Chương 6: Chapter 5: BE THE DARK

CHAPTER 5 BE THE DARK —∞— By some unspoken agreement, neither Jieyuan nor Meiyao gave voice to what they were both clearly thinking. Briefly, Jieyuan considered telling her that the cost of a command in terms of chroma was in part determined by its consequences. That commanding someone at the same step as him to kill themselves would use up almost all the chroma he had. Instead, he asked, "Again?" The reply took a while to come as Meiyao studied him, visibly tense.

When she did speak, her voice came out tight, controlled.

"The same command?" For a moment there, he'd thought she'd just break things off and send him packing.

"Something even simpler. Like 'step forward.'" Meiyao gathered herself up until she was standing as tall as he'd ever seen her. She gave him a stiff, terse nod. Her right hand was now brushing the handle of her saber. Jieyuan had a feeling that if the next word to come out of his mouth was anything other than step, she'd run him through the chest with three feet of steel.

Rather than trust in him, he'd bet it was pride—backed by the confidence that she'd be able to deal with him if he tried anything funny—that had her letting him give it another go." Step forward," he commanded. Another mite of chroma vanished from his soul, and their minds were connected. Just like before, a NO rose to meet the command, but this NO was much stronger from the get-go. This time, Meiyao was putting up resistance right off the bat. Jieyuan's body went rigid as he poured himself into the command.

He didn't have much left in him to fuel the command—cultivators recovered much faster than mundanes, but his step wasn't high enough yet to get him back to tip-top form in minutes—but Meiyao had to be just as spent as he was. On the other side of the yard, Meiyao took on a look of intense, pained concentration. In the end, she still stepped forward. —∞— The sun was close to setting when Jieyuan made it to his doorstep.

He'd left Meiyao's place barely able to walk, but in the time it took him to get back to his house (a little journey that lasted at least five times as long as it normally would) he'd recovered enough to at least stand straight. Still, his trek to his bedroom happened as a series of slow, laboring steps through his dimly lit living room. He'd used Absolute Will Command on Meiyao over twenty times.

After the second time, Meiyao seemed to have taken her inability to resist as a personal challenge, because she just kept insisting on doing it again. And again. And again. Even with how little chroma simple Commands cost, if Jieyuan hadn't started going for even simpler Commands like twitch and blink at the end, he'd have used up his whole soulprism. Not one of his Commands failed to go through.

He'd been the one to call it a day, and he had a feeling that Meiyao seriously considered keeping him there by force until she'd managed to resist. Intentionally losing had crossed his mind, but that idea was quickly discarded. Meiyao was hardly the only one with a competitive streak. He also suspected she'd be able to tell if he threw in the towel, and that appreciation wasn't exactly what she'd have felt.

Arriving at his bedroom, he stopped for a moment on the doorway, squinting at the gloom ahead, the blinds over the little window on the opposite wall letting in only a scattered trickle of dying sunlight. Then he caught sight of his bed. Small, tidy, neatly tucked in the corner of the room. It was, he decided, the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen in all his eighteen years of life. Jieyuan took a few stumbling steps toward the bed, before gathering the dying fumes of his strength and threw himself on top of it.

He was asleep the very moment his body hit the mattress. —∞— Jieyuan woke up with a start, his body burning with energy. He sat right up, rolled off the bed, and made his way over to the window, fumbling his way in the dark, guiding himself by the faint, barely visible outline of his desk. Reaching the window, he pulled the blinds wide open and peered outside. The moon hung in the sky, full and round. A smattering of star glittered around it. Judging by its position, he'd say it was just before midnight.

He'd slept for around three hours, then. Interesting. When a cultivator reached second-step, they gained the ability to augment their body. This was done through the mantle, the aura emanated by the soul. It wasn't just their strength they could increase, though. They could heighten any aspect of their body besides their senses and their mind (those, they could only augment at later steps). And some of these augmentations were passive, always active.

Regeneration was one of those passive augmentations, and that was in terms of both healing and stamina. As a second-step Redsoul, he only needed a fourth of the rest a mundane did. What should have been a twelve-hour sleep was just three hours for him. He'd been concerned that if the exhaustion came through chromal means, he might have been put under for longer. But, clearly, that wasn't the case. Oh, that's good. He drew back from the window, sitting down on the chair in front of his desk, his thoughts racing.

