For a moment he thought about killing himself.

It wouldn’t even be that hard. He was halfway there already. Return to his Estate, craft another reincarnation spell, try for a less dismal start…

He banished the thought. He’d lived through worse before. And besides—if he were to die, it would never be by his own hands; he’d go out fighting.

The first thing he did was turn around and spit out the sand. Goodness was there so much sand! Then, face-down, he tried to breathe. It came in shallow spurts; there was very little air to go around, but little tunnels, carved out by the scorpions that’d stung him, worked as air vents of sorts.

Now there was nothing to do but dig. He set to it with frantic intensity, making clawed shovels of his hands, kicking and bucking up. The sand above was loose and gave way before his tears, and he dragged himself upward like he was swimming up the world’s slowest waterfall. His ribs stung like someone had driven a spear through his midsection, but pain like this was only a small inconvenience. His fatigue, and dehydration, and dizziness, too—just noise.

After what felt like an eternity a hand broke through to the surface. Light! His lungs rattled with fresher air; a last-ditch heave took him over the top and he was out, panting, swollen, sweaty, but alive.

It was night. Two moons, one white, one red, hung like discolored eyes of the sky. A great streak of white lay between them, a ring of high-up debris which split the firmament in two. All three gave off their own brands of light, intermixing in witching purples and dark-grays and turquoises; in the Izod Desert it was never truly dark at night. All around stretched sands black as coal, rising and falling in dunes, sweeping in low, murmuring winds across the land.

But something else caught Dorian’s attention first. Many somethings.

At first he thought they were very pale, tall trees. But then his eyes adjusted and he panned around, breath catching.

Giant bones studded the sand. In the horizon they dared the sky; up-close they broke the monotony of the black dunes in curved, sheer-white verticals spaced a few hundred feet apart. These must’ve belonged to thousands—no, tens of thousands—of massive beasts! How old they were he couldn’t say. Millennia? More? They seemed unending, easy to mistake for a natural part of the biome. But Dorian knew better.

This wasn’t just any desert. This was a graveyard.

Dorian hacked the last bit of sand from his lungs and grinned. Where there were graves, there was a chance for grave-robbery. Maybe this starting-point wasn’t without positives after all.

That was for later. Far later. He was still very much not clear of death, as his ribs and his pounding head reminded him. There was also that small matter of the poison, which seemed all-too-eager to take him in the next few hours.

And he was thirsty. So horribly thirsty, on top of all the usual ailments. If he didn’t quench his thirst, it might kill him first.

There had to be water nearby. If he was lucky, an antidote too. He frowned. He had a sister, didn’t he? She’d raised him. And her tent, if his hazy memories could be trusted, wasn’t so far off…

Water first. Poison second. Plan after.

He staggered like a drunkard up the sand dune ahead.

A settlement lay across the hump—to his bleary eyes, a series of lights swathed in a smudge of dark brown. A blink revealed it to be torches and tents of some sort of leather hide, jutting out of the sand at random intervals. After a few steps he stumbled into a tent with a red top, which he vaguely recalled living in, and collapsed into it.

Black spots poked into his vision, and not from the darkness. Simple room: two cots, central pole, lumpy bags, a chest…there! Water-skins! He dove for it, uncorked it, and drank deeply.

“Ah…” It was like someone turned his head back on. He took another swig. His thoughts revved up from their sluggish funk and he could think clearly again.

One issue solved. Now, for the poison and the ribs… he prodded at his memories again but found no recollections of owning any high-grade elixirs, much less an antidote. Bah! Backwards hicks… he’d have to fix that too.

Then a shadow fell across him from behind, and he froze.

“Io?” croaked a high voice.

He was in no condition to react as a someone tackled him from behind. He fell with a strangled gasp.

Wait, no. Not tackle. Hug. And tightly, too, so tightly his ribs ground painfully together.

His sister, Kaya.

