The Dao of Magic

01 - Ascension

What is a soul? This question has been bothering me for my entire life. Where I come from research into souls is the god's domain, forbidden until one ascends to a higher plane of one's choosing. That's what all the sects, organizations and churches have been spouting at me for my entire life. The why of it keeps me up at night, not that I need to sleep nowadays, but still...

I am called Drew Lian, a being at the top of this world. A rogue cultivator unbound by any sect, just the way I like it. The body I'm in was born in a village in the shadow of the great Black Turtle sect's mountain, my life the life of a simple farming family's son.

Life as a mortal under the thumb of a major sect sucked a lot. I cannot understate how infuriating it feels to be a pawn or plaything of anybody with an ounce of qi in their system. We were expected to scrape and bow and thank them for even noticing us.

My parents got killed off by some young master dispshit a thousand years back or so, something that tends to happen when you look at a cultivator for even a second too long. That was the same incident that killed this body's previous owner, allowing me, a 21st-century guy from Europe, Earth to inhabit this body. After a period of adjusting and integrating memories I buried the previous owner's dead parents and returned to the village. Life is shit for a mortal in a cultivation world, so I laid low until I saw my chance to get the hell out of dodge.

At least, that was my plan until I came across the corpse of a low-level outer court disciple. I was 16 at the time, too old to get into any sect and without any special body constitution or major elemental affinity I would've been stuck in the outer court my entire life anyway.

I looted the dead sucker and found an introduction to cultivation manual, a few pills and a talisman or two. I think the corpse got into a fight, got poisoned, escaped and succumbed to his wounds a few kilometers into the forest bordering my birth village.

This kickstarted my intense interest in the soul, I wanted to know how I got here and if I could go back. I traveled the world on my own with my ill gotten loot, got lucky a few times, gaining some scarce resources and manuals, and started to contemplate the Dao of freedom. Being unbound and untethered, that was my personal goal. I traveled far into wild beast forests, explored expansive cave systems that crossed continents and avoided being in debt to anyone. I avoided sects like the plague, running away as soon as I sensed the energy emanating from legacy cultivation methods.

The initial cultivation method I found was called the Black Bone first stage manual, a system in which you infuse your body with qi of certain elements. Starting from the bones, tendons, muscles, inner organs and finally skin, your flesh and bone would change the colour of your chosen element. I didn't like being restricted to a single element even back then, so I just read the manual once, got the gist of what I was supposed to do and threw it away. From then on I tested every manual I came across, tried to learn the fundamentals behind what makes the method special, followed by experimenting with the basics learned from it. I used the fundamental tenants of science from Earth to create my own understanding of the concept of cultivation. Observation and experimentation. Look at something happening and wonder why.

I even once came across a legacy of a demi god realm cultivator, a legendary and mythical figure that ascended thousands of years ago. Instead of following in his footsteps, I tried to deconstruct it to its basic elements and improved my own improvised cultivation method using that information.

Turns out, everybody's Dao is different, and restricting yourself to one single method or technique and polishing it till perfection is severely limiting your potential. I simply learned from what all I came across and chose my own path.

So here I am, having reached the top of this world a few hundred years ago and about to ascend. Turns out the big shots up in the higher realms really don't like unaffiliated cultivators ascending. Especially if that cultivator is secretly a heretical soul cultivator. I didn't cultivate my soul though, that tends to go wrong very quickly. With going wrong I mean that's how devil or demonic cultivators are born. One small mistake with the construct that's at the core of every being and things tend to go very, very wrong, in a spectacular fashion.