I didn’t sleep after that. It wasn’t anxiety or triumph. I just didn’t seem to need to; my body and mind felt refreshed. Renewed. Instead, I found a spring and took a bucket of fresh water back to my hut. It was freezing cold, but strangely I didn’t mind that either. I recognized it as my skin tingled from the scrubbing necessary to get rid of the impurities that had been purged from my flesh. I wasn’t numb. But my skin just seemed to accept the reality of the cold without being bothered by it.

  Once I was clean, I put on my only other sect uniform – the first was going to need more than one scrubbing – and hauled the dirty water do a disposal basin. I poured it out, marveling at the sheer amount of black, tarry gunk that had apparently been inside of me.

  Maybe. In the back of my mind, there was an awareness that perhaps the impurities were not just physical. My thoughts felt clearer. Some of the anxiety and unease that had followed me as long as I could remember had disappeared. It was like when I’d first learned to breathe correctly, and my body was receiving as much air as it truly needed for the first time. My mind finally had the clarity to think the way I’d always wanted to think.

  Back in my hut, I settled into meditation until dawn. Even with my eyes closed, I could ‘see’ the flow of qi around me in shimmering fields of color and light. Inside of me, too, but there it was more ordered, flowing down into my nearly empty dantian, then outwards to my limbs and my meridians.

  Not all the meridians, though. Only three could properly receive the flow of qi. I could sense the others, but when I tried to push qi in that direction, it was if I was pushing water against a stone wall with only my hand. The qi just slid away and the blockages remained. Something to work on in the future.

  What I could do was play with the flow of qi in my body and along my skin. I fed it into the muscles of one of my hands and reached into my interspacial space to grab the inkstone. It was an apprentice’s inkstone, not one of my parents’ beloved heirlooms. Those were safe in a hiding place in the city, or so I hoped. This one was plain but sturdy, a dark gray stone carved into a simple well with a ridged design around the edge. I weighed it in my palm for a moment, then curled my fingers around it. I squeezed.

  The stone resisted for three seconds before cracking beneath my fingertips, then snapping in half. The pieces slid from my suddenly loose fingers and fell to the ground. I couldn’t help it, I giggled, half with disbelief. It hadn’t hurt. It’d felt like an exertion, but only on the level of...snapping a thin branch, maybe. Ridiculous visions danced behind my eyes of carrying Zhuzhu on my back or running up to Sun Feiyun and cracking his face open with my fist.

  In the next moment, I took a closer look at my fist, and sighed with disappointment. Fully half of the qi I’d pushed into it was gone, expended by something as small as three seconds of superhuman effort. I’d collapse before I even got Zhuzhu on my shoulders.

  But with more meditation, more qi, more practice—I’d seen some small portion of the feats of true cultivation and while this was my start, it wouldn’t be my end. I’d passed through the first two gates to my vengeance...and godhood: becoming an outer disciple, and laying my spiritual foundation to have my first breakthrough. The next step lay ahead.

  The sect trials.

  No one had shared any details of what the trials would look like. I’d attended one cultivator tournament in my life, shortly after arriving in the city. I’d already known I’d have to join Seven Striking Thunder, so I’d used some of my dwindling savings—my family’s savings, I should say—to purchase a ticket for the festival’s tournament. Those had been one on one duels of what I suspected were low power cultivators, possibly only a little above where I was right now. Even so, it had been a spectacle beyond my expectation. My favorite competitor had been from a sect I’d never heard of, Flowering Boar, and he’d at least looked about the same age as me. Gangly and awkward, in a bright saffron robe with a ragged green sash, and so nervous that he’d tripped when his name was called for his match.

  But once the fight began, he transformed into something else. Something beautiful. And deadly. He’d flowed around the blows from the Seven Striking Thunder disciple as if he were made of water. And as he danced around his opponent, his hands had flickered, weaving light and shadow from thin air. Birds in a thousand colors sprang from his fingertips and swarmed the other disciple. While they had seemed as insubstantial as light itself from my place in the stands, wherever they struck, they left ragged, bleeding wounds. The crowd had sucked in a collective breath as the first volley hit, before letting that air out in a roar of approval.

