Four Sect Alliance (Harry Potter AU; Xianxia inspired)

For as long as Harry could remember darkness and tight spaces had meant safety to her. The cupboard beneath the stairs had been dark when the door was closed, only a little light filtering through the cracks when the door was closed, and it had been her private place.

It was when Aunt Petunia, or Uncle Vernon, had wanted to yell at Harry that she had been dragged out from the cupboard but while inside with the door shut she had felt safe. She remembered the Christmas when she had been given the upstairs spare bedroom to sleep in, the windows finally fixed so that it was no longer unlivable in the winter months, and how she had ended up retreating to her cupboard after barely a week.

She still didn't know what it was about the New Year's fireworks which had triggered them, but sudden her nightmares had driven Harry to retreat to the cupboard. To her cupboard.

Harry had never been afraid of the dark.

As Hagrid sealed the cave, cutting off the last of the light and leaving her in the narrow passage, the young girl found herself mouthing protests which she couldn't manage to give voice to. Hagrid had been warm and Hagrid had been reassuring, but now he had fed her that pill and left her to potentially die?

"This can't be happening," She finally began to mutter, eyes staring blindly into the utter blackness, "I can't believe it. There has to be an explanation!"

Her voice grew louder as she spoke and her last exclamation held a hint of hysteria.

"Hagrid?" Harry called, reaching out towards the wall of the tunnel to support herself, and she struggled to ignore how lacking in energy her body felt, "This is a joke, right?"

There was no answer and she couldn't tell if it was because Hagrid chose not to respond, if the stone muffled her voice too much for him to hear, or if he had already left.

"HAGRID!" Harry tried again as loudly as she was able.

There was still no response and, despite the stone walls of the tunnel, the darkness around her seemed to almost swallow the sound of voice rather than echo it. If Harry had paid attention to only what she could hear and what her eyes were showing her then she would have thought herself somehow lost in an endless void. However the feel of the stone wall beneath her hand reassured her that was not the case.

Harry moved her hand from the wall to the slab blocking the entrance. There was a different texture to the two types of stone, the first rough and the second as smooth as glass, but as she tried to feel around for some way to shift the slab out of the way her fingers began to tingle.

At first the sensation was not too intrusive but soon enough, as she continued to check for seams or handles or anything that would let her out, the tingle in Harry's hands progressed to the level of an unpleasant buzz. Harry grit her teeth and stubbornly tried to continued searching, but when she felt her fingers prickling like the brush of nettles she was forced to pull away.

"He… said that there was another way out," Harry reminded herself as she shook her hands, trying to return proper sensation to them. "Hagrid wouldn't lie about that. He's a cultivator and they're supposed to keep their word."

Harry clung onto that idea, and her memories of stories about cultivators keeping their word despite the troubles that it had caused them, for reassurance. It was just that most of those tales had concerned promises of vengeance for wrongs, or insults, given to them.

Reaching out with both hands Harry let her fingertips brush against the walls either side of her then slowly and carefully began to walk along the tunnel. The solid contact was reassuring in more ways than one but her mind kept playing tricks on her, trying to convince her that the tunnel was closing in on her, even though she knew that it couldn't really be doing that.

No matter how much it felt like it was about to. No matter that she could almost feel the presence and mass of all the rock, earth, and soil above her head. A mass which was just waiting to collapse down on top of her.

Harry's already hesitant steps began to falter and the soles of her shoes scraping against the soil beneath her as the sensation of weight made raising her feet to take the next step harder.

"What was that pill?" Harry muttered as she forced herself to go on rather than stop to catch her breath. While she lacked the usual aches which would normally indicate exhaustion the sheer lack of energy made her body feel like a hollow shell. "He said it'd give me more energy."

The sound of her own voice, despite how the words were swallowed as soon as she spoke them, was encouraging and she thought over the question as a distraction from the growing need to just stop.

Hagrid hadn't actually, Harry realised as she thought back, said that it would give her more energy. He'd said that it would give her more energy 'to work with' and she had certainly felt that for a brief time after swallow the pill.

Distracted by the thought Harry almost stumbled on her next step as her foot almost caught on an irregularity on the tunnel floor. Her hands broke contact with the walls as Harry reflexively moved them to catch herself but when she failed to fall she immediately moved both back out again.

She hesitated before taking her next step. Were the walls just a little closer than they had been a moment ago? Surely not.

That stumble was the first sign that things were to become harder as the further along the tunnel that Harry went the more uneven its floor seemed to become. What had been relatively smooth dirt path was becoming littered with stones of increasing sizes until Harry found herself carefully stepping around a rock which reached up to her knee.

Harry consoled herself with the thought that the passage couldn't be that long, that she just had to keep going for a little longer.

And a little further than that.

Then a little further again.

With the encompassing darkness surrounding Harry soon had no clue as to how long it had been since she set out along the tunnel. The apparent narrowing of the passageway which had seemed at first to just be her nerves playing tricks on her quickly revealed itself as the utter truth and she no longer has to move her hands out to touch the walls.

