Shadows danced on the walls of the altar room as Seth sat on the ground, all attention focused on the needle of ice floating between his hands. Two feet in front of him was a dark gray, six-legged rabbit. He had temporarily numbed it to pain, though he couldn't do anything about the creature's fear. After hardening his heart, he stabbed the rabbit's leg with the needle, and blood spurted from the wound.

  The past three days, he had been trying to transform his special healing into a more generic energy form, with little success. He closed his eyes and felt the healing energy gathering around his hands. Once settled, he used a tiny ritual to generate a spark of decay qi and injected it into the healing. Then, the healing qi destabilized, trying to revert to ordinary qi.

  He pushed down the rising wave of frustration and focused. When he used this technique to heal a specific area, it worked without any issues. This path seemed like a dead end, though. Not even Mal had managed, even though it worked itself to exhaustion once Seth promised lots of food.

  The healing qi continued to crumble into normal qi, and eventually Seth gave up and used the remaining healing energy to heal the rabbit. The flow stopped. Groaning, he closed his eyes again and summoned his healing energy.

  What does this healing energy do?

  He came up with various answers, all landing in the camp of accelerating the body's natural healing. In a way, it was a shortcut to most of what he could do with his more in-depth healing.

  Then what would my healing energy do?

  That was the question that stumped him, especially since he and Mal performed the same procedure, just with different results. He clenched his fists at the cultivator bullshit, then took a deep breath.

  What is Mal?

  The question popped into his mind unbidden, as if someone else had asked it. The question dragged him deeper into his trance. Mal began as an aberration that had hijacked the plumbing and out-competed him for resources. And when Mal healed with the decay qi...

  It moves the healing closer to their... what? Soul? State of being?

  And more importantly, where did that leave him? When he first arrived here, he had nothing but his life. But as much as it had ruined him, it also paved the road for him to become something stronger.

  True, I think I've strayed a bit from humanity, but...

  Something clicked inside his soul, and he saw a yellow ball of light in his vision. A gray speck slammed into the side of the yellow ball. At first, it appeared unaffected, but then small gray ripples appeared on the surface. Ripples became waves, and soon the warm yellow glow became a pallid gray light. It looked as if it were on the verge of giving out when he saw a spark of yellow flash in the depths of the ball. The flash exploded outward until it filled the ball, shining the area in a brilliant yellow glow.

  He opened his eyes and looked at the rabbit he had healed a couple of days ago. Even after opening his qi sight, he couldn't tell that anything was different with the rabbit. It was hopping around its tiny, invisible enclosure. The only sign that there was anything different about the rabbit was a persistent presence in the back of his mind. He pulled at that presence, and at first couldn't see any impact on the rabbit. Then it stumbled. He had healed its leg, and now the healed leg was moving ever so slightly out of sync with the others. He relaxed the pull, and the rabbit's gait returned to normal.

  Seth continued to test for the next two hours. He tried flooding the rabbit with normal healing qi and repeating. It still worked, though it became less effective after every round of normal healing. After six rounds of normal healing, his own healing had lost its effect. He had tried to re-injure and heal the area, but he couldn't get the same effect with the same area.

  Seth took a deep breath to settle his nerves and re-entered his mindspace. He formed the healing qi, then injected a mote of decay qi. As he did, the vision of the yellow ball resonated through his soul and stabilized his healing qi. It was still healing qi, just a shade brighter.

  He opened his eyes and tried to condense the qi into a needle. The technique rapidly drained his qi. The needle formed in his hands, a bright, almost neon yellow. Then, it wavered before shattering into a million motes of light.

  Still more work to do.

  [Teach?]

  Seth's focus snapped in shock, partly due to Mal's non-food request. At least a few days had passed since his epiphany, but he was no longer sure exactly how many.

  "What do you want me to teach you?"

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  [Healing energy.] Seth got an image of his bright yellow healing energy.

  That's what he thought. First question: Could he actually teach Mal? He suspected Mal was smarter than it let on, but it was still a child in terms of experience. Getting into the question of should...

  It would be dumb to give this thing more power. Then again, it did help me, and karma seems to be a real force. Not to mention withholding help after it helped me feels wrong. It's mostly been behaving.

  [Teach?]

  Seth chuckled at Mal's impatience with his thinking time.

  "I'll try, but this is hard to teach."

  With that, Seth dove into his mindspace. Mal was already there. Is its consciousness always here? He pushed that thought out of his mind and created some healing energy. He had no confidence in being able to teach Mal, but he hoped teaching would help crystalize his own understanding.

  "You already know how to generate normal healing energy, right?"

  [No.]

