Being encased in stone felt wrong. I tried, despite that. I took up a meditative pose in the center of my hut, the one place I was reasonably confident that I wouldn’t be disturbed. I closed my eyes. I breathed as I’d learned to breathe, feeling that pillar that connected me to sky and earth in every inhale and exhale. A rebirth was waiting for me. I could feel it, as hot as a star and as alive as a child, waiting to emerge into the world.

  But this was not the place.

  This knowledge was as clear to me as hunger, one of those nameless cravings that would afflict me in the dead of the night. When you could take a bite of something and know, instantly, that it wasn’t what you were hungry for, that it wouldn’t quiet the need inside of you.

  I gathered myself and left the hut. By this time, it was approaching dinner. The bathhouse would be full, and the pavilion setting up the meal. Neither of those places appealed to the need inside of me. I scented the air, unconsciously animal-like. It was damp, cold, and carried the faintest tang of ozone from the constant storm that protected the sect. A breakthrough, even the first breakthrough, was about more than just being so full of qi you can use it to purify your body and take another step forward to godhood. It was about an understanding that brought you closer to enlightenment. What did I understand of myself? What was necessary to truly be cleansed and refined in the spiritual fire?

  Darkness.

  Something spoke without words, and relief swept through me. Recognition. Yes. I wanted somewhere dark. But not encased in stone. Somewhere I could feel the wind. And see the moon. Yes. Somewhere I could see the moon. I tilted my head back, squinted through the mist. It might be a crescent moon tonight. It was difficult to tell. I was only sure that it wasn’t full, and it wasn’t a new moon. The oncoming night would take care of the darkness. But for the rest…

  I searched the sect. I avoided the boisterous groups of disciples and skirted the far edges of the walls. My intuition told me that I wouldn’t find what I was looking for in the interior. There were too many people, too many lights. My footsteps carried me lightly over rock and moss. I wasn’t following any sort of internal guide, no secret lodestone. I would know what I needed when I saw it, I thought, but otherwise it was defined by not. Not that place, with its pretty little garden of brightly colored moss and lichen. Nor this one, where some artist had carved four statues of white jade and set them at the cardinal directions. They would suit some other cultivator, some different understanding. But not mine.

  By the time I found it, it was full dark. I stumbled through a crumbling doorway in a part of the sect that felt as if it had been abandoned for some time. This had been an Inner’s sanctum, once upon a time. The walls were expansive and carved with sacred symbols and spell sigils, although I felt no power from them now. But the ceiling had been broken--

  --no, it had been blasted away. The fog thinned for a moment, and the light of the crescent moon shone down, as if to deliberately show me the signs of past violence. They were old, perhaps ancient, mere whispers of history on stone. But the diffuse light lingered on the scorch marks, the break marks. In the center of the central room was what once must have been the staging ground for an array. Whatever precious qi-gathering materials that had made up the array had been pried out and taken away, but there were still circles and sigils that time and weather hadn’t completely destroyed. I approached, kneeling on the cold, damp stone. Moonlight and mist swirled as my fingers found the carved brushstrokes that defined the innermost ring. Not all of it was readable.

  --protect this ---, name --- power --- am Guanqing--

  The breath left me in a long, slow sigh. The mysterious cultivator who had turned on someone in his own sect, an act of oathbreaking that led to his death, trapped under the earth. “Was your vengeance worth it?” I asked the stone. Nothing answered.

  That was an answer I would have to find for myself. But here? Here is where I could start. I could feel that this was the right place. Open to moonlight and mist, and the lingering power of a man who had taken his own vengeance regardless of the cost. I could be reborn here. Purified. Empowered.

  I meditated.

  At first, it was like every meditation. Calm descended and I could feel my body as it existed in the air, my skin forming the thinnest of barriers between within and without. But that barrier was not absolute. In every breath, I exchanged power and life with the world outside, and I gifted it some small fraction of my own essence in return. My lower dantian glowed like a sun in my mind’s eye; it was achingly full. All that qi, distilled with every breath, ready to be used to refine my impure flesh and seek godhood.

  It called out for guidance. Raw life, creation, possibility. It needed to be shaped, for me to understand how to sculpt myself in the image of...something. The crescent moon flashed in my mind’s eye: sharp, changeable, its true form concealed by its curving and deadly edge. Before I could reach for it, claim it for my own, though, the image flipped, and now it was the bright swell of the quarter moon, the crescent reduced to a black shadow behind its light and weight. No, I want to be the knife.

  But the knife was an illusion, wasn’t it? Just as the quarter moon was an illusion. They were both the same moon, bright and dark, sharp and fecund. Each was revealed in its time, and every phase concealed some part of the truth of the moon. Even the full moon, in its bright perfection, surely hid some truth behind its silver light. We were liars, the moon and I. Perhaps we were all liars, displaying only what we needed to show to meet the moment, overcome the challenges of this physical world. Changeability, deception. These weren’t flaws or deficits: they were tools. Sword—no, knife and shield as needed. I could embrace that, understand that.

  I was plunged into darkness without warning, tossed into nothingness before I could fully process my revelations. The void was achingly cold; my limbs went numb immediately—except for a circle on the palm of one of my hands. I couldn’t move from my meditative stance as I spun without anchor or ground. Just as fear gripped my heart stronger than the cold, there was light.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  The moon. No. As the circle of light resolved, grew full and fecund, it revealed its true shape: a giant white rabbit, curled into a circle, the pale jade-colored fur radiating that cold illumination. I was spinning towards it, drawn by either its will or its sheer power. One massive eye opened, and it was as black as its fur was white, the slow blink a moon phasing in inverse. It spoke like ice and winter.

  Cultivator. Is it you who seeks to usurp my mistress?

