Shards of Awakening

Quan Jia scowls down an aisle bordered by shelves at least ten feet tall and crammed full to bursting with leather bound books. Not a single one looked like it had any fancy ink drawings in them, let alone stories about friendship and rivals or any cool looking fight scenes. Plus, I swear I've been down this one before… see, there's that bright yellow book again…

This entire afternoon had been a near complete waste of time. And she'd come here with such high hopes too… I could have found a cool Technique, or a talking book, or at least pestered Ninth for one of those Art flower things, but noo…

Instead, she'd been trapped here on the bottom floor of the library wandering through the stacks and studiously ignoring boring book title after boring book title… stupid stairs, hiding like they're the Chthonic Font…

Qi twists and a kaleidoscope within her soul shatters. An iridescent line appears beneath her feet. It sparks sullenly and then fades away with a nearly audible snap… so not fair…

Quan Jia sighs with the resignation that only comes after having all of one's hopes and dreams shattered.

"You win this time, stupid library. I'll read your boring books, but next time…"

With that admission, she reaches out for the obnoxiously yellow book that was sitting there at eye level and taunting her with her failure. On Spiritual Phylogeny… who puts gold lettering on top of a yellow cover, so tacky... Flipping the book open to a random page, she starts reading.

One must of necessity draw a line of demarcation between Spirits who have associated with a Court and those who have not. This however, is not a distinction of type, but rather of personality, or perhaps of Resonance.

Boring… stubbornly, she flips past the unnecessarily wordy introduction to Spirit Courts and stops at a page almost halfway through.

In contrast to Spirits, whose precise nature and origin as yet eludes Imperial Scholarship, Spirit Beasts are much more well understood. Consider for instance, a wolf: in all ways mundane, born without any of the ephemera which allows Awakening or any quirk of environment that bestows upon it an unusual character. However, instead of the death that normally arrives for beasts who live amidst the wild it survives, it grows up and if exceptionally fortunate will eventually old. With age comes wisdom, so it is for cultivators and so it is for beasts as well.

More than mere wisdom though, a curious thing occurs for a beast which surpasses ten years of life: it gains an awareness of self, a single smoldering ember of sapience. Should that wolf then survive ninety more years, a more profound change occurs: the unrefined Qi of Earth affects a transformation of that wolf into a spirit-wolf and bestows upon it a dramatic increase in physical prowess, and critically the ability to communicate.

This pattern repeats for years 1,000 and 10,000, whereby the thousandth year of life grants considerable refinement to both the wolf's intellect and physical power while the ten-thousandth year grants the wolf the ability to manipulate the Qi of Earth in a crude facsimile of the manipulations accomplished by cultivators.

The refinement offered by aging to 100,000 years bestows upon the spirit-beast powers equivalent to that of the most powerful of Emerald Souled cultivators and the title of Ancestor-Beast. Fortunately, the number of Ancestor-Beasts that exist within the borders of the Eternal Empire can be counted on the fingers of one hand with digits to spare.

Alights upon Spires of Stone has chosen for himself a demesne amidst the high desert spires of the Wang Kingdom. The Ancestor Vulture has in the time since maintained cordial relations with the Wang Clan and will at times even consent to a trade of shed feathers for various curiosities. It is worth noting that the particulars of what the Ancestor Vulture desires with respect to trade is unknown. He has turned down treasures, the purchase of which could bankrupt a core kingdom for simple baubles of cut glass.

Delver of Sightless Depths indiscriminately claims all oceans as its domain, an act that has brought it into irregular conflict with the navies of The Stormwall. Despite repeated attempts, the Yao Clan has been to date unable to slay the Ancestor Serpent, due in no small part to its ability to survive at depths that would crush even the most resilient of cultivators.

Gnawing at the Root of the World tunnels without discernible pattern deep beneath the surface of the earth. The Ancestor Worm has ignored all efforts at communication, but fortunately has yet to exhibit any hostility, and perhaps even any awareness of the Eternal Empire. The Ancestor Worm's passage is considered a sign of positive fortune, though, for in the massive tunnels left in its wake are gems and ore and other riches of the earth unearthed by its passage.

Well a giant worm is kind of cool I guess… still… Quan Jia flips forward a handful of pages and continues reading.

It is through analysis of the flow of the Qi of Earth through a beast during its refinement that a cultivator can draw lessons regarding their own process of refinement. The following ten diagrams depict the channels of qi opened and modified during the 100 and 1,000 year refinements of the Spirit Wolf Hunts at Dusk. May your spirit ever rest easy within the embrace of the Earth, my friend.

Who buries something cool like this at the end of a boring book… an eyebrow slowly raises as Quan Jia studies the drawings. It was definitely a curious pattern, but perhaps… if I moved this here and that…

[+3 XP to the next cultivation attempt (not effected by any modifiers)]


Fortunately, finding people was easier than finding stairs… stupid library, you haven't won yet… though Quan Jia wasn't quite sure why she hunting for that boy... Zhu, Zhen, Zi… well Z something anyway...who'd woken her up from a perfectly nice nap. Still it was a nice spring day and the rainbow path leading out to the sparring grounds was easy enough to follow, so it probably wouldn't be that bad.

