Leon half-opened his eyes. The crimson sky drifted lazily above him between the jagged silhouettes of black stone. Every jolt sent a dull ache through his stomach, but he didn't make a sound. Davis was carrying him across his shoulders, breathing in heavy, controlled bursts. Beside them, Miller stumbled over a loose stone before catching himself, his face pale beneath the blood-red snowfall.
"I..." Miller bent forward, hands on his knees. "I can't keep this up." His chest rose and fell violently. "Just five minutes. Five minutes wouldn't hurt."
"No," Leon answered immediately.
Miller stared at him in disbelief. "You don't even have to walk."
"I know."
"Then why?"
Leon slowly shifted his gaze toward the endless wasteland ahead. "The smallest decisions create the largest consequences. A single choice changes another. Then another. Before long, you're living in a future that never would have existed otherwise." A faint smile tugged at the corner of his lips. "I would know. One Google search turned the next twenty years of my life into hell."
For a second, neither man knew whether he was joking. Then Miller let out a tired snort despite himself. "...Seriously?"
Leon closed his eyes again. "Unfortunately."
The three continued onward. After several silent minutes, Davis adjusted Leon's weight on his shoulders. "So..." he grunted, "can you walk?"
Leon looked down at his own legs. "Yes."
Another pause. "I'd rather not."
Davies sighed. "I figured."
Miller rolled his eyes. "You know, most people would've at least pretended to feel guilty."
"I do."
"You have a strange way of showing it."
"I conserve energy."
Despite the freezing wind and the constant fear of death, the three of them shared a brief laugh. It was the first genuinely human sound any of them had made since arriving in this world.
Eventually, Miller looked around the empty landscape. "I've been meaning to ask... how did you kill that thing?"
"Ignoring how I know what I know for now because it's a long story..." Leon sighed. "I killed that creature by relying on the basics of cultivation. Cultivation is a progression and magic system where we make ourselves stronger by absorbing and refining on Qi. Growth is split into strict ranks. Moving up a rank vastly multiplies a person's power and lifespan. I still haven't properly cultivated, but I used Qi to some extent."
"Wait what's qi?" Gasped the breathless Miller.
"This world has a universal life energy called Qi. It's a Spirit World. Our world, which didn't have any, was a scattered world. They are both the same except for age. When a scattered world is old enough, it advances and becomes a spirit world."
Miller didn't fully understand but nodded and pointed toward the distant horizon. "How do you even know we're going the right way?"
Leon shook his head. "I don't."
"You... don't?"
"I only know where not to go." The answer confused both men. Leon raised one finger toward the distant mountains. "I can sense Qi—the life energy of this world. It isn't evenly distributed. It gathers, flows, and pools. We're moving toward the area with the lowest concentration."
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Miller frowned. "...Wouldn't more Qi be better?"
"It would," Leon nodded. "If we were the only living things here. The strongest creatures naturally gather where resources are abundant." Realization slowly spread across Davies' face as Leon nodded again. "The monsters... they need Qi too. Walking toward dense Qi is the equivalent of voluntarily hiking into the territory of every apex predator nearby. I'd rather postpone that experience."
Miller swallowed hard. "...So we're deliberately making ourselves weaker?"
"Not exactly." Leon lifted one hand weakly. "The Universal Vessel lets me absorb environmental Qi roughly one hundred times faster than an ordinary person. So while low-Qi regions slow everyone else, they barely inconvenience me." He looked down at his own body. "My current problem isn't Qi. It's vitality. I have more energy available than I can safely process. What I don't have is enough body left to process it. Even before the fight, my body was half crippled from an old injury."
The freezing wind swept through the valley. Despite Leon's naturally high metabolism and unusual resistance to the cold, even he could feel the hostile frost biting into his muscles. His body had reached its limit. Miller remained silent for several steps before finally asking the question that had been bothering him. "...What exactly is the Universal Vessel?"
Davis nodded in agreement. "And that energy you used. Can we learn it too?"
Leon was quiet for a long moment. "The Universal Vessel is a very long story. It's my Innate Great Creation—my life's work. It allows me to perceive, manipulate, and absorb Qi at an absurd rate, along with a few other miscellaneous abilities that are applications of the original function."
Miller's eyes brightened. "So we can build one too?"
Leon answered without hesitation. "No." The excitement disappeared from Miller's face before Leon continued. "You can create your own, but you cannot create mine." He picked up a small black stone from the ground. "A Great Creation is a singular existence. It is the ultimate form of a person's feats after they accumulate enough to pierce the sky. It is not something I can explain to you right away. We would need a lot of time to establish some basic rules of the world first, and only after you digest them can I explain what a Great Creation is. You can repeat every step I took and spend ten years doing exactly what I did, but you would still create something entirely different. If anything at all. That's why they're called Great Creations. They belong to no one except their creator."
The three walked in silence for another minute before Miller spoke again. "...Then what about that colorful energy?"
Leon smiled faintly. "That is the Foundation Realm of the Man Path of cultivation. Any progress on any path of cultivation grants enlightenment. I didn't know what was the man path or that cultivation was even divided into paths until I made the breakthrough." He picked up three stones from the ground, balancing them across the back of Davies' shoulder one after another without stopping. "The world has three known cultivation paths." He tapped the first stone. "Immortal Cultivation—the path corresponding to Heaven." Then the second. "Body Tempering Cultivation—the path corresponding to Earth." Finally the third. "Self Cultivation—the path corresponding to Man. Every path begins with a Foundation Realm. For Immortal Cultivation, you establish a dantian—basically a core where the energy gathers. For Body Tempering Cultivation, you forge a bloodline. For Self Cultivation, you express yourself, but Self Cultivation is different." He looked at the final stone. "There is no universal foundation."
Miller frowned. "What do you mean?"
"My self expression..." Leon raised his hand, faint traces of remembered energy flickering across his fingertips before fading away, "...is Linked Energy Manipulation. It is the physical expression of who I am. I solve problems, I connect systems, and I create bridges between things that shouldn't work together. So my foundation became exactly that." He lowered his hand. "Someone else would create something completely different because they are different."
Davies looked thoughtful. "So... how do people discover theirs?"
Leon answered almost immediately. "They understand themselves."
"...That sounds easy."
"It isn't." A quiet chuckle escaped Leon as he watched the crimson snow drift across the wasteland. "It's probably the hardest thing any person will ever do. Most people don't know what they truly want. They know what they've been told they should want—their parents, their teachers, their friends, their society. They spend years climbing someone else's mountain, and when they finally reach the top...They wonder why the view feels empty."
Silence settled over the three men. Only the crunch of footsteps remained. Leon closed his eyes once more. "Self Cultivation demands honesty. Brutal honesty. You polish your heart. You strip away every lie you've told yourself. Only then can you express your true self clearly enough for the world to recognize it."
Miller stared blankly ahead. Several moments passed. Finally he scratched his head. "I think...I understood maybe thirty percent of that."
Leon nodded approvingly. "That's actually above average."
Davis couldn't hold it in anymore. A laugh escaped him. Soon Miller joined in. Even Leon allowed himself the faintest smile as the three figures disappeared deeper into the endless crimson wilderness.