Unseen Cultivator

"There is no river or mountain range able to guide you to the ocean," Zhou Hua had explained this as they poured over old maps. "The shortest path is simply south and slightly east, directly overland. It will be rather rough and rugged, with much up and down, but such a course should not draw undue attention."

Liao had agreed swiftly. He knew this terrain well by now, the endless rolling hills and valleys that continued south as far as he had journeyed. It was a landscape without shortcuts. Instead, he would simply walk. One thousand kilometers of unclaimed wilderness, over one hundred hills and across one hundred valleys, that was the path he must accept. Sayaana had passed through that land, centuries earlier. She believed, based on all they had seen so far, that there had been no appreciable change in the terrain.

The resulting journey was one of considerable repetition. That did not make it boring, Liao did not find the wild so at any point, even in territory he'd passed through many times, there was little that was new in the first few days. The same birds, beasts, and vegetation occurred, shifting only slightly each day as he pushed onward another one hundred and fifty kilometers.

Those things that did change were subtle, signs that Sayaana had taught him to recognize, and he'd learned to read with great care. As he moved south, the land grew warmer and wetter. It became increasingly lush, and the green shades darkened. The number of conifers diminished, replaced by fruit trees and eventually even some palms. Weasels and foxes ceased to ramble through the canopy and undergrowth, their place taken by civets and monkeys instead. Deer and various forms of sheep gave way to ever-increasing numbers of boar, elephants, and herds of massive black cattle that resembled old drawings of a beast called the gaur, though only imperfectly. "A hybrid," Sayaana explained this animal. "The wild beasts bred with those cattle left behind when the plague scoured this land of people. Similar events struck sheep and horses further north, and wild cats everywhere. Humans left much behind."

That much was certainly true. Liao could feel the flattened surfaces of the long-buried terraces beneath his feet as he walked. Many of the ridges, above the reach of such sculpting, possessed forests comprised almost entirely of a single type of tree growing in conspicuous crumbling rows. The mark of plantations long past. There were even, on some of the smaller rivers, dams and weirs of stone that, though covered in moss and weeds, continued to function thousands of years after they'd been laid down. Though the stretch of time since humans lived in these lands was immense, the legacy of people was far from gone.

Only truly catastrophic events that remade the land's very structure could fully erase that influence.

Hills generally bore fewer signs of impact than the lowlands. Above the terraces and the tree plantations there was little evidence left that humans had ever been present. Pasturage and timber cutting did not sustain their marks across millennia. Only the occasional cairn or standing stone served to break apart the otherwise primordial wilderness.

It was in close proximity to rivers, especially the steady ravine-carving kind that remained within fixed banks, that the greatest evidence of the old world could be found. There, on the edge of the floodplains, it was often possible to discern fallen masonry or overturned walls from large stone buildings now fallen. The buried remains of roads were also noticeable, forming lines cut through the turf that Liao carefully avoided, for they cut a path through the concealing overhead canopy.

This had not, in the time of the sects, been a region of many great cities. The former regional capital, once home of the Iron Stance Sect, was by far the largest, and Liao gave this a wide berth as a matter of natural caution. The twisting courses of the southern rivers and canyons had once held numerous towns, however, and these ruins, often centered on a single large and crushed building mound, grew in number the further south he traveled.

Extensive terraces, often encompassing the entirety of the nested valleys, surrounded such places. Many featured other obvious constructs of human hands in the form of flooded pits that had once been used as mines or quarries. In this way Liao was able to glimpse a structure similar to the layout of Mother's Gift, network components laid out to channel production towards the city-seat of a powerful sect.

He was even, in some places, able to detect periodic gaps in the long-ceased land use changes. These, he realized after several encounters, marked the border regions between the sects. The old world had been divided between hundreds or even thousands of small cultivator fiefs, each with a fallow buffer zone between them to minimize conflict.

