Path Of The Dragon (A Dark Fantasy Cultivation Wuxia Xianxia Progression Series)

Chapter 2 The Bargain

Finally, Ming found the source of this strange aura. He'd flown slower than he could because he was afraid to lose it, but even so, the distance it had traveled was incredible.

He hovered outside a hospital, almost choking on the waves of energy coming from it.

He'd seen these hospitals before... places of healing, usually. What would this expert be doing here? Were they injured from defending their world? Is this where they went to recover? Were they a healer perhaps?

His mind reeled with questions, and he found it hard to focus when this aura choked and clung to him. He slipped inside the building and flowed toward the source.

He felt her now. A girl with a powerful soul and determination so strong it came off her in thick waves.

The weakling humans must be exceptionally talentless not to sense... this. It should be suffocating them.

He'd never felt anything like it.

Ming drifted through the sterile white corridors of the hospital and found the girl in her room. She was alone, propped up in a bed with a tube in her arm connected to a bag of fluid. A machine next to her beeped steadily. Another device seemed to breathe for her with more tubes that went down her throat.

Ming frowned. Was she part machine?

It wasn't unheard of for an expert to replace parts of themselves with metal. He scanned her gently but found nothing aside from that strange aura. Not even a scrap of cultivation.

Yet, he didn't fall into despair. She was just too... interesting.

He glided closer to her until he was just a hair's width away from her. She didn't seem to notice, and her eyes remained fixed on a glowing device with what looked like an alien language scrawled on it. Yet, the words changed every so often.

He shook his head. Such a strange world.

He stared into her eyes and brought one clawed finger to her forehead.

He placed the tip of his claw against her pale skin, careful not to hurt her delicate body.

A blue light shone from the tip of his claw and into her head. And he scoured her memories, thoughts, and emotions.

He saw her happiness with her parents. He felt the smile on her lips when she looked at them. He saw the men who broke into her home and beat her parents to death before her very eyes.

He felt the agony as they broke her bones and left her paralyzed. All so they could take a few measly possessions...

He stayed in her mind and felt her agony day by day. He felt her helplessness, her thirst for revenge, and the heart-shattering grief that haunted her.

He felt hopelessness, and despair like he had never known as she learned from coldly professional doctors that she would stay trapped in her own body for the rest of her life. Dependent and at the mercy of others.

Forever.

The pain in her heart was so great that even he despaired. Were it not for the one emotion that overpowered all of that... he would've been lost inside her mind.

But that was what had drawn him to her. Determination. Determination so raw, intense, and powerful that she exuded it from her being.

She refused to buckle and bow down, accepting a hopeless fate. The device she looked at contained countless books, and she turned pages by twitching her cheeks... she'd studied at a level far beyond her peers.

In a few years, she'd put the scholars he'd looked at to shame.

She couldn't move. Couldn't breathe without the aid of a machine, and yet she drove on and pushed forward.