Sky Pride

The morning after his first lesson with Daoist Steelshimmer, Tian rose before dawn and invited Sister Liren to cultivate with him in the garden. They both seemed to get something from watching the dawn rise as they meditated. Tian was cultivating almost constantly, but he still felt that dawn cultivation had that extra something that made everything go that little bit better. Besides, he had ulterior motives.

The Myriad Tormenting Worms dagger was tucked against the small of his back, providing a steady stream of curse qi as the Advent of Spring drank in the morning sun. He had grown so used to it, he scarcely noticed it anymore. After having a demon's finger jabbed nearly through your chest, the cold prickles barely registered. He had to periodically remind himself that it was a dangerous, valuable weapon. For other people, anyway.

The thought made him smile. He was still eating garbage, turning poison into medicine. His body exceeded mortal notions of perfection. He was sitting next to a good sister in an immortal garden flying through the air on a magical barge, but somehow, he never quite left the dump. Not all the way. It was his roots. That was fine. He was growing. Right now, he was a tree, stretching out of the rotting remains of the mortal world. Reaching up and grasping the heavens.

In and out, his breath cycling endlessly, the Hell Suppressing Art spinning within him. Tian nicked himself the other day with the tip of his rope dart, just to see how quickly he healed. A scratch healed almost as quickly as he made it. It still hurt, but the way his heart raced, watching the shallow furrow along his thigh not even having time to bleed before it healed made it all worth it. There wasn't so much as a reddish line to show where the cut had been made. He felt more solid too. He couldn't explain it better than that. He was flexible to a frankly silly degree, yet he was moving with explosive speed and he was hitting hard enough to crack stones.

The art was aptly named. Demons or heretics alike would get suppressed directly into a smear on the ground around him. To say nothing of the benefits it provided for his cultivation.

The rising dawn flashed purple on the horizon. Tian and Hong breathed in perfect synchronicity, drawing in the qi. Something within Tian filled to the very brim.

There was a moment of balancing on the precipice. Tian could feel now what had been happening with each advancement. That wood qi was pulling the other elements along with it as it spread through his body, saturating his flesh with vital energy. He had once imagined cultivation as a series of vessels, and once a smaller vessel overflowed, it poured into the next, larger vessel- a tea cup into a soup bowl into a jar into a water barrel and so on. But that wasn't right at all.

Where, on the human body, were the series of buckets supposed to be? Did they magically vanish after being filled? Was there a neat row of vital energy filled vessels dotted along his lower ribs? Of course not.

He was the bucket. The whole of him. The qi was pulled into his lower dantian and converted into the vital energy that strengthened and gave life to the fleshy body. Each level of cultivation was a transformation- not of the flesh itself, exactly, but of the body's ability to hold all that qi. The genius of cultivation arts wasn't the drawing in of qi, it was that saturation and transformation. The difference between a good cultivation art and a bad one was that stark. Tian couldn't begin to understand the mechanics of it.

A body was often referred to as the mortal vessel. Something carrying the person, not the person themselves. Tian smiled. For a vessel to be useful, it must be empty. The vital energy filled him to the very brim, then overflowed. The vessel broke and reformed, no longer a water barrel. There was a whole pond waiting to be filled, and the little energy he had built up over five years of cultivation barely made a puddle in it.

He had remade his body repeatedly. Grandpa had just done something dramatic with all the accumulated elemental dao charm from the Six Turns Cavern, to say nothing of all the curse energy from that demonic finger. That all played a role too. Tian wondered if Myriad Blessings Child, the creator of the Advent of Spring, would be surprised by just how mighty each new level made him.

"Congratulations on reaching Level Seven." Hong glared at him, then smiled. "In place of my senior sisters, allow me to give you the customary 'That's nice' of acknowledgement." She stood, faintly leaned over him, and delivered the single most patronizing shoulder pat of his entire life.

It was made immediately worse by a white feathered wing batting him on his other shoulder.

Tian spun, looking at the traitorous Snow Grace Crane as Hong collapsed, convulsing with laughter. "This is what you learn? This? Hooliganism, and the petty envy of a junior? Crane, I thought better of you!"

The crane looked unmoved and batted him again. Tian required no special techniques this time. He could feel her wants clearly.

"I am spoiling you. We start fight training today. No more guessing games." Tian grumbled and gave her a fishy treat.

"Stand up for yourself, crane! Don't be oppressed by the shorties of the world. You already tower over him. Take the fish you deserve!" Sister Liren was not, in Tian's opinion, being helpful.

"She does not tower over me! I am almost a whole foot taller than her."

"Four inches is almost a foot, eh? My sisters were right again. She can grow into a crane big enough for you to fly around on. She is, definitionally, towering over you."

Tian silently vowed to learn a cultivation art that let him transform into a giant twenty miles tall. If a bird could make itself huge, a human definitely could. He swiftly changed the topic. "How did your training go with Daoist Steelshimmer?"

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"Excellent! She was full of profound insights on mental training and combatting the illusory dao. She was even gracious enough to share some of her understanding of the dao of piercing. Not quite the same as the spear dao I study, but very related. I have to say, Elder Feng's face is enormous, to persuade such an accomplished daoist to share her wisdom so generously." Hong's face lit up.

Tian nodded. Their elder certainly was an expert, but he couldn't help but suspect Sister Liren's gain was as a result of his efforts. Ah well. A senior brother should be magnanimous. He patted her on the shoulder.

