SpiralingSilverandEyes
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Chapter 342 - Introspection And Uncertainty
🕑 Added 2025-06-10 04:54:15 +0000 UTCRaaaagh! No more apologizing! Fuck it! Manifesting self-confidence! It's a chapter, it came out much sooner to the last chapter than that one did to the one before, and it ain't bad! Sticking to my guns and knuckling down with my self esteem and recovery! Enjoy! We've got maybe 3-ish more Shin Ren chapters after this, maybe 4, and then back to not-so-regularly not-so-normal programming (i.e. Raika!)
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The world is made asunder, and at its heart sits a man.
There are plenty of cultivation chambers available to him, flooded with artificially procured Qi, runes, and artfully arranged concepts. If he would only ask, architects and scholars and researchers of the Division of War would do their utmost to craft a place perfectly suited to him. If he asked the bull, or the ones that follow his methods and bow to the Division of Altered Cultivation, they might even succeed, and build a perfect shell, perfectly suited to his cultivation and eventual breakthrough.
Instead, he sits outside, beneath clouds of falling ash and amongst the dead and the dying and those trying their best to be anything but.
Shin Ren has long surpassed the conventional bounds of the Nascent Soul realm. With three mostly-formed souls, brought about by three different cores, his Qi reserves vastly outpace all but the highest of prodigies and mutants in the same realm as him. His grasp of the Dao of Flame has six of the seven possible colors of Dao, a mastery that many in the Divergent Paths would find respectable or even envious. His techniques are refined by constant battle, flowing seamlessly through each other, his failings corrected by a multitude of voices from within which see every misstep. His Killing Intent, and the Cut with which he often wields it, are honed to a fine point.
And yet, the world is vast.
The wind blows around him, picking up bits of debris and ash.
What great value is there in having almost triple the normal amount of Qi one can hold at the Nascent Soul Realm, if the Warrior Realm holds a hundred times more? What use is having three Souls, all nearing completion, when one has no Domain in which to wield them, and any single, fully-realized Soul could overpower them?
The techniques, he grants, are useful. Learning of propulsion and perception, transmutation and combustion, will only aid his development as solid foundations on which to build from. Knowing intimately the way something works only facilitates the use of recreating it, and one is usually well-suited by knowing what the rules are when determining how best to break them. And yet, even still, having movement techniques and attacks and manifestations built out of the realm of faux-immortals cannot compare to those who have actually grasped the realm beyond.
Perhaps after he steps into the Warrior Realm, he’ll be able to look around and see how superior he is to his peers. Until then, the sheer scale of those one step above remains nearly overwhelming.
And so, he cultivates. So he sits, listening to the sounds of war, and the sounds in its absence.
The wind blows over the trenches and their towers, playing a haunting melody over miles.
Three Souls. He’s refused a more… comprehensive study from Head Researcher Boriah, otherwise known as the rebel and madman Taurus, but there’s still plenty he can feel about the pathway he’s walking. Or creating, perhaps. It’s not enough to create one and then elevate the others. It feels possible, sure, but it doesn’t feel right, and he comes back to metaphors each time he tries to explain it to himself. Like… baking a bun, before creating the filling. One can still add a filling, sure, and maybe even put it back in the over, but one cannot expect it to bake as harmoniously, and perhaps might be better suited to a filling that needs no baking at all. What he’s trying to do is fuse every step of the process into one, put everything into a single cohesive whole, rather than interlinked but distinct parts.
This does, admittedly, present certain challenges.
He possesses three distinct cultivations, each one requiring its own patterns and ingredients.
Firstly, that of the core “Shin Ren”, a wielder of Mystery and Truth, who does his best to pursue wisdom and enlightenment. A bit arrogant, but such is cultivation. His Soul, currently manifesting as [Divine Purity Of Flame], is a perfect pillar of fire, extending up to the Heavens as if to confront them and colored by his comprehension of Dao. He cycles Qi through his meridians and spiritual organs in a constant flow towards the center, burning as if in a great bonfire and adding in more Qi as it goes, pushing ever inwards. Only when he needs it to push his physical abilities or manifest techniques does it flare out, bright lashes of plasma like those of the sun arcing through him and looping out- but always reconnecting to the center.
Second, the Smiling Noble. Manifesting now less as a privileged princeling and more as an idealized general, glittering with the jewels of nepotism and jingoistic patriotism, it and its Soul, a [Gilded Smile Of Delusion], are far more delicate and ephemeral. Its cultivation pushes Qi through his meridians in a perpendicular pattern, weaving intricate sequences of almost dance-like streams that intersect and break apart semi-randomly. Poorly suited for blanket reinforcement or sudden bursts of power, the patterns it weaves are instead ideal for subtler effects, spreading in hard-to-discern movements and laying out traps with ease.