The hand that Harry kept in front of her face touched something and she ducked her head lower to avoid the latest jagged outcropping from the ceiling. A few words she'd heard from Dudley, ones which had Aunt Petunia coldly telling her child off for using, escaped Harry's lips as groping around revealed that the 'outcropping' was actually a lowering of the tunnel's roof.

"It's just a test." Harry muttered to herself as she crouched then forced her body to take another step despite her leaden limbs, "Hagrid will be at the end and I've got plenty of time. It can't even be near lunchtime yet."

"He'll let me out and then explain everything." She told herself a few minutes later when she was forced to stoop lower. "I'm sure."

"It won't be far at all." Harry insisted to herself when the tunnel become lower than her waist and she resorted to moving forward on her hands and knees. "Just a little further."

There was a hollow feeling in Harry's stomach as she was forced to crawl to progress along the passageway. The rough dirt and scattered rocks which formed the floor here dug into her palms and, through the fabric of her trousers, into her knees but she forged onwards. Again and again she had to remind herself that the walls weren't closing in on her, that she could still move, and that the entire passage wasn't about to snap shut on her like the jaws of some giant beast...

She winced at that particular line of thought. Something about the image of the tunnel as the mouth, or perhaps gullet, of a monster which Hagrid was happily feeding her to struck a chord which made it hard to ignore bec-

Something shifted under Harry's hand as she put her weight on it and, with no more warning that that, she slipped and hit the dirt face first. Haltingly she tried to move her arms, to put her hands beneath her and push herself up so that she could go on, but after coming so far she simply had nothing left to fuel the attempt.

Harry was alone with the taste of soil on her lips as she lay there in the endless darkness.

Occasionally Harry twitched as she tried to convince her body to 'get up!' and get moving, but slowly those attempts also ceased. For a time she tried focusing on her breathing, forcing herself to be aware of the mechanics of inhaling and exhaling, yet her awareness of the earth around her intruded on that and each breath was shallower than the last.

It crossed Harry's mind that this was what it was like to be buried alive, but somehow she couldn't bring herself to care. She was empty, utterly empty, and what reason did she have to try to go on? She felt as though she could just rest there in the comforting darkness and let it numb all her hurts.

Here there wouldn't be yells to wake her.

Here there weren't be demands to do chores.

Here nobody would call her 'freak!'.

All Harry needed to do was lay down and lay still as the earth pressed upon her. That wasn't so hard a thing to do, she realised, and the faint fuzziness of her thoughts made the idea seem all the more inviting.

But don't want to die...

Something inside of Harry Potter twisted as the thought surfaced in her mind. It twisted and thrashed and tried to move. It wasn't her body, the animal instincts saying to simple lay down and die. It wasn't her rational mind as tha had found acceptance with the idea of passing on.

It was her soul, her will and the essence of herself, which dug in its heels and objected.

Faced with no alternatives the core of Harry Potter's existence stirred itself in an attempt to simply survive. With no resources, with nothing to work with, Harry Potter pushed and strained against the hollow lethargy within and the crushing pressure she felt from outside her body.

I want to LIVE.

The vessel is empty yet stands ready to be filled.

A barrier broke and Harry felt a sense of both loss and gain. The hollow inside of her, the result of the accursed pill that she had chosen to swallow, gained a sense of permanence. Yet something else cracked open and, for the first time in what felt like an age, she took a breath.

New energy began to fill Harry, drawn from the darkness and the earth with each fresh breath, and she coughed once in response to the strange sensation. It was just a trickle of energy, like beads of moisture forming on the outside of a glass, but her body drank deeply of each drop and her numbingly exhaustion gradually faded.

Hagrid's waiting for me, Harry realised as she breathed slowly and deeply, So why am I just laying here?

Harry could almost smell Hagrid's distinctive scent and could almost feel the warmth and solidity which had reassured her when he had carried her far from Privet Drive. He wasn't far away, not too far at all, and she felt sure that he'd be able to explain about all of... this.

Harry Potter got up onto her shaking limbs and, as the darkness and earth filled her with a trickle of energy, she began to crawl forwards with renewed determination.


The first glimpse of light as Harry rounded a twist in the tunnel was a painful. After so long in utter darkness it jabbed into her eyes like a dagger, making her reflexively turn her head away from it and screwed her eyes tight shut.

"Yer almost there, Harry." Hagrid called from somewhere beyond the glare, "Jus' a lil further now…"

The sound of that deep rumbling voice, such a contrast to the silence which had dominated the hours of the void, shook Harry. Her fingers dug into the dirt beneath her, softer and with fewer rocks than further back through the tunnel, as she fought the urge to retreat into the calm and safe darkness.

Yet, somehow, hearing Hagrid's voice wasn't a complete surprise. Somehow Harry had known that she was getting close to the cultivator. The knowledge that she had just needed to go a little further had helped spur her on to reach this home stretch despite the pains from her hands and knees.

The floor, the rocks and soil, had not been kind to her flesh.