"That's nice."

He didn't ask her about the generation-crushing thing. Tian suspected that was something Daoist Steelshimmer could cover with Liren in a single sentence.

Blessings came in pairs that day, as he finished cultivating his second dart that afternoon. It was almost indistinguishable from the first one, but after so much handling and refinement Tian thought he could tell them apart. He flung them one at a time and watched them weave through the swinging balls until they stuck into the fourth ball. Concentrating on one of the darts, he circulated Imperial Heavenly Swallows as powerfully as he could, and pulled.

It wiggled. Then it fell onto the ground. Tian felt like he was trying to drag a warehouse with a thin chain. His whole body ached as he forced his vital energy out of his body and into the bit of his body that, inexplicably, was twenty feet away. It tumbled and twisted and dragged, but it came. Tian was gasping for air by the time it nudged against his shoe.

He reached down and scooped it up, jabbing it into the air in triumph. He had done it! He could finally call the darts back to him. He collapsed backwards and sprawled on the path, luxuriating in his success. He allowed himself a good ten minutes to recover and silently gloat, then he got set to do it all over again. The other dart was still stuck in the cloth ball, after all.

Once he had it back, he could get onto what he really wanted to start trying out. Imperial Heavenly Swallows wasn't about throwing one dart. It was for controlling a storm of them. Learning to control two darts at the same time as they flew through the air would be… interesting.

You know, you learned something just last night that might be relevant to that.

"Might be relevant?"

Might be. You would have to figure it out yourself.

Tian quickly discarded the possibility that Grandpa was talking about appearances and manipulating people. Brainpower. But Brainpower was a type of qi manipulation he wasn't capable of using at the moment. It was a Heavenly Person thing. Except that wasn't quite right, was it? Daoist Steelshimmer could feel his attention on her. Presumably she had cultivated her ability to sense that attention, but there had to be something there for her to sense.

It couldn't be as simple as "pay attention but harder," could it? Tian fiddled with a dart while a small thunderstorm crackled below the sky barge. All blue skies this high up.

Tian carefully circulated Heavenly Swallows, really feeling the art move through him and the darts. There was a very specific circulation path he was to follow when he was throwing two at a time, which grew slightly more complex with each dart he added. Not much more complex, but a bit.

He threw the darts, aiming for the second ball hanging behind the first. With practice, he should be able to get the darts to attack from opposite directions. He was content to keep them moving together for now. His control was rough, much worse than he could manage with a single dart. It wasn't that the art was twice as tiring to use. It only took a bit more energy to add a second dart, but that energy felt a bit jumbled. Like he was trying to throw the darts into a strong wind.

Tian walked over and pulled the darts out of the target. Storms below, serene blue above. Not quite yin and yang, but similar. The male and female, complementary yet in tension. Just like Daoist Steelshimmer. He let the thoughts swim around for a few moments, then sighed.

"Really."

Really.

"The beauty tips."

Mmmhmm.

"Not the Heavenly Person tier knowledge."

She was vague to the point of being almost misleading about that. I know what she's talking about, and that conversation should have started and ended with "Higher realm people can use their qi in ways you can't to affect your perception, and you use your own vital energy, in varying forms, to defend against that."

"Beauty tips."

It was a lot more than that and you know it. Now. Lay it out plainly. How does this all work?

"The needles form a sort of array. The reason each one needs to be cultivated at a particular time of day and on a particular schedule is to make sure each one is elementally aligned in such a way that they fit in with the previous darts and support the next dart. The reason it's hard to control is that these darts are both Yang. Tempered a bit with yin phase metal, but yang. And if I recall the next dart cultivation date, it's a minor yin day in a minor yin month. Bringing balance to the formation."

Correct. It's not that two darts can't be controlled. You just need to tweak the elemental vital energy you pour into them. More metal qi in one, less in the other, their natural pull drawing them together. That will let you focus on aiming them while they keep each other in line.

"And when I have the yin darts in the mostly yang needle array, they will fill that purpose. I won't need to play around with elemental balancing."

It looks that way.

Tian shook his head in wonder at the seemingly infinite interconnectedness of it all. Without Grandpa's nudge, he never would have connected Daoist Steelshimmer's methods with a dart art. But the hint was enough. It was an analogy he could actually follow. Amazing. Maybe he was getting better at this human relations thing.

He sat under the tree and fiddled with a dart as he looked up into the sky. Training on resisting illusions, advancing his cultivation and his battle arts, learning about how humans could communicate between themselves and with animals… amazing. Amazing, amazing, amazing. Grandpa was right- the treatment first class talents got was incomparable to the second class, and the second class talents were pampered princes compared to those relegated to officework or muddling along in lower sects.

It was worth struggling for the apex. The view was unmatched.

He laughed, a bit self mockingly but sincerely all the same. He claimed to just like Daoist Shu as a friend, and it was true. But he was honest enough to admit that his ego gloried in her affection. In being wanted, instead of chased away with stones. When they visited Burning Stone Manor, he had discovered a unique gift, one that he could grow with and earn from for at least the rest of his time in the earthly realm. Maybe longer.

Tian really couldn't wait to see what he could get from the Five Elements Courtyard.

"Since when have I been afraid to snatch food from the mouth of a tiger? I've been doing that my whole life!"