Between Beast And Buddha: A Drunken Monkey's Journey to Immortality

Orange-crest was exploring himself. Or, he was exploring the mountain? He wasn't exactly sure which statement was more true.

Cultivation was mysterious like that.

The monkey had found a spot beneath a tree he rather liked and sat down in the tall grass that tickled its roots. He'd tried sitting as his master taught at first, back straight and legs knotted. But it'd felt wrong. He'd tried curling up next, the most comfortable position, but that'd felt wrong as well. Too relaxed. In the end he'd placed his feet together before him, and laid his staff across his knees. His back was bent, his head bowed, as his forearms rested atop his weapon.

It felt like a respectful attentive position. But not like he'd sat down upon a sapling. A good posture for some serious cultivation.

The hollow at the base of this tree would not normally be a very good spot to cultivate. The qi was sparse, compared to the Fathomless Well or the centipede-cave. But today qi felt effortless to gather. Like the mountain itself wanted him to cultivate. With every breath orange-crest took he felt the mountain breathe with him. A sense of connection that felt like it was ever one errant thought from tearing apart like a spider's web.

Enlightenment. Master Li Xun had spoken of it, warned him it was not to be wasted. As if orange-crest was the one who chose whether its fruits would be wasted. He could only control his actions, not their outcomes.

The Azure Spirit Method was a mysterious thing, far more difficult to understand than the many laws of plants and animals. It had three major parts. The first was the visualization. The idea that his master insisted he meditate upon. A mountain, its roots stretching deep into the earth. Its peak scraping the heavens, ever reaching out for the endless azure expanse of the skies. An image that was supposed to draw qi to him, when he looked upon it with the eyes of his mind. The part of the second was the cycling pattern. The way he was supposed to move the qi that was drawn to him, in order to make it his own. The manual said that mountains grew from their roots, and so he should circulate the qi within his belly, in strange patterns, until it grew ready to push the mountain upward from its base. That part did not work very well for orange-crest. His qi hardly felt like a mountain at all, it seemed to him more like the flame of a hearth, or the contents of a pill furnace. The third part of the method was the description of the stages. When one should need to perform a breakthrough. What their qi should feel like at each stage. Ten stages, where qi slowly transformed from gas, to fire, to water, to stone. And then some vague notes about an eleventh stage, and how most would never need to worry about attaining it.

Orange-crest was not sure if he truly cultivated the method or not. He'd performed his first breakthrough before he'd ever learned it. He'd achieved his second with his master's direct guidance. He'd cultivated the method a great deal between his second and third breakthroughs. Obeyed its instructions carefully. It had worked, a little. He'd definitely gotten stronger. But the night he'd climbed high up the slopes of the Azure Mountain and broken through to the third stage, he hadn't been following the method closely. He'd hewed far more closely to the advice his brothers had given him, than he had the words in the dusty scroll.

He recalled the words he'd long since memorized, but never felt he understood, for the hundredth time.

"Bear a mountain in your heart, for only the deepest of foundations can scrape the clouds. Though duty is heavier than a mountain, a cultivator shall not buckle under its weight. Dig deep, to rise higher. The peak only rises from the roots. Man follows nature as earth follows heaven. Only the most unyielding stone can dare to reach heavenward. Only by forging our own chains can we ever become free."

They were good words. Heavy, cold, words. Words for men.

Orange-crest liked living on mountains, but he did not want to become one.

His master had told him that most daoists eventually came to cultivate methods of their own creation. He had not suggested that orange-crest do this. He hadn't needed to.

Orange-crest already knew he would one day invent his own way of cultivating. He'd known he would as soon as his master had told him that men had invented all the ways of cultivating. He even already knew what he would call it. The Monkey Refining Law. One day, he would teach it to all the other monkeys. The only problem is that he still didn't know what his method was. He had a great name. But no image, no cycling pattern, no understanding of his method's shape and nature. What sorts of qi he would take in, and how he would use them to shape himself.

Orange-crest took another breath. It almost hurt, the way he could feel everything. He'd used a third of his qi fighting Jiang Yan. But his dantian was already full again, and every breath drawn pushed it closer to bursting. His limbs tingled as energy surged through his meridians, demanding to be used.

Enlightenment was supposed to be a blessing. But it had come too early, he didn't know what to do with it.

He tried anyway.

Orange-crest exhaled, feeling his turbulent qi slow a little. He felt the mountain pull back from him a little, as if waiting for an answer.

He needed an image. An ideal. He thought first of the Monkey King. How could he not?

In his mind, the king stood as tall as his master, with broad shoulders and a straight back. His posture was like a man's, but none could ever mistake him for one. His fur was was like the light of a wildfire reflected in a mirror of gold, lighter and brighter than orange-crest's. He held his staff in one hand, a struggling yearling, no doubt freshly rescued from some terrible peril, in the other.

