Fate Unraveled

CHAPTER

33

FATEBLOOM HEART

JIEYUAN

—∞—

It took Jieyuan a couple of seconds to remember himself and get a sense of what had just happened—what was still happening.

His thoughts were faint, unfocused—and mingled, he distantly realized, with those of Yikongwei Beidao, which droned on faintly and indistinct as he—Jieyuan himself, as well as Beidao, both of them—stared up at the night sky.

And it wasn’t just Jieyuan’s thoughts that had merged with the man’s, but his very sense of identity. Sitting there, on the grass, he felt like he was Beidao, that he’d always been Beidao. So he knew, now, all sorts of things about the man, all of it on an unconscious level, the same way you remembered all the things that made you yourself.

It just so happened that Jieyuan already had experience with suddenly sprouting a second identity. As well as with dealing the hefty helping of overwhelming confusion that followed. Even in the dissociated, jumbled haze he was in, Jieyuan managed to retain enough presence of mind to ground himself.

The first thing he did was to try to reach for his original sense of identity while doing his best to ignore Beidao’s literally intrusive thoughts. But then he found that for all that he’d suddenly, instantaneously, learned about Yikongwei Beidao, many more things were left distorted, unclear. Where Beidao was from, his original family name—confusingly, Jieyuan knew that Yikongwei was a family name Beidao had come up with for himself, but not what he’d originally been called—and the specifics of his current circumstances. And by focusing on those muddy blotches, Jieyuan found, reversely, his own clarity returning.

Throughout it all, Jieyuan could hear Beidao’s thoughts, a voice in his head—or was it Beidao’s head?—deeper than his own, colder and sharper. And much like the contents of the jade books in the cabin, most of what Beidao was thinking was hazy and unclear, like someone had tried to wipe it all away and only the vague outline of them remained. Some words did stand out bright and clear, though, from amid the foggy confusion. The same select few Jieyuan had found to be readable in the jade books.

Jieyuan could distantly feel his body now, his real body, sitting in the cabin, holding the above-Redsoul jade book, still channeling chroma into it. And he was pretty sure that as long as he concentrated, he could snap out of this… vision, memory, or whatever this was, and return to reality. He almost went for it, without really thinking. But as he started pulling away, feeling his connection to his body grow stronger and that to Beidao grow fainter, he stopped himself.

Because he was in control now. He could snap back to reality whenever he wished. And now that he was no longer desperately fumbling about to remember who he was, he could concentrate and figure out what in the Heavens was going on.

Anchoring himself in his awareness of his body—Jieyuan focused on the feel of his real body, as if he wanted to return to it, but didn’t go further than that—Jieyuan began exploring, investigating. Beidao was still staring up at the night sky, still thinking thoughts that were mostly obscured. Jieyuan could feel virtually everything the man felt, and whatever had obfuscated Beidao’s thoughts hadn’t had the same effect on the man’s emotions.

Jieyuan could sense a dark undercurrent lurking beneath the unintelligible thoughts, and as time passed that feeling only grew, like a brewing storm. Jieyuan tried to move Beidao’s body, but all that happened was his real arm twitching a little. So he was in some kind of half-disembodied—or maybe it was twice embodied—state, in some kind of immersed spectator state.

Beidao stood up, and as he did so Jieyuan finally got a good look at the man’s surroundings. They were on a circular clearing, like the Heartseat, except there was no cabin in it, or any fatebloom trees. Rather, the trees around looked like mundane cherry trees, full of white blossoms.

Beidao returned his attention to the sky, and in his thoughts, the word fate appeared multiple times, in quick succession, loud and clear. Too loud, in fact. FATE. Each instance of the word carried a weight with it, an intensity, a significance in Beidao’s thoughts that they momentarily rendered Jieyuan deaf to his own thoughts. And each time Beidao thought of fate, the dark, manic-like currents roiling within him grew stronger, more violent, rising like a crescendo.

Looking down, Beidao brought his right arm in front of him, coating it with a layer of physicalized chroma—violet chroma. Beidao’s dark storm of feelings peaked, so strong Jieyuan felt his sense of self slipping, consumed by Beidao’s presence, and he almost pulled back into his body by instinct.

Then Beidao thrust his chroma-coated arm inside his own rib cage, and the shock kept Jieyuan there, rendered the spiritual, mental version of frozen still.

The chroma-coated arm tore through skin and bone and flesh unimpeded, and Jieyuan numbly felt it all. The pain wasn’t actually that great—at least not from a cultivator’s perspective—but the discomfort that came with having an arm inside you, between your viscera, was decidedly unpleasant, only made accentuated by how he could feel the wet, bloody organs through that very arm.

