Make your peace before we put you under.

  Those are the last words I ever heard. The only words I can recall on my own.

  Ideas and concepts drift by on a notion of recollection but asking never results in specifics. I might have a body, remembering it only makes a foggy outline of what a person might be. Events give impressions, objects result in generic example pieces. Descriptions yield a colidascope of what all the possible results could be.

  I play around with this phenomenon for what feels like a few minutes before it all gets stripped away from me.

  Like my moment of chance ended and the result didn't favor me. I go from an imperceptible nothing with floating memories to sitting up, half submerged in a shallow ocean, a whole galaxy spread out above me.

  I know I died, I look down through the water and I can see it. A dumb mistake, an unforseen complication, a risky gambit, whatever it was I am gone. Unrecoverable.

  I sigh, leaning back on my arms and looking back up at the stars. Colorful clouds that might be whole clusters or concealed collossuses. Deep breaths and shallow waves are all I feel while I pack away the memory of who and what I once was.

  When I'm ready I look to my side, nothing. The other side, a table. Weird, usually the table is one way rather than the other.

  But then there's already two people sitting at it, a casual man snacking on chips and chicken-y cheese dip who I know well, who makes me smile, and the other. One who looks far too official, who's long beard is set with ribbons and chains scrawled with text, who's body is covered over in flowing robes of rolling thunderclouds.

  I give that other a look, a "get lost tryhard" kind of look and as soon as their face twists the friend laughs and waves his hand.

  The other is gone before their memory is set.

  I scoot over and snack with the friend, telling him all the funny stories between more others, each as grand as the first. Me and him, we laugh, wince, and bait our breath together through the tales.

  He looks nostalgic, almost sad as I relive the carefully packed moments of my life.

  We go on and on, then when I'm afraid of repeat material he starts telling me stories.

  The excitement of triumph and exploration, the duty of service and work, the simple joy of joking around a camp fire or enjoying a successful attempt at cooking.

  Each new face that sees us is more dignified and entitled, the clothes more layered and flowing, the sculpted text more glowing, but not a single one worthy.

  Until

  I think its a better word than unless for the end of the lorax, whether revealed at the beginning or as the punctuation at the end, but that is not my story.

  My friend looks up into the stars and sees something that he approves of.

  Then before me is a man unlike any other, several others try to elbow their way down instead of him but the ocean beneath us goes glass still and they all retreat.

  The gentle waves return as the...boy really, breathes the water and surges upright, coughing and sputtering. I laugh a little and my friend pats him on the back but when he's done he doesn't look like the others.

  This new person isn't ephemeral or bound up in hard to understand letters, they barely have pants. Their skin is skin, tough but smooth. Their hair was hair, fluffy, thick and interrupted by cat ears aside. Their eyes were normal alburn eyes, maybe leaning a bit towards amber.

  They looked confused and nervous, so much that my friend offered them the chips and dip he'd been snacking on. The newcomer looked like he was going to refuse but my friend just said it'd be just a teensy bit rude to deny the food.

  So I padded around them as they took a few hesitant bites, then enjoyed it enough to start eating it much more enthusiastically. My friend asked about the stories they had and they started telling small, basic things, then bigger and bigger events.

  I realised I had changed at some point into a fox, I shrugged and listened as I poked my curious nose all around on the boy. And he was a boy, barely into his teens and fishing for a safety net encase he became a notable side character in someone else's story. He wasn't there yet but others thought he had talent and so showered him with favors and insight until he did.

  Then my friend asked.

  "Do you think you're up to it?" The ocean above and beneath resonated the question, and the answer

  I laughed, an arrogant, joyful laugh. A new adventure, sure, it'll be great!

  I hoped up onto his back, slinging my foxy paws around his shoulders as I nuzzled his gloriously thick and unruly hair.

  My friend laughed back, looked up and flipped off the gods and nobles who'd answered every question wrong and expected me as a reward.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  ---

  Fluffy blankets greeted me, or maybe rare furs? A slight shift showed the sheets beneath were far more rough, made far more durable for it. the contrast was lovely and the shining sun felt great, so did the morning air, like a good warm spring morning. Then a thought hit, with a lot of impact.

  I could smell, feel, move again. The last dregs of someone else's fitful nightmare banished by the tinkling bells of joyous laughter.

  I took a deep breath and was greeted by the sound of chirping birds, the rush of a healthy body, the smooth sweeping of fresh, unabused joints.

  The morning was beautiful and it melted me, I simply lay there, squirming occasionally to feel the rough sheets beneath me and the heavy blanket above. But the day eventually calls and nature takes its course.

  Indoor plumbing wasn't quite a reality yet but magic made a convenient river easy enough, readily dismissed by my drowsy mind as i reviewed my life in paradise. I was driven awake by my search for soap, that's when I noticed the iridescence of the granite countertop.

  It made me pause to look around, that bathroom was big, almost luxurious save for the very purposefully rustic features around, red plastered pillars met the ground with intricate carvings of ivory or marble (shining in the light either way) and up top were cargo and fishing nets weighed down by crates and sacks of all kinds.

