Unseen Cultivator

Newly charged to find a killer, Liao's first step was to examine the most recent victim. Though eight deaths had been attributed to the stolen blade, the others were at least two years old and represented little more than names in a ledger. Long since cremated and burned, there was little to be learned from such remains that had not already been reported by the mortal authorities. Liao had requested those reports, and intended to read them, but he knew himself well enough to recognize that he would not find the killer by comparing statements and schedules. Besides, if tabulation could reveal the murderer he was certain the grand elders would have discerned the connection long before he was even mentioned.

That, he decided as he walked across the sect grounds to the Ritual Pavilion, would serve him as a strategy. He doubted that his skills would unearth the killer alone, but he could act as a beater, stirring things up in the city so that the sharp eyes of the grand elders might piece together new clues to the old. They were watching, surely. No proclamation investing him with total authority over this incident would ever suffice to keep the immortals from meddling.

Perhaps he might have been disturbed by that, but Liao knew the sisters to be stronger and wiser than he was. Such was the nature of cultivation. If one could trust in the Celestial Mother, then a similar, if limited, consideration must also be extended to her daughters.

And who in Mother's Gift could not trust their life to Orday?

Out of all the twelve pavilions in the sect, the Ritual Pavilion was perhaps the most visually impressive. Not because it was the largest, that was the Farming Pavilion. Or built of the most expensive materials, that was the Blacksmithing Pavilion. Or even designed according to perfect mathematical ratios, that was the Formation Pavilion. It was, in fact, modestly sized and quite compact in form. Despite this, it possessed a quality none of the others could ever touch.

It, unlike all other eleven arts, was not merely a building that fostered creativity, but a sacred space.

The structure was constructed in alignment to the stars. Every surface was carved in holy images, mystic symbols, and the votive displays of events critical to the lives of the sages. Nothing with the pavilion was incidental. Every pathway, every placement, every color, all these things were intended to react with the unseen energies of countless forms of interlacing qi. Imposition and invocation colored all things, trapping power within countless tiny labyrinths. This bounded reservoir was such that even mortals could feel it when they walked the corridors. The gray-robed servants moved especially cautiously here, and constantly washed themselves using boiled water to prevent contamination of the surfaces by touch. Their clothes were laundered daily, and endless routines were maintained to keep candles lit, basins filled, pools clean, and metal fixtures spotlessly shiny.

No one spoke loudly here, and prayers and chanting were more common than conversation. Carefully placed rugs, curtains, cushions, and thick fabric screens absorbed all loose sounds. There was little light save that shed by candles, for every window was covered in stained glass panels that limited the entry of exterior illumination. The entire space possessed a haunted cast, but not in a hostile manner. Instead it was warm, and comforting; a soft embrace traced back to forgotten memories of those earliest days, spent within the womb.

The close influence of the Celestial Mother indeed.

Keeping a body preserved in this place felt like a violation. The dead were meant to be sent off swiftly, released by fire that their souls might travel to the stars for rebirth. The ashes were used to fertilize the fields and in that way return the flesh to its own proper natural cycle. This view, which every child absorbed from watching funerals in their home settlements, was clearly widely shared. The members of the pavilion who directed Liao upon seeing the badge given him by the grand elder spoke in hushed voices and guided him to an isolated alcove hidden behind a screen and blocked from view by a dozen separate silver seals. No one would come to this place idly. Nor would its energies be allowed to merge with those ambient elsewhere in the pavilion.

A silent servant opened the screen and ushered Liao inside the prepared chamber. He then shut it behind the young cultivator, leaving the appointed investigator alone with the deceased. It was among the loneliest things he had ever experienced.

Dai Shui's remains had been laid out upon a plain couch of dark maple wood. Her body was covered in a simple white linen shroud. They had knotted up her robes and placed them beneath her neck in order to form the traditional pillow of the dead. All of this was perfectly normal, done to display the deceased in any temple prior to cremation. The wall behind the body featured a carved relief image of the Celestial Mother with her hands spread wide in welcome, and the vaulted ceiling of the chamber was painted with a bright blue false sky. Aside from the quality of these works and the out of the way location, this little alcove could have been found in any village throughout Mother's Gift.

The difference was found in the ritual elements arrayed surrounding the remains.

Fourteen candles, arrayed in a complex double polygonal geometric structure, outlined the body. No ordinary tallow or even high-priced beeswax, these were alchemical creations that bore a violet shade and burned with eerie purple flames. Running lines of quicksilver placed within streams of powdered rock crystal linked each of these beacon points. A tiny bell, barely the size of Liao's thumb, had been placed behind Dai Shui's head. The curious wooden stand upon which it rested had been fashioned in such a manner that it never stopped moving and periodically issued a soft chime every few minutes.

