Inspired by elements of the excellent and heart-wrenching "The Way of Choices", the terrible and facepalm worthy "Dragon Emperor Martial God", and some truly over the top grimderp cultivation novels that I won't name. The actual cultivation world Cultivator!Taylor comes from and her cultivation system is a mishmash of stuff from these that I felt like using, not a specific cross.
Spirit 1.1
The insects bit and gnawed at her, her helpless flailing doing nothing but bloody her skin. Her cries receiving only echoes of her own voice in return. In another reality, an alien entity would have saved her from the insects suffocating her and eating her alive, granting her control over bugs, thereby setting her on a journey that would end in the loss of everyone she loved, to die like trash, to die alone, to be hated by the ungrateful people she sacrificed everything to save.
But here, there was nothing to save her from the crawling mass covering her, nothing to stop the infections streaming into her body. Her throat was sore from screaming and her mouth sour from her vomit, yet nobody came to her aid.
Hours passed and her body was weak, her tears had long dried and the janitor that would have passed by to save her in another reality got sick and went home. Still she struggled, hitting the door with little more than a small bump, whimpering and hoping beyond hope, delirious with the pain ripping her apart.
In her last moments her whole life flashed through her mind, and she felt only despair.
Where did she go wrong, to deserve to die like this?
What sin did she commit to deserve this living hell of the past two years?
She fell still and slumped forward, not even hoping for a heaven to go to, only wishing for the sweet embrace of the end to her suffering. With one last breath, she asked a question.
"W-why, Emma? D-do y-you hate me that m-much?"
O O O
She was bound in chains and suppressive seals, her face an unholy mix of fury and hate. Her eyes defiantly smote the bastards who had chased her all her life, greedy and selfish men who saw her Absolute Yin body as nothing more than a cauldron for their own cultivation and pride.
That was the cruel way of this world, ruled by ambitious and heartless men, powerful sects that only paid lip service to justice, and the so-called Saints who were merely tyrants oppressing the powerless with their oppressive cultivation level.
She was an orphan with nothing to her name, scraping by on the streets until by sheer luck she found a secret manual for the Eternal Star Enlightenment Path. With its legendary cultivation method that revealed the entire path of ascension beyond even Saint to Divine Shadow and Grand Liberation, she began the path of transcending mortality.
With this priceless treasure, she could not join any sect for protection. She hid it zealously and fought hundreds of battles for resources and for comprehending the Grand Dao. Yet, it was meaningless as a powerful sect discovered her "potential" and forcibly pressed her into their group.
Even though she memorized the manual and kept it hidden, fighting other disciples and eking out a place in the bloody group, the sect then discovered she possessed the rare Absolute Yin physique that would allow male cultivators to achieve high level breakthroughs if they used her as a cultivation cauldron and drained her life force. To use her body's special nature as an ingredient or tool no different from a rare herb to be processed into an elixir.
She escaped in desperation when she found out.
She would never allow herself to become a slave to those disgusting pigs. Her body was her own.
She ran for two years while cultivating at an unheard of pace, almost breaking through to Saint herself with the sublime methods of the Eternal Star Enlightenment Path. She would have been the youngest Saint in history at only fifteen years of age.
It was on the cusp of her heavenly tribulation that her enemies, three Saint level cultivators, peak experts of the cultivation world, caught up to her. Their battle obliterated a continent when she revealed the legendary arts she had been cultivating, allowing her to fight outnumbered against enemies of a higher stage, but in the end the forces arrayed against her were too much.
They beat her down and tortured her for three days and nights in the hopes that she would willingly give herself up and maximize her body's utility as a cauldron.
But even through the haze of pain and their attempts to condition her and break her will, she refused to admit defeat.
Just as they gave up and prepared to take her by force, she gathered up all the energy she had scrounged together over the three days and unleashed a final, desperate attack.
She sacrificed all of her own cultivation foundation and channeled the star essence through her destiny link, sending her soul to her star of destiny in the heavens.
The three Saints were shocked as they immediately solidified their Saint Sanctuaries and fled as fast as possible, recognizing the insane power behind the suicide technique.
Her Gold Core fractured, crystallized star essence bursting forth, her Star Territory warped and expanded, a lifetime of hatred and suffering staining the incredibly dense qi black—
—a black void engulfed the Saint cultivators, a terrible pressure reverberated through all cultivators above the Meditation stage across the whole planet as three Saint presences were extinguished, the stars realigned themselves and the lights of four stars of destiny in the sky disappeared.
