Fanfic / Xia

'Across the wartorn land of Remnant, a young man flees his burning village and finds refuge in an old temple. There, he will find a new mentor in Master Shu Ren, ancient master of Lotus Temple Sect of martial arts. Trained from a young age in martial arts and the secrets of perfect aura control, a young Xia will be unleashed on the land. Remnant's last.''

— FanFiction.Net summary

Xia is a Wuxia fanfic by Coeur Al'Aran where a recently orphaned Jaune Arc is made a student of the Lotus Sect, under the wise Master Ren, and taught how to live and how to fight.

Xia contains examples of the following...

• Adaptational Badass:
  • Jaune takes to the Lotus Sect training far better than he ever did learning at Beacon in canon, after starting from the same (nil) level of training and even lower level of fitness (being younger). Even after many Volumes of improvement, being able to comfortably kill Grimm and protect himself, Jaune was still easily the weakest of the young adult protagonists. Here he's barely Beacon-aged, if that, and he's already manhandling Mercury and Emerald, and standing up to Tyrian (though still losing).
  • Blake here isn't self-taught by a terrorist lifestyle to the level of a prospective Beacon applicant. Rather she's a disciple of another Sect, the Blackened Ribbon, and can give Jaune a real fight when Mercury and Emerald (who could steamroll almost any Beacon student including upper years) couldn't.
• Adaptational Superpower Change: What's shown regarding Aura in canon is here explained as a shallow, unskilled form of the power taught to Huntsmen because that's quicker and easier to get larger numbers of trainees to the level where they can kill Grimm. Master Ren teaches Jaune that with much longer tutoring and discipline (especially how to awaken one's own Aura rather than having someone else ignite it), Aura can be a much more versatile tool than just a cudgel to swing around and armor to block with.
• Adaptational Wimp: There's no evidence here that Raven is the Spring Maiden or that Vernal is strong enough to convincingly fake that she is. The latter, who in canon was as strong or stronger than any of the protagonists, seems barely stronger if at all than the Branwens' random mooks and gets humiliated by fifteen-year-old Jaune — then again, less than a year later Jaune would go on to hold his own against Tyrian, so maybe she was just overshadowed.
• Ambiguously Related: What relation Master Shu Ren has to canon protagonist Lie Ren and his family isn't known.
• Ambition Is Evil: Cinder, as per RWBY canon. But she's arguably worse here, trying to steal the forbidden techniques the Lotus sect has in order to make herself more powerful.
• Aura Vision: A technique taught by the traditional sects is to perceive other people's Aura without needing to rely on eyes or line of sight. Jaune instantly spots Mercury's prosthetics because he has no Aura from around the knees down, and Emerald's illusions are of limited effectiveness on him because he can sense her real position by her Aura even if she's tricking his eyes or ears.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: Jaune, and any disciple of the old ways, can respond to enemies' moves with uncanny skill. He doesn't have Combat Clairvoyance or even Kung-Fu Clairvoyance (yet?), he just knows how fighting works on a purely biomechanical level. He can see opponents' tells for what they're about to try to do, in the way they chance their stance or move their limbs, and knows how to respond to those things to gain an advantage.
• Bare-Fisted Monk: Master Ren and his student, Jaune Arc, are both trained to be this. Jaune augments his fighting with a jian on occasion.
• Blatant Lies: Both Jaune and Master Ren see right through Cinder's lies about how she heard about them and why she's come to their temple. Her requests are so paltry at first that it's easier to just indulge her than risk provoking her by pressing her on those lies.
• Cool, but Inefficient: The way Huntsmen are taught to use Aura is simple, relatively easy to learn, and works well enough to support an entire profession with superhuman abilities, but it's optimized for 'maximum number of good-enough results' rather than 'optimal results'. Master Ren cites jumping a great height and landing as an example — a Huntsman would use their Aura as a brace to absorb the force of jumping and landing, and like any brace their Aura sustains damage from the effort. With the old ways, one pools Aura within one's legs to make them stronger and tougher in themselves, enough so that they can withstand jumping and landing without being damaged at all.
• Cool Old Guy: Master Ren is this in spades, being able to quote philosophy and kick Grimm ass in equal measure.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • Jaune's first fight against an opponent besides his elderly master shows how far he's come in just two years, and maybe how feeble the average bandit is. Beating Vernal and four other Branwen thugs is closer to slapstick than anything else.
  • Raven, for all her feared reputation as a bandit, can't so much as cut Master Ren's baggy robes before he disrupts her Aura with Pressure Points and stabs through her arm, convincing her to yield.
