My eyes open to a bright, blue sky.

  For the first time since my first tango with one of Xian Qigang’s corrupted creatures a few minutes ago, my body is entirely free of pain, and it is that, more than the changes around me, that clues me in that this might not be real. Or, at least, physical.

  I look around me, taking in the lush, sunlit forest I find myself in.

  This is not Xian Qigang’s hidden realm. That is a desote pce, almost like something that is the aftermath of a nuclear explosion. Ash, dust, and gloomy skies, with charred, haunting husks that look like they may have once been trees.

  This pce is the opposite of that. This is a pce that breathes life. A pce of beauty and plenty.

  This is my soul.

  I look up, spotting the sun hanging directly overhead.

  It does not blind my eyes to look at, and its heat is a soothing warmth despite the intensity of its beams.

  A deep slow breath fills my lungs, and I bask in the moment free from the pain of Wild Qi wreaking havoc on my body and cultivation.

  Glory of The Sun

  The procmation resonates through all things like the voice of the very world.

  No, not like, it is the voice of the world. Technically, anyway. And it is a voice I recognize, despite having only met its owner once.

  Wanting to be where the speaker is puts me there, like the world moves around me to leave me where I want to be.

  That’s nice of it, although where it leaves me, isn’t so nice.

  I stare at the huge swath of nd where I know more lush vegetation should be now bathed in ash, everything in it burned to nothing.

  My eyes nd on the man responsible.

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “I see you still ask stupid questions, Xian Qigang,” The Sun Emperor replies, not even deigning to look at me.

  I don’t know why, but something about the way he says my name annoys me.

  I sigh. “Must you do this every time?” I ask, honestly tired. “We’re literally stuck together. Likely for life. And, seeing as I’m a cultivator and I have no pns to die anytime soon, it’s hopefully going to be a very long life. Can’t we learn to be cordial towards each other at least?”

  “I am me, and you are you,” he says.

  I sigh again. “Yes, you’ve said, but even people with vastly different personalities can still learn to get along.”

  “Everything that you are irks me, Xian Qigang, so, no, I do not think that we will be ‘getting along’,” he says.

  Glory of The Sun

  The decree rolls across the world again, but this time, it is not the obliterating fire it conjures but the life-giving warmth.

  Green leaves shoot out through ash covered ground, and they stretch, reaching for the distant sun, aging years in seconds.

  It’s like what I did with the tree I pnted for Magistrate Qin, except on a scale that would kill me to attempt at my current level.

  In less than a minute, decades of growth rise before my very eyes, returning what was lost in perfect condition.

  No, wait, not perfect condition.

  I walk towards one of the trees.

  Unlike the others, this one looks... sick. Its branches are warped, its bark fky, leaves sparse. There’s something wrong with it.

  I reach out to touch it, only to recoil the moment my fingers make contact.

  I stare with wide eyes.

  Wild Qi. The tree is corrupted with it.

  My eyes search the other trees; they look fine, normal. This one however, doesn’t.

  I turn to The Sun Emperor in realization. “That’s why you burnt it all down. Wild Qi infected them, so you burnt it all down to start anew.”

  “The next time a corrupted creature comes at you with fang and cw, Xian Qigang, do endeavour to not stop its bite with your flesh,” The Sun Emperor says, sounding just a tad pissy.

  I gre at him.

  Why is he such a dick?

  “It’s not like I wanted to get bitten,” I say. “Besides, you can fix the corruption.” I turn back to the one warped tree. “Though not perfectly.”

  The Sun Emperor seems to take great offense to my words.

  “Contrary to what you seem to believe, Xian Qigang, I am not a method meant for healing, or keeping women warm. What I have accomplished here is above and beyond any reasonable expectation,” he says, perfect eyebrows dipped in a severe frown.

  I blink at him, taken aback by his reaction. “Um… I wasn’t suggesting otherwise,” I say, but The Sun Emperor scoffs.

  “Enlightenment was wasted on you,” he says.

  The words confuse me. “What are you talking about? I never got enlightenment, that’s a lie Meng Yi made up.”

  The Sun Emperor shoots me a long, sour look, like my very existence irritates him.

  Finally, he says, “If I cared enough about you, Xian Qigang, I would delight in tearing down this fiction you’ve chosen to hide behind.”

  The world changes then, space moving around us to deposit us before a patch of forest heavy with corruption.

  I stare at the twisted trees, pale and leafless, a network of pitch-bck veins running through them and the earth they grow from.

  Just seeing them makes me sick.

  Glory of The Sun

  This time, the decration doesn’t come from The Sun Emperor.

  It comes from me.

  Sor fire of gold and orange washes across all that I see, cleansing the world with its heat.

  The destruction of the corruption sends a wave of relief through my soul that I hadn’t even known it craved, and I stare, breaths calming, as the ashes of what had been flutters to the ground.

  The Sun Emperor sniffs. “Acceptable,” he says.

  I give him a long look. “You’re an asshole,” I inform him.

  “Better an asshole, than a coward and a liar, Xian Qigang.”

  “Can you stop calling me that?” I say.

  Something about the way he says it is just so… off-putting. Like he delights in reminding me of who I am.

