Unseen Cultivator

It took another year, which Liao spent learning to catch snakes, for Zhou Hua's research to bear fruit. In that time, he discovered that cobras could be baited into snares using tethered live rats. These traps rarely resulted in the death of the serpents, for such animals could persist for many weeks, perhaps even months, without food or water. However, a swift strike using the heavy pommel of his dagger behind the head crushed the neck completely and allowed the animal to be taken whole with the poison sacks intact.

While the alchemists claimed the toxins and the fangs, Liao was left free to experiment with the scaled leather of these animals. It had several remarkable properties well suited to hard-sided containers and a number of fascinating contrasting color patterns that formed naturally in the shaded scales of the beasts.

These he fashioned into excellent belts and, especially, fashionable bags. Liao gifted one to Su Yi. After she took to wearing it around the sect Liao found himself in the middle of a fashion fad for the first time and struggled to find enough cobras to meet the desires of the sect's female cultivators.

This made him, in a small way, rich. He did not especially need the money, the wilderness provided a bounty of resources, but Zhou Hua supplied a plan to utilize this unexpected largess. She suggested that he commission a member of the carpentry pavilion to convert his notes on the capture of cobras and the production of cobra leather into a formal textual manual suitable for inclusion in the sect library. She argued, persuasively, that the addition of any notably new document to the library would convince the elders of the value of his explorations and allow him to push for additional range.

Liao would have written the book himself, but Zhou Hua's commentary on the quality of his calligraphy was sufficiently scathing to convince him to drop that idea. He resolved to improve the quality of his writing in the future, and to take superior notes, as dictating and revising the work to another was an interminable task he had absolutely no desire to repeat.

Such distractions served to pass the time, but carrying dead snakes across hundreds of kilometers – especially while under the obligation to keep them as fresh as possible in order to preserve the venom – served only to constantly reinforce his desire for a storage ring to remove the interminable repetition from these labors. Thankfully, this practice also spurred Zhou Hua to greater supportive efforts, as a portion of his intake was allotted to her for personal use as his mission partner and this served to greatly increase her alchemical mastery. A storage ring would benefit her as well.

She uncovered, in her ceaseless rummaging through the archives, many possibilities. However, one after another was discarded, prohibited following review by the Grand Elders. Too dangerous to approach, or almost certainly already plundered, or simply too distant, all such reasons were used to prohibit pursuit of critical artifacts.

In response, the alchemist chose to go even deeper into the past in her search. She uncovered a preserved text of Annals of the Former World, an encyclopedia that purported to explain the world as it existed prior to the emergence of the Third Sage and the foundation of rule by regional sects and their immortal masters.

"There was a state," Zhou Hua had to explain this term, as the idea of rule by anything other than a sect was utterly foreign to Liao's mind. He settled on conceiving of it as rule by cultivators united by their martial strength rather than their allegiance to a specific pursuit of the dao. "Called Yezi." She had laid out a series of several maps on a wide table in the sect library, having dragged Liao there from his curing vats. One of the skins featured a sketch of her own, simple but quite fine. "It existed in the land to our south that was later home to the Hill-Splitting Halberd Sect and Million Terraces Sect."

Those two names were ones that Liao knew. They had not been, in the complex reckoning of the old world, sects of any great strength or legacy. The heavily forested and rugged hills to the south of the basin Mother's Gift occupied were not easily converted to rice cultivation and had never hosted any especially large numbers of people. The handful of hospitable valleys that lay in the center of the region had been claimed by the Mystic Cloud Sect, a much stronger entity whose techniques of painting and formation creation had been preserved in the libraries of Mother's Gift. That group's geographic focus had been quite narrow, and Liao had been explicitly ordered to avoid venturing anywhere near their core territory.

"Little is known of the Yezi," Zhou Hua continued. She spoke in tones even softer and more somber than the carefully studious atmosphere of the library demanded. An appropriate emphasis, Liao silently agreed, when speaking of those lost many thousands of years in the past. "It seems they lived in the valleys to our south for a long age, but when the Mystic Cloud Sect took form, it conquered them and drove them from their lands. If they had writing, and many of the peoples of that time did not, it was not in the Sage Script and none has been preserved to reach us."

This, Liao knew, meant it was surely lost forever. He found that sad, in some strange and difficult-to-define way. The Grand Elders had ordered him to avoid any obvious old ruins, for demonic cultivator attention was far more likely to be focused upon them, but Sayaana had the skills to point out many sites as they passed them by. However, time had done terrible injury to the works of humanity. After thousands of years, little more than odd stone plinths poking through the soil and mounds of heaped earth marking where buildings had once stood remained. In his two years spent wandering about, he'd yet to discover anything resembling a town or city. Any writing preserved on paper or wood had surely been consumed by the centuries. Even stone inscriptions might not endure the turn of many millennia.

He wondered, absently, what it was that Zhou Hua found so interesting about this long-lost people from before the old world. She would, of course, tell him eventually. He'd learned, working with her, that she enjoyed explaining all she had learned by going through the full list of the steps required to deduce the solution. It was as if she was explaining an alchemist's recipe in reverse.

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It was a moderately endearing practice, this effort to explain. At least, so long as it did not go on too long.

This particular pedagogical digression was mercifully short. "The important discovery I made is that the wandering painter, Rippling Rogue, recorded their image in his great work Styles of the Forested East. He included a discussion of their formal dress and burial customs."

