A coin that tries to cultivate / Goes against the heavens

And all the progress that they make / Just pays them back in seconds

Coin just push your whole life through / Coin just keep your cover

You’ve only got one life to live / And you won’t get another

************

“Be Silent”.

All motion on the platform stopped. The students present found it impossible to move, and struggled even to breathe as their chests strained against a gossamer web that had sprung into existence from nothing, chaining their bodies in the exact position they held when the elder’s words reached their ears.

Elder Sun twitched a finger and their chests loosened, all rapidly filling their lungs despite their jaws still being locked in place.

“You feel betrayed.” He said, standing up from his chair and pacing through a corridor of students. “I understand. In inviting you to our sect, we allowed you to believe that we have in our possession established cultivation methods for you to practice. This was a necessary lie of omission.”

He examined each of the students he passed, noting the expressions on their faces, some of horror, some of anger, most of silent resignation. “As a courtesy, I will explain myself. I swear to you on my cultivation that I have not consigned you to death or madness, and that both you and the sect stand to benefit greatly if you follow me. Any who wish to leave the sect after I explain my reasoning, will be free to do so with no ill will. All who object to this arrangement, please blink twice.” He paused for a beat. “None? Excellent”.

The elder breathed in, and the students felt their cages evaporate off their skin in a hiss of steam. As he walked back to his stone chair, those students that had risen to their feet found themselves being tugged down to a seated position by their paired ice cultivators. Jack turned to look at his partner, who failed to meet his eyes. He reached out to pat Sollens arm, and when the lanky cultivator looked up, Jack gave him a weak smile. It seemed that for all his time in the sect, Sollen didn't have any more power than he did.

“Now,” said the elder, settling back into his seat. “You have all been told many lies about cultivation in the name of common knowledge, but there are two that have caused the most damage. First, look around you.” he gestured to the vast range of ethnicities and features on display in the crowd. “The more astute or social among you will likely have noticed that all of you have affinities that would normally preclude you from cultivating. Every one of you is, to use the common terms, a dual, coin, fallen or unstable.”

This sent another susurrus of motion through the crowd, members shifting in their seats to try and assess those around them. The elder stilled them with a look.

“According to common knowledge, this would make you a danger to yourself or others if you set down the road to cultivation. For every single one of you, that assumption is false.”

He let the impact of his words sink in for a moment before continuing. “I would pose to you that there is no such thing as a cursed constitution, only ill-advised or ill-suited cultivation methods.” He turned to one face in the crowd, which appeared to be rapidly coloring with rage. “You have a question, Rin?”

The bronze boy leapt to his feet. “You would defend the duals? Every family of my people has lost members to the Demon of the Dunes!” As he spoke, several faces in the audience drew tight, hands clenching at their sides. “Generations have been afraid to fly too high for fear of angering the Thief of Breath! The bones of the army it took to slay the Prismatic still lie under the sands! In my culture of stories, I have never heard a tale of a dual that was anything less than a monster.” He looked around, expression haughty, daring anyone to disagree.

“Well then, let me tell you one.” The elder twitched a finger, and a figure of ice grew from the stone of the ring under their feet. It was a boy, too young to have reached puberty, sitting on a mound and looking out into the distance with a wistful expression. “Once, there was a boy. He grew up the son of two mercenaries, and spent his early years traveling the desert with merchant caravans. When he wasn't busy with the chores he was given to earn his keep, his favorite method of passing the time was to sit atop a wagon and watch the shifting sands. He would sit and watch the dunes form, collapse and reform, breaking like waves in an ever shifting sea for hours upon hours. Then, one fateful day, his affinities made themselves known.”

The boy stood up, and moving in an odd way that called to mind the motion of the dunes, began to dance, and sand swirled around his head in a twisting ribbon.

