Bury Them All: A Cultivator's Path

Chapter 2

One day, cross-legged on his bed, the ambient spiritual energy drawing steadily closer —

Click.

Something inside him gave way, and he broke through into the first stage of Qi training.

Power surged through his limbs, settling into muscle and bone. Compared to the frail body that had nearly frozen solid half a month earlier, there was strength in him now that hadn't been there before.

Thanks to his borrowed experience, consolidating the new level took almost no time at all — as though his body had simply been waiting for permission.

He stepped out of the hut and into the snow.

It happened to be the first of the month — payday.

The Sky Burial Sect ran, in Silas's estimation, rather like a company. The head of the sect was its CEO. The elders sat on something like a board. Peak lords were upper management. Inner disciples were middle management. Handymen were the unpaid interns.

Silas himself occupied a strange niche equivalent to an outer disciple — technically staff, technically salaried, despite doing nothing that resembled cultivation in the eyes of anyone who mattered.

Nobody respected the position. Silas didn't care. Getting paid without having to fight anyone for it struck him as an excellent deal.

Snow needling at his face, he stepped onto the great bridge for the first time since arriving.

He carried the original owner's memories, so the geography wasn't unfamiliar, but this was the first time he — the man now wearing this body — had crossed into the sect's main grounds.

Sky Burial Mountain lay on the other side, connected to Skypillar by the span beneath his feet — the true heart of the sect, where disciples gathered and business was conducted.

From the bridge, peaks rose on either side of him, wreathed in something that looked almost like living light. These were the mountains where the sect's elite trained, where its most powerful masters cultivated in seclusion — and also, at their base, where the outer disciples swarmed like moths to every scrap of opportunity.

Once across, the mist parted, and the mountain came alive around him — disciples cutting through the sky on flying swords, a blur of cranes strung out overhead, senior cultivators streaking past like comets given human shape. Groups of sect disciples moved past him in loose clusters, laughing, arguing, altogether unconcerned with the world beneath their feet.

Silas made his way toward the Outer Sect Steward's office, keeping his head down, blending in as best he could.

The office, when he reached it, was already swallowed in several long, restless lines.

For disciples without talent or connections, the spirit stones handed out as salary weren't just currency — they were fuel, some of the only pure cultivation resources most of them would ever touch.

The mountain wasn't short on ambient energy — every peak practically hummed with it — but raw ambient qi was nothing next to the concentrated purity of a spirit stone. For the gifted, the difference barely mattered. For everyone else, especially those still stuck in Qi training, it was the difference between climbing and staying still.

Silas joined the line near its tail and had worked his way toward the middle when he sensed a cluster of people approaching from behind — one of them radiating a presence like moonlight through storm clouds, unmistakably strong.

Heads turned all down the line. Silas kept his eyes forward.

As the group passed, he allowed himself one glance, then dropped his gaze again.

"Move." One of the newcomers reached out and hauled a man bodily out of his place near the front, making room for someone clearly more important.

"What are you all crowding for — back up!" the man barked at those behind him, a knot of young toughs falling into formation at his shoulder.

Nobody argued. The line shuffled backward. The disciple who'd been yanked out of place rejoined the queue further back, face tight with humiliation, saying nothing.

"Bullying the weak again, Rourke?" someone called out from the other side, voice edged with contempt.

The leader — Desmond Rourke — didn't so much as blink. "Touch me during next year's spring tournament and see what happens."

"Only because your brother's an inner disciple. Otherwise you'd already be feeding worms on this mountain, a year early." The other cultivator shook his head, disgusted, and walked on.

Silas kept his eyes down the entire time.

When his turn finally came, he was handed five low-grade spirit stones.

He'd watched every other outer disciple ahead of him receive ten. He said nothing.

Stones in hand, he turned immediately for Skypillar, walking faster than strictly necessary, every nerve alert for anyone looking for a reason to start something.

Only once he'd crossed back onto his own mountain did the tension finally leave his shoulders.

Back in the hut, he examined the stones properly.

"That's remarkably clean energy." Even holding them, he could feel a weight of power far denser than the ambient qi around him.

He crushed one between his fingers. The room filled instantly with pressure, thick and warm.

He inhaled it, and felt his cultivation tick upward — his dantian pulling energy in faster than it had before.

Crack, crack, crack.

He crushed the remaining four, sat down, and got to work.

Months slid by like water. Winter thinned and finally broke; spring crept back into the world.

On Skypillar Mountain, a light rain fell without sound, carried on a mild breeze.

Silas stood before a freshly dug grave, waiting for the system's report.

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

Spirit root fragment gained

Three months of steady work had passed since that first burial — hundreds of bodies handled, hundreds of small harvests collected — but nothing spectacular had come of it. The dead who found their way to him were, without exception, low-ranking outer disciples. Nobody worth learning much from.

Today's burial was, if anything, the most accomplished person he'd handled yet.

Even so, three months of accumulation wasn't nothing.

His grasp of the Sky Burial Cultivation Art now sat comfortably at the fifth level, backed by a lifetime of borrowed instinct that made every stage feel less like learning and more like remembering.

His Fireball Technique, meanwhile, had been refined past anything he could have managed alone — dozens of small insights layered on top of each other until the spell was, by any measure, flawless. Nobody in this sect could out-fireball him. He was fairly confident of that.

He'd also picked up threads of body cultivation and windcraft from the borrowed memories of thirty-odd cultivators, though his grasp there remained solid without being masterful — competent, not exceptional.

What he hadn't found, not once, was any hint of the sect's rarer crafts — artificing, alchemy, formation work, talisman-scribing. Formations especially nagged at him. Concealment arrays, spirit-gathering arrays — those were exactly the sort of thing he wanted and exactly the sort of thing nobody dying around him seemed to know.

Thrum.

Something shifted deep in his chest.

His spirit root — the thing that capped his entire potential — had finally closed its last gap and become whole.

"A complete low-grade root, then?" He nearly laughed with relief, feeling the connection between himself and the world tighten noticeably.

Three months in, he'd reached the third stage of Qi training — by his own estimate, another two or three months from the next major threshold. With a complete root behind him now, paired with everything his borrowed experience offered, that timeline had just been cut to a single month. Maybe less.