A mechanism to keep the soul tethered to the remains. Similar measures had been applied to the flesh. The feet were bound together and the fingers entwined using chords formed of pure pine bark, a distinctive scent Liao could detect buried beneath the seven sticks of incense that filled the room with a complex smoky melange of variable, unfamiliar odors.

It was an incredibly detailed arrangement, all pieces perfectly in place. Upon entering, Liao could do nothing but stop and stare. It took several minutes before he caught sufficient breath to move once more.

"Iay did this herself," Sayaana declared, speaking from behind his eyes. She did not appear in his sight. Even granting her habitual irreverence and variant faith, she would never act to disrupt such an obviously sacred and heartfelt ritual presentation such as this one. "Its perfect." Awe, an extraordinarily rare response from any immortal, infused those words. "She could be kept this way for millennia."

"That would be a terrible thing," Liao whispered. Holding a person's soul away from rebirth for so long, it would be monstrous. Merely seeing the servant this way pained him. It was hard to look at the body. He believed, almost, that it would be better to take the remains away and cremate Dai Shui now, today, even if that made it impossible to catch the killer later on.

"True," the remnant soul did not sound equally concerned, but her assent remained welcome. "Best if we resolve this quickly. You'll need to remove the shroud. Don't touch those candles."

Grimacing, Liao steeled himself to this task. It was not difficult, he possessed more than sufficient control over his movements to grab the shroud without impacting any of the nearby objects. Exposing the dead woman was awkward, but he repeated the mantra in his mind that the body was mere flesh, the same form of remains as he'd touched from animals countless times.

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He hoped, desperately, that this was truth. For now, it sufficed to overcome his hesitation. The shroud came loose in a single motion. Lifting it away, he folded it quickly and laid the linen on the paving stones where it touched no part of the ritual. Only then did he move to examine the body.

In death, Dai Shui was extraordinarily pale, deepening a feature she had doubtless prized in life and sought to preserve with great care. Soft white skin was much admired, and the servant families were well positioned to sustain it by spending their days indoors rather than under the sun in field and forest. Petite and pouty, she could not have been more than twenty, and even those limited years lay lightly on a body that had never known heavy labor nor experienced the struggle of bearing children. Her figure was not perfectly exquisite, she was too thick through the hips and chest to meet the standards applied to true beauties, but it was certain more than pretty enough to spark the interest of any number of men. That she possessed a narrow face naturally suited to coy and flirty affectations only made it easier to understand how this young librarian had drawn eyes.

She was exactly the sort of young woman who could, and in the sect almost inevitably would, charm her way into the bed of a handsome young cultivator. This, being strongly encouraged by both the sect and the servant families themselves, carried no shame. Liao knew those arguments well, and he could hardly oppose them. After all, he had done precisely that with his own maid, as intended. This, the remains lying before him, that was evidence that however useful the policy might be to manage the lusts of cultivators, it could go wrong. Sadness tied to emotions he could not name or articulate filled his frame from crown to toes.

"Delicate hands, thin scars from paper cuts, ink stains," Sayaana interrupted Liao's reverie by beginning a disturbingly mechanical analysis of the corpse. "Small frame, little muscle, light bruising across the stomach." The remnant soul snapped her nonexistent jaw together in sharp conclusion. "She was grabbed from behind and then stabbed, probably while trying to run. She knew the man who killed her, and feared him. Bet you a month's stipend that she'd rejected him before."

A simple but effective deduction, and a wager Liao had no intention of taking.

The grim twist Sayaana added a moment later was far more evocative.

"Fire-aligned qi from the murder weapon would keep the bodies warm," the remnant soul noted. "I bet he drags the women off and rapes them after he kills them."

She said it a flat, perfectly matter-of-fact tone, as if she was not the least shocked by contemplating something so utterly horrific. As if she'd witnessed far worse, which, of course, she had.

"That's…" Liao had no words to answer with. He held his hand over his mouth, swallowing down the bile that tried to escape him churning stomach. Silently, he stared at the carving in the back and offered a brief prayer to Orday to spare the dead recollection of such monstrous acts.

"You live in a peaceful land controlled by overlords who do not accept such things," Sayaana explained, clearly feeling the disturbance to Liao's qi induced by her words. "My sect ignored the mortals. I saw the full range on monstrous deeds humans may inflict upon each other. One who kills, again and again, they are not driven by mere slaughter. A deeper rot motivates such filth. All the targets were women. You cannot remove desire and sex from this."

Swallowing carefully, using the burn in his throat to fortify his resolve, Liao looked over the remains in detail. He focused on mechanics, the interaction of blade and flesh, metal and bone. That helped, barely. "The wound struck the heart, but levelly, not from above. The killer was barely taller than she was." A short man, then, for Dai Shui had been a woman of small stature. "Not an especially strong blow," Qi, burning free from the tip of the dagger, had left a mark on the left breast, a black scar without any surrounding blood or bruising. The dagger had not been driven through the whole of the chest, though Liao knew the blade had surely been long enough.

