The Cold Mountain Fire was kept in a cave deep below the Alchemy Peak.
Our group gathered together in the silence of dawn on the third day after the competition. There were no well-wishers to send us off. There were no sounds of people starting their day. There was only the stillness of death.
The previous night, I had said my goodbyes. To my two friends, I was leaving to enter the outer sect. Only I knew what was about to happen. In a day, they would be gone. Perhaps from their perspective, I would be the one who had vanished, having betrayed the sect in my final monts. I didn’t know. Either way, it was still goodbye.
Our group gathered at the edge of town near a small path into the forest. There were four of us. The three champions and one elder.
The elder who was to guide us looked familiar. I felt like I had seen him before, but I had seen many people co and go over the years, so I couldn’t be sure. His face was stern, yet at that mont I felt he was closer to a grandfatherly figure.
The other two victors of the competition arrived with expressions of pride and expectation on their faces. They were eager for what the day would bring. It was their chance to shine. I could not share in the excitent.
As the sun crested the horizon, we began to walk into the forest.
I felt like I was walking to my death. I was walking to my death. I would not survive to see another sunrise. In a way, I hoped that none of the other people of the sect would either. The mont I had that thought, I was racked with a deep pang of guilt.
This was the first ti I was doing sothing I felt was morally indefensible. I knew it would not be the last. This kind of thing, it’s the start of a path, not the end. I did not know where that path would lead . I could only hope that I would not turn into a monster who did whatever I wanted because I could.
Still, I was stepping on this path willingly. My current morals would not survive this world. I would inevitably change and compromise, slowly but surely. Better to act deliberately, with a focused, though not clear, conscience.
We walked through the forest in a straight line. The path had no bends or turns. As we walked, the trees around us seed to move of their own accord. When I saw them out of the corner of my eye, they seed to be distorting and twisting, but when I focused on them, they were just normal trees.
The walk through the forest was not long, maybe half an hour, but when we stepped out from beneath the cover of the trees, the sun was already high in the sky. The elder didn’t give us any ti to linger in the sunlight. He hurried us along the path and into a cave that bore into the mountain’s heart.
There were no decorations here. No masonry to make the cave entrance stand out. No guards to protect what lay inside. It looked like nothing more than a normal, natural cave that one might find within any random mountain.
As we walked down the tunnel, the elder used his qi to light our way.
Everything about the cave looked natural. I wasn’t a geologist, but it seed like the rock might be listone or sothing similar. Water seeped through the ceiling in several places, causing stalactites and stalagmites to form. I was pretty sure that this was a sedintary cave, but I wasn’t sure. Did that make sense for this type of mountain? I didn’t know. It didn’t matter. I was just distracting myself.
Our group finally arrived at an underground vault. It was larger than any cavern I had ever heard of. Massive pillars were spaced around the room, bearing the weight of the mountain overhead. Everything looked like natural stone, but the regular spacing of the columns indicated that it had been constructed.
In the center of the cavern, rising from a great pit, burned a blue bonfire.
As we approached, I felt no change in temperature. The raging flas made my brain feel that the room should be unbearably hot. With ‘cold’ in the na, I had thought that maybe we would be entering an ice cavern. Instead, it felt like the fire was just an illusion.
The elder stood in front of the bonfire and turned around to look at us.
“We’re here. We will proceed in the order you placed during the competition. I believe everyone has prepared and knows what to do. If you are unsure of anything, then ask. Absorbing a spirit fire is dangerous. Everyone needs to be careful. Pull in only as much fire as you can handle. Do not overdo it. When your body reaches its limit, you will be able to feel it clearly. At that point, do not push. Back away imdiately.”
I was to go third.
I watched as a short girl approached the flas first. I hadn’t paid any attention to her before that mont. Her hair was in a single long braid down her back. As she stepped toward the fire, her hair seed to light up in a corona of flas. It looked like she was about to enter hell itself.
Her actions were textbook, matching everything I had read. She walked within arm’s reach of the flas and held out her hand. Then, she used qi to connect to a small lick of fire on the edge of the bonfire. Using her qi like a fishing line, she pulled the flas into her body. The process was slow. After ten minutes, she began to sweat. At fifteen, her face turned into a grimace. At that mont, she quickly cut off the qi and stepped back.
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The girl, looking exhausted from her ordeal, sat down and leaned against one of the room’s many pillars. She closed her eyes in deep ditation.
The boy who ca in second looked at her as she sat and gave a cruel sneer. It was strange, I realized. It had been years since I had seen anything even approaching malicious intent. This boy, though, when he looked at the girl… He looked like he was a devil that had walked out of the flas.
He strode up to the bonfire confidently and placed an entire fist into the flas. His face quickly beca manic. The elder appeared beside him and threw him away to safety.
After giving the crazy boy a dismissive snort, the elder looked at .
