The sky was there as always, waiting to welcome him into its comforting drifts. He was a child of the sky, but he was chained to the ground. For all his feathers, he had no wings. For all he wanted to become, Tsem was not enough.

  He was a monster, his body no longer his own, his self no longer himself. Tsem was no cultivator, nothing like those heroes of children’s stories. None of them had turned into abominations. None of them had failed so spectacularly. He’d reached beyond, to become more than what he was, and ended up as this.

  Tsem was a vestige, a fragment from what he had been. Eventually, he would be erased completely. That didn’t keep him from fighting. He still had goals, objectives, things to live for. He still had a path to walk.

  The rest of him, the parts that were corrupted beyond recognition, didn’t respond well to that though. Instead, they surrounded the last of him, intent to absorb him, to corrupt every speck of him. They wanted to fly, to kill, to hunt, and to be free of the chains of his path.

  Those desires were creating a crushing weight around him and it was simply too much. Rather than regaining ground, he was losing it, the last piece of his uncorrupted self was being squeezed out of existence, bit by bit. Piece by piece.

  He wasn’t sure how long that fight lasted. Hours? Days? It felt like years, each tiny section of himself erased made its own desperate battle, buying as much time as it could. The hope was that he might figure out some plan, some stratagem that could turn back the tide. There was nothing though. He could figure out nothing.

  Then there was a light, distant, filtered through layers and layers of his corrupted self. It was something foreign, something even less himself than the werebeast that had taken over. Tsem made a decision. He needed to reach that foreign energy, no matter the cost.

  He stopped his fight, instead pushing all his energy towards that foreign light. His sides were chewed down, the werebeast eagerly taking the chance to eat, taking his pure self and using it as fuel to grow and strangle him all the more. He let it, pushing forward, pushing forward.

  He made contact with the light and felt qi flowing through the link. That qi brought with it memories, disorienting ones. The qi was not his own and the memories it carried were not ones he possessed. Rather, they were of a child reading a story, a child named Kanuk reading a story.

  The tale of the witch and the werebeast. Once there was a man who no longer remembered he was a man. He’d been alone so long, everyone he’d known were but faint impressions. Gradually, he came to forget what he was, thinking he was a beast, and so, one day, he became one. All he knew was one need, one thing he wanted to be. Time passed, and an immortal witch came across the creature as she wandered through the forest. Instantly, the beast recognized his true kin, but he was stuck, unrecognizable, unable to call out. Time and hopelessness had left too big of marks. The witch cast a spell at the beast, seeking to destroy it, but instead, she connected with it. Her power flowed from her. For three days and three nights it gushed from her, and then she saw the beast transforming before her eyes, not into the man it had once been, but rather the man it needed to become.

  The memory of that story came through with flashes of a girl smiling at Kanuk as its background, impressions of hope carried alongside it. Tsem didn’t know what the story meant. He didn’t understand what his senior wanted him to do, but he did know that his friend had come for him. That alone made him fight all the harder.

  The qi flowing across the bridge that connected Tsem’s last remaining scrap of self to Kanuk empowered him, serving as a lifeline. Where before he was crushed, now he could push back. It wasn’t easy, it was nothing like fighting the impressions of raptors that had come before. What was left here was the very strongest, most distilled parts of those hundreds of beasts he’d consumed.

  It was like wrestling the grout inside a stone wall. Most of his self was corrupted, but it was still his original self. He couldn’t just blindly push that away. He needed to reabsorb himself, the stone, but it was nearly impossible to tell where the stone ended and where the grout that held and controlled it began.

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  Tsem scraped away at the werebeast’s will, whittling down tiny pieces at a time. It wasn’t enough. Each scrape took an enormous amount of qi. Kanuk was a strong cultivator, but he was no immortal like in the story, no more than Tsem was. His qi wouldn’t hold out for days. It was already almost gone.

  Tsem stopped his efforts. He didn’t understand everything that was going on, but he could feel from his friend’s qi the risk Kanuk was taking. Tsem couldn’t free himself like the man had in the story. This was no fairy tale. What he could do was form the last scraps of himself into a barrier and resist, long enough, perhaps that Kanuk could escape back to his own body untainted.

  Tsem felt resistance to the idea as his intentions moved back through the flowing qi to Kanuk. His senior didn’t retreat, even as the supply of qi ran out, even as Tsem’s self was crushed and slowly absorbed down to nothing, he didn’t pull back. Instead, he radiated an insistent feeling of hope through their connection. Tsem begged him to go, sure he’d be unable to hold out much longer.