  I blinked. “No?” I offered, tentatively. “I bear the moon goddess no ill will.” Because who could this be, if not the Jade Rabbit who walked beside her and protected her? And yet, the stories had always made him sound less terrifying than the freezing behemoth before me.

  Then turn from your path. Earn immortality through service to the gods and your fellow man, if you must earn it at all.

  “I can’t do that!”

  The rabbit had been regarding me with one eye. As I drifted closer, every time my rotation let me see it, that eye was larger. I could fit inside it at this point with room to spare. And now its head turned, and I got a glimpse of its teeth as its mouth gaped. They were much less threatening when either of the two front teeth wasn’t the size of my torso. The head kept turning, and now it regarded me with the other eye.

  You can. Why will you not?

  Could you tell the gods about fury? Was the Rabbit even a god, or was he like Wai Kei, the offshoot of a god, with its own strange thoughts and needs? Had it ever loved, ever lost, ever craved an enemy’s blood? “I can,” I had to admit, because it was true and arguing with whatever the Rabbit was about something we both knew it was right about seemed like a bad idea. “But I won’t. Not for you. Not for anyone. My dead cry for vengeance.”

  The dead want little. You cry for vengeance.

  “Yes! Fine, if that’s what you want. I cry for it. I demand it!”

  One giant ear twitched, and I stopped rotating and drifting. I hung in black space, freezing as it pinned me in place with its mad, lapine gaze. All hares looked insane to some degree. Expanding the size to that of a palace only amplified the effect. And if my mistress’ place in the celestial court stands in your way? If you must ascend to her throne on the moon to have your vengeance?

  I swallowed hard. “Then...that’s what I’ll do.”

  Sound cracked through the void: thunder, devoid of lightning. The lightning was in the depths of the Rabbit’s eye, reflecting its fury. When that time comes, the Tribulation of Heaven shall stand against you. I shall stand against you. You will die by the fury of the gods.

  Fury of my own sparked in my soul. I was tired of everyone assuming that I would fail. To get it from a rabbit, however large and terrifying, was just too much. I shouted with all my soul, “Or I will live, and overcome, and stand beside them as an equal! I can become immortal and not even Heaven can stop me!”

  Bold words. The Rabbit’s great, black eye slid closed. We will see.

  The void, and the Rabbit, vanished. Frost cracked over my skin and broke away, falling to the stone of the ruined meditation chamber. My heart, which hadn’t seemed to beat at all, suddenly remembered the trick of it and hammered in my chest to make up for lost time. The gods had taken notice of me, and had not liked what they saw.

  I strangled the guilt before it could break my concentration. I already knew I was defying the Will of Heaven. By presenting myself as a man. By becoming a cultivator. By joining a sect known as villainous and demonic. I knew my path was one of sacrifice and making enemies. Nothing would stop me from walking it. Not even the gods.

  Qi surged as this understanding settled inside of me and filled spaces in my soul that I hadn’t realized were empty. It burned, exploding from my dantian to remake my body. In my heart, I knew this was the most dangerous moment of my awakening, more dangerous than even my brush with divinity. My truth and my will were the only things that could control the power that blazed through my flesh, seeking out impurities and refining this mortal body. And that truth was so fragile. So barely understood. I flung it at the tide of qi like a talisman.

  To change is to reveal and deceive in turns. Until deception becomes revelation and revelation, deception.

  Deception is a tool. It must be mastered and used, but not allowed to master or use.

  Guanqing’s name blazed behind my eyes, and I heard the slow, deep rumble of the turtle god, telling the end of his story. Speaking of vengeance and its results. Another truth came to me, my mouth shaping the words I’d spoken then, weaving them into my transformation:

  There are graves I value more highly than my own.

  The air stunk, rancid with impurities as the qi forced out of the newly-reborn temple of my body. It hurt more than I expected, the filth my mortal form had built up since birth fighting to remain as it was ripped through my flesh and expelled into the world. It hit resistance along the way, blocked meridians that had to be cleansed. The qi burned its way through the ones it could reach, as harsh and uncompromising as fire, but there wasn't enough qi. I could feel that so much remained to be unlocked, awakened, purified. I refused to scream. I tilted my head back, lifted it towards the moon. The mist had rolled back and it was a hazy cloud of silver light. I breathed in, then out, expelling another wave of filth.

  And as the impurities left my body, qi replaced them. Infused muscle and bone. I could taste it. I could see it: the moon above me was no longer obscured by the mist. Its own celestial qi was well defined, although even as I watched, that qi shifted from bright to dark to bright again. The truth of the moon.

  My truth.

  The sense of rightness slid home with a force that made my soul shudder. I was empty, and I was full at the same time. I put one hand on my torso, just above my womb. Both my sect outfit and my hand were covered in a black, tarry substance. It smelled wretched, like rot and burning hair. Just in case, I reached for my hair with my other hand. It was tacky, soaked in impurity sludge, but still there.

  I no longer felt tired. When I breathed in, I could see the qi that entered me. Feel as it descended into my dantian. Move it at my will to refresh and rejuvenate myself. The qi that surrounded me was dark and celestial. When I breathed it in, it felt surprisingly warm. Except, again, for the hand that had touched the spirit’s core. I turned the palm up to catch the moonlight. Even beneath the film of impurity, I could see the circle of skin—when it had healed, it had retained a blueish tinge. Now, it was a deeper blue, and I could watch as the qi that swirled around my skin was changed, bit by bit, from celestial to water. I exerted a touch of will and watched an icicle form in my cupped hand.

  This qi wasn’t as comforting or easily integrated as the celestial. Like the water it was the essence of, it kept slipping free of my will, and the icicle dissolved into freezing cold water after only a few moments. But I sensed potential there.

  I took a deep breath of the rancid air and grinned.

  I was a true cultivator now. I sensed potential everywhere.