The night fell with a heavy silence, broken only by the distant crackle of a fire. Arthur sat with a few of the sect's other students around the flames, casting uneasy glances at him.
He knew they saw him as an outsider. To them, his questions—why they trained so ruthlessly, what they aimed to achieve with their cultivation—were laughably naive. A young cultivator, Lin Wei, scoffed at his latest attempt to understand.
"You wouldn't get it, foreigner," she sneered. "You came here by accident. We've been training since we could walk."
Arthur didn't flinch. "You think that just because I'm new, I don't know struggle? In my world, we fight, too—just with different weapons." The words fell flat even to him. What did he know of their hardships, really? This was their life; to him, it was a strange journey.
But their disdain didn't shake him. In fact, it drove him harder. While the others slept, Arthur stayed awake, absorbing the nuances of meditation and channeling qi until he could feel it as a subtle hum under his skin. The physical pain was real, but it was the inner struggles—self-doubt, loneliness, and fear—that gnawed at him. And the only way forward was through them.
When he wasn't training, he observed his fellow students, catching fragments of their own struggles. Some feared never advancing to the next cultivation level, terrified of "qi deviation," a fate that twisted the energy within until it consumed them. He saw how mortal these supposed immortals were, constantly aware of the thin line between mastery and ruin.