“Don’t you ever go out that late again!” she hissed. “Do you have any idea how long I was out looking for you?” Her eyes were red and rimmed with darkness and still she somehow managed to look like she was a princess plucked out of some trite children’s tale. Flowy black hair, dainty face, tall frame—taller than him.

Memories flooded over him.

She was the sole reason he was alive. After their parents had died, leaving only their sizable debts as inheritance, Kaya had taken up the mantle of breadwinner and home-maker both despite being only three years older than Io.

She was, in short, most things Io was not: competent, smart, brave, pretty. Io, the little layabout prick, hated her for it. If Dorian didn’t feel very bad booting him out of his body before, he felt less than bad now.

As he awkwardly balanced returning her hug with surviving this cobra squeeze, he thought about how to play this. She didn’t know of his near-death, or of the bully beatdown, clearly...

“What happened?” Her eyes roamed his face then scanned down his body, widening.

“I’m sorry!” he whimpered. “I—I went out to take a leak but tripped on something and fell…I hit my head real bad.” She gasped, and he gulped. “I think I need to lie down for a bit…”

“Oh!”

In the span of a blink she’d chucked a sandbag pillow and a thick fur-blanket at him. “Is your head feeling alright? Hot? Cold? Do your arms feel tingly? Numb? You’re not bleeding, are you?”

She paced back and forth, still looking him over. Dorian nearly snorted. Outwardly, he smiled.

“I’m alright, sis. Just a little sore. Thank you.”

Just enough to shoo her off, gain some space for him to address the poison liquifying his insides.

She paused, then looked at him weird. At which point he remembered that Io’s reaction would’ve been to throw a hissy fit about her fussing, declare himself perfectly well, then cry himself to sleep.

Oh well. He’d hit himself on the head, or so she thought—a little weirdness was understandable. There’d be a lot more changes than a few personality quirks coming, besides.

“You rest. I’ll make you some bone broth,” she declared. She went over to the other side of the room, started wrestling a cooking pot out of sack.

“Mmh,” he said. Then he enveloped himself in the furs, hunched in, and closed his eyes. Closing himself off to the outer world.

He combed his memories old and new, searching for a cultivation method. His body had no qi, and for now—until he found a proper antidote—qi was all that could stave off his death.

But this body had no [Skills] and all of Dorian’s technique knowledge was in jumbled fragments, lost in the reincarnation process; it was beyond the reach of this body’s puny mind. At last he found a suitable technique in this body’s old memories—the tribe’s standard cultivation technique, [Peerless Yang Sutra].

…[Peerless Yang Sutra]? He flicked through Io’s old memories in consternation. He could scarcely invent a less effective means of cycling qi! Its only saving grace, he supposed, was that it required nothing but a hot setting.

Buried in the bowels of a sand dune was hot enough. The [Sutra] gave all sorts of esoteric instruction—draw the heat of eternity into the self; yadda-yadda—but in truth, at the lowest levels they all worked basically the same. If cycling methods were houses, their insides might differ vastly. But the first step in was always to open the door, and there were only so many ways to turn the knob.

The poison rose up in his chest like bile, but he stuffed the feeling down with conviction. He got to work, and cycled.

[Level-up!]

[Peerless Yang Sutra] Lv. 1!

It felt like flexing a muscle he didn’t have. A strand of qi, drawn from heaven and earth, crawled into his body, then vanished almost as soon as it’d come. This body didn’t have so much as one spiritual vein open. Now he’d unblock his first.

Ten minutes of straining passed, and he made scant progress.

…he was wrong. There was turning the knob like a normal human, and there was turning the knob with the arthritic, spasming, greased-up hand that was the [Peerless Yang Sutra]. No wonder Io was stuck here so long! The technique was peerless only in its ineptitude. Even with Dorian’s expertise it’d take months to reach the first level this way; far too late.

Time to improvise.

