I wasn’t too worried, and neither was Yu Jie. Honestly, if the opponents in the mass qualifiers were as weak as the people Bai Guo had fought, we had this in the bag easily.

With that, we painted the town red, buying as much as we could before leaving. Deng Ming was in charge of clothing, getting us as much as possible for our admittedly cold journey.

We moved out in dawn, when the first snow-flake had fallen from the overcast skies.

The great plains were soon half-submerged in that snow, but we were protected by the mild chill, our furs newly bought, and our shoes new at that.

With all that we had, we were ready to take the world with a storm. Tian Mo would not defeat us once began our training.

000

Monkey had walked tirelessly through the central plains until he arrived at the giant behemoth mountains spouting molten rock and metal, ever more resolved with what he was about to do. The journey had been tough on him, having to swallow the pride of abject failure, but thoughts on the levels of strengths that were to come had mollified him. This was the part where he would finally become stronger than his Mentor.

It was always the same with those old men. ‘Strength could not come in a day’. It was a limiting ideology, one spoken by people who stumbled blindly through the Martial Path, spurred on by others who did much the same. The Jianghu always had the advantage when it came to strong warriors, as they were the non-conformists, and while the Wulin were weaker on average, their strongest were insanely strong.

Everyone’s Martial Path was different, walked in solitude. It was safe for Monkey to admit that Dragon hadn’t just failed him. He had sabotaged him. Not of his own willingness, no, but because he did not have an intimate enough grasp on the Martial Path to know when to let things lie, and when to instruct. Rage was his fuel, but it was one that had failed both him and his disciple.

With the magma bubbling fort through the giant hole in the volcano peak, he only had to jump in. The goal was not to survive. It was to become one with the magma without dying.

Before he could talk himself out of it, he jumped straight into the magma, immediately taking control of the heat around him, insulating himself from it. He knew that it was just another method of running away, but it was all that he had.

Even now, staying inside the insanely hot magma, he had overtaken his mentor, but he could feel his Chi stores depleting rapidly. He could maybe stay in there for another ten minutes before his control faded and he would be cooked in an instant, a death too fast to even scream, his corpse consumed by the magma and slowly grinded into ash before becoming one with the magma.

That was not the oneness he desired. That was consumption on the magma’s part. Consumption on his part would be equally erroneous, in and of itself. What he needed to do was reach an accord with the fire. The fire was not conscious, but it had intent, it had a soul. He had to connect with that soul, grant it something that it would want, and then finalize the bargain.

With the pressure of time working against him, he did not spend much time to ponder. Fire was not just there to burn things, nor was it there to just kill. Maybe he had been too narrow-minded in his application of his blessing. It was the only thing that made sense.

Fire provided. Fire was what humanity needed to prosper. Fire made weapons. Fire warmed houses. Fire cooked food. Fire provided light for the world during the day, and fire could burn down decaying forests, providing new life once again for young trees. It gave and it took. It was life, and it was death, an endless cycle of Samsara.

When the Chi in his Core ran dry, he did not die. The magma listened to his command, parting before pushing him up slowly. He stepped onto the ledge of the volcano an entirely new man. Sitting down to meditate, he replenished his Chi almost instantly, the essence of the potent fire around him filling him up in a raging torrent which he swallowed up with ease.

He had thought that at this point, he would chase down Kang Yilan and exact vengeance, but… what for?

Then he began to think. What was it that he valued above all? Was there an aspect to life which appealed to him more than anything else?

The incessant bloodshed and battle was always something which he ignored, never repulsed but never really into it. He wasn’t like his mentor, ruthless and willing to kill anyone in his way just for the fun of it. Senseless violence simply put wasn’t fun.

Tian Mo wished to create an ideal society, but at the end of the day, Monkey had never agreed to be under him. Monkey had submitted to Dragon, and when he died, he should no longer have been beholden to Tian Mo. Yet, he still was.

This wasn’t how he had expected his own life to go down. Really, he… he hadn’t actually expected his life to go anywhere. Jianghu warriors died left and right, that was just a fact of life. He had been here for a good time, completely discounting any sort of longevity that he may yet earn from his cultivation, but now…

…there was no reason for him to die.

Neither was there a reason for him to live. What did he, Monkey, really want?

Picking a direction, he simply began to wander, an emptiness in his soul that he simply could not fill. His hatred for Kang Yilan and the Thunder Mountain disciple had burnt until it fizzled and became nothing. The simple truth was that, had it not been for them, he would have continued to languish in mediocrity.

But was his mentor’s life really worth advances in his Martial Path? He had raised Monkey for eighteen years, taking him in when no one else did, a simple infant on the brink of freezing to death, not even bundled as he laid outdoors, crawling on grass, naked as the day he had been born.

He was fed, clothed, healed, educated and trained. He was grateful for all of those things, but in the end, he recognized that Dragon had sent him down an erroneous path. What he did now, with his life, was all up to him, with no one that could possibly sway him to do anything which he did not want.