“Your turn.”
I gazed at the fire. It was an ethereal blue. The flas were nearly transparent, so much so that even though they covered a huge area, I could clearly see through them to the other side.
In the center of the flas was a solid mass of dark blue. That was my target.
I began walking.
I did not rush. I didn’t want to alarm the elder. I didn’t want him to stop .
When I got to the flas, I didn’t stop. I kept walking.
When he saw this, the elder’s eyes widened in alarm, and he began shouting at .
“What are you doing!”
At that point, I ran.
The elder would be hesitant to enter the flas himself.
Cold Mountain Fire would not burn most people who entered it. I had checked. But the other three already had part of the flas inside their bodies. If they entered the bonfire, there was a risk that the flas inside their bodies would begin to resonate with those outside of it. If they did so, the fires within them could surge out of control. This made it dangerous for anyone to chase after .
Still, there were plenty of ways to stop , so I ran.
It took only a few heartbeats to reach the dark blue core at the center of the fire. It was the size of a fist.
I grabbed it.
I surrounded the core with my qi and shoved it into my chest. After having decided to steal the seed, I had read a rough account of how it was supposed to work, but I had not researched it too deeply. It would have been bad if anyone found out what I planned to do. I just hoped what I did would work.
The fire seed entered my body and passed into my soul.
Flas erupted in my soul, and my soul burned. It was being cleansed by the seed of the Cold Mountain Fire. This was supposed to happen. It was a good thing I knew that, or else I might have tried to force the seed back out, damaging both it and .
The burning energy burst forth from my soul and into my flesh. Inside my body, one cell after another began to shut down and die. They could not contain the power that was being forced through them. After only a few monts, my brain turned off.
You have died. Calculating…
You died as a Martial Master 2 — 2,000 credits awarded.
Total Credits: 2,000
I sat in my small house. The normally drab house seed to have lost what little color it had.
I had made my decision, but that didn’t an it didn’t affect .
Physically, I had just burned to death. The feeling of flas slowly spreading and growing inside my body… I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Thankfully, my rebirth had affected my mories, compartntalizing them. This removed the sting of those mories of physical pain.
However, the emotional pain lingered. I had betrayed my friends. I had betrayed my sect. I had made rationalizations, and I had promised to repay the debt, but none of that changed what I had done. I had chosen to act against people who had done more to help than anyone else in this rotten world had. Even if that was a low bar, it wasn’t nothing.
I didn’t want to push forward. I didn’t want to spend endless hours pushing toward the next aningless cultivation milestone. I just wanted… ti.
Ti to decompress. Ti to understand myself better. Who I was. Where I was going.
I stood up and walked outside.
I began just strolling around the houses. I was locked away in this damned courtyard with its moldering houses.
The Su Clan. I hated it, but I also didn’t know it. At that mont, my hate felt like an empty thing. Bad things had happened to here. They would continue to happen here, if not to , then to soone else. That hatred. I decided to let it go. There was no reason for it anymore. I had already escaped from my imprisonnt here.
I had my own moral line. It was born of the knowledge and experience of my first life in another world. Even though these mories had started to fade, I could not let go of my morals—they were a part of —but I would cross that line in the future. I already had crossed it once. Even if everything was reset, that did not change the fact that it happened.
To be able to forgive myself, I had to be willing to forgive this clan. It and the people here were products of the environnt. Just don’t forget. Never forget, or it will happen again. I needed to be willing to understand them. That was my path forward.
I began to really look at my surroundings. The walls surrounding us were stone with so type of red-painted plaster coating on them. In places, the plaster had started to crumble, revealing the bare stone beneath. Looking at the ground, I noticed ruts that had been worn into the cobblestones by thousands of feet stepping on them countless tis.
Were these only signs of imnse age? Was the Su Clan facing hard tis and unable to afford maintenance? Or, did it just show how little they cared about the people who lived here? I didn’t know, but the answers could give so insight into this place.
After walking aimlessly for an hour or two, I approached the door of a random house and knocked on it. I had never even thought to try this before. I had to wonder why. When I had lived here, I had locked myself away and driven myself nearly mad with the pressure. Maybe if I had tried to speak to the others here…
A young girl opened the door and looked at like a deer in headlights. She must have been sixteen, but she looked so young to my eyes.
“He… Hello?”
“Hi, I’m Fang. What’s your na?”
She quickly closed the door. “Please… please, no.”
She was terrified. Terrified by rely introducing myself.
I sighed and returned to my room. I had wanted to let things go. I had wanted to leave the past in the past. I felt like soone just slapped my face with how fucked up everything was.
I wanted to fix it, to make things better.
I couldn’t. Even if I did change sothing once, it would go right back to how it was before.
I could change things and then move my reset forward. That might be possible. But I felt like that would just be a bandage on a gaping wound.
I returned to my room.
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