Redeeming the Broken Stars.

CHAPTER. 16: NO WE ARE JUST GETTING STARTED.

 "That's how Kaelen Ashwright would have fought in his original body if he'd had to fight upward, against stronger opponents." 

Kaelen's voice was distant, remembering Typhon's lessons about conserving power against superior foes. You are not always the strongest in the room. Learn to make that irrelevant.

"You were taught well," Old Moth said, and it was the first time she'd acknowledged the tragedy of that directly. Taught well. By someone who betrayed you with everything he taught you.

The silence that followed had weight to it.

"There's something else," Kaelen said. 

"The tournament. The fallen men. You listed cultivators with genuine motivations, genuine reasons to enter. The woman looking for her daughter. The man trying to help his student." He looked at Old Moth steadily. 

"Most of the people I'll be fighting aren't villains. They're desperate people in an impossible realm trying to survive."

"Yes," Old Moth said.

"And I'm going to have to kill them."

"Yes."

"That doesn't trouble you?"

Old Moth was quiet for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice was careful. "It will trouble you. That's different." 

She folded her hands on the table. "You were raised in the upper heavens, where combat was theoretical.”

“Where cultivation competition was structured, controlled, with healers present and outcomes rarely permanent. The concept of killing as a practical necessity, rather than a moral failure, is going to be one of the hardest adjustments you make."

"But you think I should make it."

"I think you will make it or you will die. The tournament doesn't care about your moral discomfort." She tilted her head. 

"I also think that there is a difference between killing out of cruelty and killing because the alternative is your own death and the abandonment of everything you're trying to accomplish.”

“You didn't create the tournament of Shadows.”

“You didn't create the Nine Heavens that made it necessary. You are a consequence of a corrupt system, navigating within it the only way available to you." Old Moth immediately responded.

"That's the justification every person who does a terrible thing uses," Kaelen said quietly.

"Yes," Old Moth agreed. "The difference is whether you actually mean to change the system afterward, or whether you're just using it as permission." She looked at him. 

"Do you intend to change it?"

"I intend to burn it down."

"Then perhaps some portion of what you do in service of that goal can be justified by the goal itself." She rose. 

"You should sleep. The stabilizing compound will complete its work while you rest, and your body needs recovery more than it needs conversation."

"We haven't finished. The training plan. The technique details. What I need to know about the City of Ten Thousand Sins before I arrive." Kaelen pushed himself upright, or tried to. 

His body had apparently decided that it was done cooperating for the evening, and the act of standing required more effort than he had remaining.

Old Moth watched him struggle without moving to help. Not unkindly. Just... watchfully.

He made it upright on the third attempt.

"Tomorrow," she said. "We begin at dawn. 

Sleep now. The moths will keep watch." Old Moth said, almost laughing.

She moved toward her sleeping mat with the ease of someone who'd been doing exactly this for decades. "And Kaelen Ashwright."

"Yes?"

"Welcome to the Mortal Coil. It is significantly worse than you were led to believe."

Despite everything, despite the compound churning through him and the weakness in every muscle and the gravity of everything that lay ahead, Kaelen Ashwright almost smiled.

"I've noticed," he said.

He lay down on the floor, because there was nowhere else, and the moths settled around him like a soft, silent audience.

He was asleep before the lantern burned out.

“I just

hope I don't die again in this place.” He immediately muttered to himself.