Chapter 2: Chapter 1: Leaving the Sect

CHAPTER

1

Leaving the Sect

I

Standing on the last step of the stairway, Hao Zhen stared at the gate that marked the entrance of the residential area of the Outer Court of the Blazing Light Sect. The gate was built on the base of a small mountain, before which was a large a square, with the stairway he had just descended leading up the mountain.

Hao Zhen stepped onto the square and started looking around for his teammates. It didn’t take him long to notice a group of two—a young man in his early twenties and a girl who appeared in her mid-teens—standing near the edge of the square, where the stone floor of the square met the surrounding grass.

Seeing no other groups on the square, Hao Zhen made his way over to them. As he approached, he noticed that the male disciple’s robe wasn’t the same color as his, but instead a shade darker and clearly made out of a more expensive material. Seeing that, he grew confident in his judgment and hastened his pace.

As he drew near, the pair turned to look at him. After he introduced himself, they exchanged greetings, and it turned out that he had judged correctly: they were indeed the members of his team.

The young man, Ke Li, was an inner disciple—as Hao Zhen had expected—and the one in charge of leading the team. As for the girl, she was called Duo Lan, and she was an outer disciple like Hao Zhen. She didn’t seem much interested in him and had fallen silent after curtly introducing herself, gazing into the distance while pointedly ignoring everyone else.

This wasn’t Hao Zhen’s first time seeing Duo Lan. They had entered the sect at the same time, and although they had never talked in the past, he remembered her because she gotten second places in the entrance examinations, whereas he had just barely managed to pass. Not only that, in the two months since they had become outer disciples, Duo Lan had built quite a reputation. Rumor had it that she had defeated an inner disciple in a due, exposed a corrupt outer elder, and beaten one of the most talented disciples of the alchemy division in a contest.

You wouldn’t have been able to tell that by looking at her, however. Duo Lan wasn’t bad-looking, but she wasn’t couldn’t be considered particularly remarkable, either, with a squarish face, dark eyes, and short brown hair. One did stand out about her, however, and it was her height. She was unusually tall for a girl—almost Hao Zhen’s height, who was of average height for a sixteen-year-old boy.

Once the formalities were out of the way, Ke Li silently gazed Hao Zhen for a moment, before asking, “Is this your first mission outside of the sect?”

Hao Zhen blinked, then slightly flushed. “Was it that obvious, Senior Brother Ke?”

In a sect, seniority was based on power, with rank taking precedence over age. Even if Hao Zhen had been older than Ke Li, he would have still needed to address  him as “Senior Brother Ke.”

Ke Li chuckled. “A little,” he said. “Now, regarding the mission, a week may seem like a long time, but we’ll be back before you know it. And even though we’ll need to leave the sect, where we’re heading isn’t anywhere dangerous, so there shouldn’t be any issues. You just need to….” Ke Li trailed off, his eyes focusing on something in the distance.

Following his gaze, Hao Zhen saw a male disciple in a blue robes walking over to them. When Hao Zhen’s eyes fell upon the newcomer’s face, he blinked, startled, realizing just who the last member of his team was. Tian Jin—whose name Hao Zhen must have heard at least a hundred times this week alone—was making his way over to them.

The legendary outer disciple came to a stop a few steps away from them, and Hao Zhen found himself having to look up a little. Even though they were about the same age and Hao Zhen was of average height, Tian Jin was taller by over half a foot.

Tian Jin’s gaze lingered on Hao Zhen for a moment before he turned to look at the other two members of their team.

Hao Zhen did his best not to stare at the boy. Back in the entrance examinations, he had seen Tian Jin, but only in the form of brief glances from a distance, so he had never been able to get a clear look at him at his face. Since joining the sect, he had heard many rumors about Tian Jin’s appearance, but he had thought them exaggerated. Now he was forced to admit that he had been mistaken. Tian Jin did look outrageously handsome—as if he had stepped out of a painting—and the much taller boy carried himself with a level of ease and confidence Hao Zhen doubted he would ever have.

