Alchemists and Cultivators I

The cave was dark and immersed in an unnatural silence, the bodies of those who had lost their lives in that foolish attempt to bend fate laid on the ground, staining the brown sand with their blood.

There were only two people still alive. They stood on the bloody ground of the cave, motionless facing each other: too many emotions could be read on their faces one after the other.

Everything they knew, everything they loved, had just been destroyed. They had been so naïve, and how arrogant!

What laid at their feet was what remained of humanity's most powerful army, as they had called it from the day of its formation. There were nearly a thousand of the most powerful young men in the world, and they had all died in a battle that ended in a blink of an eye.

Only the two of them remained alive, helpless. Too young to know what to do, too upset to be able to react.

These were the thoughts that crowded the man in red's mind, as he looked at the pale hand of a dead companion, less than a meter away from him.

'All of this is my fault.'

Slowly, almost without realizing it, the man dressed in red loosened his grip on his sword, which finally fell from his hands, touching the ground with a metallic clang. The man collapsed to his knees, his head lowered, desperately trying to find a spot that his companions' blood hadn't reached.

"I should have never left Nar." He murmured, his eyes full of tears that he did not allow himself to let flow.

The man standing in front of him, wrapped in an elegant green robe, stood silent for a long moment. The words simply did not form in his head, much less in his mouth: there was nothing he could say, nothing that would have explained, even a little, what they were seeing around them.

He could not accept that this was the reality because it was not possible, it could not have really happened. And if it was true, why was he still alive? Why was he living while the corpses of his companions surrounded him? He wasn't more powerful than them, what was saving him? Why were the two of them alive?

"I'm sorry." Whispered the man kneeling in front of him, and it seemed that he was speaking more to the air than to a person in particular. After that words, he finally burst into uncontrolled tears.

He was crying, and as the tears fell to the ground he kept repeating his apologies, as if they were the words of a ritual, as if they could change what had happened.

But that wasn't real, the man in green thought, and then ignored the sobs of the other: there was nothing to apologize for because that hadn't happened.

Finally, he managed to move and leaned over the nearest body, it was covered in blood, which seemed to have come out of every body hole: nostrils, eyes, mouth, ears and genitals.

He gently placed two fingers on the young man's wrist and waited for a heartbeat: there was no pulse. There wasn't anything at all. He looked at the lifeless young face and felt a stabbing pain in the pit of his stomach. That was the corpse of a man less than thirty years old, a man who the day before had finished carving a wooden butterfly for his first-born baby daughter. 'You can't be dead.' The man dressed in green thought. 'Please don't be dead.'

But the more he tried to give him his own spiritual energy, the more he realized that the body was not responding, there was nothing able to receive that precious gift.

He let go of the young man's wrist and ran to another body, like everyone in that cave this second corpse also belonged to a young woman in her early twenties. She had a florid body and two rosy childly cheeks: on a face like hers, death seemed even more painful.

The man repeated the same movements as before: he listened to her wrist, placed a hand on her forehead, tried to transfer his energy: and failed.

He continued like this with at least a dozen corpses, and he didn't seem willing to stop, he would continue until he tried that desperate rescue attempt with all the dead on that foolish battleground.

The man dressed in red finally managed to get up, he was no longer crying.

Despair on his face was now replaced by anger.

"Stop it, can't you see they're dead?" He asked the other, who did not even look at him but continued to whisper the Energy Transferring spell as if no one had spoken.

"Stop it, you'll end up killing yourself" Yelled the first, grabbing the one dressed in green by the shoulder, forcing him to turn around. "You'll die" He repeated, in a lower voice.

The man shook him abruptly and bent again over the body of the young man he was trying in vain to revive.

The man in red let him do it. There was an idea in his mind that was taking shape, a voice in his head that for a few minutes had been whispering something that he still couldn't understand.

Finally, now he could make out the meaning behind those whispered words, the voice became clear in his mind, so much so that he wondered if the other could hear it too.

"If you die now," the voice was saying. "All of them will be spared. I told you long ago, and you didn't listen. You chose to let them die for you instead."

The man dressed in red looked around as if he was looking for the source of the voice.

He did not understand if he was imagining it or it was really there.

At the same moment, the man in green straightened up, still holding his sword in his hand, some tears were running down his cheeks. His hands were now covered in crimson, viscous, blood.

Once again, they found themselves facing each other.

Neither of them dared speak a single word, but they both understood what was about to happen.

Eventually, the one dressed in red managed to crack a smile, which didn't reach his eyes.

