dancing around me as I continue to worry.

  “This won’t do. My beautiful and useful tree I’m sorry but I have to check something out.”

  As I feel shock emanating from the brown and blue barked tree I stand up and walk towards the direction of the village that I saw earlier today. Standing in the same spot for hundreds of years and doing nothing but grow, only to have some guy forcefully start talking to you and leave right after must be quite the experience.

  I walk away from the tree while worry gnaws at my guts, my emotions just not calming down after this discovery. Forcibly trying to clear my mind I focus some qi into my leg muscles, instantly running at Olympic speeds while zigzagging through the forest.

  Half an hour later I observe a cosy village, while trying to keep my lungs in my body. I have not felt these levels of exhaustion for a few hundred years, but I’m thankful for the distraction. The treeline ends about fifty metres from the nearest hut. As I sneak through the underbrush, I thank the sun for creating lengthening shadows around me. I avoid the people walking around as I sneak towards the nearest house.

  Keeping my breathing in check I spread my spiritual sense through the wooden wall. A single person is inside, cooking. Focusing on the person’s head a ball of blackness stares back at me. Suppressing a shiver, I creep to the next house, only to find two adults and a child. Two pitch-black souls and a dark grey one. Are my senses fooling me? Are soul laws so different here that I’m simply interpreting things differently?

  Realisation hits me. A total unknown phenomenon is staring me in the face and I’m worrying? I had trouble finding new things to learn in the previous world, so now something unknown hits me from left field and I’m acting like a worried pansy? I crawl through the entire village, scanning the inhabitants of every house. Around thirty wooden houses with an average of three and a half inhabitants and one stone building with seven people in it nets me only dark or black souls. In a daze I crawl back to the woods, walking through the forest back to my tree.

  How did this happen?

  An entire world filled with dark souls?

  Are there even any gods here?

  A massive black energy generation phenomenon?

  A self-sustaining expanding imbalance?

  Thoughts swirl through my head as excitement replaces worry. A new world to explore, new theories to formulate, and new dishes to taste! I reach the tree and sit down. My excitement gets a slight damper as I notice momma bunny eating one of her young.

  With a bloody cute little maw, she just munches on the legs of one of the naked pink creatures. The little baby bunny keeps on suckling, not having the energy to fight back. There are just three babies left; blood stains the only indication that there were more. As I force more qi into her mind I try to analyse what hormones are causing this behaviour.

  My mood further darkens as I only feel a sense of laziness. Too lazy to move a few metres to eat some grass so she just eats one of her young? Normal bunnies do this too, but not often, and then it’s usually a result of neglect or a dietary deficiency. This bunny is perfectly healthy, just too bored to bother otherwise.

  As she finishes her current meal and starts nibbling on the second-to-last healthy youngling I feel my stomach churn a bit. Wait, no that’s just hunger. Not having eaten anything since coming here I suddenly feel quite famished. It seems that this world is also one where might makes right. Let’s exercise that right now.

  Standing up I position myself above the burrow, focussing qi on my fist. I aim a lazy punch to the ground. The earth splits as the qi shoots forwards when my fist stops. A latticework of qi shaped into the form of a shovel shoots through the ground and I decapitate the fresh mother. I retrieve the bundle of qi and reach into the hole, gently putting the last young on its mother’s body. I pull the two warm bodies from the earth, leaving the head along with half of a chewed-up youngling in the ground, as the hole collapses.

  Standing there with a bunny corpse and a freshly born bunny baby, I start thinking about what to do. I notice that the foundation of my new power base is rather unstable. Putting all my qi into a shovel shape and moving it outside my body was a lot more draining than I thought. I need to work on firming my foundations.

  Also, I’m hungry and am holding a relatively large piece of fresh meat. I regain a bit of my smile as I think about how ethical it is to burn wood in a cooking fire while talking to a tree.

  Chapter four

  Ascension

  “What is a soul,” I say to the small naked rabbit sheltered in my cupped hands. “That’s the first thought I had when I ended up here.”

  I sit down and rest my back against the tree’s interior. I poke the fire while putting the rabbit on my lap. The little animal looks like an oversized pink raisin, it’s ugliness somewhat countered by the cute way the little critter is wiggling its nose and nuzzling my hand. I stare into the fire for a bit, wondering how I should tell this tale of mine. I have found that reasserting oneself is a rather crucial habit to have when you get to my age.

