Unseen Cultivator

Throughout the history of the Celestial Origin Sect, tens of thousands of cultivators had passed through its halls. Some had been true recluses, barely emerging from meditation to speak to their colleagues. As such, though Qing Liao had spent almost no time in Starwall City, he was a long way from unique. Still, his almost total absence from urban life certainly stood out among the sect's current membership. Many younger cultivators, especially those who had managed to breakthrough to the vitality annealing realm and acquire the significant increase in stipend that came with it, visited the city regularly. Weekly visits were common.

Most traveled to the city in groups, engaged with whatever companions in their weapon hall or artistry pavilion they'd managed to acquire. Such jaunts among the mortal population tended to feature strong gender divisions. The men preferred to frequent the dancing halls and would stay out until nearly dawn, finding contentment in the company of professionals in private backrooms. Female groups were more inclined to slightly more cerebral engagements, taking in entertaining performances by pretty young boys and, if they desired companionship in the dark, escorting their paramours back to their private chambers.

Liao, essentially severed from the sect's social cliques, had never participated in such gamboling evenings. He did not feel any real lack as a result, and was generally grateful to avoid such circumstances, as he dreaded being forced to endure Sayaana's commentary on such matters. The remnant soul could be disturbingly ribald in her remarks, especially when in a teasing mood.

He spent little more time in the city during the day than at night. A few visits, most scheduled shortly after joining the sect, had served to inform him of the workplaces and practices of the mortal tanners and leatherworkers in Starwall City. He had not been welcomed among such artisans, but they had quietly consented to his observation of their craft. Not wishing to remain where unwanted, he had left after learning all he needed and had not returned. In the past decade he'd not visited the city at all.

This mattered little. It did not change very much.

Starwall City's lower half, occupied by its nearly fifty thousand civilian residents, was laid out in a grid of sections, seven by seven. The middle section was split down the center by the main road and therefore devoted to commerce and entertainment. Residences and industry were relegated away from this principal avenue. The main east-west road led directly to the grand staircase that separated the raised platform housing the sect and housed business intended to cater to cultivator interests. The north-south road took the alternate approach and featured establishments intended for patronage by the city's mortal elite, by far the wealthiest non-cultivators in Mother's Gift.

It was along this thoroughfare that Chen Chao led her cultivator master, a portion of the city he'd never visited before. The countless differences between these facilities and those intended for cultivator patronage were almost instantly apparent, and not only because the locals gawked at the unexpected presence of a white-robed cultivator.

Compaction was the first, and most obvious, variance. Though all parts of the city were largely built of the same rammed earth walls with stone or wooden facades serving as framing for the gates of prosperous establishments, those beyond the cultivator spaces were shorter, narrower, and closer together. Courtyards shrank and open space reduced, often to the point of becoming nearly nonexistent, especially in the back alleys at the center of the blocks.

Grime served as the second indicator. The sect was kept relentlessly clean, and the city authorities strictly monitored the main road in order to entice visiting cultivators to key establishments. The rest of the city did not receive such care.

Efforts were still made, of course, and the streets remains largely clear of waste and obvious debris, but many lesser forms of dirt and decay found their way along the road. Stains were present upon many walls, and those barriers themselves often sported patches of crumbling earth or the scars from the impact of some thrown object. Water, and other liquids, pooled in corners and ruts. Leaves, blown down from nearby trees, lay scattered about alongside bits of leftover berries and whitish remainders of bird droppings. These awaited the intermittent attention of overworked sweepers. Fur and refuse, sourced to countless wandering cats and dogs in addition to the numerous pack animals used to haul loads through the streets, were widely apparent, clinging to every crack and post.

It was not an ugly city. Care was taken by the residents, and the sect both planned and paid to ensure their neighbors remained free of true squalor, but it lacked the easy, nature-cleansed openness of a small village. Trapped within walls, heavy rain could not properly scour this place free of the buildup so many concentrated lives created. Human effort, always in short supply, was needed to maintain absolutely everything.

It was also an old city. Farming villages and market towns regularly demolished and replaced old buildings, but Starwall City layered refurbishments upon hallowed halls century after century. Restricted by the walls, it could not expand or truly contract. Its population remained largely constant, mandated to a level in a manner similar to that of Mother's Gift as a whole, but the control was far more visible at this scale. This gave the city a strange character, perpetually huddled and crouched in the shadow of the sect.

Liao wondered, as he walked the streets, if the cities of the old world were like Starwall City. There were images in the history books, buildings of similar size and arrangement, streets with identical layouts, but aside from the Twelve Sisters no one had ever witnessed the settlements of the old world. Even Sayaana had only ever walked through ruins buried beneath the turnover of centuries. "This one place, it holds more people than most hidden lands," she'd told him. She believed most other hidden lands hosted no settlements larger than a market town.

Chen Chao turned them from the main road after a time, departing from the large pathways to enter into the interior of one of the residential blocks. Within those confines Liao lost his way almost immediately. The complex interplay of homes, shops, parks, warehouses, and many other buildings almost instantly abandoned the grid structure and fell into a chaotic, sprawl.

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Paths devolved into a maze of tiny alleys barely large enough to permit the passage of one man pushing a wheelbarrow. These bent and twisted accordingly to no logic Liao could follow, a forest of structures laid out according to a pattern unknown to him where the pathfinding was not his ally. The dagger hall records had contained the location of Deng Sheng's residence, but beyond the grid designation of Two East and Four South he had no idea where it lay. That block was home to over a thousand people, spread across several hundred homes.