The full details of better techniques were lost to him, sure, but it was still obvious how this technique was wrong, the same way he didn’t need an architect’s step-by-step knowledge of how to build a house to know the door didn’t go on the roof. He took a solid few minutes to tweak, fix, improve the [Sutra]’s steps. It told him to guide the qi like a rushing river when in truth the step should be more precise—like threading a needle of qi through the insides of a lock. Its use of the environs’ heat was laughably ineffective too, like trying to fry an egg with only sunlight; he adjusted accordingly. Until…

[Skill learned!]

[Peerless Yang Sutra (Modified)] Lv. 0 -> 1

He’d unlocked Veins more times than anyone else alive, in all probability. Now, with his little [Modified] version, he gave it another stab.

This time the qi came easier. It took a lot more effort, too; his head was beading up with sweat already, but he made a little progress. His brow scrunched up as he dragged the thread in slowly, surely…

After some indeterminate amount of time—always impossible to tell how fast time passed in a cultivating trance—he heard Kaya’s muffled voice and felt a little shove. Must be telling him the broth was ready, but he was in too deep to care.

She rustled him again, then left. He kept at it. A little more… just a little…

[Level-up!]

[Peerless Yang Sutra (Modified)] Lv. 2!

Even as he cycled, the mere presence of qi was doing wonders for his body. The poison, which was doing a solid job bashing his insides, was held at bay. The qi boosted his body’s natural healing, fortifying his organs, slowing the poison’s march… by now he’d bought himself a half-day, he guessed.

His whole body was drenched. He was approaching the final steps, and guiding the qi-strand now felt like holding onto a squirming serpent with soaped-up hands.

Then it happened.

A note. A resonance. Like his heartstring and the universe’s were vibrating to the same tune; a lock unlocked; there was a feeling of wholeness, of that supreme heart-pumping progress. His first spiritual vein cleared fully and qi flowed through it like water down a riverbed, frictionless.

Level-up!

[Origin] Lv. 1!

[Level-up!]

[Peerless Yang Sutra (Modified)] Lv. 3!

His grin was fierce and primal. Only now could he be called a cultivator. Only now could he use qi. That was the essence of cultivation and its level-ups: the accumulation of qi. Only now had he taken the first step on the path to the heavens, a step his previous body's owner hadn’t managed for fifteen years.

Qi flowed in and out of him even without conscious effort; he was still poisoned, but with qi’s healing powers he had at least a day’s worth of time to figure out an antidote.

More than enough.

***

As it turned out, he’d cycled for much of the night. He still felt fresh. A perk of the breakthrough.

Kaya was a sleeping hump in the tent’s corner. His suspicions were right; she had finished the bone broth— a white, milklike soup in a clay bowl. He grabbed it and stepped outside. The sky was slowly turning lighter colors, heralding a sun not yet brave enough to peek over the horizon. It was quiet as a grave over these black sands, over these towers of bone.

He was here to drink the bowl, and to think. To plan.

The first thing was to befriend the tribe’s alchemist. He was infected with low-level scorpion poison. Even this tribe should have the resources to cure it.

But the greater purpose was to ‘apprentice’ himself to said alchemist so that he’d become an alchemist himself, and gain access to those all-important cauldrons and herbs. Then he’d use elixirs to boost his cultivation speed—and, hopefully, fix this body’s abysmal talent. What’d it take him, five hours? To reach the first Origin Realm. Far too long! And each subsequent vein would take longer still…

The second thing was to get stronger, and fast. That meant learning battle-related [Skills]. Luckily, this tribe valued martial strength above all—a paramount trait for survival in these wilds. He’d need to prove himself a valuable asset fast, so that the tribe’s growth resources all went to him. No sense in playing coy with his talents. Most every plane loved to reward talent—sect resources, tournaments, treasures, apprenticeships, inheritances, legacies all went to the best and brightest. He’d seize every last one he could.

He finished his broth just as the sun rose on a new, glorious day.

Time Elapsed: 6 hours