Foreward:

Rather than publishing a chapter at a time, I've chosen to publish this story in arcs. Mostly because I like being able to change my mind and rewrite things and don't want to publish a chapter too early.

Ch 1: Aww, crap.

I’ve read a lot of random novels, and lately I’ve read a lot of novels I like to call Cultivation novels. I call them that because they all involve worlds where people gain power through what is called Cultivation, though the exact methods vary a lot. Cultivation is typically a fairly solitary affair, and these worlds are often full of terrible people using and abusing their power for their own gain. 

What really got my attention though, was that I realized these stories were full of really bad thinking. Main characters would lament how the world is, and seek power to change their lives, and protect people they cared about, but in the end, they’d do nothing to actually change the way things worked. All that changed was who was on top, not the fundamental unfairness and lack of rules or structure. They’d talk about fighting fate, and defying the heavens, all while continuing to support and enforce the underlying structure of how it all worked.

“If I were one of those main characters, I’d not do things the same way as they do!” Talking out loud to myself was a bad habit of mine.

“I’d like to see you prove that.” 

“What the heck? Who said that?” Looking around in concern, I see no one in my cluttered room. “Am I hallucinating?”

“Just a bored diety interested in seeing just what you’d really do in a cultivation world. Don’t worry, I’ll give you a few cheats to help you out, just like those main characters!” As they said this, my vision went dark. 

“What? I don’t want to go! Those worlds are terrible!” Really, really, terrible. No internet! No ice cream! No video games! I’d be so bored!

“Too late!” As these final words entered my mind, all that was left was dread. Please let this just be a dream.

Ch 2: Oops.

The idea of retaining the mind of an adult in the body of a baby always seemed crazy to me. A baby doesn’t have enough mental ability yet. A lot of stories still allowed reborn characters to have full adult knowledge and thinking in a baby or child body, regardless of logic. Unfortunately for me, this world didn’t do that.

Instead, what I got was a slow recovery of knowledge and memory as I grew up. Mostly this just slowed my ability to learn the local language, as I kept saying words from my old language instead of the new one I needed to learn. I quickly got labeled the weird kid by all the others my age, and I never really did understand them. Probably didn’t help that I spent so much time staring at the sky, trying to understand what I was looking at.

The sky had no curve. I remember in my past life, when I spent time staring at the sky, I could see a slight curve to things. As I got older and learned about how the earth was round, it made sense. Here: There’s no curve. It’s flat, like a skybox in a game. 

After more time spent staring at the sky and horizon, I concluded this world was probably flat. It felt so weird to me. Made me wonder if I’d find invisible walls at the ends of the zone.

Eventually, a few people showed up on flying swords. All the children had to line up and take turns touching an orb. There were only about two dozen of us, though the adults (clearly cultivators if they are on flying swords!) already had a half dozen kids with them. 

It didn’t take long, eventually I went up and…

“Pure Water vein, excellent. Go join the group over there, lass.” The man handling the orb seemed pleased. I guess I pass? Pure water? That’s a good thing right? Is that the promised cheat?

“Hi, I’m Tessa. It’s good to see I’m not the only girl.” A friendly face introduced themselves. 

“Uh, Alice.” I tersely introduced myself… wait… first the guy called me a lass, then she’s saying… I’m a girl? … How did I get to 8 years old without noticing that I was a girl and not a boy, like I’d been in my past life? 

“You probably won’t get much out of her. She’s always lost in a daze like that. Name’s Mark, nice to meet you.” A boy tried to greet Tessa, but got ignored.

Ch 3: Friend

Tessa’s View:

Leaving my friends and family behind to join the Skyland Sect was scary. So, when I saw another girl get chosen, I immediately went to try and get to know her. She wasn’t very talkative at first, and didn’t seem to pay much attention to anything, but I wasn’t about to give up with just that. So, when we arrived, I grabbed her hand and took her with me everywhere we needed to go. We even got a shared room for the two of us!

At first I was worried about Alice, but it didn’t take long to realize she seemed to know a lot more than most. Like, when our teacher talked about the water element, and how it was mostly only good for support. 

“Foolish. They think water is always calm and tranquil? They’ve clearly never seen an ocean storm.”

How would Alice have seen such a thing? She always spoke with such certainty though, that it didn’t seem like she was lying. Was she perhaps an Oracle? Is that why she was always staring off into the distance, as if seeing something we could not?

What she had to say ended up being really helpful though.

“You have both fire and earth veins, right? Instead of thinking of it as two separate powers, think of it as one power. When earth gets hot enough, it melts, turning into a red hot thick fluid known as lava. If you can learn to use that, it’d be far more effective than either, fire or earth on their own.”

I may not understand what lava is, but heated earth is a simple idea, and learning to employ that did help me make more effective techniques. One of the early low level earth skills involves making the ground soft so people sink into it. Channelling both fire and earth so the soft ground is scaldingly hot, changes it from just a hinderance to a real attack. Teachers started calling me a genius, but it’s Alice who’s the genius.

“Have you really not learned any attacks, Alice? Other than healing, you’ve not displayed much ability. The teachers seem disappointed.”

“I can’t use my attacks in a sparring match. They are too deadly.”

I wonder what she means by that. 

Ch 4: I feel pretty lucky

While Tessa and I are not the only young girls at this sect, I feel pretty blessed that Tessa chose to befriend me right away. The others seem untrustworthy. Too many people in this sect are greedy. 

Due to having gained a reputation as a useless nobody, despite my single vein (in this world, the fewer veins one has, the easier cultivation is supposed to be) people only speak to me when trying to get closer to Tessa. Even our teacher seems uninterested in teaching me any techniques other than healing and basic cultivation.

