Unseen Cultivator

The power beneath Liao's feet shocked him. It was nothing he'd expected to sense in the wild, stronger than anything save an immortal. It did not, he recognized immediately, belong to a living being. The qi was all wrong for that, too steady and motionless.

Some sort of object or empowered structure, one far too potent to be concealed by simple earth and stone no matter the depth. The stone brick shaft that opened a path downwards was shrouded in near total darkness. The opening was almost totally exposed, covered only by a thin layer of sod that had grown over a gap barely large enough to permit an adult human passage.

Liao dropped to his stomach, starring at the edge of this access. He crawled over the lop and, with a sharp motion, punched away the remaining grass. Open air greeted the tips of his fingers. Running his hand along the outer edge of the shaft, he touched something brittle and soft as he sought to determine how this thing had come to be.

When he pulled his arm back, his fingertips were coated in black dust. "Charcoal?" The smell was unmistakable, a scent not easily confused with anything else, but its presence here was puzzling.

"A tree," Sayaana chuckled through his skull, excited and amused at once. "Someone grew an entire tree up through this shaft, using its qi to hide whatever was hidden below. Smart, if the tree was qi empowered, it could hide a lot of power. It must have caught fire recently, maybe that big drought five years ago."

It was smart, but also bizarre. Such a move was inevitably temporary. Trees died, eventually, and in a place like this were often brought down by flood or disease. Their lifespan could not be predicted. A bizarre method to hide an artifact, one of dubious efficacy. Liao did not understand the purpose. "What would you hide in this way?"

"Something made of wood," Sayaana replied, though even the remnant soul was hesitant. "That would maximize the masking. There is no hint of metallic qi, but the scent is unfamiliar. We might as well take a look."

Though he was not certain he agreed with that assessment, Liao felt the pull of his own curiosity. He did, of course, take precautions. He dropped a stone down the hole first. It struck the bottom, hitting something wooden, perhaps twenty meters down. There was no indication of any traps. He followed this up with some freshly cut reeds, in case of a formation triggered by living material. Finally, he walked back to the river, caught a small fish between his hands, and tested that.

Nothing reacted. Either the shaft lacked additional defenses, or they had faded with time. This supplied sufficient confidence to slowly make the descent.

It was a very well-made stone construction. The stone fitted together with precision even most cultivator creations often failed to match. Some kind of highly durable mortar filled every gap, able to block all passage by water even through thousands of years surrounded by saturated soil and murk. It reminded Liao of the Starwall, on a much smaller scale.

Char covered every brick, thick and heavy. Liao was coated in black dust by the second step. That was, thankfully, the only negative condition he faced on the way down.

The bottom of the shaft terminated in a small room. This was similarly formed in stone and sealed perfectly on every side save the bottom. That had been left open, allowing free access by the mud. This surface was now utterly festooned with burned away wooden shafts; the remnants of roots scoured by the fire that claimed the rest of the tree. Knee-deep charcoal covered the otherwise brownish surface. Clearly, roots had once filled almost the entirety of the space.

There was only one exception, a small alcove carefully molded out of the eastern wall. This indentation, roughly the size that a couch might occupy, lay halfway between floor and shaft. A pocket that had become a tomb.

A skeleton lay on top of the bare masonry. The remains had been reduced entirely to bones, and even those were half-crumbled. Several ribs collapsed away even as Liao watched, reduced to powder by the vibrations he made moving through the chamber. Whoever had once taken shelter in this place, most likely the last survivor of the Dancing Sword Sect, had perished many centuries ago. Most likely it had been over a millennium.

There were no notes left behind or any other explanations, not even an inscription carved into the wall, though any decent cultivator could make such marks with bare hands. This long-passed cultivator had not felt it necessary to leave behind any message or means to explain why they had confined themselves to this space.

Instead, they had left their work to speak on its own.

The skeleton cradled a wooden carving in crumbling hands. A creation that took Liao's breath away.

It was a bird, but no bird such as had ever lived on earth. Its body was a perfect composite form, seamlessly blending together the traits of countless other birds. In one single glance it displayed as a pheasant, in the next a crane. It possessed wings belonging to both a swallow and an eagle, somehow, at the same time. Despite this myriad formlessness, it was also remarkably distinct. Every piece was carved in perfect, unbearably gorgeous detail. Every feather, every curve of beak and talon, every fold of skin on the legs, it was all incorporated into the construction, exactly as it would be on a living bird. Even the colors, somehow pulled out of the wood itself in a cascade of orange, red, and brown shades without any need for paint, possessed the vibrant and overlapping textures that a live animal would possess.

Liao absolutely anticipated, when he reached out to touch the sculpture, that it would leap into the air and fly away into the darkness. That did not happen, but a brilliant mix of wood and fire qi surged across his fingertips at the moment of contact, enough that he had to rapidly cycle it away from his skin or burst into flames.

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A store of power, that was the purpose of this creation. A masterwork poised to serve as the central focus of a formation able to set the sky itself aflame.

That detail, that grasp of the underlying purpose, triggered recognition. "Fenghuang," that was the identity of this melded, mystical bird. A potent symbol in the old world, though one that saw minimal use in Mother's Gift. Liao had seen it, inscribed into the pages of the old books Zhou Hua studied, but never like this, never with such majesty. Fire and rebirth, among many overlapping potentials, anchored its qi.