She stops at the edge of the sparring grounds, a step before a dome of spiderwebbed silver qi anchored to an array of runes to her left… I guess it is nice to just let loose every now and then… A sprinkling of rainbow colored qi threads through a simple knot in the runic array and sends a crystalline chime ringing through the training ground.

Moments later, the dome dissolves into silvery light and Z whatever… he's a nap ruiner, that's what he is… is there. The first thing she notices is all the sweat dripping from blonde hair and splotchy dark stains on a navy blue robe worked with crimson thread. Said robe is tied loosely around nap ruiner's waist revealing tanned skin wrapped with ivory white bandages… Mei Mei's bandages are way cooler than that...

Nap ruiner glances at her. An odd sort of look flashes across his face and he practically explodes in a flurry of cloth and motion. Quan Jia watches in bemusement as within moments sweat stains and dishevelment transform into something that wouldn't be out of place at a fancy dinner.

"Lady Quan Jia. Truly the fates have blessed me with your presence on this day."

"Right, umm…" Quan Jia trails off before she can call him what he truly is… I did go back to sleep, so maybe he's only a nap interrupter? Nap ruiner does sound better though...

"Ahh, forgive my rudeness. I am Zhang Bao, eldest son of eldest son of Baron Zhang Chao, one of Count Quan's many loyal retainers."

That sounded familiar, but she couldn't say from where, and the moment of curiosity it raised vanished amidst the general disinterest she felt for noble things… where's Mei Mei to shoo away annoying people when you need her?

"Na- Baron Zhang why did you both- introduce yourself on the caravan trip?"

Whatever nap ruiner thought about her slips, he hid behind a fake smile… why do they all do that…

"To merely bask in your radiance from a distance should have been reward enough. This humble servant but dared the blinding incandescence of your beauty in the hopes of receiving the simplest of tokens of your favor."

Huh, I guess Mei Mei was right…

"Why?"

"What reason could one as smitten as I by your mere presence offer save that it would be the apex of my days were you to accept?"

Quan Jia stares blankly at the nap ruiner in front of her… is this what pops meant by love at first sight? I hope he wasn't this weird around mom though…

"We don't even know each other though?"

"That Lady Quan Jia could wound so casually, for I surely know her: as the flower knows the sun, as the Earth knows Spring."

Quan Jia blinks. Blink. Blink. Blink. A frown, somewhere between annoyed and confused flickers across her face. Though it vanishes as indifference wins out. She shrugs.

"Hmm… I think I'm going to leave now."

"It was too much, wasn't it?" Nap ruiner mutters to himself as his head shakes slightly, "but it always works in eldest sister's books. Ahh well…"

"To begin again, Lady Quan Jia. I did wish to spend time with you in the hope that you would be favorably disposed toward my suit, however, it seems that I should revisit my approach."

"Not interested."

"Only to be expected, given my poor showing. However, would Lady Quan Jia enlighten this fool as to why she sought him out on this day?"

"I wanted to know if that pig has been spreading lies about my fluffy best friend?"

The question very nearly causes that fake smile to crack. It does cause nap ruiner's head to tilt to one side in confusion as he mouths words like "pig" and "fluffy".

"Ahh, I'm not sure I, hmm… is this perhaps related to the gathering Lady Luo Lifen organized a few weeks ago to warn a number of the baronial clans about a disciple with unsanctioned spirit blood…"

"Maybe, what did she say?"

"Merely that, a warning that there was an unsanctioned spirit blood among the first year disciples… Xiao Lien if I remember correctly and a reminder of what happened to the Thousand Lakes Province during the Cataclysm of Fire."

"Squalling pig." Quan Jia mutters to herself even as her mind casts back to history lectures she'd barely paid any attention to… Thousand Lakes… boiled by the Calamity of Fire after a spirit-blooded magistrate had sabotaged the wards… millions dead… a whole province rendered forever uninhabitable… blackened fire still burning atop the magistrate's palace…

"That's got nothing to do with my friend though."

"True enough, I suppose. The imperial safeguards against the unsanctioned attaining that level of authority have eliminated the possibility of such widespread devastation occurring again… though there are still periodic reports of the unsanctioned seemingly going insane and slaughtering thousands."

"Xiao Lien's not like that."

"Perhaps she is and perhaps she's not. Either way, while I appreciated the warning, the Zhang are tied too closely to the Quan for it to be politically acceptable for me to join her side."

[] "In that case… I suppose you could join us instead."

[] "in that case… it's probably best if you just stay on the sidelines."


[AN I don't know if I like how this chapter turned out or not, but either way I suppose it's better to publish it and move on rather than continue to tweak it.

I will say I didn't expect Zhang Bao to make a reappearance and I'm not yet sure what I think about him as a character, but I hope he at least makes sense in setting.]