Silver light pooled around me as I cultivated, driven by instinct to waste no time in my progression. It was life or death, after all.

I tried to control my breathing. It was funny how much this was affecting me. I had already made peace with my death — I had lived for centuries. More than anyone in this world. I had lived more, seen more, felt more. But it still felt like a hand was clutching my heart, my chest constricted and breathing tight.

I was going to die here. Again. Was that what bothered me?

Cross-legged on a beach of smooth white pebbles, I contemplated. The Qi in the air was so thick I could feel it move across my skin. Beyond the beach of smooth stones, the forest danced, a million silver leaves moving in a breeze that didn’t reach the shore. Despite it all, the lake was perfectly quiet. My brain tried to fill the silence with noise, with streams of conscious thought to shut out the silence, but the quiet felt like a building pressure behind my eyes.

Kim was going to die here. And it was my fault. I had chosen the gate that led us here.

I grit my teeth, focused on my cultivation, directing the Qi through my body. I only needed days to stabilize my cultivation. A distant noise grabbed my attention, the snap of a twig deafening in the silence of this half-real space. I stood slowly, turning to face whatever fate approached me.

Squinting into the distance, I saw a humanoid silhouette approaching, and gripped my knife tight in my hand. Reality bent at Kim’s approach, the forest warping around her as she neared.

She stopped a few feet away from me, hands on her knees, panting. Her face lit up when she looked at me, and she spoke between ragged breaths.

“Enemies… behind me.”

“You’re alive.” I felt a little bit of the dread clutching my heart fade away. But only a little. Then I saw the enemies behind her.

3 more fox-kin walked closer at a slow and steady pace in the distance. The vanguard of the group hefted a two headed axe over his shoulder, holding a hand over it lazily. He stopped a few dozen feet away from us.

Our two groups stood in opposition. Kim had turned around, holding the spear, but she was still panting. How long had she been running?

Instead of attacking us, the monster tried to speak to us in a series of guttural noises. I held my knife between us, staring at the monster and waving it in a gesture. The monster looked down its nose at me in a universal expression, barking out more alien sounds that could only amount to curse words. He gestured, and one of the two monsters behind him stepped forward. The monster pulled two swords from the sheathes at its side.

At the moment the second monster drew its blades, I stepped forward and stabbed the axe wielding monster in the neck, slamming my left hand onto the axe held lazily over its shoulder. The monster screamed, trying to raise its axe above its head, but I slashed to the right, carving out a chunk of its neck and pulling it forward with my left hand before stabbing it again.

With a scream, the monster with two swords charged towards me. I grabbed its leader’s neck with my left hand, using it as a meat shield to absorb the cuts and pushing towards the monster before kicking, sending the dead fox-kin forward and knocking the sword wielder off guard.

My eyes snapped open as Kim’s spear stabbed in front of my eyes. I ducked, stabbing forward, but the moment of hesitation let the blade wielder stumbled away.

He ran.

I turned around.

Kim’s spear glowed silver, buried in the neck of the third monster. She panted, eyes wide and panicked, and then let go of her spear, sitting on the ground with a groan. I pulled the axe off the ground, turning and throwing it at the retreating monster.

It landed no where close. Reality warped as the monster ran out of the forest.

“Great.” I said. “It got away.”

“Not bad at all. Glad to see you’re alright. I was worried the gate slammed shut behind me.” Kim said.

Kim rubbed at her leg. I spared a glance her way, then walked back to the edge of the lake, sitting, and staring. I couldn’t keep my eyes off it. What realm had it reached? Probably at least the 6th to be worth tying off and used as fuel for a cultivation realm.

We sat in relative silence, neither of us talking. I turned to Kim, just to see her staring out to the tree line, calculating. Then I turned back and continued watching the water.

After what must have been half an hour, Kim stood.

“We need to find and kill the boss. Gate’s not so bad together.”

“I found the boss.”

“Is it… did you kill it?” Kim asked, walking beside me.

I choked back a laugh.

“No. We can’t kill it.” I said, pointing.

Kim walked up, looking over the edge into the water.

The monster looked back.

“What? It’s restrained?”

“Not for long. The chains on it are melting. Breaking apart.”

“Easy, so we just kill it now. Swim down there and stab it? Kind of anti climatic.”

