Unseen Cultivator

Sayaana's suggestion took an unexpected level of effort to implement. The fundamental problem was remarkably basic: Liao did not have enough rope. He had plenty of hooks, but a limited amount of line. Taking apart the net increased the supply some, but still not enough to use all the hooks at once without placing them absurdly close together.

He knew how to make rope. Once, he'd had a neighbor obsessed with the process and could hardly avoid picking up the basics. It was not complex, but it was time consuming. Even a cultivator could only strip and braid so fast. The few days he had on the shore did not suffice. Instead, he stripped the nearby forest of long vines and wrapped them together.

Unfortunately, while this method sufficed to hook small fish, the sharks proved to be far stronger than anything he'd expected. Hundreds of meters of improvised line were dragged under, snapped through, and bitten away. He lost half his hooks in a single day, to no benefit. "More rope next time," Sayaana declared sadly as the entwined vines sank to the bottom of the bay.

The incident did have one positive outcome. When diving into the ocean to try and retrieve his sinking hooks, Liao got his first good look at a shark.

There were, according to the old books, many kinds, ranging from small to massive. These were a mid-sized variety. Averaging perhaps as long as Liao was tall, they were full-bodied with a broadly cylindrical form rather than the flattened frame common to most fish. They possessed paired dorsal fins and a bent tail much larger on the top half than the bottom. Small eyes lay sheltered behind a broadly triangular snout with the mouth half-concealed beneath. The body was shaded to a soft brown on the top and stark white below. Beneath the scaled skin, the flesh rippled, revealing massive banks of potent muscle.

But it was the mouth that drew all the attention. The shark had protruding teeth, curled backward from the front of the jaws and sharply pointed, like tiny awls. There were hundreds of these spiny knives lodged in the gums, arrayed one row after another. The inside of the mouth resembled nothing so much as a bed of nails ready to snap down with trapjaw force on anything it encountered.

A perfect structure to grab and puncture slick-sided fish.

Fearsome creatures, but they expressed no interest in Liao. With the combination of powerful lungs and the ability to reinforce his blood using qi his cultivation provided, the trapper could stay submerged for over an hour and dive to considerable depths – something he'd tested in the deepest lakes of Mother's Gift. So, at sunset on the third day by the sea he sat on the muddy bottom of the bay and watched as a quartet of sharks tore his vines apart and found countless clever ways to snatch baitfish right off the hooks.

These animals broadly ignored the human in their midst. They kept their distance and even, if he tried to swim towards them, retreated with swift flicks of the tail when startled. They could not possibly recognize humans, given the immense span of time since anyone had swum these waters, so Liao wondered at the source of this impulse. Perhaps they simply feared the unknown, there were animals of that sort.

More frightfully, he considered that they might think he was a ghoul. He did not sense any demons nearby in the bay, but there were claw marks on some of the rocky coves that marked out their passage along the coast in the past.

The sharks were far more engrossed in the bait he'd provided. Many, experimenting with the lures, took hooks into their gums. Such wounds impeded them minimally at best, a clear lesson that the metal barbs were too small. Designed to catch lake-dwelling catfish and carp, they were no match for the countless teeth of these sea beasts. Many broke apart between the teeth. Others stuck in the edges of the mouth, lodged useless in the thick gums. All were torn away from the vines. The largest specimen Liao encountered, a three-meter-long female, simply swallowed bait, hook, and a substantial chunk of vine whole without the least hesitation.

Observation also revealed that while the sharks normally moved about quite languidly, apparently seeing no need for haste in a space broadly devoid of anything able to threaten them, they could twist around with abrupt and impressive flexibility and rapid gyrations of their tails unleashed powerful short bursts of speed.

Liao could move far faster than any ordinary human swimmer while underwater, but he did not think he could hunt these animals with spears. At least not without making a terribly bloody mess and drawing out more of the scaled saurian beasts that lounged upon the mud flats, basking in the sun.

As he spent the night gathering additional bait fish, he talked through the problem with Sayaana. "Hook and line would work, will work, once I get much larger hooks, but that will have to wait. Spears could work, but the sharks are fast and strong, and blood draws other predators, which would ruin the hides. They're far too big for any trap or net I might place." All the standard options he knew were unworkable. A lake, it seemed, was not the ocean. Nor were sharks fish.

Sayaana, staring out as the ocean while he prepared hand-sized bait, offered up a simple answer. "The water is clear, and they come up close to the surface. You're an archer. Tie a line to an arrow and shoot one."

Liao felt supremely foolish at how long he had gone on missing such an obvious approach. "I'll need to build a raft," he recognized at once. There were no good outcrops upon which he might stand, and getting the shark out of the water quickly was imperative. He would need to dismember and dress them quickly once slain; they were too large to fit into any of his storage rings whole.

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The work would make for a laborious night, but that was not in itself a serious problem. He need not make anything complex, the bay was quite calm, most days. A simple creation of lashed-together logs should suffice. The local pines would serve; they were familiar enough and would float well.

"Don't push this," the remnant soul cautioned. She moved to stand directly before him as he took out his axe and saw. "The ocean is a different world. I ran across it, never wandered within. My knowledge can't help you here. You already found the cones you promised your mother. The rest can wait. It's a long walk back. Don't get exhausted."

