Unseen Cultivator

Qing Liao returned from the southwest, long-ago known as Twisted Mountain Province, with a set of storage rings and bracelets filled near to bursting with feathers, musk glands, frog eggs, strange flowers, and far more. He also carried a necklace of glass beads found adorning a shattered stone marker atop one of the numerous southern peaks. He believed it was, once, a cairn grave. The beads possessed no qi, merely great age, making them, in Liao's eyes, an ideal gift for Zhou Hua.

The alchemist disciple met him in the Killing Fields, arriving as soon as she could after the scouts reported his return. This was an official role, as the cataloging and subsequent distribution of all he obtained beyond the gateway had been placed beneath her purview, but the need to organize the materials within the bounds of heavy sacks and other receptacles for distribution to the relevant pavilions did not serve as the source of her haste.

The expression on her severe face told a silent story, one that Liao hungered to examine but knew must wait until they could find a private moment. It was incredibly worrying, the fear he observed waiting there, but with the initiates assigned to transport duty standing about on all sides there was no way to reveal the truth. It was hard, but he managed to bury his dark curiosity and foreboding beneath the needs of the moment, at least for the several hours necessary to organize and disperse all he had brought back. That work was too important, and too time sensitive – many of the components began losing potency the moment they were removed from the storage rings – to neglect. Disappointing the elders and their expectations would bring about consequences worse than even those frightful looks declared.

It was nearly dark by the time the couriers had gone and the remaining scouts left their posts. Liao was left to walk back across the Killing Fields in twilight, with only the alchemist beside him. Of the vast quantity of materials he had gathered, enough to fill nearly ten cubic meters worth of bags and boxes, he kept for himself only a backpack's worth of pelts, mostly fox and civet. Zhou Hua had, for her participation, secured control of several score rhododendron cuttings, all belonging to varieties found only in the rough slopes of the southern hills. The roots and flowers of those shrubs were valuable in simple alchemy recipes and could be grown, with only a minor application of temperature-adjustment formations, in pots within the boundaries of her courtyard.

They walked a short portion of the distance in silence. Liao could tell that his friend had something she wished, needed, to say, but, unusually, was struggling to find the right words. After perhaps one hundred steps, she simply gave up the search and resorted to the cold force of blunt revelation. "Two pieces of news came while you were gone," she began simply.

This was not entirely unexpected. He had been absent from the sect for fifteen days, enough time even for something to happen at the slow-motion pace of cultivator life. "First," this was delivered in flat and measured tones, but without emphasis. Ordinary and, today, unimportant. "The council met over the solstice, as usual. They ruled that you are approved for journeys beyond the gateway lasting no more than twenty days and that you may travel as far as the southern ocean. However, you are under no circumstances to enter any water beyond the sight of the coast or to travel over the sea to any islands, no matter how close to shore they might be."

Joyous news, or it ought to have been. Zhou Hua's failure to convey any enthusiasm – she remained tightly restrained, struggling to hold back a surfeit of emotion – set warning bells ringing across every surface of Liao's being. The other piece of news must be, he was certain, terrible. Considering how little matters in the sect were liable to change in a week and a half, this meant it was almost certainly personal in scope.

A suspicion that would prove, horribly, regrettably, correct.

"Your former servant, Chen Chao, came to visit me while you were gone." That arrangement had been made many years ago, establishing the alchemist as the master of Liao's private affairs in his absence.

Zhou Hua stopped suddenly, frozen stiff. She turned, forcibly, and faced him, looking up to meet his gaze directly. The beginnings of tears in her eyes and the shuddering of her qi filled Liao with dread. The words she spoke next confirmed it. "Your mother is sick."

There was a pause, a sudden deep intake of breath, before the rest spilled out from the alchemist like the onrushing tide. "I conducted the exam myself. There is a growth in her stomach, a large one. It, is, it, it will grow until the stomach tears open from the strain, and that will be the end. It cannot be cut out, the damage would be too great to fight through, and the same is true of any attempt to kill it with pills. There are medicines that exist that should slow the growth, and others that will tame the nausea and mitigate the pain. I have provided a supply already, and will make as much as necessary, but, but this, it can only be delayed. It cannot be stopped."

Liaa froze, but the binding lasted only a moment. He had heard this diagnosis, this dark tale, once before. It was the same as his father's case, the stomach or the liver, the difference was small. He centered on that, on the repetition, on knowing how events would unfold, and somehow found his way to focus on the outside of the moment. It helped, somehow, in some strange and distant manner, that time had passed since then. His mother was not his father, not a man who might have lived another twenty years had things gone otherwise. She was truly aged now, having surpassed eighty. That was a good number, a respectable number, by any mortal reckoning. Few indeed were those who saw it.

