Unseen Cultivator

Grand Elder Neay, as the head of the farming pavilion of the Celestial Origin Sect, had a truly immense amount to say regarding the subject of digging and excavation. This was notably focused on the use of the enhanced strength possessed by cultivators in tillage. She had even developed and recorded a technique specifically focused on this purpose, the Efficient Excavation Exercise, that described everything from how to craft a shovel of sufficient strength to bear up under such blows to the proper stance and motion to be used while digging vertically as opposed to horizontally.

Prior to authorizing Qing Liao's journey to search out long-buried storage rings she'd ordered him to learn this method. Then she'd tested his knowledge by demanding that he excavate and subsequently fill in a twenty-meter-deep pit in the middle of the Killing Fields. She required it to be an utterly perfect circle when completed.

Her final verdict was that Liao's technique was 'rudimentary, but sound.'

As he began digging in the dark, he rather wished he'd had more time to train in the exercise.

His shovel, thankfully, was excellent. It was a single piece of forged steel, hardened and reinforced through careful welds. The shaft was hollow and the blade thick to provide maximum leverage. Angled to a diamond point, the blade was not especially sharp, it would not cut through armor, but it had been forged of some strange alloy that made it a soft gray color and far harder than ordinary steel. Though the edge was broadly dull, it was immensely durable. It had been tested through slams against a steel plate and lost nothing of its potency.

With this weapon in hand, Liao went to war against dirt, gravel, and root.

The last of these proved to be his bane. The forest here, he discovered during the slow process of cutting his way downward, was stunningly old, ancient in a manner not apparent from the surface alone. Trees here might die from time to time, struck down by fungus, wind, lightning, or even old age, but the forest itself endured endlessly. Protected by the narrow gorges and the nearby river, fires only ever reached it many centuries apart and rarely burned hard.

The hands of the sects had been light upon this land as well. A timber reserve, this forest had not felt the bite of the axe in nearly three thousand years. Trunks might have been smashed by the brows of elephants but never cut. Towering giants, the elders of the woodlands, extended high into the sky. Their boughs spread wide and thick to form a mighty canopy.

And equally vast was the mass of their roots below.

Liao swiftly acquired the conviction, in mood if not in fact, that there was more root than dirt beneath the surface. He did not take measurements, but it felt that way to his eyes, and he would swear to it if questioned. Over and over, he drove the shovel down straight on to hack through a thick woody cylinder. Many were as thick around as his arms, gnarled and hardened by age. Tossed aside, they formed a pile of scrap wood that grew immense and towered above the far more compact pile of excess dirt he removed from the hole. Even as he tunneled deeper and deeper the prevalence of roots showed no sign of decrease.

He was forced to adapt accordingly. Strength was not an issue, nor endurance, his reinforced cultivator body could cut and shovel endlessly. The tool granted him by the sect proved ideal for this purpose. Its immense durability allowed him to wield the shovel with strong strokes and never worry that the blade would crack or chip. Twisted and bent wooden barricades that might have demanded hours of work by a mortal wielding a saw were parted by the gray blade in moments.

The task presented a challenge formed not out of difficulty, but of tedium.

"How do farmers do it?" Liao wondered as he approached what felt like the halfway point. The endless repetition, chop, pull, and lift, thousands of times now, caused his focus to reel. It was enough to exhaust even his reserves, forcing breaks to eat and meditate not from the effort, but through the sheer quantity of exertion demanded.

"It is a puzzle," Sayaana nodded from his side as he guzzled water from a bamboo canteen. "And, somehow, it is the way most humans live. They battle with the earth, every day. Frightening." The green-skinned form shivered. "But it is effective. And, this pit, it holds a truth. The forest grows below as much as it grows above."

It did, though Liao recognized that this extensive array of roots was also, in its own way, a legacy of the old world. The ground in these hills was, in many places, quite rocky. He had already descended many meters, well past the point where he ought to have hit bedrock. Only the treatment of the land, the placement of barricades and ropes that captured soil and leaf litter until it rose and rose to strengthen the timber growing there, had allowed the soil to reach such immense thickness.

That transformation did have at least one secondary benefit. The thick roots fixed the earth securely in place. Liao was able to tunnel straight down in a narrow circular pattern no wider than the sweep of his shovel without any need to place bracing or worry that the hole would collapse in upon him. This greatly increased the speed at which he could operate.

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Shortly after dawn, his shovel struck, with a distinctive clanging noise, against a metal surface for the first time.

A short bit of careful, bare-handed digging thereafter revealed a much crushed and crumpled bronze vessel, one vaguely shaped in the fashion of a metal drum. Covered in a thick verdigris layer and bent heavily by the motions of the ground over time, it was still broadly whole.