The image felt like home, but there was a terrible weight to it. A pressure that did not come from the terrible strength of his king's form, or even in the way his king's jewelry shined with sourceless fire-light. The mountain-shaking pressure came from the lines of the king's face, the eternities reflected in his eyes. The eyes that had seen a hundred-hundred monkeys like orange-crest live and die.

The mountain still waited for an answer. Orange-crest shivered, and for a fraction of a moment, he felt like the Azure Mountain shivered with him.

No. It was wrong. He could not, would not, cultivate the image of a person. Not even the Monkey King.

He considered other images. His master and brother, with their terrible might. The other orange-crests he'd seen in his stone-dream. The human trickster-hero with hair like a river of flame, and the perfect predator that towered over even big-butt and Brother Han Jian.

All wrong. If his king was not worthy, how could his master be? And he'd already rejected the futures of the stone-dream, he could not turn to them now.

He saw another mountain next. His first home, Mount Yuelu. Its receding profile, as he'd seen it that night clutched in Daoist Scouring Medicine's hand. It was both his past, and part of his future. But it was not enough.

The connection, the qi, began to slip through his fingers. The mountain demanded an answer.

He saw it then. Or felt it, perhaps. He didn't need to know the destination. Only the next step. He did not need to invent his Monkey Refining Law in this moment. He only needed to shift the Azure Spirit Method by the smallest of margins.

He saw a mountain in his mind. One far taller than even the central peak of the Azure Mountain. It was so massive it filled the entirety of his mind. Its peak did not scrape the trackless blue fields of the heavens. Rather its bulk vanished into the clouds, the mountain so wide and steep he could not even begin to guess how far into the misty heavens it rose. Rather than a mountain, it almost seemed more like the stony trunk of a tree fit to span the whole world.

A dozen figures dotted the mountain. Yang Wei and big-butt, standing merely a few dozen chi above him, staring down with pride and impatience. His master and brother far ahead, waiting with patient bemusement for him to catch up. Misty shapes, the stories of daoists and elders he'd never met. Formless-gleam danced among them, ever just out of sight. Above them all, standing just beneath the hidden expanse of the heavens, the Monkey King looked down upon them all. His eyes were stern and terrible, but filled with pride and joy.

Orange-crest's spirit put one paw in front of the other, and climbed.

Heat built in his belly. Instinct and reason moved in concert, revealing a cycling method to him. His qi boiled like water, and crackled like fire. It rose in sudden fits and starts, climbing up from his lower dantian. It rose up his body, moving in concert with the climbing monkey.

The qi tried to stop when it reached his head. To rest in the tight confines of his upper dantian, for it had nowhere higher to climb. Orange-crest didn't let it, forcing it to fall, and climb anew. His master had warned him against splitting his cultivation base between dantians this early. His vision was boundless, but his flesh and meridians were not. So the qi exited his body, only to be drawn in anew for a another round of cycling.

This part felt wrong, but only a little wrong. Like it could be better.

In his mind's eye, the tiny image of himself hardly seemed to move. The mountain was so massive he might as well have been standing still. But orange-crest continued, putting one paw in front of the other.

Eventually, the newly absorbed qi began to get tired. Sluggish and controllable. Generously, orange-crest allowed it to rest in his middle dantian. Slowly, he felt his cultivation begin to change. This new qi was different somehow, in a way he trusted would reveal itself in time.

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He knew this was a simple technique. Not one of those legendary cultivation methods his brother had spoken of, the impossible arts that made their practitioners untouchable within their realm.

But it was his. And it was better for him than the Azure Spirit Method.

With every breath, power surged through him. His head felt light, like he'd climbed to those rarified heights were the air became thin.

Orange-crest began to feel pressure build in his chest. Limitations he had barely been conscious of before suddenly rising to the fore. He did not rage against them, batter at the walls of his dantian with waves of qi like he had last time. He just kept climbing, one paw in front of the other.

The handholds grew smaller. Further apart. He strained his spirit-body for every chi he climbed. He couldn't see the cliff. The boundary of the fourth stage of Qi Condensation. But he knew it was there. It had to be. He could only trust, and strain his fingers, striving for one more step.

The boundaries of his dantian began to shudder, The qi within him was slowing, but that was good. It meant it wanted to come home, to rest in his overfull dantian.

Orange-crest gave one final push, straining to crest the cliff, to clamber up to the solid ground of the next stage. His spirit-fingers reached up, and found only slick black stone.

There was no cliff to be grasped. He slipped. The connection shattered.

Orange-crest jolted back to reality, falling forward. His stomach roiled, like it was somehow both empty and filled with rotten meat. The qi that had felt so good, so life affirming, just a moment ago, rebelled. It raged, no longer quiescent and biddable, tearing up his meridians in a wild rush to flee his unworthy body. He felt like Brother Han Jian had socked him in the stomach. Sour blood filled his mouth. He gagged, then spit, letting it all spill out. Little grains of rice floated in the chunky reddish puddle, like maggots in old meat.

