The Saint’s Assassin Regresses Into a Cozy Cultivation Sect

Tags: LitRPG, Progression Fantasy, Regression, Anti-Villain Lead, Found Family, Cultivation, Slice of Life, Hard Magic.

Blurb:

Kael was the Saint's personal blade. He was very good at it, and it ruined him. When he finally died, he was not surprised and not sorry.

He woke up fourteen years old, ten years in the past, with a cold floor under him and a cracked bell ringing somewhere down the corridor he had spent three years hating. He has all his old skills. He has all his old memories. What he does not have is any interest whatsoever in saving the kingdom.

He wants a hot spring. He wants a roof. He wants to never kill anyone again and possibly raise chickens.

The System has other plans.

Chapter One: The Cold Floor

He woke up cold, which was strange, because the last thing he remembered was being warm. Not comfortable warm. The other kind. The kind that comes after the burning and means there isn't much left of you to feel anything with.

Kael lay still and listened. A wooden beam ticked overhead as it cooled. Two rooms away somebody coughed and rolled over on a straw mattress. A bell rang the hour, thin and cracked and off by about a quarter.

He knew that bell. He'd spent three years hating it.

He opened his eyes. The ceiling had a water stain on it shaped roughly like a dog. He looked at the dog for a while.

"No," he said out loud.

His voice came out wrong. Higher. He sat up too fast and his knees cracked, and he looked at his hands. Small hands. Soft ones, with no callus on the left palm where the knife-work had worn it in, no scar across the right thumb from the business in Marrow.

He got up and went to the mirror by the door, because he knew exactly where it was, and that was the worst part. His feet knew the floorboards. His body had been walking this room for years and hadn't thought to mention it.

The face in the glass was fourteen and looked like it had never done anything worse than steal bread.

Kael sat back down on the edge of the bed and put his head in his hands. He didn't cry. He'd used that up somewhere around the third year. But he came close, which was more than he'd managed in a decade, and it took him a while to get himself together.

The System arrived while he was sitting there. It didn't announce itself. It just appeared in front of him the way a headache appears, and he hated it on sight, the way you hate a person you've been married to.

[Regression confirmed. Timeline: ten years prior to the Consecration. Retained: Soul Architecture, acquired skills, acquired memory.]

[Current level: 1.]

Level one. He'd forgotten what level one felt like. Like being a house with no walls.

A second panel crowded in behind the first, eager, like a dog that doesn't know it's been kicked.

[Quest: The Saint's Shadow. Report to the recruitment office at Vessel within forty-eight hours. Reward: starter class, 100 experience.]

He read it twice.

In the first life he'd gone. He remembered the walk, and the cold, and signing the ledger, and being handed a coat that didn't fit. He remembered most of what came after, in the way you remember a long illness.

He took the parchment off the desk where it had materialized and tore it in half. Then in quarters. Then he put the pieces in the little iron stove and struck a match, and watched them curl up black, and felt for the first time in either life something that might have been his own opinion.

[Quest declined.]

[Alternate path recognized: Found a Sect. Requirements: claim territory, accept three disciples, establish sustainable cultivation. Reward: Cozy Aura — hostile encounters within sect boundaries reduced ninety percent.]

He read that one three times too, for a different reason.

Ninety percent. He could work with ninety percent.

He knew a place. East of here, three days on foot, a valley with a hot spring and an old shrine nobody had tended in a hundred years. In the first life he'd buried a purse of spirit stones under the shrine's east wall after a job went badly and he had to run. If the stones were still there, and if he was careful, and if he did nothing stupid, he could be a nobody in a valley for the rest of his life.

He packed. One spare shirt. The dull knife from under the mattress. The gold coin he'd stolen out of the donation box when he was eleven and never spent, out of some superstition he couldn't have named.

He had his hand on the door latch when he heard it. Small sound. From the stable side.

He stood there and thought about the fact that he was a grown man in a child's body who had killed thirty-seven people, and was therefore not, under any reading of the situation, the sort of person who went to check on noises.

He went to check on the noise.

