Unseen Cultivator

There were trails in the southern forests and hills. Trails that carved muddy barren paths marked by stomped herbs and small trees thrown to the ground broken. These were not made by any deer or boar; Qing Liao knew those pathways well and recognized that it could not be so. Initially he suspected the trails might have been cut by some form of cattle. Oxen were, in his experience, the largest of animals, rare though they were in Mother's Gift. This, he quickly recognized, was not the case. The muddy trails, soft after rain, bore no hoofprints. Instead, he tracked rounded, soft-edged imprints made by an animal as immense as it was unfamiliar.

It took him some time, for these animals were both uncommon and elusive, before he finally managed to track them down at a resting point south of the river, between funeral grounds.

The mighty beasts were something he'd previously known only through old scrolls and artistic engravings. They had gathered in herds along an oxbow point, drinking heartily and rolling about along the grubby banks in order to coat their bodies in mud as a barrier against the harassment of biting flies. As they ate and splashed, they called to each other using loud and low trumpet-like sounds from their immense trunks. It was a potent sound unlike anything he'd ever heard and one would not have believed was real if it was spoken of in a story.

Elephants.

Gigantic animals on pillar-like legs with large heads, trunk-like noses, and tusked teeth the size of spears. Their immensity shocked the disciple.

They were not, he'd thought, supposed to be found here. Not as far north as he remained. Zhou Hua's list had mentioned these huge creatures, for the shaping pavilion desired the ivory of their tusks for use in crafts and the alchemists sought to utilize both tusk and skin in powdered form. They were believed to live only much further to the south, and even there only in remote valleys.

This herd, happy and healthy under the leadership of a sharp-eyed matriarch whose gaze it took the cultivator a surprisingly diligent level of effort to evade, was hundreds of kilometers north of expectations. If the trails, which he had witnessed for years without understanding their source, were any guide, then they occasionally ranged even as far north as Mother's Gift itself.

"How are they here?" Liao whispered to Sayaana in confusion. "Why were the predictions so far off?"

"What are you standing on?' the remnant soul offered by way of explanation.

It took no more than a moment to parse these words and unfold all they implied. He was standing, as he so often found himself in these hills, atop the buried remains of a former rice paddy terrace. All the slopes in this valley had been transformed in such a fashion. Land converted to support as many villagers as possible. A method to funnel as many cultivators into the great sects of the old world as could be born.

Such converted river valleys had no space left for elephants. The herd playing in the river numbered thirty-four, mothers and calves all. The males wandered elsewhere. Liao suspected that this group of not even forty animals might well eat as much as the thousand humans of his home village.

Quotas. Restricted hunting seasons. Rules against the taking of fertile females. These rules, and others, the trapper knew them well. An extensive array of restrictions designed to keep the limited wilderness of Mother's Gift productive year after year in all things needed by the sect and the people. The Twelve Sisters had not derived such rules from nothing, Liao realized now. They'd simply borrowed them, taken the existing structures of the old world and adapted them to new circumstances. The sects had long managed resources, not for the benefit of the wild or the masses, but for the cultivators.

Staring at the elephants, especially the joyous little ones who played with all the exuberance of a puppy but whose dark eyes concealed understanding vastly in excess of any hound's, it was hard to think of them as a resource. They were incredible, majestic animals whose existence demanded he reconsider everything he'd thought about the natural limits of size and strength. The aged matriarch stood more than two and a half meters at the shoulder, nearly three times that in length, and must weigh close to five thousand kilos. She could surely, if she wished, stomp ghouls flat. The bulls, which he had glimpsed in passing, grew even larger. He suspected that their long tusks could gore ogres to death if pressed.

"Could they be ridden in battle?" he wondered, imagination teased by the idea.

"Yes," Sayaana's affirmation of this was both unexpected and swift. "I saw it, in a sculpture to the south of the mountains. A sport for rich mortals. Combat between cultivators would result in the slaughter of even such behemoths."