Thirdly, the Corpse Aflame. Its Soul, [Burning, Grasping Ruin], is a corpse-thing, made of dead bodies animated by destruction. Flesh like molten wax runs and mutates evermore, always reaching outwards to drag in that which it touches and destroy it in turn. The cultivation of her Core is a stuttering thing, like that of an engine, exploding in sharp bursts of movement through his meridians and then drifting like ash down to her. Distinctly designed for massive and explosive shows of force, which then either collapse into a slow build back up or cascade into ever-increasing manifestations.
Each one needs different things, in spite of their similarities. The higher one advances in their cultivation, the more Qi is required, but also the more concepts to flavor that Qi, and the deeper the flavoring required. The Corpse Aflame can drink freely of the death and devastation and transformation all around, reflecting in many ways his old perspective on Raika the Bloody, but she can also easily be overfed, damaging the balance between the three cores and throwing all of their carefully balanced cultivation out of sync. The Smiling Noble, on the other hand, is a bit of a “picky eater”, requiring ideas of subterfuge, delusion, dreams and misdirection alongside a healthy feeding of Flame and harm-tinged concepts. Shin Ren, meanwhile, thrives on stranger fare, and as best as he can determine, seems to “click” best with concepts of balance, “divinity”, and purity. Which… are all in short supply, and awkward as hell to even properly describe. Besides centering on Flame, they’re much more esoteric than even the Smiling Noble’s dietary requirements.
Like with all cultivation, a strong enough will and cycling technique will eventually convert any Qi absorbed into the type that matches the cultivator, but the efficiency varies wildly. Shin Ren is lucky that his central cultivation style, long since changed past its original name and function, has a high conversion rate, using some of its energy to purify any Qi that reaches it to add to its cycle. It still costs him something, and some concepts would be more expensive than they’re worth, but using the right reagents, he’s easily able to make enough fires around him that reflect that almost-white heat of pure Flame. They flicker in the wan light of the battlefield, like pure and colorless candles illuminating away the messiness of the war.
The Corpse Aflame’s hunger is, if anything, too easy to feed in this place. What might once have cost him tremendous harm to others and his environment to create is here in abundance, brought about by the ever-ruinous effects of War. The ashes falling down, the burning bodies of enemies and allies contaminated by plague techniques or strange magics, and the destruction of the breach itself all provide exactly what his larger, hungrier heart demon craves. The issue in her case is limiting the feeding below her ideal- of all his cores, hers could likely crystallize a true Soul in no time, but not without destabilizing the balance he holds within himself.
Last and, by some measures, least, the Smiling Noble possesses requirements that both Shin Ren and his sibling heart demon lack. One feeds on war, the other on esoteric forms of Flame, the Smiling Noble’s cultivation requires a social aspect. Which… has admittedly never been Shin Ren’s strong suit. He’d thought it was, and that delusion is what spawned the heart demon in the first place- in reality, he finds himself much more comfortable away from the games of politics and social complexity. Interacting with Mei Yu helps with that, and her advice, hard-earned from one of the six grand Sects of the Empire, is invaluable- but he’d rather not have her here at all times.
And so, he continues to meditate, out in the open, amongst the falling ash.
And also on a roof.
A fucking windy roof.
The building itself is… normal, frankly. One of the many towers along the miles of trench-city that extends past the breach, yet close enough to it that he can still taste charred flesh and hear the screams of battle. As leviathans and armies paint the horizon infinite shades of devastation, he allows the sounds of life beneath his seat to rise to him, listening closely.
The barracks and office and logistic center (as all the towers of the trenches are) is a hub of activity. Cultivators of every background walk in it, speak to each other, politic against each other constantly. Their manipulations and subtle battles for favor or ascendancy flavor the world around them ever-so-slightly, and the madness of playing such games in a war add a deeper layer. As those concepts filter into his awareness, the pass through his idea of the space around him, picking up notes of heat and haze from the firepits he’s made around himself. Each pit is carved carefully, using aspects of the Cut and filled with rare materials from his storage rings that burn bright and pure, adding stranger reactions into the mix, and as their presence changes the world around him and their positioning draws in Qi, he absorbs it readily.
And, of course, the Corpse Aflame eats freely, the flames all around them the only missing piece to the utter devastation she absorbs constantly.
He balances on the edge of a knife, close enough to the battlefields to be in danger, yet far enough away as to not be an ideal target. Surrounded by devastation, yet relying on the lives and madness of the people he’s surrounded by. Available to be commanded, exposed to machinations and elements, but protected by propriety and convention and social graces.
