The jade beauty was staring at the empty space, her jaw set, her hand at her side.
She had moved without calculating the odds. She had seen Qian preparing to leave with information that would compromise everyone in this inner world, and she had acted. The fact that it failed didn't change what the decision had been.
I found I respected it quite a bit.
I also could not ignore what it meant because I had learned a lot from watching her during this conversation.
The woman had a sense of justice that cut clean through her caution when something genuinely offensive was happening. She had called out Elder Shen Boyi's treatment of a child before anyone else did, she had been against Wen Suli being used by others to avoid calamities, and she had gone after Qian without hesitation.
That was the kind of person I preferred to be around, but preference was not the issue.
The issue was that Qian had just demonstrated exactly what happened when someone in my inner world was not what they presented themselves as. He had spent this entire conversation gathering information, and the only thing that had stopped him from walking out with it was the Genesis Seed. I had gotten lucky. I couldn't count on that luck repeating itself. And it wasn’t a system I wanted to rely on for the safety of the people who lived here.
"I need to know your story," I said to her.
She looked at me. The stubborn set of her expression didn't change.
"I've managed this long without—"
"Qian didn’t cause any trouble, but he was collecting information and plotting the entire time," I said. "I'm not accusing you of the same thing, but I can't make that assumption for free. You need to convince me that you’re not a threat to my people."
She was quiet for a moment, then she looked at the Genesis Seed.
This was the tree that had saved her from enslavement.
But this was also the tree she had just witnessed tear a soul to shreds.
When she looked back at me, the stubbornness finally left her face.
"Fine," she sighed. “But keep in mind that I’m not like anyone you have ever met, and I don’t mean that with arrogance.”
I blinked at that since it was an extraordinarily arrogant thing to say.
I looked at her for a moment, trying to work out if she was aware of how it had come out, and from her expression, she was completely aware.
The thing was, I had spent enough time analysing her to know that she wasn't giving a performance. She had been exactly as difficult as she felt like being and not a fraction more cooperative than she thought the situation required.
Whatever she said, the woman believed.
So I decided to give her the benefit of the doubt and see where it went.
"Alright," I said.
She looked at me for a moment like she was checking whether I was being sarcastic. Then she seemed to determine I wasn't, and she took a deep breath and began.
"My name is Sun Li Hua," she said. "I am from the Heavenly Pill Sect, but I am not a member."
I waited for her to continue, and when she didn't immediately, I said, "What do you mean by that?"
"I was created there," she said.
I turned that over for a second.
"Are you an inner world being?" I asked.
It wasn't an unreasonable question.
I had met inner world beings who existed in the Cultivation World before.
Wei Ye, Wei Lin's father, was one, though Wei Lin himself didn't know it.
The man had presented himself so thoroughly as an ordinary person that the truth of his nature had never surfaced in any of my interactions with the family, and I had only understood what he was after Azure examined his spiritual roots.
That was the first time that I had realised that there were inner world beings who left their original worlds and established themselves in the Cultivation World.
Sure, they weren’t common, but they weren't mythological either.
They did tend to attract strong opinions.
There was a significant divide in the Cultivation World about what inner world beings actually were.
One camp held that beings born or created within an inner world were fundamentally lesser, shaped by a cultivator's internal reality rather than the external world's natural laws, which made them derivative in some way those cultivators struggled to articulate but felt very confident about.
A second camp went considerably further than that and didn't categorize inner world beings as people at all. To them, an inner world being was a resource. Something that could be used, traded, studied, and discarded. The Celestial Trade Nexus probably had a section for them somewhere, and I tried not to think about that too hard.
Then there was the third camp, which held the position that a conscious being capable of thought, feeling, and choice was a person regardless of where or how it came into existence, and that treating something with consciousness as a resource was simply wrong.
I had never had any difficulty knowing which camp I belonged to.
Back on Earth, when I was Kane, I had grown up watching people sort other people into categories of more and less and use those categories to justify things I found straightforwardly cruel.
I hadn't understood it then, and nothing about arriving in a cultivation world had given me a new angle on it that made it make sense. Whether the sorting was by birth, by bloodline, by origin world, or by what kind of substance someone had been made from, the underlying logic was the same, and the underlying logic was wrong.
So yeah, I wasn't going to start treating conscious beings as lesser things because the world I had landed in had strong opinions about their origins.
Sun Li Hua shook her head.
"I'm not an inner world being," she said.
That surprised me.
I looked at her more carefully, which I realized immediately was a useless instinct because there was nothing about her appearance that would tell me what she was. She looked like a beautiful woman in her mid-twenties that was ready to fight at all times. That was all I had gotten from looking at her this entire time.
"Then what are you?" I asked.
"I'm a pill," she said. "An alchemist elder in the Heavenly Pill Sect created me."
Honestly, I had expected to encounter something like this eventually.
I had read enough of the xianxia genre to know the territory.
Cultivators and the worlds built around them had a specific relationship with the idea of things becoming people. It showed up everywhere once you knew to look for it.
The most common version was spiritual beasts.
They were creatures that cultivated long enough to eventually cross a threshold where their form was no longer fixed. The fox that had been a fox for five hundred years could walk as a person. The serpent that had spent centuries absorbing spiritual energy from a mountain range could take on human features if it chose to, and what was more impressive was that their intellect could rival or even surpass humans.
For some, it happened gradually with the beast becoming more and more capable of human expression until the form followed naturally from the cultivation. For others, a single breakthrough that is powerful enough can completely change their appearance.
Regardless of the method, by the time they fully crossed over, most of them were indistinguishable from born cultivators unless you looked at their spiritual signature very carefully or made them angry enough to slip back into their original nature.
Weapons were rarer.
A sword used for thousands of years by a cultivator with a strong enough Dao could develop an awareness of its own. Some of them developed personalities that were basically extensions of their original wielder, while others developed personalities that were entirely their own and occasionally in direct conflict with whoever was currently holding them.
It really wouldn’t surprise me if Wu Kangming’s sword thousands of years later gained consciousness, or more likely, for a protagonist like him, it could even happen within the next few years.
As for pills, they were one of the rarest to gain sentience, but I understood the theoretical basis for why it happened.
A pill was the product of an alchemist's sustained intent.
Every ingredient, every flame adjustment, every condensation and refinement carried the cultivator's understanding pressed into it over the entire process. If that understanding was deep enough, and the pill itself was complex enough, and the process was long enough, then what emerged at the end could carry the spark of life.
Most pills with that quality were consumed immediately and never had the opportunity to become anything. The ones that weren't consumed for long enough sometimes became something else entirely, something like Sun Li Hua,
A pill that had become a person.
She had said that she wasn't like anyone I had ever met, and I had been skeptical about that claim and wondered if that was arrogance.
Clearly, that had not been arrogance.
Sun Li Hua was a pill given human form.
The first I had ever encountered.
The question was: which pill?
For the Masked One to target her, it must be something heavenly and ridiculously overpowered.
A/N
Comment below which pill she is :)