This was a statement Liao needed to put to the test. Hard though it might be to treat these mighty animals as a source of supplies, that role remained critical. Beyond the tusks and their use in carving, the hide of the elephants was incredibly thick, a trait revealed by their very motions. It would make excellent armor and surely had many other uses. Liao knew he needed to improve his protection for the trip to the ocean, a journey that now seemed very close at hand. Stumbling on a potential source of the exact material he needed was a blessing from the Celestial Mother.

As was the pile of storage bracelets and rings filling his pack, a trove recovered from Yezi graves. He had enough space remaining to recover everything an elephant might source. Tusks, hide, bones, nails, and even internal organs that might be of some use to the alchemists could all be placed in those voids. To turn back from the hunt before him would mean betraying not only the sect but also his own dao.

Hesitation faded as he turned away from the river.

Not that he targeted the herd, of course. Hunting mothers and young was improper, and most of the females either lacked tusks entirely or sported only modest nubs. He tracked down a lone bull instead. Middle-aged only, but still substantially larger than even the matriarch, and with tusks longer than Liao's legs.

It was not a difficult stalk. The massive tusker left an obvious trail, the clean and clear path offered by an animal that feared no challenge. It was surprising only for a second. Liao knew there were tigers here, ranging through the forests, but though those cats were mighty and could take down any cow or boar, they were no match for a grown elephant. The difference in size and strength; it was far too much.

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

"Mortals must have hated these animals," Liao considered, speculating to Sayaana as he tracked the bull towards a clearing as sunset approached. The male had shattered countless small trees as he roamed in order to get at lush understory grass and succulent broad-leaved low-lying shrubs. "But how could they have fought?" Though they initially seemed large and lumbering, observation revealed that the elephants could move with shocking speed. A single blow from the tusks would easily slay even an armored mortal man.

"Bows, braced spears, and bleeding." The remnant soul responded. "In the north, elk and moose get very big. That's how the people there handle them. Elephants are bigger and stronger, but the same techniques work, given enough strikes. You though, one arrow, no more. Clip the neck veins, swift and sure."

Liao nodded in agreement with this advice, finding it sound. He had never attempted to hunt anything even close to this size, or, more importantly, with such a peculiar build. He took up position in the shadows beneath a tree at the edge of the clearing, frozen in place with his bow held before him. The elephant bull moved about slowly, grabbing rolls of shrubbery with his trunk and then lifting them to the mouth in great heaps. Idly, he battered through stands of bamboo that impeded him, scattering the poles like matchsticks. If the bull noticed a human at the very edge of his visual range, no sign was given.

The cultivator drew out from his quiver not a standard hunting arrow, but one of his much larger ghoul-killing broadheads. Once, long ago, such arrows were used for precisely this purpose. Though they had been changed to accommodate the humanoid shape of demons, one could still be channeled to serve in the old way. Strong enough to carry the necessary qi, Liao considered it a testament to the might of both animal and forest that he repeated all the steps of his ghoul-slaying strikes before launching this missile.

He pulled the bow back swiftly, aiming even as he drew, with qi enhancement strengthening his hands, sharpening his eyes, and empowering his weapon. The line to the target formed instantly, a bar of light across his vision, qi guidance similar to the Stellar Flash Steps, an unseen luminous path to the point of finality.

With a silent turn of the thumb ring, Liao released the tension. The string pulsed and the arrow flew. It flashed across the clearing, a dark streak beneath the light of the setting sun. With a loud, sharp, shunk-sound it impacted perfectly on target.

Strengthened by qi from manufacture to launch, the arrow sank up to the fletching in the center of the elephant's throat.

There was no scream or rumble of pain, not with the throat torn. A red stain surrounded the wound, spreading swiftly to cover the whole flank. In seconds the knees trembled, then buckled, and the bull collapsed into the grass. The ground crackled as shrubs and fallen bamboo poles were crushed beneath the bulk. Moments later the ribcage ceased all motion. The bull had taken his final breath.