"Rude." He told the mountain, coughing the word out between bloody gasps.

The moment his stomach stopped emptying itself, orange-crest shoved a healing pill through his lips. He was down to four of them for the rest of the tournament. But he could make more, with the spirit stones his master had given him. The ingredients were not that expensive-

The spirit stones!

Orange-crest checked his pouch. It was open. Empty. For a moment, he thought someone had robbed him like he had those two disciples in the centipede-cave. He blinked, and remembered. He hadn't even noticed when he made the decision, but he'd consumed the three spirit stones during his attempt at breaking through.

"Don't worry." He told the mountain. "I'll get it next time."

He'd rushed at the end. Hadn't trusted his strength. He knew better now. The hand-holds were there. Other people had walked this road before him, so a passage must exist. Slow and steady would carry him through.

The autumn wind, chill and clean, shook the tree above the monkey. A leaf fell, gently landing in the puddle of blood and rice.

Orange-crest looked up, and saw a dozen of the leaf's brothers dancing through the air. How sad, that each leaf would only ever fly for a few short moments in its life.

"Stop." He commanded, picking one on a whim.

It shivered to a standstill, limned in qi that shined with a color between orange and gold. Another leaf collided with it, bouncing off without budging it. It didn't take much to break his immobilizing spell, but it took a little more than a falling leaf.

"Come here."

He felt his qi latch on to the immobilizing spell as it never had before. The leaf did not glide through the air elegantly. It zipped over to him like a dragonfly, so abrupt he almost failed to catch it.

He marveled at it, how its own fire-orange coloration complemented the light of his qi. Wondered at what had changed in his cultivation base to make manipulating an immobilized object possible.

It wasn't the true Phantom Palm. He knew instinctively it wouldn't work on anything he hadn't immobilized first. But it was more than he'd ever been able to do before. He might not even have needed to leap into the air if he'd been able to pull Jiang Yan's sword directly to his hand.

Yang Wei might be an impossible fight for him as he was now, even with his stone-form and illusions. Both of those seemed a lot better for dealing with the Xiao Clan's blasts of flame than a powerful spear-wielder. Yang Wei's martial skill had already been terrifying, orange-crest wasn't looking forward to seeing how he had improved. But if orange-crest could disarm him, he liked his chances a lot better. Fist to fist, he was pretty sure he'd win that.

Master Li Xun said cultivation was learning the true shape of the world. Brother Han Jian said it was choosing a path to walk, a future to grasp.

It was both, and neither. And orange-crest was getting better at it.

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Daoist Scouring Medicine's finger glided down the tournament roster, looking for his disciple's name. It was rather inconvenient that sect did not publish the full brackets for the tournament, instead releasing each round one at a time. The elders did not even bother to pretend that they did not place their fingers on the scales, arranging matches for their own purposes. Officially, the justification was that the sect wanted to best display the full breadth of it's talent for outsiders, and so sought to preserve as much of it for the final rounds as possible.

But the opaque process made it difficult for him to guess how Elder Lu would attempt to fix the matches to eliminate his disciple. Would he seek to maximize the length and difficulty of the gauntlet Li Hou would need to traverse? Crush him beneath the weight of accumulated injuries? If he did, he risked the monkey showing enough talent that he would not be able to justify placing a prodigy in his path prior to the final rounds. But placing Li Hou opposite a prodigy early meant putting all his eggs in one basket. If the monkey won, Elder Lu would not be able to risk getting another eliminated before the main stage. Even if he wished to, the other elders wouldn't allow it.

Not knowing how Elder Lu would proceed made it difficult to give Li Hou good advice about how to perform. Showing his talents early might make his matches easier, but it would also make them common knowledge, giving his later opponents time to prepare countermeasures. Li Xun hated this particular sort of plotting, where hidden information made it impossible to know for certain one was making the optimal move. Back when they'd been on better terms, Li Xun had often played board games with Daoist Guarding Thunder. Their matches had been relatively even, but when Cao Renshu took games off him, it was because Li Xun had played the rules, while he'd played the players. If his estranged brother were arranging the matches, he would go all-in early. A noble scion by round two or three at the latest. But would the man's master favor the same move?

"Your next opponent is Wu Yingjie. Do you know him?" He asked the monkey.

Orange-crest thought about it. Wu Yingjie... It sounded vaguely familiar, but it didn't knock any fruit free in his mind. He'd definitely heard the name once or twice. But humans had so many names that were basically the same. Yingjie and Qingyi, and Jingyi, and probably even Qingjie. How was anyone supposed to keep them all straight?

"Nope. Maybe met." The monkey hedged. "Don't remember."

