"Do you want to be able to cultivate?"
Raider's mind went blank upon hearing this question.
His whole life he had been told he could not cultivate and had to watch others do just that. He had to suffer the life of a mortal while others had it easy. Worse, he was forced to do dirty work for those who had it easy and could simply wave a hand to accomplish what would take him an hour to do.
Of course he wanted to have the same abilities.
But at the same time he wondered if that would truly make him happy.
Not everyone in the Clan was happy. Sure, they had it easy, but they all had their own difficulties.
Social classes were well defined and merit was extremely important. Resources were split according to one's class and one's standing within the class, as such, there was a lot of competition within each class.
Raider didn't want to enter this world, he was happier with the devil he knew.
But at the same time... why couldn't he be like everyone else? Why was the world so unfair to him?
The hardest to accept was that the clanspeople had always made sure to remind him that he wasn't the problem, rather they were all special and he was the only normal one.
Why couldn't he live with other normal people then? Why was he abandoned? Who were his parents? Where was he from?
These questions had plagued his mind for as long as he could remember and he knew that the only way he could ever get an answer would be to become one of those powerful cultivation experts who could roam the skies, travel the world and live for hundreds, even thousands of years.
Did he want to cultivate?
"How?" he asked uncertainly.
"Hmpf" the man smirked. He quickly performed some hand gestures that seemed to be an incantation and then hit himself in the stomach.
A small portion of his soul detached itself from his body with a ray of light. Raider shielded his eyes and thus didn't see the portion of soul shooting towards him and expanding to cover him up.
When Raider reopened his eyes he was taken aback and tried to step out of the portion of soul. He couldn't move at all. He almost felt like he was being squeezed by the air around him.
This continued for about three breaths of time before the spirit withdrew the piece of soul and reintegrated it.
He looked perplexed.
Raider as well wasn't sure what was going on. It was the third time now that nothing had happened, except this time, he could see the magic around him and even feel something around him, just nothing inside.
"If I can't instil cultivation directly into you then maybe a Dao seed will allow you to cultivate on your own..." the spirit said, more to himself than to Raider.
He performed some more incantation gestures and then placed his index finger on his forehead. His entire spirit-body seemed to dim a little as light gathered into a little ball on his fingertip.
He slowly removed his hand from his forehead and then flicked the ball of light towards Raider. It flew directly into the latter's own forehead and went straight through him.
Next, a familiar scene played out with a youth standing there perplexed and a ball of light repeatedly going in and out of him from every direction. However this time the spirit did something different.
He controlled the ball of light to stop within Raider's brain and then detonated it!
He controlled the resulting fragments to directly imprint themselves onto the neurones making up Raider's brain.
To the spirit's dismay, the outburst of light also slipped right through Raider and this time faded into a dim gaseous substance that quickly returned to assimilate with its original owner.
The incorporeal man was speechless. He was certain this method would work. How could this kid be impervious to everything?!
"Kid are you a ghost or what?" asked the spirit in visible shock.
Raider was also surprised at the moment. Surprised that nothing was working and surprised at the man's reaction. He was starting to think that maybe this spirit had been dead too long and was weak. Maybe the so-called expert hadn't even been so almighty while alive. Maybe all of it was for show.
Nonetheless he tried to maintain his attitude and explained.
"I'm just a mortal slave. It just so happens that for some reason some magical attacks don't work on me. No one in the Clan understands why and neither do I…"
The spirit listened but didn't say anything. He was still using his gaze to examine Raider. Every time their eyes met, Raider would shudder and feel completely exposed.
"What's your deepest desire in life?" asked the spirit while staring at Raider intensely.
The young boy was startled by the question.
Two shadows suddenly pooped up in his mind. They had no features, no colours, nothing. They were silhouettes of a couple, his parents. Having never met them he had no idea what they looked like.
"To find my parents, to live a happy and peaceful life with them." he said, resolutely.
"What if they aren't alive?" probed the spirit.
"I still need to find them." said Raider, unshaken. The thought had naturally occurred to him.
As far as he knew, he had been found as a baby by one of the clan experts when they went out to hunt. According to them, there weren't any traces of anything at the place they found him. There wasn't a single clue.