  • With all pretense of holding back out of the way, Jaune proves that he was holding back way more than Mercury was in their spar. He pretty decisively stomps both the boy and Emerald at the same time even when the latter tries to trip him up with her Semblance. Jaune is only forced to flee when the two are bailed out by Tyrian, and the fact that it wasn't a Curb Stomp against one of the world's most dangerous Huntsman drives home how brutally one-sided it was against Cinder's lackeys.
• Dangerous Forbidden Technique: Some of the scrolls of the Lotus sect implicitly deal with this, such as attempts to use aura to become immortal. Master Ren warns Jaune not to attempt such, and to be wary of others that are marked because they can lead to tragedy.
• Doing In the Wizard: Master Ren explains that this seems to have happened historically to the Supernatural Martial Arts discipline he practices. His predecessors managed to figure out a system of Pressure Points that worked great as the basis for honing Aura and using it to enhance physical abilities. But the whole philosophy had a foundation of mysticism and superstition. As Ren understands it now, the meridians are a purely practical system describing how human biology interacts with the tangible effects of the soul, and there's nothing spiritual about it in itself like its inventors had believed.
• Dying Moment of Awesome: Even when being overwhelmed by superior foes like Hazel, Cinder, and Tyrian at the same time Master Ren just sounds disappointed by their motives, still teaching a lesson even as they try to end his life.
• Friend to All Living Things: After a few years of training, Jaune is so serene that he can calmly communicate with a random bear that comes up to him to bum some of the fish he's catching off him, and neither one is remotely distrustful of or threatened by the other.
• Great Offscreen War: One Point of Divergence from canon is that the peacetime after the Faunus Rebellion was a brief respite of twenty-ish years. Recently, conflict between Menagerie and Atlas has fired up again with such an intensity that all the kingdoms are preparing for a potential second Great War. Able-bodied civilians are being drafted and excess resources commandeered all over, which contributed to Ansel being destroyed as most of the people that would have defended it were called away. Even places that aren't destroyed are under considerable turmoil as their economies are starved and they are plagued by bandits with no one left to fight them off.
• Groin Attack: Mercury gives away that he's holding back against Jaune when the latter decides to test him by throwing an all-out punch to the nuts. In a panic to protect his junk, he reflexively blocks and counters with more speed and skill than he was showing before.
• Handicapped Badass: As it turns out, Master Ren is a badass not only in spite of being positively ancient by any standard, but also in spite of suffering from advanced lung disease that should have killed him decades ago.
• Healing Magic Is the Hardest: Healing Hands is a particularly advanced Aura technique. Less advanced is using one's own Aura as a tool to manipulate another's Aura into healing them more effectively. But using one's own Aura to fuel the healing is much harder, as the healer's power doesn't know how to do all the processes instinctively when it's outside their body, and must be deliberately controlled to do them and not make mistakes.
• I Let You Win: Jaune figures out pretty quickly that Mercury is sandbagging during their spar. He responds by holding back quite a lot himself, so neither party gets the full extent of the other's skill and abilities. As it turns out, Jaune was holding back a lot more than Mercury.
• Instant Expert: Instant in a relative sense, anyway. Master Ren privately muses that Jaune has well above-average aptitude and potential with Aura. It takes him only a couple short years to pretty well lock down the basics of the Lotus art and go up against Huntsman-level enemies like Mercury and Tyrian, when the traditional discipline is supposed to take much longer to show results like that.
• Last of His Kind: Master Ren was the final disciple of the Lotus Sect before Jaune winds up in his care.
• Mentor Occupational Hazard: Master Ren is fully aware that this is inevitable — even if nothing happens, he is going to pass on before Jaune has time to learn everything. When Cinder and her entourage arrive with transparent ulterior motives, Ren realizes the deadline is likely fast approaching, and gives Jaune the information he needs to preserve the Lotus tradition and continue his training on his own when the time comes.
• Mooching Master: As payment for saving his life and taking him in, Master Ren has Jaune perform most of the necessary chores to support both of them, as he's clearly too old to have to take care of himself anymore. Jaune almost instantly sees through it — the Master is not exploiting him, he's giving a traumatized child an immediate distraction and goal so that he doesn't fall into depression. The long labor also disabuses him of the aimless civilian lifestyle he grew up in and gets him in the right mindset to properly learn the Lotus art.
• No-Sell: The second Emerald tries to cast an illusion on Master Ren, he notices and uses an Aura technique to give her a Poke in the Third Eye.
• Old Master: Master Ren has spent the majority of his long life honing the Lotus art to the keenest edge. In his old age, there's not a single character who's shown to be able to threaten him one-on-one — he dances circles around Raven, and can comfortably fight Cinder and Hazel at the same time.