Had he not become a cultivator, had he not possessed a stipend to move her to the city, to pay Chen Chao to care for her full time, she would surely never have reached that mark. Liao could say, to the empty void that Zhou Hua's words opened in side of him, that he had done his best, that the life he had lived had prolonged hers. That he was a filial son.

It helped. Barely. Immeasurably.

He had known the end might come at any time. His mother knew that too. They had both spoken of it in the quiet hours they shared after the sun went down. Yet, despite such preparations, from the moment he heard the diagnosis there was only one possible question he could ask. "How long?"

Zhou Hua, in a gesture of true friendship he found almost impossibly valuable, did not prevaricate. "Six months, most likely. Nine at the most, less if the medicines are absorbed poorly. But, you must know that such things are never certain. Only the sages know this truth. The final moment could come at any time. There may be little warning." She winced visibly. "If you take any long trips, you might miss the signs. You might not be there."

Harsh though that truth was, it could not be denied.

Liao could, of course, simply remain in the sect until the final hour came. To remain in Mother's Gift for six months, or even a year if he dared to hope spectacularly, was no great sacrifice. He had more than sufficient work to busy his hands, and the grand elders were not so heartless as to fail to accommodate such a reason for delay. Everything he'd ever felt from them, whether from stories or qi, suggested they recognized the profound important of familial duty. To wait, if that was his desire, was within his power.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

But if he waited he forsook all chance of bringing his mother a gift from the ocean, a dream that, now, seemed vastly more important than ever before.

There was a choice to make. A choice that, as Liao stared into the depths of Zhou Hua's dark eyes and tried in vain not to cry, he realized was no longer his to make. "I will go see her, tonight," he determined. "Let's get everything stowed."

The glass beads he'd carried over five hundred kilometers were forgotten. The alchemist never asked about the test she'd laid upon him prior to departure. Such things no longer mattered.

Liao found his mother in the small residence he'd purchased for her in the southeastern section of Starwall City. It was a modest place distant from the central bustle and surrounded by other homes belonging to the relatives of cultivators, retired servants, and other quiet folk with little to do every day. Chen Chao met him at the gate and bowed as she led him within.

His former maid was herself aged, now. She had entered her sixties and had slowed considerably, to the point that Liao had retained a second, younger servant, to handle the heavy labors of the day. The gray-haired servant nevertheless insisted on caring for his mother herself throughout the evenings.

Looking upon her was a strange experience, as always. To see one's parents grow old was natural, and in the absence of a mirror Liao could ignore that he appeared less than half the true measure of his years, but it was different with a peer. Chen Chao was barely a year his senior. Her own time might well come very soon, perhaps any year to come. Staring at her back as she walked slowly and deliberately over the cobbles forced him to reckon with a terrible truth.

Were he not a cultivator he would be an old man himself, staring at the final chapter of his life.

A man without a wife, without children. One who barely could be said to keep a home of his own and instead lived half-wild in the woods. This reflection, cast out from the silver of Chen Chao's hair, struck him a hammer blow full to the face. It made him want to run back up to the sect, to find Zhou Hua and beg her to marry him, today. To run off together to some village and live as trapper and herbalist, taking some final chance to fulfill ordinary dreams before everything was gone.

This impulse sustained itself for a single step forward, a step that carried him across several stones and effortlessly left Chen Chao behind.

A simple motion, a fraction of the power of the Stellar Flash Steps bound innately within his stride through long decades of use, it was enough to remind him that he was not ordinary, not a mortal man with a mortal life. He was a cultivator, and immortality beckoned.

Liao's mother liked, in the summer months, to spend time outside where the light and air were better, even in the night. She lay on a couch under a silk blanket, with a small lantern on a stand to guide her hands as she worked to embroider a pair of gloves. Age had left her hands gnarled and thin, but the motions of the digits remained steady. There was no indication of illness there.

The face told a different story. Long since lined and wrinkled, and with snow-white wisps of hair all that remained on the scalp, his mother had now become thin and pale. Her hair was ragged and falling out. Skin hung loose upon her face, neck, and shoulders, signs she was unable to eat enough despite plentiful food. She lay down weakly, as if rising demanded strength she would struggle to summon, and her qi was weak and sluggish.

A tumor in the stomach, that was what Zhou Hua had declared the cause. A beast that stole the nutrients from food and starved the body from within. A slow end, and a lingering one, though Liao believed desperately that the alchemist would spare his mother any true suffering. Eventually, he suspected, his mother would simply slip into a slumber from which she would never awaken.

