Redeeming the Broken Stars.

CHAPTER 15: FAR FROM HOME.

"A stabilizing compound. Your soul is still partially fragmented from the consumption process.”

“The fragments that made it into this body are integrating, but they're doing so in a chaotic pattern.”

“Without assistance, the integration could take months and cause considerable internal damage." She folded her hands. 

"With the compound, the process will be uncomfortable for approximately two hours and then largely complete."

"And if I choose not to drink it?"

"Then you spend the next several months feeling like your soul is trying to exit your body through your eye sockets while simultaneously hosting the memories, emotional residue, and muscle memory of a dead street rat whose cultivation was destroyed through his own impatience." 

Old Moth's expression was tranquil. "I recommend the compound."

Kaelen drank it almost immediately.

It tasted like regret and metal and something that had no business being a flavor.

He managed not to make a sound, because some dignities survived death and possession.

Old Moth watched him with her white, impenetrable gaze. "Now," she said, "we talk properly."

"We've been talking since the alley."

"We've been exchanging information. That's different. Now we talk." She leaned forward slightly.

"You know what you want. Revenge. Your father punished. The system destroyed. Your mother rescued. These are clear motivations."

"Yes."

"But you've been thinking about them with the mind of who you were. A cultivator raised in privilege, trained by masters, operating within a system that, however corrupt, had rules and structures you understood." Her blind eyes found him with unsettling accuracy. 

"You are no longer that person…Kaelen Ashwright.”

“The system you understood no longer applies to you. You need to learn to think like what you actually are."

"A cripple with a forbidden technique."

"A survivor," Old Moth corrected, and there was something sharp in her voice that cut through his self-deprecation.

"The word matters. A cripple is defined by what he cannot do. A survivor is defined by the fact that he is still here when everything designed to destroy him has failed." She tapped the table.

"Kaelen Ashwright died on the Convergence altar. The Nine Heavens believe he is gone. The Elders have moved on. Soren Ashwright has filed his grief and returned to his duties.”

“Typhon has resumed his endless calculations. Even the Devourers, who consumed most of what he was, have settled back into their prison satisfied."

"And yet," Kaelen said quietly.

"And yet. You exist. You breathe. You drink foul medicine and think about revenge in a room full of moths." Old Moth's voice didn't soften exactly, but it acquired a quality that was, in its own strange way, kind.

"That is not nothing, Kaelen Ashwright. That is everything. The impossible has already happened. Everything else is merely difficult."

Kaelen stared at the empty clay pot in his hands. The compound was already moving through him, warm and uncomfortable, doing whatever it was doing to his fragmenting soul-integration. 

He could feel it, like pressure from the inside, like something finding its way back to where it belonged.

"The tournament," he said, pulling his mind back to the practical.

"Eight days of preparation, you said. What can actually be accomplished in eight days?"

"More than you'd think. Less than you'd hope." Old Moth rose and moved to one of her packed shelves, running her fingers along objects with the certainty of someone who'd memorized every inch of the space. 

"The Essence Devouring technique has multiple levels.”

“The version in the manual I gave you is the baseline, the most fundamental expression of the method. In an emergency, with no practice, against an opponent who is sufficiently weakened, you could use it now.”

"But?"

"But without training, the absorption is inefficient. You'll take perhaps thirty to forty percent of what you should from each target.”

“The rest dissipates, wasted." She pulled a scroll from the shelf, handling it with the practiced care of someone who knew it was old enough to disintegrate under rough treatment. 

"There are three preparatory practices I can teach you in eight days. They won't give you the full technique's potential, but they'll bring you to sixty, perhaps seventy percent efficiency."

"What are they?"

"The first is Soul Anchoring. When you absorb another cultivator's essence, the process is violent and chaotic.”

“Your soul, already fragmented, will be buffeted by the incoming energy. Without anchoring, you'll experience what practitioners call essence sickness, essentially, the absorbed energy fights against your soul's natural patterns before it settles.”

“It causes pain, disorientation, and in severe cases, temporary blindness or loss of motor control." She unrolled the scroll slightly, revealing text in the same archaic script as the manual. 

"Soul Anchoring teaches your soul to create a receiving framework before absorption begins, so the incoming essence has a structure to integrate into rather than crashing against your soul's existing patterns."

"And without it, I could be disoriented mid-fight after each absorption."

"Precisely. In a tournament with no rules and two hundred opponents, disorientation is a death sentence." Old Moth set the scroll on the table.

"The second practice is Essence Reading. The Devouring technique doesn't discriminate by default, it takes everything available.”

“But there are cultivators whose accumulated essence would actually harm you if absorbed, those who practice dark techniques that carry residual corruption, those who have made pacts with certain entities, those whose cultivation base has been deliberately poisoned as a trap." She met his gaze levelly.

"Yes, that last one exists. Some participants enter the tournament as bait, their essence laced with a toxin that activates upon absorption. A previous Essence Devouring practitioner died this way three tournaments ago."

Kaelen Ashwright immediately filed that away with cold efficiency.

"Reading tells me what I'm absorbing before I take it."

"It tells you the general quality and safety of the target's cultivation base. It's not infallible, but it will catch obvious traps." 

She returned to her chair. "The third practice is the most important and the most difficult. It is called the Empty Vessel stance."

"I don't recognize that from the manual."

"It isn't in the manual. The manual contains the technique itself.”

“What I'm adding is context that the manual's original author didn't bother to include, likely because he died before he could write it down." Old Moth's expression was dry. 

"The Empty Vessel stance is a combat posture designed specifically for practitioners of Essence Devouring.”

“Your situation is unusual: you have the soul of a cultivator with nineteen years of training and the body of a cripple with no cultivation base. In a direct exchange of power, you lose. Every time."

"I know that." Kaelen Ashwright immediately said.

"But the body has muscle memory. Movement memory.”

“The techniques Typhon taught you, the Stellar Cascade, the Void Step, the Celestial Dragon forms, these are patterns that your soul knows intimately. And there is a method, imperfect, but functional, of using your soul's pattern-knowledge to move the body in ways that exceed its physical limitations." She paused.

"Not for long. The soul can push the body beyond its normal capacity for perhaps thirty to forty seconds at a time before the strain becomes dangerous.”

“But thirty to forty seconds, used correctly, is enough to close the distance to an opponent and initiate absorption."

Kaelen felt something sharpen in his chest. 

Not hope exactly. More like the click of a lock opening.

"So the strategy is: survive long enough to get close, absorb the first opponent, use their essence to stabilize, absorb the next."

"While using knowledge, strategy, and brief bursts of soul-enhanced movement to bridge the power gap between encounters, yes." Old Moth nodded. 

"You will not win this tournament through strength.”

“You will win it through every advantage that isn't strength: positioning, information, patience, the willingness to let others exhaust each other while you conserve your resources, and the capacity to make one per

fect strike count when the moment arrives.” old Moth immediately said, her voice was laced with a mixture of authority and seriousness.