Rebirth of the Weakest

4: The Fire in the Storm

Some doors should never be opened. Destiny, apparently, had already turned the key without asking permission.

Le Ken did not stop running until the trees swallowed him whole. He collapsed onto the damp ground, chest heaving, and let himself cry without anyone around to see it. Somewhere between the tears and the exhaustion, his mother's voice drifted back to him, patient and steady, the way it always sounded when she explained something important.

Cultivation begins at Beast Refiner, levels one through ten. After that comes Beast Geek, eleven through twenty. Then Beast Master, twenty-one through thirty. Beast Practitioner follows, thirty-one through forty. Beast Grandmaster sits at forty-one through fifty. Beast King climbs to sixty. Beast Ancestor to seventy. Beast Venerate to eighty. Beast Saint to ninety. Beast God caps at ninety-five. And Beast Emperor, the peak anyone has ever reached, tops out at ninety-nine.

Ken stared up through the canopy, rain starting to needle down through the gaps in the leaves.

"Level two," he muttered, "with a cat spirit nobody can even refine, in a world where everyone else was born swinging a sword. Is this really supposed to be my destiny?"

The sky answered with a low growl of thunder, which felt a little dramatic even for the universe.

He let the rain fall over him, washing the dried blood off his wounds in thin pink streaks. Lightning cracked somewhere overhead, bright enough to leave spots in his vision, and for a moment Ken almost laughed at how familiar this all felt. Rain. Cold pavement under his back. A world that did not care whether he got up again.

Then he noticed the fireball.

It hung high in the storm at first, distant enough to look almost peaceful, before gravity got involved and it began falling straight toward him.

"Is this a dream," Ken asked no one in particular, and closed his eyes, too tired to move.

The meteor slammed into the forest a good distance off instead, close enough that the shockwave rolled through the trees and slapped Ken back into full alertness. Branches snapped somewhere behind him. Birds scattered in every direction at once.

Ken sat up fast, heart hammering, and before his brain fully caught up with his legs, he was already running toward the crash site.

*Why am I running toward the explosion,* he thought halfway there. *Normal people run the other way.*

He arrived to find a massive crater carved into the earth, and at its center, a woman wrapped in a sphere of strange red flame, the grass around her untouched despite the fire's obvious intensity.

Ken froze at the edge of the crater. *A goddess. An actual goddess just fell out of the sky in front of me.*

His first instinct told him to turn around and pretend he had seen nothing. Getting tangled up with heavenly beings rarely ended well in any story he had ever heard growing up, and he had already died once from bad timing.

But his feet refused to listen to a single word of that logic.

He circled the crater a few times, arguing with himself the entire way, before finally giving up and calling on his cat spirit. It responded, faint but present, and Ken pushed through the flame sphere with it wrapped around him like a thin shield. His shirt did not survive the crossing. His skin, thankfully, did.

Up close, the woman looked barely alive, her spiritual energy flickering unevenly like a candle about to give out. Ken hesitated only a second before reaching for the red mask covering half her face.

The moment it came away, his whole body went still.

"Mirinda," he whispered.

It was her face. The same face from those impossible dreams, the woman who told him he did not have to save her, the fiancée from a life he was fairly sure he had only imagined until this exact second.

"No matter what life this is," he said quietly, mostly to himself, "fate keeps dragging us back to each other. I am not losing you again."

He began pouring his own spiritual energy into her without waiting to think it through properly, which, in hindsight, was possibly not his smartest decision of the day.

Red fire surged back through the connection almost immediately, slamming into his body like poison. Ken doubled over, skin burning from the inside, and collapsed onto the muddy ground, gasping.

*Great. Dying twice in one lifetime. New record.*

But his cat spirit, useless as it usually felt, began doing the one thing it was actually good at. It devoured the fire poison whole, chewing through the toxic energy and rebuilding his cultivation pathways as it went. Ken felt himself lurch upward through the ranks, breaking clean through to level five, his cat spirit finally manifesting in physical form for the first time.

His wounds sealed shut in seconds.

*So that is the secret,* Ken thought, still catching his breath. *This useless spirit eats anything it touches. No wonder my growth crawls along at a snail's pace, it keeps snacking on my own progress before it can add up to anything.*

Then the seven amulets stirred inside his soul, rising up on their own like they had been waiting for exactly this moment, and poured cosmic energy into the woman beside him, something that did not feel like it belonged to this world at all.