O O O
A new star emerged in the skies of Earth-Bet, and a destiny link found its way to the body of Taylor Hebert who just breathed her last breath.
The soul of the orphan Taylor with no last name came into the body and the two souls merged.
The Absolute Yin meridians of her body opened suddenly, and with her existing comprehension of the Dao and the link to her destiny star, she skipped past the Spirit Forming and Star Designation steps of the Purification stage.
Her inner qi began to move sluggishly and fight the infections even as two souls' memories exchanged in the merge, sending her into a state of coma.
After another three hours, school was over. The smell of the locker grew overwhelming and it was found by a passing teacher. The locker was then forced open by the substitute janitor. Taylor's unconscious body fell out along with the biohazardous waste and huge gathering of bugs. The ambulance and police were called, and Taylor was rushed to the hospital for life support.
It was only in the late evening when Panacea arrived to help with the permission of a lifeless father.
When she touched Taylor, her power showed her that it was a miracle for Taylor to be alive still.
Her bloodstream was already beyond the lethal limit of bacterial infections, her skin had hundreds of insect bites, her organs were already failing, she was not breathing enough oxygen to sustain her brain function, and her heart was pumping at less than five beats per minute.
Taylor wasn't even a parahuman, as she had no Corona Pollentia. It was as if this girl was living on sheer will, with the intense brain waves that defied her lack of nutrient transfer and her apparent coma, because Panacea's power told her that Taylor's body should have stopped working a long time ago.
Panacea was both incredulous and awed by the way the girl fought to stay alive.
She decided that compared to all the ungrateful patients that seemed to feel entitled to her help, this girl was truly worth giving her best.
Then she tried to manipulate the girl's biology, and found that it was like swimming uphill. Her power was working at barely a tenth of its regular speed for some reason. With the catastrophic damage the girl had suffered and the ongoing cell damage from lack of oxygen, she would be here all night if she wanted to save her.
She grew determined and barked out orders for the nurses to bring biomass, sitting down for what might be the longest continuous healing session of her life.
After Panacea used hours of concentration processing the trillions of cells in Taylor's body, the comatose girl was back to a stable state.
The healing wasn't over but Panacea felt like she could take a short break and shut her eyes with a sigh.
Meanwhile, Taylor finished consolidating her memories.
After comparing her two terrible lives, the hatred and anger only grew.
Where were the heroes that should have saved her before her bullies killed her?
Where were the wisdom and virtue of the sages that comprehended the Dao?
She never fought back against the trio, hoping that Emma would come to her senses and become her best friend again, but she was killed for her naivety.
She had worked so hard to build her cultivation just to survive every day, following the virtuous teachings of the Eternal Star Enlightenment Path without trampling on the innocent, yet in the end she died at the hand of Saints.
It was as if fate itself had decreed that being Taylor was suffering, regardless of which reality she was in.
'I won't accept that!'
The world was full of nothing but scum.
Men were all lustful, power-hungry wolves, not a single chivalric knight among them.
Women were scornful, jealous vipers, not a single kind maiden among them.
Nobody ever helped her in either life.
She never asked to have an Absolute Yin physique yet jealous disciples acted as if she ought to be grateful to have the chance for "pair cultivation" with a Saint or otherwise would have gladly seized her themselves if not for fear of spoiling the masters' cauldron.
In Winslow, the girls led by Emma made her life a living hell without even any reason. The guys were like dogs that followed the popular girls' instructions to gain their favour, and the few that didn't were too cowardly to help her.
The authorities were useless and her parents—oh heavens, she wanted to cry at the thought of her mom.
Here on Earth-Bet, she had loving parents she had only dreamed of in the cultivation world, yet all she had now was a fresh kind of pain, a hole in her heart that formed when her mom died.
And her dad—she felt an unreasonable hate for shutting down, for not being there when she needed it and not even realizing her every day was endless torment.
Even now, her spirit sense told her he had been uselessly sitting in the room, lifeless and lost in his own sorrows before falling asleep.
Any cultivator who had completed the Spirit Forming step was capable of using spirit sense, and despite being physically unable to use her five senses during her coma, her mind was conscious of the room through her spirit sense.
It was just unfortunate that only cultivators who had finished the Purification stage and entered the Meditation stage could control their qi consciously. That was why her qi fought Panacea's healing efforts and Taylor could not do anything about it.
