Unseen Cultivator

It was moderately amusing to Qing Liao, in an ironic fashion, that the first significant action he took after being sternly warned to 'stay alive' was to paddle a handmade raft several hundred meters out into the ocean with the direct intention of hunting down predators not only larger than himself but also sporting more teeth in their mouths than an entire pack of wolves. Only moderately, because he recognized this analysis as colored by the lingering perspective shaped during his mortal life, before cultivation changed everything.

This situation would surely have been extremely dangerous, and perhaps even impossible for an ordinary human. Liao suspected that the sharks were more than strong enough to haul any mortal who attempted this hunting strategy down into the depths to be devoured. For a cultivator in the thought weaving realm, it carried minimal risk. The teeth in those mouths, though sharp and frightfully numerous, were small. It was unlikely that, passing through his armor, they would retain the strength needed to pierce the skin.

Nor did he face any real risk of drowning. He could stride atop the waves or walk along the bottom with ease even if swimming failed. Even if he was somehow knocked unconscious, his lungs would likely sustain him long enough to awaken amid the clam-covered mud of the seafloor well before his air ran out.

Even if the sharks could harm him, landing a strike would require that he simply tread water in place and allow them to attack. Such a thing was simply not going to happen. He did not freeze in the face of predators, that impulse had been beaten out of him as a child. Though Liao could not yet match the speed of these predators while submerged, he could react faster even than swift beasts of this kind and, if threatened by a mobbing, could easily burst free to the surface.

It was said, in various sect annals, that no natural phenomenon, not even the most devastating of disasters such as earthquakes and volcanoes, could slay a cultivator who had achieved even the first layer of the spirit tempering realm. Even two full realms below that status, Liao recognized that he had already moved beyond the reach of everyday occurrences and all but the most immense living creatures. He found that status curious and possessed a strange sort of guilt at the recognition that he had departed from the embrace of nature in some profound way.

Pushing past such ruminations, he focused on the matter at hand. It was nearly sunset. He had spent the day refining his raft and considering the best point to attack across the bodies of the sharks. The lost time did not trouble him too much. There were few of the distinctive fins matched to sharks to be seen during the bright hours. It seemed the animals were far more active at night, a trait that matched his understanding of how predators acted naturally.

He would have only a single full night to truly hunt, but there was no point in hoping for more. It would suffice to retain the lessons of this encounter for another trip.

He'd scouted out his advance carefully, choosing a submerged ridge as the ideal hunting spot. There was no way to anchor the raft in place, but in the absence of wind there were only mild currents and minimal drifting. A sack full of bait waited atop the lashed-log construction beside Liao's bow, the chosen implements of the hour.

When the sun set behind the mountains across the bay to the west, he took up both in hand.

The relatively simple act of pouring a mixture of liquid fish guts, still-twitching bait fish, and pulverized crabs into the water had an almost immediate impact. Fish rose from below to swirl and swarm. Birds, drawn by this churn, mirrored the process in the sky above. The raft began to rock back and forth as a great mass of animal life gathered to consume the prepared feast.

The initial adherents were small, intrepid explorers. Gulls, small swift fish, and crabs all streaked in from hiding places nearby. Only after the scent spread across the waves and time passed did larger creatures appear. Long and slender fish, with toothy mouths, arrived from deeper waters to snap up the still-wriggling prey. White-feathered birds with immense wingspans swooped down from on high. Flying with incredible grace and control, they snatched thrashing fish from the surface in their beaks without any other part of their bodies touching the water. Strangely shaped creatures with wide white wing-like fins that vaguely resembled bats and according to the old books were known as rays rose from hiding places buried in the bottom mud to snap up fragments of crabs and fish guts in vise-like mouths.

And then, at last, the sharks arrived. Some were the same ones he'd seen before, four large individuals each with hooks still stuck in their jaws. Others, smaller and slender kindred forms, also joined in the feast. Spinning circles just beneath the surface, they raced through the gathered swarm, snapping and biting anything that came within reach of the toothy mouths. The churn grew intense as large bodies slammed together barely a handsbreadth beneath the waves.

Standing atop the raft, using qi to anchor his footing in place atop the rocking platform, Liao took his bow in hand. He placed a broad and barbed demon-killing arrow to the string. The pattern of the circling sharks fit together perfectly when exposed to his enhanced senses. He could, within moments, predict every turn. Cultivator eyes pierced the refraction of the water under moonlight, allowing him to release the strike precisely, no need for compensation.

Qi moved through fingers, shoulders, and back. The arrow shaft thrummed with power, strengthening it to increase penetration while preventing breakage. Not knowing the necessary strength to sunder the shark's cranium, Liao provided his blow with elephant-killing power.

The large female served as the first, and most important, target. Liao aimed at the point atop the skull equidistant between the eyes. Though he did not know the arrangement of the organs within the body of a shark, he'd felt the predator's qi as she passed close by. The brain was there, a proper place to launch a lethal strike.

A single twang of the bowstring split the night air. The arrow, accelerated with incredible force, traveled a bare handful of meters. It slipped through the water as if the liquid was mere air, sliced through the gray skin atop the shark's head, crashed through the reinforced cartilage beneath, and delivered the full force of its qi-backed momentum into the braincase.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

The shark thrashed once, muscles spasming down the length of the long frame, and then was still.

Liao stretched out and reached down. He grabbed the shark's tail and, through the exertion of the full measure of his superhuman strength, pulled the shark out of the ocean and onto his little raft in a single move. The heavy cylindrical form rolled awkwardly across the logs and the tail shifted against his hands as the body shuddered. Something tugged and sliced against his skin with each shift.