Over a quarter of his arm sunk into his rib cage, Beidao felt around his viscera, pushing his hand and wrist between his lungs, before gripping his right arm, reaching his arm deeper inside his chest so that he could get a good grip on it, before spreading the coat of chroma around the still-beating organ. Some of the shock had faded, and it was a morbid sort of curiosity that Jieyuan felt now, even more given Beidao’s own feelings at the moment. Heavy, grim determination, laced with barely contained anticipation.

Then, in one hard, unhesitating pull, Beidao tore his chroma-coated heart right out of his body.

Beidao barely seemed to notice the gaping hole in his chest as he stared at his own bloody, still-beating heart, now lying in his hand. And even as Beidao stared down at his heart, Jieyuan could feel, through Beidao’s senses, as the hole in Beidao’s chest closed up all on its own, and a new heart started growing inside him. Barely a couple of seconds passed, and Beidao’s new heart was almost a fourth of the way grown and the hole in his chest mostly closed.

FATE, Beidao thought, madly, victoriously.

And then Beidao was gone, together with everything else, and Jieyuan was floating around, properly disembodied now, in a black, featureless void. Before Jieyuan could think to return himself to his body, another scene took form around him just as abruptly as the previous one had disappeared.

He was in Beidao’s head again, but everything had changed.

Beidao was still in a clearing, but now what surrounded him weren’t mundane cherry trees, but fatebloom trees, with trunks like pillars of gold and crowns like clouds of blood and emerald. And while Beidao was still holding a heart, it wasn’t his own, bloody, mundane heart freshly plucked out of his chest, but rather the Fatebloom Heart, golden-bodied, emerald-veined, crimson-crowned.

Beidao wasn’t the same man as before, either. Before Beidao had seemed half-mad, like he had one foot dangling over the edge of insanity. Now there was no more half about it. Beidao had taken the leap. The man’s feelings were now a convoluted, tangled mess, and Jieyuan got the impression that even if most of Beidao’s thoughts hadn’t somehow been shrouded from him, he’d have still found them impossible to understand.

The mania Jieyuan sensed in Beidao before, dark and brewing, seemed to have completely taken over him, and it was now suffused by bone-deep desperation, rage, wonder, and obsession, all of it churning and twisting violently inside the man. Fate rang over and over again in Beidao’s mind. Fate and Heavens.

Beidao then focused on the Fatebloom Heart, and his thoughts changed. Huaxin featured prominently now, and to a lesser extent, Linzushen and Miwanxue. After staring at the Heart for over a minute, Beidao looked off into the distance, eastward, and now at the forefront of his thoughts were Liangshibai, Gleamstone Serpent, and Corruption.

The memory—because by now Jieyuan was fairly certain that’s what it was—cut off then, and this time, there was no brief interlude of darkness, and Jieyuan was returned straight back to his body.

Beidao’s thoughts and feelings lingered like an echo as Jieyuan sat in the cabin, eyes closed, breathing heavily. At the end there, he’d felt Beidao’s madness sure as if it were his own, and even now, uncertain, uneasy thoughts of FATE thundered in his head. But cultivators were nothing if not mentally resilient—you had to be, to handle the Pains—and Jieyuan had struggled with his inflamed emotions his entire life. Focusing on his breath to the exclusion of everything else, Jieyuan cleared his mind, bringing himself halfway into Heavenly Communion.

It did the trick. Beidao’s remnant grip on him slackened, then faded, and Jieyuan’s own thoughts and feelings soon settled in the absence of Beidao’s lingering madness.

Jieyuan opened his eyes and raised the jade book he was still holding—the one he couldn’t soulsense—and turned it over between his fingers. What he’d just felt were Beidao’s memories, from Beidao’s perspective. Jade books did store memories. But at least as far as Jieyuan knew, that could only be done in the form of text and images. What he’d just experienced was different—the two scenes had been more along the lines of a full memory, even more vivid than what Jieyuan had felt when going through Amyas’s memories.

But it wasn’t the jade book that was important here and what it did, but its contents and what Jieyuan had seen—or rather, what he’d lived.

Standing up, Jieyuan put the jade book away with the others, and strode out of the cabin. Back outside, he made straight for the center of the clearing, stopping in front of the gleamstone statue. He studied its face again, cast in glowing, kaleidoscopic crystal. Sure enough, it was familiar to him—familiar to him like his own face.

It was indeed Beidao. Jieyuan hadn’t actually seen what Beidao looked like in the man’s memories, as they were from Beidao’s perspective, but they’d also come with Beidao’s sense of identity, and so Jieyuan knew that was what Beidao looked like. Right now he could recognize Beidao much like he’d have been able to recognize his own face.

And beside Beidao’s crystallized form was the Fatebloom Heart, still beating, cradled in the half-grown golden trunk of a fatebloom tree. Beidao’s heart, Jieyuan was sure, somehow transformed into… whatever it was now. He recalled Beidao’s very last thoughts, of the Liangshibai and gleamstone. And how, at the very end, it was in the direction of the Gleamstone Valley that Beidao had been staring off.

