"Concentrate."

He didn't have to hear the word. But all the same, he was thankful. He was thankful to have his Master sitting before him, to have his voice as his guide.

"Arha is rooting for you, XJ-V!"

That voice was another story. It was the squeaking of the little fox rolling around behind him. It was curious. In attempting a Dao-Walk, a Disciple was supposed to enter a state of sensory deprivation so complete that his mind opened to the realm beyond all mortals. The Huli's voice should have distracted him, but, perhaps because of her nature as a spirit birthed by the Dao itself, the voice became a light in the shadows behind his eyes that he was following.

Until, once again, he came to the peak of the mountain.

He felt rain on his shoulders. He felt rust cake his body. Then, the Cog-Shadow turned and looked into his eyes as he made his climb. He stopped, stood before the creature wreathed in darkness, and stared right back at it.

"This is where I must leave you, My Disciple," he heard the faint voice of Longhua echo within him. This is your battle. Victory, or loss - it must be yours."

"You can do it, metal-man!"

XJ-V smiled and walked towards the shadow-fiend. Every step was labored, weighted down as though the pinnacles that shackled his metal body to this earth were pulling him down, keeping him from his goal. But this time, he pushed forward. This time, he did not avert his gaze. He looked at the dark-self that assumed a battle-stance before him, and he saw its form begin to shift.

First, the eyes of the High-Eagle morphed into being on its face.

Next, the broken arm of Fai-Deng sprouted at its side.

More shadows fell away from the being's skin, and the smile of Mah-Jung smeared itself across the creature's face.

Fear. Hate. Jealousy – the being was a distorted amalgamation of all these things. XJ-V knew that now. He knew that this dangerous triad was what was keeping him from his destiny as a Cultivator. They were keeping him bound to the scorched earth of the Wasteland.

The creature adopted the Crouching Tiger and stamped its feet at his approach.

But this time, XJ-V did not waver.

The High Eagle is not here, XJ-V told himself. Fai-Deng is my Brother, now. And Mah-Jung – he is so far beyond me that it is pointless to feel envy. There is no logic to any of these emotions.

He saw the face of the creature waver, its metal limbs starting to melt away as though it shook with fright at XJ-V's approach.

"You," the true Cog said. "You are not a thing born of logic. You are a thing born of ignorance. My ignorance. Such ignorance blinded me once. But now, it does not exist."

The dark reflection wavered again, its stance failing as the earth began to shake beneath its ghostly feet. The mouth of Mah-Jung opened to bellow a roar at the interloper in its limbo-realm and XJ-V looked into the black, bubbling tar at the heart of its being.

"You," XJ-V said. "You do not exist."

The punch of the creature came flying at his face, and XJ-V watched it melt away before it could do him any harm. Within his chest he could feel the searing light that powered him reaching out and piercing the torso of the beast of darkness. He watched the eyes, the arm, and the smile fade away until it crumbled to ash at his feet, and he took a single breath of still air as he saw the white light that lay behind its ashen corpse.

A mountain range, their peaks touching the skies, whisks of clouds intertwining themselves between them like questing snakes.

Beyond them – a wall of radiant white light.

The Cog spread his arms wide, closed his eyes within the dream-realm between this world and that of the Dao, and took a step forward.

He fell.

He felt the winds of the ethereal air whip against his face, the side of the mountains grow larger above him as he plummeted towards whatever awaited him below. His eyes were open now, watching a white-gold ocean undulate beneath him and knowing it was instant death to all his vital systems. Yet he fought the urge of self-preservation. He fought the desire to close his eyes off and return to his room beside his Master. He fought the impulse – the simple desire deep within the raging flame that was his heart – to fail. To reject anything beyond his metal frame. To simply be a Cog – to be a being of form and function. There was simplicity in that. There was certainty.

And here, beyond the waves of white, there was danger. There was death. There was constant trial and endless suffering.

But there was something else beyond it all. Something that he saw clear as the light of day as he crashed through the waves and let the ocean beyond take him:

Life.

He saw it all.

From the tiniest centipede to the largest Rozarkh stampeding down the wastes of Ishkara. From the single ameba of a human embryo to the triggering of synapses within the minds of the men who had created his kind. He saw blades of grass growing beneath his feet, and waterfalls spilling from the heavens and shrouding his body in crystalline liquid – every component of their molecular structure, every atom, every subatomic particle – all of this washed over him and passed through him like a waking dream. In the world of white light where his body was both there and not there, he saw the fires that had burned the world stain the blue, cloudless sky above him red, and even within the destruction there was beauty. From the flames he saw the birth of new organisms, mutations grown from imagination and magic crawling from the cracks in the earth. He saw villages and towns sprout up like saplings from the seeds of chaos, budding, flowering, and growing, and he saw the truth at the heart of the earth: all life goes on. All life finds a way.

He basked in the light of this formless realm until he started to feel his limbs burn and sear away. He was being taken by the force that whispered in his mind like a mother rocking its child to slumber and the most incredible thing of all was that he did not mind at all as he watched his metal hands melt away to become part of the earth itself.

He had breathed in the depths of the Dao. Now, The Dao was taking him.

The light within his chest reacted – it surged and pulled him back. And XJ-V felt something then that he had never felt before: rage.

Not his own. It was not an emotion that emanated from the logic matrix of his mind. It was something else…it was the mind of someone – something – else entirely…

"XJV!" he heard. "Disciple! Do you hear my words?"