  That surprised Seth a bit, as he had been sure Mal had seen how he performed the technique. After a moment of deliberation, he slowly demonstrated the technique used to generate healing energy, trying to explain it to Mal. While doing this, he noticed some small parts of the process that, on reflection, he had no clue what they did. He tried to omit them, but the technique failed to materialize anything. No matter what field of study, you can find surprising depths even in processes that seem basic.

  "I will not demonstrate again. Practice on your own later," Seth said, not wanting to get stuck demonstrating the basic technique for hours.

  [You not tell everything.]

  "I can't tell you everything. Unless you master this, you wouldn't survive the next lesson." As he sent that to Mal, he focused on his experience in the trial where he learned his more advanced healing. When he thought about it, he still hadn't delved too deep into how it worked, instead relying on the intuition that trial gave him. I'll need to fix that once I have time.

  The tumor quivered under his skin, causing a mild flash of pain through his body. Hopefully, he got the message across.

  [Can wait. How special healing?]

  "That's the part I don't completely understand." He said, demonstrating the process of using a tiny amount of decay qi to destabilize the healing qi. Then, he used the vision of his soul to stabilize it.

  "The part I do understand is using decay qi to destabilize the healing qi. The harder part is that you need a solid vision of what you are, and use it to bring the destabilized healing closer to what you are."

  [What am I?]

  "How am I supposed to know?" Seth asked. He could tell the tumor that it was cancer. That it was a parasite. But that wouldn't help, as its being an invading organism was only part of its journey. He tried to imagine what kinds of descriptions people would use for him if you limited him to pre-sentient Seth. To an alien, if they didn't have a concept of child rearing, an infant would probably appear to be a parasite.

  [What are you?]

  "Someone who was almost completely destroyed, and through that, became something stronger."

  As he said that, he felt the truth resonate through his mind and soul. Mal fell silent. After a minute, he left his mindspace, returning to the all too familiar altar room.

  On a whim, he formed an ice needle, but at the last moment, formed his healing qi and put it in the needle. The cost was still many times higher than a normal ice needle, but it was stable.

  Time passed, and Seth noticed a growing need to get back to the sect. He pulled out the life preserving treasure they handed out, and the need became stronger. He was sure the treasure was the cause of his growing unease. If this treasure is able to cause mental change like this, what else has the sect been doing? He fought to keep such questions down by focusing on the positive. Having a timer allowed him to stay out training for longer.

  He flew on his sword, trailing a pack of twenty wolves. Nineteen of them were normal, but the alpha of the pack was the size of a bus. He wasn't sure if this creature would have a magic stone, but even if it didn't, it would challenge his new techniques. A ritual flared to life in front of him, and a river of glacier-blue needles flowed out at the unsuspecting pack. Five wolves died before the rest noticed anything was wrong.

  The pack skidded to a halt and howled. The alpha glared at him and leaped into the air. Seth turned the stream of needles on the alpha, and as he thought, it weathered the assault. Still, over the last couple of weeks, he had managed to incorporate needles with a small amount of his 'healing' qi, and sensed them invade the alpha's body. Then, the alpha howled, and a barrier of swirling wind deflected his stream of needles to the side. Not that it mattered, as the wolf was already falling.

  The alpha's paws pushed against the air as if it were solid ground, and started sprinting at Seth through the sky. With three steps, the alpha had closed most of the gap between the two. A shimmering blade of air twice Seth's height ripped from the alpha's mouth. Seth deactivated his ice needle technique and slammed a door-sized wall of ice between himself and the rushing blade. He formed a directional barrier as the wall of ice shattered, barely slowing the blade of wind. He angled the shield to deflect the blow and had his flying sword drop straight down.

  The blade of wind slammed into his shield, and he heard the qi construct crack under the strain. The force pushed him down and out of the way of the blade. It wasn't enough, as a flurry of smaller wind blades from the alpha's wind shield carved into his legs. He rushed to form a technique, and an orb of ice floated from his hands toward the wolf. The wolf's eyes narrowed, and it backed away from the orb, giving Seth room to turn the sword around and flee the fight.

  The alpha gave chase, but when it got into range, Seth pulled on his connection to the wolf. It fought the disruption to its qi, and he could feel how badly the creature outclassed him. Still, the disruption was enough to cause it to stumble in the air and fall out of the sky. It caught itself and fired a wind blade that Seth dodged.

  Seth healed his legs as he flew, his heart calming down post-battle. Should I go back? No, no need to risk fighting that thing. I can come back once I get stronger. Good thing we didn't run into that thing last time we came here.

  Even though he had to flee that fight, Seth still smiled. He had accomplished his goals, and was confident he was ready for what awaited him back at the sect.