Chapter 90: TAKE A LOOK

CHAPTER

90

TAKE A LOOK

JIEYUAN

—∞—

The revelation hung between them. Lingered, stretching into the silence that followed as her eyes, a green so deep and bright they seemed to glow, stared fixedly into his own.

Jieyuan would’ve liked to say that the rest of her face blurred, turned indistinct, one with the mist, as her gaze swallowed him. That in his head, Meiyao’s words did the same, expanding, swelling, until there was no room left for any other thoughts.

But rather, it was all of her face that went out of focus, eyes included, as he worked through her words. And they did take over his thoughts, sure enough, but they still left enough space for a little—

Huh.

For good measure, he said it out loud too, “Huh.”

The second thought to follow was, No wonder she wasn’t interested in Rongkai’s skill-seed. It had always stuck with him how easily Meiyao had passed up Rongkai’s violet skill-seed, all those months ago, at the end of the first mission in the Fatebloom Woods.

She’d been the one to search Rongkai’s corpse while both he and Daojue were out of commission, the one to find the violet skill-seed. Where most disciples would’ve kept it to themselves, she’d just offered it up and told him and Daojue to sort out between themselves who’d get to keep it.

But he’d gotten closer to Meiyao since. Way closer. Enough to know she would’ve turned her way from anything—even a treasure like that—if she didn’t think she had a right to it. She was fair like that. Just—if not outright honorable. But even so, she should’ve felt something toward the skill-seed, some hint of wonder or awe. But she’d treated the Violetsoul skill-seed like any old thing.

No wonder, he thought again, when she already had six of them.

He focused on Meiyao again, on her face. She was still watching him attentively. He trusted her almost unconditionally. After everything they’d been through, after her speech earlier, after everything he knew about how she acted—how could he not?

But he still found himself searching her expression for some hint of playfulness, of some sign she’d been jingling his coinpurse.

None. She looked intent, as serious as he’d ever seen her.

“That’s—” Jieyuan searched for the rest of the sentence. But it was like reaching into an empty purse—he felt like there should be something there, fumbled around for it, but nothing came up.

Violetsoul was so far above him—so, so unimaginably, impossibly far above him—that he didn’t even know how big of a deal this really was. He had no proper frame of reference. He’d barely begun to understand the Redsoul world, to begin with.

He only knew of one Violetsoul—Yikongwei Beidao, the man who’d ripped his own heart out of his chest and transformed it into the Fatebloom Heart. The man who’d stood in defiance of the Heavens themselves as his body transformed into gleamstone. Jieyuan couldn’t even begin to comprehend the reality of someone like that, and he’d only gotten the smallest hint into Beidao’s life.

“That’s—” He tried again. This time he didn’t come up as empty. But it wasn’t that much better than nothing. “That’s… odd.”

Meiyao smiled then. Slowly, softly. Not the smile that said—Aha! You fell for it, sucker! Rather, the message behind this one was more along the lines of, You’re adorable. Take your time. I’ll wait.

The first might’ve been preferable, though.

Jieyuan leaned back a little, away from Meiyao. The distance—or maybe the motion—set his thoughts moving a little further, as good as grease on wheels.

I wasn’t born with just one skill-seed. I was born with six. All of them violet.

It wasn’t a complex sentence, but it was a loaded one. One with lots to unpack. Jieyuan did it piecemeal. He put aside, for now, that Meiyao was born with skill-seeds, and focused on the skill-seeds themselves.

And on the implications at hand. One thing immediately became glaringly obvious.

He glanced back—confirmed that Daojue was still there, cultivating, unperturbed—before turning to Meiyao. “If you’re killed—”

“My skill-seeds will probably manifest, yes,” Meiyao said. “It’s not guaranteed, since I was born with them and I’m unsure whether that might change anything, but the possibility exists, and it’s a likely one.”

“No wonder your mother kept you from telling others,” Jieyuan said. “If others had found out—if even a whisper of it—”

A dead Meiyao was worth six violet skill-seed. She hadn’t been born with six realm-skills, but with the most absurd bounty on her head he’d ever heard of.

“That’s part of the reason. But not all of it.” She frowned. “I was young, when it happened. Barely five. We were in my room, just Mother and I. She’d given me a soulsense pill. It’s common practice, with clan children. Get them used to using soulsense early on. Makes it easier to enter Heavenly Communion—and once you’re a cultivator, to use actual soulsense and soulforce.”

She looked off to the side but at nowhere in particular, focusing inward. “And then I saw them. The six, violet prism-like clumps sitting inside my soul, toenail-sized. So I told Mother about it. She didn’t believe me, at first. Thought Uncle Yiming, or Aunt Wanxin, or even Aunt Yuyan had put me up to it. But—then, I don’t know, but she must’ve realized I was serious, somehow. I don’t remember exactly what came next, but she fell silent for what felt like ages.