Unexpectedly, Liao recognized the name of both the ancient immortal and the text in question. Elder Fu Jin had a copy in her private workshop and made extensive use of the patterns documented by the long-fallen immortal. He had examined portions of the book himself, on several occasions, when considering fringing and stamping possibilities for hats and gloves. When Zhou Hua pulled out a new copy of the book, one clearly produced by some initiate no more than a decade or two in the past, he recognized the cover geometry instantly.

He also knew the image that Zhou Hua selected. "I made a hat like that," he pointed at the black, reversed conical wrap structure adorning the male figure in painting of a couple. "Lined using black squirrel fur. I thought they lived far away to the south." The idea of such an ancient people living so near to the sect struck him dumb. There was something impossible and yet perfect about it.

"Close in space," Zhou Hua smiled softly. Her inspired expression was quite cute. "Not in time. It has been over seven thousand years since they perished."

The casual mention of such a vast span of time settled heavily over Liao. It was difficult to think of such immensities. Twenty-five hundred years since the demon war was already long enough, but it was something else entirely to think of how the old world had existed for an even longer span of ages. So much time that it had moved beyond even the memory of immortals.

"How does this help me find a storage ring?" Flinching from that expanse of eternity, he preempted the slow roll of the alchemist's explanation.

"Here, here, and here," Zhou Hua pointed to three spots on the painted images, the man and woman preserved in elaborate formal dress. A silver disk tie at the base of the woman's neck, a series of spherical silver clasps used to hold the sides of the man's jacket together, and a pair of thin bracelets worn by the woman. "According to the Rippling Rogue, the Yezi used these silver implements to 'carry many things.' Critically, they were also used as part of their burial rites." She moved her finger slowly along a single line of thin text.

Liao, following the digit, read the words aloud. "The skulls of the dead were placed in bronze jars, save for those of the cultivators, who hid them in silver beneath the alloy's glaze."

Blinking rapidly, he worked to parse the long-lost painter's words. "They put the skulls of their dead cultivators inside storage rings?" The very idea seemed utterly bizarre. He knew that some people buried flesh and bone, Sayaana had mentioned this practice as a legacy of her own homeland, but this ritual seemed beyond strange.

"Do not judge other peoples as if they lived as you do," the remnant soul unexpectedly spoke up within his skull. "Here, you plant trees over graves. In my homeland, such a thing would be a hideous defilement of the forest."

This rebuke struck deep. Silently, Liao bowed his head and acknowledged the chastisement with care. He admitted to wholly lacking the perspective, much less the right, to judge any actions of such ancient days.

Zhou Hua, for her part, gave no sign that she had witnessed the silent exchange. "Apparently," she answered the hanging question. "The Rippling Rogue has a questionable reputation. Some of his stories were embellished, but this one is highly plausible." She put the book back beneath the table and returned her focus to the map she'd drawn. "The records of the Mystic Cloud Sect speak of grave sites on their land; pits dug into the ground." Fingers moved rapidly, indicating a series of dots she'd marked out in red. "I believe these areas are likely to contain Yezi graves. They will be buried deep, by now, but the silver should be preserved, underground. Do you think, if you were close by, you could find such pit chambers?"

"I don't know," Liao admitted. "How much can possibly be left after seven thousand years?" He had no idea, but unless the shafts had been solid stone they were surely long since collapsed. "And how can I search for something buried in the dirt?"

"Items made of silver should still remain," Zhou Hua made this conclusion in a firm voice, backed by an alchemist's conviction regarding the properties of metals. "Metals endure time well, save for iron, especially when strengthened using qi. They may have tarnished, but they should be sound."

This statement was clearly intended to be encouraging, but Liao did not find it so simple. Even if he could find a way to identify the correct hillsides, he would then need to excavate truly massive amounts of earth in the hope of recovering tiny bits of ancient jewelry. Given enough time and a suitably strong shovel a cultivator could tear up immense amounts of ground, but not that of the lands of an entire sect. "Is it possible to locate silver qi?" Though the sect had few miners, techniques to uncover veins of ore were well-attested.

"Not accurately enough," Zhou Hua shook her head. Her gentle features adopted a troubled expression. "There's too much silver scattered about in ordinary rock for that to work. You'd have to be standing directly on top of the pit. Even then, it might be too deep."

That seemed to put an end to this scheme. Liao had already begun to turn away and push to stand when a green flash distracted him.

Sayaana stood above the map, staring down at Zhou Hua's work with a deeply thoughtful expression on her bark-laced face. "You don't need to detect them from the surface. If you can find them when digging down, that's enough." She spoke calmly, but with an amused smile. "Otherwise, you just have to follow the demons. The ghouls track any distortion of the spatial dao, even a tiny one. If these rings are buried underground, every last one will have a ghoul standing on top of it. Some might even have tried digging a little."

Astounded by the simple but powerful logic behind this explanation, Liao swiftly reported the words to the alchemist, crediting Sayaana by proxy as best he could.

"You've seen this?" Zhou Hua questioned, awkwardly tilting her head to speak toward the open space where the remnant soul was standing.

"Yes. Though all the good stuff was plundered by demonic cultivators." The green face wrapped around into a fearsome frown. "But these rings are old and simple. They might not have bothered."

Liao remained uncertain about this, but he wanted a storage ring. More importantly, he wanted to support Sayaana's experience. When she extended herself, he always tried to act. "I'll see about learning to detect silver." In this way, he cast his vote behind the plan.