Unseen Cultivator

Liao flew upwards, careening wildly through the air. He spun about, out of control and trying to avoid violently spewing his last meal across the sky. His hips ached, his body groaning from the speed at which he'd been pushed.

A prolonged pair of heartbeats passed, and then Artemay was beside him again. She stepped on nothing but air as if it were solid as stone. "Higher!" She declared and then pushed once again. Higher they went, flying upwards in a wretched, distorted facsimile of flight.

It took all the control Liao could muster to steady his body and avoid collapsing into a second wild spin.

"Higher!" Artemay continued the process. Seven times she pushed the initiate, sending them both streaking through the air. When Liao reached the top of the last shove, feeling momentum finally lag and his body twist towards the beginning of a catastrophic plunge, the grand elder appeared behind him and grabbed him about the waist.

Liao hung, gasping, in the cold air. His breath was suddenly thin. His vision spun; eyes watery in the darkness of the night.

"Swallow these," Artemay pushed a trio of pills into his mouth. "And wear these," she pushed two necklaces over his head and wrapped a belt around his waist.

Swallowing, Liao felt warmth rush through his body. His lungs felt suddenly full, as if he could breathe in the whole sky. His eyes cleared and his balance returned to normal though he still hung in midair.

"We are thirty-five hundred meters above the plain," Artemay announced calmly. Wind whipped about them on all sides, but her voice remained clear. The hood atop her head somehow remained perfectly motionless even as the edges of her dress whipped about. "High, but not so high that birds cannot fly to such heights, and in the great mountain ranges of the world this is not even a consequential altitude. Still, it illuminates certain things. This is as high as one in the spirit tempering realm can fly unaided. Bracing, isn't it?" Blue lips bent into a wide smile. "Now look down."

In his two decades as a cultivator, Qing Liao had faced many difficult commands. This one, though seemingly mundane, rocketed to the top of the list of most challenging to obey. There was nothing below his feet. If the grand elder dropped him, something he knew he was absolutely powerless to prevent, it would be a long but also swift descent to an ultimate end.

She would not do such a thing. He trusted that. The grand elders were strange, and Artemay might be capricious even by those disturbing standards, but they were not cruel. Knowing this, however, provided little aid when it came to staring down into the abyss below.

It took great concentration to bend his head. The wind howled about them as he slowly forced the muscles and bones in his neck to obey. When he shifted the angle at last and saw past his feet, Liao was treated to a view unlike anything he'd ever seen in his life.

He had climbed mountains before and seen the land spread out below in a vast panorama, but such views were always at a shallow angle.

This was head on. The land arrayed below, spread out as if it were a grand diorama. He could see the large sect buildings, the blocks that made up the city, and the arc of the Starwall. Even the sprawling courtyards of individual homes in their endless honeycomb pattern.

People too, though there were only a handful moving about in the middle of the night, could be glimpsed from this height. Distance rendered them tiny, even in the enhanced vision of his state, nothing more than little dots. He could not determine any details. Male or female, young or old, all these things were lost, beyond the range of eyes and qi sense alike.

Liao was struck by the sensation that he could reach out and pluck them from the streets, like flicking an ant off a table.

"Humans seem small from this height, do they not?" The question hung in the wind. "You can see the whole city, fifty thousand lives, but hardly any individuals. It changes things, trying to make decisions from this viewpoint. I believe you grasp this, correct?"

Liao nodded. Roads, buildings, he could see these things, could trace the flow of traffic through the city, but not the individuals, not truly. Patterns, not people, this perspective demanded such focus. Even qi-enhanced eyes could only see so much. The city sprawled out below, humming. Despite it being the middle of the night, sound radiated from far below, penetrating the caress of the winds. Life, impersonalized.

Hand sewing with blinding speed, Artemay pinned a series of pendants to Liao's chest and wrapped bracelets around his wrists. "Close your mouth," she ordered. "We have further to go yet."

The moment his jaw clenched she threw him upward again.

Faster, further, they flew with intense speed, streaking into the night sky. Even surrounded by protective talismans, the speed was such that Liao felt the flesh on his face twist and bend, and his bones ached from the strain. Seven times more Artemay tossed him forth, higher and faster, until all sights blurred. Clouds streaked past, blobs in the night, and the sky took on strange colors along the horizon. Liao blinked rapidly, struggling to focus as he moved through the air at a speed he'd never approached in his life, never seen anything reach. He pushed qi to the edges of his limbs, recognizing that without the protections provided this velocity alone could kill.

It was all he could do to hold on until Artemay caught him again.

"Swallow this," the grand elder pushed another pill into his mouth. As it went down, Liao felt a strange pressure in his chest, one he had barely realized was present and constraining his qi, relax. Standing there, high in the sky, somehow felt almost normal, even as there was nothing beneath his feet and the wind whipped them back and forth in great sweeping motions.

