This Venerable Demon is Grossly Unqualified

Su Li groaned as her eyes stubbornly popped open again. Her shutters had come loose again during the night, letting the hateful sun pour a blinding torrent of light through her open window. To add insult to injury, they flopped back and forth in the light breeze, occasionally slapping loudly against the outer walls of her cottage. She pressed her face into her pillow, but it was futile. No matter how she contorted, the light and noise found a way in.

Finally, she blearily stumbled out of bed. It had to be nearly noon, even if she could fall back asleep, she couldn’t afford another late morning. She’d put off her allotted shift too long already, it had to be today. A mug of hot tea sounded heavenly, but her stack of firewood was almost empty, and the coals had long since cooled. She checked the kettle, and there was still a little water in it. It tasted of iron, but one perk of the chilly weather is that at least it wasn’t lukewarm. For a moment, she missed living in the initiates dormitories.

Sure, they were loud, there was never enough room, or any privacy, and any good stuff always got stolen, but at least there was always a fire. On second thought, perhaps she should count her blessings that she had earned her own cottage. Even if the shutters didn’t work. And she had to cut her own firewood.

It was a little ironic that she was out of firewood, after all she’d chopped recently. But Elder Hu had put it to good use. She smiled, remembering last night’s dinner. It hadn’t been anything like her mother’s fried rice, with crispy pork belly and little cubes of seared zucchini. But it had been real food, with actual seasonings, that she hadn’t had to pay for. And she’d been able to eat as much as she wanted. She was perhaps the only disciple who was able to say that, her master had let her have a second, then a third, serving, once it was clear all the disciples who wanted a bowl had been fed.

Her cultivation might be weak, at only the fourth stage of Qi Gathering, but it was still enough that skipping breakfast and lunch would be only a mild inconvenience after such a meal, at least within the sect's grounds. Plus, if she was lucky, Disciple Sun Ming might feed them.

If not, with her last shift done she could claim her allowance on the way back and make her own dinner anyway.

Her whistle wetted, Su Li pulled her outer robes on and stepped out into the chilly morning air.

The Pathless Night was always quiet in the mornings, but that was even more true in the outer sect than anywhere else. Most outer disciples cultivated manuals that were most efficient, or even only possible to cycle, at night. And almost as a rule, outer disciples did not have sufficiently deep cultivation bases to go without sleep for more than a day at a time. There were exceptions, strange freaks like Geng Ru that seemed to never need sleep despite only being in Qi Condensation. If Su Li had learned one thing at the sect, it was that there were no rules to cultivation, only suggestions. But most disciples were still bound by the tyranny of the clock, both the heaven’s and the sect’s. And so Su Li joined the thin stream of disciples heading towards the fields.

She didn’t see anyone she knew, so she kept to herself as she walked. Most of her fellow outer disciples were safe enough, at least in the common areas. More desperate or foolish, than true demons. But it didn’t pay to draw the attention of the few exceptions to that rule. She’d been lucky, that she had learned that lesson from observation, rather than experience.

She still remembered how Deng Xue had cried himself to sleep for a week, after his mother’s necklace was stolen. For the rest of her time in the dormitories, she’d slept clutching her father’s sword like a doll.

It wasn’t a long walk to the fields. The outer sect was massive, but whoever had laid down the plans had been kind, or perhaps simply logistically minded, and they’d set the majority of outer disciple residences relatively close to the fields most of them spent their days tending. As always, it was the smell that struck her first. The fields of rice were still flooded, the outer sect’s mild climate meant they didn’t drain for the harvest until late in the ninth month, still a few weeks away. She liked the smell of the rice. The fields smelled like good mud, but richer, more alive. She knew from experience just how alive they were. While they were flooded, the gnats and flies did their level best to eat the disciples assigned to them.

Hongzhou had mostly raised cows and pigs, and while the smells of grass and shit reminded her of home, if she was honest, she much preferred the smell of the paddies. She didn’t miss working them though. There were always so many midges.

She was on herb duty now, and glad for it. She still had to help with the rice harvest, and the threshing, every outer disciple without a sponsor, or the money to buy their way out of the duty did. But she didn’t have to maintain the system of ditches and levees that fed the fields, or spend her days pulling up weeds from between the rice plants.

