In some hidden world inside of Jin, a battle was raging.

For anyone looking at him from the outside, the boy appeared to be in an unpleasant trance, with eyes rolled back in his head, a veneer of sweat glazing his forehead, and the occasional twitching of a limb. But since the only person looking at him from the outside was the sage who had put him into this condition with his soul reforging elixir, it didn't serve to unsettle him. Jiang Deng knew there was nothing he could do to help Jin now, and so he made himself some tea, and sat, and waited, reading a book to pass the time. The shortest spell he'd seen a person spend in this state had been two hours, so he wouldn't know the results of the procedure for some time. He found himself hoping the boy came out of this as something truly remarkable, not just for his own professional satisfaction, but because there was something about Jin that was just plain surprising. At Jiang Deng's age, people had stopped seeming unique with any frequency generations ago.

***

I don't know where... no, I don't know what I am.

Jin's experience of the soul reforging elixir had placed him in some other plane. All around him was fire - furious, red hot flames that roared and towered, spewing burning embers the size of beetles, but he wasn't sure what exactly it was of himself that they were burning. He knew who he was - not in the sense of being Jin Shi, none of that really seemed important here - but in the sense of being the same consciousness he had always been. But he didn't seem to be a body. Something was hurting, something was being seared and tortured in the flames, but it wasn't flesh. The part of him that was a human man on the cusp of 18 wasn't here. He wasn't sure if he was glad it was being kept safe somewhere else, or if he missed it terribly. A man who had raised himself to the throat-chakra level of the corporeal conditioning stage, especially one who had had his body reforged, understood his physical form well, cared for it, and trusted it as his greatest weapon. Stripped of it, a man like that was defenseless.

Is this a glimpse of hell? Am I visiting some world of fire and pain just to return from it stronger? Is that how this works?

"Hell?" a voice roared with laughter, "you really do want to become a god, if you fancy there is a hell inside you."

"You! You spoke to me before! Do you understand all of this?"

The voice was the same one he'd heard in his previous reforgings, and when the goblin spirit had attacked him. Somehow Jin knew that if he tried, now, he would be able to see the speaker. As soon as this idea had struck him, a magnificent dragon rose up in front of him, so gigantic that if Jin was certain of his own size here - which he wasn't - he'd have likened it to one of the tall spruce trees surrounding his old home. It was aflame, perhaps it was even made of flame - the intensity of the fire made it hard to tell - but it had clear form, with wings and clawed legs and a long snout.

"I understand that this will give us power, and I understand that you have to endure it. It feels good. Think about it. Doesn't it feel good?"

Why the fuck am I talking to a dragon and why the fuck is the dragon such a masochist? This doesn't feel good at all! It feels like I could turn to ash and blow away in the drafts from the flames.

"I don't like it. How long will I have to stay here? Are you supposed to teach me something?"

"What could I teach you? I only know what you know. Perhaps a little more about what you can do..."

"Who are you? I don't understand any of this!"

"I'm another piece of you. The piece that you're always trying to connect with. You'll get there easier if you enjoy the flames."

The piece that I'm always trying to connect with... does that mean the dragon is something to do with my life energy? Is he what I'll be able to control and use, like Xinya's blue light? Is this the character of my future power? Fire, and dragon force?

"Does... everyone have a dragon inside them?"

"How should I know? I don't know anything you don't know. Come now, we have to embrace this together."

The fire was getting fiercer. Jin felt like whatever he was was struggling to hold itself together, like every piece of his being was being fed too much energy, and wanted to shoot apart. There was heat, there was a strange, fizzing vibration in him at a frequency that was alien to him. But the dragon was opening up his wings and stretching up his neck as if in a moment of euphoria.

Somehow, Jin got the crazy idea, perhaps from the word 'embrace', that he was supposed to hug the dragon. That it might wrap its burning wings around him and shield him from the onslaught. It made no sense - the dragon was aflame, so it could offer no refuge - but he did it anyway, moving through the fire to reach it and attaching whatever he was to the dragon's body. The dragon's wings indeed did close around him, pressing against him, burning, always burning. It roared, and roared again, sending out its own flames - white ones now, and adding to the unbearable blaze.

Endure it. Endure it.

He repeated this, and only this, for what seemed like an eternity, held close to the dragon that dwelled within his soul, as both of them burned together.

After a lifetime of this, a jolt made him aware of his body again. The jolt felt a lot like a bucket of icy water being thrown over him, followed by the hiss of rising steam. His vision changed, and he saw Jiang Deng, with an empty pail in his hands, and an impressed look on his wrinkled face.

"Jin... Jin, are you alright? You started to come round... it raises the temperature of the body very quickly, you see, as the consciousness begins to experience both the soul forge and the normal world at once, so I had to cool you with water. I have never seen the like of it though... how did you complete the soul reforging in only 15 minutes?"