Tian made Ke Li, who was fairly handsome in his own right even if his face was a bit too narrow, look plain and dull. Hao Zhen didn’t even dare compare his own looks to Tian Jin. He was well aware he was as plain as they came, with a round face, slightly swarthy skin, thin lips, a faintly crooked nose, and dark brown eyes and hair.

“Tian Jin,” Duo Lan said, stepping forward. Where she had looked at Hao Zhen with disinterest, she looked at the last member of their team with blatant hostility. Duo Lan might have made a name for herself in the Outer Court, but she was completely overshadowed by Tian Jin. Duo Lan was famous; Tian Jin was outright legendary.

Tian Jin had participated in the same entrance examination as the two of them, and he was the one who had beaten Duo Lan, taking first place. Then, after joining the Outer Court, he only took two months to become the most outstanding outer disciple in the history of the Blazing Light Sect. The rumors about him were numerous, and just as great as his fame was his infamy. Even though Tian Jin had barely been in the sect for two months, he had supposedly already made enemies out of several inner disciples, whereas most outer disciples who had been in the sect for years virtually only got to interact with inner disciples when going on missions outside the sect.

“Duo Lan,” Tian Jin said dryly. “Fancy seeing you here.”

Duo Lan glared at him for a few more seconds, then shook her head and looked away, a scowl on her face.

Ke Li stepped forward, putting himself between the two of them, and exchanged greetings with Tian Jin. They didn’t seem like they were meeting for the first time, and two two appeared to be on friendly terms. Ke Li then confirming that everyone had made adequate preparations, then led them over to a deserted spot on the grass next to the square, before waving his arm in front of him.

Hao Zhen watched in awe as a stream of red substance rolled out from within Ke Li’s sleeve, coalescing into a red cloud, hovering just above the ground. A magical cloud. Hao Zhen had never been so close to one before, having only seen them from a distance in the past.

A few of the outer disciples walking around on the square stopped to stare at the magical cloud, whereas others, who had probably been in the sect for a longer time and were used to such scenes, ignored them.

Ke Li then hopped onto the cloud. Duo Lan leaped into the air a moment later and landed softly on the cloud, followed by Tian Jin. After a moment of hesitation, Hao Zhen reached out and touched the magical cloud. It was solid in a cushiony way. He then climbed on top, feeling it shift and curve slightly under his weight, but otherwise remain firm. It reminded him of a mattress—a very soft, comfortable one.

“All right. Here’s how this works,” Ke Li said once they were all properly seated. “A magical cloud needs a steady supply of spiritual power to fly. To provide it with magical power, you can just channel spiritual power into it as if you were using any other magical artifact. We’ll be taking turns, and while one of us is powering the magical cloud, the other three will be recovering. When you feel like you’re about to run out of spiritual stamina, we switch. I’ll be going first.”

With that, Ke Li sat down cross-legged in front of them and closed his eyes. A moment later, the cloud began to rise, slowly at first, and it soon picked up the pace and started rising faster and faster until all Hao Zhen could hear was the howling of the wind. This high, the disciples on the face of the mountain looked smaller than ants.

Eventually, the magical cloud stopped rising, its speed stabilizing, and Hao Zhen finally let out the breath he had been holding. Stealing a glance at Tian Jin and Duo Lan, he saw that both of them looked wholly unaffected, if not bored. No doubt this wasn't their first time riding a magical cloud. Hao Zhen already knew that their experiences after joining the sect had been completely different from his, but he still couldn’t help but feel a bit bitter that they just took for granted something that he had been looking forward to so much.

Trying not to dwell too much on the contrast between their circumstances, Hao Zhen focused on the sights. He could see, dozens of thousands of feet below him, the Blazing Light Sect—tens of thousands of buildings sprawled throughout the mountain range, roughly divided into three areas, which he assumed were the three courts of the sect: the Outer Court, the Inner Court, and the Core Court.