He could only rely on Chen Chao's ability to find the proper path. He was sure that he could, in time, learn the patterns of this place, just as he had the bamboo forest, but such months could not be spared. Deng Sheng was a man, not an animal. He likely already recognized that efforts to pursue him were ongoing and would form plans of his own. If he ran, that was fine, he could be caught easily enough. By contrast, upon witnessing the chaotic inner life of the blocks Liao realized that if the murderer chose to go to ground matters would become far more difficult. Spooked, he might be able to hide away for months, or even longer with help.

That would be a serious problem. The sect had committed to solving the murders. They could not be seen to fail.

Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that while the city generally welcomed the presence of cultivators and their money, that acceptance was confined to specific spaces.

The citizens of the city still looked at Liao with respect, of course, but it was nothing like the awed residence present throughout the countryside. They were too close to the sect, these people. They witnessed the mortal side of cultivators, watched them eat, emptied their privies, did their laundry, poured their drinks, and saw them slump to the dirt in the exhaustion of training. They knew enough to recognize the differences between initiates, disciples, and elders. The variables that marked one as powerful but still tied to the nature of everyday life and those who had largely transcended it to become beings dependent upon qi alone. Colored belts, mandated by sect rule, made the recognition of those divides trivial.

Eyes followed Liao's every step. They conveyed a mixture of curiosity, respect, and wariness. No one impeded his passage or questioned him, but neither could he move about unnoticed. Chen Chao had warned him of this, that any cultivator in the city was being constantly monitored, no matter their business, but it took seeing such careful minders to believe it.

There were, he knew, good reasons to provide such constant observation. Cultivators in the city who acted irresponsibly might get immensely drunk – it required truly excessive amounts of alcohol but was possible for anyone not yet an elder – and a drunken cultivator was essentially a natural disaster in human form. Vigilant residents knew to stay well clear of wild parties, and to send a summons to the sect if raucous revelry spilled into the streets.

Measures existed to prevent such rampages, and the punishments for indulgence beyond all self-control were severe – no one enjoyed a decade repairing the wall – but that did little to provide safety to the people of the city. Liao did not think of himself as threatening, but he was still wearing his bow. As none of the residents were allowed proper weapons, he would have been a threat even without the power to channel qi.

He could see why they would feel nervous.

"This is a grim mismatch," Sayaana commented from inside his skull as his followed Chen Chao down the narrow alleyways. "I bet this place is pleasant, most days. I smell food, and clean clothes. No scent of mold or filth, just a little smoke. Everyone seems well, I even see healthy old people, but none of them want you here. It's like seeing a deer herd when the wolves are circling."

To a man with hunting experience, it was a most apt comparison, if rather disturbing. Liao did not enjoy being compared to a wolf, at least not in that manner. Wolves wandered where they willed, and he admired that much. Either way, he could not escape the sense of tension that wrapped around him, tightening the deeper they proceeded. It was similar, but sharper, to what happened whenever he lingered too long in a village. Whenever the feasting came to an end pretty girls vanished from open spaces and old men gave hard glares where they thought he could not see.

Chen Chao had anticipated this reaction. By taking the lead, she mitigated its consequences significantly. She did all the talking, something that clearly increased the comfort of the locals. Almost everyone living here knew someone who served in the gray robes and most had relatives among the families, if distantly. Though she had little skill as a dissembler, she did possess the dogged capability of a household manager to keep a conversation stuck to a specific topic.

She told anyone who asked that they were searching for a potential residence suitable for Liao's parents.

It was not even, entirely, a lie. After the previous equinox, Liao had come to the clear conclusion that his parents were now counted among the elderly. This was especially critical for his father, who no longer possessed the spryness necessary for anyone who made a living by clambering around through the hills checking traps. He could send money, of course, and render such work unnecessary, but Liao knew that so long as his father continued to live in the mountains nothing would stop him from hunting and trapping. It made far more sense to relocate his parents to the city. Most cultivators who found themselves in possession of aging relatives did much the same.

He had agreed with this very reasonable idea when it was suggested by Su Yi but remained uncertain of his ability to convince his parents to make the change. The familial bond retained the power to override all cultivator reputation. He was hoping to find a way to use the annual new year's test to implant the suggestion, though that was no long Su Yi's responsibility since becoming an elder and he'd yet to approach her replacement.

At present, it did not matter. The gentle fiction allowed Chen Chao to guide them to Deng Sheng's residence cloaked beneath a perfectly plausible ruse, one that did not arouse any suspicion. Several older landlords accepted the story sufficiently to try and offer property, making rather vigorous defenses as to the virtues of their buildings to the maid's face. She deflected these offers easily, repeatedly condemning them as containing insufficient garden space, a statement that Liao realized indicated she knew his preferences better than he thought.

This left the cultivator rather embarrassed. Dependent in this outing on the woman who was both his maid and lover, he discovered that while she knew him well, he barely knew her at all.

It felt as if he'd laid aside a key responsibility.

In due course, timing their arrival to the mid-evening hours when their quarry was unlikely to be home, they arrived at the residence where Deng Sheng was registered to live.

It was not a special place. The structure departed from a typical courtyard-based home only in that the central hall was larger than normal and supported a highly sloped roof with ornate drain tiles. Normally used by well-off artisans for storage, the elderly owners had converted that space to a modest loft in order to provide additional income. They were no longer actively engaged in their previous business of cloth exchange.

The couple, like many elderly individuals, had retired early for the evening, but a neighbor, clearly enticed by the still-pretty Chen Chao, was eager to chat. He opined that Deng Sheng had gone out to dinner at a nearby restaurant he favored.

With clouds gathering in the growing darkness, this offered an ideal chance to sneak inside.