Unseen Cultivator

The arrow that struck the ghoul in the back of its skull had a massive, hardened steel broadhead point and a shaft as thick as Liao's thumb. It was a heavy, heartless weapon of war designed to tear through flesh and bone in order to deal the sort of devastating damage necessary to slay a demon. There were spearheads with an impact surface smaller than the one possessed by that arrow.

To draw and shoot such an arrow required a mighty bow indeed, one beyond the capacity of any ordinary human to wield. Qing Liao's weapon, heavy and profoundly curved, taken from the armory pavilion, managed such feats easily. He was, however, extremely careful with the weapon, for it was not something he could easily replace. Though he had learned to make simple bows by bending wooden staves, the construction of a complex, reinforced, composite implement of archery able to invoke the full capacity of one in the thought weaving realm lay far beyond his skill. Even Sayaana's instruction offered little assistance.

The combination of mighty bow and equally mighty arrow sufficed to utterly annihilate the ghoul. Facing the wrong direction, it had no way to know of Liao's existence and simply stood motionless while the cultivator approached, found solid footing some distance upwind, and launched his projectile lance on a path to penetrate at the rear base of the red skull. The arrow tore the red-shaded skin and bones apart, half-decapitating the demon and slaying it instantly. The body began dissipating before it finished collapsing to the ground.

"It seems almost too easy," he murmured as he walked slowly down the slope to the rough level patch of dirt, otherwise completely the same as every other plot in the surrounding forest, where the ghoul had stood. The lone ghoul hardly counted as a threat to any cultivator, much less one they could not see. The massive war arrows, derived from weapons originally used to hunt elephants, slaughtered them without the least risk from a distance beyond the reach of their eyes to see.

Granted immunity from the plague, the demons could not concentrate against him. Liao could have stalked through the forest endlessly, killing them one by one, until all were exterminated.

"Kill too many, and a demonic cultivator will notice," Sayaana cautioned, speaking from behind his eyes. Though she repeated a warning given by the grand elders, the emotions bleeding through their linked qi suggested she broadly agreed with such a plan of elimination. "And time and arrows are better spent on other tasks."

Though he could not confirm the former, Liao had to admit the truth of the latter. The ghouls were widely dispersed and, being both almost totally motionless and subsumed into the great backdrop of the plague's qi, difficult to discern amid the thick forest vegetation despite their violently unnatural color. Isolating and killing one was time consuming, similar to the hunt for any large animal.

Worse, the arrows, impacting the thick, plague-reinforced bones of the demons, often broke. Even when they pierced clean through, they often shattered against tree trunks or large rocks. Being specialty creations of the blacksmithing pavilion, they were not easily replaced. So long as he recovered the points, Liao could repair and fashion new shafts, but that was slow, the work of a whole day. He did not, on his journeys, have such time to waste.

The grand elders set strict deadlines.

Itinay had authorized a journey of ten days to hunt for storage rings in ancient graves. She could not, of course, force him to come back in that timeframe. The sect had no way to track him down outside of a very narrow space beyond the gateway. They could, however, punish him severely for being back late, something the grand elder had not hesitated to threaten in extremely clear terms.

The only way to avoid such consequences would be to leave the sect forever, which Liao had never previously imagined doing and had no desire whatsoever to attempt. He remained bound to Mother's Gift, and therefore within the grasp of the sisters, something he was absolutely certain they knew with complete confidence.

It took three days of travel through the forest to reach Zhou Hua's best candidate site, a place she believed served as a great Yezi burial ground where their many ancient chieftains, mostly body refining realm cultivators, had been laid to rest. He moved mostly southwest, through warm and wet forests adorning both elevated hills and deep gorges. It was rough terrain, crisscrossed by endless narrow and cold streams. Water had carved its way across these old inland hills for many ages, and animals stalked their paths on narrow trails and in the shadows of mighty trees.

Though it had been over twenty-five hundred years since anyone lived in this place, the land was not devoid, not entirely, of the marks left by human presence. Many of the hillsides in this region, especially those facing south, had been exhaustively terraced. Transformed by immense effort of labor into a series of flat stairs along the hillsides for the needs of the rice crop, they retained that influence still. Though time had buried those stone walls beneath vegetation, the impact of that ancient leveling remained visible in stepwise growth patterns among the canopy trees along such slopes.

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Liao had grown up around terraces, but the scale of what he passed through now was something far greater than a few sculpted hills in Mother's Gift. Whole landscapes transformed from clear slopes to measured steps by the efforts of an immense number of people laboring over many generations. Though root and turf had covered the stones, he could still feel the platforms beneath his feet. Their influence on the flows of qi below the surface continued to the present.