  “I’m like over a thousand years old, ya know. You’re not even an hour old. That makes me…,” here I pause to let my slow brain crunch the numbers, “…ten million times your senior. So follow proper etiquette and obey me, your granddaddy, okay?”

  I stare down at the little pink thing some more. I stop poking the fire and scratch it between its ears, infusing a bit of energy into the critter as I do so. “Right, but I should start at the beginning, no?”

  Nodding to myself, I start telling my - literally - captive audience a story.

  “My name is Drew Lian and I’m a cultivator. Not one of crops and soil but one of my own body, or rather my mind. It all started when I died on Earth. My last memory is of sitting in my pride and joy, the massive library I built throughout my life.

  “Then I guess I died, because next thing I know I’m some young kid whose parents just got killed. A little shit of a young master had been torturing us three for looking at him a bit too long. That’s just something that happens when a simple mortal annoys a cultivator; stuff like that was pretty common. Life was pretty shitty for common folk in that world.”

  I shrug in a helpless manner as I relive the constant atmosphere of dread that kept the entire village docile and empty-eyed. Life for mortals under the heel of non-benevolent and all-powerful cultivators is just not great.

  “The little asswipe eventually got bored and left, telling me how honoured I should be that my lowly life had been of some use to the mighty him. Anyway, it took me a while to bury those two unfamiliar humans; my body felt the familial relation and I couldn’t just leave them there to rot. I then made my way back to the village my body hailed from and laid low for a few years.”

  I shift into a more comfortable position, patting the tree I’m leaning on while feeding the little rabbit a blade of grass. I look up and see that the big rabbit carcass hanging above the fire is nearly done. The few roots I find also smell tasty. I wipe the drool from my mouth and start eating, continuing to talk to myself and the rabbit in between bites.

  “So, I found out my parents had been simple farmers. I lived in the shadow of the Black Turtle sect, a low ranked group of bandits that lucked into finding a cultivation technique. That place was filled with zealots, maniacs, and idiots. Their hobby was sitting in a room all by themselves while absorbing this energy called qi whenever they weren’t too busy with killing themselves or us.

  “Life in that village was pretty bad. Think of a ruthless slavery dictatorship,only with less happiness and smiles. I’d have loved for something as convenient as receiving the memories of this body’s previous owner, but that didn’t happen. Instead, it took me years before I learned the language while playing the traumatised child. Some of the elder folk in the village took pity on me and taught me to speak, read, and write the local language. I’m still thankful for that old geezer.

  “My period of laying low came to an end when I came acro
ss the corpse of one of these cultivators. I was sixteen at the time, too old to get into any sect. Without a special body constitution or other mystical affinities, I would’ve been stuck with the scrubs in the outer court anyway.

  “I looted the dead sucker and found an ‘introduction to cultivation’ manual, a few pills, and a talisman or two. The corpse must have gotten poisoned, escaped, and succumbed to his wounds a few kilometres into the forest bordering my birth village.”

  I pause to throw some more wood on the fire. The flames lick at the wood as I reminisce about times long past. I briefly question my own sanity. I’m sitting in the middle of a forest, resting inside a partially hollow tree while enjoying the flames that come from burning said tree’s very body; and I’m talking to a day-old rabbit kit while leaning against a tree I’ve had an actual conversation with.

  “Right. The initial cultivation method I found was the Black Bone first stage manual. It instructed me to infuse my body with qi of certain elements. Starting from the bones, tendons, muscles, inner organs, and finally skin, my body would change into the colour of my chosen element.

  “I didn’t like the idea of having to restrict myself to a single element even back then. Instead of blindly following the complicated diagrams and chants, I read the manual and tried to understand it. I got the gist of what it wanted me to do and then made up my own method.

  “From then on, I tested every manual I came across and tried to learn the fundamentals behind what makes the method special. I then followed this up by experimenting with the basics I learned from it. I used the fundamental tenets of science from Earth to create my own understanding of the concept of cultivation. Observe and experiment. Look at something happening and wonder why.”

  I stare the little rabbit in its eyes as I say this last part. I then wonder why it has its eyes closed. Bunnies are born blind, but I’m pretty certain this one was peeking through a crack between its pink eyelids not minutes ago.