Unseen Cultivator

Qing Liao, seated in an otherwise empty grove in the midst of Mother's Gift's southern bamboo forests, took a deep breath. Then, drawing on the power spread throughout his body, from the center of his dantian to the surface of his skin, shoved an overwhelming quantity of qi, all that he could possibly control, into his eyes.

The world shattered. The veil of the physical peeled away. In its absence, vision revealed countless flows and fields that lay beneath the surface, forming the seen from the unseen. Water moving up and through the channeling cells of the bamboo stems. Sunlight piercing the leaves and triggering the formation of new tissue. Divisions among cells according to formulae embedded within their tiny centers. These truths, grand as they might be, were superficial. The integrated sight went further, deeper, into a swirling world of scatter and shift that obliterated understanding.

And that threatened to shred all that he was.

There was no pain. His body did not so much as tremble at this advancement even as its own countless imperfections were revealed beneath the searing examination of new sight; flaws that begged for repair or removal. This impulse, though potent, sat delayed, pressed down below the threshold of consciousness while all that Liao was grappled with the new reality he had thrust upon himself.

Vast quantities of input, streams of color, paths of motion, coruscating shading, overlaid translucent filtration, and many properties that he lacked the words to describe, all these things flooded his vision and demanded comprehension, interpretation. It was not enough to see that greater world; he had to bring his mind into understanding of it. To truly enter the awareness integration realm required constructing the machinery of conscious reasoning and qi filtration needed to absorb and process many times more sensory data than even the most sensitive animal eyes resolved.

"Break the world into parts, process all you see one piece at a time, then form those pieces into a puzzle, just as you find constellations among the swirling stars." Zhou Hua had repeated Orday's advice, given long ago to the Twelve Sisters, to Liao over and over. Now, it served as the primary guide to this transition, and a most potent one indeed.

He did not, however, pull constellations out of the vast black and twinkling backdrop of the starfield. That was not, he'd come to know absolutely, his dao.

Instead, he drew upon what stellar qi created; the vast swathes of greenery on display before him. From the blurred melding of stems and leaves, thousands of bamboo poles stretching out toward the horizon, filling the verdant wash, he pulled out his pieces. Leaf, stem, shoot, flower, seed, even thorns and bracts found on other plants. Insects that crawled atop them and birds resting within the tangle formed additional, variant, components. This arrangement provided the threads from which he would craft the tapestry of his new sensory processing skills.

No pain, but the strain of this process upon his mind was immense. Liao had to work constantly, methodically and swiftly at once, leveraging all he'd learned during his time in the thought weaving realm, or face the collapse of his own mind, drowning beneath a flood of data. Medicines protected him, to a degree. They slowed the buildup of toxins produced by his overtaxed gray matter and flushed his nerves full of the critical resources necessary to operate at peak efficiency. He could work faster and longer than he otherwise would, but the failsafe pills protecting his brain were imperfect. Should he fail, he would most likely survive, but it might take decades to relearn how to speak and do sums.

Not a fate he had any intention of accepting.

Orday's method was tedious, to start, but steady, and tedium did not bother Liao. Time passed, lost inside that one overwhelming image, itself constantly changing as wind, water, light, and more imparted new changes to the tableau. He worked faster and faster as he went. Not weaving, no, he eventually rejected that as a false approach. He made clothing, true, but he was not a weaver. He did not assemble threads, he gathered images, carving and stamping according to patterns found within the hides themselves.

This insight, whenever and however it occurred, transformed fruitless effort into rapid accomplishment. Parse the threads, then let them reconnect on their own through revelatory self-assembly. It was not as he'd been instructed, but at the same time, he found it did not differ from Orday's teaching at all. Constellations were found within the starfield, not placed there. So too his patterns with the storm of unseen sight.

He moved fast after this, for finding patterns in the forest based on even the least glimpse was second nature after the long years living amid the trees. Even thought itself was not truly necessary. The better part of two centuries bonded to Sayaana had taught him to feel out an image of his surroundings purely through the instinctual interpretation of phenomena. This challenge differed slightly, but his mind stood prepared and trained to meet it.

The rest was merely a matter of diligence, and if the months spent repairing the Starwall while waiting for his mother to pass had not sufficed to pound that into him, he would have torn into the heavens in fury.

Time passed, qi drained, and vision shifted. Liao's mind, already full of qi, acquired new pathways, filtered new truths into his consciousness, and expanded his awareness of the world. His body aligned to follow this, drawing upon the newly revealed structures as a template to reform itself. Biological needs dropped to minimal levels, the beginning of their almost total erasure.

