Unseen Cultivator

In the spring, Qing Liao discovered sign of Snow Feast's passage far to the south. He even determined, thanks to Sayaana's eagle-eyed assistance, that the demonic cultivator had left a trail of destruction across several islands heading eastward out toward the open ocean. After that, the waters left no further trail to follow.

Grand Elder Artemay, upon receiving this report, responded immediately with bitter certainty. "They've gone to drink the strength hidden beneath the waves. We can only hope that the waters slow them and their success is minimal."

It was not an encouraging conclusion, and the enigmatic immortal retreated into closed door cultivation shortly thereafter.

Liao found himself unable to take any act to contest that scheme, something he shared with the rest of the sect. He might reach further, but not into the ocean. The demon horde, scattered by the flood, remained widely dispersed. Calculations indicated a century, at least, would pass before the threat was renewed. Plenty of time to prepare, to make the sect – already the strongest it had been at any point in its history – even stronger.

Doing his best to take the advice of the elders, he worked to focus his effort on advancing his cultivation. Initially, this came easily. The memory of the flood, of the vast power of the land unleashed all at once, triggered something his mind. After a discussion with Su Yi in which she compared this to a solar flare, he was able to integrate this almost seamlessly with the Celestial Mother's teachings.

The stars, he learned from a series of conversations with the beautiful elder and visits to the sect's observatories, had countless fluctuations of their own. They too were, in their fiery fury, wild.

Combined with focused effort this insight propelled him to the seventh layer of the thought weaving realm in little more than a year of directed cultivation.

The next step was not one to be made with such gentle ease. Integration of the mind with his qi was simply a more detailed and complex version of the integration of the rest of the body. Specialized though the mind was, it still emerged from the physical origins of the brain. The next step moved beyond such material matters to stand on the edge of the spiritual, of the true nature of reality. Bending qi directly across the senses and tying it into mental processing meant direct integration of the spiritual world, the foundation of existence that lay beneath all material things, into the everyday experience.

To even conceptualize this process required conducting endless exercises. Non-action to center the self within the universe and defy the input of the physical was needed to find a means of drawing past barriers imposed by the primordial evolutionary bounds of life itself. The first step, sight without seeing, would be the hardest by far, and Liao knew he was far from ready.

He studied. He exercised. He worked. He cultivated. He even took to sparring regularly against Zhou Hua to gain practical experience of the capacities provided to one in the awareness integration realm. In this way he crept forward, but such progress was deeply constrained. The fundamental grasp needed to advance across this step on the path to the infinite remained beyond his reach. All his gains amounted to no more than minute increments.

But time moved on ceaselessly.

Four years after the great flood – an event most members of the sect had no idea he had engineered – the lengthened peace purchased by the sacrifice of countless beavers and endless hectares of forest revealed its true worth on a spring day when Heavenly Lightning split the sky.

By this time, Qing Liao had been a cultivator for just over one hundred and sixty years. He had witnessed the impact of many tribulations, some successful, most regrettably otherwise. They came every few years, as the sect worked to increase the number of elders under its aegis one brutal trial at a time. Though his travels meant he had seen the lightning descend in fewer incidents than most, his experience still sufficed that he could recognize how the sky raged for each of the three different types of tribulation.

Each tribulation called, as anyone might expect, more lightning down upon the cultivator the greater the realm they sought to breach. Heaven's wrath increased in response to the temerity of the defiance visited upon it. Yet this was not the only change. The lightning also multiplied in color, expanding across frequencies of an immense spectrum until it included shades no ordinary human eyes could even observe. Finally, it increased in essence. Each bolt carried ever more of the wrathful heavenly dao as the universe sought to clear away that which attempted to claim a portion of its position for themselves.

That utterly uncompromising power, the scourge that sought not merely destruction but absolute erasure of a being, body, mind, and soul alike, was among the purest expression of the dao it was possible to witness. At the highest level, the tribulation of immortality, its directed potency was such as to pull the edges of reality itself away and reveal the underlying structures and fields comprising all that was, is, and would be.

To witness such a thing, close up, was dangerous. Stray reflections of power, launching rocks and burning the sky, could easily slay. But it was also enlightening.

As fate would have it, Liao was witness to such an event in very close proximity indeed.

He was working, at that time, in the western mountains, searching for otters in the high streams in order to gather the hides needed for a new pair of waterproof boots. The flood had ruined his previous set. This placed him on the lower slopes of Mount Tianjiang, noted as the premium cultivation space in all of Mother's Gift for those who wished to remain open beneath the stars as they strove to rise to meet them.

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He had thought little of this, for he was far indeed from the summit and knew to keep that distance, but it brought him up to the very edge of the heaven-sent storm on the day when Elder Kun Haoyu of the armoring pavilion attempted to become immortal.

It was a bright day. The sun reigned high in the sky and all clouds were banished beneath the pure blue. Noon was clear and bright in the mountains, and Liao had taken the opportunity such brightness offered to practice his archery by hunting tiny mountain birds.

Then the heavens unleashed their wrath.

There was no warning at all.

It did not grow dark, though the light streaming from the sun did appear, somehow, strangely distant for the duration, as if another source of illumination had overridden its authority.