  The walls were white, patterned with shifting clouds and flying golden birds.

  A doorway the scale of an 18 wheeler opened into the bedroom which molested its royal theme with tools and scraps and Davinchian models hung from the ceiling.

  His bed was like a swimming pool set in the center of the room and some privacy curtains lay disused around it. Furrs and sheets lay in a state between crumpled up and sprawled out, looking like the frozen waves of a chaotic sea.

  Everything that was supposed to be there was some shade of white, grey, red or orange. Everything that was rebellious teen was a darker timber or aged parchment color. Brass, bronze and gold were common but the finish varied.

  The whole space was massive, with a window the size of a city buss out of the wall opposite the door to the room looking out into a spotty, wild forest.

  I turned to look into a mirror and was greeted by a very alluring figure, a legendary bed head, and a cat tail.

  "Oh no...I am a romantic subplot. I'M GOING TO BE CHARACTER MOTIVATION!!!" The dream returned all at once and pants were hastily dawned.

  ---

  Servant Yu Ten followed her charge's trail of destruction all the way through the compound. His parents had tried some decade ago to discourage him from scholarly work by moving his room to be as far from the library as possible, it only built up his arms as he carried his study with him most days.

  The Zanye clan had always had its eclectics but none had ever seemed so insistent on running the length of the royal grounds nearly nude so often. Most all of them did it once at least but little Ni had made it a regular hobby.

  So she and her entourage followed the trail of blushing servants and blank faced young masters all the way to the library where the elder in charge pointed them to a muttering pile of tomes and scrolls.

  She announced her presence as she usually did, with a lecture on modesty that she knew was going over his head before clearing away some of the pile in front of him.

  "Now what is it this time." She huffed down at the 30 year old cultivator that hadn't seemed to grow out of his mid teens.

  He looked up at her with wild eyes and a serious expression.

  "I am in grave danger."

  "You invite more danger the more nonsense you get up to, now tell me what's going on or I Will retrieve the cast iron skillet." Was her only answer.

  He simply shoved his nose back into the scroll on basic cultivation techniques, for beginners, like it held the answers to the universe. Sure it technically did, but he was already beyond it by a ways.

  The only boy in living memory to advance stages before the age of twelve sat rereading his childhood bedtime story for another minute before he bothered explaining anything.

  "I am at risk of becoming a storytelling trope" he said with full seriousness.

  "The naked arrow, evidentially"

  They each shared a deadpan stare until one of his ears flicked and he continued on while staring at his book, "I need to become impervious, I need to be immune to the threat of force. I seek to do that in as many different and compounding ways as possible."

  "You already have a body enhancement technique, you are already durable, you have to stop running around in just a towel and learn to dress before your panic attacks." She nearly pleaded to the young master but he merely waved her off.

  "If people are so oversensitive that not taking an action shocks them into despondency then they are asking to be traumatized by animals." It was an argument he rarely put so succinctly but he kept going like it wasn't upending all of society to do so,

  "I, right now, could perhaps take the force of 5 charging oxen to any particular part before that region is turned into mist." He said as he gestured around his arm, "And only if I anticipate the impact early enough to prepare."

  "I need to handle around 100 charging oxen passively, I could do that by finding a technique and advancing it to increase my durability 20 fold but that would take a century of consistent progress. No, I need to find several techniques that act on different aspects in different ways."

  She was about to speak again when he closed the book with a thump and set it to the side, crossing his legs to look up at her with a proper posture and a serious expression.

  "If I find two techniques that both act to harden my skin I would need both to act at a 10 fold improvement, rare but achievable, to hit that threshold. But I'd still have weaknesses, gaps to exploit. I mean to layer smaller improvements that each reinforce and cover for the previous."

  "And to do it passively" she included while pinching her brow.

  "That's right, improving by ones and twos may not be glamorous, but if my bones reinforce my muscles, muscles my tendons, tendons my channels, channels my skin, then all I need are 4 multiplicative steps to get up to 80 oxen,"

  "Then its a few fractional improvements to get up to 100." She finished, arms still crossed. Then he looked up at her with fire gleaming in his eyes.

  "Which means one THOUSAND charging oxen of force is no longer a lofty aspiration but achievable with just a few more stages, and improvements." And the pile of knowlage suddenly made sense.

  "I am going to stare gods down as they weep in NEWFOUND IMPOTENCY! AH HAH-Ack" it was with that revelation that the otherwise well adjusted cultivator coughed up blood and crashed down through the whole of the third and second stages into a mid Qi gathering realm.

  The energy of the revelation and collapse washed through the library in a chaotic mix of advancement and destruction until Ni Zanye fell back, half a pile of books collapsing onto his bloodied face.

  Yu Ten groaned, pulled him out of the pile and dressed him decently while the energy slowly soaked back into his body. His dantian shattered and now far broader in base than what it had been before.

  It would be be hard to explain this one, given the tournament ahead.

  ---

  "Here I thought you were a gentle soul" Ni Zanye said to a writhing fox, the rubble of his soul carefully floating down into the field around his old home.

  The fox however, was not feeling gentle, nor rather coherent.