"Do it." He murmured, his voice was only a whisper.

"I can't. Don't want to" The other answered.

The first took an uncertain step, bringing his body closer to the sharp point of the sword that the other held in front of him.

"You have to." He said.

The other shook his head, unable to reply.

"You promised it." The one dressed in red insisted, but he dared not move any further, the tip of the sword glowed faintly, less than eight inches from his stomach.

After a silence that seemed interminable, they both finally managed to raise their heads, and their eyes met once again.

At the same moment, they both made the same decision: to free the other from that burden.

The man dressed in red covered the space that separated him from the sword, the man in green sank the blade with a final jab: impossible to say who had moved first.

A much darker shade of red stained the red clothes, his blood mixing on the ground with his companions'.

Without making any sound, without looking at the man who had just stabbed him, he slowly closed his eyes.

- Seven years earlier -

"Ren, let me see!" Fiamma complained, pulling an elbow in the ribs of his friend, who was peeping through the window into the house, blocking the view with his own body.

They were on the roof of one of the villas in the Chinese district. To access it they had had to evade several guards and climb up at least half a dozen concentric walls, which separated the pavilions of the villa.

They had to be careful not to be discovered or they would have been beaten: the guardians of the villas were famous for not sparing themselves in punishing those who intruded inside the houses.

The villas in the Chinese district were like small towns within the city, they were accessed through high wooden gates that usually during the day were open but guarded. Looking inside from the gates you could see any kind of wonder: paper lanterns framing paths of white pebbles, beautifully manicured gardens, oddly shaped roofs, and silk-clad men and women with shiny black hair.

It was like a secret world that the rest of the city could enter only by receiving an invitation. It happened more often that the Villas' inhabitants were the ones to go outside, leaving the enchantment of those places far from the eyes of the laymen.

It had been two hundred years since the first members of the Chinese community had arrived in the city. This community was now made up of more than ten thousand men and women who lived in those splendid villas with exotic architecture and was the link and the center of trade between the East and the West.

Needless to say, they were also the main attraction for the city's brats. Obviously, the more the parents and teachers ordered their pupils to keep away from those places and behave with respect, the more the aforementioned children grew their desire to break the rules, venturing into the forbidden villas.

Kids from good families usually threw in the towel after a couple of failed attempts. After being beaten up for the first time, they usually made up their mind that it was not worth it and were content to peek inside the villas when they passed by the open gates.

But for those who, like Ren and Fiamma, grew up without any family, educated with sticks by the Masters, the guards of the Chinese villas were not a great threat or anything new.

Fiamma and Ren were two undisciplined, yet promising, students from one of the major Alchemy schools in the city.

It was precisely for this reason that their curiosity towards those places exceeded that of the other kids. There were two different approaches towards the study of the spiritual phenomena of the world: the one outside the walls, to which they belonged and which they knew, and the one inside, which came from the East, of which they had only heard about.

The two schools were different in practices and purposes, but they used the same fundamental energy: they were based on the same principle which stated that the physical reality of the world could be modified by those who knew its secrets.

It wasn't uncommon for the two Schools to form alliances or to consult each other on certain matters, but it was still implied that there was no exchange of knowledge beyond the minimum necessary. And these collaborations took place only among the high scholars; simple thirteen-year-old students like Fiamma and Ren would never have been able to attend such things.

They were two similar and close worlds but strictly divided. The alchemists, with their formulas and their methods on one hand, the Cultivators with their meditation practices and their swordsmanship on the other.

However, this did not prevent the two kids from wanting to hang out in those forbidden places: it rather stimulated their curiosity, even though they were aware of the risks.

There was a tacit agreement between the teachers of the external and internal schools: if the children of one side or the other were caught breaking the rules, they were allowed to punish them in the manner of the school that caught them red-handed.

This meant that for the Cultivators caught snooping around the chores of the Alchemists, the punishment was a day of confinement in the dungeons and hours and hours of polishing the corridors of the School's cloisters. The punishment for the Alchemists who meddled in the affairs of the Cultivators was usually much more of the physical type. Of course, this did not apply to those who broke the rules more than once.

If you were caught for the second time, other ungrateful tasks were added to the beatings. Fiamma shivered as she remembered when, the year before, she had been forced to copy pages and pages of Chinese characters with a brush and over-watered ink. Characters whose meaning was obviously completely obscure, so she had learned nothing from that experience, except that holding a brush for too long can lead to excruciating cramps and calluses on somebody's fingers.

"Okay, let's go." Ren declared and motioned to his friend to follow him.