When he finally spotted the characteristic, jagged ridges of the stark-white flower below, Boneroot dropped from his treetop perch to pluck it. The lithe, teenage boy was thrilled to find yet another specimen of the flower for which he was named. By this point, he had become quite adept at transporting them back to his lair relatively unscathed.

The trick, he discovered through a couple years of trial and error, was to channel just the tiniest bit of light ki through his fingers in the moment he plucked the flower. In retrospect, Boneroot felt it shouldn’t have taken him that long to figure the trick out, even if his ki was uncontrollable until just last year. As he brought this newest specimen back to the cave he called home, he winced at the memories of all the boneroot flowers he’d ruined. Certainly, he could have collected hundreds by now. Soon, Boneroot crested the heavily wooded hill that marked the path up to his cavern, nestled not-too-far up the base of the mountain. With practiced grace and qi-enhanced speed and balance, Boneroot lept from one worn foothold to the next.

The moment he entered his home, Boneroot secured the flower’s place among its kin before readying himself for meditation. He found it helpful to begin by mentally tracing the edges of the black and white flora surrounding him. In sync with this mental exercise, he willed the qi within him to course from his heart down to his toes and back. The roots. Up his spine and back. The stem. Out to the tips of his fingers and back. The leaves. Around his lungs, up to his head and back. The blossom. And then each part simultaneously. And then automatically. As the process became mechanical, Boneroot started to bring his ki into the cycle. Once the two were properly synced and cycling around his body, he focused on bringing in the natural essence of the world around him. Though only a sliver of that energy would properly assimilate into the cycling of his ki and qi, the two would nonetheless be stronger and more plentiful for the effort.

Meditation had become most of Boneroot’s daily routine since awakening his ki attunement a year ago. In his case, that attunement was Light. For members of his village, though, Shadow was far and away the most common of such energy affinities. While a moderate portion of the village had Light as their primary attunement, those unfortunate few were hampered by their relative inability to cultivate the village’s Shaded Spear Art.

The Shaded Spear was a cultivation art which focused on imbuing shadow ki into a physical spear. Or creating one with shadow ki. Or maybe using qi to better wield a spear. Really, Boneroot just wished anyone from the village had taught him the art before they all vanished. Or any other art! No, instead they had only taught him the breathing and visualization exercises to prepare for his imminent awakening. Part of them, anyway. He still had to round those out through his own efforts, culminating in the meditation method he now used.

Furthermore, since they never began teaching him the actual cultivation art, Boneroot had spent the last couple years trying to figure it out for himself. As far as he could tell, his efforts had not borne fruit. While he was at first loathe to admit it, this had to be due to his Light attunement. He hadn’t realized it for quite some time, embarrassingly. When he first awakened to the essence around him, he was overwhelmed. Usually, cultivators are guided through this process and told how to interpret their new sense and develop their new abilities. With no such guide, Boneroot mistook his modest ability to cultivate shadow ki as proof of his attunement.

It was only after he developed a small repertoire of shadow techniques that he bothered tinkering with Light ki at all. Lo and behold, that came much more naturally! The boy still held onto some bitterness about that wasted time. More than that, though, he was surprised by the effectiveness of those shadow techniques. Though they paled in comparison to the raw power of his Radiant Claw technique, the Shade Step and Integrated Shadow were exceptionally useful, particularly given they weren’t from his primary attunement.

While he knew cultivators could use one element of energy adjacent to their own attunement (Shadow to Light or Metal, Light to Shadow or Fire, Fire to Light or Lightning, etc.), he thought techniques of said elements were supposed to be significantly weaker than that of their main element. And harder to use, for that matter. On the other hand, the power of all of his abilities was hardly surprising, given the source of their development, the apex predators of the forest, the hellecats.

