Unseen Cultivator

Qing Liao endured the flood battered but whole. He had almost been swept off the boulder several times and had discovered several broken finger bones when everything came to an end, but he'd been far enough from the main course of the river to avoid the worst waves. He still ended up soaked to the bone, but that mattered little to a cultivator. During the night that followed he managed to regain sufficient strength to crawl into one of the countless piles of debris that signified all that remained of once-mighty forests.

His surroundings had been reduced to mud, puddles, shattered trees, and ruined greenery. Birds sang dirges while perching atop broken scraps, their nests and prey alike carried off by the waters. The stink of death had already begun multiplying, though Liao suspected it would be many days before the full fury of starvation and decay raged in true force across the flood-devastated basin.

The very land itself had been shifted. Whole hills were gone, and the rivers had begun settling into new courses. The soil had been picked up, tossed about, and deposited anew. When growth managed to return, it would never be the same as before. He had done this, he knew. He had killed the forest with beavers, fleas, and a shovel. A terribly righteous thing to do, something he hoped never to unleash again.

"Nature, the strength of the world itself, should not be made a weapon in the wars of cultivators," he whispered, on the edge of an oath.

Sayaana forestalled such reckless expressions. "It already is. What do you think the demon plague does? Until that's gone, the world cannot be whole. You just struck a blow in a war that continues across every part of the world every hour of every day."

This point struck deep. "Then the plague must be destroyed, not just the demons and the cultivators." It seemed so obvious, surrounded by destruction of such spectacular scale. How that could be done, he had no idea. He could sense that Sayaana, for all her wisdom, had no knowledge of such things either.

He would ask the Grand Elders upon his return. Itinay planned for everything. Something this vast could not possibly have been overlooked.

For the present, however, he dared not move about at all. He needed to remain hidden. The demons were gone, mostly, though some few thousand injured ghouls remained where they'd been driven into crevices or trapped in mud holes. Their masters, however, had not departed. The brilliantly horrific qi signatures of the demonic cultivators lingered nearby, clustered just above the gorges to the east. Liao had no option save to wait until they dispersed before he dared to retreat through the gateway.

Initially he lost himself in questions as to what they might do or how long they would linger nearby indulging in their rage, but such speculation deflated immediately when his straining senses detected the presence of not the four demonic cultivators he expected, but five. Someone else had watched the flood unfold, someone who possessed a distinctive flavor of tainted metal-tinged qi he could not help but recognize.

It was weaker than he recalled from his time with the horde overhead, but the same molten mixture of deeply embittered qi remained recognizable. Scoria Scorn, restored to immortality. She stood beside the other four demonic cultivators, though Liao had no idea as to why. Unable to move and risk detection he could only wait and wonder.

The reborn demonic cultivator surely had plans, plans that almost certainly included the destruction of Mother's Gift. That much he'd gleaned from Artemay's briefings. Beyond that, he had no idea what she might be doing here. She was certainly not a creature of ice like the others. Rather than speculate endlessly, Liao simply reached out with his senses and did his best to track the vile immortals.

He expected to have to remain vigilant for many days, as immortals were notorious for standing around and contemplating for ages, but unexpectedly things shifted rapidly. Within only a few short hours the group of five departed at speed, streaking east at the sort of incredible velocities only those in the celestial ascendancy realm could attain. To divine a destination merely from a single cardinal direction was impossible, and at such speeds even maintaining observation was possible for no more than a few heartbeats.

But he did not forget this incident. Knowledge, any understanding of the plans of the enemy, was critical, and Liao had no intention of losing track of these monsters permanently. Snow Feast, marking the land as he did with lifeless voids, would be easy to trace. He would find where they had gone, in time. But not this day. Weary, weakened by bruising, pill backlash, and qi exhaustion, he could only slowly stumble back to the gateway.

Amusingly, he discovered that the shifting nature of the landscape meant that it now terminated several meters above ground. This would, he'd been told, correct itself over time, but for the moment it meant he had to jump into a hole in the air in order to return home.

Grand Elder Itinay was waiting on the opposite side, holding a vigil with sword in hand. The blue steel implement vanished into his sheath upon witnessing his return. Her feet shifted on ground coated in slick mud. The floodwaters, apparently, had passed through in some force.

"So, it seems you have succeeded," she did not smile, but pride swelled through her chill qi as she made the declaration of victory. "Does it feel glorious?"

This question stopped Liao in his tracks. He looked out into the endless layered defenses of the Killing Fields, barricades coated in splash marks rather than bloodstains, and wondered. The great forests of the basin, and all that lived within them; he had sacrificed that for this emptiness. An incredible price for a momentary pause, a few brief decades of peace.

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The demonic cultivators, with their hideous qi and domineering power, remained. They had suffered no injuries save to their greed. "Did I achieve a glorious victory?" He answered the grand elder with this dangerous question.

"Yes." Blue eyes flashed, filled with a certainty he never expected and tied to an oddly wholesome ferocity. Hard fires burned cold in her eyes, but they were aligned with him. "You killed half a million demons using beavers and a shovel. That is an achievement that will live in military history for ages. More importantly," there was something utterly transfixing about the fearsome glow of triumph that shone through the surface of the sparkling blue face. "You have won us time. Decades at least, perhaps as much as two centuries, and in this war, time is the most precious resource there is."

