"If you wish to be loved, you may seek it anywhere." Hu Biyan set the discarded book down properly, folding his hands.
"But you can never trust the human heart. Do you believe anyone would die for you? Why? How deep does that love truly run, when tested? For you to want something, you must be able to grasp it. You must be able to protect it. You may become whatever version of yourself you wish, chase whatever softness you desire, but without the strength to defend it, none of it will remain yours for long."
He reached forward and took both of Li Yan’s hands, spreading them open, one palm turned upward beside the other.
He tapped the left. "Power."
He tapped the right. "Love."
"They must come together." Hu Biyan pressed Li Yan’s palms flat against one another, folding one hand over the other until they sat joined. "You cannot hold one without the other, or the one you lack will be the one that wounds you."
Li Yan stared down at his own joined hands, the weight of the lesson settling somewhere far heavier than the words themselves should have earned.
"Today’s lesson ends here." Hu Biyan rose, gathering the scattered scrolls back into their neat stack with practiced efficiency. "I will return to inform you once breakfast is ready."
He left without waiting for a response, footsteps fading down the corridor beyond the door, leaving Li Yan alone with the quiet and his own joined hands still resting in his lap.
He turned the words over slowly. Power and love, bound together, neither one sufficient without the other.
It was not so different, in its bones, from what he had already decided the moment he opened his eyes in that dirt-streaked room and found himself alive again.
Strength alone had not saved him in his first life. Neither had...waiting for love that never came, not from a father who blamed him for his mother’s death, not from a brother who sold him for silver without a second thought.
"Xiaoxiao." He kept his voice low, more to himself than to her. "Do you think Hu Biyan is right?"
"He is not far off, Master." Xiaoxiao’s tone lost its usual lightness. "I have watched this play out more times than I care to count, across more lifetimes than yours. Strength without anyone worth protecting hollows a person out. Love without the strength to guard it gets that person killed, or worse, gets someone they love killed instead. He is describing the world as it actually functions, not merely his own opinion of it."
Li Yan said nothing further to that, turning his joined hands over once more in his lap, watching the ring catch what little light spilled through the shuttered window.
Power, so he would never again be powerless in front of men who thought him worthless. Love, so that strength alone would not hollow him out the way Xiaoxiao described. Both, or neither would ever be safe to hold.
He rose from the table at last, setting the thought aside for now, though it did not leave him entirely. There would be time enough to untangle it later, once cultivation, sect examinations and a certain overly affectionate prince had all settled into some order he could actually manage.
Li Yan walked back toward his room slowly, letting his gaze linger on the portraits lining the corridor as he passed. Something about them held his attention longer than mere skill in brushwork should have earned, a faint pulse behind the ink that felt closer to spiritual energy than pigment, subtle enough that he doubted he would have noticed it at all before yesterday.
"That is odd." He slowed further before one particular painting of distant mountains. "This is not mere paint. There is real energy inside it."
"Correct, Master." No need for him to speak the thought aloud at all; Xiaoxiao caught it regardless. "Whoever commissioned this manor clearly spared no expense. A faint qi signature runs through several of the paintings you have passed. Nothing dangerous. Simply well made."
Well made, and now noticeable to him in a way it would not have been a day earlier. His dantian had truly opened. He could feel qi now, thin threads of it drifting through the air of the manor, more concentrated here than anything he remembered from the Li household, where even the wealthiest room had felt spiritually barren by comparison.
He quickened his pace toward his room, a plan already forming.
"Xiaoxiao, prepare a basic cultivation manual for me. Something suited to where I currently stand."
"At once, Master."
A faint shuffling sensation stirred at the back of his mind as she searched, the mental equivalent of pages turning somewhere out of sight.
"While I select something appropriate, allow me to explain the tiers properly, since you asked about pill requirements earlier and never received a full answer." Her tone shifted into something more instructive. "Pills exist in tiers matched to cultivation realms, Master. A basic pill requires the user to already sit within the Martial Qi realm or True Warrior realm before the body can safely absorb its effects. Medium-tier pills require the user to rest somewhere between the Gold Qi realm and the Yang Lord realm. High-tier and heaven-tier pills require Heavenly Venerate standing at minimum, climbing higher still toward Heavenly Paragon, Heavenly Priest, and finally Heavenly God, for the very strongest formulas within the space."
Li Yan reached his door and pushed it open, crossing to sit at the small table rather than the bed, more interested in listening properly than in resting further.
"Heavenly God, then, sits at the top." He turned the realm rankings over slowly in his mind, trying to fix each one in place.
"As far as anyone on this continent knows, yes, for those still bound to mortal cultivation." Something almost thoughtful entered the reply.
"Heavenly God marks the highest a mortal body can reach through cultivation alone. Beyond that lies the heavenly tribulation, Master, a trial few survive and fewer still choose to face. Those who do and live ascend into the God Realm itself, the heavens, a place this continent knows almost nothing about."