Now she spent her days pulling up weeds among the lesser spiritual herbs. Ruby ginseng, five-flavored berries, black angelica, and a dozen more that all went into the pills the sect gave out to outer disciples in the allotment. Most of them were pretty mundane, fairly normal plants with odd colorations that just so happened to absorb qi. She still wasn’t allowed to touch, let alone tend to, the more dangerous plants, like the Wild Gorechids. But in the hands of Elder Su’s disciples, those mundane plants were transformed into Hallowed Night pills by the thousands, one of which was distributed each month to the sect’s outer disciples.

This late in the year, her job was mostly pruning and feeding the ruby ginseng. The strange matte black stalks of the black angelica rotted any weeds foolish enough to grow near them, and the five-flavored berries were harvested weeks ago. The ginseng, though, needed to be fattened before its winter hibernation. It was a curious plant. Her grandmother had grown mortal ginseng before, back in Hongzhou. It’d been a great occasion when the little plants had finally grown their fourth stalk and been ready for harvesting, almost a decade after she’d planted them in their little garden. Ruby ginseng wasn’t like that. It grew to maturity in less than three years in the fertile ground of the sect, and it grew stalks like weeds, regularly needing pruning to prevent it from wasting all of its energy growing upwards rather than fattening its root. It also needed to be doused twice a month with a liquid fertilizer she was pretty sure was made with human blood.

It was her first year being trusted with responsibility for a patch of the valuable plants, and she wasn’t going to disappoint Sun Ming, no matter how unsettling the red tint of the stalks was. Lest she be fed to them. Or worse, relegated to the rice fields.

As Su Li settled into her first patch, scissors in hand, she felt a shadow pass over her back.

“Disciple Su! Finally! You neglected my babies so long I was thinking I’d have to handle this patch myself!”

Sun Ming was watching. Sun Ming was always watching. The plants were her babies, and if she felt that what they needed to grow properly was the blood of outer disciples, then by the four prime hells she would water them with the blood of outer disciples. She was also the nicest inner disciple Su Li knew of, and one of the few disciples at the sect, inner or otherwise, that Su Li could honestly call a friend.

Sun Ming was a curious person, full of contradictions. Her hair was a brilliant yellow, shining in the dull light of the early morning sun like spun gold. Her eyes were as green as the plants she loved, the more mundane ones at least. She was also tall and broad shouldered, with more muscle on her arms than most men. A disciple had mocked her for that once, claimed no man would ever want her for a wife. She’d laughed loudly, agreed with him, then slapped him so hard his jaw broke.

Most of the disciples that quickly resorted to violence scared Su Li. But despite her hair trigger temper, she’d always been sure that Sun Ming would never hurt her. At least, as long as she never gave her cause to. Even though she loudly proclaimed that she hated people, and only loved plants, she was one of the kindest of the inner disciples.

Su Li wondered if all powerful cultivators were like that, two-faced. Elder Hu certainly seemed to be.

“What are you staring into space for! Greet your senior sister!”

“Su Li greets Senior Sister Sun.”

“Not like that!” Sun Ming shouted, waving her hands in the air. “Give me a hug, I haven’t seen you all week! What’s all this I hear about you having found a master? I leave you alone for a few days, and this is what you get up to?”

“You know about Master Hu?”

“Who doesn’t! Well, who among the inner disciples that is. You outies are like mushrooms, fed shit and kept in the dark, where you grow best. Or, the opposite I suppose, since you’re not allowed into the real dark.” Sun Ming paused, and looked back at her. “Don’t distract me!” She exclaimed, rather unfairly in Su Ling’s book. She had been doing no such thing.

“Still, congratulations are in order.” Sun Ming continued. “I’m sure with a master like crotchety old Hu you’ll be joining us in the inner sect in no time at all.”

“You think so?”

“Sure, I bet it won’t take you more than a decade to establish your foundation!”

“A decade?”

“What, were you looking to do it even faster? Not all of us can be Fang Xiao. Why, your senior sister still hasn’t completed hers and I’m old enough I’d be a spinster if I were still a mortal.”

“Sun Ming… How old are you?”