Liao offered the hunter's prayer to Orday, as always. Then he put up his bow and walked over to the carcass.

He touched the elephant once, feeling that the spark of qi had failed. The body remained warm, it would take some time for such bulk to cool, but death had come and gone already. All that remained was to do the work obligated to this end. Pulling out his tools, now carried in the silver bracelet that he had recovered first of all and strapped to his right wrist, he set himself to the task.

It was a slow and careful process, for not only was the elephant massive, but its form was also unknown to his hands. This was not a creature that shared the same base shape and bone structure common to boar, cow, deer, and sheep. It possessed a variant character and a form he'd never glimpsed in the past. He had no desire to dishonor the mighty bull through reckless and crude butchery.

As he labored his understanding expanded, and he adopted a new rhythm. The hide was, as expected, extremely thick, but this was a minimal barrier to a cultivator's enhanced strength and coordination, to say nothing of his unbearable sharp blades. His carving knife, designed by alchemists for the purpose of organ extraction, was even forged out of a black bladed metal whose name they concealed all to prevent any corrosion that might come from exposure to hot blood.

Slipping into the well-worn grove of trapper practice, thoughts of the moment faded, and others bubbled up. The elephant, and the clearing he'd created atop a long-lost rice terrace that time had almost, but not entirely, erased; it prompted deep rumination. This land, untouched by humans for two and a half millennia, was so different from Mother's Gift. "I am beginning to see why you called my home a farmer's pen," he told Sayaana. "Seeing creatures like this, in places uncontrolled."

"Good," the green-skinned woman's image appeared opposite the elephant. Moving slowly and deliberately, she walked along the border of the little clearing. "Openings, trails, bamboo, the animals that shape the forest, and its work to shape them too. Not like a land that submits to the spade."

Surrounded by endless greenery, hands soaked to the elbows in hot blood, Liao could not deny that truth. The world, he recognized, could shape itself. It did not need human help.

He would even call the name the Twelve Sisters had laid upon it, the Ruined Wastes, a lie. This land was not in ruins. It was vibrant, glorious, and abundant.

Except for the red haze that clung to everything.

The plague could not touch him, and that allowed him to ignore it, to filter out its presence.

Most of the time.

But it remained, always. The least shift of perception, a single blink or sniff, would reveal it again. Everything lay beneath its touch. Even the elephant, the plagues tiny flakes revealed their presence on its tissue through the echo of their qi. They had infested the skin, ears, and even the tongue.

Liao did not know what it did, that clinging crimson coating. He could discern only that it contained vast quantities of qi, qi that had been taken from the rest of the world. Perhaps, he considered, the vibrant life he saw around him was truly no more than ruins, a lesser world that, however much it had recovered in the absence of humans, lacked the power it ought to possess. He thought that, if he could fly up to the black edge where the sky ended that Artemay had shown him, he might someday find a way to measure such damage.

"The plague needs to go first," he decided. "Then we can worry what to do about spades."

"Can we?" Sayaana was suddenly beside him, whispering in his ear. "I do not think so. It is early now, but you'll need to define your dao long before that moment. And your dao, like that of any other immortal, includes a vision of how the world should be."

She stepped back, spinning around before him with dark hair flashing in the last light of the sun. A momentary glimpse that revealed the truly stunning beauty he sometimes forgot the exotic woman possessed almost casually. "If it happens that you don't fit with those star-worshipping sisters, don't flee that. I'm with you, and we have the whole of the world to roam. You don't have to seek a version of immorality that fits inside a farmer's pen."

To seek immortality not within Mother's Gift, but in a place of his own. Not standing beside the Twelve Sisters beneath the stars but walking a pathless road. Somehow, that vision chased away a shadow Qing Liao had not realized was shrouding his heart.

The stars rose as he worked through the process of field dressing the elephant, and though he welcomed their coming, he realized he could walk the forest under any sky. Such thoughts quickened his step along the way back.