“If we had arrived a week earlier, maybe. When it was more restrained.” If only life was that easy. If it was a little more restrained, we would probably get close enough to hit it. Kim looked at me in confusion, so I picked up a rock off the store. It glowed white in response to being touched, Qi sizzling my fingers. The monster had converted the Qi around it to spirit stones as its cultivation base dissipated.

I threw the rock at it, water splashing back at me as the glowing white, round stone fell through the water and landed on the monster.

It thrashed madly, moving feet in either direction as it tried to free itself. The sound of its roar was distant and muffled from feet under the water, and minutes passed before it calmed again.

“It’s still just a bronze boss, right? We should be able to kill it.”

“It’s not a boss at all. It’s a spirit beast. This — “ I gestured around us. “It’s a small world for cultivation, built around draining this things cultivation base and distilling it around us, fueling its own seal. But the seal is old. Ancient. It’s falling apart. To fuel a formation of this size, it has to be in the Fifth… maybe Sixth Realm. It could kill us with contemptuous ease.”

“So how are you going to kill it? Some surprising technique! Or a weapon?”

“Kim. There is no way to kill it.”

“I — what do you mean?”

“The First Realm to the Third Realm of cultivation can be considered preparatory stages. You could say one doesn’t truly become a cultivator until they survive the first tribulation — the leap between the Third and Fourth Realm. At the Fourth Realm, we temper the body through Qi, becoming more than human. Aging slows. Bones become as hard as steel. Then harder. Our skin becomes impossible to cut. With our current strength, we should give up on any hope of scratching it.”

“It’s at the Fourth Realm? But there are two of us. And I have mana. You don’t know that we can’t kill it.”

“It’s not at the Fourth Realm. To be an anchor for this seal, it has to be at the Fifth… or Sixth. The gap between a Fifth Realm cultivator and a Fourth realm cultivator makes Fourth Realm cultivators look like mortals. The best thing we can do is hope it chooses not to kill us while it escapes this place.”

Kim walked right next to me, her feet dragging and displacing gravel, cutting through the silver light still pooling around me.

“So what are you saying? You’re just going to give up?” Kim asked.

“We can’t kill it. It doesn’t matter how hard we try. Even if weakened from the seal, we simply won’t be able to cut it.”

“What about all the people on the other side?” She asked, turning to me.

“What about them?”

“It’s going to kill them. Dozens of people will die! For no reason!”

“That’s how the world is. What can we really do? Delay it for seconds? Maybe minutes, if we’re lucky. There are Awakened in the city who can fight it.”

“Even if we can only hold it back for seconds, we have to try!” Kim said. She paused, taking a calming breath. “It might be the difference between someone living and dying once the gate break starts. Even if it’s just one person, it’s worth doing.”

Her last words stung. A memory popped into my mind — a memory of the person who put me down the path of cultivation. ‘If I can save even one person, it’s worth it.’

He died for that.

Was I really the same? Willing to risk everything to protect some strangers?

“You’ll try to fight it even if I say no, won’t you?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I wasn’t willing to fight for a stranger. But I could at least fight for Kim.

“If we want to have a chance at fighting it, I have to reach the Fourth Realm. Even then, we have to wait until it exits the gate.”

“If we wait that long, it will already be rampaging.”

“There’s nothing we can do about that. If we try to fight it earlier than that, we won’t even be buying anyone time.”

“So you’ll fight it with me. How long will it take you to reach the Fourth Realm?”

“In this place? Only a day or two. You should cultivate as well. We need every advantage we can get.” I paused. “The question is whether we have enough time before the monster breaks out.”

With a deep breath, I started my cultivation towards the Fourth Realm. With focus, the slow stream of silver light pooling around me intensified. The denseness of Qi in the air here was on another level.

Kim reminded me of… me. Before I joined the demonic cult. Willing to do so much, for so little. It was so long ago that I forgot the reason I originally sought power. And when I got it, I changed on a fundamental level.

What started as cultivation to protect others became a quest for revenge.

Distantly, I was aware of Kim sitting down somewhere beside me. I focused inward, only opening my eyes after hours — the distant noise of a chain breaking alerted me. I stood, looking down into the water at the thrashing monster.

“What is it? Are we under attack?” Kim asked, standing beside me.

“The time between the two chains breaking was…” I paused, trying to calculate the time internally. Then I checked my phone. There was no service here, but it still held the time. “Six hours? Which means we have… about 4 days, based on how many are still intact.”

I sat back down with a sigh. In only a few hours, I was 20% of the way to reaching the peak of this realm. I would reach the Fourth Realm before this seal broke.