"But I didn't kill the demonic cultivators," swiftly, he revealed what he'd felt, what he'd discovered, in the aftermath of the flood. "And now Scoria Scorn is with them, restored somehow to the celestial ascendancy realm."

Itinay froze. Just for an instant, but long enough for Liao to pierce the burning cloak of starry dao and glimpse a flicker of fear within the immortal's core. "Walk with me." All such signs vanished swiftly.

They moved along the northern edge of the Killing Fields, following the curve of the Starwall. Liao paced beside the grand elder in silence, keeping up with Itinay's effortlessly rapid stride with no more than a minor expenditure of effort. Pushing along the edge of the ditch that secured the inner border of that stony masonry barrier, he watched the defenses pass by and considered what might have been. The fixed expression on the immortal's face revealed a mind dropped deep into a near-trance of high-speed reasoning.

"Did they depart?" Itinay asked after a lengthy silence.

"Yes, they went east," it felt good to supply this, though it did little to pierce the vast weight of foreboding that lay atop this conversation.

"Acquiring surviving demons swept downstream to support their next scheme," this was spoken firmly, an absolute conclusion. She took seven steps further, then stopped and looked toward him with her multi-layered blue-white eyes. "You may have won us a far greater victory than it initially appeared."

Liao stood still, head twisting back and forth, as he struggled to parse this confusing statement. "How?" He did not understand how Scoria Scorn's arrival could possibly be of benefit to the sect or Mother's Gift.

"Do you know the greatest strength of the Celestial Origin Sect?" This time, it was the grand elder's turn to answer his question with one of her own. Her qi coiled up inside her, as if poised to strike.

"The teachings of the Celestial Mother," Liao responded at once. He could not imagine anything else.

"Ah," this drew a brief, flickering ghost of a grin across the shining blue face, one banished almost immediately. "That is, as ever, the overarching truth, but I meant a more specific aspect. Our mother taught us many things, but the critical facet of that teaching, one we have struggled to replicate in this place she granted us, is unity."

At the somewhat blank look Liao knew he must have offered in response, she continued. "A ruling council of sisters, working in concert. We have disagreements, of course, but we are a family who love each other. In the old world, and even in what little we know of the other sects that may yet survive in hidden lands, this is almost unknown. Cultivators compete against each other, fighting for resources, prestige, and even pleasure." The sour twist that twitched her lips at the last word could have rotted an entire barrel of lemons. "In the old world immortals feuded constantly, internally and externally, only avoiding open war due to the need to prioritize new generations of cultivators. We are not like that, here, but the demonic cultivators came from such origins, and they are all vile traitors who have betrayed their loyalties at least once. Scoria Scorn, surviving as she does, exists in opposition to Bloody Roam. That she has joined with those four icy souls, what do you think it portends?"

The implication could not be missed. The demonic cultivators would fight each other, likely kill each other. "Will that truly happen?" It seemed to Liao an unbelievable dream. All the stories of Bloody Roam proclaimed him a dark god, authoritative and invincible. That any would dare to challenge him was an idea almost as incredulous as the idea of rebellion within Mother's Gift.

"If they feel strong enough," Itinay proclaimed this softly, but without hesitation. "And perhaps Scoria Scorn has found a way to offer them sufficient qi to gain that strength, it seems there is little she could promise them to save herself, otherwise. I hope that is false though, it would be a gruesome outcome. In any case, we cannot control faraway events, we can only seek strength in ourselves."

In order to grow stronger, the demonic cultivators would have to slaughter and kill. Liao knew this, though he rarely thought about it. Images took shape in his mind now, hidden lands like Sayaana's home besieged and overrun, with every life taken. Tens of thousands of lives lost, all to feed the cultivation of five.

He did not, could not, accept that, but he also had no idea what he could possibly do to stop it.

"You have been engaged in a ten-year project," Itinay revealed that, as expected, she had a plan already in place. "Take time to consolidate your cultivation, integrate all you have done and learned into your core. The years you purchased for the sect belong to you as well. Do not forget that, however far you may go, you remain one of us."

"I want to know where our enemies went," Liao countered. It felt important, something he needed to know.

"You described the signs Snow Feast leaves behind in great detail," the counter struck swiftly. "They will still be there next year. Do not neglect yourself. If you do, it will never feel like victory. Wars are not won in a single day or a single battle. Nor are they won alone. The sect had relied upon you. Do not neglect your recompense."

It was an oddly generous speech, from Itinay, but Liao grabbed at it tightly with all the strength he retained. He refused to let the world beyond outrun his reach. The sect might be home, but the world beyond the gateway, that was the world he wanted to explore, to see. He belonged there. His dao was found in the wild. Even knowing this, he understood the need for balance as the grand elder implied. The awareness integration realm beckoned, and with it the power to travel wholly as he wished. Perhaps, he considered, once he'd found where Snow Feast had gone, a prolonged cultivation session was in order. He would ask Su Yi and Zhou Hua for advice on the best approach.

A shovel had earned him this time, that much, at least Liao knew was true. If cultivation was its best use, as the grand elder suggested, then perhaps he was best served by following that advice and digging deep. The trail of the enemy and the path of advancement, perhaps, for now, they overlapped.