“Fire. Arguably the most Yang element. So… I should explode my way out of here.”

Sure. You do that.

“It was a joke, Grandpa.”

I wasn’t joking. But you would be missing out. My opportunity senses are going crazy. We have to get into that ring.

“The person who jumped in before me said his name was Ma Teng. I don’t know what honorable clan the Ma are, but even if they loaded him up with four times what Sister Liren’s grandmother gave her, that’s at best a nice-to-have, not a need to have.”

True. But I trust my instincts. Let’s go investigate.

“How? Actually, that’s the most important question. How do we deal with all this fire? Because I’m okay standing here for the moment, but I’m going to get tired soon.”

Now that, I’m afraid, is something for you to figure out.

Tian looked around the room. How was he supposed to “figure out” walking through fire? Maybe he could swing from stalactite to stalactite? That seemed… possible. Maybe. But it wasn’t really useful. That was just moving around the room. The real value of the chambers came from understanding their elements and incorporating them into his own cultivation. So what could he draw from here?

The chamber seemed to have more stalactites and stalagmites in it. Some even touched, forming thin pillars. Others were squat and wide. Most were long and narrow, with smooth ridges along their length. For some reason, despite there being almost no similarities, he was strongly reminded of the trash heaps in the garbage dump. You could jump between them, but there were unpleasant consequences for failing to nail the landing.

Fire was associated with spontaneity. Tian grinned, and jumped.

He switched over to Light Body Heavy Hands. It wouldn’t make him fall any slower, but it did let his jumps push him further. His foot touched on the hot stone of a stalagmite just long enough for him to gather his strength, then he kicked off again. It felt like one of Grandpa’s jumping games. Each foot falling just where it needed to, but his mind focused on something else.

Tian failed to appreciate how special it was that he could jump from stone to stone, never really worrying about where his foot was going to land and focusing entirely on what his path through the stalagmites would be. It didn’t occur to him that, for most people, a slippery, sharply angled surface would not be considered a suitable surface to jump to or from. It was all normal for him. Who’s grandpa didn’t play jumping games with them when they were growing up?

It was an eight jump path that turned into fifteen jumps due to poor planning, but none of the jumps were too dangerous. By the end, he was just having fun. Grabbing the ring was going to be tricky, however. Bones would fall apart without connective tissues, so he couldn’t just grab the whole skeleton with his rope dart.

He was going to have to reach into the fire. Actually… he would have lower himself into it. Not something he was looking forward to. He swapped over to Snake Head Vine body and wrapped his dart around a stalactite, cinching it down tight and popping the barbs for extra grip. It wasn’t great. The rope kept trying to slip. Tian poured more and more of his vital energy into it, but he couldn’t stop moving now. Each time his foot touched a stalagmite, he was riding a wave of momentum. Stop moving, and he would drown in the fire.

He jumped for the bones, letting his weight ride on the rope as he slid lower down. He grabbed the finger with the ring on it. Got it! It was burning, searing hot in his hands, the whole bone was hot enough to sear flesh. He yanked upwards… but the bone didn’t separate. Ring, bone and the whole skeleton was pulled upwards for just a moment.

The skeleton was so heavy, Tian briefly wondered if it was made of stone. Then the rope slid off the stalactite and he stopped caring about the little things.

Tian shoved the ring into a pocket on his robe and, with the instinct born of fighting in the wasteland, stowed the skeleton in his storage ring. He just needed a quick jump. He just needed to get up out of the flames quickly, and he would be alright. He started to crouch- but it was too late.

Tian didn’t remember how he was burnt as a child. He vividly remembered what it was like to have been burned. He remembered how, in those first days of learning how to cook, he feared the fire. A long ago memory, something he had firmly overcome. Or so he thought.

“I can’t burn! I don’t want to burn!”

The fear, the anxiety, seized ahold of him. It squeezed him, his body flooded with adrenaline, his breath came in panicked panting hyperventilation. He ran in the rough direction of a flattish stalagmite he remembered, praying he would reach it. He could feel his body burning. He could feel his skin turning agonizingly hot and freezing cold as nerves died reporting dreadful damage. He reached the wide base of the stalagmite and he scrambled up, out of the fire, out of the terror. The top was barely as wide as one of his feet. It would do. A thousand times over, it would do!

Frantic hands patted his body. His shoes were gone. His feet were in agony. His trousers were mostly gone too, and big portions of his outer robe with them. Silk was a lot of things, but even the specially treated and woven silk used by the sect crafters wasn’t fireproof. He ripped off everything he could. There was a moment of refusal, where he rejected the evidence of his eyes.

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Then he started cultivating. He wouldn’t live that way again. Never again. Advent of Spring could heal him. It could heal anything.

Tian NO!

The wood qi cycled- and his meridians burned. Tian screamed, barely clinging to the top of the stalagmite. The fire qi that had invaded his flesh fed on the rich wood qi and vital energy and grew into a blaze. Pain made Tian stop immediately, but the damage was already severe. Without serious help, he would die.

The pills Doctor Pei gave you! First eat the Jade Spring, then Golden Dew. Quickly!

