Bury Them All: A Cultivator's Path

Snow covered everything in winter.

The cliff rose sheer and impossibly high, its upper reaches lost in a churn of cloud and mist, its sides jutting outward like something that had been carved rather than grown. A single vast bridge connected it to the rest of the range — the only way in, the only way out.

This was Skypillar Mountain, the burial ground of the Sky Burial Sect, where the dead of the order were laid to rest.

"Three days now." Beneath the eaves of a rough-thatched hut, sprawled in a weathered old chair, lay a young man dressed in plain white — the look of a scholar who'd wandered somewhere he didn't belong.

Silas Marrow turned an old bell over in his hands, muttering to himself out of sheer boredom.

He wasn't from this world. He'd arrived in it only three days before.

The body he now wore had belonged to a scholar's son from a respectable family in the Ashland, a kingdom that answered to the Sky Burial Sect. That boy had studied at Wren Academy — until his family was handed a quota they couldn't refuse: send a son to serve as attendant to one of the sect's young cultivators.

He'd had two older brothers and a handful of younger siblings. By any reasonable math, the duty should have skipped him entirely.

Luck disagreed. The obligation landed on him.

If he'd been born without spirit roots — which he was — the arrangement might have been a quiet, comfortable sort of exile: serve faithfully, live out a peaceful hundred years. Instead, after little more than ten days training on the mountain, once he'd learned enough of the cultivator's world to understand what he'd walked into, he found out the attendant postings were already filled. He was reassigned instead to Skypillar Mountain.

Cold, forgotten, and functionally alone.

That was where the transference had happened. That was where Silas Marrow, formerly of nowhere in particular, had opened his eyes in a stranger's body.

Naturally, a man who falls into another world ought to bring some kind of advantage with him. Silas had one.

No spirit root of his own — but he carried something called the Gravebinder System.

Bury a corpse properly, in a coffin, and the system would strip something loose from the dead: cultivation experience, techniques, and a fragment of whatever spirit root the deceased had carried in life.

He'd arrived expecting to grind his way upward in obscurity until he emerged, eventually, as something formidable. All he needed was material to work with.

Three days, though, and not a single body had come his way.

Wasn't this supposed to be a world of blood and ambition, a place where the strong devoured the weak without a second thought? Surely people died here constantly.

Apparently not fast enough. So for three days he'd done nothing but watch the snow fall, throw a little of it at nothing in particular, and drink it melted from his palm, thoroughly unimpressed with eternity.

Eventually he dozed off in the old chair.

He woke to find two young men in grey robes standing over him — handyman disciples, judging by the plainness of their dress. Rock-bottom of the sect's hierarchy.

"Junior brothers — don't tell me you've finally brought me a body?" Silas didn't bother apologizing for having been asleep. He rubbed his hands together instead, looking at them with open, unashamed anticipation.

Something about that expression made both of them visibly uncomfortable.

"Senior Brother Marrow. If you'd come with us," one said, straightening his face into something more formal.

They led him toward the bridge.

Ten minutes' walk brought them to a corpse near the span's edge, wrapped in white cloth already dark with old blood.

Silas wondered, privately, why they hadn't simply carried the thing to him in the first place, since they'd clearly come looking for him anyway.

Closer now, the smell told him the body had been dead a while.

"Senior Brother, if you could see to her burial. She didn't have an easy life, even after she made it into the sect." One of the disciples looked genuinely mournful — until Silas cut him off.

"Junior brother, whatever happened to her isn't mine to judge, and I've no interest in the particulars. Go on back. I'll handle everything from here."

He waved them off, swallowed down his own nausea, and hauled the body over his shoulder.

He meant every word about not wanting the story. If some secret about a sect elder came bundled with the corpse, the surest way to end up buried beside it was to know it.

The two disciples left without further comment.

Dead weight, it turned out, earned its name honestly. It took the better part of half an hour for Silas's slight, scholar's frame to reach the burial ground.

Skypillar's rules on burial were rigid. Important figures got fortune-blessed plots, carved headstones, sometimes whole mausoleums. Someone this far down the ladder got a patch of unmarked ground at the margins and nothing more than the bloodied shroud she'd arrived in.

A lonely grave, and nothing to mark it.

Silas spent half a day with a shovel, digging deep, and laid her to rest.

Burial successful.

Techniques acquired: Sky Burial Cultivation Art (first level), Fireball Technique

Immortal experience gained!

Incomplete spirit root obtained!

The notifications rolled through his mind one after another, and with them came a strange lightness — his senses sharpened, his thoughts moved quicker, and somewhere beneath his ribs he felt, for the first time, a thread connecting him to the world itself. The ground seemed to hum faintly with something almost kind.

He'd gained a spirit root. He could feel the world's energy now, faint as it was.

Before he could finish marveling at it, another chime sounded.

System-exclusive technique unlocked — Dao Breath Concealment: suppress your presence so that nothing, living or otherwise, can read your true cultivation level.

That one, at least, suited him fine. He'd been wondering how to keep his head down.

"My thanks, Miss Marion." He bowed his head slightly toward the fresh grave.

The system didn't only hand out rewards — it handed out context. Fragments of the dead person's life came with the harvest.

Her name had been Marion. A handyman disciple. Beaten to death by an outer disciple named Desmond Rourke, then left in some forgotten ravine until a sect patrol happened across her and brought her here.

Silas began to understand, in that moment, exactly how cold this world could be.

Spirit root or not, there was cultivating to be done now. If he meant to survive here, strength wasn't optional.

Hum.

Cross-legged inside his hut, he felt the ambient energy of the mountain pull toward him in slow, uneven spirals, gathering around his body like water circling a drain.

Five days later, he opened his eyes and frowned.

"An incomplete root really is more trouble than it's worth. Five days and I still haven't broken into the first stage of Qi training."

With a lifetime of borrowed cultivation experience behind him, the first stage should have posed no difficulty at all. The problem wasn't knowledge. It was raw material — his root was too weak to draw energy quickly, no matter how well he understood the process.

Still, even this much had changed him. The frigid winter that had nearly killed the body's original owner no longer troubled him. He didn't reach for an extra blanket anymore.

"More bodies, then. That's the only way to strengthen this root." He sighed. Eight days between corpses wasn't exactly the murder-a-minute chaos he'd been led to expect from this genre.

A half-month passed. Silas settled into the rhythm of Skypillar Mountain. The sect kept sending bodies his way — a dozen or more, mostly low-ranking handymen and outer disciples, victims of infighting or unlucky enough to cross someone with real power.

Three of them, he noted grimly, were women killed by Desmond Rourke.

Each name, each fragment of a life cut short, deepened his understanding of exactly how merciless this world could be. All he could do about it was keep accepting what the system gave him and keep getting stronger.