At the thought of Panacea, Taylor's heart clenched. She remembered what she had read and heard about the miracle healer.
She was just a teenager like Taylor who worked herself to the bone healing anyone and everyone, going to Endbringer battles bravely, never taking a single dollar for her efforts. Even the Wards and Protectorate got paid but Panacea just volunteered her time and energy until she was exhausted. Taylor could feel Panacea's qi struggling to sustain her.
The healer was healing everyone else when her own health was being traded away, healing Taylor when nobody else had bothered to help.
She had once admired Alexandria and Armsmaster, but they weren't the ones who came to help. If her life in the cultivation world was any indication, they were probably just more of the same scum that pretended to be virtuous while oppressing the weak with their power.
In both worlds, the only one worthy of the title of Saint was Panacea, even if she had no cultivation whatsoever.
Taylor felt the starlight streaming through the window.
She felt the pull of her star of destiny and the resonance building in her soul.
'I've gone through too much to lay down and accept my fate.'
She felt her qi stirring again as her soul remembered the first night her body collected star essence.
'Even if I have to restart again, I'll cultivate to the top! This time, I would rather be sorry to the world than to let the world be sorry to me!'
At the stroke of midnight, she focused and reached out through her destiny link to her fated star, its crimson image crystalizing in her mind.
'If fate has decreed that my lot in life is to suffer, then I'll reach the Grand Liberation, pluck my star of destiny from the sky, and hold my destiny in my own hands!'
The scripture of the Eternal Star Enlightenment Path flowed through mind easily, and starlight mixed with her qi, forming the star essence that would be the foundation of her cultivation.
In a few short moments, her body began the final step in the Purification stage, Essence Cleansing. The power of the star essence flowed through her meridians and her body rapidly healed, then advanced further, enhancing her physical attributes.
The effect was still small, but after a few more nights of Essence Cleansing at the hyper efficient rate she was cultivating, she would be ready to breakthrough and become a true cultivator again, surpassing mortal limits of physical ability. Even tonight, she had already advanced to the level of a world-class athlete with none of the long-term damage caused by excessive training or inefficient muscle bulk.
As she reached her body's current threshold for star essence, she opened her eyes and sat up.
She turned to look at the Saint who saved her tonight and who still tenderly held her hand.
A pair of shocked eyes stared back at her. Her mouth was slightly agape as if she had just seen something unbelievable. To Taylor, it was a curious expression, but she did not know that Panacea had felt through her power the sudden rapid change in Taylor's entire body. Entire organs were revitalized, DNA mutations were fixed, free radicals completely annihilated by some unknown mechanism, and individual genes were activated or deactivated, all of which transformed the half-dead girl in front of her to the peak of health.
"You saved me," Taylor said, staring reverently at Panacea. Her eyes roamed all over the healer's body, as if desperately trying to burn the image into her mind.
Panacea was at a loss for words, unable to comprehend how someone who was not a cape could suddenly transform like that. Could she have done it herself subconsciously somehow when she accidentally dozed off? It wasn't impossible, seeing as she might have just forgotten how she got rid of the free radicals, and she could theoretically have done the rest…but it would have taken her another hour at least at the rate her power was working before, not the mere minutes it seemed to take just now.
She felt Taylor's hand gripping hers tightly as Taylor's eyes stared into hers.
"Everyone else left me to die. Nobody else helped me. For a long time, I thought someone like you could never exist. Someone with so much kindness and selflessness. You are a born Saint, someone who comprehended the grand Dao by her virtuous nature. I've been searching for someone like you my entire life."
"I'm not a saint, I just happen to have healing powers. It would be wrong if I didn't use them to help," Panacea said with a growing blush. This girl was too strange! What she said just now sounded like a confession. Why was she holding her hand so tightly? It was just for the healing, it didn't mean anything!
"You are doing far more than you have any obligation to. Your own health has declined while you heal others. I feel your qi struggling and the burden you carry in your spirit."
"Huh? What are you talking about?" Panacea recognized the word Taylor used. Was she one of those people that believed in eastern mysticism?
Instead of answering, Taylor pulled Panacea closer to her and reached out to her cheek.
"H-hey, what are you doing?!" Panacea yelped as her face flushed at the sudden prickle of Taylor's fingers on her cheek and nape. Her heart skipped a beat and she fought the thoughts of Taylor's body that came into her mind.