Her eyes snapped open.

For a moment she only blinked, disoriented, memories clearly scattering somewhere behind her gaze. Then her focus sharpened, landed on Ken, half dressed and hovering over her, and her expression shifted straight into alarm.

She lashed out at him without warning.

The amulets moved before Ken could, throwing up a barrier that caught her attack and held it there. She froze, breathing hard, clearly weighing whether to try again.

"Who are you," she demanded. "Speak."

"I am just helping you," Ken said, hands raised. "Trust me, without it, you would not have made it."

She tried to retreat and immediately buckled, her wound reopening with the movement, blood soaking further into her sleeve.

"You are still badly hurt," Ken said gently, taking a step back to give her space. "If I were you, I would not be moving right now."

"…Thank you," she said, voice thinner than before.

She studied him for a long moment, taking in his level, his age, the flickering cat spirit still hovering faintly around his shoulders.

*A level five Beast Refiner at his age,* she thought. *Something clearly held him back for a long while, though he seems to be climbing again now. And that spirit of his, one that devours cultivation instead of building it. What a miserable hand to be dealt.*

Ken, meanwhile, was fighting a losing battle against his own memories, half convinced he was staring at a ghost.

"I am not the ungrateful type," she finally said. "You are clearly struggling with your own path. I can help push your cultivation forward, as far as you would like, actually. In return, there is something I need from you."

"And what exactly could I possibly do for a beast goddess," Ken said, one eyebrow raised, "given that I am apparently the least blessed cultivator on this entire continent?"

That earned him a small smile, the first real one she had given him.

"I am injured," she said, "and my own cultivation has dropped significantly, all the way down to Beast Saint. I was hoping you might lend me those amulets of yours."

Ken blinked. "Amulets? I genuinely have no idea what you are talking about. I did not even know I had those until about five minutes ago."

She studied him again, something unreadable passing behind her eyes.

"I am Dragon Goddess Mirinda Chan, of the Upper Realm," she said. "Though for reasons I cannot explain right now, I am unable to return there. Which means, unfortunately for both of us, I will be staying here with you for the time being."

Ken sat with that for a second. "I am, uh, currently too weak to protect a goddess," he admitted. "I am barely capable of protecting myself most days."

"The seven amulets are cosmic artifacts," Mirinda explained, ignoring the self-deprecation entirely. "Older than cultivation itself. Lost long ago by someone who mattered a great deal."

"Do you actually know how they work," Ken asked.

Instead of answering, she pressed her own Qi directly into the amulets.

They responded instantly, exploding into a burst of lightning that condensed into the shape of a massive White Tiger spirit before slamming straight into Ken's body.

Ken screamed, the sensation tearing through him as his cat spirit and the new tiger spirit collided somewhere deep inside, refusing to coexist. His whole body convulsed under the backlash.

Mirinda moved fast, wrapping her red flame around him to force the chaos into something manageable. The white tiger spirit sealed itself into a cocoon somewhere beneath his ribs, dormant for now, and Ken finally collapsed, completely spent.

His Qi surged one final time as he fell, carrying him straight through to level nine.

When he woke, his body felt different, stronger, reshaped somehow beneath the surface.

"Thank you, senior," he managed, still catching his breath.

The amulets slipped back beneath his soul, settling there like they had simply been waiting their turn.

"I cannot use them anymore, it seems," Mirinda said, studying him with quiet surprise. "The relic has already chosen its master."

A moment later, she doubled over, coughing blood into her palm. Ken lunged forward without thinking.

"What is happening," he asked, alarm sharp in his voice.

"My Dragon spirit has gone unstable," she admitted. "I will not be able to draw on my full power for some time. I may need to rely on you until it settles."

"Oh, right, I should probably mention," Ken said, managing a weak, crooked smile despite everything, "I am Le Ken. And I have what everyone around here likes to call an irreparable fate. There is a real chance I never even make it past Beast Geek in this lifetime."

Mirinda tilted her head at him, something thoughtful settling over her expression.

"There is no such thing as a curse," she said. "A martial spirit grows because its master grows. Yours simply feeds instead. It devours rather than builds." She paused, eyes narrowing slightly, calculating something. "There may be a way to break that pattern. To finally make you its master instead of its meal. I call it the Body Refining Technique."