"I thought, before the plague, the sects of the old world lived in peace," he commented to Sayaana after he passed through one such span and the realization took firm hold in his mind. "Why would they need such large buffer zones? The cities are already hundreds of kilometers apart."

"I don't know," the remnant soul admitted. "I was told similar tales of the old world, but maybe they were lies. Or, maybe, the sects competed through duels. A fight between elders can do a lot of damage, a big open space would be smart."

"True," Liao supposed that made sense. Even a non-lethal battle between immortals could devastate a huge region. The Killing Fields, he recognized, were just such a buffer zone, one designed to protect the rest of Mother's Gift from the blasts.

He did not believe the history of the old world he'd been taught was merely lies, but he did wonder as to which stories had been told and which ones forgotten. The books always spoke of glory and wonder, but he saw little of that left behind. Not when he watched monkeys clamber over shattered mansions and birds build nests atop broken statuary.

He wondered, as the days passed, what might become of the world with the plague gone. Between long strides, moving past a long pile of fragmented masonry dumped at the edge of a river by some massive and unrecorded flood, he posed this question to the remnant companion upon his brow.

"No idea," Sayaana replied swiftly. Such rapid response was a clear sign that she'd thought about such things often in the past. "I'm a wanderer, not a teacher. You're all the disciple I'll ever need. Those shining star sisters, well, I think once they finally cleanse this world they'll leave it. They'll either attempt ascension or just fly off in the sky to find new ones. They have a duty to the earth, to humanity, one they placed upon themselves. That was very generous of them and I'm grateful, but when it's all done, they'll leave the future to others."

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Liao found any attempt to disagree with that assessment, though a part of him cried out to denounce it, very difficult. He recalled Neay's dream, the transformation of another world. If she, the one out of all the sisters who devoted the most of herself to the sect and the land, was going to depart, then they all would.

Their choice, their lengthy stewardship; it was indeed an act of incredible duty and boundless generosity. "Why did they fight at all then? Why not flee?" Iay had traveled to the moon, or so it was said. There was no plague there, upon the pale surface of that pocketed world. Nor was there any air, or so she'd reported, but that absence was no impediment to an immortal.

Others had fled, and not merely a few. There was a book in the sect library, A Record of Abject Cowardice, that named and profiled every cultivator known to have run away from the demon war. Zhou Hua had read it in its entirety, searching for possible artifacts to recover. She said that the majority of those who tried to escape were hunted down and killed by demonic cultivators, but quite a few powerful cultivators, including a number of immortals, had simply vanished into the unknown.

"They fought because Orday asked them to," Sayaana replied, suddenly deadly serious. "I asked that myself, and that was the answer they gave, all of them. I don't think the Fifth Sage ever bothered to explain why, but they never asked. Their mother asked them to do something, so they did it. Sometimes the world is simple."

Liao silently acknowledged this truth. Rather than dwell upon it, an unhappy thought in his present circumstances, he briefly considered what it might mean to have the sisters simply leave when the plague was destroyed. Someone would, he supposed, take up mastery of the sect and spread Orday's teachings across the world. Phantom Flare, he supposed, might do it, though that man remained mysterious to almost all in the Celestial Origin Sect.

Eventually, Liao imagined, teachings would diverge and whatever new world emerged following the plague would divide among sects again and come to resemble the old.

Something about that idea, that future, did not sit right with him. He could not define it properly, but he did know that the old world destroyed itself. The plague was not merely a disaster, it was something seven cultivators had created as a way to acquire power without risk. That was not a grand inspiration. The wilderness, unfortunately, could only teach him so much of a world long buried.

Such thoughts weighed heavily upon Liao's mind when his path led him unexpectedly to stumble upon a fallen city.

He saw it as he crossed over a ridge from the north and discovered a wide valley below with a large, fertile floodplain across its flattened base. A strong river flowed through this place, rushing eastward. The power of that waterway preserved, even now, a wide space devoid of tall trees.