• Paper Tiger: As usual, the Branwen bandits are mostly only threatening to people who have literally no means of defending themselves. In this case, the clan is largely comprised of deserters who were too chicken-shit to cut it in the real military, even as just basic soldiers. Raven is implied to be more dangerous, but even she fails to intimidate Master Ren at all.
• Pressure Point: The "meridian" system of Chinese medicine and spirituality is adapted here, in a manner that's both demystified and justified. RWBY does have a "life energy" that does "run through the body" and cause effects, in the form of Aura. Though the inventors of the system in this setting were likely wrong about the meridians having any religious or philosophical significance, they were right that there were certain places on the body that were functionally important to the flow of Aura and focusing on those points could have major effects. Most of the intermediate-and-above Lotus teachings deal with manipulating the meridians of oneself and others. Master Ren demonstrates by lightly poking Raven a few times, causing her Aura in that area to fail to protect her from his blade.
• Quality over Quantity: An acolyte at one of the traditional temples may take decades to learn the full breadth of Aura and its capabilities, and will end up with more strength, endurance, and versatility than most modern Huntsmen. But a Huntsman may need only a few short years before taking up the fight against the Grimm, because they only need to learn Aura as a shield and a bludgeon, and humanity is numerous and prosperous enough now that they need protectors sooner rather than later. Master Ren explains that both of these approaches are valid and have their pros and cons, and the only part of it that seems to bug him is that the old ways are dying out when he feels they're still valuable.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Master Ren imposes strict discipline on Jaune, but in practical ways rather than dogmatic ones. He wants Jaune to have all the skills to be self-sufficient and keep his tradition alive, but he mentions other masters would go overboard with arbitrary rituals and sacrifices that do nothing more than enforce control and suffering on the student.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: Reports say that the Faunus army from Menagerie has made landfall on Vale's coast as retaliation for the kingdom supporting Atlas with trade, where they then proceeded to raze villages, taking no prisoners and leaving no survivors except for refugees who fled at first sight of trouble. Supposedly they even massacred other Faunus who didn't join them in slaughtering innocent humans.
• Secretly Dying: Jaune lives with Master Ren for years and only gets an inkling that the old man is not well when his first excursion out of the temple is to a nearby village to pick up medication. Talking with the elderly alchemist, he finds out that the old man was given a prognosis of only a few years for a lung disease, but then proceeded to outlive the doctor and is still going decades later.
• Sole Survivor: As far as anyone can tell, Jaune was the only one present in Ansel at the time of its destruction to make it out alive.
• Stock Wushu Weapons: Jaune trades in his regular broadsword from RWBY canon for a jian he recieves from Master Ren.
• Supernatural Martial Arts: A given, since RWBY canon already established aura can make you stronger and faster and tougher, but this story delves a lot more into just what you can do with such aura.
• Take That!: Coeur has been deliberate in defining the story as a tribute to Wuxia, not Xianxia. In Chapter 2, Master Ren goes on a tangent saying that there are versions of Aura teachings that claim to unlock immortality or godlike strength through mysticism or alchemy, and that it's all nonsense invented by foolish men afraid of death or conmen tricking people with snake oil.
• Training from Hell: Downplayed. It's tough, sure, but Jaune isn't being beaten to within an inch of his life every day. Just expected to learn the hard way and learn well. Most of Master Ren's teachings generally boil down to "figure it out yourself" only acting as a guide to help Jaune figure things out.
• The Worf Effect: Traditional disciplines like the Lotus art are meant to get better results in the end than the Huntsman academies do. This is proven very quickly when several characters, whom the readers know from canon are some of the most dangerous Huntsmen-trained fighters in the world, cross paths with Jaune and Master Ren and proceed to get schooled.
• Wuxia: Implicitly, the story is this. The author's notes even go into details about what sort of storytelling elements to expect.
• You Are Not Ready: After one too many ominous incidents, Master Ren feels forced to introduce the full roadmap of the Lotus discipline to Jaune as he fears there will not be time to reveal it gradually. He makes it clear to his student that he is not to attempt to learn from any of the most advanced manuals, no matter how tempting they might be. The techniques therein are incredibly precise and complex, and rely on foundational knowledge and mastery from the earlier manuals. If Jaune were to attempt an advanced technique without the needed control and experience, the consequences would (not could, would) be dangerous or even deadly.

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