Unseen Cultivator

The grand elders decided, following some private debate whose contents were never revealed and whose outcome was relayed to Zhou Hua through written messages alone, that Qing Liao was to spend no more than two consecutive days beyond the gateway. Additionally, the total time spent on his excursions was not to exceed half of all the days in any given year. Due to the gateway's position and the surrounding geography, this limitation naturally channeled his traveling either into the numerous deep river-carved canyons to the east, or into the warm mountain forests covering the rugged hills to the south. Travel to the west was of little interest, for it merely overlapped with the land Mother's Gift itself occupied, and though the mountains to the north beyond the river's reach had somewhat variant prospects they were highly elevated and lacked the rich and diverse bounty that the southern course supplied.

It took only a month or so of effort to reveal that focusing on the southern hills would provide the greatest return for gathering effort, and this choice pleased the pavilions as more and more items from their requested lists returned to fill their coffers. As he learned the terrain and its characteristics, Liao's efficiency, and consequently his intake, increased markedly. He set out snares and wires for mammals seeking to gather not only hides, but also teeth, antlers, musk glands, and even eyes. Net traps, strung between trees to take in birds and bats, added to that tally, even as he did his best to avoid thinking about exactly which parts of the giant-eared skin-winged fliers were being used by the alchemists to produce pills. He also took to crafting fish traps and even hunting in some swift rivers using spears and arrows – a task made much easier by the ability of a cultivator to sense the target's qi even through completely opaque waters – to add fish, frogs, salamanders, and even snakes to his pack.

The alchemists were, for reasons that even Liao could grasp, remarkably fond of snakes, and Zhou Hua pushed him to expend extraordinary efforts to recover specimens of the poisonous cobras and bamboo vipers who were known to haunt those hill forests. He had, at least at the start, little success in this pursuit. The deadly creatures were not easily spotted and did not respond to conventional trap and bait methods. He realized, after several failed attempts, that he would need to develop a new approach entirely on his own.

There was no one to learn from – Sayaana's experience was tied heavily to northern climes where snakes barely lived at all – and no old books to study. In the old world the acquisition of such materials had been a task largely left to mortals and if they had written of it, those works were long lost. Zhou Hua had a number of books describing how to extract and utilize the poisons such serpents possessed for the manufacture of deadly oils and potent pills but barely spoke of the animals themselves at all.

Sayaana, at least, looked forward to the prospect and offered helpful commentary and scouting. She had learned the means to hunt everything that lived in the Endless Needles Land, whether it was furred, feathered, or scaled, and found the prospect of a new technique enticing. "A chance for us to acquire a new skill together," she explained with vigor so fresh it qualified as infectious.

It soon became clear that this learning process was one they would need to repeat, regularly. The ranks of the creatures spoken of in ancient texts as possessing reagent value but lost to the grasp of Mother's Gift grew almost exponentially as one proceeded south to the hot and misty portions of the world.

Liao did not mind this progression in the least. The ocean lay at the end of the southern journey, and anything that allowed him to push the limits in that direction was welcome. It was not merely for his mother either. Sharkskin was not a luxury. Its use could, possibly, ensure the survival of all living in the hidden land. To neglect that need, when he could supply it, felt wrong, irresponsible.

"You won't be able to bring back any sharkskin without a storage ring," Zhou Hua counseled. Her logic was unassailable. "It is one thing to carry about a heavy pack full of blood and gore for a few hours, in the nearby lands where the demon population remains depleted." Even now, decades since the horde's incursion, Liao hardly saw any ghouls. Those he did detect were widely dispersed and easily avoided. "But try to haul such a thing for many days and scavengers will circle endlessly, and that will stir up demons and perhaps even draw the eyes of a cultivator."

Liao had seen hints of this. Buzzards seemed to track him towards the end of his circuits. Sayaana confirmed that the demons did notice such things. They lacked curiosity with regard to most events, but mass death carried a qi signature that stimulated their attention.

"I have begun to search the archives," the alchemist promised. "In the hopes of uncovering any nearby places where a storage ring might be found. It will take some time," she granted him a commiserating grimace. "The old records are poorly organized and must be handled with great care. Use the interim to build trust with the elders, consistency."

Something about the way she said those words, seated as she was in a relaxed posture atop a silk-laced cushion and sipping honeyed water from a fine porcelain cup, seemed to imply that time and effort were meaningless constraints before the dao. Seeing, feeling, that disconnected ennui, sent a spike of something hard, sharp, and unnamable rushing through Liao's veins.

Restraint failed him, suddenly, and emotions long suppressed rose to the surface. The serene face, the casual tranquility, the assurance that all things would find a resolution given time, it all boiled over across his skin at once.

"I am sick of waiting." He growled out these words with gravel crunching force. "Of running a course like a performing monkey until the sect decides, without ever asking me, when it will allow me to do what needs to be done." He had formed such thoughts, many times, nearly nightly, but never voiced them before. Faced with the grand elders, with their inhumanly perfect immortal visages, he naturally swallowed his tongue. Their qi, their presence, it drove resistance from his mind and bent the soul towards supplication.

He was aware of that subtle influence now, hearing the same words repeated not by an entity of revealed dao but by a peer. Zhou Hua was his senior, but only just. She could be contested, even though he knew these circumstances were not her fault. To shout at her was shameful, but that no longer sufficed to hold him back.

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"How do you obey everything so easily?" He snapped the question at her like a whip. It was almost ridiculous, how perfectly Zhou Hua fit the image of the ideal cultivator of the Celestial Origin Sect. Serene, cultured, intellectual, restrained, capable, and patient; she resembled a living expression of both the Celestial Mother's ideals and the Twelve Sisters' desires.

Su Yi might be able to overwhelm her through raw beauty, but even she could not come close to matching the painting-perfect image of a rising alchemist sitting in front of him.