"No tools," Sayaana noted from behind his eyes. "This was carved purely using qi. The maker invested it with his whole lifeforce, a core creation finalized by draining the dantian." Anger and contempt bled into the remnant's voice. "An extraordinarily arrogant way to kill yourself."

Liao blanched. He stared at the little bird, perched atop its nest of crumbling bones, in horror. He had not even known such an act was possible, and his mind, his dao, recoiled from the very idea. To sacrifice oneself for an object, no matter how precious, was simply alien to his thoughts. "How could anyone do such a thing?" He could not even conceive of it.

"You have to have the right dao, and the right obsession," Sayaana sounded equally disgusted. "I saw it happen once. A fool of a girl who'd hit a bottleneck and gave everything to offer a weapon to her dao companion. Typical dual cultivation, always hits bad ends. It doesn't even necessarily make the artifact more powerful. It just pushes more qi into it." Rare fury burned behind the remnant soul's words. Liao had learned to accept her skepticism regarding the Celestial Origin Sect's methods, but he'd never felt her direct such wrath at a practice before.

A fury that he found himself rising to share. "The sculptor did not leave their name. We will never know who they were." Somehow, he found that it was easier that way. The origin of the carving could, in the future, simply be ignored. It was a beautiful and powerful thing taken from an ancient tomb, that was all. A fortuitous discovery that would benefit the sect; all other meaning could simply be discarded, forgotten.

Carefully, wrapping a cloth around the wood first, Liao picked the fenghuang up. The wooden bird filled both his hands but was not especially large. The wood felt warm, almost hot to the touch even through the silken wrapping. Every contact conveyed the sense that, if even the merest chip were broken free it would explode into a massive conflagration of flames. Qi flooded out from each point of contact, wood and fire in tandem, but it was raw and unshaped. No purpose, no dao, had been imparted to this masterpiece.

"What is it for?" Liao asked Sayaana, uncertain given the lack of an obvious intention. In his experience, artifacts were manufactured to perform specific tasks. This lack of direction left him confused.

"Nothing," the remnant soul explained. "It's nothing more than a monument to its creator's mastery. But, since it absorbs and redirects huge quantities of qi, it can be used to anchor a formation, a powerful one."

Vaguely recalled lessons and readings on the basics of formation studies suggested this was a true assessment. The bird was, in Liao's estimation, perched on the knife's edge of capacity between the height of the soul forging realm and the bottom of the celestial ascendancy realm. Its existence suggested the sculptor had been at the peak of the soul forging realm, one who chose to sacrifice everything for their art rather than dare the tribulation.

He refused to try to understand that. He did not want to know the justification, lest it worm its way into his thoughts as he pursued his own path. Immortality could only be dared, never shirked.

Instead, he kept his focus on the bird itself, on the beautiful and rare treasure. Though not a mathematician, he could do simple arithmetic and estimations. His partnership with Zhou Hua had only increased this skill. It took only a moments tabulation to recognize that this single little wooden carving was more valuable to the sect than everything else he'd brought back with him over eight years combined.

That realization placed him in the center of a sudden conundrum. "I can't put this in a storage ring," he noted grimly. The various artifacts recovered from Yezi graves were incredibly useful, but their simplistic binding of spatial dao had nothing like the power necessary to confine a source of qi with the magnitude of the fenghuang. Even making the attempt would cause one to explode. "And if I carry it with me, I risk notice."

The fenghuang was not a person, it was not even a source of vital qi. Wood and fire qi were natural, indistinct. The sensation the carving gave off was that of the mightiest and most ancient tree in a great forest, burning away in a massive fire. It would not, from far away, be perceived as instantly anomalous in the way a human or fashioned metal might, but it was detectable. The ghouls had noticed it.

If they could find it, so could Snow Feast.

The obvious move was to take the bird, obscure the qi as best he could through wrappings of silk and mud, and rush back to Mother's Gift with all possible speed. That was the course his duty to the sect demanded. Long-term thinking and proper calculation of the risks and rewards came to that conclusion inevitably.

But Liao knew where he was on the map. The ocean was barely a day away. If he turned back now, he would be unable to return for at least a month, perhaps longer. His mother might not have that long.

It was not, in the end, a difficult choice. "I will cut reeds and use them to fill the chimney shaft," he decided. That greenery lacked the power and impact to mask the bird a centuries-old tree offered and would rot away within days, but it was something that could be done quickly. "And retrieve the bird on the way back." The fire had been several years ago, and Snow Feast had not found it yet. A few more days ought to represent little risk.

A gamble he was willing to take.

"Artemay will know you made this choice," Sayaana spoke quietly across his skull. "You are not powerful enough to deny her probes, and too honest to avoid triggering one. The sisters will punish you for this. They'll have to even if they don't want to."

"Then I'll serve the sentence," Liao understood the remnant soul perfectly. He might have special skills, but that would not be allowed to spare him from discipline, the needs of the sect demanded it. Yet, for the very first time he faced the prospect of spending months laying brick and spreading mortar without fear. Compared to keeping his promise to his mother, that was no cost at all. He would reach the sea. No one was going to stop that now.

"Good," Sayaana materialized before him, a bright smile on her green face. "I was worried you were too much like Itinay, all cold calculation. You might have obligations to your sect, but the dao, your dao, always comes first. Don't forget it."

Her support was a joyous reward, one he'd not known his resolve desired.