The higher his step, the less rest he'd need. Tenth-step Redsouls were said to recover their stamina faster than they could spend it; they couldn't get tired even if they wanted to, no matter how much they exerted themselves. And if that still held true when it came to the stamina expenditure of Absolute Will Command… It would completely remove stamina from the equation. As long as he had the chroma for it, he'd be able to use his bondskill indefinitely.

Jieyuan hardly needed any more motivation—he already had that in spades and then some—but he got a blast of it all the same, like a shock of freezing water, like a lick of scorching flame. His eyes found his meditation mat, square and yellowish in the light of the moon and stars streaming through the window. No time to waste. In two large strides, he was in center of his room, and with an easy drop he was sitting down on his mat again.

Legs crossed, eyes closed, he tapped into his soulsenses and sent his focus inward, toward his chest. There his soul sat, a floating sphere taking up a good deal of his rib cage, overlapping with his heart. Jieyuan froze. What in the Heavens? His soul was the wrong color. It was supposed to be second-shade red: a light, faint red, almost pinkish. And it had been, last he'd checked, not even two days ago. Now, though, it was several shades darker. Muddy, even.

He stared it through his soulsenses, struck utterly dumb. But no matter how he focused on it, the sight of his soul didn't change: a dark red sphere. He'd never heard about something like this, about someone's soul turning the wrong color. Jieyuan checked his mantle, and his confusion only grew. Because unlike his soul, it was the right shade: a faint red, nearly pink, radiance outlining his body, extending to cover the robes he wore. All right. Jieyuan forced himself to stay calm and think it through.

What are the facts? His soul, two days ago, had been the right color for his step. Now, it was significantly darker. His mantle, on the other hand, hadn't changed. His soul and mantle being different colors was just as odd as his soul darkening. Because the color of his soul and that of his mantle were determined by the same thing: the stable chroma imbuing a cultivator's soul. Jieyuan frantically recalled everything he'd read on spiritual anatomy, trying to make sense of the situation.

Souls were many things, and supposedly there were several layers to them, some of these layers metaphysical in nature. But the way they appeared to the soulsenses was as a sphere divided into two parts: a shell and the hollow. A thick, spherical layer wrapped around an empty core. There were also a number of thin, near-invisible apertures throughout the shell through which you could pull ambient chroma directly into the hollow. Harvest it.

Moving chroma from the hollow and into the shell, imbuing it, was the most important part of cultivation. When the chroma imbued in the shell reached specific density levels, it stabilized—and it was this stable imbued chroma that gave cultivators all their abilities and powers. What radiated the mantle. The soul had no color of its own; a mundane's was invisible to a cultivator's soulsenses. Rather, the soul took the color of the stable chroma imbuing it, directly reflecting that color.

There could be more chroma imbuing it, in the shell, but if it was unstable, it had no impact on the soul's shade. All that mattered was stable imbued chroma. Or, at least, Jieyuan though, that's how it's supposed to be. The more he reviewed his thoughts, recalling everything he'd ever read on the subject, the surer he became that what he was seeing through his soulsenses was impossible. The laws of cultivation—of the world, really—were all hard. Carved in metal.

And cultivators had been studying it since time immemorial. A day and a half ago. That was the last time he'd sent his soulsenses inwards, the last time he'd seen his soul. His last cultivation session, right before the mission in the Fatebloom Woods. And since then, the only thing real thing worthy of note that had happened… The assassination attempt. The memories. Amyas's memories. Jieyuan's breath caught. That had to be it. There was no other explanation; these two things had to be related somehow.

This change in his soul, and the way he'd suddenly remembered his previous life—or whatever it was that happened yesterday. His heart beat furiously in his chest; his thoughts raced even faster. All right. First. Was there any other change? The answer came to him quickly. No. He hadn't noticed anything wrong with himself up until now. All his powers as a cultivator worked normally, and he didn't feel any different (Amyas's memories notwithstanding).

It didn't mean things would stay that way—but for now, the change didn't seem to have come with any adverse effects. Good. What else? Meiyao and Daojue. Jieyuan's eyes widened as he sat up even straighter. He'd been around them, close enough their soulsenses must've caught him. If so, there was no way they hadn't noticed the change in his soul. And maybe Daojue, being who he was, wouldn't have commented on it. But Meiyao—she'd have said something. No doubt about it.