He began taking notes on their techniques for a rather simplistic reason: like himself, they were named after a black flower. In the wake of his village’s disappearance, that tiny bit of kinship was something worth latching onto. The very first technique Boneroot had to practice in order to properly make his observations was the Integrated Shadow. By emitting shadow ki and allowing it to shape the natural essence in a shaded area, the boy developed the ability to camouflage himself in shadow, becoming nearly undetectable.

Though still unable to meld with his own shadow, a feat he was no longer confident he could ever manage due to the truth of his attunement, the technique allowed Boneroot to observe the hellecats much more safely and easily. Consequently, he was able to develop his Radiant Claw and Shade Step techniques over the next year.

The farther he took his cultivation of the predators’ techniques, the more the boy felt his fighting style had started to mimic theirs. Now, when he hunted for the hares and squirrels that comprised the lion’s share of his diet, he was most effective at his most feline. Boneroot always travelled low to the ground, snaking between patches of shade, or underbrush, looking for the smallest opportunity on which to pounce. Though it stung to admit, the boy knew that he wouldn’t have come this far, or perhaps survived at all, without the paradigm of the hellecat guiding him.

When Boneroot finally finished with his meditation, he was satisfied with the progress he’d made. Though each cultivation session produced only marginal results, he knew that he had come a long way from those first days stumbling through the woods in a daze. He could still remember with perfect clarity the day of his awakening. Already on his own for a year at that point, Boneroot had been preparing with unbridled fervor. He assembled a wide array of breathing techniques, mental exercises, and meditation styles to try out once he was finally able to tap into the essence coursing through and around him.

Thankfully, the process of awakening was one that did get properly passed onto him before the village up and disappeared. For over a month once the time was upon him, he performed his breathing exercises while switching his focus inward and outward, feeling for any sign of the spark that would signal the start of his life as a cultivator. When the boy finally did feel that first inkling of power, he pounced on it like one of the wildcats he would soon come to emulate.

Boneroot emerged from the cave to stretch out the stiffness that inevitably followed extended meditation. Judging from the sun’s position high overhead, he knew he’d been cultivating for at least six or seven hours. In the same moment he noticed the time, Boneroot realized that, in his hurry to bring home the rare flower, he never accomplished his original goal: finding food. The boy scanned the forest below, looking for any signs of prey nearby.

Even at the low altitude where his home was situated, Boneroot could see for miles over the forest. Of course, that hardly mattered when those miles yielded only trees and more trees. His mother told him, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there was an entire world outside of the forest. The cultivator’s faith in her words dwindled with each day. Ever since breaking into the first realm of his qi cultivation, Boneroot had pushed his body to its limits, seeing just how far into the forest he could get. Always, the answer was the same. That is, just far enough to see even more forest ahead.

His musing was cut short by an unusually rough shaking of branches not a half-mile east into the forest. As a flock of black and green birds rose from the canopy, Boneroot launched himself down into it. Rocketing from stone to stone and landing at the treeline with the learned silence of a hunter, the boy quickly scanned his surroundings before making his way toward the disturbance. Though he knew any predator of real threat was unlikely to be in this part of the forest at this time of day, Boneroot still kept to the shadows, ready to disappear at a moment’s notice.

He steadily moved through the dense foliage, staying low to the ground and disturbing his surroundings as little as possible. When he finally reached his approximation of the scene, he was immediately struck by the unmistakable presence of shadow ki nearby. Emitting his own shadow ki and using it to ready the space in front of him for easy passage, Boneroot quickly performed a Shade Step, followed by Integrated Shadow to bring himself closer to the action without being detected. From his hiding place in the shadow of a tree at the edge of the clearing in front of him, Boneroot could finally see the cause of the commotion. Though he couldn’t feel much surprise at the source of the foreign ki being a hellecat, he was certainly startled by the full extent of the creature’s power.