He found her in the old oak past the eastern fence, in the hollow where the wood had rotted out. He nearly walked past. It was the smell that stopped him. Not rot, not quite. Sickness.

She was folded up small with her arms around her knees, and her hair had gone stiff with mud. Nine, maybe ten. He crouched down and she woke and looked at him and didn't scream, which told him more about her life than anything else she could have done.

"Don't," she said.

"Don't what?"

"Take me back."

Kael didn't ask where back was. He could see it from here. The glow in her chest, wrong-coloured, flickering. A cracked core. In the first life he'd watched the Saint's healers turn away a girl with the same problem. Divine rejection, they'd called it, which meant the same thing as unprofitable.

He knew how to fix a cracked core. He'd spent six years learning how a soul was put together and eleven months learning how to take one apart, and the putting-together half had never stopped being useful.

"I'm not taking you anywhere," he said. "Where are your people?"

She just looked at him.

"All right," he said.

He took off his coat and held it out. She didn't take it, so he set it on the leaves in front of her and stepped back, and after a moment she reached out and pulled it around her shoulders, and that was that.

"There's a hot spring," he said. "Three days east. I'm going to fix the roof of a shrine and grow some vegetables and possibly raise chickens. It'll be very boring. Nobody dies."

Nothing.

"I'm Kael."

"Lira," she said, after a while, like it cost her something.

[Disciple accepted. Bond formed.]

[Quest: A Safe Place. Build the sect's first structure. Reward: Foundation Stone (common).]

He looked at the words for a long moment, then closed the panel with a gesture he'd learned in a life that hadn't happened.

Three disciples, he thought. Two to go.

He offered her his hand. She considered it for a while before she took it.

[Reluctant Mentor — passive. Disciple growth increased. Emotional attachment risk: elevated.]

"Oh, be quiet," Kael said, and picked her up, because she was too light to walk.

Chapter Two: Three Days East

They walked.

Kael had forgotten what a nuisance walking was when you were small. His legs were shorter than his stride thought they were, and he kept catching himself moving through the underbrush the way he used to — quiet, low, weight on the outside of the foot — which did not work at all with a nine-year-old asleep on his shoulder.

So they walked like normal people. It took longer.

Lira woke around noon and made him put her down, and then walked beside him instead of behind, which he noticed and didn't mention. She didn't ask where they were going. She did ask, once, whether he had any food. When he said no she produced half a hard roll from somewhere inside the rags and split it, and neither of them said anything about that either.

On the second day he caught himself checking the road behind them. Twice. Then three times in the last hour before dark, when the light goes flat and every stump looks like a person standing still.

"Nobody's following us," he told her, because she'd noticed.

"How do you know?"

Because he'd been the one doing the following, once, and he knew what it looked like from the other end. "I just know," he said.

She seemed to accept that. Children did, if you said it flatly enough.

They came down into the valley on the third morning, and Kael stopped at the top of the ridge.

He'd remembered it wrong. Memory does that. It makes places smaller and more useful than they were. The valley was wider than he remembered and the slope gentler, and the shrine at the bottom was worse. The roof had gone entirely. One wall leaned as though it had something to say to the ground. The little stone figure of the household god — some fat smiling thing with a cracked face — had fallen off its plinth and lay in the weeds with its smile in the dirt.

"Well," Kael said.

"Is this it?" said Lira.

"Yes."

"It's broken."

"It's fixable." He heard the word come out of his own mouth and had to stop and consider what had happened to him.

The spring was still there, though. Steam coming off it in the cold, the stone rim mostly intact, the water clear. He crouched and put his hand in. Right temperature. He sat back on his heels and something loosened in his chest that had been tight for about ten years.

[Territory claim available. Cost: one token of intent. Claim the valley?]

Token of intent probably meant blood, or a promise, or something else the System thought was poetic. He didn't like the System's poetry.

"Claim it," he said, mostly to get it over with. The valley settled around him slightly, like a dog lying down.

[Territory claimed: unnamed valley. Cozy Aura active within boundaries.]

[Warning: existing inhabitant detected.]

His hand found the knife before his mind caught up. Old habit. He hated that it still worked.

"Come out," he said, to the shrine.