"Why transform the land this way?" He asked Sayaana as he picked his way across the legacy landform. "Did they truly need so much rice as to clear even these forests?" He might not be a farmer, but it was impossible to spend as much time in farmland as he had and not absorb a few fragments. Nothing about this land suggested it would be highly productive.

"I don't know," the remnant soul admitted. "It looks like your home. Pen the people in place and farm them. More rice, more humans. More humans, more cultivators. Why they needed so many though, with no plague to fight, I have no idea."

They left it there, each equally isolated from the past despite the great gulf of time otherwise separating them. A strange continuum, one Liao reflected upon wordlessly as he walked on towards the goal.

The Yezi, having lived in a time before the sects, before the modern principles of cultivation were developed, were incomprehensible to him. Had they started the terracing project? Or had they lived as he had among the bamboo, reliant upon the land's bounty? He could not tell. All that remained to speak for them were words left behind by an immortal who had tried and failed to ascend over five millennia ago. It was barely even a glimpse into those lives. Everything else was lost, buried deep beneath the churn of the earth.

Demons were poorly adapted to digging. Their claws were long, narrow, and broadly straight, designed to rip and tear flesh not to move earth. The ghoul Liao killed had cleared away the leaf litter and cut away surface roots beneath its feet, but it had not gone further. The result was a tiny scratched and pitted landscape rather than a hole. Even so, this sufficed to make the plague's interest in the location perfectly clear.

It was a far better indicator than anything else Liao had found so far. He had killed ten other demons only to detect nothing at all. Zhou Hua had speculated that the valleys containing this river system might well hold hundreds of tombs. Perhaps it had, once, but it seemed that those containing storage items were either rare or, more likely, time had robbed many of the artifacts of their power. Even qi-reinforced materials could lose their potency over time. Aside from the small number of dead ghouls, which could only be considered positive, the first two days of searching had been fruitless.

Sitting down in the roughly scratched forest floor, Liao settled in to meditate. The dissipation of plague creatures was a notable benefit now, a gift that saved him from having to wallow in blood and gore. Closing his eyes, he slowly restricted all other senses until only his ability to detect qi remained. This practice he knew well, though the vibrancy of the surrounding forest made it difficult to extend his qi sense very far. There was simply too much life, too many variable sources of essence constantly moving about, shifting and merging. Even with the benefits provided by the thought weaving realm, which greatly expanded his ability to process all he detected, it was too much.

Bending his focus downward, a method he likened to placing a shade over a lantern, helped little. The thick soil beneath his feet held just as much life as that lying beneath the sun, and perhaps even greater variation. Worse, flakes and flickers of metallic qi sourced to bits of rock and ancient scraps of tools left behind by the people who once lived here offered up an additional layer of qi vying for his attention. To search effectively at all he had to narrow the shroud into a slender tube and then try and pierce the shadowy morass that remained below. Incredibly frustrating, it demanded diligence, patience, and repetition all to search even a tiny space.

Thankfully there was no terrace here. He'd tried that the day before only to discover that the subterranean rock layer blocked his progress entirely. He could sense qi beyond those stones, just as he could still hear with his ear pressed against a stone wall, but everything was distorted, blurred, and useless.

It took well into the night, extending his senses nearly to bedrock, before he completed the search of this little one-meter diameter cylinder using the Precious Jewel Recovery Technique. The tiny telltale flash of silver qi impacted on his mind just as the moon set and only the stars remained overhead.

This discovery taught Liao something critical. Not about himself, but about the demons. The senses belonging to any individual ghoul were superior to those of a mortal human, but otherwise ordinary enough. The sensory capabilities of the plague itself, and its power to direct the demons accordingly, were extraordinary. Somehow that red haze was able to direct a ghoul across hundreds of kilometers of hillside until it stood perfectly positioned above the artifact. If, thousands of years in the future, the whole hill eroded away beneath rain and flood, the ghoul would have remained, still waiting for a chance to tear into the spatial distortion.

The infinite patience of the plague made the plans of immortals seem like those of mayflies. It left him absolutely terrified in a way he'd never been before. The inhuman accomplishments of the plague rammed a dark truth home, one oft forgotten.

Demonic cultivators were not the enemy. Nor were the demons the foe. Or, at least, they were not the only or greatest one. They were traitors and victims gathered together beneath the banner of the true enemy, the plague itself.

As a trapper, not a healer, Liao knew little of medicine. Zhou Hua, however, learned such arts as part of alchemy practice. He resolved to ask her about this upon his return.

Until then, he had digging to do.