That's why he thought he had to be a powerful cultivator to find out about his parents. The higher one's cultivation base was, the better they understood the world and how it worked.
"What about being a slave? Is that not something you want to change?" asked the spirit.
"..." Raider was pondering.
While falling to what he thought would be his death for an interminable amount of time, Raider's mind had really gone through a lot of twists and turns. Panic, relief, impatience, anger, he had gone through many states of mind. Mostly, he remembered his life. He asked himself: "What if?"
What if he was still with his parents? What if he was just another regular kid within the Clan? What if he could cultivate? What if he wasn't a slave?
He had played many scenarios in his head fuelled by the anticipation of death.
Seemingly knowing what was going through Raider's mind, the spirit interrupted his train of thought.
"Kid what's your name again?"
"Raider"
"Raider. I have one last way to change your destiny." the spirit paused meaningfully.
Raider was listening, waiting, hoping.
"Take me as your Master. Accept my legacy. Achieve my Dao." said the spirit, almost like a chant.
A strange power was condensing around the area.
Raider was somehow surprised and not at the same time. It was like he had had a feeling all along that this would happen, since the moment he hadn't died, but didn't realise what this feeling was until right now.
Somewhere, it had always been his fantasy to suddenly have a fortuitous encounter. After all, wasn't it everybody's fantasy?
The strange power condensing within the passage of light grew more concentrated as Raider realised his mind was already made up.
"OK!" he said loudly and with determination as the power culminated to peak.
"Good." said the spirit, smiling "I like your attitude, from now on your are this old man's Legacy Apprentice. I'm sure you won't disappoint me." he continued as the power seemed to bind their two existences together and then suddenly vanished.
Raider felt none of that but the spirit did and seemed satisfied by the proceedings.
"Well, come, sit, let me tell you about your Master." the spirit began.
Its attitude was completely different now compared to before. Raider sat down cross legged in front of the spirit, about three meters away from the bone formation.
"I was born on a far far away world a few hundred thousand years ago..." began the spirit. "I have long since forgotten my given name, and have gone by quite a few in my lifetime... you can call me Master Bones."
"Back in my day, cultivation was practiced by training the Mind, Heart and Body to the pinnacle in order to step into a higher realm of existence. I was able to take two such steps. Such a shame, as time passed, most people chose to focus only on one aspect of cultivation. By the time of my fleshly death, finding a 3rd Realm Cultivator like myself was harder than finding a needle in a haystack. I'm afraid there might not even be anymore today..."
As Raider listened, he almost started panting from shock. If what the spirit, Master Bones, his Master, had said was true, then it was truly a legendary figure!
More importantly, this otherworldly being was floating in front of him right now and had even become his Master! This was truly a change of fate!
"...So you see kid..." continued Master Bones, "your Master was quite a powerful fellow in his time" he said proudly, as if he knew what Raider was thinking.
"Now, I wasn't able to impart anything to you in the aspects of the Mind and the Heart, we can only hope that the Body will work or else you will truly have to work on it alone..." said Master Bones with a twinge of concern in his tone.
"But before that" Master Bones interrupted himself as if he had just remembered somthing important "Tell me, what do you know about the Dao?" he asked slowly and mysteriously.
"Dao?" repeated Raider.
"What's that?"
"Haha" chuckled Master Bones. "That's for you to tell me. I believe each person has their own Dao... others disagreed back then. As for what the word itslef means... you decide. And then you decide what to do with that. That's what being my Legacy Apprentice entails. This is my Dao of unrestrained freedom."
"Now, take my bones, just one for now." instructed the Master.
"Your... your bones?" asked Raider to make sure he hadn't misheard. He wasn't a very educated person but was still quite intelligent and pricipled. To him, taking away a dead person's bones couldn't be the start of a good story.
In any other situation, he would have felt it to be disrespectful to take away the bones but here, the owner of the bones himself was instructing him to take one away.
Raider gulped audibly and stood up to hesitantly walk closer to the bone formation.
Closest to him were the legs and feet bones of the skeleton, arranged in a crisscross fashion.
Raider slowly bent down and reached out to pick up the left tibia. His entire arm was trembling.
As his fingers wrapped around the bone, he could feel a warmth pulsing out of it, as if it possessed a life of its own. It felt smooth and emanated a feeling of durability and power.