It was not necessary to strike with such force to kill, of course, but this had been a murder driven by passion, however tinged by madness, not the precision strike of a duelist. Surely all possible force would have been used to drive the blade home. "But a proper blow, a trained hand." In his own dagger training Liao had learned just how easy it was to catch the blade against the ribs. Many desperate souls failed to kill for just such a reason. This strike had moved in smooth to pierce the heart.

"And someone familiar with cultivators, with the sect," he added, thinking further. "If they managed to slip away from Qin Xuegang immediately following this attack. He must have managed the blow without getting blood on his clothes."

"Your sect does not permit martial training for mortals," Sayaana noted. It was a choice she had often criticized, believing even mortal archers would be useful atop the Starwall if gathered in sufficient numbers.

Her opinions aside, it was a key truth, and while there were manifold means to acquire the knowledge needed to kill otherwise, through hunting, trapping, or even as a rat-catcher, those who learned to strike in those ways did so as hunters, not soldiers. Liao knew this better than most, having been forced to acquire a completely new method of archery and knife-work upon entering the sect. A trapper's methods did not serve to slay demons.

"What do you think that means?" the remnant soul's question sounded almost eager.

"A mortal could learn dagger techniques by reading in the sect library," Liao supposed. The servants were instructed not to read the works stored there, but everyone knew they did so regardless. A smaller man would not seem out of place as servant in that place, while one in the Blacksmithing Pavilion surely would be. The servants there, depended upon to constantly lift and haul heavy loads, tended to be some of the largest men in all of Mother's Gift.

"Good idea," Sayaana agreed quickly. "Though my first guess was the Dagger Hall."

It was an equally plausible, if not better, possibility. "He could also be the personal servant of any member of the Dagger Hall," Liao mused aloud. Daggers were not especially popular in the sect, but they were, by an overwhelming margin, chosen as the backup weapon for those who needed one such tool.

"I do not think so," the remnant disagreed. "The murders took place in the city, while personal servants sleep on the sect grounds. And, none of the dead were personal servants, since a cultivator always notices when such a person is lost. The killer was cunning, and chose his victims carefully."

"The library and the dagger hall then," it was easy enough for Liao to concede the point. "A small man with a taste for targeting young women." Dai Shui, preserved in death, remained tragically youthful. He was sure, somehow, that the other women had been similar. "Probably not old, though if he's had the dagger since the horde, not that young either." Frighteningly, Liao realized this murder was likely close to his own age.

Recognizing that there was little more to learn from the body, he replaced the shroud with care, checking to make certain the ritual components remained undisturbed. It was easier, standing there with the remains covered. No need to face the horrors of torn flesh that way. Silently, he prayed for Dai Shui to find providence and peace in the next life. Carefully, he made his way out of the pavilion shortly thereafter.

"A male servant, twenty to forty, and small, who works for the dagger hall or library," Sayaana summarized as they walked, taking advantage of the inability of anyone else to overhear her words. "How many would that be?"

Liao realized, the moment she said this, that he had absolutely no idea. He had always seen the servants as largely interchangeable. Gray-robed beings who it was impolite to notice, never to be spoken to unless some clear request was required. Though he had, in his nearly two decades as a cultivator, interacted with hundreds of them, he knew the name of only one: his own maid Chen Chao.

This was not, he believed, uncommon, cultivators were not encouraged to fraternize with the servants outside of their own modest households. Restraint, distance, these were careful watchwords informing all such interactions. Inevitably, any member of a servant family would age and die in a way that cultivators would not. Closeness offered up nothing beyond a path to bitter grief. Liao knew this, he could feel the day coming for his parents, not soon, and yet far too close. Beyond family, he had no desire to inflict such pain upon himself.

"There could be hundreds," he answered Sayaana. "I do not know, the world of the servants is closed off." He moved swiftly, walking with strong strides beyond the bounds of the Ritual Pavilion. "Finding this killer means finding a way into it." He could not do that alone, and knew of only one name that would offer the chance of aid. Turning his path sharply, he oriented his feet along the road home.

The next step, he was certain, would be painful, perhaps irreversible, but Liao saw little choice. The grand elders had laid this duty upon him. How could he dare balk? Worse, he could not help but recognize that another young woman represented the ideal ally to recruit to this cause.

He expected Sayaana to protest, but she surprised him by through swift agreement. "You're right, and it's another reason why that cold star chose you. As you spent most of your time away, the damage you can do by pushing in where you don't belong is minimal. One servant only, that's a small price to pay, considering how many some of the elders possess."

An ominous remark, and one Liao expected foretold grief to come, but he could not let this killer remain free, not based upon such nebulous and personal trepidation.

Innocent life was too important.