Before long, the sect disappeared in the distance, swallowed by the horizon.

II

Hao Zhen had dreamed of riding a magical cloud from the moment he became a cultivator and learning that magical clouds were a thing. Alas, the novelty wore off quickly, and by the second day, he felt nothing but boredom—a feeling he had long since grown used to as a cultivator but had never felt so strongly as he did now.

There was no talking, no conversations. Everyone seemed content to mind their own business, and Duo Lan's feud with Tian Jin didn't help the situation. He didn't know the story behind it, and he wasn't too keen on asking. What he did know was that the conflict was mostly one-sided. As far as he could see, the problem lay with Duo Lan, who seemed determined to antagonize Tian Jin as much as possible. Tian Jin, on the other hand, just appeared to be exasperated with her antics and was doing his best to ignore her.

Thankfully, Duo Lan had eventually grown tired of trying to rile Tian Jin up, and it had been a couple of hours since her last attempted to start a fight. At least for the time being, she had settled for pretending Tian Jin didn’t exist, a decision Tian Jin appeared to wholeheartedly support.

That just meant that the situation wasn’t as tense as it used to be, however. Unfortunately, the boredom remained.

According to Ke Li, who occasionally gave them updates, they would reach their destination around midday. As dawn had only just broken, that meant that there was still about half a day left, and Hao Zhen couldn’t think of anything else to do during that time but practice cultivation—an activity that, at best, could be considered dreadfully dull and repetitive.

Hao Zhen, as well as all of the other member of the Blazing Light Sect, was a spiritual cultivator: a person who practiced spiritual cultivation, which was the act of cultivating the soul through magical means. More specifically, Hao Zhen was a redsoul—a cultivator at the first realm of cultivation, the Red Spiritual Realm. Cultivation was divided into six realms, and whenever a cultivator advanced to the next realm, the color of their soul would change as it turned into spiritual matter of a higher grade. Each realm was further divided into eleven levels

Specifically, what cultivators cultivated was their crux: a fist-sized orb of concentrated spiritual energy that could only be found inside the soul of magical beings. Spiritual energy was a magical substance that was usually physically intangible, visible only through the use of Spiritual Sight, the first spiritual technique that every cultivator learned. Essentially, cultivation boiled down to absorbing magical energy into the crux, increasing its density, and whenever the crux reached a certain level of spiritual density, the cultivator would advance to the next level.

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Even after two months of dutiful cultivation, however, Hao Zhen was still stuck at the first level of the Red Spiritual Realm, having made little progress. He had joined the Blazing Light Sect to leave his old life behind, and he had only barely managed to pass the entrance examinations. He didn’t regret his decision to break ties with his family—it galled him to even think of his stepmother and stepbrother as such—but he was having second thoughts about being a cultivator. Sure, cultivators could potentially live for thousands of years and become powerful enough to split mountains in half by simply swinging their sword, but to reach that level, you needed talent—something that Hao Zhen was rather deficient in if the last three months were any indication.

With a sigh, Hao Zhen started reciting in his mind the incantation of the Outer Blazing Light Method: the cultivation method given to all outer disciples when they joined the sect. The next moment, he felt a connection form between himself and the spiritual power being emanated by his crux. Keeping the mental chant going, Hao Zhen used his spiritual power to pull ambient spiritual energy—the ownerless magical energy that permeated the world—into his soul, assimilating it into his crux. Because of how sparse ambient spiritual energy was, however, this was perhaps the most inefficient form of cultivation. If he had spiritual stones, this would be a different story, but he had already used up his monthly allotment, and he wasn’t talented enough to get his hands on more—unlike his teammates, who were all holding onto a spiritual stone and converting it into spiritual energy.