He did not even notice the process occurring as his subconscious drew up new awareness and channeled qi to remove moles and blemishes from his skin. Nails, teeth, and eyebrows shifted into idealized alignments and shapes. Even his nostrils and ears adjusted subtly, the better to produce airflow, smell, and hearing. Erratic hairs spread across the body subsumed away, the follicles replaced by smooth, level epidermis. Countless other tiny erasures eliminated the signs and imperfections that were the legacy of ordinary biological aging. Soon, only the cultivator on the path to perfection remained.

The process, from start to finish, took twenty-two days. It left Liao utterly famished and thankful for the stores of dried food laid around the spring near his chosen breakthrough point. Crawling over to drink and eat was a brutal struggle. He might have integrated his vision, but the very act of sight now demanded qi. The quantity was minute, barely a detectable amount to a cultivator in the awareness integration realm, but, depleted as he was, he was practically crippled. He had to keep his eyes completely closed and feel his way along, aided only by Sayaana's advice.

A critical lesson as to the extraordinary dangers of qi depletion to those in the higher realms. Sensory overload could easily render a depleted elder utterly insensate.

He spent additional days sitting within the grove, recovering and mastering how his new senses adapted to basic tasks from walking to archery. The pathways that revealed the courses of light necessary to channel the Stellar Flash Steps, which he had long struggled to visualize, were now perfectly obvious. His strides increased in both length and swiftness almost at once.

At the conclusion of three days of practice Su Yi came to escort him back to the sect, offering her congratulations as she arrived. Zhou Hua, Liao knew, would not be coming, for she was engaged deep in closed door cultivation stretching across many months. Kirulay's achievement of immortality had driven the alchemist, alongside a significant portion of the sect as a whole, into ever greater devotion and study of the Celestial Induction Method as she sought to take her own place as an elder of the sect. Catching her was, at this point, a false dream, even though reaching the awareness integration realm while still in one's second century was counted an achievement of great significance that not even one cultivator in one hundred managed.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Catching Su Yi, by contrast, had shifted from the realm of the utterly impossible to the potentially manageable, something the doll-like elder acknowledged herself shortly after they returned to the road. "Keep up your efforts and our paths may converge just as we both reach the soul forging realm." Su Yi's progress through the spirit tempering realm was sluggish, though, so far, she had avoided the danger of serious bottlenecks that stymied so many elders.

"When would that be? Three centuries from now?" It was only half a joke. Their paces would indeed converge across such a great length of time, should nothing change, but while life in Mother's Gift remained much as it always had – though the sect compound had grown crowded to the point that the grand elders now contemplated territorial expansion – Liao did not believed they would be blessed with such a prolonged, peaceful, period of continuity.

Scoria Scorn had gone away, seeking power. Should she find it, and Liao respected her cunning enough to suspect she would succeed, she would surely return. Far more swiftly than in three centuries, most likely.

"I would like to think so," Su Yi smiled softly, an expression that proved she knew the awaiting dangers quite well. "But for now there is no rush. The scouts have reported that all is quiet beyond the gateway. We do not know where Snow Feast went, but it would seem that neither do his fellow demonic cultivators. There are no traitors nearby, our surrounding territory goes unclaimed."

That was good. Should another horde begin to form, as would inevitably occur, the lack of oversight meant that, by utilizing Artemay's formulas, he could forestall it indefinitely through selective killings of demons. There was a whole system for it, complex geometric overlays that he had been obligated to learn and memorize.

He paused, the impact of the thought freezing him in place.

To prevent another horde. It was not a dream, he understood then, but a matter of serious, deliberate consideration and planning. As such, he recognized, categorizing his shock, it was a thing he had come to consider within the umbrella of his capabilities.

This was not a matter of beavers, shovels, and flooding anymore, not harvesting the vast potential power of the wild. He could do this with his own strength, defend the sect from the demons, perhaps indefinitely. Not from the demonic cultivators, not yet, and not from a fully formed demon horde, but in the moments in-between, when peace reigned, then he could act as the wilderness defender the sect required.

A strange and profound shift in his status, in his purpose, one only now, with his awareness expanded, he truly recognized.

It meant everything to come would have to be reconsidered. Three centuries, perhaps that truly was possible. If Scoria Scorn had really gone to plunder the oceans, as Itinay's speculation, shared with him, suggested, that was possible. He had seen the ocean now, a vastness to dwarf the greatest of forests. Only the Celestial Mother could say how long it might take to form hordes and locate hidden lands floating beneath the waves.

