Unseen Cultivator

'People often fail to pay attention to what lies beneath.' Those words had been a favored saying of Scoria Scorn's sect patriarch and father. He had loved that admonishment, using it to stress the potential dangers of weak cultivators and even mortals to the strong in moments of vulnerability. She suspected he'd come that conclusion from the many lovers who'd tried to end his life in the bedroom.

It hadn't helped him in the end. The demon plague had found fertile grounds indeed in the distorted monstrosity he'd formed as a sect, and all his vigilance had not prevented him from being overwhelmed and gutted. In the end, she'd stabbed him to death herself.

Scoria Scorn believed he'd not been taking the phrase sufficiently literally.

She'd killed her father by carving her way through the paving stones beneath his favorite couch. It had been her first use of qi-concealing formations combined with an attack from below ground. A great success, one she'd emulated many times in the long years since.

The method had, regrettably, lost efficacy as her power increased. The complex and potent formations needed to cloak a cultivator in the celestial ascendancy realm could only be produced by a fellow immortal. Such craftsmen were exceedingly rare and little inclined to part with their creations. Even when they could be found, these products were short-lived and failed to cover the use of any powerful techniques.

In her newly weakened state, such limits no longer applied, but she took no chances regardless. There were many ways to evade or confuse the senses of others, and hiding below ground was a simple and effective method. Air carried the signs of qi sources through it easily, but earth and, critically, water, were far less capable of conveying signals.

Scoria Scorn traveled thousands of kilometers up the great river, past vast forested lowlands, through immense gorges, and deep into a realm of rugged and winding hills. She kept her head buried below the surface of that waterway the entire time. Walking along the bottom, using the weight of heavy armor – she had recovered a useful suit of refined mail from the body of a cultivator whose stasis formation had failed ages ago in a deep arctic cavern – to hold her body down, she cycled her qi against the cold and made steady progress. Every day or so she rose to near the surface and, using a long bamboo pole, slurped down enough air to sustain her for the next turn of the world.

It was anything but a pleasant journey. The water was almost perpetually murky. Filled with silt and vegetation scraps, the path could be found only by following the current, not by sight. Harassment by fish and overly curious river dolphins was regular. She was forced to kill nearly a dozen of the long-snouted animals to stop them from trying to nuzzle her. Thankfully, they seemed to eventually learn the lesson. That was an improvement compared to the fish, which never stopped bothering her and whose corpses made a trail behind her passage.

The perpetual wetness grew extremely wearing, and her skin suffered from the constant scraping of the debris-filled current against her.

Food was not a problem. Even in the spirit tempering realm she had progressed beyond that need. Nor did she need to drink, which spared her any need to imbibe the wretchedly turbid river water. Sleep remained a problem. She had not missed the requirement to periodically spend hours unconscious and vulnerable. Though the needed quantity time asleep was minimal, it still forced her to stop twice during her lengthy trek. Thankfully, the hills and gorges possessed extensive cave systems, often quite secure. Many were reachable only through traversing veins of minerals using her movement technique. The air within such inaccessible caverns was always stale and unbreathable, but that was of no consequence.

She could sleep without needing to breathe.

There was, however, an unexpected danger in accessing such places. Some of them, sealed against outside air and water for twenty-five hundred years, were untouched by the plague. In those spaces it was impossible for a demonic cultivator to recover qi.

She left all such empty pockets behind very quickly.

It was strange to her, encountering natural spaces where the plague had not yet reached. She had not believed, until stumbling upon them, that any such places still existed. Now, having found them, she supposed they must be many, in the deep places beneath the earth. She recalled feeling the presence of such voids, strange empty gaps filled with alien qi, during the nightmarish journey her soul made through the depths.

Those thoughts suggested possibilities for the future to come, ones she had only barely begun to consider.

For now, caves successfully infiltrated by the plague remained common enough that she need not risk spending time outside of the familiar red embrace of that predatory qi. Sleep, when demanded by her body, did not come easily. Even pitch darkness helped little. It was a difficult habit to regain, after evading the need for so long. One of many limitations imposed by her now mortal form that grated upon her at every moment. It hurt, recalling that she had once been so weak and vulnerable. Being reduced to this state, again, was almost unbearably degrading.

Such feelings made the journey, this prolonged delay from her true plan to properly regain her strength, interminable. It ground at her, day by day, but she endured. Her body might not be immortal, but she intended to continue conceptualizing herself as if she was. A necessary accommodation if she hoped to remain sane.

Her weakness had practical consequences as well. Reduced to spirit tempering realm cultivation, her senses were comparatively weakened. While that made little difference in terms of walking along the bottom of a river or crawling through a cavern system, it presented a true problem in terms of locating her quarry.

She did not need to reach the hidden land of the Twelve Sisters. In truth, she was deeply aware that getting too close would lead to her own detection, a death sentence. However, she needed to get within range of their patrols, and at the same time, needed to track Rust Reaper's movements so that her fellow demonic cultivator would not intervene in an unfortunate moment. A difficult task indeed, considering the limitations laid upon her qi sense.

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Thankfully, the naturally subordinate cultivator was a creature of deep military tradition, and therefore predictable. He had, as Scoria Scorn expected, marked his possession of this new territory by leveling a high mountaintop and covering it with an improvised fortress covered in prominent spikes. He'd even acquired dye from somewhere, probably copious quantities of animal blood, and painted the walls red.

He'd also filled the little fortress with giants, giving him something vaguely resembling an army, or at least minions capable of throwing rocks.

Scoria Scorn thought it a pointless enterprise. Spikes, even those sharp as razor blades, were useless against an equal-realm opponent. No one else was liable to appear and challenge him, so why would he so obviously advertise his dwelling-place? The few dozen giants were somewhat more useful, especially given that they'd been armed with a pile of spiked steel balls reinforced by simple qi-infusions, but still limited. Such improvised artillery might be effective against an incredibly slow enemy, but she could not imagine where such a thing would be found.