That much could be expected from Ke Li, as he was an inner disciple, and so the sect probably provided him with as many spiritual stones as he needed, but Hao Zhen couldn’t help but feel bitter when he thought of how even though Tian Jin and Duo Lan had entered the sect at the same time as him, they were so far ahead it was hilarious. From what he heard, the two of them had already broken through to the sect of level of the Red Spiritual Realm—something that would probably still take him a couple of years.

Hao Zhen sighed. Talented people were something else, all right.

Thankfully, completing the mission would get him with a couple of spiritual stones, so although he wasn’t going on this mission by choice—every month outer disciples would be assigned a mission by the sect that they couldn’t refuse, and this was one such mission—at least it’d be worth it in end because of the reward.

III

Their destination, it turned out, was a valley near a small village, thousands of miles away from the sect, though still within its sphere of influence. Ke Li lowered the magical cloud into a clearing, and after the four of them had gotten off it, the inner disciple retrieved the magical cloud into his sleeve.

“All right, here’s what we have to look for,” Ke Li said, handing each of them a jade slip—a small, narrow strip of jade in which information could be magically stored. Upon channeling his spiritual power into it, Hao Zhen saw three images form in his mind’s eye. The first one was of a red-colored stalk of grass, whereas the other two were of flowers. Next to each image was a small paragraph.

“The first magical plant is sunpraising grass,” Ke Li explained. “We need at least ten blades of it. In the jade slip, there’s information about where it usually grows. There are also two other magical plants there—deathpetal orchids and shadowseeker daffodils. Although they aren’t required to complete the mission, we’ll be given an extra reward if we bring some of them back, so keep an eye out for them.”

Ke Li gave them some time to look through the contents of the jade slip before continuing. “There’s no special method for collecting these magical plants, but to be on the safe side, don’t pull them out directly with your hands. Instead, envelop them with your spiritual power and use it to carefully lift them off the ground. Don’t cut off their roots and make sure not to damage the stem or the petals in the case of the magical flower. Also, these magical plants aren’t intelligent, so you don’t have to worry about them resisting capture, either.”

Hao Zhen, Tian Jin, and Lan Yue listened in silence. The instructions were easy enough to follow, and Hao Zhen had done some missions that had required him to tend to spiritual plants, so the only part new to him was having to search for the plants in the wild.

Ke Li’s instructions hadn’t ended yet.

“Now, the valley is pretty big, and these plants could be anywhere. To increase our chances, we’ll spread out and meet back here on night falls. If we’re lucky, we can still head back to the sect today. I’ll take West. Tian Jin will go North; Duo Lan, South; Hao Zhen, East. Understood?”

They all nodded their heads.

“Very well,” Ke Li said. “Just remember to be careful—this is supposed to be a peaceful area, but you never know. If anything happens, send out a spiritual beacon, and we’ll rush to your location. One last thing.” Four pills suddenly appeared above Ke Li’s hand, floating in mid-air.

At that moment, Hao Zhen finally noticed the ring on Ke Li’s hand, which had emitted a soft red glow just before the pills appeared. It was red and shaped like a band with intricate carvings on it. A spatial ring, he realized. He had only heard of them before. He then stole a glance at Tian Jin’s and Duo Lan’s hands, and realized that both of them had similar rings, Tian Jin also having a second ring, though Hao Zhen didn’t think it was another spatial ring, considering it was a dull metallic gray in color and didn’t have any intricate designs or patterns on it.

Just another way in which Duo Lan and Tian were more like inner disciples than outer disciples, Hao Zhen thought to to himself.

“These are Golden Eye Pills,” Ke Li explained. “After you take them, magical plants will glow golden when you use Spiritual Sight. They should allow us to complete the much mission faster. Also, if you come across any plants glowing golden, pick them up even if they aren’t one of the three listed in the jade slip, as we can still take them back to the sect to be exchanged into contribution points.”

Ke Li then waved his hand, and one of the pills flew over to Hao Zhen, the other two going to Tian Jin and Duo Lan. Hao Zhen’s impression of Ke Li, which had already been good to begin with, improved by several notches. He had spoken with other outer disciples who had gone on missions outside the sect, and they had all claimed that inner disciples were an extremely arrogant and aloof bunch. Ke Li, however, had not only been friendly and understanding from the very start, but was also actively helping them.