The black-furred form of the wildcat was smaller than average, but the powder-white tail was disproportionally long. It took quite some time to realize through his past observations that the hellecats’ tails undoubtedly grew in relation to their cultivation, rather than their physical age and growth. The specimen in the clearing now had a longer tail than Boneroot had ever seen. Thinking through the initial shock, the boy realized this creature must at least be in the second realm of cultivation. No, the third realm. Boneroot suppressed a shudder at realizing the animal before him was close to a full two levels above his own power. Though, whatever surprise he felt at the hellecat’s cultivation, it was blown out of the water by his reaction to what followed.

“Take this! Super Shadow Claw Mega Blast!” The hellecat shouted in a curiously juvenile accent as he slashed at a massive oak tree in the middle of the clearing. The cat’s materialized open paw of shadow ki sent a shudder throughout the oak.

“Aww. The mega part isn’t working.” The cat paced in a quick circle, growling in frustration, his edged, white tail sashaying frantically.

When the initial shock faded away, Boneroot realized the cat spoke and growled simultaneously. And when that shock faded too, he realized the cat wasn’t speaking at all.

“Are you going to keep hiding in there? Oh, are we playing hidey-cat? That’s my favorite!” The predator’s voice rang out in Boneroot’s head, shaking what little composure he’d regained. When the mysterious intruder did not respond in the expected, playful manner, the cat turned to face Boneroot’s hiding spot, despite appearing to not know his precise location. Boneroot knew, even before the cat lowered its shoulders, that he had no hope of escaping. The difference in power between their respective realms was insurmountable. Perhaps if he was in mid-second realm, he might have had a chance. As it was, though, Boneroot had really only one option.

~

‘Maybe I scared it away?’ Kuroki thought to himself. It was a silly thought. He knew the intruder was still hiding in that shadow beneath the tree.

‘I know! I probably spooked him super bad with my Super Shadow Claw Blast!’ The tsovar’s thoughts took on a familiar air of superiority, though not one entirely unearned. The tsovars were scary enough as is, so it was rare that any manner of creature would think to challenge one in the yellow realm like Kuroki. The cat felt a bit bad for the human hiding in the shadows. It was only red-realm, after all. Still, though, it was a human! Feli had told Kuroki all sorts of stories about them! He really hoped he hadn’t scared his first human away. What a waste that would be.

When the human still didn’t emerge into the clearing, though, Kuroki grew suspicious. He readied himself to fight as an entirely different sort of excitement welled in his body. He lowered himself, adopting perfect stillness, prepared to pounce at any sign of threat.

After a lengthy, suspenseful moment, the human emerged. First came a tangle of black hair, glistening with sweat. Beneath the long curls was a slender face bearing soft features, save for the angular cheeks. A number of gemstones were embedded in each ear, shining in the light as they came out from the shade. It wasn’t very tall. It didn’t have big muscles like he’d hoped. It held its thin arms out in front of it, to look less threatening perhaps. It looked weak. It was weak.

While Kuroki tried to figure out if this human was male or female (Feli said they can’t change), it opened its mouth to speak (out loud!). The sound was meek, yet rough.

“How did you do that? You didn’t actually...” There was a tremor in its voice, no doubt a reaction to Kuroki’s fearsome display of power.

This time, Kuroki let out a rough approximation of a giggle to accompany his words, “How silly! Why would you be so loud? You’ll scare away the food!”

The human was still wary and adjusting to Kuroki’s superior way of talking, so he just kept at it.

“Do you live here? I haven’t seen you before and my eyes are super good so I would have. Are you one of those bad cats who wants to hurt us? I’ll beat you up! I can do it! I can beat up all the others except for Feli. And Kroshi. And that human, Venh, but he cheated!”

Though Kuroki was being playful, the boy still tensed at the threat. Oblivious to the intimidating effect his cultivation might have on some, the tsovar continued to prattle on with idle chatter and half-empty boasts. Nonetheless, Kuroki waited patiently while his new companion gained his bearings. Though that might take longer than he’d like, the newly-sentient cat wasn’t going to miss out on a friend who was actually weaker than him, for a change.