There was also the inner elder who'd brought them over here. And Yunzhu. There was no way all of them had seen his soul—darker, the wrong color, something that should have been impossible—and said nothing about it. There were two explanations, then: either his soul had only changed right this moment— or to them, to their soulsenses, his soul hadn't changed and was still second-shade red. It had to be the second option.

The change in his soul must've happened when he regained his memories, there was no way it'd suddenly only happened after he'd left Meiyao's place. So … Jieyuan followed that thought, considered the implications. If only he saw his soul as wrong, it might be that the problem didn't lie in his soul, specifically, but… With his soulsenses? Or with his mind. A chilling thought, that. But Jieyuan would honestly rather that than having something wrong with his soul.

Except he hadn't noticed any other issues with his soulsenses. Or with his mind. But just in case, he focused further on his soul, searching for its song— If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. And his soulsenses were overcome by a visage of a towering, near-blinding bright red blaze: a burning inferno reaching for the Heavens, screaming a rising, chaotic symphony.

And radiating from the flames, there was a single, overwhelming, all-encompassing impression: AMBITION. Well, that's my song, all right. Just as he remembered it. He could almost feel the sheer heat of it through his soulsenses. Pulling away from his song, Jieyuan forced himself to relax a little. There wasn't much he could do.

Tomorrow, come morning, he'd hit up the outer court's library (which only had mundane books, since outer disciples didn't have the ability to read jadebooks), just in case, but he doubted he'd find anything about his condition. For now, though… There was one thing he still he needed to check. A very important thing, in fact. And what he'd been planning on doing anyway before he got sidetracked with this whole dark-soul business. Cultivation.

Jieyuan delved deeper into his soul with his senses, past the shell and into the hollow space at the center of it. There he found his soulprism, a prism-shaped cluster of second-density red chroma. Attuned chroma. His chroma reserves. It was second-shade red, roughly the size of his heart. This was the chroma cultivators used. The chroma they sacrificed—or, if they'd already unlocked the ability, moved outside their soul for any number of purposes.

The chroma imbued in the shell, on the other hand, was untouchable; you never used it for any reason, never subtracted from it. All you did was add to it, imbuing more and more chroma into the soul shell. That was what cultivation came down to, stripped to the foundations. You pumped the wall of your soul shell full of chroma—until the chroma in it reached a specific density and you got a nifty little boost in power for your efforts, time, and pain.

Checking on his soulprism, Jieyuan found it was a fair bit smaller; it'd been almost full two days ago, filling up the hollow. His practice session with Meiyao this afternoon had put a dent on it. It looked smaller by about a fifth, if not a fourth. Ouch. It'd take him many hours of harvesting and attuning to get his reserves back to full. Cultivation was divided into three separate stages. When he was running low on chroma, he'd normally first spend some time on the first two stages, harvesting and attuning.

That gave him time to get in the right mindset for imbuing, the third and last stage—the one where Pain made itself known. Even after two months, he still felt some apprehension before he started imbuing. Each and every time. Unfailingly. But right now, he really needed to confirm that whatever had happened to his soul hadn't also affected his ability to imbue it with chroma.

Concentrating, Jieyuan steadied his breath and willed himself back into the state of mind he had to enter every time he wanted to use a heavenly hymn. The state of mind he'd first entered at the last stage of the entrance trials, induced by the incense that Wanxin, his proctor, had burned. Heavenly Communion. He recalled exactly how he'd felt, how he was supposed to feel. Recollection blurred into awareness as a presence brushed his mind, heavy and bright and airy.

Supposedly the attention of the Heavens themselves. He still wasn't sure if that was really what it was, no matter what the texts he'd read on the subject said, but as long as things worked as intended, he didn't care much for the details. Together with that presence came the swollen, distracting awareness of his physical senses. The touch of his robes against his skin, the feel of breath leaving his nostrils and brushing his lips, the hardness of the chair underneath him.

With practiced ease, Jieyuan ignored the raw, magnified awareness that came with Communing with the Heavens, and began chanting the imbuing hymn he'd picked for himself, " Ravenous." His soulprism collapsed. It happened like a drawn-out, languid explosion. The chroma previously comprising his soulprism expanded outward, spreading throughout the soul hollow. He had no control over it, not anymore.

