It turned out it wasn’t that easy.

“It’s like trying to hold onto water. When I get even more than a few minutes of it, it boils away instantly.” Kim said, between grunts. “But its getting easier the more I do it. The second I let go, its sucked into my heart like water down a sink.”

“Are you sure that’s necessary?” I asked, waiting for her to finish carving the little gems from the monsters. She called them mana stones, or something, I wasn’t sure, but I knew what they really were. A beast core is a beast core. A condensed bit of Qi from inside of a monster, a physical organ matching a dantian from creatures that cultivated only unconsciously. On monsters this small, they couldn’t be worth much. I mean, they wouldn’t buy a meal on my continent.

“I’m not getting paid for this run.” Kim said, leaning back and gesturing with the knife. It slipped in her hands, covered in viscous red blood. “So, yeah. We’re not all made of money. Normally I’d get paid by the person. Unless you’re paying?” As she finished her sentence, she stabbed into a goat. The little beads of Qi were awkward to get to it— at least they looked like it. Kim was stuck knifing through the layers of fat on the goat’s stomach.

She pulled the core free, wiping blood on the plants below.

“Last one.” She said, rising with a stretch. She extended her hand, and I gave her the spear back. Back to barehanded for now, I guess. “So?”

“The trickle of Qi you’re getting isn’t enough. It sounds like your control is improving— but at this rate, it’ll take years before you progress. It will still be possible to reach Qi saturation if you hold the Qi away from that sinkhole in your heart. So now we hunt for bigger game. If you have more Qi, it will make the job easier.” I started walking as I spoke, moving towards the forest choked by vines.

“So that… sinkhole, its not normal?” Kim asked.

“No.” I replied. We walked in silence for a few seconds, then I looked towards her face. She looked worried. Was she worried? I would be worried. She was meddling with magical systems she didn’t understand and has an abnormality. “I suspect it’s something in common with all Awakened. Not an abnormality.”

She calmed down a little. The trek was awkward with the ground constantly shifting— by the time we rose from the pile of goats we had moved a solid five minute walk away. It was like walking against an escalator, the ground working against us, but we would arrive in the forest soon.

And then I could hunt.

“So.” Kim started, pacing along with me. “You said you saw other worlds. Like, gates? Like you… wait, no, let me guess!” She said as I opened my mouth to reply. “Okay. So you found a gate. And then you found a gate inside of a gate!”

“No.” I replied, and the conversation trailed off into silence.

“That was a reference.” She said a minute or two later. “You know, to Gatecrashers? The TV show?”

“Is that a… C-Drama, right?” I said. It sounded like the show Willow and Rose had been watching.

“What? No. You’re thinking of a totally different show.” Kim replied. “Okay, so really. Whats your backstory? Top secret government agent? You spent the last few years training?”

“I was in a coma.” I replied. “I guess.”

“Oh, okay. Mysterious elder came to you in a dream and granted you magical powers?”

“No.” I considered my words for a moment. “I was in a coma— here. On earth. From my perspective, I was reborn in another world. I woke up there— a baby. I lived a full life. More than a hundred years. And when that life ended, I woke up here. In a hospital.”

“So you mean you lived another, complete life? Thats… thats a little crazy, Rain…” Kim trailed off.

“Magical powers. Monsters. Other worlds full of monsters. Those are all real.” I paused. “But reincarnation is where you draw the line?”

“I mean yeah, its like crazy? Like what? Your soul went there? I’m not even sure souls are real.”

“They are.”

“What?”

“Souls. They’re real. Once you enter the Nascent Soul Realm you can sense them.”

“So you’ve seen souls before? How high is the Nascent Soul Realm? How long did it take you to reach it? What does my soul look like? How long 'til I can see it?”

“Sensed them. Not seen them. Not very different than your ability to sense Awakened.” Kim frowned at my reply. “With dedication you might be able to reach it in…” Was a few years right? It took me more than a few, the first time, but I didn’t have access to an endless horde of monsters to farm for Qi. Or the personal training of the Patriarch. “A year, if you’re lucky.”

My eyes scanned overhead as we stepped into the forest of crawling vines. They suffocated the canopy, the sky, and even the light, until it only fell here and there through the canopy of vines. The light shifted with the plants, sunbeams falling to the forest floor in thin patches and then closing immediately. The forest was bigger from the inside than the outside— not any trick of a spatial formation or compression, but as we walked into the tree-line there were less and less vines below us, eventually leaving us on the muddy ground of the forest.

The only vegetation in the tightly packed expanse of trees were parasitic plants that seemed to cling to their sides, stretching off in great multicolored bushes, leaving nothing more than a canopy of shifting vines above and a forest of dancing shadows below.

It seemed like the path for an Awakened to cultivate might be fraught with difficulties. I only hoped that the path wouldn’t become more arduous going forward. For my own progression, I needed Kim to advance. I was banking a lot of my time and effort on the hope that her own progression would also make her rank higher, thus able to grant me access to more gates and resources. Even if the cultivation didn’t directly increase her rank, making her able to gain more experience would allow her Awakened rank to progress as well, albeit slowly. From my understanding, even Awakened who capped were still inching forward up the ranks, just at a crawl.

“So are you climbing to catch up to your sister?” Kim asked.

“What?” I asked, caught off guard by the question.

“You know, climbing. It means, uh, trying to rank up. Like for me, from Iron to Bronze.”

“No, I know what climbing means… just…” How do I explain something like this? Cultivation itself had been my life goal for years. “Cultivation is an end goal in it of itself. To pursue the Dao. To reach immortality.”

“It can’t be the end goal, right? Spending all day killing monsters.” Kim said, then paused, looking at me as we walked. “What do you do on the weekends?”

“Cultivate.”

Kim laughed. I raised an eyebrow.

“Oh, you’re dead serious. What… were your hobbies before? You know, in your… your other life?”

“I…” I thought about that. What were my hobbies? Most of days were spent overseeing the training and administration of the sect. Overseeing the affairs and disputes between the elders— which were endless. And cultivating in isolation. My personal palace overlooked a garden of sacred herbs, but I didn’t often tend to them myself, though in my later years I did visit it often. My son was raised by other members of the sect, as I was too busy to attend to him personally.

I granted audiences to foreign elders who partitioned us, offering resources in exchange for aid, and oversaw our own internal tournaments— which often ended in blood baths. Day in and out, I was buried in what amounted to paperwork. Actually, there was one thing I liked to do, mostly just for myself. A foray out of the sect when spirit beasts were rampaging or acting overly territorial near our mountain.

“Yes. I liked to hunt.”

“Like, uh, deer? Or monsters? Because if its monsters it doesn’t—“

A shadow fell towards Kim from the canopy, and she jumped back, cutting herself off mid sentence.

An ape hit the forest floor. At least it looked like an ape. The dancing light of the forest crawled on its fur, which ended abrupt An ambush predator lurking in the tree tops. Curling horns hung from its head, and its mouth was opened wide, showing rows of teeth as it screeched. It pounded at the ground, jumping in circles, and Kim stabbed at it without hesitation.

Her spear made a scraping noise as it slashed along the scaled carapace that covered the ape’s forearms. The ape howled, changing targets and charging at me. With a few quick steps, I moved to the left, putting its charge directly in the range of Kim— who stabbed deftly into the monster’s side.