  The Sun Emperor gives me a look that is the visual representation of condescension.

  “What should I call you then?” he asks. “Young Master? Commander? Or… hmm, perhaps I could call you by your name, in that supposed life you lived back on Earth that you never shut up about.

  “I am unfamiliar with that one however, so you’ll have to help me. Tell me, Xian Qigang, what was your name?”

  The Sun Emperor’s golden eyes meet mine in challenge, an expression of distaste and, paradoxically, enjoyment on his face.

  I, meanwhile, am suddenly struck mute. My heart pounding in my chest. A chill crawling down my back.

  I swallow with a dry mouth.

  “Well, Xian Qigang, what was your name?” The Sun Emperor asks again, gaze holding mine.

  My body shifts an involuntary step back, like it’s trying to pull me away from this confrontation.

  The Emperor doesn’t let me.

  “I’m waiting, Xian Qigang,” he says, eyes alight with delight at my reaction.

  His obvious enjoyment of my distress makes me angry, and I tch onto the anger like a life preserver.

  “I recall you saying you didn’t care about me enough to enjoy tearing down the fiction I hide behind,” I say. “I guess you’re just as much of a liar as I am.”

  The Sun Emperor does not appreciate my words much, but to my surprise, his features actually soften, and his expression shifts into something like pity.

  It almost makes me want him to return to the condescension.

  “What was your name, Qigang?” he asks once more, tone firm but with an odd gentleness to it.

  I don’t reply. I can’t.

  “What was your name, Qigang?” he asks again, tone firmer.

  “I’m from Earth,” I say. “I was born there. I lived there.”

  “Qigang, tell me your name?”

  The world reacts to the technique.

  Emperor’s Decree

  The edict sms onto me like a tsunami. Inevitable. Unstoppable.

  I feel it vibrate through my being, shaking me down to my very core. Forcing an answer out of me.

  I could resist it, I know. It wouldn’t be easy, but I could resist it. This is my power. Not in the way that it would be if I’d attained congruence, but it is still my power.

  I can resist this. The Sun Emperor must know that.

  I sigh. “My name is Xian Qigang,” I say, and just like that, the barriers come apart.

  —?—

  Once there was a man named Xian Qigang. He was petty, and he was cruel.

  But this was not Xian Qigang’s great crime in the eyes of his peers. See, pettiness and cruelty were things barely blinked at in Xian Qigang’s social circles, but there was one thing, one thing above all that everyone held in high regard.

  Talent.

  And Xian Qigang had little talent.

  Now, having little talent was not Qigang’s great crime. No, his great crime was acting as though he did.

  A cultivator with talent great enough could get away with anything. Much like the Xian Matriarch, Qigang’s mother. Founder of the Xian cn.

  In certain circles on certain worlds, they would call her a protagonist. A woman with talent so great, she pulled herself from the literal gutters of The Capital to become the head of one of The Fifty Great Cns of The Sunrise Empire.

  But this is not the story of Xian Qi, this is the story of Xian Qigang, her seventh born and second son.

  Xian Qigang had little of his mother’s talent. Not to say that he was a poor cultivator, but for someone of his parentage, it was certainly less than ideal.

  Being the least talented, and the youngest, among seven siblings was not a good pce to be. And among people who saw those of cking talent as less than dirt, growing up was especially rough on Xian Qigang.

  He was the one who all of his peers could look down on. The one who it was safe to knock around.

  Among the one percent, Xian Qigang was at the bottom of the dder, so he went looking for a different dder.

  It didn’t take the boy long to realise that there were people he could pick on. So, he bullied them. But that didn’t stop his bullies from assaulting him, so he doubled down on his victims, trying to make himself feel like more than the bug his oppressors treated him as by crushing those that he had power over.

  Things snowballed from there.

  Now, again, in the eyes of cultivators, especially those at the top of the world, talent is everything.

  Talent is the difference between breaking through realms under your own power and needing a Transformation Lotus to accomplish it. It is the difference between needing meditation to push through a bottleneck and needing a literal miracle to do the same.

  Talent is the thing that separates the noteworthy from the trash.

  In many ways, especially in the highest levels of cultivator society, Talent… Is… Everything.

  Qigang forgot that.

  Or perhaps he didn’t. Perhaps he remembered.

  After all, his cking talent was why he’d been designated the trash among his peers. Why his mother left him with a method the same rank as the servants’. So, perhaps Qigang was fully aware of what he was doing, when he began to develop a penchant for crippling promising, young cultivators.

  He started small. Picking nameless nobodies who looked like they might amount to something. But soon that wasn’t enough. Soon he needed to cripple real talent.

  That was when his life came crashing down.

  The Empire needs talented cultivators to protect Her from Her many enemies, so, an eye is always kept out for—and on—cultivators of sufficient talent to add to Her ranks.

  If Qigang had talent anywhere near his mother’s, hardly anyone would have given him grief over his actions. But, then again, if Qigang had talent anywhere near his mother’s, his life would not have gone anything like it did.

  Xian Qi made amends for her son’s actions, and then, mostly because she couldn’t tolerate him any longer, she sent him off to Silver Springs. And it was in Silver Springs that Xian Qigang had the luckiest encounter of his life… depending on who you ask.

