They spend a while just walking, the boy tried to start up conversation but stopped after Tantra didn’t reciprocate. She doesn’t want to just say no to the boy, after all she was never really meant to cultivate, but how does she make him understand? There’s only one real method she can think of, but she really doesn’t want to use it, traumatizing the poor kid wouldn’t be ideal. Still it’s the only idea she can come up with.

  She keeps walking.

  A few people are staring at her bewildered, with some other kids trying to grab the boy away from her, but they backed off when she glared at them. A lot of kids seem quite hostile to the boy, even the other beggars, and she isn’t fool enough not to notice the sneers of derision directed his way from the adults. She can take guesses as to why but she’d rather not make assumptions.

  He can’t come with them, can’t come with them at all. They can’t protect him if something like the bear-thing shows up again, even if it was a mistake of navigation rather than an expected occurrence. She can’t have the death of a boy so young on her conscience, to be frank, but she needs to make him understand.

  “You realize,” she starts, “that cultivation is a dangerous path? And that’s ignoring the fact that you won't be part of a sect anytime soon but with a group of wandering cultivators. We will encounter spirit beasts, frequently, and your chances of surviving them isn’t even worth mentioning.”

  He doesn’t even pause to think about it, “that’s okay,” he says, “it’s better than this.”

  She sighs, mulls it over in her mind and considers that yes he probably would think so. From his perspective, anything is probably better than being a beggar.

  She points at the scar on her neck.

  “You see this boy?”

  He nods.

  “I got this fighting bandits, I have another scar on my back from where the man cut me down. Then he pulled me by the hair, and slit my throat and my friends could only watch. The only reason I'm alive is some freak accident.”

  Then she shrugs her robes off a bit to show off the bigger scar on her shoulder.

  “I got this one fighting a different bandit, earlier than the last. Cut through this bone right here-” she points at her collar bone, “-and stabbed my friend through her guts. She didn’t survive”

  Surprising Tantra, the boy doesn’t seem to budge, staring at her with determined eyes.

  “Do you understand?”

  He nods.

  She sighs, she’s wearing an old pair of robes right now, one of the ones with sleeves. She did not want to do this. She takes the sleeve of her left arm and reveals a truly mangled sight of torn viscera, oozing pus, and peeking bone.

  The kid's eyes go wide, and it looks like he’s about to puke, but he holds his composure and manages to stare her right in the eye.

  Then he rolls up his own sleeve.

  -

  “So you wanna, what? Take him as your apprentice?” Rakan says, clearly unimpressed.

  “Well,” Tantra drawls, “I was hoping you could be his master.”

  He gives her a flat look, “absolutely not”

  Tantra shrugs, “he’s coming with us anyway, and anything you teach me, i’ll teach him. So might as well skip that middleman to save time.”

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  Rakan slaps a hand over his face and drags it down, “we barely survived a fight with a spirit beast and you want to take some toddler along, Tantra please, are you gonna get pulled along into every charity case that comes to your door?”

  Tantra sighs and turns to the boy, “show him”

  The boy nods and takes off his shirt, he has a bit of fur on his back and forearms, but that’s not what she wants Rakan to see. She wants him to see the bruises. It’s perhaps easier to tell where he isn’t bruised than where he is, covered in batches of black, blue, and purple. All across his chest, back, and arms. She assumes his legs are the same. Rakan goes quiet at the sight, just staring at the boy.

  “What the fuck?” he finally says.

  “His father was a felinid.” She says, “he was sent to war with Okham-Khal, and died in battle. His mother was left to starve and he’s been sustaining himself the past few months by stealing as the only thing the people here are willing to give him are beatings.”

  “If they hate him so much, why didn’t they just kill him?” Rakan asks

  Tantra shrugs, “isn’t that what they’re doing? Just slowly, and painfully.”

  Rakan goes quiet, clearly contemplating. She doesn’t want to bring the boy along, not at all, but if they reach Ralth she can sponsor him into becoming something other than a cultivator, it’ll just take a while with all the detours their gonna take, but it’s better than this. It’s either risk death on the road or guaranteed death staying here. She does not want to abandon a child to that kind of fate, it’s simply too cruel.

  A part of her is sad for him, that he had to go through losing everything only to be beaten to the ground by his neighbors. Most of her is feeling something called rage. She can’t kill an entire village, that’s the realm of immortals, but she can kill a few. Honestly she’s barely holding herself back from doing just that, who does this to a child? Suddenly she can understand why people are so scared of cultivators. She has the power to kill without consequence. Rikidan cares little for the lives of mortals other than being useful tools to support the empire, some nobody bumfucks in some forgotten village? The only question is if she’s the kind of person to do that.

  She doesn’t want to be.

  But she can’t help the rage, it bubbles and boils and threatens to overflow. She’s gonna have to stay at the inn for the foreseeable future. She’s not sure if she can control herself.

  “Alright,” Rakan says, “alright i’ll teach him, but he’s your responsibility, got it? you’re the one who has to change his diapers.”

  The boy pouts, “I don’t need diapers.”

  -

  Tantra is boosting her blood continuously, letting a flow of Qi engulf her body. It’s inefficient, you can only give so much Qi before there’s no gaps left to fill, at which point you’re just wasting Qi as most of it is absorbed in the atmosphere. It took her two weeks of gathering to collect the Qi, all to be lost in the span of a few hours.

  But she needs to do this.

  The fight with the bear-thing revealed two very important details, one she already knew, and one she was purposefully avoiding. The first is obvious, she’s weak, she hasn’t had the time needed to really build her strength, even though she can circulate extremely efficiently. That, however, brings us to the second issue. Her boosting wastes too much Qi, despite how good her control has gotten, threading Qi during combat is still a challenge, and she doesn’t have the meridians to skip past the issue entirely. Which means she needs a way to be more efficient.

  Lucky then, that she’s already thought of one.

  It’s just a tweak to her particular brand of circulation.

  Qi, at it’s most basic, improves what something can already do. Muscles get stronger, bones get harder, senses get sharper. The blood infusion technique takes advantage of this, afterall, the purpose of blood is to feed the body through circulation. It does this with almost perfect efficiency.

  The key word in all this is efficiency.

  If she can change its purpose through intention, she can theoretically get a full body boost all at once, wasting little to no Qi. The first problem of course is control, she’ll have to be much better to be able to boost her blood with any accuracy while fighting. The second problem is her organs.

  They’re still mortal.

  Most cultivators don’t particularly care, letting them slowly reach the foundation level over four decades, (or in her case, four years), but she needs this now. So she’s forcing her body to take the Qi anyway. She’s going to have to get better at gathering, maybe she should start trying to do it while walking? It’ll be difficult, but it is possible.

  She’s not even touching the issue of manipulating Qi with intention until she can try out her theoretical technique without accidentally killing herself.