“That was when she told me to never tell anyone. Nobody. Ever. She didn’t explain why—I was too young—only made me promise. But over the next three years she gave me soulsense pills several more times, always in private, and she’d ask me questions to see if I could somehow figure out the violet skill-seeds. What Concepts they drew on, just what they could do. And over these sessions, as I grew older, she explained just why they were so dangerous.”

She fixed her focus back on him. “There’s what others could gain from killing me, yes. But she was more concerned about what could be had from me alive.”

Meiyao didn’t give Jieyuan time to let his imagination run wild as she went on, “Violet skill-seeds aren’t worth as much as you’d think. Once assimilated, you can’t use the forms at a higher realm than your own—in practical terms, they’re not that different from a Redsoul skill-seed. There’s only one real advantage to assimilating a higher-realm skill-seed. You don’t need to spend time pursuing its Concept to raise your affinity enough to advance it to the next realm, further down the line.”

She gave a dismissive wave. “But that’s a minor thing. Besides, at higher realms, it becomes easier for cultivators to get their hands on skill-seeds. Because the higher the realm, the higher a cultivator’s heavenly affinity has to be—and so the easier it is for them to get their hands on a realmskill. They also become more and more common in higher-realm sects. So while Redsoul skill-seeds are fairly rare, Violetsoul skill-seeds should be just another twig in the forest.”

Jieyuan blinked. But he didn’t even need to think it through—he immediately saw the truth in what she’d said. It was a simple question of supply and demand. If anything, he should’ve seen it much sooner—but he’d been so caught up in the mysticism of Violetsoul that he hadn’t really taken the time to think it through.

Something that didn’t help, either, was how powerful, how useful, Absolute Will Command was. That’d certainly colored his perception several shades golden.

Meiyao, it was clear, must have put a great deal of thought into the subject too. And that added up—she’d had thirteen years to prod and pick at this particular conundrum from every angle.

“There’s another upside, if you really want one,” Meiyao said, more to herself than to him, the words almost practiced. “It’s that a Violetsoul skill-seed should be future-proof. Not all realmskills are made equal. The Heavens don’t care much for balance. Some start off strong but dwindle away further down the line.”

That Jieyuan didn’t doubt in the least—if the Heavens cared for balance, Absolute Will Command definitely wouldn’t be a thing. And it promised to become even stronger, further down the line.

“If a skill-seed has reached Violetsoul, however, it’s safe to assume it’s worthwhile all the way through—because a Violetsoul else either raised it to Violetsoul or created it at Violetsoul.” Meiyao sounded more contemplative now. “That must mean it’s at least decent. And since there’s no way to get rid of a skill-seed once it’s been assimilated into a realmskill, that kind of guarantee can be valuable. But—again, this isn’t that much of an advantage.”

“And there’s no guarantee, either,” Jieyuan said, his mind starting to work in earnest, “that it wasn’t a realmskill some Violetsoul got stuck with and had no choice but to advance to Violetsoul, even if it wasn’t any good.”

“Exactly.” Meiyao’s smile was quick and sharp, like the glint of a blade. “What Mother really feared was that she didn’t know why or how this had happened. Not being born with six skill-seeds, necessarily—but being born with a skill-seed at all. Not even six, not even Violetsoul—just one. There are no records of any such thing happening in the history of the Viridian Death Cult, or the Gleaming Stone Sect—or even the Radiant Gold Palace. She used every connection she had, looked through all sorts of records. Nothing.”

“It’s not related to your bloodright, then?” Jieyuan asked. “They seem connected. Nature, plants, spores—”

“If it is, then I’m the first,” Meiyao said. “Bloodrights give you bloodskills, not realmskills. They do seem connected—and in a way, that only makes it worse. The Liangshibai and the Linzushen go out of their way to keep their bloodrights secret—the existence of bloodrights as a whole, in fact—for a reason. We would’ve even gone around with our eyes always mundane, if it didn’t take effort to keep it that way.”

Meiyao’s fingers drummed lightly against the blade of her saber, propped up across her thighs.

“Cultivators don’t let things lie. Every phenomenon can be an avenue for power. If there’s something we don’t understand, we dissect it until we do—often, literally.” She pursed her lips. “We’re already lucky the higher-realm sects view the Linzushen and Liangshibai oddities as—well, oddities, and not much more. In a way, we hide in plain sight, and it works. But six Violetsoul skill-seeds? That’d be different.”