Cleaning the dirt from this vessel, Liao carried it out from the hole into the sunlight and offered up a brief prayer to Orday. Forgiveness for this disturbance of the dead. He did this for the war effort, for the need to defeat the plague, not himself. That, he knew, made little difference. He added a silent request that the Celestial Mother might guide whichever soul had been consigned here to the next life.

His thoughts paused then, considering the immense age of the remains. Had the person whose bones were placed in this ancient grave been reborn since? Perhaps even many times? It might well be so. No one truly knew the length of such cycles. Liao very much hoped that it was true, for in such a case the soul placed here would have long since forgotten this end.

Within the bronze vessel, which Liao was regrettably forced to crack open using shovel strikes, he discovered a clod of dirt, a small ant nest, several surprisingly large worms, and a single silver bracelet tarnished till it was entirely black.

In order to properly examine it, he climbed all the way to the crown of a large nearby tree so he might see the little ring in the full light of the morning sun.

The bracelet was a hollow ring band covered in stylized carvings of flowers and a cross-hatched pattern that strongly resembled the belly scales of a cobra. A solid disk on what Liao supposed was the upper outer face was carved with carefully inlaid geometric designs.

Passing his hand over that point, he discovered a shimmering gap in space similar to that of the gateway to Mother's gift, only thousands of times smaller. It was barely large enough to reach his hand through, and doing so offered up an eerie experience indeed as his arm seemed to vanish from sight. Itinay had instructed him to expect this, but the first time experiencing it remained a deeply frightening sensation.

Storage rings made immediately prior to the demon war recognized the intent of their wearers. They could place any item within their space into the wearer's hand immediately in response to a mental request. This ancient bracelet lacked any such measures entirely. Lao had to rummage around within physically, his arm lost inside a cool, lightless, and dry pocket of empty space that reached all the way to his shoulder before he tapped the inside edge.

The space inside contained no air. There was only a true void, empty of all things. It felt strange against his skin but did no noticeable harm.

The bracelet was largely empty. It contained exactly one object, a human skull.

The skull was perfectly preserved. Untouched by time and bleached long ago by some post-expiration process to be incredibly white, Liao pulled it out slowly and handled it with all the delicacy superhuman agility allowed. Moving carefully, he put it back inside the damaged bronze drum vessel. That was just large enough to encase the bones. Placing the skull there felt like the only appropriate action in the moment.

Offering a second prayer to Orday, he placed the bone and metal construction back at the bottom of the hole and quickly began to fill it in. This final action was, probably, not strictly necessary. It was not as if anyone was likely to wander past, but something within him faced the prospect of leaving such an open wound in the side of the hill with deep discomfort.

Filling was much easier, and faster, than excavation. It was barely the work of an hour. Excess dirt and roots covered the loose hole to some depth but mixed well enough with the nearby litter. There was no sign, unless one dug, that any disturbance had taken place.

The image of the skull lingered in Liao's mind throughout, called to his eyes with every heft of the shovel.

Those bones surely belonged to a cultivator. Perfect teeth, effortlessly aligned cranial bones, idealized symmetry between eyes, nose, and cheekbones; they could not belong to any other kind of human. Ordinary mortals did not leave behind such flawless remains.

Beyond that though, he discovered nothing. Not whether the grave belonged to a man or a woman. Not what kind of qi they cultivated. Not even how long they might have lived. Nothing beyond a ghostly image, and nothing more, briefly elevated from the depths of the past only to be returned moments later.

The whole process left him feeling very strange. It was not as if he'd robbed a grave. Age had long ago erased any barriers and markers. Only the vessel remained. This did little to reduce the sense of interference, of acting where he ought not. That stuck with him, sinking deep down. "I do not like this much," he muttered, struck by regrets neither defined nor voiced.

"Find acceptance," Sayaana countered from the opposite side of the mound of loose earth now covering the hole. "That bracelet is simple. It won't even hold as much as you can stuff in that pack of yours. You're going to need to fill a sack with as many of them as you can find."

Seeing as this failed to mollify him, the green-skinned apparition went further. "It is simply bone, and bone cannot hold a soul. It's too weak." She tapped the gemstone on her brow; the mirror image of the one Liao wore. "There is no difference. Death in a muddy ditch, death in a grand sect palace, all the same. Only immortals are different."

It was true, Liao had no doubt. Sayaana would know it better than anyone. However, that did not mean he found this truth comforting.

Biting back a sigh, Liao turned instead toward the prospect of digging dozens of holes and wondered once again how farmers performed such works. Then he turned back north. The time to search for other rings would come. For now, he needed to demonstrate to the grand elders that it had worked. And to celebrate with Zhou Hua.

The former was merely protocol, but he found himself aggressively interested in the latter.

The ocean was, at last, one step closer.