As Raider pulled on the bone to lift it up, he realised he couldn't move it. He reaffirmed his grip and pulled with all the might his mortal slave body could muster.
Nothing.
He looked up questionningly at his Master.
"Try another one." said the spirit with an encouraging undertone.
Raider gulped and moved towards another part of the formation. Here, the entire right arm bones were aligned in a curve, as if outlining part of a circle. Raider looked back and forth at the bones and their owner kind of hoping the latter would tell him which bone to pick.
After a moment of silence under the observing gaze of the spirit, Raider randomly reached for the longest bone there, the humerus.
It felt exactly like the tibia before it. Warm, almost alive, but unmovable.
He looked up and his eyes met the spirit's. He could see the patience of a teacher in them.
"Observe. Feel. Don't just pick randomly." said Master Bones softly.
Raider let go of the bone and stood up straight. He felt strange. No one had ever spoken to him in such a way. It felt... different, but a good different.
He thought about what his Master said. Observe and feel. He looked closely at each bone. Somehow, the light coming from them wasn't as painful anymore, as if they were begining to approve of him.
He looked at every single bone and spent time checking as many details about them as he could. Every single one was perfectly smooth and immaculate to his eyes. He observed their shapes and positions and relations to the other bones.
After a long period of time, he closed his eyes and focused on his breathing in an attempt to imitate the cultivating Clanspeople he had seen from a distance. He tried to calm his heart and to feel all of his surroundings.
He had no idea what he was feeling for.
After a certain amout of time had passed, he opened his eyes and looked at the bones again. The prickling pain rerturned and a light bulb went off in his mind.
He started attentively observing each bone again but this time he was doing something different.
Instead of simply observing details about the bones, he was feeling the pain they made him feel. He had an intuition that the pain represented a degree of approval and that the bone which made him feel the least pain would be the one that approved of him the most.
When he started truly focusing on the pain in his eyes as they shifted from bone to bone, he realised that he did feel different degrees of pain depending on which bone he was looking at. He could also determine that this was not due to the size of the bone or the bones around them.
Furthermore, the light coming from the skeleton was uniform except for the brighter skull.
As Raider gazed upon bone after bone, he found one to be the least painful to look at, the left radius from the forearm. It lay opposite the other arm in a similar fashion, tracing another part of the formation circle.
There didn't seem to be anything different between the right and left radii, except for the pain Raider felt when looking at them.
He approched this bone and sat in front of it for a while. Instead of reaching out for it straight away he just looked at it.
"Master Bones" began Raider while raising his head, "Are all cultivation experts' bones like yours?"
"Of course not" declared the spirit with a chuckle.
"To reach the 3rd Realm one's body must be one of a kind. Each of them will be incredible treasures after death for sure but they'll each have something different that makes them special." he explained.
"What makes your body special then, Master?" asked Raider eagerly.
"Pick one up and I'll tell you" said Master Bones with a slightly develish smile.
Hearing these words, Raider's face became more solemn and his gaze returned to the left radius in front of him.
He had a feeling this was his only shot, if this bone didn't move, none of them would.
He slowly grabbed the bone in its middle and pulled towards himself.
Before the bone even budged, a bright white light shone from it through Raider's hand. He was blinded by the light again but this time it was strangely not painful, as if closing his eyes was just a reflex. In any case keeping them open would have only revealed a world of white.
Raider lifted the radius away from the formation and held it in his hand for a moment.
"Good job" said Master Bones praisingly.
Raider was still immersed in the moment. He had succeeded in taking a bone and had made his very first step on the long and winding road that was cultivation.
"This bone of mine you just picked up has now acknowldged you. You will be able to wield its power and gradually make it your own and merge with it."
"Each of my bones contains a specific portion of my power. The one you picked up just now, my left radius, holds my understanding of the element of Wind. From now on, you will be able to wield Wind like I once did."
"Now, go forth, make this bone yours and come back once you have fused with it completely. Don't disappoint your Master."
"I won't." said Raider resolutely, holding his Master's bone tightly in his hand.
He turned around and prepared to make his way back to the outside world when he suddenly realised something: he had no idea how to climb the abyss that brought him here!