This Venerable Demon is Grossly Unqualified

I shivered. That disciple’s presence had been unsettling. Like someone breathing down your neck. He hadn’t felt like that at the library. He’d been doing something, but I wasn’t sure what. I was starting to get the hang of feeling the shape of my own qi, at least enough to be able to tell it was there. The storage ring had helped with that, by continually toggling things in and out of storage, I was able to at least feel the level of qi in my body.

But I couldn’t move it. All the manuals talked about cultivation in terms of cycling your qi, moving it around in a complex pattern. I could feel mine, or Elder Hu’s, rather, suffusing every inch of my body, and what I thought was my core, a raging storm that dwelled just to the side of my heart. But beyond the time I’d accidentally called a hurricane, and the way my storage ring pulled at it, I couldn’t make it move of my own free will. My body consumed it, my limbs drinking a trickle to fuel their superhuman strength. When I swung my sword, it followed, extending the edge. But I had no idea how to control it actively, beyond those passive effects.

Something that disciple had been doing felt like he’d been interacting with my qi? Had I been leaking more power than I intended to, and he was fending it off? Or was he inspecting me for some anomaly? I didn’t know what he might have seen, looming over me for hours in the library. I could try to avoid him, but it wouldn’t help. If a disciple could see something in hours, I had no doubt my fellow elders would see it in a moment.

And now I was going to meet them for tea.

As I slowly made my way through the woods outside the plaza, hoping to stumble across a bamboo grove in the general direction of the repository, I punched a tree. It didn’t fall over, I wasn’t that strong. But my fist ripped all the bark right off, leaving flyaway strands of wood exposed to the elements.

I hated this. It’d been a day and a half. Nothing had happened. But I couldn’t let down the mask for a moment, around others. I had to be Elder Hu, play a character that I couldn’t afford to ask about. Hope that imperious aloofness was close enough to his personality that nobody would notice the difference. Hope that rank and eccentricity would cover for any faux pas.

I hit the tree again, harder. My fist drove into the wood like it was wet pulp, leaving tiny splinters wedged between my fingers. I opened my hand, and they fell away like sand. My knuckles were skinned, but only just barely.

Hope for this and hope for that and hope that something I didn't know and couldn't ask wouldn't suddenly doom me. I suddenly remembered that silly Twitter post from another life, of the mouse that had touched two opposing terminals on a high voltage line, and been reduced to a skeleton instantly, doomed by a natural law he had no hope of ever knowing in advance.

I pushed the tree over. Gently, it didn't take much. It had a hole the width of my arm clean through its center after all. Truly, it was a wonder we had any trees at all here, let alone so many, if they made the perfect punching bags for a frustrated elder. I snorted, as a darkly humorous thought popped into my head. Perhaps the other elders just used their disciples for that. Strike a disciple, spare the environment.

For the hundredth time, I wondered if I could just run away. I had power. Even in an unfamiliar world, I should be safe. But would they let me go? Elder didn't really seem like the sort of position one was allowed to retire from. With our military power, and all the sect had probably invested in us, I was almost certainly trapped in a gilded cage.

So many unknowns, so little I could do about them. So I did what I could, and stalked off to find some bamboo.

Su Li burned. The moon shone distantly, a thin crescent. Perfect conditions for her cultivation method. The qi around her was so thick that she could almost taste it, like she was breathing in congee salted with steel dust.

A silver aura formed around Su Han's sword. Impermanence. Loss. A sliver of untouchable eternity, brought down to earth. It was too elegant. The waxing crescent was a swordsman’s technique, not a woodcutter’s. So much of it was focused around cohesion, binding the light of the moon into a blade. She didn’t need a range of a dozen paces. She didn’t need the light to remain bound to its form on impact, that it might bypass a mortal’s parry. All she needed was for it to cut. She poured more power into the technique, watching as it deteriorated into little more than a churning mass of lunar qi.

She swung. The memory of light swung with her, the silver storm biting into the wood. Biting in all of two inches, the wasteful usage of power cutting almost as wide across as it did deep. It was enough though. She let her sword fall away and staggered forward. Five swings, to make it most of the way through the log. She was slowing. Unacceptable.