  Seven Striking Thunder might have been “our” sect, but everyone likes a good show.

  The Flowering Boar disciple had won his fight, and made it up several ranks in the competition before being defeated by a cultivator who pulled shields and blades from the earth itself. By then, he’d become a bit of a favorite, and I had groaned and mourned with the rest of his fans when he’d conceded.

  That was my only template for what the sect trials might look like. That tournament had given prizes to the top five competitors. Presumably, our prize would be getting to become inner disciples of the sect. But surely it wouldn’t just be the top five. There were still some forty-odd of us and such a small graduating class...the fighting would be vicious.

  Which, let’s face it, was probably the point. I swallowed the sour taste in the back of my throat and pulled my mind away from such useless thoughts. Instead, I concentrated on my meditation, on the slow gathering of qi to refill what I’d used in my breakthrough.

  Hours passed like minutes until I felt the sun rising. The transition from night to day stirred the celestial qi that I was painstakingly gathering—there was so much less of it than I needed. I could use a little of the water qi; the mark on my hand built something of an affinity. But the dark celestial qi sang inside of me.

  Now it was fading, and the bright celestial qi of daytime and sunlight was slow to penetrate through the perpetual storm and mist. With a sigh, I pulled myself out of the trance and rose. I wasn’t hungry. Some of the qi I’d taken in had dispersed through my body with my breath, as nourishing as any meal. Which was going to take some getting used to. I hoped that I still could eat and I wasn’t expected to subsist on nothing but qi and air.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  In the next moment, I shook my head. No, that couldn’t be right. I’d prepared enough meals for the inners to know that they ate, and ate heartily at that. Still, I’d be cautious about how much I ate until I understood my new capabilities.

  When I reached the pavilion, I had to take a moment to just stop and stare. My compatriots were wreathed in rainbows. Around most of them, shimmering veils of qi made it clear just how close they were to breaking through as I had. Some, I noted, were not nearly so far along, with just dregs of qi that gathered sullenly around their torsos, barely stirred by their breath. Others, including the Kohs, had reached breakthrough before me; Koh the Younger raised his head as I entered, and both brothers assessed me before the Older gave a single nod of acknowledgment. His qi gleamed darkly, metal and earth like a shifting caul about him. Koh the Younger was earth and water, and between the brothers was a strange, qi-based bond. I could see it, the color of polished cherry, but the meaning of it was beyond my current understanding.

  I was so caught up in my new sight and its revelations that I didn’t notice Zhuzhu had joined me until his large hand came down with bone-rattling force on my back. For the first time, I didn’t stagger. I felt it, don’t get me wrong. But like the icy chill of washwater, it was something my body acknowledged without bowing to.

  Until, a second later, I forced myself to stumble forward a little and make a whine of protest. Zhuzhu laughed and draped an arm around me, dragging me towards the food. “Mouse, you must toughen up,” he crowed with delight. “Come, now. We’ll eat well, and maybe some of that food will build muscle for you!”

  He hadn’t broken through, but he was close. Achingly close – at this distance, with his arm on my skin, I was drowning in green smoke. The qi he attracted was the essence of wood and fire, the life essence of wood stoking the fires of his passion. Beneath them both, I caught glimpses of some other type of qi, but I couldn’t name it. Regardless, I would have put coin down on his breakthrough happening in the next couple of days.

  Despite everything, I hoped it succeeded. Of us all, I felt like Zhuzhu was the one closest to living his most joyful life. Maybe the most honest of any of the disciples here. He had a singular goal, and pursued it with enthusiastic sincerity. “You’re going to be a powerful disciple some day,” I said, before I quite realized what I was saying.

  Zhuzhu paused in the act of ladling steaming strips of meat onto his rice. He gave me a peculiar, sidelong long. Then shrugged. “Of course! I am going to be the strongest disciple of any sect in all the Empire.” With a grin, he filled an extra large ladle, then dumped it on my rice. “Here. We’ll trigger a growth spurt yet.” We walked back to our usual table and I nearly dropped my bowl.