By chanting the imbuing hymn, he'd started the imbuing ritual, and now the Heavens were in charge of his soul and soulforce." Ravenous," Jieyuan chanted. He couldn't stop chanting, not unless he wanted the ritual to end. Ravenous. That one word was all it took. A heavenly hymn all on its own, just like the seven-line hymn he'd recited at the end of the sect's entrance trials.

When the elder stationed in the outer court's library had shown him the sect's Fire-aligned Redrealm harvesting, attuning, and imbuing hymns, Jieyuan had thought it was some kind of practical joke played on unwitting mundane-borns. But no, only the chromalization hymn was several lines long. Redrealm hymns of all the other types only amounted to only one line, and often just a single word. His attuned chroma reached the soul shell.

Jieyuan sensed the first chrom—the smallest unit of chroma, a particle of it—penetrate the wall of his soul, imbuing it. He felt a prickle somewhere in his chest. A sharp, needle-like sensation. One prickle became two, then four, then eight… They multiplied by the instant, spreading beyond his chest and throughout his body. In the span of a breath, the sharp, pricking sensations took him over entirely until not even an inch of him was spared.

What must've been a million needles dug into his body, over and over, unceasing." Ravenous," Jieyuan kept chanting even as he felt his lips and tongue peppered by needles. Prickles grew into stings. Stings into stabs. And then it was no longer needles biting into him, breaking skin and piercing flesh, but daggers.

Sharp, slender-bladed daggers, meeting no resistance as they buried themselves in him, sinking to the handle, the blades vanishing into his body, and then fully drawing back out of his body until only its tip brushed raw, tender flesh, before burrowing back in with vengeance, deeper than before. Thousands of daggers, just stabbing and stabbing and stabbing into every inch of his skin.

Jieyuan carried on chanting, even as he felt his body being reduced to ribbons of shredded meat and splintered bone, his tongue and lips feeling like tattered strips of flesh as he forced them to move, to take shape and form words. And as he felt the stabs reach their peak, felt as they pierced past bone into something deeper still into himself, something rawer, like they were burrowing into his nerves themselves, each movement a bolt of excruciating agony, he braced himself.

Because this was all just the prelude to the First Pain. What all cultivators felt while imbuing, regardless of alignment. But now his Fire would claim the stage, make itself known. Because he was a Firesoul, and so Fire was his Pain. His price to pay. Sure enough, stabs soon gave way to sears. Bright and burning, like cutting blades heated red over flame. And the heat kept growing and growing as searing turned into scorching, and soon the heat was just as terrible as the stabs themselves." Ravenous."

The stabs disappeared. Now there was only burning, only fire. In an instant, it grew a thousandfold. Every cell of his body turned into a miniature sun. He was heat." Ravenous," Jieyuan chanted. His mouth moved almost on its own accord, the words not really his own. Blood boiled, eyes melted, and viscera sizzled, and he kept on chanting. Even as he burned and burned and burned, he chanted and chanted and chanted. —∞— Jieyuan opened his eyes to a blank stone wall. Warm, yellow-white light filled his vision.

Sunlight. He squinted his eyes at the wall. He was… in his bedroom? His thoughts came slowly, like he'd just woken up and hadn't entirely shaken off sleep. Feeling uncomfortably sticky, like someone had dumped a bucket of water over him, he looked down. His robes were drenched, sticking to his body. It didn't feel like water, though. It was clingier, thicker. Sweat. Clarity came over him, and he recalled what he'd just been doing.

A bit unsteady, Jieyuan stood up and gave his legs and arms a good shake, then twisted and bent himself this way and that. Once he felt his blood flowing properly, he moved over to the windows and got a good look outside. The sun was rising on the horizon, already well on its way up. He stared up at the daytime skies, briefly dazed. Ten hours or thereabouts. That was how long he must've spent imbuing. He'd never managed to stretch an imbuing session that long before; usually, he took a break every hour or so.