"We are now twelve thousand meters high," Artemay explained. She did not sound the least bit troubled, though Liao realized she was infusing qi into her words as she spoke to ensure they reached his ears. "That is higher than the tallest mountain in the world." She pointed to the distant west. "And above the height at which any bird may fly. No creature large enough to see can live here. Though tiny lives remain, blown upon the wind and drinking in stellar qi."

It was true, Liao could feel it. Tiny flecks surrounded them, though compared to the immense volume of stellar qi they were difficult to notice. Still, in the absence of distractions, of other life, he could detect those scattered presences. He wondered, idly, what it would be like to cultivate at such heights. The cost in pills, he supposed, would make any such activity counterproductive.

"Look down now," Artemay commanded. "What do you see?" She pushed out qi against the wind, holding them steady for a brief interval.

In the clear night air, Liao could see much. Starwall City, the wall, and the surrounding fields and roads all unfolded in his sight. Turning his head, he could see clusters that must be villages and dark sinuous lines delineating the course of rivers. People were impossible to see, and even individual buildings could not be differentiated save for the largest pavilions. Inside the city, structure blurred together into uniform blocks, broken up only by the wide roads of the grid. Fields, forests, villages, they world divided up into these landscape units, abstracted away from individual focus. Even the defenses of the Killing Fields, a bizarre patchwork of color and shading, gathered together into a single linked composite form.

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"This height forms the limits of the flight available to a cultivator in the soul forging realm," Artemay explained. It was pointless for Liao to try and speak. The wind would steal his voice away completely. "You no longer see people, individuals. Only villages, towns, and cities. The land unfolds, it becomes a thing of numbers and flows. Water, crops, births and deaths, all these things, devoid of caring and the human touch. Stay at this height and you will see things change. Rivers move, forests burn and regrow, lakes dry up. As the decades pass, all things shift."

The hooded grand elder spun him about in a full circle, standing on empty air. Light propelled her steps. "From this height, you can almost see to the edges of Mother's Gift. The whole of this world and its million souls, but not even an elder's mind can juggle a million names. They become fragments, villages, towns, units of hundreds, even thousands. Every choice, every decision, when seen from here it impacts so many that they cannot even be counted. And yet," the blue face turned upward, looking towards the stars. "This is far from the limit. Would you like to see?"

Desperately, Liao shook his head. The vastness already nearly overwhelmed him. He could look down for no more than a few moments at a time. Latching on to Artemay's face and voice anchored him, but barely. Terror, the absurdity of such height transformed into fear, surged with every beat of his heart.

"Wise," the wicked smile returned. "But restraint is not the order of this night." She pulled out a final pill, a black orb the size of a lychee and with a similar spiky exterior. "Hold this in your mouth and suck on it." She pushed the alchemical creation past his lips. A moment later protective talismans, coated in sticky wax, were slapped across his chest, neck, and forehead. "Do not breathe otherwise."

She wrapped both arms about his shoulders, gripping his larger frame awkwardly – in physical form Artemay remained a small woman – but with almost crushing strength. "Close your eyes," she ordered, suddenly extremely serious.

Knowing, somehow, that to disregard this order would bring about terrible consequences, Liao did so. He held his breath but found that the pill in his mouth pushed air into his blood without use of the lungs. His body felt fine.

Until Artemay commenced her final upward burst.

Bruising afflicted the entirety of his body instantly, and blood pressed down through every vein, pushed towards the base of his feet by the immense acceleration. Bones ached, and strange sensations sent muscles twitching. Qi reinforcement mitigated this; its effects multiplied by the power of the protective talismans. Without that ability, Liao suspected he might well have been smashed flat.

Strangely, there was almost no wind. Everything felt very cold, but in an odd, still manner. It did not match any prior experience he could recall. Stellar qi remained, surrounding them on all sides, but all other essences save that of his own possessions and Artemay vanished. A strange void encompassed his attempts to probe his surroundings, bizarre and alien.

"Now, open your eyes," the grand elder's words reached Liao's awareness not through his ears, but through the bones of his skull, conveyed over her fingertips, in a manner familiar to him from hearing Sayaana's voice.

He did. His jaw immediately attempted to fall wide open.

An ice blue hand held it shut. "Careful," the blue lips twisted in a smile Liao never noticed.

He was too busy staring at the world.

That the world was round was a truth taught to every child. There were globes kept in temples and the sect library marking out general boundaries. This was a thing Liao had long known.

But to know a thing is true is not the same as seeing it.

Here, impossibly high in the sky, he saw this truth revealed. The great curve of the earth, like the blue-tinged edge of a coin, was visible in his sight. Vast territories, the immense blue vastness that must be the ocean, huge swathes of forest green to the east, wide gulfs of yellowish mountain grass to the west, and more, including numerous features he did not recognize. All of it held within the grasp of a blue-white ball floating in an endless, boundless black field.

