It had been about a week and a half since the young man started his cultivation journey. At first, he intended to head straight down to the road and figure out his place in the world. That had been the plan, at least. But after he had successfully cultivated to Realm 1, Rank 1, everything changed. It was like his body, mind, and soul, maybe, had grown leaps and bounds in ways he had no words for.

  The shift had been subtle at first. A strange clarity. A strange cohesion. The kind of mental sharpness he had not felt since before the fracture in his old life. It unnerved him just a little. So he spent the next day and a half simply contemplating the changes, studying them, recognizing what had shifted inside him and what had remained the same.

  He listened to the beat of his heart. Felt the stretch and coil of new muscle. Watched how his breathing deepened without effort. Every motion, every thought, seemed cleaner. He did not trust it at first. But slowly, as the hours passed, he accepted it.

  Then, over the next couple of days, he dredged up from his perfect memory every bit of training he had ever done. Special Ops training. The weekend experts his military company would fly in to give pointers on this technique or that. His backyard sessions with friends who were martial arts experts when he was home and not on tour, just to keep in shape. Every throw, every lock, every strike, every controlled breath. All of it resurfaced as if it had happened the day before.

  At first, it was harder than he thought. Perfect recall did not actually mean perfect muscle memory, especially in a brand new body. So he took his time. He started with what he knew best: the military training, the close-combat style they had drilled into him until it lived in his bones.

  Once he had that down fairly well, he branched off into the other things he remembered, testing them slowly, carefully, building his repertoire until it once again felt almost second nature.

  It had taken surprisingly little time, but he chalked that up to cultivation, and to the changes wrought by the crossover.

  "Fucking lightning," he muttered to himself more than once.

  After that, he started noticing oddities in the way he moved, in the way he flowed. Training told him to do one thing, and instinct told him to do another. It was like a part of him approved of his training, encouraged it even. In truth, it was just a hodgepodge mix of several styles, several influences stitched together by a lifetime of necessity.

  But, he laughed to himself, kind of like himself, it was starting to form its own whole.

  The more he practiced, the more he noticed it. Slowly, he started being able to listen to these instincts and incorporate those movements as well. A dodge became a slide. A step became a hop. A pivot became an awkward but effective half-fall, half-roll. He felt ridiculous the first few times he did it, but the motions worked. Even when they looked stupid, they worked.

  He began making short, sharp noises under his breath during some movements. Instinctual things. Not quite words. Not quite shouts. Halfway to a caw.

  Hell, he thought, maybe it'll distract someone. Who caws at anyone?

  But still, it felt natural. It felt right.

  Eventually, he realized why. His path, his Spirit Forge, was the Corvid. Crows and ravens. Raucous. Clever. Unpredictable. Sometimes ridiculous. Sometimes unsettlingly precise. As human as he was, he started trying to incorporate movements as well as his body could manage: short hops, deceptive shifts, precision strikes that came from odd angles.

  It made sense. Too much sense.

  So that was what he practiced until the end of the week. Fairly confident in his ability to defend himself, especially if he came up against someone like the robed man, he settled down and meditated by the pond.

  He started a small fire. Cooked a few fish he had caught the old-fashioned way, with patience, slow movement, and well-timed strikes that flicked them out of the water and onto the shore.

  That had amazed him. He had never been able to do that before.

  He wasn’t sure if all cultivators or techniques or methods were the same, but he felt more connected. In an odd way he couldn’t quite describe. Connected to… well, the world, kinda. It was hard to explain. Like his awareness had grown roots without asking his consent.

  He shrugged, ate his fish, and once again thought about his life. About what he had been. Who he had been. What had happened. What he had done. What he had survived. And what had survived of him.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  He remembered the words of the three women now gone, and their warnings that this world was not a safe place, or not a kind place, as they had put it.

  He was young in body, cultured in nature, but old in his soul. His newly reformed soul. He was tired of death. Tired of killing. Tired of surviving. Tired of fighting other people’s battles.

  He had thought, maybe, if he could just find a spot and settle down in this world, he could live a normal life. Whatever the hell that even means. But the robed man he’d had to put down, the Corvid itself, and the three women had shown him this was probably a fool’s dream.