It certainly would not help against the local opponents; she shuddered in recognition of that. The sisters were fast. Faster even than she was, and few had ever been able to claim that.

Clearly the teachings of a true sage were on a different level from any other. A weakness only acknowledged with pain, but one that death had made impossible to ignore.

The prominent fortress was absurd, but the demonic cultivator's patrol schedule was little better. It was dynamic and appeared random, of course, he was not fool enough to be so easily predicted, but he had made a common soldier's mistake. He thought his pattern was so clever that no observer would be able to puzzle it out. This was not true. In fact, the key was quite simple. In keeping with his name, he had tied his movements to the motion of the red planet across the skies.

Though not a student of heavenly motion, the mathematics tied to such processes were not so complex that Scoria Scorn would fail to solve the equations through a modest amount of scratching out numbers in the dirt. She was quite certain that the Twelve Sisters, who she recalled practically worshipped the stars, had made similar deductions. They had scouts of their own, doubtless, and would be keeping a close eye on their new neighbor.

Not that he was close by. His chosen mountain base lay hundreds of kilometers north to the gateway of the hidden land. Sufficiently distant that there was no chance Rust Reaper would ever simply stumble across the gateway by chance, but not far enough to prevent a swiftly running agent from keeping an eye on his activities.

An ideal scenario, from Scoria Scorn's perspective. It provided precisely what she needed. Working carefully, she made a complex mental map of the region and plotted a line based on landmarks of qi-flows discerned as she walked her way through the rivers of the high plateau. In this way she formed a clear mental image of the terrain, one that extended far below the ground and encompassed over two hundred caverns.

It took two years, during which she never saw the sun. Below ground and underwater she remained, constantly. There were too many hidden eyes to dare the surface. Often, she was stuck resting beneath the earth, motionless, while the demonic immortal flew about high overhead. It was only safe to move about when he journeyed to far off destinations far from the hidden land.

She did not quite understand Rust Reaper's impulse to relentlessly patrol. It was largely pointless. Any orthodox scouts crawling about would be cloaked in protections and all but impossible to see from the lofty heights where eagles soared. A cultivator's eyes could breach such distances easily enough, but not even an immortal could stare through solid objects, including a forest canopy. Such high-altitude flight made for a useful way to observe demons and the occasional natural disaster, but that was all. There was truly no need for such exhausting excursions.

Possibly, Scoria Scorn suspected, Rust Reaper simply enjoying flying and observing the occasional forest fire. The latter was, admittedly, a glorious vista to take in. There was something truly grand about watching the flames consume vast swathes of vegetation from high above. Especially when the lack of any need to breathe allowed the observer to swim through the midst of the immense smoke plumes.

Ultimately, such idle speculation made little difference. All that truly mattered was that, by plotting out Rust Reaper's movements in advance, she could maneuver in the gaps he left open. Buried out of sight from the sun, she was never noticed. In this way, through constant repositioning, triangulation, and delineation of visual pathways, she managed to determine where, precisely, the scouts dispatched by the Twelve Sisters were standing when they went to spy on Rust Reaper's little fortress.

She was even able, on a handful of occasions, to crouch in pools on peaks far away and catch a glimpse of cultivator bodies as they streaked across the landscape just above the upper reaches of the forest canopy. They moved like horizontal lightning, these agents. Primarily awareness integration realm cultivators, with a few weaker or stronger, they were hidden under powerful formations that hid their qi but not the signs of their motion.

They would dart in, take a quick look at the fortress to confirm that Rust Reaper had not departed for parts unknown, and then swiftly retreat. This occurred roughly once each week.

They were careful. Much like the patrolling flights of their enemy, they utilized a method to randomize their timing. It too was keyed to patterns in the sky, in this case the motions of several principal constellations. This math, being significantly more complex, proved impossible to puzzle out. Scoria Scorn knew she ought to be able to solve such equations, that she had done so in the past, but even after she constructed a makeshift abacus using river pebbles the answer proved to be beyond her reasoning. Some key principle governed the formulation, one her weakened flesh could not properly discern. Her body, the brain she presently possessed, lacked the power to utilize the full capability attached to her soul.

An utterly infuriating limitation, one that left her consumed with rage for many days.

Thankfully, cultivators were still human, and remained vulnerable to all the weaknesses of humanity, including laziness.

There was, in a small mountain valley, a lake. Truthfully, it was more of a deep, oversized pond, but its surface was absolutely covered in water lilies. The opening in the forest afforded by this patch of water not only offered an ideal point from which to observe Rust Reaper's fortress, it presented a truly glorious vista filled with vibrant flowers that was capable of registering an impact even on Scoria Scorn's metallic aesthetic sensibilities.

Being a pond, it was also largely free of demonic threat. Ghouls could survive being immersed in water perfectly unharmed, but enough of their human instincts remained that they did not enjoy it much and preferentially made their way to shore. Stopping on water was doubly useful for a scout seeking to avoid attracting attention.

One of these scouts, an awareness integration realm cultivator, probably in the third or fourth layer based on how he moved, took to stopping at this pond each time he was dispatched. When he did so, he always picked a lily flower and took it with him. Doubtless the man had a woman he wished to impress, and this particular flower was not to be found anywhere in the hidden land.

Love, such a classic weakness to exploit. Scoria Scorn took great pleasure in turning such cliches to the service of her purpose. With her imperfect understanding of the equations governing the scouts' motions she could not predict when the man would arrive perfectly, but she could get very close. Close enough to crawl deep down into the many-layered muck that formed the base of the pond and set her ambush.

The time to capture a corpse had come.