Sayaana, alerted by personal experience a fraction of an instant early, cried out a desperate warning. "Get on the ground!"

Liao was still dropping toward the earth, having dived in absolute trust of the remnant soul, when the first bolt of heavenly lightning struck.

The bolts themselves offered no danger. The Heavens never missed their target. But there were other consequences.

The air quaked at the impact unleashed by such power carving burning paths through the sky. The blinding brightness threatened the eyes of everyone nearby. Wind rose. Branches snapped, and the twisted spatial dao that held mother's Gift together bucked and shook. The earth, in reply, shifted.

Leaves and branches raked across Liao's back. A flying stone struck his right leg with force enough to seriously sting. A blow that would have shattered a mortal's bones. The forest was suddenly ten times as bright, bathed in unpredictable hues that swapped out colors for meaning and reflected the world across the fractured, fractal planes of the dao. Wind carved its way through the illuminated air, its path fully visible, and Liao's senses scrambled through rhythmic synesthesia, tasting sounds and feeling shadows. The true meaning underlying those ten thousand sensations exposed, refracted through the mirror where only sages stood upon the other side.

Unable to bear this unceasing assault upon his senses, Liao closed his eyes and slammed his hands over his ears. This made the deluge manageable, for a moment, but did not eliminate the impact. Spiritual strikes rained down from on high, the wrathful dao of the scourging heavens drawn into direct competition with the dao Kun Haoyu had fashioned for herself.

The forged soul placed into the final testing furnace.

Crashing against each other, waves, swords, stormfronts, every possible conflict propelled together at once, they ripped at the world itself, tearing and crashing with force that unveiled the infinite dao and the endless connections binding together forest, mountain, earth, sky, and stars. The boundless qi of the world flexed and pulled the barriers of reality back together as the pulses passed over.

Liao felt this, watching without seeing, and understood at last what it meant to integrate awareness. It meant to peer into this world beneath the surface not in fragmented glimpses, but continually. To look at reality on a level that revealed qi, not simply matter. In this place, as everything shattered and was rebuilt, it became clear, impossible to evade or deny. The next step slotted into place within his imagination.

Lightning raged, and the wind buffeted him. It seemed as if hours passed, coupled to such disturbance that, even in the peak of the thought weaving realm the flow of time escaped reckoning. Even with eyes shut and ears covered, the discharge overwhelmed. Liao could only cling to the soil, a thin thing wedged between the stones and the stars, and hold himself together amidst the storm.

Then it stopped.

Liao blinked one, rolled over onto his back, and looked up. The sun had not moved. Only moments had passed.

The damage was almost immaterial, nothing but fallen leaves and broken branches marked the storm that had just ripped through the mountain's reality. Heaven left its sign only upon the summit.

The summit, where the world's newest immortal emerged.

She rose into the air, high above the mountain, brilliant and shimmering, and Liao saw this presence with almost perfect clarity in the first moment following completed metamorphosis.

Pale pinkish skin covered a compact frame laced with countless glowing green lines, shining jade in serpentine patterns. The skin shaded orange along her flanks, and the glowing marks darkened to a burning flame of orange and then dimmed to black upon the hands. The skin there was a pale violet shade, glowing with restrained and mastered power. Her hair was black, laced with green streaks. Finally the eyes, revealing her immortal focus and surrounded by black shadows, wrapped twin layers of green iris about and orange core.

Rippling and coiling as she danced in the sky, she left trails of flame in her wake as the charred remains of her mortal form were burned off by her immortal qi. Rep lips marked by emerald accents smiled broadly as newly obtained power was let loose for the first time and a new dao roared out its place under heaven.

Kirulay. That was the name of this newest entrant into the celestial ascendancy realm. Something Liao somehow knew without ever being told. Identity conveyed purely through qi.

She did not look down at him. Liao's proximity was, after all, a matter of mere chance. Immortal attention was focused elsewhere, and the sisters raced across the sky to welcome the newest member of their fellowship.

Knowing he had no place among such company, not for many years yet, Liao packed up his traps and set his feet to descend the mountain and return to the sect. There would be time for well-wishes later. He would send the armorer the finest treated hides he possessed, suitable for use in boiling and hardening to make protective scales. Such a gift was the most appropriate offer he could devise to try and repay the insight Kirulay had inadvertently provided.

During his one hundred and sixty years as a cultivator, four soul forging realm elders of the Celestial Origin Sect had attempted to breach the barrier of the heavens and claim immortality. Kirulay was the first to succeed. The others were deeply mourned, but the value of a new addition to the ranks of the sect's immortals was immeasurable.

Time, Grand Elder Itinay had claimed that was what the flood had provided. On that day, seeing the green-lined immortal rise to the skies of Mother's Gift, Liao finally understand the true potency of that resource. Had their been a battle, many elders would have been lost. The chance, this growth and the hope it provided, was a consequence of the delay he had purchased through many furry lives.

Liao's pride, long contained, finally broke free.

He would walk the Ruined Wastes and find the means to purchase many years more. As he grew stronger, he swore that he would bring about many more centuries of peace.