(5k words. Please vote with your monthly tickets!)
[Inside Peach Blossom Spring.]
[Another 184 marks had quietly appeared on the peach tree that kept count of the days. Half a year had passed.]
[As the sun sank, its last light fell on a white-robed youth working beside the pool. He built a small cabin with carefully fitted peachwood, then split more wood and deftly made several simple, rustic chairs.]
[The white-robed youth always seemed busy and fulfilled. Sometimes he caught fish in the pool; sometimes he planted peach trees throughout Peach Blossom Spring. Day after day, he never tired of it.]
[Now he sprawled lazily in a chair he had made himself, watching Xie Guan in the pavilion nearby.]
[Broken flecks of gold shimmered across the pool, reflecting the energy flowing around the green-robed youth. Over the past half year, he had cultivated his Primordial Spirit to the brink: his Yin Spirit was about to shed its old form, and his Yang Spirit was about to take shape.]
[What was a Yang Spirit? It was forged when the three souls and seven spirits had been tempered a thousand times, their yin dross burned away like true gold repeatedly refined in fierce fire, until body and spirit alike attained perfection.]
[A Yin Spirit could leave the body, but it was like "a candle's reflection trapped in ice, vanishing at the sight of the sun," bound by the Five Elements.]
[A Yang Spirit was different. It could "pass through metal and stone unhindered, walk beneath sun and moon without casting a shadow." Neither water nor fire could touch it, and thunder could not wound it.]
[A peach blossom fell into the center of the pool, stirring a faint ripple.]
[The white-robed youth lifted a cup of freshly brewed peach blossom wine. The