That black, it terrified. It was deeper and darker than the worst night sky. The stars filled it, in numbers uncountable beyond anything Liao had even seen. Not even the clearest mountain air could compare. Their presence, and the stellar qi radiating from them, were essential anchors. Only that touch, that familiarity, prevented a rapid descent into gibbering insensibility. A true void, one that offered up no substance, no material, only qi. It appalled his senses and made him desperate to run away, even though it surrounded him on all sides.

He stared desperately at Artemay instead, sought to find some focus, some measure of the familiar in that alien blue immortal face. He pointed to the blackness beyond and mouthed a mad inquiry. "Why is the sky black?"

"The sky is blue." This response carried no reassurance, no solace. "Air, when struck by light, produces that color, like a rainbow formed entirely from a single shade." This explanation, though it touched on principles far beyond Liao's knowledge, was eminently sensible. "Above, there is no air, and so no color. The void contains light, still, but until it touches the material it remains unseen."

Rotating them around, with Liao securely fixed in place using her right arm, the grand elder pointed directly above her head with the left. There, at the edge of perception, a truly faint shimmer, the telltale boundary of spatial distortion, could be noticed. "This is the upper bound of Mother's Gift. We can go no higher," she explained. The words were somber and carried an undercurrent of disappointment. "In the Ruined Wastes there are no such limits. Stellar qi fills the void. For those of our sect, who draw upon it, one can go as far as cultivation can carry you." She pointed toward the white disk of the moon, half-hidden by the curving edge of the Earth to the west. "Even to the moon, if you have the patience. Iay went once, though there is little to see there."

These words passed through Liao's mind without comprehension. The idea of visiting the moon was simply not something he could hold in his imagination. It was already too much, viewing the world from this altitude.

"Now, look down," the instruction was a clear demand. "What can you see?"

Liao discovered he could see the entirety of Mother's Gift, and yet he recognized none of it. The city, fifty thousand lives, was merely a scattering of lights against a dark background. Shapes and lands matched nothing viewed from the ground. Rivers moved, perhaps, in vast lines crossing ridges and mountain ranges. Vegetation obscured everything, even the clean line of the Starwall, stark as anything humans might build, vanished.

"Small, so very small," Artemay intoned in sadness. She held out a pale-as-ice hand and covered all the land within Mother's Gift from sight. "One million souls, in one tiny part of the world. Once, one thousand times that filled the world. Now, two or three at most. This is what an immortal sees, what an immortal must reckon with." She paused and turned eyes of many blues upon him. "And yet not. What does qi tell you about human life?"

"That it is different," he could not articulate it further than that, but he knew it. It had been obvious since the moment he awakened the sense, the divide between human qi and that of all other things. "But why?"

"Because we can surpass all of this." Artemay looked up. "Even this void, ascension, the realm of sages. The Heavens, that is not some great height, it is some place beyond, a place only those who find the dao can enter. Eventually we will all get there, though it may take time beyond reckoning. The many, and the one, you must value both." She pulled a dagger from her belt. "Two edges. You cannot forget either one and you cannot drop the knife either. What do you think would happen if I dropped it from here?"

It did not take much thought to recognize that this would be very bad. Artemay did not wait for a response. "Every step up, the burden grows heavier, the choices less personal. You have taken one step slightly early. Now, I've shown you where it leads. I could do many things, with this knife, from this height. Destroy a mountain, carve out a river, set fire to a forest, and more, but I cannot drop it. You will, in time, do many things, some you will love, some you will regret, but you must do them. The world turns." She pointed to the edge, the shifting horizon. "Night turns to day, day turns to night. There are endless paths to the dao, and all grow heavier with each step up, but waiting will only see the world choose for you. Now, pay attention as we descend."

Without warning, they dropped.

Not fast, far slower than the ascent, but by no means slow. It took many minutes, and as Liao watched the ground slowly resolved in his vision. The earth, the land, a slender band of blue between stone and void. A land he understood, as it rushed up at them, that he had no desire to leave. The grand elders could have the moon and the stars. He would take this, instead, and call it enough.

His hand moved to the hilt of his own dagger, a new piece taken from the armory, and considered what that meant. To wield a knife for the world. To take one life for the millions who were and the billions that might be.

A very long time to ascension. Thousand, perhaps millions of lives for each soul. Better then, he recognized, that they should reclaim the whole world. Better too, if horrid cycles that led nowhere were shortened. In that decision he found a measure of contentment even as they settled to the ground.

"Why show me this?" He asked Artemay as they touch the soil, knowing that he'd not been ready; that he still was not.

"You have been asked to answer an immortal's challenge," she shrugged. "You can't, but at least now you have seen the scope of it."

She vanished then, leaving him no more confident than before, but somehow settled.