An image that he should, logically, admire and seek to emulate, but somehow found himself viscerally rejecting.

Zhou Hua very deliberately took a slow sip of her warm beverage and placed her cup down on a woven fiber saucer before answering. "I obey because obedience offers me the path to all I desire." She did not, thankfully, sound offended. Instead, the expression filling her dark eyes was one of intense curiosity. "But you do not desire that which I do. Your path is not the one I walk. The rest," she shrugged lightly. Her white robes rolled across narrow shoulders. "Is just a matter of degrees of divergence."

Liao stared at her, his expression blank, unmoored. This deflection passed through him entirely, no contact made. "How can we want different things?" He questioned her desperately. "We're both cultivators. We're each pursuing the dao and immortality."

Silence answered him, merciless in his stranglehold over the moment. The alchemist looked upwards, bending her head slowly. Eventually she moved such that she stared through the roof above, eyes directed towards the distant sky. "That is theory," she whispered after the voiceless moment had stretched nearly past bearing. "In practical pursuit it unfolds differently. Tell me," Her neck bent suddenly, and she stared Liao full in the face. "When you were growing up, which of the Twelve Sisters did you pretend to be, when playing?"

"What?" Something in Liao's thoughts failed to connect. No coherent response could be made. The context needed to answer, to even properly understand this question, did not exist within him. "Play as the Twelve Sisters? Is that a thing children do?" He could not recall any such game, not that he'd played much with the other village youths growing up. Games, such as they were, existed forever tied to chores. There was always work to be done on the edge of the mountains. If he played at anything, it was hunting. Hours spent stalking dogs and cats along the edge of the village grounds.

"Perhaps boys do not," the sly smile that spread across her face was lightly mocking, but also genuinely amused. "But girls do. Every woman I have ever met grew up with at least one doll, woven out of reed stalks if nothing else, and they always imagined it was their favorite of the sisters. Akiray, Neay, Ohlay, and Uzay are the most popular choices."

It was a statement that Liao found instantly believable. He could recall, misty but certain, preserved across the wounds of childhood sorrow, little straw dolls held in his sisters' tiny hands. They'd been painted green and red.

"We all dream of being cultivators, don't we? And we pick our idols." Zhou Hua continued with relaxed ease. Tension dissipated from her frame with each word. "I wanted to be Iaray." She named the second eldest of the Twelve Sisters, the one often thought of as their most discerning member. "But I wanted to make pills, not sculptures, because pills saved me."

Even as Liao stared and thought back to the waifish, frightfully thin girl she'd been when they'd first met, the explanation was already on its way.

"There was a blockage, in my stomach," she placed a hand over her belt, softly, involuntary. "Pills kept me alive until, by igniting my dantian, I was able to heal." She smiled even harder now, vision looking somewhere far beyond where the trapper sat. "My dream came true, by the grace of the heavens. Why should following it be hard at all?"

There were no lies embedded in her words, not the least hint of effort to dissemble. It was an almost too perfect story, much as Zhou Hua was an almost too perfect cultivator, the improbability of a child who was exactly what the sect wanted her to be becoming a cultivator was surely greater than one who was immune to the plague existing. Sometimes the stars aligned.

Besides, Liao was not blind to how he stood apart. Almost every other child in Mother's Gift desperately wanted to become a cultivator. Even Grand Elder Itinay had called him strange, from the very beginning, for not bringing that desire with him.

Being invisible to demons was not the only trait that set him apart, he realized. It was a truth he'd subsumed and only unearthed now through contrast. The path the woman seated across from him walked, the road of a proper student of the Celestial Mother's teachings, it had never been his. "I think." Eventually, after many false starts, he managed to find his voice. "I have different dreams."

"That will make things harder, but it is not surprising," Zhou Hua looked slightly downcast. She picked up her cup and took another slow sip, hiding her expression somewhat behind the white veil. "I am rather skilled at mathematics," she spoke quietly. Liao nodded at this, he recalled her performance as a recruit, the ability to swiftly resolve in her head problems he could only work out slowly on paper. "Enough that I could easily discern a difficulty the sect seeks to obscure through large numbers."

She frowned now, and her qi turned inward in clear sadness. She ran a fingernail along the edge of the cup, slipping the digit against the glaze. "Men and women enter the sect in essentially equal numbers." Rather than look over toward Liao, she stared at the floor tiles below. "But, in the aggregate, three quarters of all cultivation gains accrue to women. It is not immediately obvious, in part because as more women attempt to advance through tribulations more perish, and because men are more likely to be assigned to wall maintenance duties as a punishment and suffer fewer battle deaths as a result, but the pattern is easily measured once these things are included."

"It is not the teachings," she noted softly. "Nothing in Orday's philosophy speaks of gender at all. Instead, fit and motive are responsible. You are probably lucky, seeking out a different path rather than being guided to one that can never properly match your dreams. It is not fair, that is true," she forestalled the objection before it could be voiced. "But that is the fault of the plague. Only one worthy teaching survived. If you want that to change, we must defeat the enemy and establish new teachings."

Unexpectedly, Zhou Hua looked up, and speared Liao with an inscrutable look. "You, you could do so yourself. If the demons are eliminated, then you will have the freedom to found a new sect. That is something I can never do. I will go as far as I can here, under the stars, but you can make a new dream your own. And the best part about dreams," her sudden smile shone with astounding brightness. "Is that they defy time. Go out and catch a few snakes. We will find a way to recover storage rings. The rest will come."

Liao discovered that he could not object, not to such profound faith. He could only nod. Silence swallowed all else. New teachings, his own sect, that was a seed he buried deep in his heart. It would lie dormant for a long time, but like dreams, seeds could defy time. Not forever, but long ages even in the reckoning of cultivators.