The last thing Orin remembered is going to bed after a very weird day that he really wanted to finally come to an end. But right now, he found himself fully awake in a pristine white dome and the only thing in this dome was something that looked like a grey headstone for a grave.
One would think that suddenly finding oneself in an enclosed dome with a headstone would be the scariest part of this situation, but to Orin it wasn't. The most terrifying thing to Orin was the fact that every time he looked at headstone his entire body felt like it was being pressed down upon, and thoughts of be unworthy and that he shouldn't defile this holy place with his presence kept running through his mind. And for some reason he was walking towards the headstone, step by step no matter how hard he tried to stop himself from moving he couldn't.
As Orin got closer the headstone the larger it got, changing from a headstone to a thirty-foot-tall stone monument. Standing a few feet from the monument Orin felt like throwing himself to the ground and pleading for forgiveness for even being there. He wanted to run away, to leave this place and never come back, but his body wouldn't listen to him. Instead, Orin found himself sitting in front the monument staring at symbols carved into the weathered grey monument.
The symbols formed long lines on the monument with squares and circles with slashes and curved swirls. Orin couldn't tell if these lines of symbols were a word or an entire sentence without spaces between the words. But soon Orin had a different concern, his eyes had locked onto the upper left symbol, and he couldn't move his eyes. More his eyes stared at that one spot the more uncomfortable his eyes became.
At first it felt like his eyes were just a little dry and if he blinked them, it would go away, but he couldn't blink his eyes. A few minutes later it felt like wind was blowing sand into his eyes, he wanted to cry out in pain but couldn't make a sound. Orin was a prisoner in his own body, even when the pain in his eyes became a searing, burning agony, he was unable to do anything. He had lost track of time, he couldn't tell if he had been staring at the symbols for a few seconds, minutes, hours, or even days.
After a while Orin's body felt like it was convulsing, and then suddenly a feeling like something popped came from Orin's head and then his head slumped down. His eyes began to slowly blink by themself as he was now looking at his own legs. As time passed the pain in his eyes and head started to disappear, till finally it was gone.
When he was no longer in pain, and with nothing else to do as his body was acting against his will, Orin began to count the blinking of his eyes. Two-hundred and thirty-seven blinks later his head raised, and he began to look at the symbols again. But this time there was no pain, and while Orin still couldn't read the symbols, he now understood what they meant and more importantly he knew what it was.
It was a cultivation technique. Till now, the only cultivation technique Orin had seen was the "Imperial Cultivation Technique" that everyone is allowed to learn after their tenth birthday. Orin spent weeks in the city library learning this technique and the beginner spells. Like every ten-year-old, he dreamed of reaching the sixth layer by his sixteenth birthday and being recruited by a sect, then getting a foundation pill and becoming a real cultivator. He didn't want to be like most people in the city and have to decide withier to continue to be a false cultivator and take the dreg jobs, or to give up cultivating and pick a trade like being a baker, carpenter, or a farmer.
Orin's father reached the sixth layer at the age of eighteen and none of the sect's that came to recruit within the city would take him as a disciple. Without being able to enter a sect and getting a foundation pill, and unwilling to give up cultivating, he could only take a job as a caravan guard before he married and had a child. Denied the future he wanted drove Orin's father to become an angry drunk with such a violent temper that Orin's mother fled the city in fear for her life.
While not all those that fail to get into a sect and continue their cultivation, end up as violent drunks, it's not that uncommon. For most people when they fail to reach the sixth layer by the age of sixteen, they stop cultivating. Most people in the city have a cultivation base between the fourth and fifth layer with only those who take jobs needing greater cultivations having higher.
Thinking about cultivating brought memories that Orin didn't want to think of at the moment, so he tried to focus on the cultivation technique. But he soon found a problem, he couldn't remember anything, unless he was looking at the words on the monument or what they meant. Every time his eyes blinked, the information disappeared from his mind only to return when his eyes opened. Since he couldn't retain the information from the monument, Orin decided to just feel the flow of energy in his body so he could still cultivate the technique even if he couldn't understand how it worked. But this also led a problem.
He couldn't feel any energy flowing in his body. He could feel his body trying to draw in energy but there didn't seem to be any energy to draw in. Orin was dumbfounded, everything that happened had been against his will, but when he thought this unknown cultivation method would be his, he thought it would be worth it. But he couldn't remember the technique or feel the way it was supposed to be used. Orin was frustrated and wanted to scream at whatever brought him here and didn't notice the parts of the monument that had no symbols was rippling.
Orin only noticed after the first bubble left the monument and changed from the same grey as the monument to a pristine glowing white. The bubble flew towards him and quickly entered his body, and the moment it was inside it rippled, like a rain drop hitting water. The ripple bounced around the inside of his body before a slight pulling sensation came from near his dantian and the ripple disappeared inside. Soon another bubble came off the monument and went inside him and the same thing happened. As time went on many bubbles came off the monument and his insides resembled a rainstorm. The more energy that flooded his body the easier it was for him to recognized it, he had felt it before, in fact he had felt it this morning.
This morning Orin decided to go to the local market to buy food for the week. It didn't take long to get what he needed and was about to head home when he saw them. They were children belong to the Hander family, the family that controls this area of the city and the family that Orin's father works for. These children had a habit of messing with the people that were dependent on their family because they knew that they could get away with it.
They stole from shops, damaged people's property, and bullied anyone they could. Orin tried to avoid them but after the usual taunts and insults, he was shoved into the wall of a building and fell to the ground hard. That is when he felt this energy, it felt pure, it felt holly. Laying in the dirt, Orin heard them laughing at him and the others around him, he felt rage. He didn't know why but he had extended his arm towards the bullies and found five thin white threads in his hand. Looking at the threads the rage he was feeling exploded, and he crushed the threads. In an instant the threads that connected to the bullies and to wherever they led to were severed and began to rot away. While the bullies didn't seem to notice anything, Orin felt like he had done something horrifically evil, something he would never, could never be forgiven for.
Looking at the bullies, Orin noticed they seemed to be dimmer than everything around them, as though they were in a shadow. He found himself feeling more and more guilty by the second, so he grabbed his food and ran for his house, all while the bullies laughed at Orin running away. As he ran the feelings of wrongness and guilt faded away. Safely in his home with his back against the door he finally calmed down, and he began to try and convince himself those feelings weren't real, and only a daydream caused by his anger. But now in this place, with these bubbles raining inside him, he couldn't ignore it as a daydream anymore.