"Come on, Harry." Hagrid coaxed and somehow Harry found the energy to move forward despite the way her eyes watered. The weight which had been pushing down on her, the crushing sense of the stone and earth on all sides of her, diminished and abruptly Harry realised that she could hear the sound of her own breathing as she panted for air.

"Well done, Harry. Well done." Hagrid congratulated and she risked opening her eyes.

Harry was out of the tunnel.

"Just catch yer breath there," Hagrid advised as he knelt there on the dirt next to her. Harry pushed herself back, moving from all fours to sit on the ground, and looked up at Hagrid's smiling face. "You dun well."

"I.. I think that I did." She said breathlessly, "I knew that you'd be here. That you'd be waiting for me. It didn't- It didn't take that long, did it?"

"Longer than you prolly thought." Hagrid told Harry. "You still had a good three, maybe four, hours till sundown though. Plenty of time."

Harry blinked several times as she looked at him and saw more than she remembered seeing before she had gone into the cave. Hagrid appeared just as large, and just solid, as he had been then but now there was something else about him.

The closest comparison that Harry could think of was that Hagrid had gained a bright 'afterimage' which somehow moved with, rather than behind, his motions. With the darkness gone her thoughts had begun to clear and she realised that this 'image' was what she had noticed, and used as a beacon, while in the darkness.

"Yer seein' that, are ye?" Hagrid asked, sounding interested and perhaps even vaguely impressed, "Well, I wuz definitely right 'bout you bein' worth it then if you're gettin' a sens of my vis."

"Vis?" Harry echoed as, drop by drop, energy returned to her tired body.

Hagrid pulled himself up straighter at the question and when he spoke he was obviously trying to suppress his accent"Vis is yer- Vis is your strength. Your energy. The stuff of your spirit which fuels what any cultivator does. If you use techniques then that is what fuels them and as you advance yer- your body and mind will gather or even produce more of it."

"Yer awakened now." He favoured Harry with a smile then lightly tapped her collar bone, "You should be able to feel it inside of you, little droplets of it condensing inside your soul now you've cleared out some of the blockages. The next steps are all about clearing out the rest and making your body fit fer yer spirit to dwell in."

As she rubbed the small bruise from that 'light' tap, wincing as the automatic motion aggravated the scrapes on her fingers, Harry realised that this did make sense in a way. Inside of her was a hollow she had never been aware of before, empty and waiting to be filled, with the merest trickle of something beginning to fill it drop by drop.

Hagrid rummaged around in his coat and produced a block of something wrapped in waxed paper to Harry. When she pulled it open she discovered large chunks of fudge inside and she shot him a quizzical look.

"Yer gonna need the energy there." Hagrid said as he stood up, "Someut sweet should help and I'm goin' t' work you hard just now on a a sensing technique."

Harry picked up the first chunk and carefully popped it into her mouth. She hadn't thought that she would want to eat anything, her stomach was still twisted from the stress of her experience, but as the sweetness almost melted on her tongue she found herself craving more.

Before she knew it the half dozen chunks of the treat was gone and Harry was extracting the last fragments of it from the paper. However as she was doing so the girl noticed that her hands weren't hurting any more and neither were her knees.

Her hands were still dirty, and still showed trace of red-brown smears were blood had been, yet somehow the underlying scrapes had vanished. Harry hesitated, uncertain if this was normal or not, but finally found her voice.

"Hagrid? She asked quietly.

"Yeah?"

Harry held her unmarked hands up to the cultivator, "They were bleeding before, but they're not now."

"Well, yeah?" He responded with a vague shrug as he examined a large rock. "It was just small stuff, right? Not like you broke a bone or tore a big gash in yerself? Tell me yer not scared o' blood."

"No." Harry answered hurriedly, "It's just that, well, is that normal?"

"Not really." Hagrid admitted as he picked up the rock, a slab which was as struggle for him to grab each side of but apparently not a hard for him to life otherwise. "Once you get started on body hardening then you'd not be getting cuts from something small like that."

That wasn't quite what Harry had asked, but she decided that it would be better to drop the subject. Instead another question rose to the forefront of her thoughts and then came unbidden from her tongue.

"If I hadn't gotten out before sunset would you really have sealed me in?"

Hagrid dropped the slab in place, covering the tunnel entrance which she had just used, then brushed off his hands as he strode past her, "Well, let's get started on your training. You ever done meditating? It's dead simple, you see..."

As Hagrid began to give Harry her first lesson on cultivation she did her best to focus on his words rather than how he had avoided that second question as well.

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The character sheet and glossary post has been updated with new information.

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You have been taught a type of technique that is new to you.

Do you have an affinity for sensory techniques?
(This is a separate vote from the other in this update.)
[ ] Yes. (Takes up one affinity of three for your female form.)
[ ] No. (Barred from taking this affinity for your female form.)

After Hagrid finishes teaching you today where will you be left until the trip to Hogwarts?
(Pick one; no write-in.)

[ ] An alliance way house in a small town.

[ ] A holding place in a big city.

[ ] A empty building in the wilds.

[ ] On an isolated ranch.

[ ] With an isolated cultivator.