At least I was able to read lots and lots of books. I learned so much from reading them all, that I was able to start developing my own techniques, and modifying others. One of the more important things in my opinion, was learning to use techniques for body boosting, to help Tessa train and cultivate faster. I’ll let her take all the attention, while I hide in her shadow. She is strong enough to have the protection of one of the elders now. They believe she’ll become one of the pillars of the sect some day.

One thing I noticed that I sorta expected: a lot of the skills people would brag about learning were the least useful ones. The best skills were often seen as too easy by the “genius” youngsters. The issue was that at our low level of skill and ability, the best thing to focus on was efficiency, and efficient skills don’t waste energy on anything flashy or cool. No blur effects, no illusions, no fancy confusing footwork. A good movement technique will simply move a person very quickly, with as little advance warning or prep time needed as possible.

In public the elders praise those who master the most difficult and flashy techniques. In private, they compliment those who never bother to try, for recognizing the inefficiency. The ones who get the least praise, are the ones who try the difficult techniques and fail. 

While others ignore me, at least Tessa listens to me, and seems to understand what I say. Maybe she can make the changes in the world that I seek on my behalf. I don’t think I can really stay with her forever, after all, and I don’t think I’ll get strong enough fast enough to really change the world myself. 

“Only by changing how important power is, can we really change the world. Just gaining power alone isn’t enough.”

“Don’t worry, even if I ascend I won’t abandon you.”

“You may not have a choice.”

Ch 5: Why?

Tessa’s View

When someone tries to mug us in an alley, they always go after Alice first, thinking she’s the weakest of the two of us. Sure, her cultivation is lower than mine, yet when attacked, she is far more ruthless than I. The first time it happened, it was a shock. I wasn’t fast enough, I thought she’d be in danger. Her attacker died before I could even realize what had happened. “Too lethal to use in a sparring match” she’d said to me once. Now I understood. Her attack wasn’t a martial arts move, it was a killing move.

For some strange reason though, no one ever seemed to realize that Alice was the one responsible for all the deaths. I may have killed quite a few myself, as this world is not a nice one and there’s no reason to spare someone when they’ll just go attack someone else. However, most of the deaths are Alice’s work. Everyone seems to think that Alice is weak, and that I’m protecting her with mysterious arts. The one with mysterious arts is Alice.

I often wondered how she did it. When we went hunting, Alice would notice monsters, valuable plants, and troublemakers before I did. Even when powerful monsters appeared, before her mysterious arts, they’d be sluggish and weak. Her only explanation was that all living things have water in them, and that just as she can heal someone and boost their physical abilities, she can harm them, and weaken their abilities too. Why doesn’t anyone know of this?

“It’s not that no one knows, but that no one cares.” As is common, her words were confusing. “While knowing such arts is useful to those with water veins, it is not useful to those without. They would prefer I remain weak, and dependant upon others, so that they can use me.”

I didn’t really know what Alice meant. However, it began to make sense when a tournament was announced with Alice as the prize. 

“How can you do this? She’s a person, not an object!” I was outraged. Sadly, my teacher wasn’t interested in my objections.

“She has grown strong enough, lived free long enough, we cannot continue to delay. Our strongest disciple shall be granted the right to use her and boost their own cultivation. This is the best use for the pure water vein. Only if you win, will you have the right to keep her for yourself.”

I didn’t win.

Ch 6: Loss.

Elder Eun’s view.

“Our disciples are the future of our sect. I’ve said this many times, correct?” I really shouldn’t have to keep repeating this, but it seems like I must. No one ever seems to listen.

“Of course, of course! We all understand this very well!” The sniveling fool clearly didn’t understand a thing. All he knew was that I was angry, and he was afraid. I once thought that fear would make him easy to control. Now, it seems he is too useless for that to matter. 

“You say that, yet somehow, under your watch, all of the most promising students we’ve acquired in the past 8 years are either missing or dead! I let it slide when the Merrick brothers died. I let it slide when Jane and her entourage died. I let it slide when Brad, and Greg, and Yulia died. These fights, after all, would only make the victor even stronger. Our two most promising students grew and grew and grew.” 

Deaths were common. Fights would break out, and the strongest would live. Fighting with real risk was the fastest way for the strong to grow even stronger. There wasn’t a single cultivator at the higher ranks who didn’t have a mountain of corpses in their history. 

“Yet now what do we have? Tessa has fled, and Lyndi is dead! When the intersect tournament comes next year, we’ll have no one worthy of attending!”

Alice’s View; Personal Log, Stardate… I have no fucking clue.:

That life didn’t last long, I knew it wouldn’t from the moment I learned I was being sent to a cultivation world. I don’t have the personality to put up with that shit. Human Cauldron? Destroying someone else’s cultivation to boost your own? Don’t try that shit with me. From the very start, I’d been busy making sure I’d be able to take my enemies down with me. 

I had the pure water vein. I had pure water ki. The “gentle” and “docile” and “easily tamed” water ki. I turned it into poison. Poisons, and acids, are in the domain of the water element too. Taking my power without my permission was drinking from a poisoned well. They killed me for revenge, but I knew that would happen.

So what happens next god? Are you done with your stupid games? Did I entertain you enough?

God’s view

Well, she certainly lived up to her claim of doing things differently. That was just supposed to be her tragic backstory that would send her on a path of revenge. She’d lose her cultivation, get help from her friend to escape the sect, have a fortuitous encounter with a demonic cultivator, and begin demonic cultivation to get revenge on those who wronged her. Except none of that happened. She killed the one who stole her cultivation, getting revenge instantly, and clearly and visibly ruined the plans of those involved. She may have even started that sect’s downfall. The reputation loss for having their best cultivator of that generation die, and their second best leave, will severely weaken them for at least a century.