“Did you really never think to ask that until now?” Sun Ming shook her head and made an exaggerated clucking noise. Then, she leaned in and said with a conspiratorial whisper. “This year, your beloved senior sister will be… Thirty-seven.”

Su Li didn’t know what to say to that. She’d heard the stories, as a child. Legendary cultivators spending a hundred years training, before they took vengeance. She’d just never considered herself one of them. But Kang Guo had been beyond foundation establishment. Core formation, at the very least, to have killed her father. That wasn’t just the work of one decade then, but two or three.

She shivered, at the thought of spending more years than she had lived so far, chasing her father’s killer. She’d known that the journey would be long, but to consider thirty years a rapid rise, made it feel altogether different. Would it still hurt this much, when she was almost as old as her father had been? Would she still remember his face? Would Kang Guo even remember his name?

“What is it with you today! Got something on your mind more interesting than your senior sister?”

“N-no, Sister Sun.”

“Pfwah, you’re no fun to tease while you’re like this. I’ll come back later, when you’ve settled your head.”

Sun Ming crouched down, like a cat preparing to pounce. The ruby ginseng plots were terraces cut into the side of a hill overlooking the flooded paddies. Normally, people used ladders to get from plot to plot. Sun Ming didn’t do ladders.

“Oh, that reminds me.” She said, pausing at the nadir of her squat. “There’s a small gathering tonight. A few of my peers. A few of your more promising ones. You’re invited.”

“Invited?” Su Li asked, already knowing the answer.

“You’re coming. Unless you have a real excuse.”

“I’ve had a long week.”

“I’m sure. You’re still coming, for your own good. For better or worse, you’re interesting now.”

“Is this an invitation, or an order?”

Sun Ming sighed, then stood up straight, and stepped back towards Su Li. Up close, she towered over the younger disciple.

“Look, I know you have… issues with some of our disciples. They’re not all as soft-hearted as you and I. But you chose this sect, and the ones on the guest list tonight are on the better side. Information is power, and if you're smart you can parlay even inoffensive secrets into concrete benefits. Free food, access to technique manuals, sometimes even actual cultivation materials.

“You can either play the game, or be a piece on the board, but after your showing yesterday you can't stay out of it. And you do not have the strength to protect yourself if someone like Fang Xiao decides to stop asking politely.”

Su Li clenched her fists, nails digging into her palms. None of them had cared if she lived or died just a few days ago. But now, they all wanted to be her friend, to pick her brain about why Elder Hu had shown interest in her. For the moment.

“Very well.” She ground out through clenched teeth.

“Night above, you’re acting like I’m telling you to shovel the stables, instead of attend a party. Fang Xiao’s at the beginning of the rooster’s hour. Be there, and take a bath first. Do not make me drag you there.” Sun Ming paused, then quietly added. “I hope you know what you’re doing, with Elder Hu.”

Without waiting for a reply, she again crouched down, then leapt. Sun Ming soared through the air, landing two terraces up without a sound.

“Dong Luoyang! What do you think you’re doing with those ginseng! Why are those stems wilting!”

Su Li chuckled despite herself. If nothing else, Sun Ming could always be trusted to be Sun Ming.

“So do I.” She muttered under her breath.

She still didn't know what to think about Master Hu. He was nothing like the stories the older disciples had told her. But she couldn't understand why he cared about her. Why her pleas hadn’t fallen on deaf ears.

She shook her head, and took up her shears. She’d spent hours thinking in circles on the matter. The ginseng wouldn’t trim themselves.

It was dull, repetitive, work. She filled a pair of buckets with the wet, crimson, fertilizer used for the ginseng, then hauled it back to the patch. Every plant got a trim, until it had no more than three stalks, and eleven leaves. Any more, and according to Sun Ming they might get ‘appetites beyond their station’, which was a phrase Su Li had no desire to learn the exact meaning behind. Every wound she left with her scissors got daubed with the fertilizer, twice, to encourage healing and prevent infection. Then she poured a thin stream of the bloody mixture into the raised mound at the plant’s base. She waited until it drained enough that it stopped running down the sides, then repeated that twice more, until the soil was thoroughly saturated.

