Of Hunters and Immortals

Jiang was getting too comfortable.

He realised it sometime in the second week of routine. The moment had been quiet, uneventful—just a brief pause after morning drills, standing in the courtyard with the winter sun on his shoulders and the sounds of sparring echoing around him. For a moment, he'd simply breathed. No tension, no racing thoughts. Just a long exhale and the warmth of the sun on his skin.

And that was when the unease had settled in.

He was starting to relax. And that was dangerous.

The Sect hadn't changed—still full of politics, posturing, and people who either wanted to ignore him or beat him bloody—but Jiang had adapted. He had routines now. Habits. He was even starting to recognise some of the servants and other disciples – not that he really interacted with them all that much, but even that much was somewhat out of the ordinary for him.

The duels still came, but they'd slowed to a trickle, and he was increasingly able to defend himself in them. He was losing more than he won still, by a fair amount, even, but… he didn't feel pressured by them anymore.

He was getting used to it.

And that made him itch under his skin.

Progress hadn't stopped. He still trained, still meditated, still pushed his body until it protested and then ignored it anyway. He spent time asking quiet questions, listening to older disciples talk about mercenary contracts and border patrols, and piecing together scraps of information about bandit movements in the outer provinces. He knew more now than he had before—about how captives were sold, who might buy them, where such transactions might happen—but it wasn't enough. It felt like chasing shadows with a blindfold on.

And with each day that passed, the edges of his resolve dulled just a little more.

For all that cultivators seemed to thrive on conflict, the Sect coddled in strange ways. Food appeared without effort. Clothes were provided. No need to hunt, to scrape together coin, to barter with stubborn merchants over half-cured pelts. For someone who had grown up worrying about the next snowstorm and whether the root cellar would hold, the lack of struggle should have been a gift.

Instead, it made him feel like he was stagnating. Like he was standing still while the world moved on without him.

Li Xuan hadn't changed. Still smug, still insufferable, still hell-bent on drilling him into the ground every other morning. Their training sessions were as exhausting as ever, and Jiang left most of them with sore muscles and a growing sense of inadequacy. The gap between them felt impossibly wide. Jiang wasn't even sure if he was making progress anymore, or if Li Xuan was just shifting the goalposts every time he caught up.

Zhang Shuren, on the other hand, was a different kind of misery. The man had taken to "offering pointers" at irregular intervals—always unannounced, always public. Jiang hated it. Zhang would wait until there were just enough onlookers to make retreat humiliating, then casually invite him into a spar that Jiang always lost, badly.

But.

Zhang's advice was… good. Painfully so. Practical. Precise. Every fight left him sore, embarrassed, and more skilled than he'd been the day before. And unlike Li Xuan, Zhang taught at a level Jiang could reach with enough effort. Which, of course, only made it more frustrating.

He was improving. Slowly. Painfully. But he was improving.

And it wasn't enough.

Some nights, he found himself staring out over the mountain ridge, watching the clouds move across the sky, and wondering if he'd made a mistake. If he should have left weeks ago, kept tracking, kept pushing forward instead of sitting here, playing at being a disciple. He told himself he was gathering strength. Resources. Information. But it felt like excuses. It felt like cowardice.

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He missed movement. Missed the forest. Missed being able to act instead of waiting. The Sect was a place of stillness, of layered words and careful steps, and Jiang had never been good at either.

And worst of all, he was starting to get used to it.

It wasn't all bad, though, and he genuinely had been using his time wisely. Working on finding a technique was difficult, considering the Sect didn't have any scrolls, but it wasn't impossible.

Then again, maybe it was, and all the progress he thought he was making was actually pointless.

Using the raven to build a technique from scratch was… a work in progress. Part of the problem was that it came and went as it pleased. Sometimes it would vanish for days. Sometimes it would be waiting on his windowsill before dawn, black eyes blinking slowly in judgment as if to say he was already behind. It never spoke – obviously – but it watched him, tilting its head in that disconcertingly human way whenever he tried to practice the technique.

He wasn't even sure it counted as a proper technique at all, but over the weeks he'd gotten curious as to why nobody else seemed to ever notice the raven. Granted, most people didn't pay particular attention to birds, but after he'd broken through to the third stage some of Elder Lu's questions had been rather pointedly asking if he had interacted with any spirit beasts since igniting his dantian.

Jiang still wasn't entirely sure why he had lied. Maybe it was pride – not wanting to consider that the strange not-bird could be affecting him. Maybe it was fear, that he would be tossed out of the Sect if the Elders learnt the truth and forever lose the chance to get strong enough to rescue his family.

In hindsight, he should have been more curious as to why Elder Lu didn't pick up on the lie in the first place – Elder Yan certainly hadn't struggled to notice his lie when they first met, and Jiang doubted he'd suddenly become a better liar in the intervening weeks.

That was what tipped him off in the end.

The raven was way too stealthy to be normal – not that the bird itself was normal, but still. Surely someone would have had a couple of questions about it by now… unless, of course, it was doing something to avert attention.

Jiang didn't really understand how it worked, but as far as he could tell the technique worked by sort of bending his Qi – not cloaking it, exactly, but diffusing it. Stretching it out at the edges until his presence felt less substantial. Less immediate. He wasn't invisible, not even close, but people's eyes slid off him a little more easily. Their attention drifted. They'd glance over him, then past him, then forget he'd been there at all.

It didn't always work. Some people still saw him just fine. And if he moved too fast or tried to actively do anything while using it, it unravelled instantly. But when it worked, it worked. He'd used it a couple of times to avoid the stubborn few disciples who still thought it was great fun to challenge him to duels every day.

Useful? Yes. Powerful? Not really. He couldn't hide from a cultivator who was paying attention. Hell, he doubted he could hide from a half-blind sparrow if it got a good enough look at him, but the important part was that it had potential.

And it was his.

The Sect hadn't taught him this. No elder had approved it, no scroll had listed it. He'd learned it alone, from a silent bird with too much judgment in its eyes.

Which, more and more, was starting to feel like a metaphor for something. Probably something unflattering.

Still, the fact remained—he had a technique. One that, however shaky and half-formed, belonged to him. That meant something.

What it meant… he wasn't sure yet.

The problem with obsessively focusing on finding his family was that it left him with very little room to think about what would happen after. Up until now, he'd sort of been putting the topic off – too busy trying to figure out how he was going to manage the rescue without dying along the way.

But now?

Now he had time. Time to think. To worry. To realise that getting them back was only the start of the problem.

They couldn't go home, obviously. Their home didn't exist anymore, having burned to the ground. Even if, for whatever reason, he rebuilt the house from nothing, it wouldn't be the same – not with the rest of the village gone.

And besides… he was starting to like it here in a way he didn't particularly want to admit. There was a rhythm to Sect life, a sense of purpose, even if the politics made him want to break something. And, if he was being honest, there was something deeply satisfying about not having to worry about where the next meal would come from.

He still hadn't worked out whether the Azure Sky Sect allowed cultivators to bring their mortal families in. He hadn't seen anything that indicated it was common, but then again most of the disciples were from nobility anyway, so they didn't exactly need a place for their family to live.

If he made it far enough - high enough - maybe that would change. Maybe he could argue for it. Or demand it. Or earn it.

If not…

Well. He'd burn that bridge when he got to it.