“You bit off more than you could chew, didn’t you?” Beidao had been planning something involving the Gleamstone Valley. Clearly, that hadn’t gone well for him—and from the looks of it, in his final moments, Beidao had known who to hold responsible for that.

Stepping back, Jieyuan fully took in the sight of the statue Beidao had been transformed to—crystallized as he’d been in his very last moments, pointing a sword at the Heavens. Now that he’d gotten a peek at Beidao’s head, the impression Jieyuan got when he’d first looked at the statue was reinforced. It was in challenge—and accusation—that Beidao pointed his sword up at the skies. A final stand against the Heavens, against Fate.

Jieyuan stared at the statue for over a minute, trying to imagine what exactly had happened to Beidao at the very end, and why he seemed to blame the Heavens for it. Fate. Beidao seemed to care a great deal about that. Like it was an independent force, or maybe a power. Something that could act upon the world. That wasn’t an interpretation of fate Jieyuan was familiar with, at least not in his current lifetime. Here, fate was simply the result of one’s actions. It was an abstract, mostly meaningless concept that only really mattered in hindsight.

“Fate…” Jieyuan murmured, softly. Beidao was mad. He’d been half-mad in the first memory, full-on mad in the second, and Jieyuan imagined the man hadn’t been much better during his very last moments.

But Beidao had still been a violetsoul—a tenth-sign violetsoul, Jieyuan knew, from the memories—and you didn’t ignore the words of a man who’d reached the very peak of the world, the very peak of existence.

Jieyuan turned to regard the Fatebloom Heart. Beidao was a crystallized corpse, and all that had been in the cabin were jade books that raised all sorts of questions and answered almost none. Any artifacts Beidao might have had on him would’ve been converted into gleamstone with the rest of his body.

The Fatebloom Heart was all that was left. Jieyuan had come here searching for a violetsoul’s inheritance, and as far as he could tell, he was looking at it now. The problem was, he wasn’t sure what to do with it.

He moved closer to the trunk, peering down at the Fatebloom Heart. He couldn’t tell its soulsign, couldn’t sense its spirit-song. He had no idea what it did. The only impression he’d gotten from Beidao’s memories was that the Heart had been very important to him. The culmination of his life’s work, even, judging by the way Beidao had felt while looking at it.

It was Beidao’s legacy. A tenth-sign violetsoul’s legacy.

Daojue had bonded Gleaming End, even though that should’ve been impossible. Gleaming End was at Orangesoul, and the bonding ritual only worked on entities at the same soulsign as you or lower.

Assuming the Fatebloom Heart worked like an artifact—that it was an artifact, even, though a very unconventional one—could he do the same? Should he try to do the same?

Jieyuan frowned down at the golden heart. Odds were that it was dangerous. It could consume him, take him over, or do any number of things. And even if he did bond it, he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do with it, or how he was even supposed to use it. Was he supposed to carry it around with him?

But he’d come here despite the risks for a tenth-sign violetsoul’s inheritance, and making away with just the corrupted jade books while leaving what was clearly the true treasure behind didn’t sit well with him.

And just standing there, hesitating wasn’t really a choice here, because the sooner he returned to the relative safety of the sect, the better.

So he needed to decide, and he needed to do it now. Maeva would be against it. He didn’t need to call on her to know that, just like he’d known she’d be against his expedition to the Fatebloom Woods in the first place. And he’d be calling on her later, to review everything he’d gotten from the jade books, but not now.

Jieyuan stepped closer to the trunk. This was an opportunity, and as with all the opportunities that really mattered, it came with significant risks. As far as he could tell, as long as he stuck around Meiyao and Daojue, other opportunities would come—but there was no guarantee they’d be any less dubious than this one. Or that, if he didn’t take this one, he’d even be able to keep up with the two.

He seemed to be doing well so far, but Meiyao and Daojue still had a whole deck of cards up their sleeves. Meiyao had shown hints of it here and there, what with her mysterious ability to glow green and that red haze of hers, not to mention her aptitude for nurturing and probably refining. And Daojue had just straight-up done the impossible by bonding Gleaming End, and hadn’t even shown a hint of the realmskill Jieyuan was sure he had.

Go big, or go bigger still.

Jieyuan reached forward and laid his right hand on top of the Heart. Its surface was sleek, smooth, warm. He could feel it contracting and then expanding under his touch as it beat. In his chest, his own heart beat much faster.

So far, so good.

There was only one thing left to do.

Jieyuan entered Heavenly Communion. His next word would lead to one of three outcomes. It could very likely be his last one. Just as likely, it could give him just what he needed to catch up—if not surpass—Daojue and Meiyao. And it could also result in nothing at all besides him feeling stupid.

Feeling like Beidao had felt as he ripped his heart off his chest—feeling that same heavy, grim determination and barely contained anticipation—Jieyuan chanted, “Ablaze.”