  It was on his second day after he stormed off into the mountains, angry because his mother wouldn’t heed his pleas for a higher ranked method.

  He’d gotten lost barely an hour in and failed to notice, and then he’d come across a qi beast.

  It was a weak thing, barely more than prey, especially to a cultivator of his level, but Qigang gave chase, and the creature took him running.

  It was several hours ter before Qigang gave up, and by then, he was many li away from home or civilization.

  He’d wandered then, telling himself that he was headed the right way even as all evidence pointed to him heading deeper into the mountains.

  He’d walked through the night, hungry and tired and too proud to admit it. Most especially though, he was too scared to stop.

  It was in the early dawn the next day that he stumbled into it. Quite literally.

  The entrances into hidden realms can’t be sensed, so when he fell in, it was entirely a shock.

  The bounty he found within was even greater.

  Right there, near the entrance, a tree. With a divine rank celestial plum hanging on one of its branches.

  It was the greatest find of his life. The greatest find of anybody’s life. But there was a catch.

  See, there was a spatial tear in the hidden realm, and through it, Wild Qi had seeped in.

  The tree was growing corrupted before Xian Qigang’s very eyes.

  A piece of shit he was, but Xian Qigang was well educated. He knew what Wild Qi was. He knew the harm; he knew the dangers.

  His greed made him forget them all.

  This was his chance. His opportunity to finally become who he was always meant to be.

  With this, no one would ever again be able to look down on him.

  Wild Qi is, at its heart, chaos. It is not bad, per se, simply… inconducive to order.

  Celestial Plums, meanwhile, are one of the very few natural things that affect the soul directly. They connect it to the multiverse at the deepest level, making it part of the framework of reality itself, and as you can imagine, they are not something you want to use if they’ve been infected with raw chaos.

  Xian Qigang ate the divine rank Celestial Plum, and his soul shattered.

  That’s how I came to be.

  I suppose you could say that I’m his conscience. That small, withered part of him that he’d long since learnt to drown out.

  I don’t think that’s true though. Because I don’t think it’s possible for a person’s conscience to hate them as much as I hate him.

  Due to it being a Celestial Plum, the Wild Qi’s corruption began in his soul, but his soul was broken, and for that moment, I was free of him.

  So, I stole his body and I ran.

  Infected with Wild Qi or not, a divine rank Plum was still a near unmatchable force in the universe, and with its effects flooding through me, I knew what I needed to do.

  As I was, I wasn’t enough to make a person. Sure, I could manage it well enough while under the effect of the Plum, but eventually, that would wear out, and I would be done.

  I didn’t want to be done.

  So, I reached out, into the vastness of the endless realms, and I grabbed what I could find.

  They were echoes. Memories almost, of people who had lived.

  I brought them to me, and, following an instinct provided by the Plum, I wove them into myself.

  It was a birthing, almost. Of myself.

  Like all newborns though, I needed to gestate before I could be brought into the world.

  So, I draped the shell of Xian Qigang’s psyche over myself like an itchy, ill-fitting coat, and I went to the only pce I knew.

  Meng Yi thought Xian Qigang had been somewhat reticent the following days due to embarrassment. The truth was Xian Qigang was stuck without a body in a hidden realm a day’s walk into the mountains. What she’d interacted with was little more than a veneer of the man I subsumed a few days ter when I was ready to awaken.

  I hadn’t meant to create the fictitious history. But, apparently, mixing oneself with multiple personalities, even if mere echoes of what they’d been, leaves its mark. And it had been oh-so pleasant to not be him.

  In a way, this is Meng Yi’s fault.

  I remember in the beginning, when we first met, and I wanted to tell her my name from my supposed life back on Earth.

  She’d shut me down. Made me accept that I am Xian Qigang now and that wasn’t changing.

  I don’t know what name I would have told her, likely that of one of the vestiges I subsumed, but the effect was stronger then, and if she’d let me indulge in the fantasy of not being Qigang, I suspect that it would have settled in firmly.

  In many ways, she’d left the first crack in my fa?ade.

  I sigh as my eyes open to see The Sun Emperor still staring at me.

  “You’re still a dick,” I say to him, though without any actual animosity.

  “And you are still an irritation,” he replies, tone matching mine.

  I turn to look at the forest I’d scorched.

  Glory of The Sun

  Life returns with the procmation, sprouting and shooting up to leave lush vegetation.

  A quick search for some corrupted ones reveals a couple.

  I try to not let it bug me.

  “Are there any others?” I ask The Sun Emperor.

  “Not that we can do anything about,” he says, irked by the admission.

  I simply nod in acceptance.

  “I need to go,” I say. “I have to punch myself in the face. Heavily and repeatedly.”

  “Good,” The Sun Emperor says. “He is quite unpleasant… And Meng Yi is a fine servant. Get her back, Qigang.”

  That surprises me. Then I smile and nod.

  “See you, Sun Emperor,” I say.

  “I surely hope not,” he replies.

  —?—

  Back in the hidden realm, corrupted with Wild Qi and plentiful with enemies, my eyes sm open and the world catches fire.