It was all wrong, she liked Vicky, she thought as Taylor closed her eyes and her face approached. However, her body didn't listen and she failed to resist.
Just as she shut her eyes and waited for the kiss to come, Taylor touched her forehead to Panacea's.
Her spirit sense entered through the physical bridge between their heads, and brushed Panacea's still unformed spirit sea.
In that moment, Taylor shared her qi perception, and Panacea's awareness bloomed with a magnificent wave inwards and outwards.
It was completely unlike the data from her power.
She felt the life energies in the room, the vibrant energy of the earth, and the wondrous glitter of raw starlight energy.
She felt Taylor's qi brimming with vitality and laden with purified ✷ ✷ ✷ ✷, dwarfing her own pitifully struggling qi and the pathetic barely moving qi of Taylor's father.
In that moment she understood what Taylor meant, and she ư̶̧̱͋̆͌̍ͅn̴̢̯̮̺̣͓̣̒̊͋̚͠͝d̸̯̰̪̦͆̆̐̈́̕͠è̸̙̩̲͎̝̆͒r̸̘͖̙̿̓̀͛͐͆̈́́̏s̵͙̙̃̐̈́̊̓͋̚̕͝͠t̴̳̣͓̘̙͍̮͓͋̅̎̑o̶͕͉̝̎̾̍ͅö̶̻̲̱̼̪͚̪́̅̏̿͊͂̎d̸̢̛̳̅̈́͊̏̈́͐͑́̊ so much more.
She knew without a doubt that Taylor's words were genuine, she felt the magnitude of Taylor's pain and gratitude.
In her mind's eye, she saw an unforgettable beautiful red star in the sky, and somehow she knew that the star represented Taylor, her f̷̝̣̝̽̈́̽͛̊̀̔͘a̴̹͕̳̲̟̾̂̌̑͗̂̕t̶̺̉e̵͚͈͇͒̇̾̒̔̑̐̈́̇͘ and her ̧͍͕͙̬̮d̸͚̻̗̦͕̝̪̖̭̐́̈́̅̿̋͝e̶͖͉̟̲͊̒͗̔̀̉̓͘͝͝ş̶̛͉̥͇͆͆̈́̏̚͝ͅt̷̖͇̰̗͎̖̝͐̃̾̃͠i̷̡̦̠̞͈̜̹̠͂̅̉̆̀̕ͅn̵̘̱̲̣̙͎̼̗̉́͂̃͛̾͘͝ÿ̴̭͚̯͙͖̞̈̄̀̚͠͠, her bond and her will, her weakness and her strength.
She had the curious thought that if she looked up in the night, she would be able to pick out that star from the countless stars in the sky and know which belonged to Taylor.
Even though she did not understand why, she knew that Taylor had given her something precious beyond measure, the knowledge of a secret forbidden to any but one whom Taylor trusted utterly.
Suddenly the feeling ended and Taylor pulled away.
Panacea felt tears streaming down her face inexplicably.
"W-what was that?" She whispered with both longing and fear.
"That was my spirit sense. I shared it with you so that you could know me as I know myself," Taylor said, smiling softly.
The healer felt her cheeks and ears burning again. Did this girl not realize what she was saying and the effect it was having on her? How could she continuously spout such cheesy lines without any romantic intentions?
At the thought of that, Panacea felt an inkling of disappointment and shame.
By the shared emotions of that moment, Panacea knew that Taylor didn't mean anything other than the literal meaning of her words. There was no lust or ulterior motive.
But why was she disappointed? Her love belonged only to Vicky.
Yet, in that moment, there was a feeling she couldn't turn away from, a sense of comfort that only Taylor gave her—
—she knew Taylor and she knew how Taylor knew her through the flow of her qi and her ș̵̢̡͉̯̰͇͎͕̈́̿̓p̵͈̆̓͑̃̓̃̈͝ī̶̼̆̄̋̅̈́͛̒r̷̟͇̰͐̃ͅi̴̛̳̲̭̥̯͎̳̿̓̀́͑̉̚͝ţ̶̬̜̓͑̈́͠ ̶̨̰̄̋́̀̚s̵̘͖̭͔͈͠ę̸̭͚͍͍͚̬̙̆̉̐̾̂̉͘͠͝͝ͅă̷̧̛̪͎̘̼̲̝͗͊̊̈̇̒̕—
—the absolute certainty with which Taylor determined—
—You are a good person.