His previous best had been just under five hours before he'd had to call it. He sent his soulsenses inward. His soulprism was whole and solid again, looking fractionally smaller than before. Ten hours did seem to be about right. More importantly, the imbuing session had gone normally. He'd only be able to really tell for sure when he went for his next breakthrough, but so far, the change in his soul seemed to be strictly cosmetic. Small mercies.

Jieyuan glanced back at his meditation mat, now cut through by a thick slice of daylight. At the thought of another imbuing session, he felt something inside him, inside his head, twist into itself. Like there was a raw, open wound in his head, and someone had poked a finger inside it and started prodding. Jieyuan winced and promptly discarded any thoughts of imbuing for now. That was his mind's way of telling him not to overdo it.

Normally, after an imbuing session, since he'd already be drenched in sweat, he'd head out to the backyard and spend an hour or two doing some shadow combat with his spear. Today, though, he had a different priority. —∞— It was late in the afternoon when Jieyuan found himself back in his room with a frown on his face and complex thoughts on his mind. He stood in front of his desk, facing the window. He'd spent the day in the outer court's library.

He'd just about scoured all the sections on the soul and cultivation. Sure enough, he hadn't found a single mention about a soul being the wrong color. The possibility of something like that wasn't even discussed in the more theoretical, speculative works. Whether that was a good thing or not, Jieyuan hadn't decided yet. He sat down at his desk, by the window, and sighed. On the one hand, he still had no idea what it meant.

On the other, this was better than finding out a darkened soul was a sure sign you'd be dying tomorrow, or something equally bad. At least he had the confirmation that whatever was wrong with his soul, only he could see it. He hadn't gotten any odd looks even though he'd walked within range of quite a few cultivators' soulsenses. Nobody had given any indication whatsoever they'd sensed something was wrong with him. Jieyuan stared out the window. This side of his house faced a large, expansive landscape of green.

Idyllic rolling hills and mounds. Off in the distance, he could see some of the other buildings of the outer court. He took in the sight of the setting sun, the way it bled the clouds red and bruised the sky purple. He checked his mind, toying with the idea of more cultivation; he didn't feel any resistance to it. His mind had already recovered, that raw feeling gone. But before that, there was something he wanted to do.

With everything else that had happened, he hadn't really had the time to consider what he'd learned from yesterday's practice session with Meiyao. Jieyuan started pacing around his room. He thought back to the commands he'd given Meiyao, the results, and her reactions. Their practice session yesterday hadn't been good for much besides giving him an idea of what it felt like to pit his will against another's. All the Commands he'd given her had been conscious ones, targeting Meiyao's conscious mind.

But that wasn't all Absolute Will Command's first form could do. When he sprouted Absolute Will Command's skillseed, he'd gotten a sense of what the bondskill was capable of, and he'd had a couple of ideas while practicing with Meiyao that he hadn't acted on. To really explore the limits of Absolute Will Command, he'd have had to reveal more to Meiyao about what it could do than he was comfortable with. More than he was willing to share with anyone, really.

For one, he knew commands had to be spoken aloud—but he wasn't sure whether the target had to actually hear it. He could've tested that with Meiyao, and almost did, but ultimately held himself from it. Because if commands didn't need to be heard, if he could whisper them near-inaudibly, that was the kind of thing Jieyuan really didn't want others knowing. He also hadn't tested any commands that might incapacitate or kill Meiyao, or whether he could have a target under multiple commands at a time.

Again, depending on the results, those might very well end up becoming aces up his sleeve. It was like his old man used to say. Even better than keeping your real limitations a secret was giving your enemies fake ones for them to try and exploit. All cultivators kept the details of their bondskills a secret.

In the case of cultivators with signature bondskills—bondskills that could be reliably manifested through the use of pursuit manuals, something usually only sects had—that was harder to pull off, but sect cultivators still made a collective effort to underplay just what their bondskills were really capable of. Jieyuan felt like Absolute Will Command was a special case, though. That it was much more important to keep its limitations to yourself than your average bondskill. To yourself.

Jieyuan stilled, coming to an abrupt halt. His eyes went wide then narrowed. Yourself. Just like that, another idea had come to him. And this one, he could test on his own. In fact, the only way to test it was on his own. Concentrating, Jieyuan found the presence of Absolute Will Command inside him and flexed it, as if he were clenching an invisible, intangible hand. As he did, he could feel a pressure in the back of his head, like a string pulled taut. Jump, he thought.