But he… didn’t know what he wanted.

He began to examine what he then lacked.

People.

He laughed at himself at the sheer ridiculousness of the notion. He had no friends. He never had any friends, and never saw a reason to, but now that he had lost everything, that was what he wanted?

What else did he lack?

Home.

He laughed again. A home was overrated. One could sleep absolutely anywhere they wanted if they could handle it. If you were sufficiently powerful enough, you could call anywhere a place of comfort and safety. Still, there was something profoundly lacking with that. Still, he couldn’t help but not take it seriously at all.

What else did he lack?

Direction.

He laughed hollowly. There was already one direction for him. Forwards. Away from Tian Mo. Live another day.

Yet, it felt like such a waste of time. Why was it that he had to be so blatantly met with the truth that he had never really made an independent decision in his life?

His eyes stung. Were they? He touched his eyes. They were wet with tears. Suddenly, they ran down his cheeks in earnest, and he let out wet, pathetic sobs, falling to his knees as he began to cry in earnest. Why was he crying? Because he was nothing. He really, truly was nothing. A user of the Divine Fire, yet he was nothing but a tool to Tian Mo.

Was there a reason to live? No.

Was there a reason to die?

…

…

It was better to be dead and free than live completely without agency.

Preparing to burn a hole into his skull, ending his life, his hand was grasped by a hand. He looked up at the person, whose head was blocking the sun, the glare painting a halo around his head.

The face was unmistakable, excruciatingly so. “You took everything,” Monkey said, his voice hoarse. “And now you take away the one opportunity to make it all right?”

“I owe you help,” the disciple of the Thunder Mountain said. “I killed your mentor, but instead of doubling down in your ways, you evolved, and became better than you once were. You can’t forgive me for what I did, and I accept that, but-“

Monkey laughed harshly. “In what world can what you did be seen as something to apologize for?” He dried his eyes with the back of his hand. “While I’m not the best at differentiating good and bad, I know that what happened to my mentor was… just. Even the moral universe has forsaken me.”

The disciple said nothing, choosing simply to sit a foot away from where he was kneeling, just being there for him. Monkey said nothing in the meanwhile, just thinking. The man was here, the person that had plunged him into this spiral of self-hatred and apathy. To take vengeance would literally be as easy as turning a hand, and yet he didn’t. He couldn’t see an actual reason to. Now that he truly had a taste of justice, he didn’t know what he could do anymore. The strongest of the Jianghu ran roughsod over those concepts, yet something deep inside him told him that they were simply ephemeral, scum in a stream that would eventually clear up.

They thought themselves above the laws of society, but the truth was that they would stand long after they would die, and they had stood long before they were even alive.

What was his place in the world? Where was it? Why was he even here? Should Dragon just have killed the young baby and proceeded to pillage whichever township met his eye? His goal was to pass on a legacy, like all great men wanted, but there he was, in the dirt, with no legacy to have passed on but the progression of a wayward disciple who had eschewed everything the man had taught him.

“I don’t want to kill you,” Monkey said. “And I don’t know why.”

“You don’t remember it,” Thunder Mountain smiled wistfully at him. “You saw it, and it affected you, but you don’t remember it, do you?”

“Remember what?”

“Divinity,” he said, still smiling. “You glimpsed it, saw its secrets, let it affect you, but your mind was not ready to bear its secrets.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s pure,” he said. “Pure evil, pure good, pure nothing. What you saw was the ultimate rounding up or down to the closest of where you once stood. And judging by what happened, you saw pure nothingness, a void, a tabula rasa, a blank canvas which someone asked you to fill out, yet you don’t even have the ink to begin.” He sighed wistfully. “Whatever it is that you saw, it’s your choice what happens to it.”

“And… and what if I don’t know what I’ll choose?” Monkey asked. “I… I don’t know what I want.”

“Yes, you do,” Thunder Mountain insisted. “You do, and it’s not even deep down. What is it that you seek above all else?”

“Freedom,” Monkey said. “But what I will do with that freedom, I don’t-“

“That comes later,” Thunder Mountain interrupted. “You can’t make plans hinging on an uncertain future. You need to win your freedom right now, and the only way to do that is to-“

“Kill Tian Mo,” Monkey completed. “Kill. Tian Mo.”

Thunder Mountain nodded. “Exactly.”

“Tian Mo can’t be allowed to live,” Monkey continued. “He says that he will rule justly, but a man like him… he does not know what justice is. He hasn’t seen it. And he never will, because he is blind.” And Monkey finally stood up, turning to the upstanding Thunder Mountain disciple, a strikingly handsome man. He raised his hand to his hair and burnt it all off without harming himself, rendering himself completely bald. “My life is over. Monkey died in that volcano, an immature young man with no sense of direction, he would be missed by no one.” His expression was ever neutral as he continued. “My name is Xiaolong.”