Nothing.

"I'm not going to hurt you," Kael said, and then, because he'd learned long ago that honesty worked better than kindness, "I'm probably not going to hurt you. It depends on what you do in the next ten seconds."

A pause. Then stone shifted behind the leaning wall, and a boy came out with his hands up.

Older than Lira. Fifteen, maybe sixteen. Tall and thin the way a fence post is thin, with a shock of hair cut badly and recently by somebody who didn't own a mirror. He had a pack on his back and a look on his face that Kael recognized, because he'd worn it himself once. The look of somebody who has been told often enough that he isn't worth much, and has started to believe it, but hasn't finished.

"I was here first," the boy said.

"Not anymore."

"I've been here four months."

"Then you've been here four months as a guest of nobody." Kael put the knife away. "Now you're a guest of me. What's your name?"

The boy's eyes went to Lira and back. He was counting exits, which was what Kael would have done. There was only the one, and Kael was standing in it.

"Fen."

"Fen. What's your class?"

Something went out of the boy's face. "Nothing. I don't have one."

"Everyone has one."

"I had one. They took it."

Kael looked at him properly then. On the back of the boy's hand was a small pale circle, the kind of thing the Saint's recruiters stamped onto the ones who didn't take.

"You went for attunement," Kael said.

"I failed it."

"You didn't fail it. You were rejected." Kael crouched and picked the fallen god up by its cracked face, turned it over. "Those aren't the same thing. What was your class?"

Fen didn't answer for a moment. When he did it came out flat and rehearsed, like he'd said it to himself a great many times.

"[Caretaker]."

Kael turned the statue over again. He could feel the shape of the boy's soul from here, if he looked, and he looked, briefly. A small tidy structure. Walls, shelves. Nothing fancy. But maintained — everything in it where it should be, dusted, in order. A core that had been scraped and sanded down, but not broken.

Ten years he'd spent watching the Saint's recruiters throw away everything that didn't kill well.

"Caretaker," he said. "What does it do?"

"Nothing useful."

"What does it do?"

Fen's jaw worked. "It keeps things from falling apart. Buildings. Ground. Tools. If I sleep somewhere, the roof leaks less. It's—" He stopped. "It's a servant's class."

Kael stood up and looked at the shrine. The roof that wasn't there. The wall that wanted to lie down. The plinth the god had fallen off.

"Fen," he said. "How would you like to fix a shrine?"

That was how he got two.

It took Fen about an hour to decide Kael wasn't going to kill him, and another hour to decide Lira was all right, and by evening he had a fire going in the old cooking pit and had shown her how to hold the flint so she didn't take her thumb off. Kael sat on the fallen plinth with his hands around a cup of hot water and watched them and tried to remember the last time he'd been in a room with three people in it and none of them were about to die.

He couldn't. That was fine. He'd get used to it.

Later, when Lira was asleep by the fire and Fen was doing something to a loose stone in the wall that Kael didn't follow, he went round to the east side of the shrine and dug.

The purse was still there. Four feet down, under a flagstone with a crack in it, and the flagstone was still cracked, and the purse came up still full. Fewer stones than he'd remembered, but he'd remembered the valley wrong too. Nine of them. And a small silver ring that wasn't his, which he put in his pocket without thinking about it.

He was filling the hole back in when Fen spoke behind him.

"You shouldn't leave that here."

Kael turned. The boy stood at the corner of the shrine with his arms folded, and the firelight behind him threw his shadow a long way up the wall.

"It's safe here."

"No." Fen nodded at the road, the one coming down off the ridge and curling along the valley floor. "That's the Vessel road. Recruiters use this valley as a stop."

Kael looked at the road. He'd come down it three days ago and hadn't thought once about whose it was. Retirement, apparently, was already making him stupid.

"They said something, before I left," Fen said. "The ones who took my mark. They were reading off a list. Valleys they meant to clear before the Consecration." He swallowed. "This one was on it. They called it the one with the red spring."

Kael looked at the spring. The water was clear. It had always been clear.

"Red how?" he said.

"I don't know," said Fen. "I didn't stay to find out."