It was good advice, in some sense, but Liao paid it little attention. He wanted to capture a shark. He wanted to explore the possibilities of shark skin just as he did the strange scaled saurian. The idea of it, the possibilities those bodies, those hides, offered, they were invigorating. Giving up now would be frustrating. He hadn't come all this way just to see the ocean.

He'd come for its bounty.

Working in the dark, beneath the persistent chill of the ocean breeze, those thoughts slowly transformed into a realization, one reinforced as he glanced up at the greenish form the remnant soul presented. Sayaana wanted to see the world. She was a wanderer in truth. The vistas, the horizons, that was her goal. She would climb a mountain purely to take in the view from the summit.

Though he understood and sympathized with such impulses, and enjoyed new and varied scenery himself, Liao could see, from this vantage point, that his true focus lay elsewhere. While Sayaana looked to the horizon, his eyes were glued to the baitfish, to the logs he was lashing together into a raft, and to the sounds from the birds and bats winging their way through the night and the fish jumping through the waves. Seeing the world was all very well, but that was only the first step he imagined. He wanted more, wanted to take it in hand. To mold it, to shape it, and, he recognized with some bitterness that Grand Elder Itinay knew her symbolism quite well, to weave it.

A critical difference between the two of them, one that only crystalized in this moment. It prompted him to use this night as a host for a question he had long wished to ask, but never previously dared. "Is it hard, not being able to draw?" The Endless Needles Sect had nothing like the formal pavilion structure of his own, but that had been her craft. Maps, illustrations, and landscapes, she had explored them all, on many surfaces. She'd told him as much long ago, when he'd first asked shortly after they were bonded, but it had gone almost completely unmentioned since.

One of many topics Liao normally avoided broaching with his rather unique companion.

"Yes," the words ground out through emerald lips. "I hate it. Especially here," she added with a hissed flourish.

There was no need for further explanation. Even in the middle of the night the bay was a stunningly beautiful vista. The moon hung high over the waters, adding an interplay of shadow and light to the scene no artist could possibly fail to notice.

Sayaana turned back from the water, facing Liao head on. She crouched down, enabling them to see eye to eye. Her green almond-shaped gaze, so different from those of other immortals and the mortal residents of Mother's Gift alike, speared him thoroughly. "I can see the world, through you. I can even touch it," her senses, linked to his own through the medium of shared qi, provided the full range of human sensation. "But it is not my own sight, and I have no control. Half a life, that is what I have."

She scowled and tapped the gem upon her brow, mirrored to the one of his own. A sliver of deep-seated anger, normally heavily suppressed, slipped loose. "Better than death, but it still hurts. I take every drop I can and use it to hold back the storms. That's the only way to keep hope alive."

The pain on her face, the long struggle of enduring the poisoned state of bodiless existence, ripped into Liao.

He'd felt it before, during desperate moments, and while advancing. Chances to pierce the veil that the remnant soul held over her core and witness the true scope of her suffering. He could not face it, not in full, then or now. Even in this moment, when he ought to hold fast to her face and support her in the anticipation of tears, his gaze dropped to the logs before him.

Centuries trapped within a stone, nothing but the dao to hold fast against. Could he survive that? Liao did not think so. How Sayaana had endured remained a mystery to him, one his own understanding could never encompass, not until he drew far closer to the dao. Perhaps not until he unlocked immortality, which would be far too late. "I…," he stumbled, searching for something that would not sound patronizing in the face of such stark truths. No words arose from the depths.

"Stay alive. Advance your cultivation." Sayaana answered the unasked question. "You want to help me? To fix this? Become immortal. That is the only solution." She leaned back then, dropping downward until she lay as if boneless upon the beach. "The gamble is miserable. One in ten thousand odds, tied to a cultivator in the first layer of the body refining realm." She looked up, green eyes lost in the night, but never weak. "But I will bend those odds. Stay alive. Avoid bottlenecks. I can help with that. I have that much power still, and knowing it keeps me sane. Even the tribulations, I will know when you are ready. All you have to do is survive. The heavens will decide the rest, and if they rule against us, so be it."

Something about the use of 'us' tripped over in Liao's mind. The axe blow he'd just launched stopped mid-descent. He looked over the logs toward his green companion, beautiful and powerful and helpless all at once. Fear coursed through his veins, anticipatory. "What happens to you if I fail a tribulation?" The answer seemed both obvious and terrible, but he needed to know for certain.

"Our qi is linked," Sayaana sat upright with a forced smile on her face, bent by her exotic features. "If the heavens burn it away, it takes us both. So, don't push it. The world was here long before cultivators, long before humans, and it will be here long after. It's the same as the stars above those sisters worship. The dao is infinite, you can't speed it up, slow it down, or spend it all. You can only stay alive and move toward it. Make your raft," she ordered, calm and still. "Catch a shark. Skin it. Walk back to Mother's Gift. Then do it all again."

Her deliberately forceful expression relaxed then. "One task, then the next, that is how it goes, both before immortality and after. Just stay alive."

Liao nodded and went to sleep when the moon set. This left the raft to be finished in the morning, but there was time enough.