Lily was ajitter with excitement by the time she got back to their house. “Alright!” She immediately settled down on the floor, assuming a lotus position. “I’m ready!”

  Avyr rolled his eyes as he settled down beside her. “Hold on. Do you even know what it means, to consume a treasure that will elevate you into a cultivator?” That was… a good point. A bit embarrassedly, she shook her head. “I thought as much… it's not particularly complicated. At least not at your level. The treasure that my parents… the treasure that I was given was a far more raw pill than the Bloody Saffron Sect’s. I doubt that you’ll need to do much of anything if their pill is as much of a miracle medicine as they claim it is… but, still. When you feel the energy of it, when you feel it burning and splintering and filling you, stretching you, bloating you… hold onto it. Crush it. Channel it and refuse to give up a single drop. It is your pill now, and inside you it will be your energy, not anyone else’s.” He was quiet for a second. “At least, that’s what my father told me. Mingtian’s cultivation method also works off a somewhat similar premise. Understood?”

  Lily nodded firmly and not at all nervously. Definitely. “Got it. So… all I have to do is just eat the pill?” She opened her hand, tilting it until the sweat adhering the tiny thing to her palms released it and let it roll around. It looked like nothing more than a drop of fathomless blood, frozen in time and crushed into the form of a pill. It didn’t have the stark, almost vulgar essence-of-magical that the Eightfold Yang Golden Dragonfruit Dan had, but it didn’t need it. Perhaps, it was all the more impressive for not having it. It was… perfect. Almost.

  She closed her eyes, and breathed in, and felt— the quiet pulse and push of the pill’s presence, prickling at her hand with an almost but not quite physical presence. The cool air. The presence of Avyr— the warmth of him, his fur, his support— the warmth of him, beyond the natural. Anticipation.

  She breathed out.

  In— “Alright. I’m ready—” and this time she wasn’t lying.

  Before she could turn back, she threw the pill into her mouth and swallowed it.

  Energy.

  It exploded out from the pill as it disintegrated within her body, not furious or burning but nonetheless enormous. A whelming wave of force that burst from the pill and swirled through her body with a terrible force, and only kept coming. She stiffened in shock, clumsily reaching out and grasping at it, trying in vain to prevent it from seeping out of her body. Yet, it was like trying to catch the rain and bar the sun from shining— it resisted every attempt, only continuing ever more to burst free and enveloped her in its magnificent scale. An unending flow that shivered and pulsed with each beat of her heart, chilling, searing lines through her body through the sheer amount of it, uncontainable, uncontrollable—

  Oh. Oh. She felt stupid for not recognizing the pattern immediately— it was an awakening pill from the Bloody Saffron Sect. Of course it would be blood-aspected. No— as she felt it race through her body, she understood, all of a sudden, at last— it was not blood-aspected but the essence of blood. It was blood. It was not blood.

  It was qi.

  It all made sense now.

  All the difficulty seemingly… melted away. The pill kept bursting with a seemingly inexhaustible source of qi, but it was no longer uncontrollable— instead, she guided it along the path of her veins, circulating it with each beat of her heart and concentrating it in… in somewhere. Her dantian. What would be her dantian, but was now… nothing, nothing but empty space and flesh and matter…

  It didn’t have to be, though.

  She saw it— for a moment even thought she might understand it— but in a passing moment it fled from her, a dream on a misty shore caught up by sun and salt breeze as all the qi pooling in the core of herself collapsed. A self-consuming star, a terrible gravity, a force that collapsed in on itself and seemed to rip all the qi in her body along with it, folding and coiling and according to some great and inscrutable pattern—

  Building—

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  She lost the thread.

  Something broke.

  Suddenly, she was more.

  She gasped, her eyes jerking open as she toppled backwards onto Avyr. “What was that?” Her head was pounding, she could barely remember what she’d been doing that entire time— much less comprehend it— and her perception was awash with lurid color and floating sound, and shivering taste that ran goosebumps up her skin… “what was that?”

  Avyr shifted a little, propping her up. “Hard, wasn’t it?”

  “No… I mean, kind of, at first, but then it just… clicked.” Avyr frowned. Or well, the next best thing to a frown that a cat could do, and the bright golden halo that surrounded twisted and shivered at the motion. “It was… I can’t even begin to describe it. Like something vast and impersonal touched me— or like I touched something vast and impersonal. It was easy.”

  “That’s… not normal. Usually— or at least I suppose it’s usually, given I’ve broken through twice now and never experienced anything even close to that— it’s a constant struggle to control the energy and keep packing it into your dantian even when the dantian struggles against being pushed beyond its limits so fiercely. There’s a reason so many cultivators get stuck at bottlenecks.”

  “Oh.” She frowned. “It wasn’t like that, though. The qi created a dantian.”

  “An aspect of the first ascension, I’m pretty sure. From my reading, I think most modern academics and even some of the establishment cultivators now adhere to mortal aspirituality. Still, it should have been the same in essence. I don’t doubt you, but…”

  “Right. It was unusual.” She closed her eyes and focused inwards, tracing the strange and fuzzy shape of… herself inwards unto itself. Like an afterimage overlayed in her mind, a strange act of knowing where perception should have failed her. She could feel her bones and blood and veins and twitching muscles, and knew still that her cultivation… her spirit… lay beyond it.

  Then, she saw it. Or felt it? The terminology of the situation left her confused. A dense, by and large empty orb within the heart of herself— roughly situated behind her navel, though that was a ridiculous oversimplification of a place where location ceased to quite matter as much as it usually did. Yet by and large empty did not mean truly empty. The last of the pill had faded, but it left her feeling… full, in a strange sense, the qi of it floating and turning and filling that strange space like a crimson mist. She reached out to it and—

  Fumbled, horribly. It completely slipped out of her hand, just as hard to manipulate as it had been at the very start of the breakthrough. She figured the ease she’d had during the breakthrough was some hidden benefit of the pill. Still, she tried, again, and again, until she barely grasped a little bit of the qi and dragged it painstakingly out of her dantian—

  She blinked her eyes open the moment she lost control of the qi, both seeing and feeling as she exhaled a faint, red shimmer from her mouth. It tasted like blood. That meant… she flicked her gaze across the room, once more taking in the flowing streams of color moving through the building with gentle ease. Then, she looked at Avyr. Compared to the cat, all the other colors in the building were pale shadows. He was wreathed in a bright light that radiated off of him, the feeling of it a vibrant and energetic and parching heat.

  Qi. A smile slipped onto her face unbidden. She could see qi now.

  Under Avyr’s curious eyes, she quickly scrambled up, grabbing her notebook and brush. Just putting ink to brush was almost unbearable, and she had to fight to keep from shivering as she traced a simple character out on the paper…

  It was the first character she’d ever seen. The one, that in many ways, had been responsible for interest in formations in the first place. Mingtian’s character, she couldn’t help but remember it as— but it was actually just the character for— light.

  She watched the qi flow, and watched the light of it, the actual glow as it shimmered with gentle radiance, and her smile was brighter than the rune could ever be. The possibilities! She dropped the pen on the table and ran over to Avyr, sweeping the big cat into a giddy hug. “I did it! I actually did it!” She squealed with excitement— “think of all the different formation things that are just going to be so much easier, and the possibilities, and the, the, the—” words failed her, so she just buried her face in Avyr’s fur instead. It managed to muffle the excitement, at least…

  After a few minutes, as initial glee faded somewhat, and the lurid colors had faded into more of a… very faint, background thing so long as she wasn’t focusing on them— which was super hard to do! It finally, really, truly settled in—

  She had finally stepped onto the path.

  At last.

  She was a cultivator.

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