She wormed her fingers into the gouge. The blood on them made it slippery. She wiped them on her robe, then tried again. The robes were black anyway, nobody would notice. She pulled, and the foot long segment of wood snapped in twain.

Twice more, she ripped the log in half, leaving this segment quartered. One tree lay dismantled behind her. With this segment, her second was now half finished. Her meridians burned as she cycled furiously, the moon's power hung thick around her, but she couldn't cycle it fast enough, every breath drew in the same amount of qi, but with each great circle through her meridians less and less slowed to settle in her bone-dry dantian.

She must keep going. She would keep going. Until the third tree was laid low and reduced to firewood. With heavy limbs, and even heavier eyelids, she lifted her father's sword once more and called out to the world. Her meridians burned with argent glory. Light surged around her blade, brighter than ever before. And yet, the world seemed darker? Surely the night was already at its deepest.

Su Li swung, and saw no more.

It turns out, when you’re an elder, they just let you take things. After I’d harvested a frankly absurd amount of bamboo, enough that I’d be just fine even if Su Li failed to make headway on those fir trees, I’d headed back to the library. I’d walked right through the empty entryway, and then saw most of the tables were occupied this time, by disciples in plain black linen robes, ranging in age from fifteen or so to well into their forties. On a whim, I’d headed up the stairs I now knew to be tucked away in a shadowed corner, and found myself on the second floor.

It was a book lover’s paradise. So, my paradise. Where the first floor was a wide open space, empty save for small tables spaced haphazardly, but never too close together, the second floor was a claustrophobic nightmare. There were none of the evenly spaced uniformly stocked shelves you’d expect to see in a library, but instead storage devices of every form, from shelves, to scroll-cubbies, to simple wood chests, were simply fit wherever there was room. I saw one great nautical storage chest simply sitting on top of a normal shelf, where its lid would hit the ceiling if fully opened.

Initially, I’d intended to go find the help desk I’d seen through the opening in the ceiling of the ground floor, but I’d never been able to restrain myself in a library. It was a problem. When I’d been forced to volunteer at one as a middle schooler, I only managed about two days of actual work before I simply began sneaking off to read the books I was supposed to be shelving at every opportunity.

It started small, excusable even. I saw a scroll with a moon on it. An honest to god pair of crescent moons, carved out of quartz or white jade, decorated the endcaps of the scroll, one end waning, the other waxing. I had to check, even if it wasn’t the manual I was looking for, surely it would be good background reading.

With a furtive glance to either side to confirm I was alone, I pulled it out and took a look.

It was exactly what I was looking for. I wondered if this was how Su Li had chosen it? Perhaps she, or a disciple looking on her behalf, had simply seen the gaudy end caps marking it as moon related right by the entrance to the second floor, and grabbed it on a whim. Or perhaps the library staff just kept it here, to give to any nobody who asked for a moon related method?

That left me suddenly quite worried it wasn’t any good. In every story I’d ever read, the good stuff was always in dusty stacks way in the back, never clearly labeled by the entrance. That rule even made some sense, in a world where a scroll in the right hands might found an empire. Still, it was what my disciple was studying, so I had to know it. I snuck off for a less frequently traversed corner, and eventually found one covered in so much dust it clearly hadn’t been visited in months or years. Reading a scroll while standing wasn’t the most ergonomic of positions, so I spread it atop a conveniently placed dresser stuffed with so many wooden slips some were sticking out of the drawers.

Pausing every few seconds to peek over my shoulder like a raccoon rooting around in a dumpster, I began to read.

It held a cultivation method, and a pair of techniques. The Waxing Crescent for offense, and the New Moon’s Veil for defense. The table of contents at least, were clear. After that, it became harder to glean much from the text. The cultivation method itself, at least in qi condensation, seemed simpler than some others, basically amounting to a big circle in the thorax. And I could only figure that much out, because this manual had a literal diagram, three cutaway drawings of a male torso, with the correct meridians to follow labeled from one to eight. While that was an improvement, the fact that they also referenced said meridians by their assigned number, rather than the number they were ordered on the diagram in the following section, seemed a little silly to me. For example, the first portion of the cycle flowed through meridian 32, which was in the upper right chest, following the curve of the top lobe of the right lung. After that, the qi was supposed to enter meridian 18, which followed the exterior edge of the right side of the torso.