Easy enough. All she had to do was repeat the process two hundred and fifty five more times. One bucket usually fed five or six plants, and if she took more than two buckets they sometimes started to coagulate before she was done, so she got to make the trek down to the base of the hill, where the compost was stored in a shed that kept it ceaselessly churning, nearly two dozen times.

By the time she was done, the sun had already begun its descent. She returned the buckets and shears to the shared shed, and then headed to the southern administration hall.

“Outer Disciple Su Li requests her standard allowance.” She said, forgoing a greeting. Never once had she seen one of the hall clerks engage in small-talk while on duty. She placed her sect token on the counter, and the clerk swiped it up with a nod.

Su Li wasn’t entirely clear how the administration hall verified that the assigned work was done, but she knew they did. She’d seen what happened, when disciples tried to cheat them. Even trying to pick up another disciples allowance with their permission could earn one a caning. The sect didn’t care what happened once the supplies were out of their hands, but they took any attempt to subvert the system at its source very seriously.

The clerk ran her token over a flat tablet of stone, causing absolutely nothing visible to happen. Then she checked a great book, and made some more notations in it with an ornate bamboo pen. Finally satisfied, they stood up and grabbed a bag from the cubby at the back of their booth, and handed it to her.

The clerk didn’t bother to say anything. They rarely did, unless you had some business more complex than the standard monthly allowance. Su Li already knew exactly what the bag contained, ten pounds of rice, a single pill, and a quarter string of two hundred and fifty cash coins. Stepping out of the way of the line, Su Li immediately withdrew the small pouch containing the pill and money, and transferred it to an inner pocket of her robes, where it couldn’t be snatched.

She went directly home, detouring only to grab a bucket of water on the way. One frightfully cold sponge bath and change of clothes later, she found herself again walking towards the first plaza. It was common knowledge that Fang Xiao had earned himself one of the coveted compounds with his first place finish in the under-thirty tournament last year.

She shivered, remembering how he’d danced around the stage wreathed in lightning, slowly picking his opponents apart as they flailed desperately, unable to so much as touch him. She hadn’t even made it out of the group stage.

It was funny, how much things could change in a year. Frustrating, how much they could stay the same. Now she was an invited guest in the home of a rising star amongst the inner sect. And yet, she still had nothing of her own. A guest in the world of the mighty. One way or another, she would earn, beg, or borrow the power to stand on her own two feet.

“There you are!” A voice from above greeted her.

“Sun Ming!” Su Li’s voice cracked into a squeak. “Were you waiting for me?”

Sun Ming stood atop a thick branch, looking down at the mountainside path from where she leaned against the trunk. The wan light of the moon back-lit her hair, giving it an ethereal quality. Seemingly without a care in the world, she leaned over into the void, looping the tip of a slipper against the branch as she fell. Her body spun end over end as she fell, before landing in a graceful crouch.

“I couldn’t let you walk into the nest of vipers alone now could I? Besides, if you chickened out, it would be awkward if I needed to make some excuse to leave and drag you over!”

She bounced over to Su Li, her sheer energy seemingly too much for gravity to bother to hold her down to earth. She grabbed Su Li by the sleeve, pulling her along as she launched into a speech.

“Alright, this is your first time at one of these little get-togethers, so here’s the basics. Since you were personally invited, greet the host in the first hour. Don’t let anyone turn a conversation into an interrogation. If they want secrets, be sure you get as good as you give. The food should be safe, recreational poisoning is for elders and alchemists. Mostly. Don’t let anyone drag you to a secondary location, doesn’t matter their rank. Fang Xiao only guarantees the peace while the party is at his place. Don’t clutch my thighs.” Sun Ming paused, realizing what she said. “Unless you want to.” She continued, with a saucy wink. “It’s not really that kind of party though. But seriously, mingle, don’t get bogged down, I’ll be there to smash heads if you really need me, but don’t stick to my side all evening.”

Su Li nodded along, trying to cram all of that into her head.

“Anyway, here we are, you’ll be fine.” Sun Ming said, half-shoving her through the open gate.

A dozen disciples were scattered about the courtyard of the compound, gathered in groups of two and three. She didn’t recognize a single face.

“Qiao Ning you saucy devil, where the hells are my death-eating lotus seeds?” Sun Ming shouted, chasing after an inner disciple Su Li had never met. And leaving her alone.