  Then something changed. The world slowed around Kanuk in a familiar feeling. Suddenly there was qi flowing to him again. A strange peacefulness came over Tsem’s friend, and he pulled qi from the world around them, faster than what normally would have been possible. Fast enough that Tsem could fight back again.

  He did so, scraping away at the werebeast with all he had. It wasn’t enough. Even with the qi, it would take weeks, for Tsem to purge himself of the werebeast that had formed within him, perhaps months. Kanuk’s trance wouldn’t last that long.

  Purifying the werebeast from his body wasn’t an option, so Tsem set about reclaiming what portions of him he could, simply pushing every bit of ghalri raptor aside. It was difficult. He didn’t know himself well enough, and most of the impressions he got were of superfluous things. Did he know whether it was he or a raptor that enjoyed the feeling of sun on his skin? He didn’t.

  Tsem focused on what he could tell. Those parts that sought to crush him and attack Kanuk. Those weren’t him. Even with his life on the line, he chose to protect, to follow his path. Those bits of jing he pushed aside.

  It wasn’t a perfect system, the portions he brought back under his own control still held corruption. They were pure enough though, they didn’t rebel against him too much, and as he continued, he got better. He identified more and more of what made him himself.

  An ever-increasing tide of energy moved out from his reclaimed self, and it pushed back. The dozens of fragments of ghalri raptor pushed against him, stronger with each passing moment. The constant support flowing from Kanuk kept coming, enough to resist.

  Tsem looked closer and closer at himself. He saw dozens of smaller corruptions. He pushed out not just the parts of himself that thirsted to kill, but also more subtle portions like those that called him to fly higher, soar faster than all others. This was trickier. He had ambition aplenty inside himself, and more than a little competitive fire. Some felt just too extreme though, the kind that pushed him to throw his life away to beat all others.

  Hundreds of judgments needed to be made, honest judgements. He couldn’t just push every dark corner of himself away. Some things he needed to accept because they were part of him. He still held anger for the great clans, for everyone back on the northern continent for denying him the ability to grow, for abandoning his parents and so many others to die.

  Gradually, a trance crawled over Tsem. At first, he thought it was Kanuk’s moving through their bond. It wasn’t though. This came from him. It helped guide his hand, his judgements. It was like a repository of his insights into himself, and he just knew answers that usually he would have needed to meditate on to recall. His pace sped up again.

  After considerable time and effort, Tsem was left with a pulsing, glowing tumor of ghalri raptor in his self, his jing as memories from Kanuk’s qi told him. He set about fixing the damage to his body, finding it horrific, the task of recovery feeling monumental. He tackled the worst problems first, turning his arm back from a talon into itself, restoring his eyes. Most importantly though, he pulled his twisted and broken meridians back into position, restoring his qi flow. The process took hours and Kanuk kept pouring qi into him throughout.

  As soon as his friend felt Tsem’s qi return to normal, Kanuk withdrew and collapsed onto the ground, his willpower and stubbornness depleted. Tsem wasn’t far behind, but the battle wasn’t over, Tsem wasn’t stable. In time, the very moment his focus slipped, the tumor of energy inside his jing would seep back in and reclaim his body. There was no purging it though. That was well-beyond what his qi could accomplish, what he could accomplish. There wasn’t much left in him to keep him moving. Before long, he would slip.

  The only option left was simple: accept it into himself. It was a terrifying, desperate idea, one Tsem struggled to even approach. The question of how to do so pounded through his head, but he already had an answer. So many desires ran through what was left of the raptors, all strong enough that they’d clung to him even past the various beasts’ deaths. One was most prominent though, most demanding. More than it called for blood, more than it called for him to hunt, the demonic blob of jing called for freedom, for flight.

  Tsem could accept that desire, even if he’d never had it himself before now. He allowed the jing to flow back into him, carefully guiding it to a position within himself, weaving it by instinct, and harnessing every bit of insight afforded him through this desperate battle. He could feel himself forever changing, on a fundamental level, even as the foreign jing accepted its place within him, already sending qi towards his back.

  A pain came from that area, an internal pain. A thirteenth meridian burrowed its way through his body, connecting points on his shoulders. Then they began to grow. Feathers of brown and black. These weren’t foreign parts to him though, they were him. Just as the fingers on his hands were part of him, so too were the feathers on his wings.

  Tsem didn’t see what exactly happened, the last of his energy was spent and he was keeling over. Wings grew along his back though, larger and heavier than those on a normal raptor. Their formation was fueled by qi and the careful weave of new jing. These weren’t the wings of a ghalri raptor though that foundation was there. No, these were Tsem’s wings.