I wasn’t going to figure this out over the course of minutes, so I stole the scroll.

I thought about asking, I really did. It was the moral thing to do, certainly, even if that wasn’t exactly my highest priority. If the scrolls turned out to be protected by some sort of magical lo-jack, it was also the safe thing to do. But there was no way to play that conversation with the library staff that didn’t risk revealing a dangerous level of ignorance. If I assumed I could borrow scrolls, but they were well known to be only for reading internally, I revealed myself. If I asked permission when it was well known that elders could take what they wished, I did the same. Better to risk the small chance of being known a thief, than take a 50-50 of being revealed ignorant of what Elder Hu should know. At least theft had a predictable motivation I could hide my status as a transmigrator behind.

So, after another set of furtive glances, I stuffed it into my storage ring.

No klaxons sounded. No army of black-clad librarians armed with jians descended upon me.

I spent a further hour just wandering the stacks, looking for anything I could find related to the moon. I wasn’t very successful, either the library employed no organizational principle at all, or I just didn’t understand what principle it did obey, because I found precious little. What little I did, I just browsed through, then returned. A lot of what I did find was meditations on the moon’s relation to the concept of yin, some of which gave me ideas. Others were biographies of famous cultivators with lunar techniques, and poems about the beauty of the moon, which were less helpful. I wasn’t sure how much time passed. It was so easy, to get lost among the stacks. The way the constitution of a cultivator meant I hardly hungered and scarcely grew tired left time meaning little. The most dangerous part was the little aches that one got, when seated for a few hours, were now absent. It made it all too easy to simply turn the next page, and the one after that, when you didn’t even need to get up and stretch.

A few of the staff passed me, I did my best to look busy and none of them saw fit to engage me in conversation. One beautiful black haired woman in silk robes trimmed with navy blue gave me a glare fit to kill a man, but did not speak with me. I ignored her and really hoped that it wouldn't come back to bite me later. Was she a jilted ex? A former student? A fellow elder? I really had no idea, and in this world I couldn’t even rely on age to make a guess. All I knew at this point was that the shine of silk robes meant someone important. I could barely even feel the cultivation of others, if I had some sort of spiritual sense, I didn’t know how to use it.

After that encounter, I stopped tempting fate and left. Truly, being a cultivator was amazing. Even as my stomach turned itself upside down with worry, not even a drop of moisture beaded from my armpits. As I passed through the ground floor, one frazzled looking outer disciple looked up from the dusty scroll on his table and turned to stare at me. I studiously ignored him. Every step I took, the impact of my thin leather-soled slippers on the worn stone felt like a gong in my head. As I approached the entry concourse, I prayed to any god who might be listening, then stopped, because in this mad world such a thing might actually be noticed. As I stepped out into the dim light of the early dawn, absolutely nothing happened. I almost smiled. It was a weight off my shoulders, another danger dodged, albeit one I’d brought on myself. But was it even worth celebrating? I felt like I was spinning my wheels in mud, scraping through every interaction by the skin of my teeth. I knew I had to play the part of Elder Hu Xin, but I still didn’t know who he was, not really.

I didn’t teach, but was that because I was unable, or unwilling?

One of my fellow elders disliked me, but was that because I was rude and domineering, or because I was lower status and insufficiently deferential?

Su Li treated my agreement to teach her like a miracle, was that because she thought my tutelage would be valuable, or because she literally had no other options?

Elder Hu didn’t keep a diary, he had almost no personal effects. I couldn’t ask anyone I’d met. Perhaps there was no way to safely figure out who I’d been, except by watching the reactions of the people I spoke to. Perhaps I would simply have to decide who I would be, and survive the consequences.