"What should we do next?" he asked, wondered what messages the grand elders had laid upon Su Yi.

"I have some ideas," the beautiful cultivator answered, casually amused. "But you should consider yourself first. You have just advanced. There is no need to rush ahead."

That was true, but Liao felt in his bones, in his dantian, a longing to return to the wild lands beyond the gateway. He could not spend all his time in this place, pleasant as it might be. Though he continued to reject Sayaana's label of 'farmer's pen,' Mother's Gift was indeed a parkland, managed by humans from the heart of its fields to the top of its mountains, intentionally or otherwise. His dao cried out for true wilderness.

"To journey does not mean to rush," he found the necessary words as the road passed by beneath their sturdy, swift strides. "I can take my time without as well as within."

"You would say that," Su Yi open amusement deepened. "The man who is patient everywhere, save at home." She laughed then, giggling in girlish fashion that belied her centuries of age. "Never get married. You would make a terrible husband."

Liao wanted to laugh at that, but the comedic impulse stalled. It felt a forced effort, for those words, amusing as they might be, were nothing any man wished to hear from a woman whose looks knifed into their insides with every glance. He tried to banish his discontent, but Su Yi had never been somehow he was able to deceive.

"That's true of almost any cultivator," the follow-up served to soften the blow, more than a little. "I would be an awful wife, meddling with formations every day, absolutely reliant upon the servants for everything. I know over one hundred alchemical recipes by heart but cannot even manage to properly wash my own clothes. We are supposed to practice the entirety of the Twelvefold Panoply, but few truly do. Your experience is far more complete than most."

The comparison helped, as did the reminder that the woman he had idolized since a very early age possessed her own flaws, however modest they might be. It also served to spark an idea.

Time, that was what he had purchased at the price of a destroyed forest. Time for cultivation to be sure, that was the achievement Itinay stressed in her calculations. Kirulay represented absolute evidence of that, but cultivators were not the only weapons the sect deployed in battle. Su Yi was a student of one of the key other arts, formations. Traps forged out of constructed qi, a neglected area of his own education.

The fenghuang sculpture powered a formation of killing fire now, but it was surely not the only treasure in vastness of the world that might be gathered in and turned to such purposes. "If the demonic cultivators truly have moved away, then the old cities, the ruins of the sects, lie unwatched." He considered this out loud. "Nothing but idle demons stand in the way of a search. There might be artifacts of power or formation supplies I could recover."

Su Yi smirked slightly upon hearing this, a blatant giveaway that she had anticipated this outcome. "The past century has seen the pavilions well-stocked with various materials from beyond. Many have been naturalized and are now grown or raised in greenhouses, tanks, and terrariums. The need for additional gathering has been substantially reduced. Artifacts represent an excellent focus, though expectations for materials that only visits to more distant lands can supply remain on the list."

Liao did not mind fulfilling such requests, not at all. He would take any excuse to travel to the ends of the earth, and he very much wished to understand every land, and the resources that they offered, in great detail.

"The main treasure halls, armories, and elder vaults of the old world's many sects were almost surely plundered down to the last arrowhead," Su Yi repeated an old truth. This was assumed to be true everywhere, with much of the looting undertaken while the demon war still raged. Everything Liao had seen since confirmed this assessment. "But," the elder continued. "When the war came to an end, a number of the survivors revealed the locations of various primitive stashes that they were unable to recover prior to being overrun. Most are quite far, as this region was among the last to be overrun, but there are some sites on the islands to the east and south."

"She really does know you too well," Sayaana commented from inside his skull. "Never sleep with her, even if she offers. It is not worth the cost of this friendship."

Having no response to that remark, Liao simply pretended nothing had been said. Interfering in the strange friendship that had grown up between the beauty and the remnant soul would likely have far worse consequences. "I need to prepare new gear." Everything he'd previously possessed appeared full of countless tiny flaws beneath the newly awakened sight he now wielded. "So, I suppose there is no hurry." That would, no doubt, keep the grand elders happy. "Then we can see about plans to refill the armory."

Humor dropped away from Su Yi's eyes, and she faced him straight ahead. "Remember, always, that you have already done more than the sect has the right to ask. You owe no one anything more."

"I will remember." It might be true, but Liao knew he owed the world itself a debt, and that one would take an immortal's years to repay. He was not going to start shirking now. The Ruined Wastes remained. He would fight until they no longer did so.