Hao Zhen quickly expressed his gratitude. Tian Jin did the same, although he wasn’t as vocal about it, whereas Duo Lan merely nodded at Ke Li.  

With that, they all took a Golden Eye Pill and set off in the direction assigned to them. As Hao Zhen walked, heading East, he channeled spiritual power into the jade slip again to review its contents.  

All three magical plants were rather intuitively named. Sunpraising grass grew in open areas, directly exposed to the sun, shadowseeker daffodils grew in shadowy areas, usually under the canopy of trees, and deathpetal orchids grew in areas where living creatures had died in the past. Confirming that there wasn’t anything he had missed, Hao Zhen returned the jade slip to his pocket and started channeling his spiritual power into his eyes, activating Spiritual Sight. A moment later, the world was tinged red, the ambient spiritual energy around him becoming visible. Spiritual energy was divided into grades, and spiritual energy of different grades were of different colors, with red being the color of spiritual energy of the lowest grade.

Hao Zhen walked at a slow but steady pace, and he eventually happened upon a cluster of three red-colored blades of grass softly glowing in the sun. Not only could he see the spiritual energy inside them with Spiritual Sight, but they were also glowing golden because of the Golden Eye Pill he had taken.

After comparing them with the image of sunpraising grass on the jade slip and confirming that they were indeed what was looking for, he collected them as Ke Li had instructed. A short while after that, under the canopy of a tree, he found a single black orchid with a golden glow around it, which turned out to be a deathpetal orchid.

Hao Zhen didn’t come across any other magical plants after that, but he figured that what he had collected so far made for a decent haul. Most likely everyone else had collected at least just as much as he had, so they’d probably get to return to the sect today.

Glancing at the sky and seeing that the sun was about to set, he started making his way back. He couldn’t help but smile to himself as he walked. The mission was turning out much better than he had thought.

By the time he returned to the clearing they had landed in, night had fallen, but his teammates were nowhere to be seen. Figuring that they’d be arriving any time now, Hao Zhen sat down to wait for them, but even after a while, there was no sign of them.

Hao Zhen frowned. Where was everyone else? He looked in the directions Duo Lan and Tian Jin had set out in, but he saw nothing. When he looked West, however, he blinked. There was something in the sky a good distance away from him. He squinted his eyes. A faint, hazy cloud of—

Red.

Hao Zhen’s heart skipped a beat, and he hastily jumped to his feet.

He used Spiritual Sight, and sure enough, the red cloud in the distance started glowing brightly. There was no doubt about it. Someone—most likely Ke Li, considering where the cloud was—had used a spiritual beacon. It was so far away that Hao Zhen wouldn’t have found it if he hadn’t been actively looking for signs of his teammates. The cloud was already half-dissipated from what he could tell, so some time must have passed since it was set off.

Without hesitation, Hao Zhen bolted toward it.

IV

Running as fast as he could, it didn’t take Hao Zhen long to reach a small clearing, above which the spiritual beacon still hung in the air. Instead of rushing in, however, he came to an almost immediate stop upon seeing what exactly was happening in the clearing.

He hadn’t been expecting something specific, but among the possibilities he had considered, were monsters and cultivators from an enemy sect.

Not among them was Ke Li, standing on one side of the clearing, some distance away from Tian Jin, who had a bloodied sword in his hands, holding the blade against his own neck, drawing blood.

As Hao Zhen stood there, struck dumb, Ke Li, who had been facing Tian Jin, slowly turned his head to look in his direction. There was sweat dripped down his forehead, and his expression was grim but strained.

Their eyes met. The inner disciple blinked.

“Well,” Ke Li said, his eyes narrowing, his voice strained as if he had to make an effort just to speak. “It appears we have a problem.”