She smiled then, but it was a bitter smile. ‘The worst part is that Mother had been so worried about me being taken away that she never stopped to consider whether it might happen to her instead. Rumor has it she was taken for her beauty—but I can’t help but think, what if she hadn’t been as careful as she believed, and ended up drawing the attention of some higher-realm cultivator? What if she’d been taken, when it was really me they were after…”

Jieyuan frowned, made to draw closer, but she shook her head.

“But that’s beyond the point.” She looked into his eyes again. “That’s me, all my secrets, laid bare.”Jieyuan stopped, stared back at her. He caught the unspoken question, saw the expectation in her gaze—almost like a challenge. “So it’s my turn, now?”

“What do you think?”

No almost about it, now. That was a challenge.

“Well,” Jieyuan said. “Fair’s fair.”

He smiled. She shot it right back

—∞—

Jieyuan sat in silence. A soft breeze drew currents into the viridian mist filling up their pocket, tendrils of it curling intangibly against his skin.

It’d been a while since his talk with Meiyao. It was still his watch. He hadn’t moved away from her side. He glanced at her. She was sitting cross-legged, hands on her lap, cradling her saber.

She was trembling slightly, beads of sweat pooled on her forehead. Cultivating, then. Imbuing chroma. Enduring the Pain.

He’d soon resume doing that, himself—just one or two more days, and his soulprism would be close enough to full he could safely cultivate while keeping a steady reserve of chroma left over.

Meiyao had been open and honest with him. More, in fact, than he reckoned she should’ve. He’d responded in kind, telling her about the Heart, the Heartseat, and the Violetsoul Yikongwei Beidao and his notes. He’d also shared with her some of the more useful applications he’d found for Absolute Will Command.

But that was it. Everything else, he kept from her—his reincarnation. Earth. Maeva. It wasn’t because he didn’t trust her, though.

He watched her, traced the lines on her face, and tried to imagine how she’d react to those things, what shape those lines would take.

He hadn’t told her any of that because it would only make things more complicated. Unnecessarily so. Knowledge of his powers and abilities? That was useful. She could plan around that, take them into consideration, just like he could with hers.

But telling her about this whole other universe, about how he could remember his previous life? Meiyao probably wouldn’t think he was mad, but she’d likely still have a hard time wrapping her head around it all. And it was useless information. There was nothing it changed, nothing she could do with it.

No—Meiyao already had enough on her plate. He didn’t need to add a helping of cosmic conundrum to it.

He kept his gaze on her, thinking. He was still going over their talk earlier, all the things she’d told him. At a slower pace now, really turning all those revelations, all that new information, over in his head, trying to fit them together. He’d have Maeva help later, but he wanted to go over it on his own first, unbiased—even if that bias was technically himself.

He didn’t think just for the sake of thinking, though. He focused on what he could do with that knowledge, how he could make it work for him. It didn’t really change much, not in the short-term. But one thing was different.

This was the first real proof he’d gotten that Meiyao wasn’t like anybody else. There was her appearance—which he now knew to be a result of her bloodright—but that was a clan thing, and the Liangshibai looked even more distinct. The fact that she was so overwhelmingly talented, and some of the little oddities he’d picked up here and there—her absurd skill with raising plants, her green aura and red haze—had been telling, but not definitive. Even Yikongwei Beidao’s notes, where he’d caught the name of the Linzushen Clan, hadn’t been definitive enough. Meiyao herself wasn’t named, and there’d been other clans listed.

But being born with six violet skill-seeds? That was different. The realm alone spoke for itself. Jieyuan couldn’t imagine someone being born with Violetsoul realmskills not reaching Violetsoul herself. That someone like there would stop at Greensoul, as her heavenly affinity of fourth-order would indicate. A lot of his suspicions had suddenly gotten a whole deal more solid.

And that wasn’t all.

He looked away from her—across the clearing.

At Daojue.

He was cultivating, too, like Meiyao, though you had to be looking for it to see the signs. His expression just a little tighter, the slight moistness on his brow catching the glow of the viridian mist.

Daojue, who must have a bloodskill, like Meiyao. Daojue, whom Jieyuan was sure had a realmskill himself—a realmskill he avoided using, like Meiyao did with hers. Daojue, whose clan—Tianzijun—had also appeared in Yikongwei Beidao’s jade books. Daojue, who gave Jieyuan the same impression that he wouldn’t be stopped at Greensoul.

And more than with Meiyao, Jieyuan had further proof of something going on—because he strongly suspected that Daojue was somehow connected to how he’d regained his memories of his previous life.

Jieyuan stared at Daojue.

And wondered just what he’d find, if he were to take a peek inside Daojue’s soul.