  If he did that, he wouldn’t grow stronger. And those who were stronger would seek to use him, or kill him, or twist him, or break him, or do any number of things for their own purposes.

  He had already been used. And not by a person. By an entire world. And that world had taken everything from him.

  He would not allow that to happen again.

  He didn’t care who or what it was. Mundane or pinnacle power or whatever the hell was in the heavens. He refused.

  He was tired and weary, but that wouldn’t stop him.

  He would build a life here. He would not let anybody trample on that life.

  He would not seek fights and death, but he would finish them if he had to.

  He made that a promise to himself. A foundation to his new life here. He would build something, and nobody, come hell or high water, would take it away from him again.

  As the days passed, he thought about the future. He wasn’t sure how to make a living, but he assumed this world had money. Commerce. Trade. If the robed man had been using his bag to move goods from city to city, then the courier part, at least, was a solid job.

  He could do that. He could head to the cities. Meet this world’s version of humanity. Integrate himself into the whole.

  He knew from experience that isolating yourself from people, whether on purpose or by force, was never a good thing. It led to odd behaviors, quirks that had no place in polite society. Humans, and probably the other sentient beings of this world, were social creatures by design.

  Without that, things tended to get bad.

  But if he took a job as a courier, he could also have downtime between cities. Quiet stretches where he could process, think, and integrate. He needed that more than he cared to admit.

  The trouble with perfect recall was that while he could remember everything fully, he could also remember what he felt. And what he had done because of what he felt. And that, he knew, would take time to sort out.

  He felt that integrating those emotional fragments was a needed process to help shave off the jagged edges left from his remaking.

  According to the three women, there was a lot of land between the periphery of the Green and the coast. Plenty of places where someone like him might want to settle down. He didn’t know if he would want to do that right away, but some of the best times in his life had been spent settled in one place with family and friends.

  He wanted that again. Needed that again. Even if he had to build it himself.

  He even knew how to build cabins. Survival training in the military. Long summers with his uncle in the Oxbow Mountains. Building primitive shelters, learning to hunt, learning to survive. And finally, building a cabin on his uncle’s property, one he never got the chance to bring his wives or kids to.

  He regretted that.

  So yes, that sounded good as both a short-term and a long-term goal.

  Continue cultivating. Get stronger. Do not let anyone fuck with him or what he cared about. Look for a place to settle. Get a job. Learn a profession. Eventually build something real.

  He had the three feathers still tucked away. The bird had said they would give him skills or abilities. He paused, wondering if they could also give him items.

  He was so tired of bland food. He missed seasoning. Spices. Salts and herbs and sauces. Both his wives had been excellent cooks. He smiled at the memory.

  He wanted that again. He would have that again.

  So as the last few days passed, he practiced. He thought. He also experimented with the bag and discovered that yes, he could scoop almost all the water in the little pond into it. Everything in the bag got wet, which sucked, but it worked.

  He tested it carefully. Removed everything from the bag first. Then added water. Then added items to see the result. It was messy, but it worked.

  On the plus side, he scooped up about thirty fish. He still didn’t know their names. They looked similar to fish he knew, but this world was different enough that he wasn’t about to assume.

  He put the water back into the pond and noticed the pond was fed by a small underground stream. It would refill naturally. Still, he did not want to harm it unless he had to.

  About a mile past the pond, while foraging for fruits and nuts, he found a grove of bamboo. Thick, heavy stalks. Perfect. He chopped the biggest ones down, used a few as staffs, used the others as storage. Hollowed-out water containers. He cut them to equal lengths, poured water from the pond into the bamboo, and fashioned crude tops using scraps of cloth.

  They worked.

  Ugly, but functional.

  He could now store several gallons of water inside the bag without soaking everything.

  He also discovered he could sense inside the bag. Not see, exactly, but sense. It was a fairly large space, ten by fifteen by ten feet. He had no idea if that was normal or tiny or a universe-level treasure.

  He chuckled.

  Probably safer to assume it was valuable.

  His preparations and training came to an end exactly a week and a half after his first cultivation attempt.

  And finally, with everything ready and settled, he rose at dawn, took one last look toward the pond that had been his first home in this new world, and started making his way east toward the road.