Tian pulled the bottles from his storage ring, the tiny flex of qi nearly making him black out from the pain. Jade spring- good for healing flesh and skin. Heavenly person medicine. He tapped a single green and white swirled pill out of the jade bottle and into his hand. Then he swallowed it dry.

Tian felt the medicine hit his stomach and explode outwards like a cool fog. It spread through his body, cooling what was hot and gently warming what was too cold. The power should have been gentle. It was anything but.

It was a medicine meant for those at the Heavenly Person Realm. Tian could only struggle to stay up on the stalagmite while the pill did its work.

The Demon Pulling Art!

“I can’t use it. I’ve barely begun studying it!”

You don’t have to use it properly. Just drag the fire qi in you towards any big concentrations of the medicinal qi. Better still, concentrate it all around your heart and pull the medicine into your heart.

“I chose to live.” Tian decisively ignored the heart advice, but was moving his vital energy as he did. The Demon Pulling Art was both hard theoretically and practically, but Tian could roughly grasp the most basic principles. He alternated between pushing and luring the fire qi, coaxing it towards the medicinal fog within him.

It was very slow going. Very slow. Tian really didn’t understand what he was doing and was mostly just bashing the qi along with his will and his vital energy. It was exhausting, on top of the exhaustion brought by the pain. He focused through it. Another one of Grandpa’s invisible lessons.

It felt like putting out a forest fire by carrying individual embers to a lake. It was successful, but it took an ungodly long time.

“I… think I’m going to pass out. I think I’m going to pass out and fall into the fire.”

Drink some water, and while you are at it, swallow a Golden Dew pill. That focuses on recovery. And you need recovery.

Another Heavenly Person medicine. This one was supposed to help speed along recovery. Tian swallowed it with gulp after gulp of water. Another burst of cool energy spread out into him. “Water. Both pills seem to be water element heavy.”

Not uncommon in healing spells and pills, if you remember your texts.

Tian nodded. He didn’t dare cultivate properly, but there was so much energy washing through his body right now, his dantian couldn’t help but fill up. He would heal with time. And once he was out of this damned cavern, he could cultivate and really heal.

“Wood feeds fire. All that fire qi in me-”

Yes. But can you turn your suffering into a benefit?

“No.”

If you say you can’t, you can’t. But if you look inwards and self reflect, maybe you will find out you can.

Tian looked inward and reflected. His considered medical opinion on his current physical condition was “fucked.” He looked himself over again and modified his initial diagnosis. “Extremely fucked.”

Healing, yes. But fucked.

His legs were badly burnt. He knew that what he was seeing was a layer of dead skin, and the itchiness that he was fighting was new skin growing underneath it. He knew that his meridians were burnt, but not destroyed. The medicine had done a wonderful job stabilizing them, and they were well on their way towards being healthy again. In time. Days, certainly, if he could cultivate. Much longer if he couldn’t.

That neatly paralleled the damage to his muscles and tendons. Jumping around the chamber was no longer possible.

He sighed and tried to see what Grandpa Jun was getting at. His body was still sloshing with the medicinal qi, and while the biggest piece of the fire qi had been eliminated, there were still traces of it lingering. Most worryingly, it was becoming stagnant in a few out of the way places. The medicine would break it down with time, but stagnant qi was always bad news. It could lead to serious, and permanent, injuries if not treated.

Maybe Grandpa saw an opportunity to practice the Demon Drawing Art. Maybe he saw it as an opportunity to study fire qi. Either way, Tian was too shattered at the moment to deal with it. He would take a minute to pull himself together first. And what refreshes the soul best?

Loot. Opening the loot is the best balm for a wounded soul. He pulled out the storage ring.

It wasn’t a sect standard storage ring. Which was interesting, because if this was the brother who got kicked in first, why didn’t he have a sect issued ring? They also tracked merits and had a few other functions. Not something that could be easily replaced or discarded. This one was rather ornate. No gem, but immensely detailed scrollwork and geometric etchings. It was… pretty. He didn’t have a better word for it- the storage ring was just pretty.

He sent his mind into the ring. It bounced straight off. He tried again. Nothing. He probed it with his vital energy. He might have well poured his water over a slab of granite.

“Grandpa? What is this?”

It’s a storage ring, but it’s got a seal on it. And not a seal that can be opened by just anyone. I’ll need to spend more time examining it. Never mind that for the moment, check the bones!

“The bones?”

The burnt bones. Take a look already!

Tian pulled out a finger bone from his ring. It looked like you would expect. Burnt to hell. It was otherwise in pretty good shape. Heavy. Inexplicably heavy. He gave the bone a little rub, then rubbed harder. It really did feel like stone. He kept rubbing, even using a surviving bit of his robe to polish it up. The bone emerged from under the soot a soft, creamy white, shiny with the iridescence of rainbows on a butterfly’s wing.

“Grandpa, what is this?”

I was wrong. That definitely isn’t your senior brother. I can’t say for sure, but I think this person was, if not a true immortal, they were at least approaching it. At the apex of the Heavenly Person level, or even above it. Which raises a lot of questions, but the biggest one for me would be- why are the bones and ring still here?