“His parents were overjoyed, as he had an unprecedented amount of control with the energy of earth, and would clearly become a powerful cultivator as soon as his second affinity appeared. They waited, and waited, until finally the truth was inescapable. Double earth. A dual cultivator. They forbade him from cultivating, and terrified, the boy agreed. He had heard the stories, knew that to cultivate a dual element would turn you into an abomination. However, he still loved to play with the energy of the sand.”

The ice sculpture began dancing its way through the crowd, weaving through the seated disciples, maturing and growing taller as it did.

“The boy grew older, and as he did, he grew more and more adept with the energy of earth, determined not to cultivate, but still in love with the sand. Eventually, he learned an odd trick. By braiding two strands of earth energy together, he could create something that better reflected his understanding of the sand. He found that he could use this energy for all sorts of things, and began to make a name for himself as a sculptor in sandstone, as his finesse was something borne of true artistry. And, even curiouser, each time he used this strange energy, he felt refreshed. It was as if he were sanding off the rough edges of himself, leaving himself polished and clean.”

“One day, when the boy was in his early twenties, in a moment of clarity, his body was so saturated with the energy of sand that it crystallized, and before he knew it, the boy, now a man, had formed a core.”

The ice sculpture ceased its dance, curling in on itself and hiding behind a dune that rose from the stone.

“All too late, the man realized what he had done. Had he been cultivating this whole time? He didn't feel like a monster. In fact, he felt wonderful. He could move like the wind, absorb impact like the dunes, and had all the strength and destructive power of a sandstorm. At this point, he was in too deep. He couldn't give up the cultivation that he loved so much, so he resolved to keep practicing in secret.”

The man of ice stood up from his crouch, and appeared to quickly grow older, and his clothes changed to be richer, robes of brocade silk and jewelry to match. He stood tall and proud, and appeared to be talking to an invisible partner.

“The man continued to make a name for himself with his art, and eventually found himself embedded in high society. There, at a party hosted by an old money merchant family, he met a woman, a rain cultivator who was as beautiful as she was brilliant.”

A new figure formed next to the man, a woman with sharp cheekbones and an even sharper gaze, who stepped up to the man and they began to dance together, an elegant flowing waltz that left you wondering where one ended and the other began.

“After a few parties and a few clandestine meetings in the night, the two fell deeply in love. However, the woman’s father refused to let her marry a man with no family name, no backing, and who wasn't even a cultivator. Faced with the impossible decision of revealing his cultivation or leaving each other, they took the third path. Two two disappeared out into the desert in the middle of the night, and went on to found a clan called the Sandwalkers which-”

“Liar!” A shout from the crowd broke the spell. Rin appeared to be visibly trembling, face flushed a deep crimson. “The founder was not a Dual! He was born to Earth and Heat! How dare you-”

“I understand that he had many children. Did any of them have an affinity to heat?”

Rin was silent, hands clenching and unclenching at his sides, nails digging into the palms of his hands.

The elder continued, unaffected. “They did not. Among them were affinities to Air, Cold, and Earth. Air and Cold from the mother, and from the father, only Earth.”

In a flurry of clothes and sweat, Rin pushed through the crowd and stormed off towards the other side of the ring, followed by a stout ice cultivator who was likely his partner.

The elder cleared his throat, and the ice sculptures picked themselves up off the floor and chased after the two students. “Thank you all for indulging this old man with a little bit of storytelling. Where was I?”

A girl with curly black hair and pale gray eyes raised a shaky hand. “The lies we’ve been told?”

The elder blinked a few times. “Oh, yes, thank you Silvia. The second lie that presents itself as common knowledge is that creating your own cultivation method is a death sentence. I would argue that, done correctly, it presents the safer option.”

Another boy in the crowd, the gangly merchant boy from yesterday, audibly swallowed and climbed to his feet. The elder acknowledged him with a nod. “Elder,” he said, voice trembling, “I’ve met rogue cultivators. Not a lot, but… some. Most of them are dead now. The ones that are still alive aren’t… right.”

A girl with a shaved head climbed to her feet as well, nodding along. “There’s one in my village who does odd jobs for his boarding. My parents say he used to be smart, but now he can't remember things for more than an hour, and he can barely talk.”