Some dark impulse suggested visions of far, far worse, and he silently prayed to the Celestial Mother that it would indeed be that calm, silent ending.

He saw all this from afar, blessed by enhanced cultivator vision. Despite this, he forced himself to walk steadily all the way up and kneel at the side of his mother's couch before speaking. "Hello, mother," he carefully put both hands over her own, smoothly placing gloves, needle, and thread back on the stand. "I'm back from the south."

Time had weakened his mother's eyes, as it did to all who aged. She barely see the courtyard gate amid the blurs of distance. Up close, however, the dark brown lenses remained clear. The fearful expression that colored her son's face could not be hidden from such sight. "The little alchemist told you," she spoke calmly. Nothing indicated that she was upset.

Denial was pointless. "She did, yes." Liao could not find any further words. The void rose up and drank them off his tongue. Only regret, and silence, replaced them.

"No," his mother rebuked him instantly. "Do not look at me like that." She squeezed back against his hands, her grip slow but still strong. "This, it comes for all of us, eventually. I have had longer than most, and it has been good. I have loved. I have prospered. And I raised a heroic son who saved the lives of hundreds from demons." She looked through him then, seeing to some impossible place where all children are forever measured. "You might not say it, but I know. The little alchemist told me. She claims you saved her life, for certain."

Knowing Zhou Hua, that statement was based on some immensely detailed calculation, but Liao could not contest it at all. He had not done anything, truly. Hiding in a hole was not heroism. He had not even come up with the plan. The idea belonged to Grand Elder Itinay. Yet, though he refused to take pride in that achievement, he transferred the regard to another event, one whose truth Zhou Hua did not know. The battle with Rust Reaper, still largely hidden from even the rest of the sect, that time he had indeed done something. The full scope, the true import, of that one arrow still lay outside his understanding, but Artemay's gratitude was enough. He had fought for the sect that day, and contributed to a victory that saved lives.

"I have regrets," his mother continued, smiling thinly. "All old women do, but not about you, my son. You have made me proud. Never forget that. The rest is for the stars to decide."

Liao could not accept this, not so easily. He wanted to fight, to strive, to quest for some hidden medicine that might prolong life. Impossible, of course. If any such potion existed, anywhere in the annals of the old world, Zhou Hua would have suggested it. Her comprehensive knowledge of the alchemist's arts vastly outstripped his own.

There was only one offer he could make, and he struggled to find the courage, the resolve necessary to summon the words. For a long time, many minutes at least, he simply sat in silence, hold his mother's hand and wondering how much time remained. In this first night back that seemed sufficient. Events had not yet reached such dire straits that every single day mattered, or so he prayed.

His mother did not respect such hesitation. "What is it?' She demanded this answer even as the lantern burned low.

Three simple words, but they sufficed to break his tongue free of the dam. "I told you, years ago, that I wanted to see the ocean." He had, though it had been cast as an idle goal, nothing like the grand desire it became later. "The grand elders have, at last, given me permission to go, but," he stumbled for a moment and only found the strength to continue as dark eyes met his own beneath the starlight. "But it is far. To go and return will require at least twenty days. And, and I do not want to be away when…." The final words simply would not emerge no matter how hard he pushed his lips to obey.

It made no difference, his meaning conveyed regardless. "Why do you want to go to the ocean?" his mother asked. The look on her weakened face suggested genuine puzzlement. It seemed the very idea had never previously occurred to her.

The idea, long gestated in Liao's mind, sound silly when spoken, but staring at his mother in her final days, he found that embarrassment no longer mattered. "I wanted to bring you a flower from the ocean, something unique, something that can only be found there."

His mother squeezed his hands suddenly, hard, enough that, were he not a cultivator, it would have hurt. She smiled at him, and the expression on her face practically melted him to the floor. "I do not need a flower, not any more," she said. Before Liao could protest, she pressed onward with steel-shattering certainty. "I need a seed. The seed of a tree. Bring that back, one to mark my grave. Let it grow, that others will know, forever, that I was the mother of a beautiful boy who gave the ocean back to the people. Go, do that for me. I will last until it is done, I promise."

Liao did not know if there were trees that lived in the ocean, but there was no refusing that command. "I promise," he said simply, forcing his voice to be level. It took a great deal of qi. "I will find a proper tree." He felt a bind fool, having failed to anticipate this need. He had one last chance, now, to obey the final command of his parents.

He refused to fail.