He felt his body react even as his mind begged him to resist. He wanted nothing more than the touch of the infinite. The embrace of the cosmos was his. Peace was his - all his. If he just accepted it.

"You must open your eyes."

Eyes. Those were earthly things. What need did he have for eyes here?

"Resist the pull, Disciple. Awaken."

Resist…that word – it meant he had a choice.

He looked into the infinite expanse before him and breathed. Actually breathed as though he bore a pair of human lungs. And he felt it then: air. Pure. Untainted by the polluted airs that swam above the wastes. Free energy formless and intoxicating as it ran through his wires and turned them into veins, then bones, and then purest starlight.

He was joining with the infinite.

"XJ-V! You must listen!"

Something shook him then – his earthly form.

Someone was pulling him back. Someone was heeding the desire that burned within his chest. The thing that sat beneath its heart roared in rejection of the pearly radiance that stretched out before him.

Then a voice burned through his barely conscious mind:

"XJ, XJ, hurry back! Arha wants a metal snack!"

That…that voice…

So…annoying…

He felt his matrix switch back on, and his body reeled back like a fish on a lure.

With a strange mix of sad nostalgia, the white world of pace drained away, and he awoke to find himself on the floor of his chamber with the worried face of his Master over him.

"You have awoken," he said simply, as if XJ-V had merely been having a particularly lucid dream.

"Master," he said. "Master, I – I saw –"

His words stopped before he could complete the sentence. For his heart burned with power. He felt his limbs constrict, go numb, and then gyrate as something flooded through them.

"Hold it, XJ-V!" Longhua roared, channeling his Qi to enhance his voice. "Hold the energy. Hold it within, let it pass through you and over you. Let it be like –"

"…Like a river, unhindered," XJ-V finished as his arms flopped down at his sides and his sensors burned with warning sirens. His vision clouded with the red haze of his internal alarm systems, but his mind showed him something beyond them:

Anima Cores: 110

He saw the words blaze across his eyes and settle there, blurring in and out of existence until the fact they signified seeped into his soul.

And he sat up with a strained breath to look into Longhua's incredulous eyes.

For a moment, neither man spoke at all. There was nothing but the sound of Arha teething on her Cog's right leg, biting at the exposed wires on his calf.

"I – hey!" he shouted down at her. "Cease your nibbling, spirit! I am not your snack!"

The little Huli giggled and rolled over on her back, exposing her fluffy belly.

"Is that any way to speak to your savior, my good metal can?"

"The spirit speaks true," Longhua said, sitting back and wiping perspiration from his forehead. "It was her voice that brought you back. Perhaps your bond with her is stronger than you think."

Either that, or my desire to make her stop those silly rhymes is greater than my desire for peace and tranquility, XJ-V thought.

He reached towards the waiting Huli and scratched her belly, feeling, somehow, that the sensation was more vivid, more real, than it ever had been for him before.

It was almost like he had skin covering the tips of his fingers. He felt her softness keenly, and his Master chuckled drily at his confusion.

"Most Disciples first Dao-Walk ends in failure," he said. "But those that push through have passed the first hurdle on the long road of the Cultivator. In time, it shall become easier."

XJ-V looked at him in disbelief.

"I saw it, Master," he said. "The Dao. It – it called to me."

Longhua looked deep into his Cog pupil's eyes, trying to discern what the metal man was truly feeling in this most significant of moments.

But he did not have to ask any questions. It was the Cog himself who revealed his own peril:
"I wanted to remain," he said as Arha wriggled under his touch. It felt tranquil. It felt like a million years of harmony."

Longhua nodded sagely. "Thus is the way of the Dao, XJ-V," he said. "You saw what it wished you to say – for the Dao is the energy of all souls who have ever walked this earth, combined with the souls of the spirits and the Gods who have long since departed our realm. Together it forms a consciousness with a will of its own. We take but a fraction of its Qi. But in turn," Longhua said with sorrow. "It can take us."

XJ-V remembered the feeling of oblivion he experienced when totally immersed in that white realm of pure nothing. It felt like the lightest, sweetest dream. Yet only now could he understand that such a dream had, for the briefest instant, convinced him to let his soul fly from his body and meet its end.

"You have luck on your side, XJ-V," Longhua told him. "Once again, your soul's insistence on not adhering to proper technique is a source of both frustration and satisfaction for me. But, no matter. The aches of my old bones are not yours to know."

He gave XJ-V a stout pat on the shoulder as though the Cog had merely returned from an afternoon hike.

"Welcome, my Disciple, to the path of the Cultivator. You will now be known as XJ-V, Rank 2 Corporeal Temperer."

Little Arha yipped for joy and ran up his arm to snuggle into his head, expecting to see joy reflected in her metal man's face. Yet when he glanced up at him, his face showed her only pain.

"Oh, will you ever just be happy?" she asked him. "Arha must find an 'off-switch' for your brain!"

While the Huli ran around his body trying to find such a device, XJ-V bowed to his Master and asked him the question that burned in his breast:

"Master," he said carefully. "What happens to those Disciples who fail their first walk?"

When he looked back up, he saw that Longhua had already risen to leave. His answer was murmured back over his shoulder. For some reason, he did not wish his pupil to see his face:

"My Disciple," he said. "Make an educated guess."

###

If you are enjoying Cog Cultivator, consider supporting on Patreon to read advanced chapters. +5 for $4 (+10 when I get to 50 Patrons!)