The two standing disciples quailed as the elder gazed at them placidly. His eyes swept over the crowd. “I see,” he said, “You all have stories like this, I assume?”

Nearly everyone in the crowd, save a few of the ice cultivators, nodded their heads as the two speakers rapidly sat back down.

“Unfortunately, disciples, such tragedies are a consequence of the nature of cultivation.” He sighed, looking out past the ring where they sat, past the labyrinthine city of stone to the mountain, sloping down towards a snow covered tundra that was being revealed by the morning fog burning away. “To cultivate is to create qi by impressing your understanding of a sliver of the dao onto the energy you control, and then to reforge yourself with that qi, growing closer to the concept that makes it up.”

He lifted a palm, and a three legged table made of ice rose from the stone. He formed a perfectly clear sphere of ice in his hand, and dropped it onto the table, where it lay.

“If the concept you impress upon your qi doesn't resonate with your body, it rebels, and you end up crippled, with luck. Without it, you may end up an abomination.”

One leg of the table shortened, and the sphere rolled off the surface to fall to the ground with a sharp crack. The table then righted itself, and the elder dropped another sphere.

“If your understanding of the sliver of the dao you use as your qi’s foundation is incomplete or faulty, your qi will become poisonous, or unstable.”

Another shortened leg, another crack.

“Finally, if your qi lends itself to a personality that you do not have, the dissonance between your ego and your qi can damage your mind, leading to anything from permanent dissociation, to a loss of faculties, to madness.”

Crack.

“Cultivation is dangerous, disciples, moreso for the talented than anyone else. You will find that if you try and perform an unsuitable cultivation method, you may be able to make it work, for a time. However, that path will only lead to ruin. I implore-”

The elder was interrupted by the sound of multiple bells filling the air. Rather than fading, the pitch of the tones began sliding up and down, as some of the disciples covered their ears, and all looked around for the source of the noise. Immediately following was the sound of the door into the tower slamming open, as a middle aged woman in elders robes strode through them, appearing at Elder Sun’s side without seeming to cross the intervening space. The disciples turned to look at this new arrival, and saw Elder Sun staring out into the distance down the mountainside.

“Bad timing, sister,” Elder Sun said softly, still scanning the horizon.

“It’s always bad timing, brother.” said the newcomer, making a flicking gesture with a hand which slammed the door shut. As she continued making odd hand gestures, a low sound like a bow being drawn across strings rang out, and the disciples turned to see a pane of ice form on the railing, which acted as a lens to magnify the view down the mountain. There, they could see the tundra in sharp relief, dotted with evergreen trees and frozen lakes, miles upon miles of it stretching out into the horizon. The scene seemed still, even beautiful for a moment until one of the hills began to grow. It ponderously raised itself up on four legs that made the trees around it look like matchsticks, and snow began to slough off it in massive clumps that set the ground rumbling, even as high up the mountain as they were. As they did, the rough shape of a quadrupedal beast began to be revealed from the mass, fashioned from mud and snow as if by a child the size of the mountain. The mouth was still forming when the creature lifted a leg to take its first step.

Boom

“Golem class, category three”.

“That’s a three? We haven’t reached four yet?” Elder Sun said with a palpable note of relief in his voice.

“Not yet. It’s getting close. Centrum and Sinstra should be obstructing within the next few seconds.”

“Am I playing executioner, then?”

“Do you have the Qi for it?” Upon Elder Sun’s nod, she responded. “Good. Go.”

In less than a second, the section of the ring that Elder Sun was standing on coiled like a spring, then released, sending their lecturer shooting off into the sky like a crossbow bolt.

The class watched, slack-jawed, as the projectile that was Elder Sun grew too small to make out. The newcomer, eyes steely, took a moment to watch him go before clearing her throat.

“Good morning, disciples. I apologize for not having the opportunity to introduce myself earlier. You may call me Elder Rime, and it’s a pleasure to meet you.”