Luxire Worse
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Dao of Fuck Off Prologue- Entering the Sect
🕑 Added 2024-07-28 23:39:22 +0000 UTCY’know. Conscious reincarnation isn’t that bad.
I mean, sure, having to go through infanthood with a fully functional mind isn’t great. And the culture shock is very real when you go from a post-industrial society to a rural farming community that has to haggle for verified news.
But other than wondering what the hell killed me and hoping everyone I knew was either spared completely or died painlessly like I must have, it was a simple, peaceful life. I didn’t have any high goals or hidden powers, so I just enjoyed learning about the world around me. Everything I could, including the existence of cultivators.
How’s that for a laugh? I reincarnate as a peasant boy in a world where bickering with heaven actually gives power, as me.
Naturally I took to talking with ‘heaven’. Not in any fancy ‘hidden cultivator’ manner. Just holding half of a conversation with the idea of a sapient world as I puzzled out the behavior of bugs and critters. I didn’t grow up under tons of stress here, so I had no particular reason to try telling ‘heaven’ it was wrong about anything and I had no idea what kind of meditation to start hearing it would get me anywhere.
And being peasant born, what energy I could gather and use to bolster my body was paltry and not worth hoping for a hidden talent with.
I’d need access to the teachings of the cultivators if I wanted to become one, but I knew even better than most of the adults that even being near one was suicidal. Face was a topic that came up fairly often, and that boded poorly for anyone having to stroke a demigod’s fragile ego.
But of course, life couldn’t just be civilized and leave me to my paltry studies.
Nope. I was 8 when a bunch of cultivators waltzed into town and “politely” told my parents that I was going with them. I managed to avoid offending them much while asking if it would be possible for my parents to be compensated for the loss of my aide on the farm. I got four lashes for my trouble, but one of the gruffer cultivators - Hing Malaping - chose to indulge my request with a spare low-quality fanged boar corpse.
Thus was I recruited into the Yellow Fang cult sect.
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Life in the sect was predictably rough. I, along with twenty or so other youths from ages 5-10, hadn’t been recruited to be trained as cultivators. Not right off, anyway.
Instead we were added to the ranks of the menial servants and set to tasks that were technically within our power to perform.
The younger kids suffered most as their tasks weren’t any less taxing than the rest of ours despite their lower stamina. Most of us were beaten frequently for letting things like ‘mortal frailty’ and ‘exhaustion’ affect our work. I wound up sharing some of my prior life’s meditations with my fellow servants just to give them a chance.
After all, working for a cultivator sect has all the hard manual labor of rural life set to the manic ‘work is life’ pace of my old world. Not something that people ‘just get used to’ without the -Very Present- threat of death.
Fortunately, there were perks to be had. A nightmare to attain, but still.
For every week that we accomplished all of our tasks without incident, we were awarded a single contribution point, the internal currency of the sect. Things like mortal-tier healing balms and completely mundane foodstuffs were available to us at the exchange office for 1-15 points. But the obvious prize to be had for toeing the line and dutiful service to the sect was a primer on the basics of cultivation for 100 points.
Upon learning this, I noticed everyone else writing it off as a fanciful dream to ever attain that many points. Which I gathered was the first of many filters for joining the sect properly. After all, a mortal who thinks that 2 years of hard labor is too long to dedicate to a goal would make a poor cultivator.
Naturally, I decided to do it anyway because nobody kidnaps me, enslaves me, and dangles ultimate power in front of me without consequences. That’s just not who I am.
But being a clever little shit, I didn’t announce my plan. Instead, I asked a few of my fellow servants about what made it a fool’s dream, because being 8, going on 9 allows one to admit to ignorance a lot easier than being 30.
And thus I discovered the second major filter: Jackasses playing crab-bucket.
Some of the senior servants, salty about their lot, would track how often someone received contribution points, whether by dutiful work or by lucking out and finding something worth turning in for a couple, and if it looked like the person was hoarding them for the primer, the bullies would just beat the shit out of them and take their points to waste on booze.
Organic. Senseless. Entirely human.
Hiding the tokens representing the points was also doomed, according to several who’d tried, on account of just about everyone having tried and knowing where all the good hiding places were.
