Reaching for the Stars

Chapter One

With a trembling hand I reached forward and placed my hand on the stone pillar, my breath coming out in a fog under the cold morning air. With a slight sparking sound, the first chamber of the pillar lights up with a whoosh of purple fire, then the second, my heart starts beating fast, I was almost there, maybe I had finally done it.

My hopes and prayers were relying on this third chamber, the chamber I needed to light up with roaring flames in order to move on to the next step of my life, to be viewed as no longer having the strength of a child but that of a mature adult. I hear the sparking, my eyes focus on the chamber that will determine my fate with eagerness, and then it whooshes with flame, and I cheer inside my mind, already celebrating my triumph when the flames stutter and go out, causing me to spiral.

"No! No! Please! Light up! Come on!" My voice is filled with desperation, I can't believe I came this close only to fail, my life was ruined, I was done, there was no turning back from the fate that awaited me now.

"Weakling! You are already 18 years old, but you can't even beat the 10-year old's here. You're nothing!" The instructor's words were harsh, but nothing I hadn't heard before.

Except of course this time they signalled a particular end for me, at the age of eighteen every cultivator would receive a power boost, a blessing from their ancestors. How filial the family was to their ancestors and how powerful their ancestors were when alive affected that power boost. But here I was after my supposed power boost, still the trash that was hardly able to cultivate at all, let alone be someone special.

"Scum! To think you were born into the Dagon family! Worthless!" Their words mean nothing compared to the names I am already calling myself in my mind.

I didn't want to be a genius cultivator, I didn't have to break through to God status, even if that was what everyone else wished for. I just wanted to at least become a Spirit Apprentice cultivator, to be able to learn anything more than basic skills I was taught since childhood.

In truth cultivating didn't interest me much, but plants did, I wanted to help people, but everyone knew that to be a great herbalist you needed to have both a strong mind and strong spirit qi. Herbs alone meant next to nothing, almost as worthless as I am, but herbs infused with the proper spirit energy, during specific processes, such as pill refining or potion brewing, those were miraculous. Capable of giving a dying person on their last breath strength again, of healing a broken bone in hours instead of months. Not to mention capable of healing the dreaded sicknesses that could affect someone's life force that could halt their cultivation in its tracks, or even degrade it.

Stuck in the second level of common qi as I was, no one was willing to teach me anything, my words meant less than most servants. In a world where the strength of your qi determined your place in it, I was at the bottom of the ladder, only slightly above the duds who couldn't cultivate at all. Though they at least had the durability to be especially resistant to magical attacks. I'd like to say that I was infected by some sort of spirit sickness that affected my cultivation, but my parents had had dozens of herbalists check on me, nothing was wrong, I was simply weak, my innate talent simply too lacking.

I was just a weakling that could be struck down by any stranger on the street for looking at them wrong and no one would care, because I was the trash, they all believed they could step on because I was so far beneath them in strength. Most children surpassed my strength not long before or after they turned ten, the fact that I was eight years older than all the kids at the spirit qi testing ceremony, meant I was ridiculed endlessly, by strangers and family alike.

"You've done it now, Elianna. You're finished, your grandfather will no doubt remove you from the family records rather than have a weakling like you recorded in the mighty Dagon family tree." Those words perhaps hurt the most because I knew of how true they probably were, not to mention they were coming from my older cousin, Elias, who had been sent to make sure I didn't lie about my ranking.