"Hmm." His master hummed, shifting the papers on his desk, pulling another page to the fore. "He must not have made much of an impression. He's on the roster for that staff class Disciple Chang ran. The updated roster for the students that made it through the whole class."

"Can't be that good, if I don't remember him."

"Don't get arrogant, Li Hou. Actually, that ship has already set sail. Don't get more arrogant. At least not until you win the tournament."

"I'm not arrogant." The monkey protested. "Just the best."

"You spent six months in the stone. You gained great benefits, but you cannot underestimate your opposition. They'll have spent that time training."

"Believing I'm gonna win is not underestimating." Li Hou complained. "Besides, last time you said you knew I would win."

"He's in the fourth stage, more advanced than your last opponent." Daoist Scouring Medicine continued, ignoring the monkey. "It's difficult to tell exactly how advanced your bodily cultivation is. Since bodily cultivation has fewer explicit bottlenecks and breakthroughs, the usual way of quantifying it is to compare one's strength to a spiritual cultivator's. What level of talisman or defensive technique you can punch your way through, or how much suppression you can withstand. From how you described your standoff with Disciple Yang, I suspect your bodily cultivation is the equivalent of either the fifth of sixth stage of Qi Condensation. Yang Wei's pressure should not have even fazed you if your body possessed the strength of the seventh stage."

"Six is bigger than four." Orange-crest noted sagely. "Six plus three is way bigger than four."

"If you're even in the sixth stage. Yang Wei is only in the fifth, and clearly his cultivation pressure shook you at least a little. I think it is more likely your body is in the fifth stage. And you can't just add realms together. I stand at the peak of Foundation Establishment in both body and spirit, and I am not optimistic about my chances against even a freshly advanced Core Formation cultivator. You should be strongly advantaged over this Wu Yingjie. But strength in battle is not a mere matter of realms. Even gulfs in greater realms can be overcome, let alone a disparity in lesser ones. I've seen cultivators overcome substantial disparities in cultivation bases without even relying on heaven-shaking techniques or magical treasures. In fact, I once witnessed a cultivator take down a foe three small realms his senior merely by taking advantage of elemental affinities and battlefield conditions. All the strength and defensive capabilities of wood techniques mean little against an opponent wielding flames moving too fast for their foe to catch."

"It was you, wasn't it?"

"What?"

"You lit the wood man on fire and watched him burn."

"That's irrelevant."

"Wu Yingjie won't be you."

Daoist Scouring Medicine smiled, but his voice remained stern.

"I was no prodigy when I fought in my own Initiate Tournament. I was eliminated in my second match by an unremarkable opponent. A man whose later career was so unimpressive that I would need to consult old records to even recall his name. I found my true strength years later. But Daoist Enduring Oath was one of those disciples who rose higher than anyone expected. He came from a background almost as lowly as my own, and suffered great tragedy shortly before joining the sect. He entered the tournament in the third stage of Qi Condensation, and finished it in the fourth. He placed fifth in our year, defeating two disciples in the fifth stage. One of them was Daoist Guarding Thunder, in the quarterfinals. His size, cleverness, and unshakeable resolve certainly helped. But what made it possible is that none of them took him sufficiently seriously until it was too late. Both of those opponents could have picked him apart if they'd brought the right treasures, or changed their strategy. You remain a dark horse. But any opponent you face could be concealing the same sort of hidden advantages you are. Or, if they have an elder's favor, be informed of the ones you possess. The average disciple might not know about your bodily cultivation, but any elder who watched your last match will have sensed its existence and approximate strength."

Orange-crest sighed. He didn't like thinking like he'd needed to when he was weak. He knew the Azure Mountain concealed monsters, but none of those were allowed to compete in the tournament. Couldn't he at least have a little fun, instead of treating every battle like one wrong move would be fatal? Worrying over every possible mishap did not actually make a monkey more careful.

But perhaps it made his master feel better.

"And this time, please try not to destroy your robe." Li Xun continued. "I only have two more spares, and I don't want you running around naked until at least the semifinals."

"Wouldn't destroy robe if didn't wear robe." Orange-crest muttered mulishly.

"Counterfactuals aren't cogent arguments if they don't address the initial premise of why an action was performed in the first place."

"Obscure words are cheating."

Man and monkey met each other's eyes for a moment. Orange-crest broke first, falling down on his butt full of laughter.

"We'll just have to go into this one blind." Li Xun said, suppressing a chuckle of his own. "If you didn't learn anything about his fighting style training alongside him for months, I doubt I'll be able to ferret out much from rumor."

"Yes-yes. Prepare for everything."

"It would be good if you could begin to lay the ground work for some..." The daoist trailed off, thinking. "Impolitic outbursts, in later matches."

"What?"

"Say some mean things to him. Not too cruel. But domineering and impolite."

"Oh." Orange-crest smiled. "I was gonna do that anyway. Men can't handle their insults."