In a better world, it might be enough. Might even be maintained well enough to allow him a glimpse of the final shade of existence, a taste of the Green of harmony and balance.
But it is not a better world. It is his world. The world that exists now, and here.
And, so, he still has to contend with the tar.
It bubbles up at the base of his fire-pits, leaving tarry remnants around them. It oozes and drips, building up in strange-smelling concentrations that he can’t quite erase from his perception.
When he looks at this substance which oozes from him, from his worldview, from the friction between all of who he is and all he aims to be, the name that comes to mind feels as right as it is wrong.
An impurity.
A flaw, created by the messiness of mortality. An imperfection, exuded in the process of reflection on reality.
The fact that the word is effectively vestigial in Imperial cultivation doesn’t pass him by. For all he knows, the term used to be used to refer to something completely different.
And yet.
It fits. As true as anything can be, and anything can be True. Of that, he is almost certain.
Pushing it away, out of himself, helps. His heart demons pursue a process that is-and-is-not cultivation, consuming some of it in turn, keeping it from coagulating. Perhaps he could create yet another core, yet another heart demon to crowd his mind and further stretch his spiritual organs. Perhaps doing so would destabilize him completely, break him, or be completely incompatible with his very being.
It exists. It oozes from the world he creates around himself, between reality and a proper Domain. A part of him, there to be consumed or excised or crystalized or anything but ignored.
But there’s always more to worry about. Balancing multiple souls, his own psyche, the demands of war and the strange things that hide and hunt and kill within it.
The knife’s edge, always. So close to glory. So close to collapse.
The heights get ever closer to reach, and the depths ever darker, ever more devastating to fall into.
He breathes it in, and keeps to his climb. He will keep walking, even as he struggles to discover where exactly it is that he wants to go.
He exhales, and feels the breath be carried away by the whipping winds all around him now.
He looks up at the source of the ongoing weather as its shadow falls atop him.
The sky has an underbelly of steel.
Above him, above many of the clouds and blocking out the sun in its entirety, is a ship. Its underside bristles with cannons, not yet in range for proper bombardment. Its sides gleam with gold and the glow of jade radiates from it to tint the air yellow and green. It exudes an aura all its own, necessitating the raising of wards beneath it to keep mortals and Qi-Gathering Realm cultivators from passing out or dying from its weight. The air crackles and hums in its presence, and in the gusts of its passing, some of the debris collected falls upwards rather than down, and occasional flickers of lightning sparks from it to the ground below.
It colors the world in its passing, and reshapes its winds with its presence.
He feels a presence enter the edges of his sensory range and exhales, pulling the firepit’s altered Flame into himself.
He’s stolen as much time as they can afford, for now.
Yula lands on his roof a moment later, cracking the stone beneath the force of her arrival. She grins a bit sheepishly, scratching the back of her head.
“Hey, Ren! We’re getting called up for stuff, now. Me and big bro Kai, I mean! Gotta show up with my supporters, right?”
He nods, the smile slipping easily onto his face. “Of course. It would not do to have the young mistress appear underserved by the Empire’s best.”
She chuckles, rolling her eyes. “Yeah, yeah, like it’s that big of a deal. I’m just… more comfortable if I’ve got some backup is all. Many hands make for light work, that’s what my pa always used to say.”
“I’ll make sure to bring a suitable entourage, then.”
And he’s being honest, too.
He’s learned a lot, operating under a Blade, not least a glimpse at the nature of the Cut. He’s gotten a shitload of resources out of it, too.
But it’s a means to an end.
Up there, in the sky, awaits a meeting with the Imperial warship, its captain… and the Fourth Blade.
It might not be time to tear his throat out yet, but there’s always opportunity to do a little more setup. Especially if one has the right people and the right ideas. His path forward might be clouded, but fortunately for Shin Ren, it doesn’t take a perfect clarity of purpose to fuck around and do something that is either going to kill him or cause a lot of mess for a few very specific people.
Comments
Summer Coff
Don't cry, don't raise your eye, it's only a teenage wasteland
Nathan Hartye
I love that one of the ways that Ren foils Raika is that while she's pioneering a new and unique style of not-cultivation he's personally rediscovering "traditional" cultivation with it's broken foundations, heart demons, and impurities. Both being a rebellion against the Imperial standard.
Unwillingmainer
Damn, for a minute that sounded like he was trying something healthy in the middle of all that war and destruction. Then that last bit reminds us what he's all about. But he's right, sometimes all you need is the right wrench thrown into the right machine at the right time. Or just be ready to shove a blade into the right back when the time's right.