The land nearest the channel had been carved free of all evidence of humanity, but portions of the floodplain near the edges only occasionally lashed by the spring rush preserved mighty stone structures that had endured the flows without being toppled. A light layer of mud and marsh grasses coated them, but they lacked the thick mounded accumulation that Liao had come to expect.

Such ruins were not widespread. The remaining structures were highly scattered, and Liao guessed that not one in one hundred of the original buildings were preserved. In total there were barely a handful of these forms, but they were by far the most substantial remains of the old world he'd ever seen.

Dancer's Rest, that was the name of this place. Once the home of the Dancing Sword Sect, it had been identified on Zhou Hua's maps as probably lying on his path. She'd asked him to sketch the remnants of the city, if he discovered it, as a possible target for future scouting missions. A disciple of the Dancing Sword Sect survived the demon war, though crippled, and it consequently had a comparatively well-documented past. It's sword-obsessed immortal leader was believed to possess a hidden armory containing powerful weapons, some of which might remain nearby.

Looking upon the city's ruins from above, Liao doubted this. He made a quick sketch on a piece of vellum out of obligation, but nothing more. The river had destroyed this city. Whatever riches it once possessed, they'd long since been swept away and scattered downstream across hundreds of kilometers of flood deposits.

Rather than artifacts, he spent considerably more time scanning the skies and the ground for the presence of the enemy.

There were demons on the floodplain. Ghouls, standing about like red statues, lingered in many places. Liao supposed they were standing atop artifacts of some kind, buried beneath many meters of mud, that radiated fragments of leftover qi. He considered, briefly, killing one and conducting an excavation, just to see if there was anything valuable, but rejected it after a very brief internal review.

Mud was ill-suited to the construction of deep holes. He'd learned that bitter lesson already, and the landscape was too open to take the time and build a braced and drained shaft. Such efforts would attract the balance of the ghouls. There were over one hundred in the valley, too many to fight.

Sayaana agreed with this decision. "The Fuming Shade surely searched this place, probably several times. There's nothing of value left here."

Liao concurred, but he decided to push through the ruins regardless. The wide floodplain, with its scattered ruins, extended east and west for a considerable distance. Going around would take half the day, time he did not wish to waste. Though the ground was open, the presence of ruins broke up sight lines. There was more than enough cover to creep through undetected.

"A good test," the remnant soul sounded pleased. "The ghouls are few enough to evade, if they charge, but enough to demand proper stealth. Take care, and eliminate eyes if you must to carve a path."

Along the course Liao chose, there were twenty-two ghouls within one kilometer. He'd long-since learned that they struggled greatly to identify a human beyond that distance and would ignore him as an animal instead unless he made obvious motions. All stood a considerable distance from the river itself, often behind stony piles that offered protection from the floodwaters and kept them from being swept away each spring. Their facing was essentially random, offering widespread coverage of the valley but leaving many unable to see their neighbors.

Liao took advantage of this as he began. He killed two on the western edge of the north bank from long range in order to open a wide gap that allowed easy access to the river. Tall grasses, clogging the muddy, silt-choked ground, allowed him to move using a low, hunched scrambling motion or even to crawl on hands and knees almost completely invisible. Numerous deer slept along those very same reeds for precisely that reason. Liao moved silently past them, detecting their qi as he approached.

The river itself offered the moment of greatest risk, for the eyes of ghouls penetrated water quite well. This mountain-fed waterway, however, was brown and murky, filled with considerable sediment. Liao simply plunged below the surface and swam across on the strength of a single mighty breath. His lungs burned by the time he hauled himself up into the mud of the opposite shore, but he remained completely concealed.

Another arrow cleared a smaller but sufficient gap on the southern bank. As he passed over the point where the ghoul had stood, he discovered not a pile of loose earth, but a hollow stone shaft, one radiating truly potent qi from somewhere far below.

Powerful enough that he stopped and stared wide-eyed down into the passage.