He imagined the word as a command, envisioning his target crouching down, flexing their muscles, and then jumping about four feet into the air. The word spoken was just an anchor for the command. The specifics were left unsaid, existing only as intent. Jieyuan got an instinctive, innate idea of what that command would cost in terms of chroma. But that could've only happened if it was possible to use it on the target he had in mind. Softly, Jieyuan commanded, " Jump."

An insignificant amount of chroma vanished from his soulprism, much less than any of the Commands he'd given Meiyao yesterday had cost. And then he could feel the command's influence on him, seizing control of his limbs. Even though he didn't try to move, his legs bent into a half-crouch. He could resist it (he could tell that all it would take was a thought and the bondskill's effects would be broken), but he let the command run its course. His feet pushed against the floor, and he jumped.

The moment his feet returned to the ground, the command's influence vanished, his hold on the bondskill slipping away even as his control over his legs returned. Jieyuan stood still for a moment, thinking. And however still his body was, his mind more than made up for it, thoughts racing, rushing, snapping between conclusions and ideas. This… This changed things. Self-commanding didn't just mean he could do away with a practice target, even if that would've been plenty handy on its own.

There were many things Jieyuan could be accused of, but a lack of of creativity wasn't one of them. Even more so now that he had Amyas's memories supplementing his. Self-commanding opened up all sorts of new possibilities. From puppeteering his own body, to controlling his own thoughts, to— Possibilities … Jieyuan's thoughts slowed to a crawl. Right. Possibilities. It wasn't uses for Absolute Will Command he was thinking of—not really, or at least not yet—but possibilities.

Moments ago, he hadn't even known that self-commanding was possible. He had no clue what could actually be done with it. He was getting ahead of himself here. Way ahead. So far all he'd done was try a conscious command on himself, and all the ones he'd used on Meiyao yesterday had similarly been of the conscious variety. Those, at least, he knew worked, both on himself and on others. But there was more to the mind than the conscious. There was also the unconscious (thank you, Amyas's memories of modern psychology).

Based on the surge of knowledge he'd gotten when he sprouted the skillseed, he had the feeling that targeting the unconscious mind might also be possible. Yes, Jieyuan decided. That was what he had to test. An unconscious command, one that acted on the target's unconscious. He'd start simple. Something to do… with the senses? Using a command to induce a hallucination in the target? That seemed promising. Useful.

He wasn't sure it would work, but figuring out the proper mechanics of Absolute Will Command was the entire point of this exercise. He looked around his room, to the desk, to the bed, to the window, eyes roving around, not really focusing on anything. Something he wanted to see… Maybe … His heart skipped. He did have something like that. Or rather, Amyas did. Jieyuan had been spending a lot of his idle moments going through Amyas's memories.

And while he'd tried to focus on just assimilating Amyas's knowledge, stripping it of all the emotional baggage, he hadn't done a perfect job. In particular, there was a very important part of Amyas's life that Jieyuan just hadn't been able to suppress. His throat was oddly tight, his mouth dry. He felt… He wasn't sure. Hesitant? Expectant? Either way, it was silly. And very much not like himself. He was no tender, confused little lad. He was a cultivator. He knew pain. Had conquered pain.

And he didn't even know if what he had in mind would work, anyway. But he had to try. He shouldn't, not if he wanted to keep Amyas's influence at bay, to keep their identities separate… But he just had to make an exception for this. He reached for Absolute Will Command again, for its faint but ever-constant presence inside him, and tested the commanded in his mind, envisioned it happening, taking place. Immediately, he got an idea of what it'd cost. Like the Heavens themselves had just handed him a quote.

He chuckled dryly. Never before had he had a question answered so quickly. Mighty convenient, that. Jieyuan licked his lips, then commanded, quietly, " See Maeva." And there she was, standing just a few paces away: in his bedroom, right in front of the window, sunlight flooding in from behind her like a halo. Blond, blue-eyed, beautiful. Amyas's sister, Maeva Auclair. Wearing a yellow sundress with a white lab coat over it. Just as he'd last seen her. Jieyuan froze at the sight of her.

She gave him a sad, beautiful smile, one that slipped past his ribcage and twisted his heart. And she said, softly, like a whisper, "Hello, Amyas."