This strange feeling, one entirely unexpected, drew the eye. Enhanced cultivator eyesight revealed the tiny implements that had rasped against but failed to pierce his strengthened skin. Thousands of tiny scales, each a tooth almost too small to see, were layered together in an overlapping array whose precision would be the envy of any armorer.

The very image triggered memories, patterns laid out in leather and metal within the texts of the armory pavilion. Sharkskin scale plating, an ancient form from the south, one still in use by armorers with the cultivation and skill to work at such fine detail.

Such a discovery, an obvious hidden property leaping out from the face of the newly glimpsed material, triggered a desire to explore, to experiment, deep within Liao's heart. He wished to uncover every property, every usage, of this unusual substance. His actions were turned toward that purpose at once.

Twice more the bowstring twanged and arrows flew. Each time, another shark was drawn up onto the raft. These smaller forms, with straighter teeth and pale gray coloration, were different from the large female. One had black marks at the edge of the fins. The other maintained solid gray throughout. No more than a meter and a half in length, these proved much easier to handle than the female almost twice their size and several times their mass.

The combined weight of these animals threatened to swamp the little raft. In order to prevent this, and protect his prizes, Liao simply jumped into the ocean to lessen the burden and began to kick and push his simplistic watercraft back to the shore. A few fish, lost to bloodlust, nipped at his heels as he passed, but they gave up swiftly when they failed to penetrate the hardened covering of his boots. One went for the thigh, but a layer of qi served equally well to dissuade it.

A greater threat, to Liao's prizes rather than his flesh, was found in the form of fish and crabs that sought to jump or crawl onto the raft and feast upon the hundreds of kilos of flesh it now contained. Countless kicks and slaps were needed to knock them away, a struggle that greatly prolonged the return journey to the beach.

Once he'd returned to dry ground and hauled the raft above the reach of the tide, Liao went to work without pause, determined to preserve his catch as much as possible.

He cut and carved with great speed. He sought to place not only the precious hides in storage, but also the teeth, jaws, eyes, fins, and livers. Zhou Hua's preparations, as thorough as ever, identified all these components as useful in alchemy or other crafts. Thankfully, the preservation effect of the empty, airless spaces within the storage rings allowed for the transport of all such items without fear of decay.

It was not an easy nor swift labor, and was also incredibly messy. Though he'd long thought himself inured to foul smells, Liao discovered that shark tissue reeked of urine somehow in a manner that was as confusing as it was off-putting. His nostrils, coated with qi, redirected this odor, but it demanded greater effort and focus than normal.

He was also forced to work very carefully. The sharks were different from any of the many fish of Mother's Gift he'd ever placed beneath his knife, and at the same time had no commonality with otter, beaver, or any other furred animal of the waters. Experience, beyond the general shape of organs, offered no guide, and he worked through many anomalies, such as the strange spiral shape of the entrails, without any real understanding of their nature.

Taking the whole night, he avoided any rush. Each piece was marked out carefully beneath the moonlight and sketched quickly once isolated. The task was not completed until nearly dawn, when at last he threw the remaining scraps into back into the ocean. Foul-smelling and strangely chemical though they might be, even this flesh would serve as food for the crabs if nothing else.

Liao kept for himself, outside of the confines of the storage rings, only a single tooth and a disk of the spinal column, both from the large female. He found himself running these between his fingers over and over, sensing countless peculiarities of texture. The tooth, though clearly intended for the same purpose as the fangs of a wolf or the snapping spikes in a snake's mouth, was made differently, a variance in material composition sensitive fingers could detect where sight could not. The spinal bone too possessed a similar structural dissimilarity to ordinary bone. He did not know what these things meant, but suspected Zhou Hua would find it fascinating.

He looked forward to her reaction when she was offered this gift.

Sayaana demanded that he pause to nap briefly in the final hours before dawn. Long days of walking north awaited, and she cautioned that if they took the opportunity to retrieve the buried fenghuang sculpture, the remaining journey would be taken at a true rush. There would be no time to spare when avoiding possible pursuit.

Liao intended to wake up as the sun rose, something he had long been able to control almost perfectly. On this day, he was jarred from his slumber by the loud screeching of the shorebirds, nearly a half hour too early.

This avian alarm represented a life-saving intervention.

Qi, horrid and red, spiked across his senses even as his eyes snapped open, and he rose from the blanket of leaves where he'd made his bed amid the thick dune grasses. Turning his head, he peered through the shadows of the pre-dawn light to watch as a wake moved through the shallow surf of the bay at low tide. A triangular path that could be traced to a pair of massive, curled, red horns rising slowly from watery depths.

"Giant!" Sayaana's voice ripped through Liao's skull even as his hands were already reaching for his bow. His mistake, the foolish blinding greed he must now survive, ripped through his awareness, obvious even as he stood.

Storage rings. They were weak, and their qi signature was further obscured by the spatial distortion binding it inward, but even though the thin stream they exuded was minimal, it was not nothing. Given enough time, the demons tracked those signs, the very method he'd used to recover them. In staying upon the shore, not moving any significant distance, he had allowed for the same. Five days, Liao recognized to his sorrow and terror, was too long.

The giant had not followed the qi trail across the land. The pair had scouted out such possible dangers and found nothing.

But they had not checked beneath the waves.

With no need to breathe, unhindered by pressure, the demon could walk beneath the ocean in the lightless midnight realm and still pursue its quarry. Now, the monster emerged from the surf striding on pillar-like limbs strong as stone. Lidless eyes the size of a human skull turned upon Liao and the plague eyed its prey at last.

The giant roared, a thunderous avalanche unleashed in a single rumbling burst, and charged.