  Ju Jing was sitting in his usual space and, from the best I could interpret my new senses, he was about to explode.

  Qi seethed under his skin, every inch of his body sufficed with tightly packed energies. Far more than one would need for their first breakthrough. So much qi that it made my eyes water, looking at him. I practically fell onto the bench and averted my eyes. Apparently oblivious, Ju Jing said, “I hear my friends approach. Zhuzhu, did you leave any lamb for the rest of us?”

  “Of course! But if I did not, that would be your own fault. You got here first, you should have taken what you desired.”

  Ju Jing lifted a clump of rice on his chopsticks. His bowl actually had very little meat; he seemed to prefer onions and peppers and some of the hot sauce. “I got what I wanted. But not everyone is so lucky to be early.”

  Zhuzhu considered that, then shrugged. “Who cares? If they wanted it bad enough, they’d be here.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “Mouse, have you been drinking without me?”

  “What? No! What makes you say that?”

  He waggled his chopsticks towards my face. “You look off. Staring like you’re trying to pretend your head isn’t hurting.”

  I jerked my eyes back to my bowl, trying not to notice how Ju Jing’s eyebrows arched in curiosity. “I’m fine. Really. I just didn’t get much sleep, last night. Thinking about the trials. You don’t suppose the inners have forgotten us, do you?”

  It was a gambit, but a successful one. Zhuzhu immediately launched into enthusiastic speculation about the trials. It seemed that he, too, had seen the same tournament I had, and agreed that our trials were likely to look very similar. “How else will they understand who the strongest of us shall be?”

  Ju Jing grimaced, just the smallest twist of his mouth, but hard not to notice when I’d gotten to know his guarded expressions. “Some tournaments have a grand melee. There is a sect near the capital which places all aspirants in an arena lined with dragonskin and takes the twenty left standing at the end.”

  I winced. Such a format would be a nightmare for Ju Jing, who had confessed that large fights were his weakness. Zhuzhu, on the other hand, seemed enchanted by the possibility. He swept a look over the pavilion and declared, “Top three, at least. I would say I would rank second in such a fight.”

  “Only second?” I teased.

  He laughed in return. “Second, yes. Everyone knows my strength. In a grand melee, I suspect I would see more than my fair share of challengers. And of the three people who are stronger than me among the outers, at least one would be clever enough to save their strength for when mine was drained.” He nodded. “But when they came for me, I would learn from their technique, and the next time we fought, I would defeat them.” His eyes drifted towards where Kai sat, eating in silence and solitude.

  I couldn’t actually argue with that. Maybe with who Zhuzhu thought would be his main threats. There was a small burst of indignation that he clearly didn’t rank me among them. But, while I might be able to hold my own at this moment? There was no way he wouldn’t breakthrough by the time of the trials. Then, my momentary advantages would be overcome. Unless I found some other power to cultivate.

  I glanced over at Kai. He was, to my surprise, not as far along as Zhuzhu. Cold, sinuous water qi swirled within and without him, but I could feel that he needed time and practice before he was ready.

  Ju Jing, on the other hand, was more than ready. Terribly more. I thought about how I had felt, filled with qi and almost as if I would burst from it. Ju Jing had at least twice the qi I’d had at that time; he must be feeling as if his skin would split with any sudden movement. Yet, his expression was as serene as ever.

  It had to be an act. But why? Breaking through was the whole point of our work as outers; we were meant to prove that we had the spiritual resonance to be true cultivators. Ju Jing already had an art, and a deadly one. Breaking through should have been as easy as breathing for him. Instead...I didn’t even have a word for the almost solid mass of qi that looked like it might tear him apart from the inside at any moment.

  Spiritual constipation. Was that a thing you could get? What did you do about it? If he hadn’t been in hiding, or whatever it was the inners were doing, I might have asked Yuanshu. As it was...I decided to do something I’d never once contemplated since the beginning of my time with the sect.

  I was going to skip practice and figure out what was going on with Ju Jing.

  I just hoped Kai didn’t kill me for ditching him.