In fact, according to everyone I chatted with over work and after hours, the only real way to have a chance at actually attaining a primer was to catch the eye of a cultivator and hope they had higher standards for their personal servants. An option that stank of pill furnace traps to me, so I politely ignored the advice to try looking adorable when a female cultivator was around.
The last interesting point of information I gathered was to ask the exchange clerk if there was any rule against sharing the primer with fellow servants. He laughed at my audacity for asking before informing me that sharing was discouraged because mortals without the fortitude to get one for themselves usually wound up crippling themselves by half-assing the meditations.
I’m pretty sure he saw right through my reason for asking when I confirmed that it was just crippling, not killing themselves.
After all, killing a fellow servant was punishable by death unless the taskmaster the case was brought to bought the ‘self defense’ or ‘accident’ argument, at which point it would just be a crippling lashing. But incapacitating them, even crippling them entirely so the taskmaster had to kill them for being worthless, was completely permitted. For reasons that eluded me at the time.
With that, I decided that my best path forward would be to become everybody’s buddy. I started with my immediate peers. The ones I’d taught my coping meditations to. One at a time, six points apart, I invited them to join me for after-work dinner.
Nothing terribly fancy, just 3 points of good meat and 2 of booze to enjoy together and commiserate our lot in being noticed by our ‘recruiters’.
Most of them mentioned the longing to acquire the primer and ascend through the heavens, which I encouraged heartily. I even promised to catch up to them some day if they made it just to share another meal with them.
Then, as each of them got mugged for going directly for the primer, I had another meal with them to raise their spirits and workshop ways of handling the bullies. Then I started having the same meal with two of them at a time, filling in my visible purchases with salves and teas to help them recover while staying off the first level radar.
Not that I went unbullied. I was accosted and knocked around by some jackass who figured I must be trying to hide my hoard by getting points from the others during the meals.
When I thanked him for the idea, I think I bluescreened him. Then I invited him to join me for dinner to discuss the idea more, which caused his greedy little eyes to gleam.
Unfortunately for him, I was more in control of my alcohol intake than he was, and a big rock beats any sized head. Or limb, in this case.
So when he failed to report for duty in the morning and I informed the taskmaster that I’d heard his screams after he left my place, I was saddled with looks of terror from just about everyone as his still-whimpering body was dragged to the medic to see if he could recover.
I don’t think I convinced the taskmaster, but I did my best “I don’t know who did it. Most of my friends were also mugged by him, and he was eating the food that I was going to share with them.”
And just like that, each of my friends realized that we could totally team up against the bullies as long as we obeyed the rules. Which meant that I was no longer the only proper psychopath among the servants.
Kids these days. So impressionable.
Alibis became hot commodities, and everyone travelled in groups, even the bullies who had very clearly never had actual cultivator potential turned on them. Five years of dutiful work later I was turning 17 and turning in 100 points for a primer with a polite smile to the clerk who had become fond of me after assuming that I was behind the broken knees and elbows that kept things otherwise civil.
I wasn’t the first of the group to get there, on account of maintaining my meal plan and continuing to befriend most of the servants. Connections would be good, and having people ahead of me to map out the traps would be even better.
The primer itself was rather sparse of reasons for things working, instead being a super simple ‘how to arrange your chi into a foundation’ series of meditations and a basic cultivation meditation to start empowering said foundation.
Being me, I took months more time than I needed to follow the instructions because I wanted to turn my attention to the aspects of my chi that the instructions referenced and to ensure that there were no obvious traps from establishing a poor foundation. I didn’t find anything that looked deliberately wrong, but I did figure out how several of the ‘dantians’ and ‘meridians’ would grow to eventually carry my will in defiance of heaven, and tidied up the sloppy formation advice in the margins.
Cultivation itself was a surreal experience as I had to take in energy from my surroundings (ki), mix it with my own stamina(chi) in just such a way that it wouldn’t dissipate, and then layer my will into it so that I could move it in ways that my intrinsic energies would resist as well. All while it was rushing through the foundation I’d built along with the entirety of the ki that I’d already gathered.
As soon as I had the foundation laid out and had a month of cultivation built upon it, the taskmaster sent me along to join the sect proper.
